TERMS STARTING WITH
sacred ::: 1. Devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; consecrated. 2. Reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object; consecrated, hallowed. 3. Secured against violation, infringement, etc., as by reverence or sense of right; sacrosanct. 4. Entitled to veneration or religious respect by association with divinity or divine things; holy; venerable; divine.
sacredalphabet ::: Sacred Alphabet (The) See Other Symbols.
sacred ::: a. --> Set apart by solemn religious ceremony; especially, in a good sense, made holy; set apart to religious use; consecrated; not profane or common; as, a sacred place; a sacred day; sacred service.
Relating to religion, or to the services of religion; not secular; religious; as, sacred history.
Designated or exalted by a divine sanction; possessing the highest title to obedience, honor, reverence, or veneration; entitled to extreme reverence; venerable.
sacred Book
sacred hill
sacred "jargon" Reserved for exclusive use by something. The term might mean only writable by whatever it is sacred to. For example, "Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler" would mean that if any other code changed the contents of register 7, dire consequences would ensue. [{Jargon File}] (2002-12-30)
sacred ::: (jargon) Reserved for exclusive use by something. The term might mean only writable by whatever it is sacred to.For example, Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler would mean that if any other code changed the contents of register 7, dire consequences would ensue.[Jargon File](2002-12-30)
Sacred Animals. See ANIMALS, SACRED
Sacred Book of the Invisible Great Spirit. In Doresse,
Sacred Books of the Buddhists. A pioneering series of translations of Buddhist texts, initially edited by F. MAX MÜLLER and later by CAROLINE A. F. RHYS DAVIDS. After Müller had completed the Sacred Books of the East series (ten of whose forty-nine volumes were devoted to Buddhist works), he continued to receive requests to publish translations of more texts, especially Asian texts. He decided to start a new series for Buddhism, with financial support provided by the Thai king Chulalongkorn (RĀMA V). The first volume was published in 1895 by Oxford University Press. Publication was eventually taken over by the PALI TEXT SOCIETY. To date, some fifty volumes have been published in the series.
Sacred Books of the Buddhists
Sacred Books of the East, (ed.) Max Muller. 50 vols.
Sacred Fire. See FIRE, SACRED
Sacred Four Used in the Stanzas of Dzyan in speaking of the primordial principles in cosmogenesis as numbers:
Sacred Heart In modern times a Roman Catholic cult which uses the heart as a symbol, especially the heart of Jesus, to which they address devotions. From time to time there have been various Christians who have particularly stressed this aspect of their religious views, among them St. Gertrude and St. Francis of Sales (17th century) who gave this symbol to his order as its object. By edict of Pope Pius IX (1856) the day is observed in the general calendar of the Church.
Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, p. 108.]
Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, The. (tr.) S. L.
Sacred Name. See NAME, SACRED
Sacred Planets. See PLANETS, SEVEN SACRED
Sacred science: In occult terminology, the esoteric philosophical secrets taught and disclosed as a part of the initiation to the highest degree in the mysteries (q.v.).
Sacred Seasons. See SEASONS; CHRISTMAS; EASTER
Sacred Sleep. See SLEEP, SACRED
Sacred Spark. See SPARK, SACRED
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. Not holy; not sacred or hallowed. 2. Not holy; impious, profane, wicked.
3000 years ago; also includes the Bhagavad Gita, the most popular sacred text of hinduism
Aaron’s rod: The rod, or wand, with a serpent twined round it, which was used in the Mosaic ceremony of initiation; it appears to have contained the sacred fire. Now commonly employed as an emblem signifying a physician; similar to the caduceus of Hermes.
Ab-e-Hayat or Ab-e-Zendegi (Persian) Āb-e-Hayat or Āb-e-Zendegi [from Persian āb, Avestan āp, Pahlavi āv, water, purity, brilliance, honor, bliss, fortune] Water of life or immortality; it is believed that the Water of Life is hidden in the most northern part of the earth in the dark. He who finds and drinks of it will become immortal. Some Persian allegories say that Alexander the Great sought after it in vain. It is also said Khezr, the prophet, found it and that is how he became immortal. Esoterically it represents the universal self and life’s principal substance. It corresponds to the use of “water” in Genesis 1:2. The ancient Iranians believed that the first created was Mithra (Mehr), the reflection of Being, the essence of light, in the water of life; so the creation was the synthesis of these two, named Mehrab. Mehrab later became the sacred place of worship in mosques among Moslems.
Abhiseka: In Hinduism, the ceremonial bathing in sacred waters. In Buddhism, the tenth stage of perfection. The term is used also for the anointment of kings and high officials upon their ascension to power or as a recognition of some signal achievement.
abhishekam. ::: the sacred bath of water, milk, curd... given to a deity
Abib (Hebrew) ’Ābīb [from the verbal root ’abab to be fresh, green; to blossom, bear fruit] Ear or sprout (of grain); first month of the Hebrew sacred year, equivalent to March-April and beginning with the new moon. Hodesh ha-’abib was the “month of green corn”; later, after the exile, called Nisan during which the vernal equinox was celebrated.
Abiegnus Mons (Latin) [from abies fir-wood, a letter inscribed on a wooden tablet + mons mountain] Wooded mountain; according to Wynn Westcott, a mystic name “from whence, as from a certain mountain, Rosicrucian documents are often found to be issued — ‘Monte Abiegno.’ There is a connection with Mount Meru, and other sacred hills” (TG 3).
According to Berosus, it was Artaxerxes Mnemon (404-361 BC) who first instituted formal worship of a divinity hitherto held too holy and sacred for public adoration, erecting statues under the name of Venus-Anahita — thus she became the Anaitis of the Greeks. Blavatsky equates her with the Hindu Sarasvati.
Acher (Hebrew) ’Aḥēr In an allegory in the Talmud (Hag 14b), one of four tanna’im (teachers) to enter the Garden of Delight, i.e., to seek initiation into the sacred science. His real name was ’Elisha‘ ben ’Abuyah. A famous Talmudic scholar before he “failed” the initiation, he became an apostate and was called Aher (stranger). Of the four that entered, Ben Asai looked — and died; Ben Zoma looked — and lost his reason; Aher made ravages in the plantation; and Aqiba, who had entered in peace, left in peace (Kab 67-8).
adytum ::: the innermost part of a temple; the secret shrine whence oracles were delivered; a most sacred or reserved part of any place of worship; hence, fig. a private or inner chamber, a sanctum.
Agama (Sanskrit) Āgama [from ā toward, near + the verbal root gam to come, go] Coming near, approaching. As a masculine noun, approach, appearance; studying, reading, acquisition of knowledge, science. In philosophy, traditional teaching handed down; likewise a collection of sacred doctrines such as the Brahmanas.
Aghora (Sanskrit) Aghora [from a not + the verbal root ghur to frighten] Nonterrifying; as a masculine noun, a title of Siva in the Mahabharata; also of a devotee of Siva and his consort Durga. As a feminine noun, the fourteenth day of the dark half of Bhadra (a rainy month in August-September) sacred to Siva.
Agnibahu (Sanskrit) Agnibāhu [from agni fire + bāhu arm from bahu much, abundant] Arm of fire, smoke; as a proper noun, a son of Svayambhuva, the first manu, called law-giver because he laid down the sacred laws that should govern the soul as well as rules for harmonious and orderly living. Agnibahu, who adopted the religious life, is also named as one of the ten sons of Svayambhuva’s son Priyavarta by Kamya (cf VP 2:1).
Agnihotra (Sanskrit) Agnihotra [from agni fire + hotra oblation from the verbal root hu to sacrifice] Fire offering; an important Vedic sacrifice to Agni, consisting of milk, oil, and sour gruel, which the head of the family is expected to observe twice a day, before sunrise and after sunset. The priest who kindles the sacred fire is called agnihotri, also agnidhra.
Agnishtoma (Sanskrit) Agniṣṭoma [from agni fire + stoma praise, a hymn from the verbal root stu to praise, eulogize] Praise of Agni, fire; an ancient Vedic ceremony or sacrifice performed by a Brahmin desirous of obtaining svarga (heaven), who himself maintained the sacred fire. The offering to Indra and other deities was the soma. The ceremonies continued for five days, with 16 priests officiating. Although in later times it may have become merely a matter of form, originally the agnishtoma was connected with the initiation rites of the soma Mysteries.
Ahimsa: Sanskrit for non-injuring, not killing. The Hindu doctrine of the oneness and sacredness of all life, human and animal.
Aleph: The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The most sacred of the Hebrew letters; seldom pronounced because indicative of the Deity.
All Hallow’s Eve: An ancient Druidic festival when all fires had to be extinguished, except for the sacred altar fires of the Druid priests.
All Saints’ Day, All-Hallows, Hallowmas. A festival originally on the first of May, said to have been instituted for the martyrs in European countries about the 4th or 5th centuries. In the 7th century, Pope Boniface instituted it on May 13 to replace a pagan festival of the dead. In 834 the day was moved to November 1st by Gregory III and was then celebrated for all the saints. The Greek Church celebrates it on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Closely connected with the celebration was the keeping of the preceding evening, known as the vigil of Hallowmas or Halloween. This was especially kept in Scotland and in Brittany, France. In Scotland an important item was the lighting of a bonfire at each house. The Celts kept two festivals, one called Beltane (Bealtine or Beiltine) in which fires were lighted on the eve of May 1st, and the other called Samtheine on the eve of November 1st, in which people jumped over two fires placed very close together. “The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore, when, while all the fires were extinguished on the 1st of November, their sacred and inextinguishable fires alone remained to illumine the horizon, like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrians” (SD 2:759). The Germanic nations had their Osterfeuer and Johannisfeuer.
Also a sacred wooden pole or image standing close to the massebah and altar in early Shemitic sanctuaries, part of the equipment of the temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem till the Deuteronomic reformation of Josiah (2 Kings 23:6). The plural, ’asherim, denotes statues, images, columns, or pillars; translated in the Bible by “groves.” Maachah, the grandmother of Asa, King of Jerusalem, is accused of having made for herself such an idol, which was a lingham — for centuries a religious rite in Judaea. Sometimes called the Assyrian Tree of Life, “the original Asherah was a pillar with seven branches on each side surmounted by a globular flower with three projecting rays, and no phallic stone, as the Jews made of it, but a metaphysical symbol. ‘Merciful One, who dead to life raises!’ was the prayer uttered before the Asherah, on the banks of the Euphrates. The ‘Merciful One,’ was . . . the higher triad in man symbolized by the globular flower with its three rays” (TG 37). See also ASTARTE.
Altar [from Latin altare from altus high] Usually an elevation of earth, stone, or wood for the worshiper to kneel on, or for the offering of sacrifices, or as the pedestal of an invisible divinity or its statue. In the Old Testament it appears as part of the furniture of the Jewish tabernacle, that sacred shrine of the Deity. This altar has horns at each end, which is said to symbolize the fecund cow — in common with the ideas of Hindus and ancients Egyptians — which again represents Mother Nature; so the connection with the Holy of Holies, which stands for the great Mother, resurrection, and birth, is apparent. In general the altar is the earthly throne or supposed seat of a deity; and its familiar metaphorical use suggests both this and also the idea of sacrifice. The altar has been taken over by Christendom, where it has become the communion table. It also has the idea of refuge and sanctuary, for it was commonly so used both with the Hebrews and the Classical ancients.
Amal: “A reference to the psychic being, the true soul in us which is hidden in our inner self and is like a ‘sacred hill’ towards which Heaven leans ‘low’ in love to ‘kiss’ it, responding to that being’s aspiration.”
Amal: “The phrase ‘The Animal browses in the sacred fence’ connotes the defilement of the psycho-spiritual nature by one’s lower vital being.”
Anagna is also the name of the main sacred writings of the Jains.
ancile ::: n. --> The sacred shield of the Romans, said to have-fallen from heaven in the reign of Numa. It was the palladium of Rome.
Ancilia: The twelve sacred shields of ancient Rome, on the safety of which the fate of the Roman people was believed to depend. The first Ancile was said to have dropped to earth from heaven.
Anesthesia [from Greek anaisthesia no feeling] Want of feeling; a condition of total or partial insensibility, particularly to touch. The many classical references to anesthetics indicate that the ancients knew much about the subject that has not been rediscovered. Blavatsky refers to the sacred beverage used by the hierophants in ceremonies to free the astral soul from the bonds of matter, so that the inner man might rise to the level of spirit (IU 2:117, 1:540).
Animals, Sacred Many ancient peoples have attached great importance to animals in their rituals; and they may have had facts to support their theories. If the hierarchical system of the universe is a reality, it follows that every animal is a feeble representative on its plane of comic potencies that descend from lofty sources. Ceremonial magic, however, may be better suited to one age than to another; so that it may be better to explain than to attempt to reintroduce the ancient practices as to the use of sacred animals in ritual.
Annunciation Announcing; in Christianity, the foretelling to Mary of Jesus’ birth by the angel Gabriel, celebrated on Lady Day, March 25. The fire and lamps used in this ceremony apparently point back to the marriage of Vulcan with Venus, to the Magi watching over the sacred fire in the East, to the Vestal Virgins in the West, and to the marriage of Father Sun with Mother Nature.
Anointed [from Latin translation of Greek christos anointed] Smeared with sacred unguent, having oil or unguent poured on the head; a ceremony originally symbolically denoting a high degree of initiation, but later borrowed for minor purposes by the Christian churches in consecrations and coronations. A true anointed or christos is one who has achieved the great victory over self in initiation and therefore in life, and thus has become a full or complete adept or mahatma.
anoint ::: v. t. --> To smear or rub over with oil or an unctuous substance; also, to spread over, as oil.
To apply oil to or to pour oil upon, etc., as a sacred rite, especially for consecration. ::: p. p. --> Anointed.
anthem ::: n. --> Formerly, a hymn sung in alternate parts, in present usage, a selection from the Psalms, or other parts of the Scriptures or the liturgy, set to sacred music.
A song or hymn of praise. ::: v. t. --> To celebrate with anthems.
Apis (Greek) Hap (Egyptian) Ḥap. The sacred bull of Memphis into which Osiris was thought to incarnate. Classical Greek authors all mention the veneration with which the Egyptians regarded the bull, Manetho stating that it was under Ka-kau (2nd dynasty) that Apis was appointed a god. The Egyptians believed that after the death of a sacred animal, on reaching 28 years (the age Osiris was killed by Typhon), the soul of Apis joined Osiris, forming the dual god Asar-Hapi (Osiris-Apis), which the Greeks in the Ptolemaic period renamed Serapis. “As in the exoteric interpretation of the Egyptian rites the soul of every defunct person — from the Hierophant down to the sacred bull Apis — became an Osiris, was Osirified . . .” (SD 1:135).
Apollo (Greek) Also called Phoebus (the pure, shining); son of Zeus and Leto (Latona), the polar region or night, and twin brother of Artemis (Diana). His birth shows the emanation of light from darkness. One of the most popular gods of Greek mythology, he is primarily the god of light, and is also associated with the sun, hence a giver of life, light, and wisdom to the earth and humanity. Apollo and Artemis are the mystic sun and the higher occult moon (SD 2:771). Apollo stands for order, justice, law, and purification by penance. His attribute as a punisher of evil is shown by his bow, with which as an infant he slew Python. He is the deity who wards off evil; the healer, father of Aesculapius and often identified with him; and the god of divination, associated especially with the Oracle at Delphi. The other principal seat of his worship was at Delos, his birthplace. He was also the patron of song and music, of new civic foundations, and protector of crops and flocks. His lyre is the sacred heptachord or septenary, seen in the sevenfold manifestations of the Logos in the universe and man; he is also the sun with its seven planets. He answers in some respects to the Hindu Indra and Karttikeya and in others to the Christian archangel Michael; Janus was the Roman god of light.
apostate ::: n. --> One who has forsaken the faith, principles, or party, to which he before adhered; esp., one who has forsaken his religion for another; a pervert; a renegade.
One who, after having received sacred orders, renounces his clerical profession. ::: a.
Arani (Sanskrit) Araṇi, Araṇī [from the verbal root ṛ to tend upward, move, insert, fix] Moving around; being fitted in or inserted. Arani (sing) is one of the two ceremonial rubbing-sticks used to ignite the sacrificial fire: the upper stick, uttararani or pramantha, is held upright and set into a groove in the lower stick, adhararani, and when twirled or rotated rapidly it generates heat and flame. According to the Rig-Veda, the upright stick was made from the sami tree (Mimosa suma), and the horizontal from the asvattha or pipal tree (Ficus religiosa), the sacred fig tree. In the Satapatha-brahmana, however, both sticks were carved from the wood of the asvattha.
Arasa-mara (Sanskrit) Arasa-mara [from arasa sapless, tasteless + mara dying, death] The banyan tree, considered in one of its aspects as the Tree of Knowledge or the Tree of Life. According to popular Hindu belief, under one of these trees Vishnu taught during one of his incarnations on earth, hence it is held sacred. “Under the protecting foliage of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons on immortality and initiate them into the mysteries of life and death” (SD 2:215).
arati. ::: the waving of lights before a sacred image of the divine Reality
Arcana (Latin) Secrets, mysteries; in ancient times almost invariably what was secret, sacred, and taught in silence and privacy in the Mysteries, whether such teachings comprised the revelation of truth, the explanation of difficult points regarding ceremonies, or the hidden wisdom.
Arcanum: An old term almost identical with occultism, its recent equivalent. Arcana were originally used to cover the sacred objects, such as the Playthings of Dionysus in the Eleusinian rites, and a cognate is ark, as in the Ark of the Covenant. Arcesilaus: (315-241 B.C.) Greek philosopher from Pitane in Aeolis. He succeeded Crates in the chair of the Platonic Academy and became the founder of the second or so-called middle academy. In opposition to both Stoicism and Epicureanism, he advocated a scepticism that was not so extreme as that of Pyrrho although he despaired of man's attaining truth. Suspended judgment was to him the best approach. -- L.E.D.
Arda Viraf Nameh: A sacred book of Zoroastrianism, dealing with cosmogony, cosmology and eschatology.
Ardeshan Zoroastrian teacher who, according to the Christian Eutychius, was appointed by Nimrod to watch the sacred fire. A voice from the fire told him that priests of the Magians must commit incest, which Blavatsky explains as a misconstruction of the idea of uniting oneself to the earth, our mother; humanity, our sister; and science, our daughter. (BCW 3:459)
ark ::: n. --> A chest, or coffer.
The oblong chest of acacia wood, overlaid with gold, which supported the mercy seat with its golden cherubs, and occupied the most sacred place in the sanctuary. In it Moses placed the two tables of stone containing the ten commandments. Called also the Ark of the Covenant.
The large, chestlike vessel in which Noah and his family were preserved during the Deluge. Gen. vi. Hence: Any place of refuge.
Ark of the Covenant The coffer or chest in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish synagogue. All ancient religions used the mystical ark, or something similar, in their respective ceremonial worships: “Every ark-shrine, whether with the Egyptians, Hindus, Chaldeans or Mexicans, was a phallic shrine, the symbol of the yoni or womb of nature. The seket [sektet-boat] of the Egyptians, the ark, or sacred chest, stood on the ara — its pedestal. The ark of Osiris, with the sacred relics of the god, was ‘of the same size as the Jewish ark,’ says S. Sharpe, the Egyptologist, carried by priests with staves passed through its rings in sacred procession, as the ark round which danced David, the King of Israel. . . . The ark was a boat — a vehicle in every case. ‘Thebes had a sacred ark 300 cubits long,’ and ‘the word Thebes is said to mean ark in Hebrew,’ which is but a natural recognition of the place to which the chosen people are indebted for their ark. Moreover, as Bauer writes, ‘the Cherub was not first used by Moses.’ The winged Isis was the cherub or Arieh in Egypt, centuries before the arrival there of even Abram or Sarai. ‘The external likeness of some of the Egyptian arks, surmounted by their two winged human figures, to the ark of the covenant, has often been noticed.’ (Bible Educator.) And not only the ‘external’ but the internal ‘likeness’ and sameness are now known to all ” (TG 30).
Arrhetos (Gnostic) Ineffable, unspeakable or, as used in Greek mystical philosophy, not to be divulged. Connected with the Greek Mysteries and of constant occurrence in Greek mystical literature dating from earliest times. Whatever was considered too holy, too sacred, or improper from every aspect to divulge to the public whether in speech or writing, was called arrheton (neuter). The word was taken over by the Gnostic sects and signified among other matters the sevenfold nature of the one formative Logos, the first cosmic hebdomad or septenary (this name of the ineffable is composed of seven letters in the Greek).
arya (Aryan) ::: the good and noble man; the fighter; he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance; he who does the work of sacrifice, finds the sacred word of illumination, desires the gods and increases them and is increased by them into the largeness of the true existence; he is the warrior of the light and the traveller to the Truth.
aryabhumi ::: [the country of the arya, India], the Sacred Land.
Aryavarta (Sanskrit) Āryāvarta Abode of the noble or excellent ones or the sacred land of the Aryans; the ancient name for northern and central India. It extended from the eastern to the western sea and was bounded on the north and south by the Himalaya and Vindhya mountains respectively.
Asrama (Sanskrit) Āśrama [from the verbal root śram to exert oneself spiritually] A sacred building, a monastery or hermitage for ascetic purposes; likewise one of the four periods of effort or inner development in the religious life of a Brahmin in ancient times. These asramas were 1) the student or Brahmacharin; 2) the householder or grihastha, the period of married existence when the Brahmin played his due role in the affairs of the world; 3) the period of religious seclusion or vanaprastha, usually passed in a vana (forest), a period of inner spiritual recollection and meditation on philosophical and religious matters; and 4) the one who has renounced all the distractions of worldly life or bhikshu who has turned his attention wholly to spiritual affairs, although he may have returned to the world of men for purposes of aiding and teaching.
Astrology Universal analogy provides a key to occult mysteries by studying the nature and motions of the celestial orbs. The heavenly bodies are in essence gods, and the influence they shed is the aura which likewise emanates from all living beings. Ancient astrology taught the absolute solidarity of the universe and of everything within it as an organic entity so that the operations and motions of the celestial bodies and influences flowing forth from them governed or regulated all subordinate beings over which their sway fell. The seven sacred planets are correlated with the cosmic and human septenates; learning the natures of these planets provides one key to an understanding of the natures of their correspondences. By their motions they measure cycles and determine epochs. Every being, if we reckon its life cycle, is an event; its nature, its destiny, is shown if we know and can define the epoch of its birth. Thus the adept, in proportion to his skill, can interpret the past and estimate what is to come; he can define the interrelations of things and arrive at an understanding of the structure of macrocosms and microcosms, which are spread out alike in time and space. “Astrology is a science as infallible as astronomy itself, with the condition, however, that its interpreters must be equally infallible; and it is this condition, sine qua non, so very difficult of realization, that has always proved a stumbling-block to both. Astrology is to exact astronomy what psychology is to exact physiology. In astrology and psychology one has to step beyond the visible world of matter, and enter into the domain of transcendent spirit” (IU 1:259).
Atash-Bahram, Atash Behram (Persian) Ātash-Bahrām, Ātash Behrām, Verethraghna (Avestan), Varhran, Varhram (Pahlavi) Varhrān, Varhrām. The sacred fire of the Parsis, kept perpetually burning on the altars; the third fire in the septenary system represents the first created fire, the fire of consciousness. Philosophically it alludes to the idea of becoming. It corresponds to the Hindu akasa (SD 1:338). Bahram (victorious) is one of the seven planets which rules over the first month of the Iranian year, Farvardin (Aries). In Vedic literature he is known as the slayer of the demon Vritra. In Islamic mystical writings Bahram is referred to as the fifth sphere or intellect. “As the earthly representative of the heavenly fire, it is the sacred center to which every earthly fire longs to return, in order to be united again, as much as possible, with its native abode. The more it has been defiled by worldly uses, the greater is the merit acquired by freeing it from defilement” (Vendidad 113). The Vestals in ancient Rome also kept a fire burning perpetually on their altars, as did the Greeks in the temple on the Acropolis, thus keeping the remembrance of the “living fire” by means of a visible manifestation.
Athravan, Atravan (Avestan), Atourban (Pahlavi), Azarban, Azarvan (Persian) Fire-guardian; the attendant of the sacred fire in Persian temples; the proper word for a priest in the Avesta, likewise Zoroaster’s name with the Persians in far later times. Blavatsky interprets the word as “teacher of fire.”
’Atstsiloth (Hebrew) ’Atstsīlōth [from ’ātsal to join, separate, flow out] In the Qabbalah, the first of the four worlds or spheres (‘olams) emanated during the manifestation of a cosmos, called the “sphere of emanations or condensation.” Being the most exalted of the spheres or conditions, it contains the upper ten Sephiroth, which represent the operative qualities of the divine will, as the most abstract and spiritual of the emanations from ’eyn soph. This uppermost sphere is represented as the abode of Diyyuqna’ (the prototype, the image, the upper ’Adam or ’Adam ‘Illa’ah) and is also called ‘olam has-sephiroth (the world of the Sephiroth). As the most perfect emanation from ’eyn soph, ’Atstsiloth is the Great Sacred Seal, the prototype from which all inferior worlds are copied, having impressed on themselves the image of the Great Seal. From this ‘olam (also called the ’Atstsilatic World), through the conjunction of the King and Queen, proceeds the second world — ‘olam hab-beri’ah. “The globes A, Z, of our terrestrial chain are in Aziluth” (TG 46).
AUM ::: [the sacred syllable om with its three constituent letters A, U, M shown separately].
Avesta (Avest, Pers) Apstak, Avestak (Pahlavi) Law or the basic foundation, the sacred scriptures of the Mazdeans. The language of the ancient Aryans was the language of the Vedic hymns and also of the Gathic chants of Zoroaster, these being so close that a mere phonetic change often suffices to translate a passage from one into the other. Because of this connection “the Mazdean Scriptures of the Zend-Avesta, the Vendidad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the gods in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through Ahura the Asuras to their legitimate place in theogony” (SD 2:60-1). Zend, on the other hand, traditionally designates the Pahlavi commentary on the Avesta. The Yasnas are the principal writings of the Zoroastrians; and in their oldest portion, the Gathas, the original philosophy of Mazdeism is expressed in a spirited poetic language. The Vispered (Pahlavi) or Visperataro (Avestan) [from vispe all + ratavo warriors, spiritual teachers] is an appendix to the later Yasnas which deals with the ritualistic aspects of the Mazdean faith.
Avesta: The sacred book of the Zoroastrians. The original Avesta (also called Zend) was said to comprise all knowledge; most of it was destroyed by Alexander. A work of 21 volumes (nasks) was prepared out of its remnants in the third century A.D., but only one volume (Vendidad) has survived complete.
A. V. Vasihev, Space, Time, Motion, translated by H. M. Lucas and C. P. Sanger, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, London. 1924, and New York, 1924. Religion, Philosophy of: The methodic or systematic investigation of the elements of religious consciousness, the theories it has evolved and their development and historic relationships in the cultural complex. It takes account of religious practices only as illustrations of the vitality of beliefs and the inseparableness of the psychological from thought reality in faith. It is distinct from theology in that it recognizes the priority of reason over faith and the acceptance of creed, subjecting the latter to a logical analysis. As such, the history of the Philosophy of Religion is coextensive with the free enquiry into religious reality, particularly the conceptions of God, soul, immortality, sin, salvaition, the sacred (Rudolf Otto), etc., and may be said to have its roots in any society above the pre-logical, mythological, or custom-controlled level, first observed in Egypt, China, India, and Greece. Its scientific treatment is a subsidiary philosophic discipline dates from about Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der reinen Vernunft and Hegel's Philosophie der Religion, while in the history of thought based on Indian and Greek speculation, sporadic sallies were made by all great philosophers, especially those professing an idealism, and by most theologians.
awfulness ::: n. --> The quality of striking with awe, or with reverence; dreadfulness; solemnity; as, the awfulness of this sacred place.
The state of being struck with awe; a spirit of solemnity; profound reverence.
Ayatana (Sanskrit) Āyatana [from ā towards + the verbal root yat to rest in or on, make effort in or on] A resting place, seat, or abode; an altar, place of the sacred fire; a sanctuary, inner or outer. In Buddhism, the six ayatanas (shadayatanas), enumerated as the five senses plus manas, are regarded as the inner seats or foci of the lower consciousness, functioning through the ordinary five sense organs plus the manasic organ in the body, the brain. They are therefore classed as one of the twelve nidanas (bonds, halters, links) composing the chain of causation or lower causes of existence.
Ayur Veda (Sanskrit) Āyurveda [from āyus life, health, vital power + veda knowledge] One of the minor Vedas, generally considered a supplement to the Atharva-Veda, one of the four principal Vedas. It treats of the science of health and medicine, and is divided into eight departments: 1) salya, surgery; 2) salakya, the science and cure of diseases of the head and its organs; 3) kaya-chikitsa, the cure of diseases affecting the whole body, or general medical treatment; 4) bhuta-vidya, the treatment of mental — and consequent physical — diseases supposed to be produced by bhutas (demons); 5) kaumara-bhritya, the medical treatment of children; 6) agada-tantra, the doctrine of antidotes; 7) rasayana-tantra, the doctrine of elixirs; and 8) vajikarana-tantra, the doctrine of aphrodisiacs. Medicine was regarded as one of the sacred sciences by all ancient peoples and in archaic ages was one of the knowledges or sciences belonging to the priesthood; and this list of subjects shows that the field covered by its practitioners was extensive. Its authorship is attributed by some to Dhanvantari, sometimes called the physician of the gods, who was produced by the mystical churning of the ocean and appeared holding a cup of amrita (immortality) in his hands.
Balder, Baldr (Icelandic) The best, foremost; the sun god in Norse mythology, the son of Odin and Frigga and a favorite with gods and men. His mansion is Breidablick (broadview) whence he can keep watch over all the worlds. One of the lays of the Elder or Poetic Edda deals entirely with the death of the sun god, also mentioned in the principal poem Voluspa. Briefly stated: the gods were concerned when Balder was troubled with dreams of impending doom. Frigga therefore set out to exact a promise from all living things that none would harm Balder, and all readily complied. One thing only had been overlooked: the harmless-seeming mistletoe. Loki, the mischievous god (human mind), became aware of this, plucked the little plant, and from it fashioned a dart. He approached Hoder, the blind god (of darkness and ignorance) who was standing disconsolately by while the other gods were playfully hurling their weapons against the invulnerable sun god. Offering to guide his aim, Loki placed on Hoder’s bow the small but deadly “sorrow-dart.” Thus mind darkened by ignorance accomplished what nothing else could: the death of the bright deity of light. Balder must then travel to the house of Hel, queen of the realm of the dead. Odin, as Hermod, goes to plead with Hel for Balder’s return, and Hel agrees to release him on condition that all living things weep for him. Frigga resumes her weary round and implores all beings to mourn the sun god’s passing. All agree save one: Loki in the guise of an aged crone refuses to shed a tear. This single taint of perverseness in the human mind condemns Balder to remain in the realm of Hel until the following cycle is due to begin. Thus death is linked with the active human mind, Loki. As the bright sun god is placed on his pyre-ship, his loving wife Nanna (the moon goddess) dies of a broken heart and is placed beside him, but before the ship is set ablaze and cast adrift, Odin leaned over to whisper something in the dead sun god’s ear. This secret message must endure unknown to all until Balder’s return, when he and his dark twin Hoder will “build together on Ropt’s (Odin’s) sacred soil.”
barhih. ::: in the Veda, the seat of sacred grass on which the gods are invited to sit at the sacrifice.
Barhishad (Sanskrit) Barhiṣad [from barhiṣ sacred kusa grass, fire + the verbal root sad to sit] Mystically, those who attend to or who are engrossed in domestic affairs, material or merely pragmatical concerns; those pitris (fathers, ancestors) who evolved the human astral-physical form. These lunar ancestors — seven or ten classes — evolved forth their astral bodies or chhayas (shadows), thus forming the first astral-physical races of humanity in which the higher classes of pitris, the agnishvattas, incarnated, thus making out of a relatively intellectually senseless mankind, true thinking human beings.
barhis ::: the sacred grass, the seat of sacred grass. [Ved.]
bedagat ::: n. --> The sacred books of the Buddhists in Burmah.
Bennu (Egyptian) Bennu. Also Benu, Benoo. A bird of the heron species, identified with the phoenix. It was prominent in Egyptian mythology, being associated with the sun: it was said to have come into being from the fire which burned at the top of the sacred Persea Tree; that the renewed morning sun rose in the form of the bennu; and that it was the soul of Ra, the sun god. The sanctuary of the bennu was likewise that of Ra and of Osiris. A hymn in the Book of the Dead says: “I go in like the Hawk, and I come forth like the Bennu, the Morning Star (i.e., the planet Venus) of Ra” (xiii 2). Blavatsky terms the bennu “the bird of resurrection in Eternity . . . in whom night follows the day, and day the night — an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and human re-incarnation” (SD 1:312).
Betylos, Baetylus (Latin) [from Greek baitylos meteoric stone] Also betylus, baetyl, betyles. In Classical antiquity a stone, either natural or artificially shaped, venerated as of divine origin, or as a symbol of divinity. There were a number of these sacred stones in Greece, the most famous being the one on the omphalos at Delphi. Likewise there were the so-called animated or oracular stones. “Strabo, Pliny, Helancius [Hellanicus] — all speak of the electrical, or electro-magnetic power of the betyli. They were worshipped in the remotest antiquity in Egypt and Samothrace, as magnetic stones, ‘containing souls which had fallen from heaven’; and the priests of Cybele wore a small betylos on their bodies” (IU 1:332). In Persia they were called oitzoe; but their origin was of far greater antiquity, for “Lemuria, Atlantis and her giants, and the earliest races of the Fifth Root-Race had all a hand in these betyles, lithoi, and ‘magic’ stones in general” (SD 2:346n). See also OPHITES
Beverage, Sacred. See SOMA
Bhagavad-Gita (Sanskrit) Bhagavad-Gītā [from bhagavat illustrious, sacred, holy, lord (one of Krishna’s titles) + gītā song] The noble song, the Lord’s song; a portion of the Bhagavad-Gita Parvan, one subsection of the Bhishma Parvan, itself one of the principle sections of the Mahabharata. The Bhagavad-Gita consists of a dialogue in which Krishna and Arjuna have a discussion upon the highest spiritual philosophy. Krishna in this instance is the inner instructor or monitor, the higher self, advising the human self or Arjuna.
bhunder ::: n. --> An Indian monkey (Macacus Rhesus), protected by the Hindoos as sacred. See Rhesus.
Bhuvas (Sanskrit) Bhuvas [plural of bhūr from the verbal root bhū to become, grow into being, spring forth] The air, the atmosphere; the third of the four sacred words uttered by Brahmins when beginning their daily devotions: Om, bhur bhuvah svah.
Bifrost, Bilrost, Bafrast (Icelandic, Scandinavian) [from bifast to tremble] Via tremula (the trembling way), the rainbow; the rainbow bridge in Norse mythology, also called the asbru (bridge of the aesir), separating the realm of the gods (Asgard) from that of men (Midgard), while giving access to it. Guarding the bridge is Heimdal, the whitest aesir, who will blow the gjallarhorn when the world comes to an end and the gods withdraw to their sacred ground (Ragnarok). Then Bifrost falls when the sons of Muspel storm over it. It is said that each day the gods cross Bifrost to meet in council at the fount of Urd (the norn that represents the past or causation), but Thor must ford the river, as his lightnings would set the bridge on fire.
Black Book, The: A sacred book of the Yezidi (devil worshippers) of Kurdistan.
blaspheme ::: to speak in an irreverent, contemptuous or disrespectful manner; curse; (esp. God, a divine being or sacred things).
blaspheme ::: v. --> To speak of, or address, with impious irreverence; to revile impiously (anything sacred); as, to blaspheme the Holy Spirit.
Figuratively, of persons and things not religiously sacred, but held in high honor: To calumniate; to revile; to abuse. ::: v. i. --> To utter blasphemy.
Blavatsky wrote that astrology is the “science which defines the action of celestial bodies upon mundane affairs, and claims to foretell future events from the positions of the stars. Its antiquity is such as to place it among the very earliest records of human learning. It remained for long ages a secret science in the East, and its final expression remains so to this day, its exoteric application only having been brought to any degree of perfection in the West during the lapse of time since Varaha Mihira wrote his book on Astrology, some 1400 years ago. Claudius Ptolemy, the famous geographer and mathematician, founded the system of astronomy known under his name, wrote his Tetrabiblos which is still the basis of modern Astrology in 135 AD . . . As to the origin of the science, it is known on the one hand that Thebes claimed the honour of the invention of Astrology; whereas, on the other hand, all are agreed that it was the Chaldees who taught that science to the other nations. . . . If later on the name of Astrologer fell into disrepute in Rome and elsewhere, it was owing to the frauds of those who wanted to make money of that which was part and parcel of the Sacred Science of the Mysteries, and who, ignorant of the latter, evolved a system based entirely on mathematics, instead of transcendental metaphysics with the physical celestial bodies as its upadhi or material basis. Yet, all persecutions notwithstanding, the number of adherents to Astrology among the most intellectual and scientific minds was always very great. If Cardan and Kepler were among its ardent supporters, then later votaries have nothing to blush for, even in its now imperfect and distorted form” (Key 318-19).
Blood Rites Ceremonies, covenants, and observances in which blood is used as part of the rites or performances. “The arcane doctrine teaches that the ‘blood’ rites are as old as the Third-Root race, being established in their final form by the Fourth Parent race in commemoration of the separation of androgynous mankind, their forefathers, into males and females” (BCW 8:251). Whatever sacred meaning may have entered into this primary memorial of the ethereal forms and forces of androgynous humanity becoming separate, physicalized, warm-blooded bodies, has been forgotten, misunderstood, or perverted in the exoteric rites which have come down to us.
Bodhi is also a name for the mystical tree under which legend says Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment, known as the sacred fig tree of India. See also Asvattha
Book, sacred
Brahmacharin (Sanskrit) Brahmacārin [from brahman cosmic spirit, divine spiritual wisdom + cārin one practicing or performing] One who is devoted to the student life of a religious devotee involved in sacred study; a young Brahmin in the first period of life as observed in ancient times. The name likewise is given to one who practices rigorous self-control, abstinence, chastity, etc.
Brahmajnana Brahmajñāna (Sanskrit) [from brahman cosmic spirit + jñāna knowledge from the verbal root jñā to know] Divine, sacred, or esoteric knowledge concerning the cosmic Brahman as taught, for instance, in Vedantic philosophy; also spiritual wisdom per se.
Brahmajnanin (Sanskrit) Brahmajñānin [from brahman cosmic spirit + jñānin knower from the verbal root jñā to know] One who possesses sacred knowledge; spiritually wise or holy.
Brahmana(Sanskrit) ::: A word having several meanings in Hindu sacred literature. Brahmana is both noun andadjective, as noun signifying a member of the first of the four Vedic classes, and as adjective signifyingwhat belongs to a Brahmana or what is Brahmanical. Secondly, it signifies one of the portions of theVedic literature, containing rules for the proper usage of the mantras or hymns at sacrifices, explanationsin detail of what these sacrifices are, illustrated by legends and old stories.Another adjective with closely similar meaning is Brahma. An old-fashioned English way of spellingBrahmana is Brahmin.
brahman ::: [Ved.]: the sacred or inspired word, expression of the heart or soul; heart; the Vedic word or mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of the intuition arising out of the depths of the soul or being; the Soul that emerges out of the subconscient in Man and rises towards the superconscient and also word of creative Power welling upward out of the soul. [Vedanta]: the Reality; the Eternal; the Absolute; the Spirit; the Supreme Being; the One besides whom there is nothing else existent; in relation to the universe [cf. atman] the Supreme is brahman, the one Reality which is not only the spiritual, material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe, but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracosmic Spirit. ::: brahma [nominative] ::: brahmana [instrumental], by the hymn. ::: brahmani [locative], into the brahman. [cf. Brahma]
Brahmaputra (Sanskrit) Brahmaputra [from brahman + putra son] In the Vedas, the son of a Brahmin, a member of the priestly caste. Also a son of Brahma, applied particularly to the prajapatis, the mind-born sons of Brahma, usually enumerated as seven. Blavatsky uses the term in a slightly different sense, referring to the Sons of God in connection with a certain Sacred Island in Central Asia (SD 1:209).
Brahmasrama (Sanskrit) Brahmāśrama [from brahman the supreme principle + āśrama sacred building, hermitage] Mystically, an esoteric seat, an initiation chamber, or secret room where the initiant strives to attain union with Brahman or the inner god. Also a temple, in which the sacred mysteries of the wisdom-religion are taught. Used as well to signify the headquarters of an esoteric school.
brindavan &
sacred ::: 1. Devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; consecrated. 2. Reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object; consecrated, hallowed. 3. Secured against violation, infringement, etc., as by reverence or sense of right; sacrosanct. 4. Entitled to veneration or religious respect by association with divinity or divine things; holy; venerable; divine.
sacred ::: a. --> Set apart by solemn religious ceremony; especially, in a good sense, made holy; set apart to religious use; consecrated; not profane or common; as, a sacred place; a sacred day; sacred service.
Relating to religion, or to the services of religion; not secular; religious; as, sacred history.
Designated or exalted by a divine sanction; possessing the highest title to obedience, honor, reverence, or veneration; entitled to extreme reverence; venerable.
sacred Book
sacred hill
sacred "jargon" Reserved for exclusive use by something. The term might mean only writable by whatever it is sacred to. For example, "Register 7 is sacred to the interrupt handler" would mean that if any other code changed the contents of register 7, dire consequences would ensue. [{Jargon File}] (2002-12-30)
bush ::: n. --> A thicket, or place abounding in trees or shrubs; a wild forest.
A shrub; esp., a shrub with branches rising from or near the root; a thick shrub or a cluster of shrubs.
A shrub cut off, or a shrublike branch of a tree; as, bushes to support pea vines.
A shrub or branch, properly, a branch of ivy (as sacred to Bacchus), hung out at vintners&
candlemas ::: n. --> The second day of February, on which is celebrated the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary; -- so called because the candles for the altar or other sacred uses are blessed on that day.
canon ::: n. --> A law or rule.
A law, or rule of doctrine or discipline, enacted by a council and confirmed by the pope or the sovereign; a decision, regulation, code, or constitution made by ecclesiastical authority.
The collection of books received as genuine Holy Scriptures, called the sacred canon, or general rule of moral and religious duty, given by inspiration; the Bible; also, any one of the canonical Scriptures. See Canonical books, under Canonical, a.
canopy ::: n. --> A covering fixed over a bed, dais, or the like, or carried on poles over an exalted personage or a sacred object, etc. chiefly as a mark of honor.
An ornamental projection, over a door, window, niche, etc.
Also, a rooflike covering, supported on pillars over an altar, a statue, a fountain, etc. ::: v. t.
cardinal ::: a. --> Of fundamental importance; preeminent; superior; chief; principal.
One of the ecclesiastical princes who constitute the pope&
castalian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Castalia, a mythical fountain of inspiration on Mt. Parnassus sacred to the Muses.
cavern in the sacred hill, the mystic
Chela(Cela) ::: An old Indian term. In archaic times more frequently spelled and pronounced cheta or cheda. Themeaning is "servant," a personal disciple attached to the service of a teacher from whom he receivesinstruction. The idea is closely similar to the Anglo-Saxon term leorning-cneht, meaning "learningservant," a name given in Anglo-Saxon translations of the Christian New Testament to the disciples ofJesus, his "chelas." It is, therefore, a word used in old mystical scriptures for a disciple, a pupil, a learneror hearer. The relationship of teacher and disciple is infinitely more sacred even than that of parent andchild; because, while the parents give the body to the incoming soul, the teacher brings forth that soulitself and teaches it to be and therefore to see, teaches it to know and to become what it is in its inmostbeing -- that is, a divine thing.The chela life or chela path is a beautiful one, full of joy to its very end, but also it calls forth and needseverything noble and high in the learner or disciple; for the powers or faculties of the higher self must bebrought into activity in order to attain and to hold those summits of intellectual and spiritual grandeurwhere the Masters themselves live. For that, masterhood, is the end of discipleship -- not, however, thatthis ideal should be set before us merely as an end to attain to as something of benefit for one's own self,because that very thought is a selfish one and therefore a stumbling in the path. It is for the individual'sbenefit, of course; yet the true idea is that everything and every faculty that is in the soul shall be broughtout in the service of all humanity, for this is the royal road, the great royal thoroughfare, of self-conquest.The more mystical meanings attached to this term chela can be given only to those who have irrevocablypledged themselves to the esoteric life.
choral ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a choir or chorus; singing, sung, or adapted to be sung, in chorus or harmony. ::: n. --> A hymn tune; a simple sacred tune, sung in unison by the congregation; as, the Lutheran chorals.
codex ::: n. --> A book; a manuscript.
A collection or digest of laws; a code.
An ancient manuscript of the Sacred Scriptures, or any part of them, particularly the New Testament.
A collection of canons.
conjuration ::: n. --> The act of calling or summoning by a sacred name, or in solemn manner; the act of binding by an oath; an earnest entreaty; adjuration.
The act or process of invoking supernatural aid by the use of a magical form of words; the practice of magic arts; incantation; enchantment.
A league for a criminal purpose; conspiracy.
conjure ::: v. t. --> To call on or summon by a sacred name or in solemn manner; to implore earnestly; to adjure.
To affect or effect by conjuration; to call forth or send away by magic arts; to excite or alter, as if by magic or by the aid of supernatural powers. ::: v. i.
consecrate ::: a. --> Consecrated; devoted; dedicated; sacred. ::: v. t. --> To make, or declare to be, sacred; to appropriate to sacred uses; to set apart, dedicate, or devote, to the service or worship of God; as, to consecrate a church; to give (one&
consecrator ::: n. --> One who consecrates; one who performs the rites by which a person or thing is devoted or dedicated to sacred purposes.
Considered as history, the Bible is a patchwork of documents put together at different times, sometimes mere allegory, as in the creation story, or partly allegorical and partly literal, as in the story of the Flood, adapted to serve the purpose of embalming the sacred teachings. It is remarkable that Christians continue to preserve books like Ezekiel — so obviously an esoteric work and so incomprehensible on ordinary doctrinal lines — the Psalms of David, Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Job.
corporale ::: a. --> A fine linen cloth, on which the sacred elements are consecrated in the eucharist, or with which they are covered; a communion cloth.
cross ::: 1. A structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece, upon which persons were formerly put to a cruel and ignominious death by being nailed or otherwise fastened to it by their extremities. 2. A representation or delineation of a cross on any surface, varying in elaborateness from two lines crossing each other to an ornamental design painted, embroidered, carved, etc.; used as a sacred mark, symbol, badge, or the like. 3. A trouble, vexation, annoyance; misfortune, adversity; sometimes anything that thwarts or crosses. v. 4. To go or extend across; pass from one side of to the other: pass over. 5. To extend or pass through or over; intersect. 6. To encounter in passing. crosses, crossed, crossing.
deconsecrate ::: v. t. --> To deprive of sacredness; to secularize.
dedicate ::: p. a. --> Dedicated; set apart; devoted; consecrated. ::: v. t. --> To set apart and consecrate, as to a divinity, or for sacred uses; to devote formally and solemnly; as, to dedicate vessels, treasures, a temple, or a church, to a religious use.
To devote, set apart, or give up, as one&
dedication ::: n. --> The act of setting apart or consecrating to a divine Being, or to a sacred use, often with religious solemnities; solemn appropriation; as, the dedication of Solomon&
desecrate ::: v. t. --> To divest of a sacred character or office; to divert from a sacred purpose; to violate the sanctity of; to profane; to put to an unworthy use; -- the opposite of consecrate.
devoutful ::: a. --> Full of devotion.
Sacred.
Dionysian mysteries: The ancient Greek mystery cult, originating in Phrygia, observed at various places by migratory groups of adherents. Originally, the rites were highly orgiastic in character; the devotees imbibed the sacred wine, ate the raw flesh of the sacrificed animal and drank its warm blood, and went into a frenzy of ecstasy, believed to be inspired by the presence of the deity within them. (Cf. Orphic mysteries.)
disconsecrate ::: v. t. --> To deprive of consecration or sacredness.
divine ::: adj. **1. Of or pertaining to God or the Supreme Being. 2. Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity. 3. Being in the service or worship of a deity; sacred. 4. Heavenly, celestial. 5. Supremely good or beautiful; magnificent. diviner, divinest, divinely, half-divine. v. 6. To perceive by intuition or insight. divines, divined, divining.**
donary ::: n. --> A thing given to a sacred use.
E. Landau, Grundlagen der Analysis, Leipzig, 1930. Numinous: A word coined from the Latin "numen" by Rudolf Otto to signify the absolutely unique state of mind of the genuinely religious person who feels or is aware of something mysterious, terrible, awe-inspiring, holy and sacred. This feeling or awareness is a mysterium tremendum, beyond reason, beyond the good or the beautiful. This numinous is an a priori category and is the basis of man's cognition of the Divine. See his book The Idea of the Holy (rev. ed., 1925). -- V.F.
elul ::: n. --> The sixth month of the Jewish year, by the sacred reckoning, or the twelfth, by the civil reckoning, corresponding nearly to the month of September.
enshrine ::: v. t. --> To inclose in a shrine or chest; hence, to preserve or cherish as something sacred; as, to enshrine something in memory.
entellus ::: n. --> An East Indian long-tailed bearded monkey (Semnopithecus entellus) regarded as sacred by the natives. It is remarkable for the caplike arrangement of the hair on the head. Called also hoonoomaun and hungoor.
Esoteric Doctrine ::: The body of mystical and sacred teachings reserved for students of high and worthy character. This bodyof teachings has been known and studied by highly evolved individuals in all ages. The esoteric doctrineis the common property of mankind, and it has always been thus. In all the various great religions andphilosophies of the world, the student will find fundamental principles in each which, when placed sideby side and critically examined, are easily discovered to be identic. Every one of such fundamentalprinciples is in every great world religion or world philosophy; hence the aggregate of these worldreligions or world philosophies contains the entirety of the esoteric doctrine, but usually expressed inexoteric form.However, no one of these world religions or world philosophies gives in clear and explicit shape or formthe entirety of the body of teachings which are at its heart; some religions emphasize one or more of suchfundamental principles; another religion or philosophy will emphasize others of these principles; in eithercase others again of the principles remaining in the background. This readily accounts for the fact that thevarious world religions and world philosophies vary among themselves and often, to the unreflectingmind, superficially seem to have little in common, and perhaps even to be contradictory. The cause ofthis is the varying manner in which each such religion or philosophy has been given to the world, theform that each took having been best for the period in which it was promulgated. Each such religion orphilosophy, having its own racial sphere and period of time, represents the various human minds whohave developed it or who, so to say, have translated it to the world in this or in that particularpromulgation.These manners or mannerisms of exoteric thinking we may discard if we wish; but it is the fundamentalprinciples behind every great religion or great philosophy which in their aggregate are the universalesoteric doctrine. In this universal esoteric doctrine lies the mystery-field of each great religion orphilosophy -- this mystery-teaching being always reserved for the initiates. The esoteric philosophy ordoctrine has been held from time immemorial in the guardianship of great men, exalted seers and sages,who from time to time promulgate it, or rather portions of it, to the world when the spiritual andintellectual need for so doing arises. The origins of the esoteric doctrine are found in themystery-teachings of beings from other and spiritual spheres, who incarnated in the early humanity of thethird root-race of this fourth round of our globe, and taught the then intellectually nascent mankind thenecessary certain fundamental principles or truths regarding the universe and the nature of the worldsurrounding us.
expiate ::: v. t. --> To extinguish the guilt of by sufferance of penalty or some equivalent; to make complete satisfaction for; to atone for; to make amends for; to make expiation for; as, to expiate a crime, a guilt, or sin.
To purify with sacred rites. ::: a.
Fifth month of the Hebrew ecclesiastical or sacred year, according to the system used after the Babylonian captivity; also the 11th month of the civil year. Likewise the 11th month of the Palmyrenes and Syrians, equivalent to July-August and the zodiacal sign Leo. See also ABBA.
foo "jargon" /foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and files (especially {scratch files}). First on the standard list of {metasyntactic variables} used in {syntax} examples. See also {bar}, {baz}, {qux}, quux, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred}, {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}. The etymology of "foo" is obscure. When used in connection with "bar" it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym {FUBAR}, later bowdlerised to {foobar}. However, the use of the word "foo" itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. "FOO" often appeared in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip by Bill Holman. This surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American comics including "Everybody's" between about 1930 and 1952. FOO was often included on licence plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew". Allegedly, "FOO" and "BAR" also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!". Oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be related to the Chinese word "fu" (sometimes transliterated "foo"), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called "fu dogs"). Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's "oeuvre" have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language", compiled at {TMRC} there was an entry that went something like this: FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}. Almost the entire staff of what became the {MIT} {AI LAB} was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there. Another correspondant cites the nautical construction "foo-foo" (or "poo-poo"), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical thing whose name has been forgotten, e.g. "foo-foo box", "foo-foo valve". This was common on ships by the early nineteenth century. Very probably, hackish "foo" had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish "feh" and/or English "fooey". [{Jargon File}] (1998-04-16)
FRIENDSHIP. ::: Friendship or affection is not excluded fron the yoga. Friendship with the Divine is a recognised relation in the snd/ianii. Friendships between the sddhakas exist and are encouraged. Only, we seek to found them on a surer basis than that on which the bulk of human friendships are insecurely founded. It is precisely because we hold friendship, brotherhood, love to be sacred things that we want this change. We want them rooted in the soul, founded on the rock of the Divine.
gayatri mantra. ::: a sacred Sanskrit mantra or hymn from the Rigveda invoking the solar powers of evolution and enlightenment, recited daily by hindus of the three upper castes for the unfoldment of the intellectual powers leading to enlightenment
Generally speaking the bull was the symbol for terrestrial and physical generation, linking it with the moon — as indeed was Apis; although the bull is also connected with the sun, as in the case with Mnevis, the sacred bull of Heliopolis. In any event, “it was not the Bull that was worshipped but the Osiridian symbol; just as Christians kneel now before the Lamb, the symbol of Jesus Christ, in their churches” (TG 26). See also BULL; SERAPIS
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, publishers of A Dictionary of the Sacred Language of All Scriptures and Myths by G. A. Gaskell.
gita dhyanam. :::nine verses that are recited before reading the Bhagavad Gita; these verses offer salutations to a variety of sacred scriptures, figures, and entities, characterise the relationship of the Bhagavad Gita to the
Gnostic amulets known as Abraxas gems depicted the god as a pantheos (all-god), with the head of a cock, herald of the sun, representing foresight and vigilance; a human body clothed in armor, suggestive of guardian power; legs in the form of sacred asps. In his right hand is a scourge, emblem of authority; on his left arm a shield emblazoned with a word of power. This pantheos is invariably inscribed with his proper name IAO and his epithets Abraxas and Sabaoth, and often accompanied with invocations such as SEMES EILAM, the eternal sun (Gnostics and Their Remains 246), which Blavatsky equates with “the central spiritual sun” of the Qabbalists (SD 2:214). Though written in Greek characters, the words SEMES EILAM ABRASAX are probably Semitic in origin: shemesh sun; ‘olam secret, occult, hid, eternity, world; Abrasax Abraxas. Hence in combination the phrase may be rendered “the eternal sun Abrasax.”
Guru(Sanskrit) ::: Sometimes gurudeva, "master divine." The word used in the old Sanskrit scriptures forteacher, preceptor. According to the beautiful teachings of the ancient wisdom, the guru acts as themidwife bringing to birth, helping to bring into the active life of the chela, the spiritual and intellectualparts of the disciple -- the soul of the man. Thus the relationship between teacher and disciple is anextremely sacred one, because it is a tie which binds closely heart to heart, mind to mind. The idea is,again, that the latent spiritual potencies in the mind and heart of the learner shall receive such assistancein their development as the teacher can karmically give; but it does not mean that the teacher shall do thework that the disciple himself or herself must do. The learner or disciple must tread his own path, and theteacher cannot tread it for him. The teacher points the way, guides and aids, and the disciple follows thepath.
hagiarchy ::: n. --> A sacred government; by holy orders of men.
hagiographal ::: --> Pertaining to the hagiographa, or to sacred writings.
hagiologist ::: n. --> One who treats of the sacred writings; a writer of the lives of the saints; a hagiographer.
hagiology ::: n. --> The history or description of the sacred writings or of sacred persons; a narrative of the lives of the saints; a catalogue of saints.
halcyon ::: n. --> A kingfisher. By modern ornithologists restricted to a genus including a limited number of species having omnivorous habits, as the sacred kingfisher (Halcyon sancta) of Australia. ::: a. --> Pertaining to, or resembling, the halcyon, which was anciently said to lay her eggs in nests on or near the sea during the
halidom ::: n. --> Holiness; sanctity; sacred oath; sacred things; sanctuary; -- used chiefly in oaths.
Holy doom; the Last Day.
hallowed ::: regarded as holy; venerated; sacred.
hallow ::: v. t. --> To make holy; to set apart for holy or religious use; to consecrate; to treat or keep as sacred; to reverence.
halo ::: a geometric shape, usually in the form of a disk, circle, ring or rayed structure, traditionally representing a radiant light around or above the head of a divine or sacred personage. haloed.
hamadryas ::: n. --> The sacred baboon of Egypt (Cynocephalus Hamadryas).
Hence in its widest sense Scholasticism embraces all the intellectual activities, artistic, philosophical and theological, carried on in the medieval schools. Any attempt to define its narrower meaning in the field of philosophy raises serious difficulties, for in this case, though the term's comprehension is lessened, it still has to cover many centuries of many-faced thought. However, it is still possible to list several characteristics sufficient to differentiate Scholastic from non-Scholastic philosophy. While ancient philosophy was the philosophy of a people and modern thought that of individuals, Scholasticism was the philosophy of a Christian society which transcended the characteristics of individuals, nations and peoples. It was the corporate product of social thought, and as such its reasoning respected authority in the forms of tradition and revealed religion. Tradition consisted primarily in the systems of Plato and Aristotle as sifted, adapted and absorbed through many centuries. It was natural that religion, which played a paramount role in the culture of the middle ages, should bring influence to bear on the medieval, rational view of life. Revelation was held to be at once a norm and an aid to reason. Since the philosophers of the period were primarily scientific theologians, their rational interests were dominated by religious preoccupations. Hence, while in general they preserved the formal distinctions between reason and faith, and maintained the relatively autonomous character of philosophy, the choice of problems and the resources of science were controlled by theology. The most constant characteristic of Scholasticism was its method. This was formed naturally by a series of historical circumstances, The need of a medium of communication, of a consistent body of technical language tooled to convey the recently revealed meanings of religion, God, man and the material universe led the early Christian thinkers to adopt the means most viable, most widely extant, and nearest at hand, viz. Greek scientific terminology. This, at first purely utilitarian, employment of Greek thought soon developed under Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origin, and St. Augustine into the "Egyptian-spoils" theory; Greek thought and secular learning were held to be propaedeutic to Christianity on the principle: "Whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians." (Justin, Second Apology, ch. XIII). Thus was established the first characteristic of the Scholastic method: philosophy is directly and immediately subordinate to theology. Because of this subordinate position of philosophy and because of the sacred, exclusive and total nature of revealed wisdom, the interest of early Christian thinkers was focused much more on the form of Greek thought than on its content and, it might be added, much less of this content was absorbed by early Christian thought than is generally supposed. As practical consequences of this specialized interest there followed two important factors in the formation of Scholastic philosophy: Greek logic en bloc was taken over by Christians; from the beginning of the Christian era to the end of the XII century, no provision was made in Catholic centers of learning for the formal teaching of philosophy. There was a faculty to teach logic as part of the trivium and a faculty of theology. For these two reasons, what philosophy there was during this long period of twelve centuries, was dominated first, as has been seen, by theology and, second, by logic. In this latter point is found rooted the second characteristic of the Scholastic method: its preoccupation with logic, deduction, system, and its literary form of syllogistic argumentation. The third characteristic of the Scholastic method follows directly from the previous elements already indicated. It adds, however, a property of its own gained from the fact that philosophy during the medieval period became an important instrument of pedogogy. It existed in and for the schools. This new element coupled with the domination of logic, the tradition-mindedness and social-consciousness of the medieval Christians, produced opposition of authorities for or against a given problem and, finally, disputation, where a given doctrine is syllogistically defended against the adversaries' objections. This third element of the Scholastic method is its most original characteristic and accounts more than any other single factor for the forms of the works left us from this period. These are to be found as commentaries on single or collected texts; summae, where the method is dialectical or disputational in character. The main sources of Greek thought are relatively few in number: all that was known of Plato was the Timaeus in the translation and commentary of Chalcidius. Augustine, the pseudo-Areopagite, and the Liber de Causis were the principal fonts of Neoplatonic literature. Parts of Aristotle's logical works (Categoriae and de Interpre.) and the Isagoge of Porphyry were known through the translations of Boethius. Not until 1128 did the Scholastics come to know the rest of Aristotle's logical works. The golden age of Scholasticism was heralded in the late XIIth century by the translations of the rest of his works (Physics, Ethics, Metaphysics, De Anima, etc.) from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona, John of Spain, Gundisalvi, Michael Scot, and Hermann the German, from the Greek by Robert Grosseteste, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant. At the same time the Judae-Arabian speculation of Alkindi, Alfarabi, Avencebrol, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides together with the Neoplatonic works of Proclus were made available in translation. At this same period the Scholastic attention to logic was turned to metaphysics, even psychological and ethical problems and the long-discussed question of the universals were approached from this new angle. Philosophy at last achieved a certain degree of autonomy and slowly forced the recently founded universities to accord it a separate faculty.
herald ::: n. --> An officer whose business was to denounce or proclaim war, to challenge to battle, to proclaim peace, and to bear messages from the commander of an army. He was invested with a sacred and inviolable character.
In the Middle Ages, the officer charged with the above duties, and also with the care of genealogies, of the rights and privileges of noble families, and especially of armorial bearings. In modern times, some vestiges of this office remain, especially in
Hereditary property: See Recursion, proof by. Hermeneutics: The art and science of interpreting especially authoritative writings, mainly in application to sacred scripture, and equivalent to exegesis. -- K.F.L.
Hermes Trismegistus: The fabled author of Neo-Platonic, Judaic, Kabalistic, alchemical and astrological works, studied as sacred writings by the Egyptian priests. Identified with the Egyptian god Thoth.
Hestia: In Greek mythology, sister of Zeus, virgin goddess of the hearth, both of the home and of the city from which each group of colonists would take sacred fire to its new home.
hierarch ::: n. --> One who has high and controlling authority in sacred things; the chief of a sacred order; as, princely hierarchs.
hierarchs ::: those who rule or have authority in sacred things; high priests.
hierarchy ::: n. --> Dominion or authority in sacred things.
A body of officials disposed organically in ranks and orders each subordinate to the one above it; a body of ecclesiastical rulers.
A form of government administered in the church by patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, and, in an inferior degree, by priests.
A rank or order of holy beings.
hieratic ::: 1. Of or associated with sacred persons or their offices or duties. 2. Constituting or relating to a simplified cursive style of Egyptian hieroglyphics, used in both sacred and secular writings.
hieratic ::: a. --> Consecrated to sacred uses; sacerdotal; pertaining to priests.
hieroglyphic ::: a. --> A sacred character; a character in picture writing, as of the ancient Egyptians, Mexicans, etc. Specifically, in the plural, the picture writing of the ancient Egyptian priests. It is made up of three, or, as some say, four classes of characters: first, the hieroglyphic proper, or figurative, in which the representation of the object conveys the idea of the object itself; second, the ideographic, consisting of symbols representing ideas, not sounds, as an ostrich feather is a symbol of truth; third, the phonetic, consisting of
hierogrammatic ::: a. --> Written in, or pertaining to, hierograms; expressive of sacred writing.
hierogram ::: n. --> A form of sacred or hieratic writing.
hierographical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to sacred writing.
hierography ::: n. --> Sacred writing.
hierolatry ::: n. --> The worship of saints or sacred things.
hierology ::: n. --> A treatise on sacred things; especially, the science which treats of the ancient writings and inscriptions of the Egyptians, or a treatise on that science.
hieromnemon ::: n. --> The sacred secretary or recorder sent by each state belonging to the Amphictyonic Council, along with the deputy or minister.
A magistrate who had charge of religious matters, as at Byzantium.
hierophant ::: an interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge. hierophants.
Hierophant: Greek for demonstrator of sacred matters. The ancient title of higher adepts and teachers of the classical mysteries. Currently used by occultists as a title of initiators into esoteric knowledge.
hierotheca ::: n. --> A receptacle for sacred objects.
hierourgy ::: n. --> A sacred or holy work or worship.
hill, sacred
holily ::: adv. --> Piously; with sanctity; in a holy manner.
Sacredly; inviolably.
holiness ::: n. --> The state or quality of being holy; perfect moral integrity or purity; freedom from sin; sanctity; innocence.
The state of being hallowed, or consecrated to God or to his worship; sacredness.
Holy Grail: A vessel of utmost sacredness, the quest for which is the subject of many tales, legends and myths. The Holy Grail and the tales built around it indubitably have a mystic, symbolical significance.
holy ::: superl. --> Set apart to the service or worship of God; hallowed; sacred; reserved from profane or common use; holy vessels; a holy priesthood.
Spiritually whole or sound; of unimpaired innocence and virtue; free from sinful affections; pure in heart; godly; pious; irreproachable; guiltless; acceptable to God.
homa &
https://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/enoch1.txt
hymnic ::: a. --> Relating to hymns, or sacred lyrics.
hymn ::: n. --> An ode or song of praise or adoration; especially, a religious ode, a sacred lyric; a song of praise or thankgiving intended to be used in religious service; as, the Homeric hymns; Watts&
hymnology ::: n. --> The hymns or sacred lyrics composed by authors of a particular country or period; as, the hymnology of the eighteenth century; also, the collective body of hymns used by any particular church or religious body; as, the Anglican hymnology.
A knowledge of hymns; a treatise on hymns.
ichneumon ::: n. --> Any carnivorous mammal of the genus Herpestes, and family Viverridae. Numerous species are found in Asia and Africa. The Egyptian species(H. ichneumon), which ranges to Spain and Palestine, is noted for destroying the eggs and young of the crocodile as well as various snakes and lizards, and hence was considered sacred by the ancient Egyptians. The common species of India (H. griseus), known as the mongoose, has similar habits and is often domesticated. It is noted for killing the cobra.
idalian ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Idalium, a mountain city in Cyprus, or to Venus, to whom it was sacred.
idolize ::: v. t. --> To make an idol of; to pay idolatrous worship to; as, to idolize the sacred bull in Egypt.
To love to excess; to love or reverence to adoration; as, to idolize gold, children, a hero. ::: v. i. --> To practice idolatry.
initiate ::: ppla.**1. Instructed in or introduced to secret or sacred knowledge. n.2. A novice, beginner. Initiate.**
Initiates ::: Those who have passed at least one initiation and therefore those who understand the mystery-teachingsand who are ready to receive them at some future time in even larger measure. Please note the distinctionbetween initiant and initiate. An initiant is one who is beginning or preparing for an initiation. An initiateis one who has successfully passed at least one initiation. It is obvious therefore that an initiate is alwaysan initiant when he prepares for a still higher initiation.The mystery-teachings were held as the most sacred treasure or possession that men could transmit totheir descendants who were worthy postulants. The revelation of these mystery-doctrines under the sealof initiation, and under proper conditions to worthy depositaries, worked marvelous changes in the livesof those who underwent successfully the initiatory trials. It made men different from what they werebefore they received this spiritual and intellectual revelation. The facts are found in all the old religionsand philosophies, if these are studied honestly. Initiation was always spoken of under the metaphor orfigure of speech of "a new birth," a "birth into truth," for it was a spiritual and intellectual rebirth of thepowers of the human spirit-soul, and could be called in all truth a birth of the soul into a loftier andnobler self-consciousness. When this happened, such men were called "initiates" or the reborn. In India,such reborn men were anciently called dvija, a Sanskrit word meaning "twice-born." In Egypt suchinitiates or reborn men were called "Sons of the Sun." In other countries they were called by other names.
In the old Persian Language Aredvi-Sur-Nahid has been used in the sense of powerful and unblemished water; Nahid is also the name of Venus. Anahita represents the water of life or the primordial substance in which the life-giving Mithra penetrates and creates light. Mehr-Ab [Mithra + water] is the name given to the most sacred place of worship or altar in all mosques, usually represented with a triangle over a square, geometrically pertaining to the number seven. This symbol can also be seen in some carpet designs and many Persian artifacts of different periods, both Islamic and pre-Islamic.
In theosophical literature Bharata has also been applied to an ancient sacred land. “ ‘Happy are those who are born, even from the condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-Varsha!’ exclaim the incarnated gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bharata is India, but in this case it symbolized the chosen land in those days, and was considered the best of the divisions of Jambu-dwipa, as it was the land of active (spiritual) works par excellence; the land of initiation and of divine knowledge” (SD 2:369).
"In the spiritual sense, however, sacrifice has a different meaning — it does not so much indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one"s being, one"s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of ‘making sacred" and is used as an equivalent of the word yajna. When the Gita speaks of the ‘sacrifice of knowledge", it does not mean a giving up of anything, but a turning of the mind towards the Divine in the search for knowledge and an offering of oneself through it. It is in this sense, too, that one speaks of the offering or sacrifice of works. The Mother has written somewhere that the spiritual sacrifice is joyful and not painful in its nature. On the spiritual path, very commonly, if a seeker still feels the old ties and responsibilities strongly he is not asked to sever or leave them, but to let the call in him grow till all within is ready. Many, indeed, come away earlier because they feel that to cut loose is their only chance, and these have to go sometimes through a struggle. But the pain, the struggle, is not the essential character of this spiritual self-offering.” Letters on Yoga
“In the spiritual sense, however, sacrifice has a different meaning—it does not so much indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one’s being, one’s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of ‘making sacred’ and is used as an equivalent of the word yajna. When the Gita speaks of the ‘sacrifice of knowledge’, it does not mean a giving up of anything, but a turning of the mind towards the Divine in the search for knowledge and an offering of oneself through it. It is in this sense, too, that one speaks of the offering or sacrifice of works. The Mother has written somewhere that the spiritual sacrifice is joyful and not painful in its nature. On the spiritual path, very commonly, if a seeker still feels the old ties and responsibilities strongly he is not asked to sever or leave them, but to let the call in him grow till all within is ready. Many, indeed, come away earlier because they feel that to cut loose is their only chance, and these have to go sometimes through a struggle. But the pain, the struggle, is not the essential character of this spiritual self-offering.” Letters on Yoga
inviolable ::: a. --> Not violable; not susceptible of hurt, wound, or harm (used with respect to either physical or moral damage); not susceptible of being profaned or corrupted; sacred; holy; as, inviolable honor or chastity; an inviolable shrine.
Unviolated; uninjured; undefiled; uncorrupted.
Not capable of being broken or violated; as, an inviolable covenant, agreement, promise, or vow.
It is equally true that such words as lion, bull, and scorpion are often used in occult writings to denote, not the physical animals, but the potencies to which they correspond. Zodiac means the circle of (sacred) animals. As man himself is on this earth the model and storehouse of all forms, those as yet unexpressed as well as those which have already appeared, he had in his own composition the ideal forms and attributes of all the various animals who in eons of past history as stocks were derivatives from him as their superior. See also ZOOLATRY
“It thus becomes clear why the Agnishwatta, devoid of the grosser creative fire, hence unable to create physical man, having no double, or astral body, to project, since they were without any form, are shown in exoteric allegories as Yogis, Kumaras (chaste youths), who became ‘rebels,’ Asuras, fighting and opposing gods . . . Yet it is they alone who could complete man, i.e., make of him a self-conscious, almost a divine being — a god on Earth. The Barhishad, though possessed of creative fire, were devoid of the higher mahat-mic element. Being on a level with the lower principles — those which precede gross objective matter — they could only give birth to the outer man, or rather to the model of the physical, the astral man” (SD 2:78-9). The barhishads “could only create, or rather clothe, the human Monads with their own astral Selves, but they could not make man in their image and likeness. ‘Man must not be like one of us,’ say the creative gods, entrusted with the fabrication of the lower animal but higher; . . . Their creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means, esoterically, that it is they who became the first Race, and thus shared its destiny and further evolution. They would not, simply because they could not, give to man that sacred spark which burns and expands into the flower of human reason and self-consciousness, for they had it not to give” (SD 2:94-5).
japa. ::: incantation; a spiritual discipline involving the meditative repetition of the Lord's name or a mantra as a means to a continual recollection of His presence; uttering the names of the gods or sacred mantras, like OM, either mentally or spoken softly as a method of spiritual practice
Jupiter is usually thought to have originated as a sky god. His identifying implement is the thunderbolt, and his primary sacred animal is the eagle,[1] which held precedence over other birds in the taking of auspices[2] and became one of the most common symbols of the Roman army (see Aquila). The two emblems were often combined to represent the god in the form of an eagle holding in its claws a thunderbolt, frequently seen on Greek and Roman coins.[3] As the sky-god, he was a divine witness to oaths, the sacred trust on which justice and good government depend. Many of his functions were focused on the Capitoline (“Capitol Hill”), where the citadel was located. He was the chief deity of the early Capitoline Triad with Mars and Quirinus.[4] In the later Capitoline Triad, he was the central guardian of the state with Juno and Minerva. His sacred tree was the oak.
Koran: (Qoran) The name for the sacred book of the Mohammedans. Its contents consist largely of warnings, remonstrances, assertions, arguments in favor of certain doctrines, narratives for enforcing morals. It stresses the ideal of the day of judgment, and abounds in realistic description of both the pains of hell and the delights of paradise. As a collection of commandments, it resembles juristic rescripts (answers to special questions), mentioning the contradictory rulings on the same subjects. It also resembles a diary of the prophet, consisting of personal addresses by the deity to Mohammed. -- H.H.
kshetra. ::: a sacred place of pilgrimage; city or the field of body
lupercal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Lupercalia. ::: n. --> A grotto on the Palatine Hill sacred to Lupercus, the Lycean Pan.
Madhav: “The Animal represents the lower rajasic nature; the sacred fence is the human being with all its scaffolding.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “The word temple is to convey the sense that there is something holy, something sacred. Even in the Inconscient there is the Divine Presence.” Sat-Sang Talk 7/7/91
Madhav: This is a Vedic imagery: the heart is the altar, and aspiration, seeking for God, is fire. The external fire on the platform is symbolic of the inner flame that is lit on the altar of the heart. Now that sacred fire is dimmed by the negative pulls.”
Mantra: A Sanskrit term meaning an incantation consisting of a sacred formula, usually a quotation from the Vedas. The word has come, especially in occult usage, to mean a spell or charm. In Shaktism and elsewhere, the holy syllables to which, as manifestations of the eternal word or sound, great mystic significance and power is ascribed.
mantra ::: sacred syllable, name or mystic formula; the intuitive and inspired rhythmic utterance; any of the verses of the Veda, revealed verses of power not of an ordinary but of a divine inspiration and source.
mantra&
marai ::: n. --> A sacred inclosure or temple; -- so called by the islanders of the Pacific Ocean.
massacred ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Massacre
Medicine-man: The priest-magician of the American Indian tribes. Medicine-men were specialists in the techniques of healing, sorcery and divination, custodians of sacred objects, masters of ceremonial lore and magic. The word is often used for tribal priest-magicians of other races, where the proper designation would be witch-doctor or shaman.
motet ::: n. --> A composition adapted to sacred words in the elaborate polyphonic church style; an anthem.
mudhead "games" A {MUD} player who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc. with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person, on a MUD or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favourite MUD; why the specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See also {wannabee}. To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi legend of the mudheads or "koyemshi", mythical half-formed children of an unnatural union. Figures representing them act as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. [{Jargon File}] (1994-11-29)
myrtle ::: n. --> A species of the genus Myrtus, especially Myrtus communis. The common myrtle has a shrubby, upright stem, eight or ten feet high. Its branches form a close, full head, thickly covered with ovate or lanceolate evergreen leaves. It has solitary axillary white or rosy flowers, followed by black several-seeded berries. The ancients considered it sacred to Venus. The flowers, leaves, and berries are used variously in perfumery and as a condiment, and the beautifully mottled wood is used in turning.
Mystery language: According to H. P. Blavatsky (The Key to Theosophy), “The sacerdotal secret ‘jargon’ used by the initiated priests, and employed only when discussing sacred things. Every nation had its own ‘mystery’ tongue, unknown to all save those admitted to the Mysteries.”
nelumbo ::: n. --> A genus of great water lilies. The North American species is Nelumbo lutea, the Asiatic is the sacred lotus, N. speciosa.
nimbus ::: 1. A cloudy radiance said to surround a classical deity when on earth. 2. A radiant light that appears usually in the form of a circle or halo about or over the head in the representation of a god, demigod, saint, or sacred person such as a king or an emperor. Nimbus.
niyamas. ::: self-purification and study; religious observances divided into five disciplines that should all be practiced in word, thought and deed &
Oahspe: “A new Bible in the Words of Jehovih and His Angel Ambassadors. A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens on the Earth for the past Twenty-four Thousand Years.” A book published originally by the Essenes of Kosmon, a Fraternity of Faithists, and currently by Wing Anderson (Kosmon Industries, Los Angeles, Calif.) The preface to the eleventh American edition (copyright 1953 by E. Wing Anderson) states that OAHSPE (pronounced O as in clock, AH as in father, SPE as in Speak) means sky, earth and spirit and is the title of a new bible given to the world in the year 1881; it goes on to say that the book was written down, under spiritual guidance, by Dr. John B. Newbrough, who was gifted with astonishing extrasensory perception and was actively engaged in psychic research. The preface goes on to say that “OAHSPE purports to have been written at the command of God, who states that He is not the Creator but is simply chief executive officer . . . of our planet earth. He explains who the Creator is and also makes clear the difference between Lord, Lord God, God and the Creator. This strange book informs us that the world entered a new era in the year 1848, how the new era is different from those which preceded it and what changes will come to humanity within the next few years.... OAHSPE is made up of thirty-six books covering the history of the planet, the history of the human race, the history of every major religion, past and present, an analysis of today and a prophecy of tomorrow.”
oath ::: n. --> A solemn affirmation or declaration, made with a reverent appeal to God for the truth of what is affirmed.
A solemn affirmation, connected with a sacred object, or one regarded as sacred, as the temple, the altar, the blood of Abel, the Bible, the Koran, etc.
An appeal (in verification of a statement made) to a superior sanction, in such a form as exposes the party making the appeal to an indictment for perjury if the statement be false.
oblation ::: n. --> The act of offering, or of making an offering.
Anything offered or presented in worship or sacred service; an offering; a sacrifice.
A gift or contribution made to a church, as for the expenses of the eucharist, or for the support of the clergy and the poor.
office ::: n. --> That which a person does, either voluntarily or by appointment, for, or with reference to, others; customary duty, or a duty that arises from the relations of man to man; as, kind offices, pious offices.
A special duty, trust, charge, or position, conferred by authority and for a public purpose; a position of trust or authority; as, an executive or judical office; a municipal office.
A charge or trust, of a sacred nature, conferred by God
Old Testament [C programmers] The first edition of {K&R}, the sacred text describing {Classic C}. [{Jargon File}]
Om: A Sanskrit word, variously interpreted and explained, believed to possess magical powers and held especially sacred by Hindus and occultists.
.OM ::: in the Vedic tradition, the sacred "initiating syllable", regarded as "the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech" and "the foundation of all the potent creative sounds of the revealed word"; the "Word of Manifestation", the mantra or "expressive sound-symbol of the Brahman Consciousness in its four domains" (see AUM).
One who knows the body of Hindu sacred writings, the Vedas.
one who knows the body of Hindu sacred writings, the Vedas.
“On the heart’s altar dim the sacred fire.”
oracle ::: n. --> The answer of a god, or some person reputed to be a god, to an inquiry respecting some affair or future event, as the success of an enterprise or battle.
Hence: The deity who was supposed to give the answer; also, the place where it was given.
The communications, revelations, or messages delivered by God to the prophets; also, the entire sacred Scriptures -- usually in the plural.
osiris ::: n. --> One of the principal divinities of Egypt, the brother and husband of Isis. He was figured as a mummy wearing the royal cap of Upper Egypt, and was symbolized by the sacred bull, called Apis. Cf. Serapis.
pali ::: n. --> pl. of Palus.
A dialect descended from Sanskrit, and like that, a dead language, except when used as the sacred language of the Buddhist religion in Farther India, etc. ::: pl. --> of Palus
palmer ::: v. t. --> One who palms or cheats, as at cards or dice. ::: n. --> A wandering religious votary; especially, one who bore a branch of palm as a token that he had visited the Holy Land and its sacred places.
A palmerworm.
parnassus ::: n. --> A mountain in Greece, sacred to Apollo and the Muses, and famous for a temple of Apollo and for the Castalian spring.
peepul tree ::: --> A sacred tree (Ficus religiosa) of the Buddhists, a kind of fig tree which attains great size and venerable age. See Bo tree.
penetralia ::: n. pl. --> The recesses, or innermost parts, of any thing or place, especially of a temple or palace.
Hidden things or secrets; privacy; sanctuary; as, the sacred penetralia of the home.
Pharisaism: The most characteristic type of Palestinian Judaism at the time of Christ. This group is to be thought of as the remnant of the traditional culture of the ancient Hebrews. Scorched by the memory of the long struggle between their fathers' and other cultures which resulted in the unhappy Captivity, these descendants took on a more militant nationalism and a more rigid loyalty to traditional customs, teaching their children in schools of their own (the Synagogue) the religion of the ancient sacred covenant. Since their ways separated sharply from their brethren in the dispersion and from the less nationalistic minded at home they acquired the party name (from the second century B.C.) "Pharisees." Their leaders were devout students of the written and oral traditions which they regarded as the Divine Will (Torah). To this tradition they added detailed codes of rigorous religious living. Popular among the masses they were comparatively few in number although powerful in influence. Pharisaism was a book-centered religion, strongly monotheistic, intensely legalistic, teaching a national and social gospel of redemption by an expectant supernatural visitation. The term "Pharisaic" unfortunately has acquired a sinister meaning, probably due to certain N.T. statements linking Pharisees with hypocrites. R. T. Herford in his Pharisaism (1912) and The Pharisees (1924) has shown thit this religious party was preeminently spiritually minded even though legalistic and not sufficiently understood by Christian traditionalists. -- V.F.
pilentum ::: n. --> An easy chariot or carriage, used by Roman ladies, and in which the vessels, etc., for sacred rites were carried.
pilgrimage ::: n. --> The journey of a pilgrim; a long journey; especially, a journey to a shrine or other sacred place. Fig., the journey of human life.
A tedious and wearisome time.
pithasthana ::: [one of fifty-one places consecrated to the worship of Parvati or, by extension, any place sacred to the Mother].
pollute ::: v. t. --> To make foul, impure, or unclean; to defile; to taint; to soil; to desecrate; -- used of physical or moral defilement.
To violate sexually; to debauch; to dishonor.
To render ceremonially unclean; to disqualify or unfit for sacred use or service, or for social intercourse. ::: a.
pontiff ::: n. --> A high priest.
One of the sacred college, in ancient Rome, which had the supreme jurisdiction over all matters of religion, at the head of which was the Pontifex Maximus.
The chief priest.
The pope.
pradakshina. ::: walking around a sacred place, object or person in a clockwise direction, signifying that the Lord is the Centre and Source of life
Pradakshini: The pilgrimage along both banks of the Ganges River, most sacred of all rivers according to the Hindus.
prayag. ::: modern-day Allahabad; site of the confluence of the three sacred rivers
priestess ::: n. --> A woman who officiated in sacred rites among pagans.
priesthood ::: n. --> The office or character of a priest; the priestly function.
Priests, taken collectively; the order of men set apart for sacred offices; the order of priests.
priestly ::: sacred; characteristic of a priest.
profanation ::: v. t. --> The act of violating sacred things, or of treating them with contempt or irreverence; irreverent or too familiar treatment or use of what is sacred; desecration; as, the profanation of the Sabbath; the profanation of a sanctuary; the profanation of the name of God.
The act of treating with abuse or disrespect, or with undue publicity, or lack of delicacy.
profane ::: a. --> Not sacred or holy; not possessing peculiar sanctity; unconsecrated; hence, relating to matters other than sacred; secular; -- opposed to sacred, religious, or inspired; as, a profane place.
Unclean; impure; polluted; unholy.
Treating sacred things with contempt, disrespect, irreverence, or undue familiarity; irreverent; impious.
Irreverent in language; taking the name of God in vain; given to swearing; blasphemous; as, a profane person, word, oath, or
profaner ::: n. --> One who treats sacred things with irreverence, or defiles what is holy; one who uses profane language.
profaning ::: treating with irreverence, esp. with towards sacred objects.
psalmist ::: n. --> A writer or composer of sacred songs; -- a title particularly applied to David and the other authors of the Scriptural psalms.
A clerk, precentor, singer, or leader of music, in the church.
psalm ::: n. --> A sacred song; a poetical composition for use in the praise or worship of God.
Especially, one of the hymns by David and others, collected into one book of the Old Testament, or a modern metrical version of such a hymn for public worship. ::: v. t.
psalmodist ::: n. --> One who sings sacred songs; a psalmist.
psalmody ::: n. --> The act, practice, or art of singing psalms or sacred songs; also, psalms collectively, or a collection of psalms.
psalmographist ::: n. --> A writer of psalms, or sacred songs and hymns.
psalmography ::: n. --> The act or practice of writing psalms, or sacred songs.
purana ::: legend and apologue; the Puranas: [a class of sacred writings written in an easy form of Sanskrit (more modem than that of the Veda and Vedanta) composed of legends, apologues, etc.].
purana ::: n. --> One of a class of sacred Hindoo poetical works in the Sanskrit language which treat of the creation, destruction, and renovation of worlds, the genealogy and achievements of gods and heroes, the reigns of the Manus, and the transactions of their descendants. The principal Puranas are eighteen in number, and there are the same number of supplementary books called Upa Puranas.
Purana: One of eighteen or more sacred treatises of India, legendary and allegorical in character, discussing five principal topics, viz., the creation of the universe, its destruction and renovation, the genealogy of gods and patriarchs, the reigns of the Manus, and the history of the solar and lunar races; interspersed are ethical, philosophical, and scientific observations; they are supposed to have been compiled by the poet Vyasa.
puranas. ::: a number of ancient scriptures attributed to the sage Vyasa that teach spiritual principles and practices through stories about sacred historical personages which often include their teachings given in conversations
Puranas(Sanskrit) ::: A word which literally means "ancient," "belonging to olden times." In India the word isespecially used as a term comprehending certain well-known sacred scriptures, which popular and evenscholarly authorities ascribe to the poet Vyasa. The Puranas contain the entire body of ancient Indianmythology. They are usually considered to be eighteen in number, and each Purana, to be complete, issupposed to consist of five topics or themes. These five topics or themes are commonly enumerated asfollows: (1) the beginnings or "creation" of the universe; (2) its renewals and destructions, ormanvantaras and pralayas; (3) the genealogies of the gods, other divine beings, heroes, and patriarchs; (4)the reigns of the various manus; and (5) a resume of the history of the solar and lunar races. Practicallynone of the Puranas as they stand in modern versions contains all these five topics, except perhaps theVishnu-Purana, probably the most complete in this sense of the word; and even the Vishnu-Puranacontains a great deal of matter not directly to be classed under these five topics. All the Puranas alsocontain a great deal of symbolical and allegorical writing.
refuge ::: n. --> Shelter or protection from danger or distress.
That which shelters or protects from danger, or from distress or calamity; a stronghold which protects by its strength, or a sanctuary which secures safety by its sacredness; a place inaccessible to an enemy.
An expedient to secure protection or defense; a device or contrivance.
revelation ::: n. --> The act of revealing, disclosing, or discovering to others what was before unknown to them.
That which is revealed.
The act of revealing divine truth.
That which is revealed by God to man; esp., the Bible.
Specifically, the last book of the sacred canon, containing the prophecies of St. John; the Apocalypse.
Rg-veda (Rig-veda) ::: [the Veda of the rks, the most ancient of the sacred books of India, composed of metrical hymns arranged in ten books (mandalas)].
Rhapsodomancy: A form of divination, based on a line in a sacred book or book of poetry which strikes the eye when the book is opened, or which is the last line to be pierced by a needle stuck through the closed book.
rigveda. :::the most ancient collection of hindu sacred verses and the first of the four
Round ::: The doctrine concerning our planetary chain commonly called that of the seven rounds means that thelife cycle or life-wave begins its evolutionary course on globe A, the first of the series of seven (or ten)globes; then, completing its cycles there, runs down to globe B, and then to globe C, and then to globe D,our earth; and then, on the ascending arc, to globe E, then to globe F, and then to globe G. These are themanifest seven globes of the planetary chain. This is one planetary round. After the planetary round thereensues a planetary or chain nirvana, until the second round begins in the same way, but in a more"advanced" degree of evolution than was the first round.A globe round is one of the seven passages of a life-wave during its planetary round, on any one (andtherefore on and through each) of the globes. When the life-wave has passed through globe D, forinstance, and ends its cycles on globe D, this is the globe round of globe D for that particular planetaryround; and so with all the globes respectively. Seven root-races make one globe round. There are sevenglobe rounds therefore (one globe round for each of the seven globes) in each planetary round.Seven planetary rounds equal one kalpa or manvantara or Day of Brahma. When seven planetary roundshave been accomplished, which is as much as saying forty-nine globe rounds (or globe manvantaras),there ensues a still higher nirvana than that occurring between globes G and A after each planetary round.This higher nirvana is coincident with what is called a pralaya of that planetary chain, which pralaya lastsuntil the cycle again returns for a new planetary chain to form, containing the same hosts of living beingsas on the preceding chain, and which are now destined to enter upon the new planetary chain, but on andin a higher series of planes or worlds than in the preceding one.When seven such planetary chains with their various kalpas or manvantaras have passed away, thissevenfold grand cycle is one solar manvantara, and then the solar system sinks into the solar or cosmicpralaya.There are outer rounds and inner rounds. An inner round comprises the passage of the life-wave in anyone planetary chain from globe A to globe G once around, and this takes place seven times in a planetarymanvantara.The outer round comprises the passage of the entirety of a life-wave of a planetary chain along thecirculations of the solar system, from one of the seven sacred planets to another; and this for seven (orten) times.There is another aspect of the teaching concerning the outer rounds which cannot be elucidated here.
sacrament ::: 1. Something regarded as possessing a sacred or mysterious significance. 2. A rite believed to be a means of or visible form of grace. 3. A sign, token or symbol. 4. A pledge. sacraments.
sacramental ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a sacrament or the sacraments; of the nature of a sacrament; sacredly or solemnly binding; as, sacramental rites or elements.
Bound by a sacrament. ::: n. --> That which relates to a sacrament.
Sacramental meal: A feature found in many ancient religions; in some instances, the purpose of the meal was to establish a “table fellowship” with the deity, in others an actual absorption of the god by the worshipper in partaking of the sacred food in which the deity was believed to be present. (Cf. theophagy.)
sacrament ::: n. --> The oath of allegiance taken by Roman soldiers; hence, a sacred ceremony used to impress an obligation; a solemn oath-taking; an oath.
The pledge or token of an oath or solemn covenant; a sacred thing; a mystery.
One of the solemn religious ordinances enjoined by Christ, the head of the Christian church, to be observed by his followers; hence, specifically, the eucharist; the Lord&
Sacred science: In occult terminology, the esoteric philosophical secrets taught and disclosed as a part of the initiation to the highest degree in the mysteries (q.v.).
sacre ::: n. --> See Saker. ::: v. t. --> To consecrate; to make sacred.
SACRIFICE. ::: Does noi so mucb indicate giving up what is held dear as an offering of oneself, one's being, one’s mind, heart, will, body, life, actions to the Divine. It has the original sense of ‘ making sacred ' and is used as an equivalent of yajna.
sacrilege ::: n. --> The sin or crime of violating or profaning sacred things; the alienating to laymen, or to common purposes, what has been appropriated or consecrated to religious persons or uses.
sacrilegious ::: a. --> Violating sacred things; polluted with sacrilege; involving sacrilege; profane; impious.
sacrilegious ::: pertaining to or involving the violation or profanation of anything sacred or held sacred.
sacristy ::: n. --> An apartment in a church where the sacred utensils, vestments, etc., are kept; a vestry.
sacrosanct ::: a. --> Sacred; inviolable.
sadda ::: n. --> A work in the Persian tongue, being a summary of the Zend-Avesta, or sacred books.
sainted ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Saint ::: a. --> Consecrated; sacred; holy; pious.
Entered into heaven; -- a euphemism for dead.
Saivites (devotees of Siva) recognize 28 agamas as continuing the full doctrine; Saktas list 77 agamas or tantras; Vaishnavas (followers of Vishnu) regard the Pancharatra Agamas as their sacred books; and the Jain agamas as a whole constitute the Jain canon.
samhita. ::: "compilation of knowledge"; a collection of vedic mantras or hymns mainly concerned with nature and deities; the Samhitas form the first part of each of the four Vedas; one of the two primary sections of each of the Vedas, containing hymns and sacred formulae, the other section being the Brahmanas
sanctification ::: n. --> The act of sanctifying or making holy; the state of being sanctified or made holy;
the act of God&
sanctify ::: v. t. --> To make sacred or holy; to set apart to a holy or religious use; to consecrate by appropriate rites; to hallow.
To make free from sin; to cleanse from moral corruption and pollution; to purify.
To make efficient as the means of holiness; to render productive of holiness or piety.
To impart or impute sacredness, venerableness, inviolability, title to reverence and respect, or the like, to; to
sanctimonious ::: a. --> Possessing sanctimony; holy; sacred; saintly.
Making a show of sanctity; affecting saintliness; hypocritically devout or pious.
sanctitude ::: n. --> Holiness; sacredness; sanctity.
sanctity ::: n. --> The state or quality of being sacred or holy; holiness; saintliness; moral purity; godliness.
Sacredness; solemnity; inviolability; religious binding force; as, the sanctity of an oath.
A saint or holy being.
sanctity ::: the quality or condition of being considered sacred or holy.
sanctuarize ::: v. t. --> To shelter by means of a sanctuary or sacred privileges.
sanctuary ::: 1. An especially sacred or holy place. 2. Any place of refuge; asylum.
sanctuary ::: n. --> A sacred place; a consecrated spot; a holy and inviolable site.
The most retired part of the temple at Jerusalem, called the Holy of Holies, in which was kept the ark of the covenant, and into which no person was permitted to enter except the high priest, and he only once a year, to intercede for the people; also, the most sacred part of the tabernacle; also, the temple at Jerusalem.
The most sacred part of any religious building, esp.
sanctum ::: n. --> A sacred place; hence, a place of retreat; a room reserved for personal use; as, an editor&
sanskrit ::: n. --> The ancient language of the Hindoos, long since obsolete in vernacular use, but preserved to the present day as the literary and sacred dialect of India. It is nearly allied to the Persian, and to the principal languages of Europe, classical and modern, and by its more perfect preservation of the roots and forms of the primitive language from which they are all descended, is a most important assistance in determining their history and relations. Cf. Prakrit, and Veda.
Sanskrit: The ancient language of India, language of the Vedas and other sacred and classical texts of Hinduism; the linguistic ancestor of the mode prakritas or vernaculars.
scarabee ::: n. --> Any one of numerous species of lamellicorn beetles of the genus Scarabaeus, or family Scarabaeidae, especially the sacred, or Egyptian, species (Scarabaeus sacer, and S. Egyptiorum).
A stylized representation of a scarab beetle in stone or faience; -- a symbol of resurrection, used by the ancient Egyptians as an ornament or a talisman, and in modern times used in jewelry, usually by engraving designs on cabuchon stones. Also used attributively; as, a scarab bracelet [a bracelet containing scarabs]; a scarab [the carved
scriptural ::: a. --> Contained in the Scriptures; according to the Scriptures, or sacred oracles; biblical; as, a scriptural doctrine.
scriptural ::: of, pertaining to, or in accordance with sacred writings.
scripture ::: 1. Any writing or book, esp. when of a sacred or religious nature. 2. Written characters.
secular ::: of or pertaining to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual or sacred; temporal.
Seven Sacred Planets ::: The ancients spoke of seven planets which they called the seven sacred planets, and they were named asfollows: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon.Each one of these seven globes is a body like our own Earth in that each is a septenary chain, sevenfoldin composition: six other superior globes of finer and more ethereal matter above the physical sphere orglobe. Only those globes which are on the same cosmic plane of nature or being are physically visible toeach other. For instance, we can see only the fourth-plane planetary globe of each of the other planetaryor sidereal chains, because we ourselves are on the fourth cosmic plane, as they also are. There is a veryimportant and wide range of mystical teaching connected with the seven sacred planets which it would beout of place to develop here.
Shambalah: The sacred island of esoteric tradition, believed to have been situated in the present Gobi desert in Asia. According to the teachings of several occult schools, including the theosophists, Shambalah is a place or town in the Himalayas.
shastra &
sheriat ::: n. --> The sacred law of the Turkish empire.
shrine ::: n. --> A case, box, or receptacle, especially one in which are deposited sacred relics, as the bones of a saint.
Any sacred place, as an altar, tromb, or the like.
A place or object hallowed from its history or associations; as, a shrine of art. ::: v. t.
shruti &
sifac ::: n. --> The white indris of Madagascar. It is regarded by the natives as sacred.
skeptical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to a sceptic or skepticism; characterized by skepticism; hesitating to admit the certainly of doctrines or principles; doubting of everything.
Doubting or denying the truth of revelation, or the sacred Scriptures.
snana. ::: ritual bath in a sacred river, pond, lake, or ocean
solemn ::: a. --> Marked with religious rites and pomps; enjoined by, or connected with, religion; sacred.
Pertaining to a festival; festive; festal.
Stately; ceremonious; grand.
Fitted to awaken or express serious reflections; marked by seriousness; serious; grave; devout; as, a solemn promise; solemn earnestness.
Real; earnest; downright.
spiritual ::: 1. Of or pertaining to, affecting or concerning, the spirit or soul as distinguished from the physical nature; incorporeal. 2. Of or pertaining to sacred things or matters; sacred. 3. Characterized by or suggesting predominance of the spirit; having spiritual tendencies or instincts; holy.
sravana &
sri &
swadhyaya. ::: personal study; study of the sacred texts
Swastika: A very ancient and widespread symbol, one of the most sacred and mystic diagrams in occultism, found both in the Eastern and Western hemispheres. It may be either right-hand (male) or left-hand (female) ; the former one is most generally used in India. In general it is regarded as the symbol of the sun; in India, especially, it is used as a symbol of good luck.
table ::: 1. An article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface. 2. An engraved slab or tablet bearing an inscription or a device. 3. tables. The engraved tablets carrying sacred laws, etc. 4. An orderly arrangement of data, especially one in which the data are arranged in columns and rows in an essentially rectangular form.
Taurus (The Bull): The second sign of the zodiac. Its symbol represents the head and horns of a bull. The sacred Apis was presumed to be the incarnation of the god Osiris—hence a symbol of a sepulchre or tomb. The Sun’s entry into Taurus was celebrated as a Feast of Maya (Maia)—our May Day—the Sun represented by a white bull with a golden disc between his horns, followed by a procession of virgins, exemplifying the fecundity of Nature in Spring. The Sun is in Taurus annually from April 21 to May 20. Astrologically it is in the second thirty-degree arc from the Spring Equinox, from 30° to 60° along the Ecliptic. It is the “fixed” quality of the element Earth, conferring external will power that, ordinarily passive, and negative, becomes obstinate and unbending when aroused. Negative, nocturnal, cold, dry and melancholy. Ruler: Venus. Exaltation: Moon. Detriment: Mars. Fall: Uranus. Symbolic interpretation. The head and horns of a bull; the sacred Apis in whom the god Osiris was incarnate; a sepulchre or tomb.
temporal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the temple or temples; as, the temporal bone; a temporal artery. ::: n. --> Of or pertaining to time, that is, to the present life, or this world; secular, as distinguished from sacred or eternal.
Civil or political, as distinguished from ecclesiastical;
testament ::: n. --> A solemn, authentic instrument in writing, by which a person declares his will as to disposal of his estate and effects after his death.
One of the two distinct revelations of God&
Tetractys: The “perfect number” of the Pythagoreans and of the numerologists, composed of the Divine monad (One), the dyad (Two), the primeval triad (Three) and the fundamental sacred tetrad (Four). The symbol of the tetractys, originated by Pythagoras, consists of ten dots arranged in four rows above each other (four dots in the bottom line, three dots in the one above them, two in the next line, and a single dot on top), forming an equilateral triangle. In occultism, this diagram is also referred to as tetractys and is believed to have very great occult, mystic power and significance.
The Animal browses in the sacred fence
The antithesis of these lofty ideas underlies the widespread prevalence of blood rites. In fact, the many blood ceremonials which mark and mar the records of so many peoples are often gross, cruel, and perverted, violating the sacredness of life by offering animal and human sacrifices. Several groups regard blood as one of the essential elements used in their numerous forms of initiations, oblations, invocations to ancestors and to spirits of various kinds. Their fixed belief that the demons or spirits invoked by these ceremonies are harmful if not propitiated, but will be gratified and nourished by the immaterial essence, savor, or fumes of the foods, alcohols, and blood offerings is not without some basis of fact; for the earth-bound kama-rupic entities and astral elementaries are attracted by, and do abstract the impalpable kama-pranic life-force from, the fumes and emanations of such offerings. These beliefs are consistent with much in the tribal customs and rites which attracts and revivifies evil entities in their own astral atmosphere. Customs like poison ordeals for so-called witches, and evil use of nature forces for injuring or destroying personal enemies, added to frequent evocations, make a vicious circle of cause and effect.
"The Chhandogya,… is to be a work in the right and perfect way of devoting oneself to the Brahman; its subject is the Brahman, but the Brahman as symbolised in the OM, the sacred syllable of the Veda, not therefore, the pure state of existence only, but that existence in all its parts… OM is the symbol and the thing symbolised.
“The Chhandogya,… is to be a work in the right and perfect way of devoting oneself to the Brahman; its subject is the Brahman, but the Brahman as symbolised in the OM, the sacred syllable of the Veda, not therefore, the pure state of existence only, but that existence in all its parts… OM is the symbol and the thing symbolised.
“The Chhandogya,… is to be a work in the right and perfect way of devoting oneself to the Brahman; its subject is the Brahman, but the Brahman as symbolised in the OM, the sacred syllable of the Veda, not therefore, the pure state of existence only, but that existence in all its parts… OM is the symbol and the thing symbolised.”the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM,—OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name—it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self—existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13—Page 315
The Christian sacrament was adopted from the pagan rite. The Protestant Churches administer the sacrament in both bread and wine as the symbol of a divine grace received by the devout participant. The Catholic Church teaches that the sacred elements are actually transubstantiated by miraculous means into the blood and body of Christ, denying the cup or the wine to the laity, and regarding the rite as propitiatory for the sins of the participants and of mankind in general. The old pagan rite contained the idea that partaking of the wine meant allying oneself with the vital energy of the spiritual divinity within the neophyte, and the partaking of the bread was symbolic of a similar union of the neophyte’s mentality with the cosmic mind for which the bread stood. See also SOMA; WINE
Theomancy: The general meaning of the word is: Divination by oracles considered to be divinely inspired. The term is used also as the name of that part of the Hebrew Kabalah devoted to the study of the Majesty of God and to the mastery of the sacred names believed to be the key to the power of divination and magical ability.
Theophagy: Literally, eating the god. The practice, found in a great many primitive religions and in the esoteric mysteries (“mystery religious”), of eating the flesh of a sacrifice or sacred animal in whose flesh the god is believed to dwell, in order to absorb supernatural power.
The original, pure Bacchic rites pertained to high initiation, in which the candidate becomes conscious of his oneness with divinity. Thus Bacchus, with his symbolic serpent and wine, stands for divine inspiration. But when the keys of the sacred science were lost and symbols were interpreted literally, the rites degenerated and often became profligate. Bacchus-Dionysos also figures as the inspirer of dramatic and representative art, inspiring the individual with the divine afflatus or mystic frenzy. Originally this meant the inner communion of the candidate with his own inner god and the consequent inspiration; on a lower plane it signifies the fleeting inspiration of poet and artist, and finally it degenerated into hysteria and morbid psychic states.
The scientific study of primitive leligions, with such well known names as E. B. Tylor, F. B. Jevons, W. H. R. Rivers, J. G. Frazer, R. H. Codrington, Spencer and Gillen, E. Westermarck, E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl; the numerous outlines of the development of religion since Hume's Natural History of Religion and E. Caird's Evolution of Religion; the prolific literature dealing with individual religions of a higher type, the science of comparative religion with such namea as that of L. H. Jordan, the many excellent treitises on the psychology of religion including Wm. James' Varieties of Religious Experience; the sacred literature of all peoples in various editions together with a voluminous theological exegesis, Church history and, finally, the history of dogma, especially the monumental work of von Harnack, -- all are contributing illustrative material to the Philosophy of Religion which became stimulated to scientific efforts through the positivism of Spencer, Huxley, Lewes, Tyndall, and others, and is still largely oriented by the progress in science, as may be seen, e.g., by the work of Emile Boutroux, S. Alexander (Space, Time and Deity), and A. N. Whitehead.
“the Supreme Chief of all those Mahatmans. This pontificate could be exercised only by a Brahman who had reached a certain age, and he it was who was the sole guardian of the mystic formula, and he was the Hierophant who created great Adepts. He alone could explain the meaning of the sacred word, AUM, and of all the religious symbols and rites. . . .
The use of the mantra, sacred syllable, name or mystic formula which is of so much importance in the Indian systems of Yoga and common to them all.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 538
“The ‘very old Book’ is the original work from which the many volumes of Kiu-ti were complied. Not only this latter and the Siphrah Dzeniouta but even the Sepher Jezirah, the work attributed by the Hebrew Kabbalists to their Patriarch Abraham (!), the book of Shu-king, China’s primitive Bible, the sacred volumes of the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes, the Puranas in India, and the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch itself, are all derived from that one small parent volume. Tradition says, that it was taken down in Senzar, the secret sacerdotal tongue, from the words of the Divine Beings, who dictated it to the sons of Light, in Central Asia, at the very beginning of the 5th (our) race; for there was a time when its language (the Sen-zar) was known to the Initiates of every nation, when the forefathers of the Toltec understood it as easily as the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis, who inherited it, in their turn, from the sages of the 3rd Race, the Manushis, who learnt it direct from the Devas of the 2nd and 1st Races. . . . The old book, having described Cosmic Evolution and explained the origin of everything on earth, including physical man, after giving the true history of the races from the First down to the Fifth (our) race, goes no further” (SD 1:xliii).
thirst ::: Madhav: “… all the power, all the knowledge that the world can give us are products of time, products of the movements of time. Truly they cannot satisfy the sacred thirst of the spirit. Mark the words ‘sacred thirst’ (III. 1. 305.). Mother uses the word ‘thirst’ so often; it is an intense aspiration that cannot be satisfied, cannot be fulfilled by the gifts of time; it can be fulfilled only by the gifts of what is beyond time, of what is eternal. The hunger of the soul in us can be satisfied only by a response from the Eternal.” The Book of the Divine Mother
thoth ::: n. --> The god of eloquence and letters among the ancient Egyptians, and supposed to be the inventor of writing and philosophy. He corresponded to the Mercury of the Romans, and was usually represented as a human figure with the head of an ibis or a lamb.
The Egyptian sacred baboon.
tie ::: v. t. --> A knot; a fastening.
A bond; an obligation, moral or legal; as, the sacred ties of friendship or of duty; the ties of allegiance.
A knot of hair, as at the back of a wig.
An equality in numbers, as of votes, scores, etc., which prevents either party from being victorious; equality in any contest, as a race.
A beam or rod for holding two parts together; in railways,
tirtha. ::: a sacred place of pilgrimage; a river or body of water in which it is auspicious and spiritual beneficial to bathe; the water offered in ritual worship and then sprinkled on or drunk by the devotees
unconsecrate ::: v. t. --> To render not sacred; to deprive of sanctity; to desecrate.
undercroft ::: n. --> A subterranean room of any kind; esp., one under a church (see Crypt), or one used as a chapel or for any sacred purpose.
understand ::: v. t. --> To have just and adequate ideas of; to apprehended the meaning or intention of; to have knowledge of; to comprehend; to know; as, to understand a problem in Euclid; to understand a proposition or a declaration; the court understands the advocate or his argument; to understand the sacred oracles; to understand a nod or a wink.
To be apprised, or have information, of; to learn; to be informed of; to hear; as, I understand that Congress has passed
upanisad (Upanishad) ::: inner knowledge, the secret teaching which enters into the final truth and settles in it, [one of a class of Hindu sacred writings, regarded as the source of the Vedanta-philosophy].
veda ::: knowledge; knowledge of the Divine; the book of knowledge; [especially, Veda: a generic name for the most ancient Indian sacred literature, i.e. the Rg-veda, Yajur-veda,Sama-veda and Atharva-veda, each of these being divided into two portions, mantra and brahmana; the term " Veda" is generally reserved for the mantras or metrical hymns, especially those of the Rg-veda].
Vedanta(Sanskrit) ::: From the Upanishads and from other parts of the wonderful cycle of Vedic literature, theancient sages of India produced what is called today the Vedanta -- a compound word meaning "the end(or completion) of the Veda" -- that is to say, instruction in the final and most perfect exposition of themeaning of the Vedic tenets.The Vedanta is the highest form that the Brahmanical teachings have taken, and under the name of theUttara-Mimamsa attributed to Vyasa, the compiler of the Vedas, the Vedanta is perhaps the noblest ofthe six Indian schools of philosophy. The Avatara Sankaracharya has been the main popularizer of theVedantic system of philosophical thought, and the type of Vedantic doctrine taught by him is what istechnically called the Advaita-Vedanta or nondualistic.The Vedanta may briefly be described as a system of mystical philosophy derived from the efforts ofsages through many generations to interpret the sacred or esoteric meaning of the Upanishads. In itsAdvaita form the Vedanta is in many, if not all, respects exceedingly close to, if not identical with, someof the mystical forms of Buddhism in central Asia. The Hindus call the Vedanta Brahma-jnana.
veda ::: n. --> The ancient sacred literature of the Hindus; also, one of the four collections, called Rig-Veda, Yajur-Veda, Sama-Veda, and Atharva-Veda, constituting the most ancient portions of that literature.
Veda, plural Vedas: (Skr. knowledge) Collectively the ancient voluminous, sacred literature of India (in bulk prior to 1000 B.C.), composed of Rigveda (hymns to gods), Samaveda (priests' chants), Yajurveda (sacrificial formulae), and Atharvaveda (magical chants), which among theosophic speculations contain the first philosophic insights. Generally recognized as an authority even in philosophy, extended and supplemented later by sutras (q.v.) and various accessory textbooks on grammar, astronomy, medicine, etc., called Vedangas ("members of the Veda") and the philosophical treatises, such as the Upanishads (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Veda(s)(Sanskrit) ::: From a verbal root vid signifying "to know." These are the most ancient and the most sacredliterary and religious works of the Hindus. Veda as a word may be described as "divine knowledge." TheVedas are four in number: the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda, thislast being commonly supposed to be of later date than the former three.Manu in his Work on Law always speaks of the three Vedas, which he calls "the ancient triple Brahman"-- sanatanam trayam brahma." Connected with the Vedas is a large body of other works of variouskinds, liturgical, ritualistic, exegetical, and mystical, the Veda itself being commonly divided into twogreat portions, outward and inner: the former called the karma-kanda, the "Section of Works," and thelatter called jnana-kanda or "Section of Wisdom."The authorship of the Veda is not unitary, but almost every hymn or division of a Veda is ascribed to adifferent author or rather to various authors; but they are supposed to have been compiled in their presentform by Veda-Vyasa. There is no question in the minds of learned students of theosophy that the Vedasrun back in their origins to enormous antiquity, thousands of years before the beginning of what is knownin the Occident as the Christian era, whatever Occidental scholars may have to say in objection to thisstatement. Hindu pandits themselves claim that the Veda was taught orally for thousands of years, andthen finally compiled on the shores of the sacred lake Manasa-Sarovara, beyond the Himalayas in adistrict of what is now Tibet.
Veda: The generic name for the most ancient sacred literature of the Hindus, consisting of the four collections called (1) Rig Veda, hymns to gods, (2) Sama Veda, priests’ chants, (3) Yajur Veda, sacrificial formulae in prose, and (4) Atharva Veda, magical chants; each Veda is divided into two broad divisions, viz. (1) Mantra, hymns, and (2) Brahmana, precepts, which include (a) Aranyakas, theology, and (b) Upanishads, philosophy; the Vedas are classified as revealed literature; they contain the first philosophical insights and are regarded as the final authority; tradition makes Vyasa the compiler and arranger of the Vedas in their present form; the Vedic period is conservatively estimated to have begun about 1500 to 1000 B.C.
venerable ::: a. --> Capable of being venerated; worthy of veneration or reverence; deserving of honor and respect; -- generally implying an advanced age; as, a venerable magistrate; a venerable parent.
Rendered sacred by religious or other associations; that should be regarded with awe and treated with reverence; as, the venerable walls of a temple or a church.
veneration ::: n. --> The act of venerating, or the state of being venerated; the highest degree of respect and reverence; respect mingled with awe; a feeling or sentimental excited by the dignity, wisdom, or superiority of a person, by sacredness of character, by consecration to sacred services, or by hallowed associations.
vestal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to Vesta, the virgin goddess of the hearth; hence, pure; chaste.
A virgin consecrated to Vesta, and to the service of watching the sacred fire, which was to be perpetually kept burning upon her altar.
A virgin; a woman pure and chaste; also, a nun.
Vestal Virgins: Guardians of the sacred perpetual fire in the temple of Vesta, chief Roman household divinity; they were believed to have magic powers.
vestry ::: n. --> A room appendant to a church, in which sacerdotal vestments and sacred utensils are sometimes kept, and where meetings for worship or parish business are held; a sacristy; -- formerly called revestiary.
A parochial assembly; an assembly of persons who manage parochial affairs; -- so called because usually held in a vestry.
A body, composed of wardens and vestrymen, chosen annually by a parish to manage its temporal concerns.
vibhuti. ::: sacred ash from a fire sacrifice; manifestations of divine power or glory; prosperity; splendor; greatness; quality of all-pervasiveness
Vidhi: Sanskrit for rule, formula, sacred precept or scripture.
violate ::: v. t. --> To treat in a violent manner; to abuse.
To do violence to, as to anything that should be held sacred or respected; to profane; to desecrate; to break forcibly; to trench upon; to infringe.
To disturb; to interrupt.
To commit rape on; to ravish; to outrage.
violation ::: n. --> The act of violating, treating with violence, or injuring; the state of being violated.
Infringement; transgression; nonobservance; as, the violation of law or positive command, of covenants, promises, etc.
An act of irreverence or desecration; profanation or contemptuous treatment of sacred things; as, the violation of a church.
Interruption, as of sleep or peace; disturbance.
Ravishment; rape; outrage.
violators ::: those who violate the sacred character of a place, language, person etc.
Virtually all ancient religions comprised references to birds, sacred and otherwise — for example, the phoenix, the simorgh of the ancient Persians, the ancient Egyptian ibis, golden hawk, and bennu, and Garuda and the kalahansa of ancient India. This last is the white swan of eternity, born in and from the Eternity or the Timeless: “The Nest of the eternal Bird, the flutter of whose wings produces life, is boundless space . . .” (SD 2:293).
wafer ::: n. --> A thin cake made of flour and other ingredients.
A thin cake or piece of bread (commonly unleavened, circular, and stamped with a crucifix or with the sacred monogram) used in the Eucharist, as in the Roman Catholic Church.
An adhesive disk of dried paste, made of flour, gelatin, isinglass, or the like, and coloring matter, -- used in sealing letters and other documents.
When it came to the Ming period especially in Wang Yang-ming (1473-1529), Reason became identified with Mind. Mencius' doctrine of intuitive knowledge (liang chih) was revived and made the basis of his theory of the identity of knowledge and conduct and the sacred duty of man to "fully exercise his mind" and to "manifest his illustrious virtues."
Within its sacred precincts, the Aesir and Asynjor (gods and goddesses) meet to assess the previous life of the world tree and to determine their course for the future. The Lay of Odin’s Corpse give insight into the gods’ council following the death of a planet, and their difficulty in extracting the essence of that experience.
Yet on the upward arc of an evolutionary cycle, partaking of this sacred ambrosial food signifies initiation, the partaking by the initiant in the Mysteries of the “drink” of spiritual immortality. This drink is symbolized by the cup and its contained liquid, but actually is the receiving into the consciousness from the inner nature of the life-giving streams, the draught of everlasting life, or the elixir of life. After partaking of this ambrosial elixir, brought about by lives of selflessness and by final initiation, the adept learns to live in the minor and intermediate spheres of the solar system as a fully self-conscious co-laborer with the gods in their cosmic work. Such are the higher nirmanakayas, true buddhas, etc.
Zendavesta: (from Middle Persian Zend u Avista, "commentary and text") The Commentary, still used today as sacred scripture among the Parsis (see Zoroastrianism), on the basic text which was composed by the followers of Zarathustra (q.v.), but had become unintelligible due to its archaic nature. -- K.F.L.
zend-avesta ::: n. --> The sacred writings of the ancient Persian religion, attributed to Zoroaster, but chiefly of a later date.
zend ::: n. --> Properly, the translation and exposition in the Huzv/resh, or literary Pehlevi, language, of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian sacred writings; as commonly used, the language (an ancient Persian dialect) in which the Avesta is written.
KEYS (10k)
9 Sri Aurobindo
4 Sri Ramakrishna
4 Saint Thomas Aquinas
2 Rene Guenon
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Anonymous
2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
2 Aleister Crowley
2 ?
1 Zoroaster
1 Woodrow Wilson
1 Wikipedia
1 W. H. Auden
1 Vicktor Hugo
1 Thomas Keating
1 The Wrathful Compassion of Guru Dorje Drollo
1 The Mother
1 Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
1 "Ten Thousand Flowers in Spring" by Wu-Men
1 SWAMI PREMANANDA
1 Swami Brahmananda
1 Sufi saying
1 Sri Ramakrishna?
1 Sri Chidananda
1 Simone de Beauvoir
1 Satprem
1 Saint Teresa of Calcutta
1 Saint Leo the Great
1 Saint Gregory the Great
1 Saint Angela Merici
1 Russell Kirk
1 Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett
1 Robert Green Ingersoll
1 Rene Guenon: Initiation And Spiritual Realization (1952)
1 Ramakrishna
1 Mary Brave Bird
1 Manly P Hall
1 Maitri Upanishad 5.2
1 MacGregor Mathers
1 Laura Whitcomb
1 Laozi
1 Kahlil Gibran
1 id
1 "Hermes Trismegistus
1 Hermann Hesse
1 Henri de Lubac
1 George MacDonald
1 From "Sacred Laughter of the Sufis
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Eriugena
1 Empedocles
1 Emerson
1 E. E. Cummings
1 Dzogchen Rinpoche III
1 Dr E.V. Kenealy
1 Crazy Horse
1 Charles Baudelaire
1 Buson
1 Bonaventure
1 Bl. Maria Droste zu Vischering
1 Baha-ullah
1 Baha-nllah
1 Alice Duer Miller
1 Alexander Schmemann (quoting Aquinas ST III q60 a2 ad1)
1 The Mother
1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 Saint Augustine of Hippo
1 Ogawa
1 Heraclitus
1 Dogen Zenji
1 Agrippa
1 Adyashanti
1 Aberjhani
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21 Ralph Waldo Emerson
11 Rumi
10 Paulo Coelho
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7 Victor Hugo
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7 Thich Nhat Hanh
7 Marianne Williamson
7 Jonathan Haidt
7 Bren Brown
6 Sam Harris
6 Kurt Cobain
6 Friedrich Nietzsche
6 Black Elk
1:Even if God did not exist it would continue to be sacred
~ Charles Baudelaire,#KEYS
2:Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive. ~ Heraclitus, #KEYS
3:Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness." ~ George MacDonald, #KEYS
4:I am the mother of pure love and of science and of sacred hope. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, #KEYS
5:In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane. ~ Dogen Zenji, #KEYS
6:The author of Sacred Scripture is God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.1.10), #KEYS
7:When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #KEYS
8:Do not let the past disturb you, just leave everything in the Sacred Heart and begin again with joy." ~ Saint Teresa of Calcutta, #KEYS
9:fading roses
in pale thin clover
a sacred space
~ Buson, @BashoSociety#KEYS
10:The mantra-siddha is one who attains perfection by means of some sacred text or mantra. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
11:this is the best season of your life. ~ "Ten Thousand Flowers in Spring" by Wu-Men, The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, #KEYS
12:Sacred scriptures all point the way to God. Once you know the way, what is the use of books? ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
13:I began to understand that the love of the sacred heart without a spirit of sacrifice is but empty illusion. ~ Bl. Maria Droste zu Vischering, #KEYS
14:late roses
in the clover
a sacred space
~ Ogawa, @BashoSociety#KEYS
15:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #KEYS
16:The wearing of the orange garb of the Sannyasin causes sacred thoughts naturally to rise in the mind. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
17:Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #KEYS
18:I am the mother of pure love and of science and of sacred hope. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, Ecclesiastes, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
19:And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. ~ Kahlil Gibran, #KEYS
20:You can read sacred books and yet be far away from the Divine; and you can read the most stupid productions and be in touch with the Divine. ~ The Mother, #KEYS
21:The human Guru whispers the sacred formula into the ear. The Divine Guru breathes the spirit into the soul. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
22:Love is an invisible, a sacred and ineffable spirit which traverses the whole world with its rapid thoughts. ~ Empedocles, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
23:Every work... is sacred - everything is service unto the Lord. You have to learn to do everything with an equal sense of reverence and sanctity in your heart. ~ SWAMI PREMANANDA, #KEYS
24:A royal Virgin of the stem of David is chosen, to be impregnated with the sacred seed and to conceive the Divinely-human offspring in mind first and then in body. ~ Saint Leo the Great, #KEYS
25:The land is sacred. These words are at the core of our being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies." ~ Mary Brave Bird, #KEYS
26:When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours." ~ Saint Angela Merici, #KEYS
27:There is the truism that has been taught for centuries in many traditions: 'Whoever approval you seek, you are their prisoner'." ~ From "Sacred Laughter of the Sufis,", (2014) Imam Jamal Rahman, #KEYS
28:All the sacred Scriptures of the world have become corrupted, but the Ineffable or Absolute has never been corrupted, because no one has ever been able to express It in human speech. ~ Sri Ramakrishna?, #KEYS
29:Just as sacred doctrine is founded on the light of faith, so things in philosophy are founded on the light of natural reason ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On the Trinity, 2.3)., #KEYS
30:Not that the One is two, but that these two are one. ~ "Hermes Trismegistus , (the 2nd or 3rd cent. AD)?, a series of sacred texts that are the basis of Hermeticism, Wikipedia. Also see: https://bit.ly/3atyenG, #KEYS
31:For this passover to be perfect, we must suspend all the operations of the mind and we must transform the peak of our affections, directing them to God alone. This is a sacred mystical experience. ~ Bonaventure, #KEYS
32:This is what our love is—a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds." ~ Aberjhani, (b. 1957), historian, columnist, novelist, poet, artist, Wikipedia., #KEYS
33:Ordinary people are friendly with those who are outwardly similar to them. The wise are friendly with those who are inwardly similar to them." ~ Sufi saying, from "Sacred Laughter of the Sufis,", (2014), ed. Imam Jamal Rahman, #KEYS
34:And symbol of some native cosmic strength,
A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,
A silent flame-eyed mass of living force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
35:Chanting is no more holy than listening to the murmur of a stream, counting prayer beads no more sacred than simply breathing. . . . If you wish to attain oneness with the Tao, don't get caught up in spiritual superficialities. ~ Laozi, #KEYS
36:All the sacred Scriptures of the world have become corrupted, but the Ineffable or Absolute has never been corrupted, because no one has ever been able to express It in human speech. ~ id, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
37:The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk
Wrapped in interpretation's silken strings:
A credo sealed up its spiritual sense. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#KEYS
38:Whoever wishes to be truly a man, must abandon all preoccupation by the wish to please the world. There is nothing more sacred or more fecund than the curiosity of an independent spirit. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
39:If, for the Fathers, symbol is a key to sacrament, it is because sacrament is in continuity with the symbolical structure of the world in which "[all sensible creatures are signs of sacred things]." ~ Alexander Schmemann (quoting Aquinas ST III q60 a2 ad1), #KEYS
40:My mind is sundered and torn to pieces by the many and serious things I have to think about. When I try to concentrate and gather all my intellectual resources for preaching, how can I do justice to the sacred ministry of the word? ~ Saint Gregory the Great, #KEYS
41:It is customary, even in Sacred Scripture, to say that God hardens someone or blinds someone in the sense that God does not bestow the grace on him by which he may be softened and see ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On Job ch. 7)., #KEYS
42:I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become One Circle again." ~ Crazy Horse, (c. 1840-1877), a Native American war leader of the Sioux in the 19th century, Wikipedia., #KEYS
43:The truth is that there is really no 'profane realm' that could in any way be opposed to a 'sacred realm'; there is only a 'profane point of view', which is really none other than the point of view of ignorance. ~ Rene Guenon: Initiation And Spiritual Realization (1952) #KEYS
44:Let us add that nature is given its full significance only if it is looked at as offering us a means of rising up to the knowledge of divine truths, which is precisely the essential function which we have recognized in symbolism. ~ Rene Guenon, Symbols of Sacred Science #KEYS
45:There is in human nature as such, because it is spiritual, a desire, a natural appetite, a sign of ontological ordination ... which could be satisfied in no way but through the very vision of God, face to face. ~ Henri de Lubac, 'Dsappearance of the Sense of the Sacred', #KEYS
46:Sacred Scripture does not present divine things to us under sensible images so that our intellect may stop with them, but that it may rise from them to immaterial things ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On Boethius' De Trinitate, q. 6, a. 2 ad 1)., #KEYS
47:The human soul is not made for the sake of Scripture... but sacred Scripture is woven from a diversity of symbols and teaching so that through its introduction, our rational nature would be returned to the pristine height of pure contemplation. ~ Eriugena, In Ier. Coel II,1, #KEYS
48:It is useless to grow pale ever the holy Scriptures end the sacred Shastras without a spirit of discrimination exempt from all passions. No spiritual progress can be made without discrimination and renunciation ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
49:We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch." ~ E. E. Cummings, (1894 -1962), American poet, painter, author, and playwright, wrote approx. 2,900 poems, Wikipedia., #KEYS
50:Without Art we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science we should always worship false gods." ~ W. H. Auden, (1907 - 1973) English-American poet; poetry noted for its stylistic and technical achievement; its engagement with politics, morals, love, & religion, Wikipedia, #KEYS
51:Try diligently to check this mad outward rush of your mind. You can do this if you do not try to meditate as soon as you sit down. First draw the mind back from its external pursuits by means of discrimination, & lock it up inside, at the sacred feet of your Chosen Ideal.~ Swami Brahmananda, #KEYS
52:Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.
~ Robert Green Ingersoll,#KEYS
53:May the sacred page be a book for you, so that you may hear, may the globe of the earth be a book for you so that you may see; in these books only those who know letters read these things; in the whole world, even the fool can read. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, On the Psalms 45.7, #KEYS
54:To understand any one sacred book completely it is necessary to understand all other sacred books. In spite of human prejudice to the contrary, there is but one religion and one truth and all the great faiths of the world are parts or fragments of the Anscient Wisdom.
~ Manly P Hall, The Students Monthly Letter 1973,#KEYS
55:The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience. ~ Adyashanti, #KEYS
56:By thee I have greatened my mortal arc of life,
But now far heavens, unmapped infinitudes
Thou hast brought me, thy illimitable gift!
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
Make still my life through thee a song of joy
And all my silence wide and deep with thee.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Return to Earth,#KEYS
57:Reflect attentively with all thy knowledge on the divine manifestation in all things of a glorious unity ; purify thy understanding from the sentences of men that thou mayst hear the sacred and divine harmonies which come from all directions ; sanctify thy heart from all the superstitions of the past that thou mayst understand the simple, direct and marvellous Revelation. ~ Baha-nllah, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
58:If thou shalt perfectly observe these rules, all the following Symbols and an infinitude of others will be granted unto thee by thy Holy Guardian Angel; thou thus living for the Honour and Glory of the True and only God, for thine own good, and that of thy neighbour. Let the Fear of God be ever before the eyes and the heart of him who shall possess this Divine Wisdom and Sacred Magic. ~ MacGregor Mathers, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, #KEYS
59:Her self was nothing, God alone was all,
Yet God she knew not but only knew he was.
A sacred darkness brooded now within,
The world was a deep darkness great and nude.
This void held more than all the teeming worlds,
This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown.
But all was formless, voiceless, infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#KEYS
60:In Bahaí belief, the Holy Spirit is the conduit through which the wisdom of God becomes directly associated with his messenger, and it has been described variously in different religions such as the burning bush to Moses, the sacred fire to Zoroaster, the dove to Jesus, the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, and the Maid of Heaven to Bahaullah.[14] The Bahaí view rejects the idea that the Holy Spirit is a partner to God in the Godhead, but rather is the pure essence of Gods attributes
~ ?,#KEYS
61:I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, #KEYS
62:By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and moulds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers. In eo vivimus. As Jacob said, awakening from his dream, the world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, #KEYS
63:O son of earth, be blind and thou shalt see My beauty; be deaf and thou shalt hear My sweet song, My pleasant melody; be ignorant and thou shalt partake My knowledge; be in distress and thou shalt have an eternal portion of the infinite ocean of My riches:-blind to all that is not My beauty, deaf to all that is not My word, ignorant of all that is not My knowledge. Thus with a gaze that is pure, a spirit without stain, an understanding refined, thou shalt enter into my sacred presence. ~ Baha-ullah, "The Hidden Words in Persian.", the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
64:The library smells like old books - a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.
~ Laura Whitcomb,#KEYS
65:Invocation
NIGHT after night within the grove
The night wind spares the sacred fire -
The breath made visible of love,
Of worship and desire.
I set the tripod at thy shrine;
The silver bowl, the amber flame,
And in the dark where no stars shine
I speak thy name.
By the high name I call on thee
Which only I, thy priestess, know.
I tread thy dance in ecstasy,
Sweet steps and slow.
O God, the hour has come. Appear!
I have performed the appointed rite -
The dance, the fire; I long to hear
Wings in the night.
~ Alice Duer Miller,#KEYS
66:Now then, that part of him which belongs to tamas, that, O students of sacred knowledge (Brahmacharins), is this Rudra.
That part of him which belongs to rajas, that O students of sacred knowledge, is this Brahma.
That part of him which belongs to sattva, that O students of sacred knowledge, is this Vishnu.
Verily, that One became threefold, became eightfold, elevenfold, twelvefold, into infinite fold.
This Being (neuter) entered all beings, he became the overlord of all beings.
That is the Atman (Soul, Self) within and without - yea, within and without! ~ Maitri Upanishad 5.2,#KEYS
67:[...] Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries. ~ Rene Guenon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times #KEYS
68:Direct not thy mind to the vast surfaces of the earth; for the Plant of Truth grows not upon the ground. Nor measure the motions of the Sun, collecting rules, for he is carried by the Eternal Will of the Father, and not for your sake alone. Dismiss from your mind the impetuous course of the Moon, for she moveth always by the power of Necessity. The progression of the Stars was not generated for your sake. The wide aerial flight of birds gives no true knowledge, nor the dissection of the entrails of victims; they are all mere toys, the basis of mercenary fraud: flee from these if you would enter the sacred paradise of piety where Virtue, Wisdom, and Equity are assembled." ~ Zoroaster, #KEYS
69: But we now come to speak of the holy and sacred Pentacles and Sigils. Now these pentacles, are as it were certain holy signes preserving us from evil chances and events, and helping and assisting us to binde, exterminate, and drive away evil spirits, and alluring the good spirits, and reconciling them unto us. And these pentacles do consist either of Characters of the good spirits of the superiour order, or of sacred pictures of holy letters or revelations, with apt and fit versicles, which are composed either of Geometrical figures and holy names of God, according to the course and maner of many of them; or they are compounded of all of them, or very many of them mixt. ~ Agrippa, A Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, #KEYS
70:If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering ; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 141, #KEYS
71:The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn't speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #KEYS
72:At one stage in the initiation procedure, Christian tells us...the postulant climbs down an iron ladder, with seventy-eight rungs, and enters a hall on either side of which are twelve statues, and, between each pair of statues, a painting. These twenty-two paintings, he is told, are Arcana or symbolic hieroglyphs; the Science of Will, the principle of all wisdom and source of all power, is contained in them. Each corresponds to a "letter of the sacred language" and to a number, and each expresses a reality of the divine world, a reality of the intellectual world and a reality of the physical world. The secret meanings of these twenty-two Arcana are then expounded to him. ~ Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards - The Origins of the Occult Tarot, #KEYS
73:In medieval times, the learned man, the teacher was a servant of God wholly, and of God only. His freedom was sanctioned by an authority more than human...The academy was regarded almost as a part of the natural and unalterable order of things. ... They were Guardians of the Word, fulfilling a sacred function and so secure in their right. Far from repressing free discussion, this "framework of certain key assumptions of Christian doctrine" encouraged disputation of a heat and intensity almost unknown in universities nowadays. ...They were free from external interference and free from a stifling internal conformity because the whole purpose of the universities was the search after an enduring truth, besides which worldly aggrandizement was as nothing. They were free because they agreed on this one thing if, on nothing else, fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Russell Kirk, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition, #KEYS
74:Here where one knows not even the step in front
And Truth has her throne on the shadowy back of doubt,
On this anguished and precarious field of toil
Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,
Impartial witness of our joy and bale,
Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray.
Here too the vision and prophetic gleam
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes;
Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,
Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.
A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
The worship of a Presence and a Power
Too perfect to be held by death-bound hearts,
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.
Only a little the god-light can stay:
Spiritual beauty illumining human sight
Lines with its passion and mystery Matter's mask
And squanders eternity on a beat of Time.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Symbol Dawn,#KEYS
75:Turn your thoughts now, and lift up your thoughts to a devout and joyous contemplation on sage Vyasa and Vasishtha, on Narda and Valmiki. Contemplate on the glorious Lord Buddha, Jesus the Christ, prophet Mohammed, the noble Zoroaster (Zarathushtra), Lord Mahavira, the holy Guru Nanak. Think of the great saints and sages of all ages, like Yajnavalkya, Dattatreya, Sulabha and Gargi, Anasooya and Sabari, Lord Gauranga, Mirabai, Saint Theresa and Francis of Assisi. Remember St. Augustine, Jallaludin Rumi, Kabir, Tukaram, Ramdas, Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, Vivekananda and Rama Tirtha. Adore in thy heart the sacred memory of Mahatma Gandhi, sage Ramana Maharishi, Aurobindo Ghosh, Gurudev Sivananda and Swami Ramdas. They verily are the inspirers of humanity towards a life of purity, goodness and godliness. Their lives, their lofty examples, their great teachings constitute the real wealth and greatest treasure of mankind today.
~ Sri Chidananda, Advices On Spiritual Living,#KEYS
76:Abrahadabra is a word that first publicly appeared in The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema . Its author, Aleister Crowley, described it as the Word of the Aeon, which signifieth The Great Work accomplished. This is in reference to his belief that the writing of Liber Legis (another name for The Book of the Law) heralded a new Aeon for mankind that was ruled by the godRa-Hoor-Khuit (a form of Horus). Abrahadabra is, therefore, the magical formula of this new age. It is not to be confused with the Word of the Law of the Aeon, which is Thelema, meaning Will. ... Abrahadabra is also referred to as the Word of Double Power. More specifically, it represents the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm
represented by the pentagram and the hexagram, the rose and the cross, the circle and the square, the 5 and the 6 (etc.), as also called the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of ones Holy Guardian Angel. In Commentaries (1996), Crowley says that the word is a symbol of the establishment of the pillar or phallus of the Macrocosm...in the void of the Microcosm.
~ Wikipedia,#KEYS
77:I accept, will not give up, and will practice each of the Three Jewels,
And will not let go of my guru or my yidam deity.
As the samaya of the Buddha, first among the Three Jewels,
I will apply myself to the true, essential reality.
As the samaya of sacred Dharma, second among the Three Jewels,
I will distill the very essence of all the vehicles' teachings.
As the samaya of the Sangha, the third and final Jewel,
I will look upon reality; I will behold pure awareness.
And as the samaya of the guru and the yidam deity,
I will take my very own mind, my pure mind, as a witness.
Generally speaking, the Three Jewels should be regarded as the ultimate place to take refuge. As was taught in the section on taking refuge, your mind should be focused one-pointedly, with all your hopes and trust placed in their care. The gurus are a lamp that dispels the darkness of ignorance.
As the guides who lead you along the path to liberation, they are your sole source of refuge and protection, from now until you attain enlightenment.
For these reasons, you should act with unwavering faith, pure view and devotion, and engage in the approach and accomplishment of the divine yidam deity. ~ Dzogchen Rinpoche III, Great Perfection Outer and Inner Preliminaries,#KEYS
78:The Supreme Mind
'O God! we acknowledge Thee to be the Supreme Mind
Who hast disposed and ordered the Universe;
Who gave it life and motion at the first,
And still continuest to guide and regulate it.
From Thee was its primal impulsion;
Thou didst bestow on thine Emanated Spirit of Light,
Divine wisdom and various power
To stablish and enforce its transcendent orbits.
Thou art the Inconceivable Energy
Which in the beginning didst cause all things;
Of whom shall no created being ever know
A millionth part of thy divine properties.
But the Spirit was the Spirit of the Universe-
Sacred, Holy, Generating Nature;
Which, obedient unto thy will,
Preserves and reproduces all that is in the Kosmos.
Nothing is superior to the Spirit
But Thou, alone, O God! who art the Creator and Lord;
Thou madest the Spirit to be thy servitor,
But this thy Spirit transcends all other creatures;
This is the Spirit which is in the highest heavens;
Whose influence permeates all that lives;
As a beautiful Flower diffuses fragrances
But is not diminished in aught thereby.
For all divine essences are the same,
Differing only in their degree and power and beauty;
But in no wise differing in their principle,
Which is the fiery essence of God himself.
Such is the animating flame of every existence
Being in God, purely perfect;
But in all other living things
Only capable of being made perfect.' ~ Dr E.V. Kenealy, The Book of Fo.
The Supreme Mind. from path of regeneration,#KEYS
79:The Quest
A part, immutable, unseen,
Being, before itself had been,
Became. Like dew a triple queen
Shone as the void uncovered:
The silence of deep height was drawn
A veil across the silver dawn
On holy wings that hovered.
The music of three thoughts became
The beauty, that is one white flame,
The justice that surpasses shame,
The victory, the splendour,
The sacred fountain that is whirled
From depths beyond that older world
A new world to engender.
The kingdom is extended. Night
Dwells, and I contemplate the sight
That is not seeing, but the light
That secretly is kindled,
Though oft-time its most holy fire
Lacks oil, whene'er my own Desire
Before desire has dwindled.
I see the thin web binding me
With thirteen cords of unity
Toward the calm centre of the sea.
(O thou supernal mother!)
The triple light my path divides
To twain and fifty sudden sides
Each perfect as each other.
Now backwards, inwards still my mind
Must track the intangible and blind,
And seeking, shall securely find
Hidden in secret places
Fresh feasts for every soul that strives,
New life for many mystic lives,
And strange new forms and faces.
My mind still searches, and attains
By many days and many pains
To That which Is and Was and reigns
Shadowed in four and ten;
And loses self in sacred lands,
And cries and quickens, and understands
Beyond the first Amen.
~ Aleister Crowley,#KEYS
80:The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again-if the powers have remained unfriendly to him-his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir). ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Keys, #KEYS
81:In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is called 'the resurrection body ' and 'the glorified body.' The prophet Isaiah said, 'The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise' (Isa. 26:19). St. Paul called it 'the celestial body' or 'spiritual body ' (soma pneumatikon) (I Corinthians 15:40). In Sufism it is called 'the most sacred body ' (wujud al-aqdas) and 'supracelestial body ' (jism asli haqiqi). In Taoism, it is called 'the diamond body,' and those who have attained it are called 'the immortals' and 'the cloudwalkers.' In Tibetan Buddhism it is called 'the light body.' In Tantrism and some schools of yoga, it is called 'the vajra body,' 'the adamantine body,' and 'the divine body.' In Kriya yoga it is called 'the body of bliss.' In Vedanta it is called 'the superconductive body.' In Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, it is called 'the radiant body.' In the alchemical tradition, the Emerald Tablet calls it 'the Glory of the Whole Universe' and 'the golden body.' The alchemist Paracelsus called it 'the astral body.' In the Hermetic Corpus, it is called 'the immortal body ' (soma athanaton). In some mystery schools, it is called 'the solar body.' In Rosicrucianism, it is called 'the diamond body of the temple of God.' In ancient Egypt it was called 'the luminous body or being' (akh). In Old Persia it was called 'the indwelling divine potential' (fravashi or fravarti). In the Mithraic liturgy it was called 'the perfect body ' (soma teilion). In the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, it is called 'the divine body,' composed of supramental substance. In the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, it is called 'the ultrahuman'.
~ ?, http://herebedragons.weebly.com/homo-lumen.html,#KEYS
82:The Nirmanakaya manifestation of Amitabha, I,
the Indian Scholar, the Lotus Born,
From the self-blossoming center of a lotus,
Came to this realm of existence through miraculous powers
To be the prince of the king of Oddiyana.
Then, I sustained the kingdom in accordance with Dharma.
Wandering throughout all directions of India,
I severed all spiritual doubts without exception.
Engaging in fearless activity in the eight burial grounds,
I achieved all supreme and common siddhis.
Then, according to the wishes of King Trisong Detsen
And by the power of previous prayers, I journeyed to Tibet.
By subduing the cruel gods, nagas, yakshas, rakshas,
and all spirits who harm beings,
The light of the teachings of secret mantra has been illuminated.
Then, when the time came to depart for the continent of Lanka,
I did so to provide refuge from the fear of rakshas
For all the inhabitants of this world, including Tibet.
I blessed Nirmanakaya emanations to be representatives of my body.
I made sacred treasures as representatives of my holy speech.
I poured enlightened wisdom into the hearts of those with fortunate karma.
Until samsara is emptied, for the benefit of sentient beings,
I will manifest unceasingly in whatever ways are necessary.
Through profound kindness, I have brought great benefit for all.
If you who are fortunate have the mind of aspiration,
May you pray so that blessings will be received.
All followers, believe in me with determination.
Samaya. ~ The Wrathful Compassion of Guru Dorje Drollo, Vajra Master Dudjom Yeshe Dorje, translated by Dungse Thinley Norbu Rinpoche,#KEYS
83:34
D: What are the eight limbs of knowledge (jnana ashtanga)?
M: The eight limbs are those which have been already mentioned, viz., yama, niyama etc., but differently defined:
(1) Yama: This is controlling the aggregate of sense-organs, realizing the defects that are present in the world consisting of the body, etc.
(2) Niyama: This is maintaining a stream of mental modes that relate to the Self and rejecting the contrary modes. In other words, it means love that arises uninterruptedly for the Supreme Self.
(3) Asana: That with the help of which constant meditation on Brahman is made possible with ease is asana.
(4) Pranayama: Rechaka (exhalation) is removing the two unreal aspects of name and form from the objects constituting the world, the body etc., puraka (inhalation) is grasping the three real aspects, existence, consciousness and bliss, which are constant in those objects, and kumbhaka is retaining those aspects thus grasped.
(5) Pratyahara: This is preventing name and form which have been removed from re-entering the mind.
(6) Dharana: This is making the mind stay in the Heart, without straying outward, and realizing that one is the Self itself which is Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.
(7) Dhyana: This is meditation of the form 'I am only pure consciousness'. That is, after leaving aside the body which consists of five sheaths, one enquires 'Who am I?', and as a result of that, one stays as 'I' which shines as the Self.
(8) Samadhi: When the 'I-manifestation' also ceases, there is (subtle) direct experience. This is samadhi.
For pranayama, etc., detailed here, the disciplines such as asana, etc., mentioned in connection with yoga are not necessary.
The limbs of knowledge may be practised at all places and at all times. Of yoga and knowledge, one may follow whichever is pleasing to one, or both, according to circumstances. The great teachers say that forgetfulness is the root of all evil, and is death for those who seek release,10 so one should rest the mind in one's Self and should never forget the Self: this is the aim. If the mind is controlled, all else can be controlled. The distinction between yoga with eight limbs and knowledge with eight limbs has been set forth elaborately in the sacred texts; so only the substance of this teaching has been given here. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Self-Enquiry, 34,#KEYS
84:Who could have thought that this tanned young man with gentle, dreamy eyes, long wavy hair parted in the middle and falling to the neck, clad in a common coarse Ahmedabad dhoti, a close-fitting Indian jacket, and old-fashioned slippers with upturned toes, and whose face was slightly marked with smallpox, was no other than Mister Aurobindo Ghose, living treasure of French, Latin and Greek?" Actually, Sri Aurobindo was not yet through with books; the Western momentum was still there; he devoured books ordered from Bombay and Calcutta by the case. "Aurobindo would sit at his desk," his Bengali teacher continues, "and read by the light of an oil lamp till one in the morning, oblivious of the intolerable mosquito bites. I would see him seated there in the same posture for hours on end, his eyes fixed on his book, like a yogi lost in the contemplation of the Divine, unaware of all that went on around him. Even if the house had caught fire, it would not have broken this concentration." He read English, Russian, German, and French novels, but also, in ever larger numbers, the sacred books of India, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, although he had never been in a temple except as an observer. "Once, having returned from the College," one of his friends recalls, "Sri Aurobindo sat down, picked up a book at random and started to read, while Z and some friends began a noisy game of chess. After half an hour, he put the book down and took a cup of tea. We had already seen him do this many times and were waiting eagerly for a chance to verify whether he read the books from cover to cover or only scanned a few pages here and there. Soon the test began. Z opened the book, read a line aloud and asked Sri Aurobindo to recite what followed. Sri Aurobindo concentrated for a moment, and then repeated the entire page without a single mistake. If he could read a hundred pages in half an hour, no wonder he could go through a case of books in such an incredibly short time." But Sri Aurobindo did not stop at the translations of the sacred texts; he began to study Sanskrit, which, typically, he learned by himself. When a subject was known to be difficult or impossible, he would refuse to take anyone's word for it, whether he were a grammarian, pandit, or clergyman, and would insist upon trying it himself. The method seemed to have some merit, for not only did he learn Sanskrit, but a few years later he discovered the lost meaning of the Veda. ~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure of Consciousness, #KEYS
85:requirements for the psychic :::
At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being hidden within and felt only in its rare influences is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement; it does not create a rigidity of direction like the one-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment and with a supple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the divine or Godward movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature; it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and outer existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising figure. It insists on Truth, on will and strength and mastery, on Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding Knowledge that surpasses the mere practical momentary truth of the Ignorance, on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure, -- for it prefers rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions, -- on love winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving or with its feet sunk in the mire, on beauty restored to its priesthood of interpretation of the Eternal, on strength and will and mastery as instruments not of the ego but of the Spirit. Its will is for the divinisation of life, the expression through it of a higher Truth, its dedication to the Divine and the Eternal.
But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,#KEYS
86:PROTECTION
Going to sleep is a little like dying, a journey taken alone into the unknown. Ordinarily we are not troubled about sleep because we are familiar with it, but think about what it entails. We completely lose ourselves in a void for some period of time, until we arise again in a dream. When we do so, we may have a different identity and a different body. We may be in a strange place, with people we do not know, involved in baffling activities that may seem quite risky.
Just trying to sleep in an unfamiliar place may occasion anxiety. The place may be perfectly secure and comfortable, but we do not sleep as well as we do at home in familiar surroundings. Maybe the energy of the place feels wrong. Or maybe it is only our own insecurity that disturbs us,and even in familiar places we may feel anxious while waiting for sleep to come, or be frightenedby what we dream. When we fall asleep with anxiety, our dreams are mingled with fear and tension, sleep is less restful, and the practice harder to do. So it is a good idea to create a sense of protection before we sleep and to turn our sleeping area into a sacred space.
This is done by imagining protective dakinis all around the sleeping area. Visualize the dakinis as beautiful goddesses, enlightened female beings who are loving, green in color, and powerfully protective. They remain near as you fall asleep and throughout the night, like mothers watching over their child, or guardians surrounding a king or queen. Imagine them everywhere, guarding the doors and the windows, sitting next to you on the bed, walking in the garden or the yard, and so on, until you feel completely protected.
Again, this practice is more than just trying to visualize something: see the dakinis with your mind but also use your imagination to feel their presence. Creating a protective, sacred environment in this way is calming and relaxing and promotes restful sleep. This is how the mystic lives: seeing the magic, changing the environment with the mind, and allowing actions, even actions of the imagination, to have significance.
You can enhance the sense of peace in your sleeping environment by keeping objects of a sacred nature in the bedroom: peaceful, loving images, sacred and religious symbols, and other objects that direct your mind toward the path.
The Mother Tantra tells us that as we prepare for sleep we should maintain awareness of the causes of dream, the object to focus upon, the protectors, and of ourselves. Hold these together inawareness, not as many things, but as a single environment, and this will have a great effect in dream and sleep.
~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep,#KEYS
87:Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing be cause they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing-mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common : mystery. Goldmund continued his thought: It is mystery I love and pursue. Several times I have seen it beginning to take shape; as an artist, I would like to capture and express it. Some day, perhaps, I'll be able to. The figure of the universal mother, the great birthgiver, for example. Unlike other fi gures, her mystery does not consist of this or that detail, of a particular voluptuousness or sparseness, coarseness or delicacy, power or gracefulness. It consists of a fusion of the greatest contrasts of the world, those that cannot otherwise be combined, that have made peace only in this figure. They live in it together: birth and death, tenderness and cruelty, life and destruction. If I only imagined this fi gure, and were she merely the play of my thoughts, it would not matter about her, I could dismiss her as a mistake and forget about her. But the universal mother is not an idea of mine; I did not think her up, I saw her! She lives inside me. I've met her again and again. She appeared to me one winter night in a village when I was asked to hold a light over the bed of a peasant woman giving birth: that's when the image came to life within me. I often lose it; for long periods it re mains remote; but suddenly it Hashes clear again, as it did today. The image of my own mother, whom I loved most of all, has transformed itself into this new image, and lies encased within the new one like the pit in the cherry.
As his present situation became clear to him, Goldmund was afraid to make a decision. It was as difficult as when he had said farewell to Narcissus and to the cloister. Once more he was on an impor tant road : the road to his mother. Would this mother-image one day take shape, a work of his hands, and become visible to all? Perhaps that was his goal, the hidden meaning of his life. Perhaps; he didn't know. But one thing he did know : it was good to travel toward his mother, to be drawn and called by her. He felt alive. Perhaps he'd never be able to shape her image, perhaps she'd always remain a dream, an intuition, a golden shimmer, a sacred mystery. At any rate, he had to follow her and submit his fate to her. She was his star.
And now the decision was at his fingertips; everything had become clear. Art was a beautiful thing, but it was no goddess, no goal-not for him. He was not to follow art, but only the call of his mother.
~ Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund,#KEYS
88:The madman.-
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place. and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward. forward. in all directions? be there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too. decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us-for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then: "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars-and yet they have done it themselves... It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his reqttiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann,#KEYS
89:A God's Labour
I have gathered my dreams in a silver air
Between the gold and the blue
And wrapped them softly and left them there,
My jewelled dreams of you.
I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge
Marrying the soil to the sky
And sow in this dancing planet midge
The moods of infinity.
But too bright were our heavens, too far away,
Too frail their ethereal stuff;
Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay;
The roots were not deep enough.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
Coercing my godhead I have come down
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
Twixt the gates of death and birth.
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river's song,
A home for the deathless fire.
I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;
But the hate of hell and human spite
Are my meed since the world began.
For man's mind is the dupe of his animal self;
Hoping its lusts to win,
He harbours within him a grisly Elf
Enamoured of sorrow and sin.
The grey Elf shudders from heaven's flame
And from all things glad and pure;
Only by pleasure and passion and pain
His drama can endure.
All around is darkness and strife;
For the lamps that men call suns
Are but halfway gleams on this stumbling life
Cast by the Undying Ones.
Man lights his little torches of hope
That lead to a failing edge;
A fragment of Truth is his widest scope,
An inn his pilgrimage.
The Truth of truths men fear and deny,
The Light of lights they refuse;
To ignorant gods they lift their cry
Or a demon altar choose.
All that was found must again be sought,
Each enemy slain revives,
Each battle for ever is fought and refought
Through vistas of fruitless lives.
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one
And the Titan kings assail,
But I dare not rest till my task is done
And wrought the eternal will.
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
"Thy hope is Chimera's head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead.
"Who art thou that babblest of heavenly ease
And joy and golden room
To us who are waifs on inconscient seas
And bound to life's iron doom?
"This earth is ours, a field of Night
For our petty flickering fires.
How shall it brook the sacred Light
Or suffer a god's desires?
"Come, let us slay him and end his course!
Then shall our hearts have release
From the burden and call of his glory and force
And the curb of his wide white peace."
But the god is there in my mortal breast
Who wrestles with error and fate
And tramples a road through mire and waste
For the nameless Immaculate.
A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate."
I saw that a falsehood was planted deep
At the very root of things
Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep
On the Dragon's outspread wings.
I left the surface gauds of mind
And life's unsatisfied seas
And plunged through the body's alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.
I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart
And heard her black mass' bell.
I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.
Above me the dragon murmurs moan
And the goblin voices flit;
I have pierced the Void where Thought was born,
I have walked in the bottomless pit.
On a desperate stair my feet have trod
Armoured with boundless peace,
Bringing the fires of the splendour of God
Into the human abyss.
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
The gulf twixt the depths and the heights is bridged
And the golden waters pour
Down the sapphire mountain rainbow-ridged
And glimmer from shore to shore.
Heaven's fire is lit in the breast of the earth
And the undying suns here burn;
Through a wonder cleft in the bounds of birth
The incarnate spirits yearn
Like flames to the kingdoms of Truth and Bliss:
Down a gold-red stairway wend
The radiant children of Paradise
Clarioning darkness' end.
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I shall leave my dreams in their argent air,
For in a raiment of gold and blue
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, A God's Labour, 534,#KEYS
90:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, #KEYS
91:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study
Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.
The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.
Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.
Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.
Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.
Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.
The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.
The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.
Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.
The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.
The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.
The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.
Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.
The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.
The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.
The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.
The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.
The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.
The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.
Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.
The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.
The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.
The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.
The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.
Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.
Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.
Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.
Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.
The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.
The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.
The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.
The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.
The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.
Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.
Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.
Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.
The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.
Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.
Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.
Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.
First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.
Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.
The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.
The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.
The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants#KEYS
92:This, in short, is the demand made on us, that we should turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice. Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal. All our actions, not less the smallest and most ordinary and trifling than the greatest and most uncommon and noble, must be performed as consecrated acts. Our individualised nature must live in the single consciousness of an inner and outer movement dedicated to Something that is beyond us and greater than our ego. No matter what the gift or to whom it is presented by us, there must be a consciousness in the act that we are presenting it to the one divine Being in all beings. Our commonest or most grossly material actions must assume this sublimated character; when we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass away from us. In any great labour, in any high discipline, in any difficult or noble enterprise, whether undertaken for ourselves, for others or for the race, it will no longer be possible to stop short at the idea of the race, of ourselves or of others. The thing we are doing must be consciously offered as a sacrifice of works, not to these, but either through them or directly to the One Godhead; the Divine Inhabitant who was hidden by these figures must be no longer hidden but ever present to our soul, our mind, our sense. The workings and results of our acts must be put in the hands of that One in the feeling that that Presence is the Infinite and Most High by whom alone our labour and our aspiration are possible. For in his being all takes place; for him all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on his altar. Even in those things in which Nature is herself very plainly the worker and we only the witnesses of her working and its containers and supporters, there should be the same constant memory and insistent consciousness of a work and of its divine Master. Our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective practice must carry in them three results that are of a central importance for our spiritual ideal. It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love. There is bound up with it a growing sense of the Divine in all things, a deepening communion with the Divine in all our thought, will and action and at every moment of our lives, a more and more moved consecration to the Divine of the totality of our being. Now these implications of the Yoga of works are also of the very essence of an integral and absolute Bhakti. The seeker who puts them into living practice makes in himself continually a constant, active and effective representation of the very spirit of self-devotion, and it is inevitable that out of it there should emerge the most engrossing worship of the Highest to whom is given this service. An absorbing love for the Divine Presence to whom he feels an always more intimate closeness, grows upon the consecrated worker. And with it is born or in it is contained a universal love too for all these beings, living forms and creatures that are habitations of the Divine - not the brief restless grasping emotions of division, but the settled selfless love that is the deeper vibration of oneness. In all the seeker begins to meet the one Object of his adoration and service. The way of works turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind can imagine.
Next, the practice of this Yoga demands a constant inward remembrance of the one central liberating knowledge, and a constant active externalising of it in works comes in too to intensify the remembrance. In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all are in the Divine, all are the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe, - this thought or this faith is the whole background until it becomes the whole substance of the consciousness of the worker. A memory, a self-dynamising meditation of this kind, must and does in its end turn into a profound and uninterrupted vision and a vivid and all-embracing consciousness of that which we so powerfully remember or on which we so constantly meditate. For it compels a constant reference at each moment to the Origin of all being and will and action and there is at once an embracing and exceeding of all particular forms and appearances in That which is their cause and upholder. This way cannot go to its end without a seeing vivid and vital, as concrete in its way as physical sight, of the works of the universal Spirit everywhere. On its summits it rises into a constant living and thinking and willing and acting in the presence of the Supramental, the Transcendent. Whatever we see and hear, whatever we touch and sense, all of which we are conscious, has to be known and felt by us as That which we worship and serve; all has to be turned into an image of the Divinity, perceived as a dwelling-place of his Godhead, enveloped with the eternal Omnipresence. In its close, if not long before it, this way of works turns by communion with the Divine Presence, Will and Force into a way of Knowledge more complete and integral than any the mere creature intelligence can construct or the search of the intellect can discover.
Lastly, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice compels us to renounce all the inner supports of egoism, casting them out of our mind and will and actions, and to eliminate its seed, its presence, its influence out of our nature. All must be done for the Divine; all must be directed towards the Divine. Nothing must be attempted for ourselves as a separate existence; nothing done for others, whether neighbours, friends, family, country or mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and sentiment or because the ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare. In this way of doing and seeing all works and all life become only a daily dynamic worship and service of the Divine in the unbounded temple of his own vast cosmic existence. Life becomes more and more the sacrifice of the eternal in the individual constantly self-offered to the eternal Transcendence. It is offered in the wide sacrificial ground of the field of the eternal cosmic Spirit; and the Force too that offers it is the eternal Force, the omnipresent Mother. Therefore is this way a way of union and communion by acts and by the spirit and knowledge in the act as complete and integral as any our Godward will can hope for or our soul's strength execute.
It has all the power of a way of works integral and absolute, but because of its law of sacrifice and self-giving to the Divine Self and Master, it is accompanied on its one side by the whole power of the path of Love and on the other by the whole power of the path of Knowledge. At its end all these three divine Powers work together, fused, united, completed, perfected by each other.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [111-114],#KEYS
93:One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, was drawn by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story.
As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing --specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does', the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling --which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos': and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.
It is, no doubt, possible to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,--if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,--that I could 'fulfil my task,' and produce my 'tale of bricks,' as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced--that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!
This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of 'padding' which might fitly be defined as 'that which all can write and none can read.' That the present volume contains no such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines : but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do.
My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of 'padding' it contains. While arranging the 'slips' into pages, I found that the passage was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess which they are?
A harder puzzle if a harder be desired would be to determine, as to the Gardener's Song, in which cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in which (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza.
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come's is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story--I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it--but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'--is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
Hence it is that, in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' I have striven with I know not what success to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.
If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written--which I should much like to attempt, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through--in the hope that, if I should fail (and the years are gliding away very fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.
First, a Child's Bible. The only real essentials of this would be, carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love--no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great difficulty: no new ones would be needed : hundreds of excellent pictures already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size with a pretty attractive looking cover--in a clear legible type--and, above all, with abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!
Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible--not single texts, but passages of from 10 to 20 verses each--to be committed to memory. Such passages would be found useful, to repeat to one's self and to ponder over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible: for instance, when lying awake at night--on a railway-journey --when taking a solitary walk-in old age, when eyesight is failing or wholly lost--and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of David's rapturous cry "O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth!"
I have said 'passages,' rather than single texts, because we have no means of recalling single texts: memory needs links, and here are none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen--and those by mere chance: whereas, once get hold of any portion of a chapter that has been committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.
Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages--enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.
These two books of sacred, and secular, passages for memory--will serve other good purposes besides merely occupying vacant hours: they will help to keep at bay many anxious thoughts, worrying thoughts, uncharitable thoughts, unholy thoughts. Let me say this, in better words than my own, by copying a passage from that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX. "If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images, which will generally be at periodical hours, let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy, suicidal thoughts, beset him. Let these be to him the sword, turning everywhere to keep the way of the Garden of Life from the intrusion of profaner footsteps."
Fourthly, a "Shakespeare" for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. Few children under 10 would be likely to understand or enjoy the greatest of poets: and those, who have passed out of girlhood, may safely be left to read Shakespeare, in any edition, 'expurgated' or not, that they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children, in the intermediate stage, should be debarred from a great pleasure for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated.' Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out! Besides relentlessly erasing all that is unsuitable on the score of reverence or decency, I should be inclined to omit also all that seems too difficult, or not likely to interest young readers. The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry.
If it be needful to apologize to any one for the new departure I have taken in this story--by introducing, along with what will, I hope, prove to be acceptable nonsense for children, some of the graver thoughts of human life--it must be to one who has learned the Art of keeping such thoughts wholly at a distance in hours of mirth and careless ease. To him such a mixture will seem, no doubt, ill-judged and repulsive. And that such an Art exists I do not dispute: with youth, good health, and sufficient money, it seems quite possible to lead, for years together, a life of unmixed gaiety--with the exception of one solemn fact, with which we are liable to be confronted at any moment, even in the midst of the most brilliant company or the most sparkling entertainment. A man may fix his own times for admitting serious thought, for attending public worship, for prayer, for reading the Bible: all such matters he can defer to that 'convenient season', which is so apt never to occur at all: but he cannot defer, for one single moment, the necessity of attending to a message, which may come before he has finished reading this page,' this night shalt thy soul be required of thee.'
The ever-present sense of this grim possibility has been, in all ages, 1 an incubus that men have striven to shake off. Few more interesting subjects of enquiry could be found, by a student of history, than the various weapons that have been used against this shadowy foe. Saddest of all must have been the thoughts of those who saw indeed an existence beyond the grave, but an existence far more terrible than annihilation--an existence as filmy, impalpable, all but invisible spectres, drifting about, through endless ages, in a world of shadows, with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to love! In the midst of the gay verses of that genial 'bon vivant' Horace, there stands one dreary word whose utter sadness goes to one's heart. It is the word 'exilium' in the well-known passage
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura et nos in aeternum
Exilium impositura cymbae.
Yes, to him this present life--spite of all its weariness and all its sorrow--was the only life worth having: all else was 'exile'! Does it not seem almost incredible that one, holding such a creed, should ever have smiled?
And many in this day, I fear, even though believing in an existence beyond the grave far more real than Horace ever dreamed of, yet regard it as a sort of 'exile' from all the joys of life, and so adopt Horace's theory, and say 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'
We go to entertainments, such as the theatre--I say 'we', for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one and keep at arm's length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know--dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface that it may not be your lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis--to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you to hear their troubled whispers perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, "Is it serious?", and to be told "Yes: the end is near" (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)--how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?
And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself "Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too 'risky', the dialogue a little too strong, the 'business' a little too suggestive.
I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow." To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!
"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'
Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for 'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger.
But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine 'Sport': I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some 'man-eating' tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those 'tender and delicate' beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love--'thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'--whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!
'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Every old poem is sacred. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 2:All true work is sacred. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 3:Wisdom is a sacred communion. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 4:A noble truth is a sacred creed. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 5:Everything sacred, nothing sacred. ~ bodhidharma, @wisdomtrove 6:Sacred cows make the best hamburger. ~ mark-twain, @wisdomtrove 7:Home is the sacred refuge of our life. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 8:The mundane and the sacred are one and the same. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 9:If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 10:Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 11:Celebration is the hymn and sacred dance. ~ jonathan-lockwood-huie, @wisdomtrove 12:Bigotry is the sacred disease, and self-conceit tells lies. ~ heraclitus, @wisdomtrove 13:It is often just as sacred to laugh as it is to pray. ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove 14:Ah, music, sacred tongue of God! I hear thee calling and I come. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 15:The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 16:In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane. ~ dogen, @wisdomtrove 17:From joy I came, for joy I live, in sacred joy I melt. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 18:The conscience is the sacred haven of the liberty of man. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 19:A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 20:Its as if you think you'd never find Reason and the Sacred intertwined ~ moliere, @wisdomtrove 21:To me, authentic love is a sacred encounter we all yearn for. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 22:Prayer is the most sacred occupation a person could engage in. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 23:It's east to see without lookin' too far that not much is really sacred. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 24:Our time on this earth is sacred, and we should celebrate every moment. ~ paulo-coelho, @wisdomtrove 25:An ambassador has no need of spies; his character is always sacred. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 26:We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 27:Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 28:Surplus wealth is a sacred trust to be managed for the good of others. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 29:In appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something truly sacred. ~ fred-rogers, @wisdomtrove 30:Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 31:Romance is one of the sacred temples that dot the landscape of life. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 32:The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 33:A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 34:To stand alone against all adversity is the most sacred moment of existence. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 35:There is nothing so important in the family as the sacred quality of the meal. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 36:When you look at the Sacred Host you understand how much Jesus loves you now. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 37:May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 38:The laws of physics that we regard as & 39:You have a sacred contract with the Universe, and no one can fulfill it except you. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 40:The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards (i.e., everything is turned topsy turvy). ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 41:Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 42:The protection of a man's person is more sacred than the protection of his property. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 43:a sick room is at times too sacred a place for a friend's knock, timid as that is. ~ emily-dickinson, @wisdomtrove 44:Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 45:With a sacred expectation, I look for God in ALL of the circumstances of my day. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 46:If you perform your work viewing it as your dharma, your actions become sacred. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 47:Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 48:Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 49:Sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 50:To be a lover of life is to be a heroic lover on a sacred quest to become an embodiment of love. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 51:Sacred scripture is like a mirror in which we see God, although each in a different way. ~ emanuel-swedenborg, @wisdomtrove 52:Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 53:A person's beauty is sophisticated and sacred and is far beyond image, appearance or personality. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 54:Do not let the past disturb you, just leave everything in the Sacred Heart and begin again with joy. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 55:Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 56:It is your birthright to discover your sacred contract. It will guide you to find your divine destiny. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 57:Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility. ~ oprah-winfrey, @wisdomtrove 58:The purpose of daily prayer is the cultivation of a sense of the sacred. Sacred energy renews us. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 59:The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 60:If we choose to journey on the path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 61:It is your birthright to discover your sacred contract. It will guide you to find your divine destiny. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 62:Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 63:There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 64:The sacred duty of being an individual is to gradually learn how to live so as to awaken the eternal within you. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 65:The sacred page is not meant to be the end, but only the means toward the end, which is knowing God Himself. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 66:A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 67:If you have done terrible things, you must endure terrible things; for thus the sacred light of injustice shines bright. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 68:There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 69:No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 70:Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 71:In a sacred moment, when attention is pulled inward, rather than continuing in its usual outward direction, silence is realized. ~ gangaji, @wisdomtrove 72:Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 73:The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 74:We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 75:I don't see life divided into public and private, secular and sacred. It's all an open place of service before our God. ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove 76:Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 77:Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 78:Sitting alone, listening to the sound of your breath, the beating of your heart is a reminder that you are sacred and blessed. ~ lyania-vanzant, @wisdomtrove 79:When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 80:A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred the human law in himself, his own individual will. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 81:The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 82:We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 83:Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another's life. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 84:To the truly ethical man, all of life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem lower than ours. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 85:The world would have you agree with its dismal dream of limitation. But the light would have you soar like the eagle of your sacred visions. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 86:If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them to respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religion is a sacred duty. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 87:Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove 88:There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 89:What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 90:I loved my motherland dearly before I went to America and England. After my return, every particle of dust of this land seems sacred to me. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 91:Prayer gives a channel to the pent-up sorrows of the soul, they flow away, and in their stead streams of sacred delight pour into the heart. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 92:The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 93:You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 94:Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God! ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 95:During one of these sacred time blocks, do nothing but the activity that's right in front of you. Don't check email or online forums or do web surfing. ~ steve-pavlina, @wisdomtrove 96:Everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 97:Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 98:Love, when it is a sacred quest, is a space of resurrection and repair. It does more than help us survive a soulless world; it helps us to transform. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 99:All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 100:God's children are God's children anywhere and everywhere, and shall be even unto the end. Nothing can sever that sacred tie, or divide us from his heart. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 101:We can bring our spiritual practice into the streets, into our communities, when we see each realm as a temple, as a place to discover that which is sacred. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 102:The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 103:In the sacred precinct of that dwelling where the despotic woman wields the sceptre of fierce neatness, one treads as if he carried his life in his hands. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 104:Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touched by God." ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 105:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 106:Prayer is the forerunner of mercy. Turn to sacred history, and you will find that scarecely ever did a great mercy come to this world unheralded by supplication. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 107:The world is a sacred vessel. It should not be meddled with. It should not be owned. If you try to meddle with it you will ruin it. If you try to own it you will lose it. ~ lao-tzu, @wisdomtrove 108:From the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong, and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 109:If you keep your heart immersed always in the depth of that holy love, your heart is sure to remain ever full to overflowing with the Divine fervour of sacred love. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove 110:There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 111:[T]he period between four and six in the morning is called the Brahmamuhurta, the Brahmic time, or divine period, and is a very sacred time to meditate. ~ swami-satchidananda-saraswati, @wisdomtrove 112:As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 113:Grief needs to hear your story told. Speak it out to a sacred listener. Be witnessed. And then… tell a new story, one that includes the description of how you healed. ~ danielle-laporte, @wisdomtrove 114:Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred. But here is not a question of what's sacred; Rather of what to face or run away from. I'd hate to be a runaway from nature. ~ robert-frost, @wisdomtrove 115:Our sacred contract is not a literal document. That's the first thing to understand. We could think of our sacred contract as a spiritual document that our soul recognizes. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 116:Every form of life is sacred. It is not possible to have an activity that is not sacred... Coming to see everything as sacred and honouring everything is spiritual development. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 117:It is impossible for one man both to labor day and night to get a living, and at the same time give himself to the study of sacred learning as the preaching office requires. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 118:Every man's story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 119:Indeed, baptism is a vow, a sacred vow of the believer to follow Christ. Just as a wedding celebrates the fusion of two hearts, baptism celebrates the union of sinner with Savior. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 120:The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 121:Our sacred contract is not a literal document. That's the first thing to understand. We could think of our sacred contract as a spiritual document that our soul recognizes. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 122:History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 123:Don't stop to ask whether the animal or plant you meet deserves your sympathy, or how much it feels, or even whether it can feel at all: respect it and consider all life sacred. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 124:If you try to keep your most sacred ambitions off of your weekly calendar and your most genuine traits off of your resume, then you're missing out on the power of real integrity. ~ danielle-laporte, @wisdomtrove 125:Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 126:Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred Host we hail; Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 127:Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 128:Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred Host we hail; Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 129:Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 130:I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 131:Each person is sacred, no matter what his or her culture, religion, handicap, or fragility. Each person is created in God’s image; each one has a heart, a capacity to love and to be loved. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove 132:Just as you wouldn't leave the house without taking a shower, you shouldn't start the day without at least 10 minutes of sacred practice: prayer, meditation, inspirational reading. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 133:We must not dare to resort to words or conceptions concerning that hidden divinity which transcends being, apart from what the sacred scriptures have divinely revealed" ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 134:Whenever you possibly can, sustain the flow of a sacred Name. To repeat His name is to be in His presence. If you associate with the Supreme Friend, He will reveal His true being to you. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 135:A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 136:I am against abortion; I think that life is sacred and we should take a position of being against abortion. I think it is wrong to take human life. I think that human life starts at conception. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 137:I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 138:There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 139:The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 140:The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 141:Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 142:The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 143:If we are to help heal the world, we need to remember that it is a sacred place. Our actions need to be positive statements, reminders that even in the worst times there is a world worth struggling for. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 144:The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 145:Energy doesn't come to us so much from the things around us-although we can absorb energy directly from some plants and sacred sites. Sacred energy comes from our connection to the divine inside us. ~ james-redfield, @wisdomtrove 146:There are hopes, the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description; too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should only be known through the sympathy of hearts. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 147:A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 148:All the troubles of the Church, all the evils in the world, flow from this source: that men do not by clear and sound knowledge and serious consideration penetrate into the truths of Sacred Scripture. ~ teresa-of-avila, @wisdomtrove 149:We (Christians) are always in the presence of God. There is never a non-sacred moment! His presence never diminishes. Our awareness of His presence may falter, but the reality of His presence never changes. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 150:Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 151:It took me whole decades to appreciate the depth and true value of yoga. Sacred texts supported my discoveries, but it was not they that signposted the way. What I learned through yoga, I found out through yoga. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 152:Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 153:There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 154:The greatest of all heroes is One& 155:Your work is a very sacred matter. God delights in it, and through it, He wants to best His blessings on you. This praise of work should be inscribed on all tools, on the forehead and the faces that sweat from toiling. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 156:No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like the scene on Calvary. Nowhere does the soul find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, where agony reached its climax. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 157:There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 158:The “we” of your divine birthright - the one that is aware of its place as part of the collective whole - knows that it is your sacred obligation to shine your brightest light, not just in your moments of glory but each day. ~ debbie-ford, @wisdomtrove 159:Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 160:The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 161:What really holds their marriage together are mutual respect of an awesome depth, a shared sense of humor, faith that they were brought together by a force greater than themselves, and a love so unwavering and pure that it is sacred. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 162:Little is accomplished if one tries to understand these words theoretically. Much more can be gained when one creates sacred moments in life when one is willing to energetically fill one's soul with the living content of such words. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 163:The life of the individual has meaning only insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 164:In its original Latin form, sacrifice means to make sacred or to make holy. I wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting, regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 165:Thus I came up out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, and a power divine touched my spirit and gave it sight, so that I beheld many wonders. And from the sacred mountain I heard a voice which said, Knowledge is love and light and vision. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 166:We must control the tendencies within our being that are destructive, when we want to slam somebody else, hurt them, injure them, or push them out of the way. A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 167:It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 168:In America the chief accusation seems to be one of "Eroticism." This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty "amours," or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate? ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 169:When my relations with the Communist Party gave me the necessary perspective I decided to write my autobiography. I wanted to show how a man can pass from literature held sacred to action which nevertheless remains that of an intellectual. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 170:In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; - guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 171:Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 172:[The black hole] teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as “sacred,” as immutable, are anything but. ~ john-wheeler, @wisdomtrove 173:We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 174:Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 175:I believe that appreciation is a holy thing& 176:Of all the old festivals, however, that of Christmas awakens the strongest and most heartfelt associations. There is a tone of solemn and sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality, and lifts the sprit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 177:I have no religion,’ says Borneau, ‘but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.’ Why this privilege, this immunity?... A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable? ~ jules-renard, @wisdomtrove 178:I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 179:Those tragic comedians, the Chamber of Commerce red hunters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union smellers, the censors of books, the Klan regulators, the Methodist prowlers, the Baptist guardians of sacred vessels-we have the national mentality of a police lieutenant. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 180:We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man's life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 181:So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect-only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 182:This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 183:It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked & 184:America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 185:Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it & 186:Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 187:The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 188:There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 189:We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit. ~ e-e-cummings, @wisdomtrove 190:The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 191:And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 192:Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 193:The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 194:Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form. That is why the most sacred thing in life is death. That is why the peace of God can come to you through contemplation and acceptance of death. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 195:When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 196:What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and work flow. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 197:Religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 198:People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon... .This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13]that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 199:I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved". Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 200:You are like nobody since I love you" -Pablo Neruda This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 201:If we get away from the lazy and fuzzy thinking that is like a poison in our society - if we get away from all the bad television that we tend to watch - and begin to take up serious meditation and other sacred exercises, we will have a real revolution of consciousness. If that happens, the world will change by itself. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 202:England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth sacred. The nation is represented by a family,& 203:Such words as amen, hallelujah, glory and others of like sacred association are repeated endlessly and meaninglessly in the apparent belief that they have in them some strange power for good. This can be no more than high-grade magic. It will pay us to search our own hearts thoroughly to discover just why we use these words. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 204:The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 205:Before it incarnates, each soul enters into a sacred contract with the Universe to accomplish certain things. It enters into this commitment in the fullness of its being. Whatever the task that your soul has agreed to, all of the experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 206:God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 207:In a great affliction there is no light either in the stars or in the sun; for when the inward light is fed with fragrant oil; there can be no darkness though the sun should go out. But when, like a sacred lamp in the temple, the inward light is quenched, there is no light outwardly, though a thousand suns should preside in the heavens. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 208:Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 209:Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 210:I had gradually come, by this time [1839-01], to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 211:You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 212:Not all Masons are obligated on the Christian Bible. Masonry is universal and men of every creed are eligible for membership so long as they accept the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Therefore, the candidate should be obligated on the Book of the Sacred Law which he accepts as such since his obligation is a solemn and binding one. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 213:Death is not an anomaly or the most dreadful of all events as modern culture would have you believe, but the most natural thing in the world, inseparable from and just as natural as its polarity - Remind yourself of this when you sit with a dying person. It is a great privilege and a sacred act to be present at a person’s death as a witness and companion. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 214:So long as people do not consider all men as their brothers and do not consider human life as the most sacred thing, which rather than destroy they must consider it their first and foremost duty to support; that is so long as people do not behave towards one another in a religious manner, they will always ruin one another's lives for the sake of personal gain. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 215:All were happy - plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people - adult men and women - never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy - a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 216:The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists – that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbours, friends, and family, in one's back yard ... To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is sacred. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 217:Nietzche said that one of the best days in his life was the day when he rebaptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. Rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life…..One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness towrd them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualiites ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 218:In the beginning was belief, foolish belief, and faith, empty faith, and illusion, the terrible illusion. ... We believed in God, had faith in man, and lived with the illusion that in each one of us is a sacred spark from the fire of the shekinah, that each one carried in his eyes and in his soul the sign of God. This was the source‚ if not the cause, of all our misfortune. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 219:Money, when considered as the fruit of many years' industry, as the reward of labor, sweat and toil, as the widow's dowry and children's portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 220:Going around this country, I have found a great hunger in America for spiritual revival; for a belief that law must be based on a higher law; for a return to traditions and values that we once had. Our government, in its most sacred documents - the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and all - speak of man being created, of a Creator; that we're a nation under God. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 221:I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 222:To be a lover of life is to be a heroic lover on a sacred quest to become an embodiment of love. This means facing the dilemmas that confront us with bold determination to love. But the hero doesn’t start triumphant, win every war, and return victorious. The hero struggles and fails, yet finds the inner strength, which wells up from the deep self, to come back from defeat and love again. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 223:Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?" Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches. ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 224:... when a loved one has just died, or you feel your own death approaching, you cannot be happy. It is impossible. But you can be at peace. There may be sadness and tears, but provided that you have relinquished resistance, underneath the sadness you will feel a deep serenity, a stillness, a sacred presence. This is the emanation of Being, this is inner peace, the good that has no opposite. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 225:What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 226:Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility; for his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, and the cup he brings, though it burn your lips has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. ~ kahlil-gibran, @wisdomtrove 227:Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural... . In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. Witches are today being burned in South Africa... . The worldwide TM [Transcendental Meditation] organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee, they promise to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 228:When you surrender to what is and so become fully present, the past ceases to have any power. The realm of Being, which has been obscured by the mind, then opens up. Suddenly a great stillness aries within you, an unfathomable sense of peace. And within that peace, there is great joy. And within that joy, there is love. And at the innermost core, there is the sacred and immeasurable, That which cannot be named. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 229:Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 230:When you look at the crucifix, you understand how much Jesus loved you. When you look at the Sacred Host you understand how much Jesus loves you now. This is why you should ask your parish priest to have perpetual adoration in your parish. I beg the Blessed Mother to touch the hearts of all parish priests that they may have perpetual Eucharistic adoration in their parishes, and that it may spread throughout the entire world ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 231:One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 232:Even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights: the right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities, provided only that he does not try to inflict them upon others by force; he has the right to argue for them as eloquently as he can. But he has no right to be protected from the criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove 233:... [sacred] doctrine is especially based upon arguments from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those to whom the revelation has been made. Nor does this take away from the dignity of this doctrine, for although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 234:... [sacred] doctrine is especially based upon arguments from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those to whom the revelation has been made. Nor does this take away from the dignity of this doctrine, for although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 235:[Science] is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. ... The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 236:I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 237:The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 238:Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled! ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 239:The sceptic ultimately undermines democracy (1) because he can see no significance in death and such things of a literal equality; (2) because he introduces different first principles, making debate impossible: and debate is the life of democracy; (3) because the fading of the images of sacred persons leaves a man too prone to be a respecter of earthly persons; (4) because there will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 240:May your body be blessed. May you realize that your body is a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul. And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds. May you realize that holiness is mindful gazing, feeling, hearing and touching. May your senses gather you and bring you home. May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in you presence here. May the Eros of the Earth bless you. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 241:So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States... . and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 242:Fellow Americans, our duty is before us tonight. Let us go forward, determined to serve selflessly a vision of man with God, government for people, and humanity at peace. For it is now our task to tend and preserve, through the darkest and coldest nights, that "sacred fire of liberty" that President Washington spoke of two centuries ago, a fire that tonight remains a beacon to all oppressed of the world, shining forth from this kindly, pleasant, greening land we call America. ~ ronald-reagan, @wisdomtrove 243:The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it is not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that is the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically, Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you cannot enter into this world, into the world of creation. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 244:Love was a sacred garment, woven of a fabric so thin that it could not be seen, yet so strong that even mighty death could not tear it, a garment that could not be frayed by use, that brought warmth into what would otherwise be an intolerable, cold world- but at times love could also be as heavy as chain mail. Bearing the burden of love, on those occasions when it was a solemn weight, made it more precious when, in better times, it caught the wind in sleeves like wings, and lifted you. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 245:That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 246:You know how we say things like I just have to be true to myself? What does that mean? Great people always say, There's something I was meant to do. That knowingness is what the soul understands. You have fundamental agreements that you simply feel. You can't put your finger on them because they reveal themselves to you within the context of your life through coincidence, synchronicity, and obligations you can't get out of. Together, these things form the whole of your sacred contract. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 247:As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 248:You know how we say things like I just have to be true to myself? What does that mean? Great people always say, There's something I was meant to do. That knowingness is what the soul understands. You have fundamental agreements that you simply feel. You can't put your finger on them because they reveal themselves to you within the context of your life through coincidence, synchronicity, and obligations you can't get out of. Together, these things form the whole of your sacred contract. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 249:It's strange. There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What? ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 250:Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought. He is now living according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word. Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord's Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole of life into a sacrament. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 251:All things are linked with one another, and this oneness is sacred; there is nothing that is not interconnected with everything else. For things are interdependent, and they combine to form this universal order. There is only one universe made up of all things, and one creator who pervades them; there is one substance and one law, namely, common reason in all thinking creatures, and all truth is one -if, as we believe, there is only one path of perfection for all beings who share the same mind. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 252:Belonging so fully to yourself that you're willing to stand alone is a wilderness - an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. The wilderness can often feel unholy because we can't control it, or what people think about our choice of whether to venture into that vastness or not. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it's the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 253:Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 254:Nothing is so convenient as a decisive argument ... which must at least silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, and free us from their impertinent solicitations. I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument ... which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 255:Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves& 256:Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 257:I have transported many, thousands; and to all of them, my river has been nothing but an obstacle on their travels. They travelled to seek money and business, and for weddings, and on pilgrimages, and the river was obstructing their path, and the ferryman's job was to get them quickly across that obstacle. But for some among thousands, a few, four or five, the river has stopped being an obstacle, they have heard its voice, they have listened to it, and the river has become sacred to them, as it has become sacred to me. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 258:To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove 259:Sacred Scripture, since it has no science above itself, can dispute with one who denies its principles only if the opponent admits some at least of the truths obtained through divine revelation; thus we can argue with heretics from texts in Holy Writ, and against those who deny one article of faith we can argue from another. If our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning, but only of answering his objections - if he has any - against faith. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 260:Sacred Scripture, since it has no science above itself, can dispute with one who denies its principles only if the opponent admits some at least of the truths obtained through divine revelation; thus we can argue with heretics from texts in Holy Writ, and against those who deny one article of faith we can argue from another. If our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning, but only of answering his objections - if he has any - against faith. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 261:I believe that the most urgent need of parents today is to instill in our children a moral vision: what does it mean to be a good person, an excellent neighbor, a compassionate heart? What does it mean to say that God exits, that He loves us and He cares for us? What does it mean to love and forgive each other? Parents and caregivers of children must play a primary role in returning our society to a healthy sense of the sacred. We must commit to feeding our children’s souls in the same way we commit to feeding their bodies. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 262:I must be frank in my feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout our evangelical Christian circles - the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need Him as Saviour and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we want to... The truth is that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred scripture... Apart from obedience, there can be no salvation, for salvation without obedience is a self-contradictory impossibility. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 263:This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers this morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 264:Religion ... has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, & 265:Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the sacred part of your contract and the true meaning of your highest potential. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 266:I was always embarresed by the words & 267:Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 268:In questions of this sort there are two things to be observed. First, that the truth of the Scriptures be inviolably maintained. Secondly, since Scripture doth admit of diverse interpretations, that no one cling to any particular exposition with such pertinacity that, if what he supposed to be the teaching of Scripture should afterward turn out to be clearly false, he should nevertheless still presume to put it forward, lest thereby the sacred Scriptures should be exposed to the derision of unbelievers and the way of salvation should be closed to them. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 269:Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the sacred part of your contract and the true meaning of your highest potential. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 270:In questions of this sort there are two things to be observed. First, that the truth of the Scriptures be inviolably maintained. Secondly, since Scripture doth admit of diverse interpretations, that no one cling to any particular exposition with such pertinacity that, if what he supposed to be the teaching of Scripture should afterward turn out to be clearly false, he should nevertheless still presume to put it forward, lest thereby the sacred Scriptures should be exposed to the derision of unbelievers and the way of salvation should be closed to them. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 271:There is a relentless search for the factual and this quest often lacks warmth or reverence. At a certain stage in our life we may wake up to the urgency of life, how short it is. Then the quest for truth becomes the ultimate project. We can often forage for years in the empty fields of self-analysis and self-improvement and sacrifice much of our real substance for specks of cold, lonesome factual truth. The wisdom of the tradition reminds us that if we choose to journey on the path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 272:If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these possessions are far too dear and sacred for the person I now am to spoil for myself. All there is to say of my childhood is that it was good and happy. I was given the freedom to discover my own inclinations and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 273:I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, & 274:If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to still its unease is to transfigure it, to let it become something creative and positive that contributes to who you are. Nietzche said that one of the best days in his life was the day when he rebaptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. Rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life…..One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness towrd them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualiites ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 275:Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven't even got a word for the quality I mean& 276:Humanity is an organism, inherently rejecting all that is deleterious, that is, wrong, and absorbing after trial what is beneficial, that is, right. If so disposed, the Architect of the Universe, we must assume, might have made the world and man perfect, free from evil and from pain, as angels in heaven are thought to be; but although this was not done, man has been given the power of advancement rather than of retrogression. The Old and New Testaments remain, like other sacred writings of other lands, of value as records of the past and for such good lessons as they inculcate. Like the ancient writers of the Bible our thoughts should rest upon this life and our duties here. "To perform the duties of this world well, troubling not about another, is the prime wisdom," says Confucius, great sage and teacher. The next world and its duties we shall consider when we are placed in it. ~ andrew-carnegie, @wisdomtrove 277:In everyone's life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul. This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda: "You are like nobody since I love you." This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it an decipher identity and destiny. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 278:What measures, then, shall we adopt? What machine employ, or what reason consult by means of which we may contemplate this ineffable beauty; a beauty abiding in the most divine sanctuary without ever proceeding from its sacred retreats lest it should be beheld by the profane and vulgar eye? We must enter deep into ourselves, and, leaving behind the objects of corporeal sight, no longer look back after any of the accustomed spectacles of sense. For, it is necessary that whoever beholds this beauty, should withdraw his view from the fairest corporeal forms; and, convinced that these are nothing more than images, vestiges and shadows of beauty, should eagerly soar to the fair original from which they are derived. For he who rushes to these lower beauties, as if grasping realities, when they are only like beautiful images appearing in water, will, doubtless, like him in the fable, by stretching after the shadow, sink into the lake and disappear. For, by thus embracing and adhering to corporeal forms, he is precipitated, not so much in his body as in his soul, into profound and horrid darkness; and thus blind, like those in the infernal regions, converses only with phantoms, deprived of the perception of what is real and true. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 279:Let us, therefore, re-ascend to the good itself, which every soul desires; and in which it can alone find perfect repose. For if anyone shall become acquainted with this source of beauty he will then know what I say, and after what manner he is beautiful. Indeed, whatever is desirable is a kind of good, since to this desire tends. But they alone pursue true good, who rise to intelligible beauty, and so far only tend to good itself; as far as they lay aside the deformed vestments of matter, with which they become connected in their descent. Just as those who penetrate into the holy retreats of sacred mysteries, are first purified and then divest themselves of their garments, until someone by such a process, having dismissed everything foreign from the God, by himself alone, beholds the solitary principle of the universe, sincere, simple and pure, from which all things depend, and to whose transcendent perfections the eyes of all intelligent natures are directed, as the proper cause of being, life and intelligence. With what ardent love, with what strong desire will he who enjoys this transporting vision be inflamed while vehemently affecting to become one with this supreme beauty! For this it is ordained, that he who does not yet perceive him, yet desires him as good, but he who enjoys the vision is enraptured with his beauty, and is equally filled with admiration and delight. Hence, such a one is agitated with a salutary astonishment; is affected with the highest and truest love; derides vehement affections and inferior loves, and despises the beauty which he once approved. Such, too, is the condition of those who, on perceiving the forms of gods or daemons, no longer esteem the fairest of corporeal forms. What, then, must be the condition of that being, who beholds the beautiful itself? ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:The Sacred Hoop, ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
2:Every old poem is sacred. ~ Horace, #NFDB
3:reading as a sacred ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
4:The way of the sacred, ~ Jeremy Narby, #NFDB
5:Love is a sacred silence. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB
6:"The ordinary is sacred." ~ Zen proverb, #NFDB
7:All true work is sacred. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
8:Love is a sacred mystery. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
9:Wisdom is a sacred communion. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
10:A girl’s boudoir was sacred! ~ Gail Carriger, #NFDB
11:A noble truth is a sacred creed. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
12:Nothing here is sacred. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson, #NFDB
13:The body is a sacred garment. ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
14:The miserable are sacred. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
15:I think laughter is a sacred act. ~ Tom Shadyac, #NFDB
16:It's all mine, it's all sacred. ~ Coco J Ginger, #NFDB
17:Sacred Anarchy -is the ultimate Truth. ~ MuzWot, #NFDB
18:What will be / the sacred words? ~ Amiri Baraka, #NFDB
19:Everything sacred, nothing sacred. ~ Bodhidharma, #NFDB
20:Only God can make the common sacred. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
21:Sacred cows make the best hamburger. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
22:Sacred texts always offend reason. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
23:Sacred worship is all about God. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
24:Sacred chemistry is a meta-chemistry. ~ Marc David, #NFDB
25:The bandstand is a sacred place. ~ Wynton Marsalis, #NFDB
26:Your self is sacred; be true to it. ~ Paul Brunton, #NFDB
27:Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter. ~ Max Stirner, #NFDB
28:Irreverence is our only sacred cow. ~ Paul Krassner, #NFDB
29:Nothing is more sacred than the facts. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
30:There is no trust more sacred than the ~ Kofi Annan, #NFDB
31:A sacred burden is this life ye bear, ~ Fanny Kemble, #NFDB
32:Home is the sacred refuge of our life. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
33:The sacred influence of light appears. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
34:When everything is sacred, nothing is. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
35:Sacred interpreter of human thought, ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
36:What we keep sacred, keeps us safe. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
37:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
38:Honorable battle sustains a Sacred Band. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
39:I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal. ~ Dick Cavett, #NFDB
40:Sacred cows make very poor gladiators. ~ Nikki Giovanni, #NFDB
41:How sweet and sacred idleness is! ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
42:It doesn't have to be somber to be sacred. ~ David Wolpe, #NFDB
43:Religion is often politics made sacred. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
44:Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger. ~ Abbie Hoffman, #NFDB
45:The family is more sacred than the state. ~ Pope Pius XI, #NFDB
46:The next time you get scared, get sacred! ~ Abiola Abrams, #NFDB
47:The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
48:nothing in life is sacred except laughter. ~ Twinkle Khanna, #NFDB
49:Celebrate the Sacred in the ordinary. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, #NFDB
50:Have intention, sacred will travel. ~ S Kelley Harrell M Div, #NFDB
51:Sacred or not, sacrifice is an ugly business. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
52:The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue... ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
53:bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
54:Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. ~ G nter Grass, #NFDB
55:Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. ~ Gunter Grass, #NFDB
56:Non-cooperatio n with evil is a sacred duty. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
57:The mundane and the sacred are one and the same. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
58:The very flowers are sacred to the poor. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
59:Committing yourself to one person is sacred. ~ Natalie Portman, #NFDB
60:Conscience is the most sacred of all property. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
61:Gary preened. "Sam. Sam. I'm sacred. ~ T J Klune, #NFDB
62:I have a rule about no material being sacred. ~ Hanif Kureishi, #NFDB
63:The system should treat all user input as sacred. ~ Jef Raskin, #NFDB
64:If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
65:I take the museum space also as sacred in a sense. ~ Tadao Ando, #NFDB
66:Meeting another human is always a sacred event. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
67:Now is the time to know that all that you do is sacred. ~ Hafez, #NFDB
68:The line between sacred and secular is man-made. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
69:"The mundane and the sacred are one and the same." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
70:This single-minded lust between us was sacred. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
71:Without love and compassion, nothing is sacred. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
72:Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
73:Happiness is all about milking the "sacred now". ~ Robert Holden, #NFDB
74:If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
75:Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred. ~ Robert Frost, #NFDB
76:Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
77:She was deeply passionate about the sacred feminine. ~ Dan Brown, #NFDB
78:The thing you like/are good at is a sacred thing. ~ Ken Jennings, #NFDB
79:The trombone is too sacred for frequent use. ~ Felix Mendelssohn, #NFDB
80:All over the sky a sacred voice is calling your name. ~ Black Elk, #NFDB
81:Grief . . . is a sacred way of honoring those we love. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
82:Liberty and equality--lovely and sacred words! ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
83:Meeting another human is always a sacred event. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
84:My mind is a sacred cow / bleeding in the ellipsis. ~ Toma alamun, #NFDB
85:Radical mind, sacred heart, lovers' spirit, cosmic deed. ~ MuzWot, #NFDB
86:Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
87:But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. ~ Barry Unsworth, #NFDB
88:Every woman knows the power of the sacred feminine. ~ Deborah King, #NFDB
89:It is only the sacred things that are worth touching ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
90:I've never considered musical equipment very sacred. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
91:No facts to me are sacred; none are profane. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
92:Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
93:If anything is sacred,
the human body is sacred. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
94:Sacred spirit of love, fall down on me from above. ~ Bootsy Collins, #NFDB
95:The need of truth is more sacred than any other need. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
96:There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred. ~ Nat Hentoff, #NFDB
97:To new family and girl time, both of which are sacred. ~ Kate Perry, #NFDB
98:Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbor. ~ Giotto di Bondone, #NFDB
99:I like complaining. It’s every soldier’s sacred right, ~ Jim Butcher, #NFDB
100:The task of life is to face sacred moments. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
101:Football is the last sacred ritual of our time. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini, #NFDB
102:It’s faith that makes these things sacred, isn’t it? ~ Oliver P tzsch, #NFDB
103:Never stop trying to cultivate the sacred inside you. ~ Ming Dao Deng, #NFDB
104:We cannot gamble with anything so sacred as money. ~ William McKinley, #NFDB
105:All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
106:All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
107:Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand on your sacred ground. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
108:Fields are much more sacred than the sanctuaries! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
109:In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred. ~ Auguste Rodin, #NFDB
110:Scared is what happens when the sacred gets scrambled. ~ Anodea Judith, #NFDB
111:There is nothing more sacred than air to someone dying. ~ Jeff Wheeler, #NFDB
112:A SACRED OATH
A FALLEN ANGEL
A FORBIDDEN LOVE ~ Becca Fitzpatrick,#NFDB
113:I have other duties equally sacred ... Duties to myself. ~ Henrik Ibsen, #NFDB
114:Love wins. Sleep is a healer. Loved ones are sacred. ~ Jennifer Nettles, #NFDB
115:No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
116:“The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression.” ~ Bataille, #NFDB
117:You can find the sacred in the most ordinary of things. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
118:253. … the sacred instinct of having no theories … 254 ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
119:Bigotry is the sacred disease, and self-conceit tells lies. ~ Heraclitus, #NFDB
120:Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred. ~ Black Elk, #NFDB
121:Life isn't nearly as sacred as the appreciation of passion ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
122:Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
123:Where do you live?' is ultimately a sacred question. ~ Diana Butler Bass, #NFDB
124:Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
125:Life isn't nearly as sacred as the appreciation of passion. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
126:The church is a place where we make our prejudice sacred. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
127:Comedy clubs are sacred ground. That's where anything goes. ~ Tracy Morgan, #NFDB
128:Every sacred cow in the business has to do with economics. ~ Gena Rowlands, #NFDB
129:In Bali, even mundane things are reminders of the sacred. ~ Joan Borysenko, #NFDB
130:Many people lock a part of themselves away. It's a bit sacred. ~ Tori Amos, #NFDB
131:Sacred are the lips from which has issued only truth. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
132:The road to the sacred leads through the secular. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
133:Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it. ~ John Burroughs, #NFDB
134:As you walk upon the sacred earth, treat each step as a prayer. ~ Black Elk, #NFDB
135:Claiming our voice, and our selfhood, is a sacred act. ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt, #NFDB
136:Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. ~ Leo Rosten, #NFDB
137:Get them to vow on whatever geek shit you guys hold sacred ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
138:me·nor·ah n. (the Menorah) a sacred candelabrum ~ Oxford University Press, #NFDB
139:The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
140:The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million. ~ Eugene V Debs, #NFDB
141:When you consider Life as sacred,Nature waits on you ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
142:Without a sacred center, no one knows right from wrong. ~ Thomas Yellowtail, #NFDB
143:A friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
144:Ah, music, sacred tongue of God! I hear thee calling and I come. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
145:and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
146:A peaceful home is as sacred a place as any chapel or cathedral. ~ Bil Keane, #NFDB
147:I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
148:"In the sunlight of awareness, everything becomes sacred." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
149:My body is beautiful and sacred, and I'm going to celebrate it. ~ India Arie, #NFDB
150:No sacred fane requires us to submit to insult. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
151:Silence, the ornament of sacred solitudes” (Life of Rancé). ~ Sylvain Tesson, #NFDB
152:The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
153:True beauty is a ray that springs from the sacred depths of the soul. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
154:After love, the most sacred gift you can give is your labor. ~ D A Pennebaker, #NFDB
155:Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
156:First times are always sacred. May we never run out of "firsts ~ Truth Devour, #NFDB
157:In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane. ~ Dogen, #NFDB
158:Love consists in feeling the Sacred One beating inside the loved one. ~ Plato, #NFDB
159:Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. ~ Gerald Hausman, #NFDB
160:The constitution is a sacred document in a democracy. ~ Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, #NFDB
161:[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
162:What an amazing and sacred place [Israel] to end the tour ~ Alanis Morissette, #NFDB
163:From joy I came, for joy I live, in sacred joy I melt. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
164:I should send my bees ashore for you, upon my sacred honour. ~ Patrick O Brian, #NFDB
165:Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
166:Sacred are the lips from which has issued only truth. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
167:That nothing's so sacred as honor and nothing's so loyal as love. ~ Wyatt Earp, #NFDB
168:The conscience is the sacred haven of the liberty of man. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
169:A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
170:even the most sacred bonds could be broken under enough stress. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
171:I need to offer a sacred water sacrifice at the porcelain altar. ~ Pawan Mishra, #NFDB
172:I think life is sacred, whether it's abortion or the death penalty. ~ Tim Kaine, #NFDB
173:leadership is a sacred trust earned from the respect of those ~ Henry Mintzberg, #NFDB
174:Mantras are passwords that transform the mundane into the sacred. ~ Deva Premal, #NFDB
175:Mothers were sacred. Mothers were not expected to be pretty. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
176:Even if God did not exist it would continue to be sacred
~ Charles Baudelaire,#NFDB
177:I am the mother of pure love and of science and of sacred hope. ~ Ecclesiastious, #NFDB
178:Its as if you think you'd never find Reason and the Sacred intertwined ~ Moliere, #NFDB
179:My joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
180:Opening to the sacred, we transform our vision of ourselves. ~ Stephanie Dowrick, #NFDB
181:Sacred religion! Mother of Form and Fear! ~ Samuel Daniel, Musophilus, Stanza 47, #NFDB
182:Sacred space” is another way of saying “with intention. ~ S Kelley Harrell M Div, #NFDB
183:She who is silent everywhere finds peace. ~ Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart, #NFDB
184:The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred. ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
185:To me, authentic love is a sacred encounter we all yearn for. ~ Michael Beckwith, #NFDB
186:You lose that sacred-cow status when you lose three straight years. ~ Joe Dumars, #NFDB
187:Animals are very sacred things. You don’t find them. They find you. ~ Morgan Rice, #NFDB
188:I am the mother of pure love and of science and of sacred hope. ~ Ecclesiastious, #NFDB
189:The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. ~ Akbar Ahmed, #NFDB
190:To recognize another's inwardness is to have seen the sacred. ~ Peter Koestenbaum, #NFDB
191:Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
192:I believe our most sacred moments are often our most human moments. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
193:...I learn about the sacred in the everyday - I look in your face... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
194:I refuse the rat race because God has called me to the sacred race. ~ Susie Larson, #NFDB
195:No belief or idea is sacred, unless it treats all people as sacred ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
196:Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
197:Be brave, be strong, read your sacred texts, and practice death. ~ Suzanne Morrison, #NFDB
198:By lighting a candle, you affirm that you are opening a sacred space. ~ Robert Moss, #NFDB
199:Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
200:I felt like one of Apollo's sacred cows- slow, dumb, and bright red. ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
201:Its as if you think you'd never find
Reason and the Sacred intertwined ~ Moli re,#NFDB
202:It's sacred for an actor to keep their personal life personal. ~ Jennifer Carpenter, #NFDB
203:Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
204:Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
205:The heart is the hub of all sacred places. Go there and roam. ~ Bhagawan Nityananda, #NFDB
206:There is nothing sacred, nothing uplifting, in hatred or in death. In ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
207:The sacred is found boring by many who find the uncanny fascinating. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
208:We are never so free as when we own our sacred serfdom... ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
209:Well, so much for the D’Abruzzi Pussy Legacy. Is nothing sacred? ~ Megan McCafferty, #NFDB
210:Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
211:Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
212:In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane. ~ Dogen Zenji, #NFDB
213:It's east to see without lookin' too far that not much is really sacred. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
214:Love makes every space sacred and every moment meaningful . . . ~ Barbara De Angelis, #NFDB
215:Loyalty is something you should always hold sacred in your heart. ~ Daunte Culpepper, #NFDB
216:National defense is the sacred duty of the young and all other people. ~ Kim Jong Il, #NFDB
217:Sex is the sacred song of the soul; Sex is the sanctuary of Self. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
218:Some extremists take elements of the sacred scriptures out of context. ~ Cat Stevens, #NFDB
219:The Declaration of Independence is a sacred part of American history. ~ Paul Gillmor, #NFDB
220:THE MOST PRECIOUS AND SACRED THINGS IN LIFE ARE THE MOST SIMPLE THINGS. ~ Mandy Hale, #NFDB
221:Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
222:Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness? ~ Homer, #NFDB
223:Life is precious. Life is sacred. And it ought so to be observed. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
224:No belief or idea is sacred, unless it treats all people as sacred. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
225:Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
226:Sarcasm is my sacred totem animal. I swear I wouldn’t survive without it. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
227:The purpose of all relationships is to create a sacred context ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
228:Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. ~ Aspen Matis, #NFDB
229:What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
230:Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda, ~ Wendy Doniger, #NFDB
231:Women were forbidden to study the most ancient sacred text, the Veda. ~ Wendy Doniger, #NFDB
232:A National Flag is the most sacred thing a nation can possess ~ Thomas Francis Meagher, #NFDB
233:I know of no more sacred duty than to rear and educate a child. ~ Ludwig van Beethoven, #NFDB
234:I never thought about a name being sacred or something to be hoarded. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
235:In the absence of the sacred, nothing is sacred - everything is for sale. ~ Oren Lyons, #NFDB
236:Our time on this earth is sacred, and we should celebrate every moment. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
237:Story is a sacred visualization, a way of echoing experience. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
238:There is a remote tribe that worships the number zero. Is nothing sacred? ~ Les Dawson, #NFDB
239:You are my religion, Clara Bishop. Sacred. Lovely. I want to worship you. ~ Geneva Lee, #NFDB
240:An ambassador has no need of spies; his character is always sacred. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
241:A poem is something sacred. Let no one Take it for anything except itself. ~ Jose Marti, #NFDB
242:Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. -Leo Rosten ~ Leo Rosten, #NFDB
243:Heaven hears and pities hapless men like me, For sacred ev'n to gods is misery. ~ Homer, #NFDB
244:Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don’t worship it. Feed it. ~ Abba Eban, #NFDB
245:she has carried this sacred sense of community building into ~ Zalman Schachter Shalomi, #NFDB
246:To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, #NFDB
247:We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
248:Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
249:Don't fear the light within. May it ignite the Sacred Flame in your soul. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
250:Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
251:Nonviolent non-co-operation, I am convinced, is a sacred duty at times. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
252:Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
253:Surplus wealth is a sacred trust to be managed for the good of others. ~ Andrew Carnegie, #NFDB
254:We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane. ~ Tariq Ali, #NFDB
255:All space is sacred space when you remember that God is within you. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
256:Schedule a sacred date with yourself. You deserve time for your life. ~ Cheryl Richardson, #NFDB
257:so many people concentrate on looks, but the invisible is sacred ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
258:Whatever you do, do with deep alertness, then even small things become sacred. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
259:Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
260:You either believe marriage and human sexuality are sacred, or you do not. ~ Kirk Cameron, #NFDB
261:And what aim in life is more important or sacred than a parental aim? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
262:Confession is a sacred rite enhanced by allegory, exaggeration, and lies. ~ Craig Ferguson, #NFDB
263:Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
264:One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
265:Religion blushing, veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
266:Romance is one of the sacred temples that dot the landscape of life. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
267:The library, to me, is the second most sacred physical space on the planet. ~ Nikky Finney, #NFDB
268:There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
269:The sacred lives beyond labels and judgment, in the wood-of-no-names. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, #NFDB
270:Beneath the Sacred Host, Christ is contained, the Redeemer of the world ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
271:Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
272:Drawing and masturbation were the first sacred experiences I remember. ~ Carolee Schneemann, #NFDB
273:My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
274:She who desires peace must see, suffer and be silent. ~ Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart, #NFDB
275:The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble. ~ Sam Keen, #NFDB
276:A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
277:Golf is not sacred, and there is no use getting so gosh-darned solemn about it. ~ Don Herold, #NFDB
278:Mining in BC's Sacred Headwaters is like drilling for oil in the Sistine Chapel ~ Wade Davis, #NFDB
279:To stand alone against all adversity is the most sacred moment of existence. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
280:Even the most open person has a private, sacred place where no one else may go. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
281:Everything was sacred when nothing was taken for granted, she thinks ruefully. ~ Rene Denfeld, #NFDB
282:I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
283:The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred. ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
284:There is nothing so important in the family as the sacred quality of the meal. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
285:The truth is friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage. ~ Katherine Mansfield, #NFDB
286:Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
287:When you look at the Sacred Host you understand how much Jesus loves you now. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
288:I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
289:I've got my private life - that's sacred - and I didn't have that before. ~ Elizabeth McGovern, #NFDB
290:Love overcomes, love delights, those who love the Sacred Heart rejoice. ~ Bernadette Soubirous, #NFDB
291:Love's greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred. ~ Barbara De Angelis, #NFDB
292:our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
293:The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
294:The place of true belonging, it's the bravest and most sacred place you'll stand. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
295:The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family. She ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
296:When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred. ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
297:Anything that makes you forget the wounds in your heart does a sacred job! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
298:Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
299:Food is no longer sacred to us: in becoming too efficient we've changed its nature. ~ Mehmet Oz, #NFDB
300:History is sacred—like a nature hike. ‘Leave only footprints, take only memories. ~ Rysa Walker, #NFDB
301:life is inherently sacred and must be lived with sacred intensity and purpose ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, #NFDB
302:Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law. ~ Jean Anouilh, #NFDB
303:R2-D2 squawked derisively.
“Hey, sacred island,” Luke said. “Watch the language. ~ Jason Fry,#NFDB
304:Some things are sacred. Until you act like they're not. Then you lose them ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
305:Through sacred things we can influence and be influenced by the transcendental. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
306:but that's what growing up is all about- learning nothing is sacred in this world ~ Chris Colfer, #NFDB
307:...science is the kind of sacred cow which theology was five hundred years ago.... ~ John Lukacs, #NFDB
308:The cause didn't seem sacred to her. The war did not seem to be holy affair. ~ Margaret Mitchell, #NFDB
309:The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments. ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
310:To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, #NFDB
311:You have a sacred contract with the Universe, and no one can fulfill it except you. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
312:Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it. ~ Marian Wright Edelman, #NFDB
313:If once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
314:In a world of insanity, nothing is sacred. It's an insane world, nothing is sacred. ~ Deb Caletti, #NFDB
315:It can be frustrating to see how society has taken the sacred out of everything. ~ Ravi Zacharias, #NFDB
316:The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards (i.e., everything is turned topsy turvy). ~ Euripides, #NFDB
317:The music of Bach is without doubt the most sacred gift to the world of art. ~ Heitor Villa Lobos, #NFDB
318:There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
319:And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people as one of many hoops that made one circle. ~ Black Elk, #NFDB
320:Each place is the right place--the place where I now am can be a sacred space. (3) ~ Ravi Ravindra, #NFDB
321:Love's greatest gift is its' ability to make everything it touches sacred.... ~ Barbara De Angelis, #NFDB
322:Love's the greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred. ~ Barbara De Angelis, #NFDB
323:A pinkie swear could never be broken. It was the most sacred of oaths in her opinion. ~ Melody Anne, #NFDB
324:Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
325:. I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
326:Like a mommy loves a daddy?” whispered Ava Grace, like her words were sacred. “Would ~ Katy Regnery, #NFDB
327:....my sacred landscape is the foothills of the stars - I go there often to sleep ... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
328:Sacred space allows us to enter our quiet inner world where healing takes place. ~ Alberto Villoldo, #NFDB
329:The dinner hour is a sacred, happy time when everyone should be together and relaxed. ~ Julia Child, #NFDB
330:The protection of a man's person is more sacred than the protection of his property. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
331:Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
332:We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
333:You live in the most sacred place
in the universe:
right here,
right now. ~ Ivan M Granger,#NFDB
334:a sick room is at times too sacred a place for a friend's knock, timid as that is. ~ Emily Dickinson, #NFDB
335:Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
336:I know that not only is Swaraj our birthright, but it is our sacred duty to win it. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
337:My own spirit, soul, and body are my nearest machinery for sacred service. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
338:Spiritual life is contractual. The sacred cannot dialogue with the unresponsive. ~ Christina Baldwin, #NFDB
339:Traditions don't come out of nowhere. They come from something sacred and strange. ~ Corey Ann Haydu, #NFDB
340:We have to do the best we are capable of. This is our sacred human responsibility. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
341:All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft, #NFDB
342:I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
343:If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
344:...I've marked our sacred place not with stones - I've put it my art to keep it safe... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
345:I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred. ~ Aspen Matis, #NFDB
346:New light in the sky
announces a sacred birth.
Shine brightly young star. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,#NFDB
347:The freedom of thought and expression is one of the most sacred rights in this country. ~ Eliot Engel, #NFDB
348:The mystical journey drives us into ourselves, to a sacred flame at our center. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
349:The poisonous pedagogy is transmitted multi-generationally as a sacred body of truth. ~ John Bradshaw, #NFDB
350:Against her foes Religion well defends Her sacred truths, but often fears her friends. ~ George Crabbe, #NFDB
351:Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred. ~ Sherman Alexie, #NFDB
352:I don't show just anyone how to crust a sea bass. That's sacred information. ~ Alexandra Guarnaschelli, #NFDB
353:If you perform your work viewing it as your dharma, your actions become sacred. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
354:Insurrection is the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. ~ Marquis de Lafayette, #NFDB
355:The stream Rámáyan leaves its sacred fount The whole wide world from sin and stain to free.4 ~ Valmiki, #NFDB
356:Vicky didn’t say anything for a moment. “Red Cliff Canyon is a sacred area,” she said. ~ Margaret Coel, #NFDB
357:...you know I wanted a Madonna, not a whore - I made you sacred offering you my words... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
358:Your heart is sacred land. Don't let just anything enter it. Guard it with your life. ~ Yasmin Mogahed, #NFDB
359:Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it. ~ Anthony Burgess, #NFDB
360:Everything for me is sacred, beginning with earth, but also going to things made by man. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
361:Let the soul who is desirous of advancing in perfection hasten to My Sacred Heart. ~ Gertrude the Great, #NFDB
362:some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
363:Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
364:The prophet's mantle, ere his flight began, Dropt on the world--a sacred gift to man. ~ Thomas Campbell, #NFDB
365:There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
366:If there was one thing she'd learned from her parents, it's that pleasure was sacred. ~ Stephanie Julian, #NFDB
367:Man's most sacred privilege is freedom of will, the ability to obey or disobey his Maker. ~ Joseph Hertz, #NFDB
368:Modern civilization has no understanding of sacred matters. Everything is backwards. ~ Thomas Yellowtail, #NFDB
369:Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honoured. ~ Isaac Hayes, #NFDB
370:The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
371:Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery. ~ St phane Mallarm, #NFDB
372:Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind. ~ Vince Lombardi, #NFDB
373:I believe that marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
374:Some of my friends who play rugby talk about Murrayfield Stadium as sacred turf. ~ Alexander McCall Smith, #NFDB
375:The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
376:There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross. ~ Anna Akhmatova, #NFDB
377:What makes a circle sacred is that those who show up for it are the ones who belong in it. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
378:Accepting our pain is a way to say we treasure the sacred gift of life — run to your pain. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
379:A life is sacred or it isn't. We can't adjust what we believe just because it causes us pain. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
380:Believe me, the library is the temple of God. Education is the most sacred religion of all. ~ Gene Simmons, #NFDB
381:Does love survive? Yes, I thought, somewhere in some place it is saved and made sacred. ~ Christopher Pike, #NFDB
382:Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery. ~ Stephane Mallarme, #NFDB
383:Love's greatest gift is it's ability to make everything it touches sacred. ~ Jalaluddin RumiHappy friday 💙, #NFDB
384:O Black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
385:O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? ~ James Weldon Johnson, #NFDB
386:RESIST no thought; RETAIN no thought; REACT to no thought; RETURN to the sacred word. ~ Cynthia Bourgeault, #NFDB
387:Sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
388:The most sacred laws of justice are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor. ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
389:To do everything in a sacred manner means to do everything fully in the state of presence. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
390:I feel there is a strong bond between artists and children and all other sacred fools. ~ Gottfried Helnwein, #NFDB
391:Let the mind be, along with countless other things, a landing strip for sacred visitations. ~ James Merrill, #NFDB
392:The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer. ~ Mo Yan, #NFDB
393:Things sacred should not only be touched with the hands, but unviolated in thought. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
394:When he speaks again, his tone is nearer to reverence, a voice for saints and sacred places. ~ Mackenzi Lee, #NFDB
395:I swallowed. Be strong, Valentina. The wish of a dead man is sacred. Don’t break your promise. ~ Cora Reilly, #NFDB
396:I've said it in the past and I'll say it again today: the vote is precious; it's almost sacred. ~ John Lewis, #NFDB
397:Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart. ~ Emile Zola, #NFDB
398:Mychael Eiliesor. Guardian paladin, sacred protector, master spellsinger, fashion consultant. ~ Lisa Shearin, #NFDB
399:Nothing is sacred. And, more importantly...the 'nothing' you end up with is truly sacred. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
400:Remember, it’s not your programs or methods as a church that are sacred; it’s your mission. ~ Carey Nieuwhof, #NFDB
401:We swore sacred oaths to be strong and to save the planet and to be friends forever. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson, #NFDB
402:We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert. ~ Thomas Berry, #NFDB
403:Girls’ night out was sacred, and that meant nothing with a penis was going to be within ten feet ~ Maya Banks, #NFDB
404:Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
405:People can easily take the sacred word duty as a name for what they desire any one else to do. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
406:Sacred scripture is like a mirror in which we see God, although each in a different way. ~ Emanuel Swedenborg, #NFDB
407:Taboo comes from a Polynesian word that means “sacred or holy” rather than simply “prohibited. ~ Mary K Greer, #NFDB
408:To us it’s a sacred mountain and so high that it always wears a necklace of fleecy clouds. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB
409:To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise! ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
410:we sometimes carry the sacred fire in our hearts, but have no idea where that flame came from. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
411:What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands? ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
412:Health is a divine gift, and the care of the body is a sacred duty, to neglect which is to sin. ~ Eugen Sandow, #NFDB
413:I had come to believe that there was something sacred in telling stories and telling them true. ~ Kirby Larson, #NFDB
414:In every detail a city should reflect that human beings are sacred and that they are equal. ~ Enrique Penalosa, #NFDB
415:In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
416:I was making the decision to do this work because this work, to me, was a sacred thing.) Lucy ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
417:Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
418:Our children will grow up confused, not respecting the Bible or anything else that is sacred. ~ Charles Wesley, #NFDB
419:By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors. ~ S Kelley Harrell M Div, #NFDB
420:Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
421:ELECTOR, n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man's choice. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
422:I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
423:I need to take a sacred pause, as if I were a sun warmed rock in the center of a rushing river. ~ Dawna Markova, #NFDB
424:In the minds of the early Christians, the people—not the architecture—constituted a sacred space. ~ Frank Viola, #NFDB
425:I swear, I’m going to cut the tongues from the mouths of everyone here. Is no secret sacred? ~ Victoria Aveyard, #NFDB
426:I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. ~ David Antin, #NFDB
427:I think the older you are, the more you're going to cling to the printed word as being sacred. ~ Buzz Bissinger, #NFDB
428:TAKE TIME TO BE HOLY. The word holy does not mean goody-goody; it means set apart for sacred use. ~ Sarah Young, #NFDB
429:There is comfort in keeping what is sacred inside us not as a secret, but as a prayer. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
430:The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
431:Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
432:A man and his dog is a sacred relationship. What nature hath put together let no woman put asunder. ~ A R Gurney, #NFDB
433:Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
434:The best and purest human beings, from the beginning of time, have understood that life is sacred. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
435:The constitutional freedom of religion is the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
436:the Hole is a kind of sacred high place, where insights are birthed and clarity comes to visit. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
437:Three is a sacred number. Some say it represents the trinity or three layers of the soul. ~ Laura Treacy Bentley, #NFDB
438:To me, relationship is sacred because the spirit of God is manifest in empathic connection. ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt, #NFDB
439:When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
440:Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets. ~ Hal Duncan, #NFDB
441:Any place is sacred ground, for it can become a place of encounter with the divine Presence. ~ David Steindl Rast, #NFDB
442:He that would earn the Poet's sacred name, Must write for future as for present ages. ~ Christopher Pearse Cranch, #NFDB
443:...if you don't regard your word as a sacred covenant, then there is nothing in you I can honor ... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
444:It is for the honor of Jesus that we endure the trial of our faith with sacred joy. Let ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
445:No idol, book, word, place or relic should ever be held sacred. Only human life is sacred. ~ Clark Thomas Carlton, #NFDB
446:Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry. ~ Robert Bly, #NFDB
447:When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
448:Imagine the world we would live in if we dared to see all of life as sacred - unconditionally. ~ Stephanie Dowrick, #NFDB
449:It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
450:It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular; it is why he does it. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
451:No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
452:No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
453:That which is the Real Self of Man is the Divine Spark sent forth from the Sacred Flame. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
454:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
455:...what is sacred is the other person -we forget that sometimes - and fail to honor who they are ... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
456:All Americans have a sacred duty to guarantee Social Security benefits to our nation's senior citizens ~ Steve King, #NFDB
457:All life is sacred. Even life that comes in forms that we don't understand." - Obi-Wan Kenobi ~ John Jackson Miller, #NFDB
458:Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic word. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
459:Cooking dinner is a sacred gateway from work to rest, from seven separate lives to one shared table. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
460:In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
461:The future of life on Earth depends on our ability to see the sacred where others see only the common ~ John Denver, #NFDB
462:The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
463:The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots. ~ Gary Snyder, #NFDB
464:Time to unite the Sacred Bands, Thebans and his people: one unit, one heart, one swing through life. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
465:To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. ~ David McCullough, #NFDB
466:But I think frustration is hilarious. One of my missions is to bring humor into fine art. It's sacred. ~ Wayne White, #NFDB
467:Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven. ~ James Hervey, #NFDB
468:Do not let the past disturb you, just leave everything in the Sacred Heart and begin again with joy. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
469:Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals. ~ Clay Shirky, #NFDB
470:For the words of a vow are sacred not only among men and the angels, but among the demons as well. ~ Howard Schwartz, #NFDB
471:God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
472:Government seems to me to be a part of religion itself - a thing sacred in its institutions and ends. ~ William Penn, #NFDB
473:I don't pretend to understand these feelings, but I'm willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred. ~ Marlena de Blasi, #NFDB
474:It is difficult to think of the “natural world” as sacred (because we just designated it “natural”). ~ John H Walton, #NFDB
475:I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
476:One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin,” then one touch of myth makes the whole world sacred. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
477:Silence has a regenerative power of its own. It is always sacred. It always returns you home. ~ Barbara De Angelis, #NFDB
478:The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act. ~ Joseph Epstein, #NFDB
479:Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic word... ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
480:Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen. ~ James Alan Gardner, #NFDB
481:Having tasted the honeycomb, he threw down his axe, and looking on the tree as sacred, took great care of it. ~ Aesop, #NFDB
482:It turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it's the bravest and most sacred place you'll stand. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
483:Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
484:ONE As from the pow’r of Sacred Lays The Spheres began to move; And sung the great Creator’s praise ~ Kerry Greenwood, #NFDB
485:Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out. ~ Christina Baldwin, #NFDB
486:The cruelest curse of the disease is also its most sacred promise: You will not feel this way forever. ~ Terri Cheney, #NFDB
487:The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information but to face sacred moments. ~ Alison Pick, #NFDB
488:Your body is sacred. You’re far more precious than diamonds and pearls, and you should be covered too. ~ Muhammad Ali, #NFDB
489:Aspiring to a depth of awareness of the sacred whole has always been the path to wisdom and grace. ~ Charlene Spretnak, #NFDB
490:Freedom of expression must be considered sacred and thought can only be corrected by counter thought. ~ Naguib Mahfouz, #NFDB
491:If they do not give you work, demand bread. If they deny you both, take bread. It is your sacred right! ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
492:In art the end does not sanctify the means: but sacred means employed here can sanctify the end. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
493:It is your birthright to discover your sacred contract. It will guide you to find your divine destiny. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
494:No society in history has attempted to live without a belief in the sacred, not until the modern West. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
495:Outside of a person’s love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor." -- James Carville ~ Peggy Noonan, #NFDB
496:Sacred Bands and elite squadrons aren't what the mercenaries' guild is about. Field them at your peril. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
497:The relationship between the prophet and the President, the priest and the President, is a sacred one. ~ Jesse Jackson, #NFDB
498:Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
499:We hereby declare the end to the wall dividing the sacred from the profane: from now on, all is sacred. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
500:Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
501:Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods. ~ W H Auden, #NFDB
502:By the power of The Thorn Birds," she cried, "by the sacred strength of My Sweet Audrina and Forever... ~ Grady Hendrix, #NFDB
503:Each of you, Jew and gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in the sacred war should do so now. ~ Samuel Untermyer, #NFDB
504:Entertainment is a sacred pursuit when done well. When done well, it raises the quality of human life. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
505:In the eyes of dialectical philosophy, nothing is established for all times, nothing is absolute or sacred. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
506:The dominant ethos of the twenty-first century consists of an intermingling of the sacred and the secular. ~ Harvey Cox, #NFDB
507:The purpose of daily prayer is the cultivation of a sense of the sacred. Sacred energy renews us. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
508:...and they come without any inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances made sacred by long descent. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
509:Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson, #NFDB
510:In each of us dwells a pilgrim. It is the part of us that longs to have direct contact with the sacred. ~ Phil Cousineau, #NFDB
511:The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid. ~ Augustus De Morgan, #NFDB
512:To pray is no small thing. It is nothing less than a sacred pilgrimage into the heart of the whole world. ~ Wayne Muller, #NFDB
513:Each human being must keep alight within him the sacred flame of madness, but behave like a normal person. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
514:Love is an invisible, a sacred and ineffable spirit which traverses the whole world with its rapid thoughts. ~ Empedocles, #NFDB
515:Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, #NFDB
516:The rights of men and women should be equal and sacred-marriage should be a perfect partnership. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
517:The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal. ~ Auguste Comte, #NFDB
518:The zone is a place that you rarely visit. It's not some place you go every week. The zone is sacred ground. ~ Joe Greene, #NFDB
519:We must join with the tens of millions all over the world who see in peace our most sacred responsibility. ~ Paul Robeson, #NFDB
520:When you read the sacred Scriptures, or any other book, never think how you read, but what you read. ~ John Philip Kemble, #NFDB
521:A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
522:God," in these pages, becomes a way to express our universal desire to know and to comprehend the sacred. ~ Rachel Pollack, #NFDB
523:I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred. Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
524:Let the earth look at me, and bless me, for now I am fecund and sacred, like the palms and the furrows. ~ Gabriela Mistral, #NFDB
525:Of the emotions, mourning in particular feels like something that should be sacred and intensely private. The ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
526:perpetual 'hushing' made him feel like a brutal intruder whenever he entered the sacred precincts of Babyland. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
527:Scientists or not, if you really push on what is sacred to people, you can be sure they’ll be offended. At ~ Gregory Berns, #NFDB
528:That's the thing about writers -on one hand evrything is sacred to them, but, on the other, nothing really is. ~ Lang Leav, #NFDB
529:The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
530:The Sacred Bombshell knows that her creative feminine energy is a catalyst. She remembers her womb wisdom. ~ Abiola Abrams, #NFDB
531:When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred. ~ Stephen Levine, #NFDB
532:[Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation. ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
533:For me to make lasagna would be a desecration of a great Italian dish. . . . I don't mess with sacred things. ~ Mario Cuomo, #NFDB
534:I am a congenital liar. Some Highlanders are. To my ancestors, the truth was so sacred as to be unusable. ~ Gladys Mitchell, #NFDB
535:I found you.No one can keep us apart now,and our love will now be the story told to define how sacred love is ~ Jamie Magee, #NFDB
536:I have rules about eating, exercising and rules about staying positive. And these rules are sacred to me. ~ Richard Simmons, #NFDB
537:In order to be a good gatekeeper, you have to think of your house as sacred space, not storage space. You’re ~ Francine Jay, #NFDB
538:Sexuality is a private matter; some believe that broadcasting it destroys the very things that make it sacred. ~ Lance Loud, #NFDB
539:The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time...the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
540:There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. ~ Richard M Rorty, #NFDB
541:To me there is nothing more sacred than love and laughter, and there is nothing more prayerful than playfulness. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
542:We have made our worship services more secular than sacred, more common than uncommon, more profane than holy. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
543:All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
544:His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. ~ Michelle Obama, #NFDB
545:If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me. ~ Abraham Verghese, #NFDB
546:If nothing is sacred, then we are all left to crawl through the mud, and there is no meaning to anything. ~ Frances Hardinge, #NFDB
547:If you had to work 14 hour days, Mondays to Fridays, then you have to keep Saturdays and Sundays sacred. ~ Nicole Ari Parker, #NFDB
548:The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
549:The sacred thread and the tuft of hair without a pure heart and a spirit of toleration do not make a Hindu. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
550:could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
551:IMBECILITY, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
552:I'm half Hawaiian and the haka is a very sacred thing, something your family teaches you - my father taught me. ~ Jason Momoa, #NFDB
553:Invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.” ~ J J McAvoy Samuel Johnson ~ J J McAvoy, #NFDB
554:O liberty, Parent of happiness, celestial born When the first man became a living soul; His sacred genius thou. ~ Edward Dyer, #NFDB
555:Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
556:There is then no sacred or profane, spiritual or sensual, but everything that lives is pure and void. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy, #NFDB
557:This is the great secret. This is the sacred wisdom. Do unto others as you would have it done unto you. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
558:Tis an ancient and sacred tie that binds man to his nation; neither can it be severed without infamy. ~ James Fenimore Cooper, #NFDB
559:To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
560:...what is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd?... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
561:What the Bible says is what God has disclosed and we want to approach this sacred text with cognitive reverence. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
562:Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge,#NFDB
563:Attention: a sacred energy coming into me. Be sensitive to it. Recognize again and again that it is there ~ Michel de Salzmann, #NFDB
564:Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
565:If everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die...where does the sacred part come in? ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
566:I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
567:Knowledge is a sacred cow, and my problem will be how we can milk her while keeping clear of her horns. ~ Albert Szent Gyorgyi, #NFDB
568:The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred. ~ Daniel Berrigan, #NFDB
569:The female soul is no small thing. Neither is a woman's right to define the sacred from a woman's perspective. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
570:There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
571:The world is a sacred vessel that cannot be changed. He who changes it will destroy it. He who seizes it will lose it. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
572:Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
573:Andrés was Latin enough to understand the sacred rights of the family and the inconvenience of a same-sex lover. ~ Edmund White, #NFDB
574:Art is sacred.
Punk rock is freedom.
Expression and right to express is vital.
Anyone can be artistic. ~ Kurt Cobain,#NFDB
575:I have no soul," [Raphael] said. "But I made you a promise on my mother's doorstep, and she was sacred to me. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
576:Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti. ~ Neville Marriner, #NFDB
577:My pigment is of the earth, and collecting my sacred fire from my solar plexus with the central sun of the earth. ~ Jimmy Cliff, #NFDB
578:As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have... ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
579:I am ready to defend my convictions even unto death. I have followed the Sacred Scriptures and the holy doctors. ~ John Wycliffe, #NFDB
580:I follow nature as the surest guide, and resign myself with implicit obedience to her sacred ordinances. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
581:In a land where sport is sacred, Where the labourer is God, You must pander to the people, Make a hero of a clod. ~ Henry Lawson, #NFDB
582:I take the dust from the lotus feet of the guru to cleanse the mirror of my mind.” So begins a sacred ode to Hanuman. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
583:It does not do to let the senses fall asleep, whether in the shade of the sacred tree or in the shadow of an army. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
584:No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey, at length evening comes with its sacred song. ~ Brian Friel, #NFDB
585:The Conscious will is represented by the Sacred Woman, Maria, Isis, who crushes the descending serpent's head. ~ Samael Aun Weor, #NFDB
586:There are two worlds: the world where nothing is sacred except money, an the other world, where everything is sacred. ~ Ron Kauk, #NFDB
587:The spiritual space we’re trying to find and maintain in meditation practice is the sacred place in each of us. ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
588:We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs. ~ Joseph Bruchac, #NFDB
589:A glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic like the sun, It gives a light to every age, It gives, but borrows none. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
590:Every human being should keep alive within them the sacred flame of madness, but should behave as a normal person. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
591:Honor the sacred. Honor the Earth, our Mother. Honor all with whom we share the Earth Walk in balance and beauty. ~ Robert Muller, #NFDB
592:Meekly, with reverent steps, the sacred feet of her Saviour. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline (1847), Part II. V, line 35, #NFDB
593:The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
594:The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
595:The instant we admit that a book is too sacred to be doubted , or even reasoned about , we are mental serfs. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
596:The look is elegant and sacrilegious and makes me feel sacred and immoral.
Haute couture and getting hauter. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
597:Why did Christ become Man if not to save men by uniting them mystically with God through His own Sacred Humanity? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
598:Almost everything you think is sacred, good and decent, is a lie and an all-out assault against truth and decency. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
599:Every hero’s journey included some sacred task that culminated in a deeper understanding of who they were born to be. ~ Jeff Goins, #NFDB
600:No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
601:The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty ... students perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
602:The Love factor makes anything hallowed, and an action is no exception. Doing things with love makes the work sacred. ~ Banani Ray, #NFDB
603:...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---. ~ Romain Gary, #NFDB
604:No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
605:Our experiences of God matter—those sacred moments that defy the very rational capabilities we are so keen to rely on. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
606:A sacred respect for the Constitutional Law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
607:A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
608:But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Keep sacred your highest hope! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
609:If you have done terrible things, you must endure terrible things; for thus the sacred light of injustice shines bright. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
610:In church, sacred music would make believers of us all — but preachers can be counted on to restore the balance. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, #NFDB
611:It's very crucial that you get your feelings out- but don't ever inflict harm on your body because your body is sacred ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
612:Mark that the blessings of sacred fellowship and perfect cleansing are bound up with walking in the light. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
613:No political body is sacred, sustainable or under protection, which allows the exploitation of its weakest citizens. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
614:Red cattle," Annabeth said. "The cattle of the sun." "What?" I [Percy] asked. "They're sacred to Apollo." "Holy cows? ~ Rick Riordan, #NFDB
615:The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills. ~ Nicol s G mez D vila, #NFDB
616:There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
617:When we gaze into the eyes of our beloved, we're staring into the eyes of a sacred mirror, and we recognize our oneness. ~ Alex Grey, #NFDB
618:Do you believe in soul mates? A connection so sacred and profound that one soul instantly recognizes it’s other half? ~ Siobhan Davis, #NFDB
619:How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust! ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
620:I guess there should be somewhere on the Internet that feels like a source of sacred truth. But Wikipedia sure isn't it. ~ Nick Kroll, #NFDB
621:There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. ~ Madeleine L Engle, #NFDB
622:The tantras are ancient sacred books of India and Tibet. The tantras detail specific means for attaining liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
623:The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. The sacred word: EGO. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
624:Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds — that sacred place of reason, action and will — and throw off our compass. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
625:When we fail to appreciate Sophia’s presence at work in nature, we are also more likely to fail to appreciate the sacred ~ Ilia Delio, #NFDB
626:But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk… ~ Keri Hulme, #NFDB
627:He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death. ~ Garrett Leigh, #NFDB
628:If we want to know what's most sacred in this world, all we need to do is look for what is most violently profaned. ~ Christopher West, #NFDB
629:One saintly priest attracts more souls to Christ...than do those who lack the imprint of their sacred office ~ Dietrich von Hildebrand, #NFDB
630:The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred "No" even to duty -- for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
631:The essence of the present moment, no matter how chaotic it may appear on the surface, is stillness, sacred stillness. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
632:The right of self-defense never ceases. It is among the most sacred, and alike necessary to nations and to individuals. ~ James Monroe, #NFDB
633:Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
634:atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
635:But the winners chose what we should believe in. They chose which writings were sacred and which ones were ‘heretical. ~ Raymond Khoury, #NFDB
636:Children and babies should be held in the most sacred regard. We feel that they're the most natural and true magicians. ~ Zeena Schreck, #NFDB
637:It is hereby decreed that the wall separating the sacred and the profane be toen down. From now on everything is sacred. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
638:Life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
639:Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness. ~ Stanislav Grof, #NFDB
640:The word 'silly' derives from the Greek 'selig' meaning 'blessed.' There is something sacred in being able to be silly. ~ Paul Pearsall, #NFDB
641:Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
642:Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
643:he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
644:Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred. ~ Anatole France, #NFDB
645:It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops. ~ Ernest Bramah, #NFDB
646:Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. ~ Jacques Ellul, #NFDB
647:The song and the drumming were like this: Behold, a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling. ~ Black Elk, #NFDB
648:When you let go of fear and the need to control, you’ll experience how mysterious, sacred, and interesting Life can be. ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
649:A beast sacred and profane bore him north, with a beautiful, terrifying woman, to defend a city wonderful in its horrors. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
650:All that exists is the temple. In this sacred place, the only religion without atheists puts its divinities on display. ~ Eduardo Galeano, #NFDB
651:How can it be that the most wonderous and sacred human space - the womb - has become a place of unutterable violence? ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
652:In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe. ~ Valeria Luiselli, #NFDB
653:I purified my lips with sacred fire that I might speak of love, but when I opened my mouth to speak, I found myself mute. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
654:It was not certain what significance the ceremony held... but the formality was no less sacred for it being unintelligible ~ Mervyn Peake, #NFDB
655:I wondered if there was something sacred, something everlasting, about melted ice cream and summer days and good stories. ~ Natalie Lloyd, #NFDB
656:Oh, God, today I pray [to] you on my knees for Dostoevsky’s obscurity, blindness, the most sacred and precious of all things. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
657:We (Easterners) are not like the Franks, who barter everything, even their most sacred feelings, even love. ~ Marmaduke William Pickthall, #NFDB
658:We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
659:. . . a man's sacrifice is a surrender of his sacred independence: he becomes more consciously related to woman. P. 126 ~ Carl Gustav Jung, #NFDB
660:DIVIDE YOUR LIFE INTO SACRED AND SECULAR, HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY, CHRISTIAN AND HUMAN REALMS. DEVOTE THEM ALL TO CHRIST. ~ Michael E Wittmer, #NFDB
661:...how are you sacred to me? your lines are golden threads - your patter, my patten - I explore the liturgy of your words... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
662:I have to say, music was always my self preservation survival technique. This sort of sacred space in my life and in my mind. ~ Jon Gordon, #NFDB
663:In a sacred moment, when attention is pulled inward, rather than continuing in its usual outward direction, silence is realized. ~ Gangaji, #NFDB
664:In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
665:Man becomes aware of the Sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the Profane. ~ Mircea Eliade, #NFDB
666:Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. ~ William O Douglas, #NFDB
667:One theme underlying my method of tidying is transforming the home into a sacred space, a power spot filled with pure energy. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
668:Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
669:There is nothing holy nor sacred to those who have abandoned God and reason in order to follow their perverse desires. ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
670:The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
671:We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
672:Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it. ~ Christopher Isherwood, #NFDB
673:You are the sacred consummation of the sun and the moon and the shadow and you will become the poison of death. [Sylvian] ~ Karen Maitland, #NFDB
674:Civil union is less than marriage. Marriage is a sacred and valued institution and ought to be afforded equal protection. ~ James McGreevey, #NFDB
675:I consider music to be very sacred and I feel I'm blessed to be born with a talent which allows me to make the best of it. ~ Shreya Ghoshal, #NFDB
676:I love my prayer rug. . . . because it helped me remember that the earth is the creation of God and sacred the same all over. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
677:Love is a beautiful, wonderful, and even sacred thing, but until it arrives, shouldn’t we give ourselves permission to thrive? ~ Mandy Hale, #NFDB
678:Sports evolve when sacred cows are killed, when basic assumptions are tested. The same is true in life and in lifestyles. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
679:The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
680:I am of the opinion that the vulva of Your Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before intercourse. ~ Mary Roach, #NFDB
681:It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
682:One way of celebrating the Solstice is to consider it a sacred time of reflection, release, restoration, and renewal. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, #NFDB
683:Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
684:Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community. ~ Andrew Carnegie, #NFDB
685:The story of sacred texts has always been the story of their readers: of shifting and often clashing interpretations. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah, #NFDB
686:This was the joy that the world sought— sacred and pagan all at once. A union between two dissimilars into a seamless one. ~ Sylvain Reynard, #NFDB
687:Work is holy, sacred, and uplifting when it springs from who we are, when it bears a relationship to our unfolding journey. ~ Wayne Teasdale, #NFDB
688:All money represents theft… To steal from the rich is a sacred and religious act. While looting, a man to his own self is true. ~ Jerry Rubin, #NFDB
689:And in our families, we can create sacred spaces—the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the car—that are device-free. ~ Sherry Turkle, #NFDB
690:Be kind to all beings, this is more meritorious than bathing at the sixty-eight sacred shrines of pilgrimage and donating money. ~ Guru Nanak, #NFDB
691:Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
692:For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred. ~ Paula Gunn Allen, #NFDB
693:I think that's what love is; holding someone sacred, honoring them, protecting them, living up to the very best of them. ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
694:I urge you by all this is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that you pray but also that you act! ~ John Hancock, #NFDB
695:living room by a curtain of colored beads. The room’s furnishings consisted of a table, an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
696:O Music! how it grieves me that imprudence, intemperance, gluttony, should open their channels into thy sacred stream. ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
697:Red cattle," Annabeth said. "The cattle of the sun."
"What?" I [Percy] asked.
"They're sacred to Apollo."
"Holy cows? ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
698:Remember this always: The living of your own life writes the book of your most sacred truth, and offers evidence of it. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
699:the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
700:This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort. ~ Matthew J Sullivan, #NFDB
701:But just like believing in God, falling in love is such a sacred feeling that it leaves you with no room for any other passions. ~ Orhan Pamuk, #NFDB
702:For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull. ~ Ralph Nader, #NFDB
703:On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness. ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
704:Some holiday traditions are sacred. In our house one such tradition is the annual Christmas classic cinema celebration. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, #NFDB
705:The love of God and people is the whole substance of life. Nothing is more important. This is sacred work and very much counts. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
706:The Thames is in many respects the river of the dead. It has the power to hurt and to kill.’ Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River ~ Kate Rhodes, #NFDB
707:Visiting the fields is more sacred than visiting the temples because our existence is based on fields and not on temples! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
708:We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
709:Where did I meet him before - this buckbasket of fat, this full-moon face of purple, and this carriage of a sacred elephant? ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
710:You are free. Your mind belongs to you. Your thoughts are yours. Honor the sacred territory of your freedom and individuality. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
711:You know, in my hometown of Hope, Arkansas, the three sacred heroes were Jesus, Elvis, and FDR, not necessarily in that order. ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
712:Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe. ~ Marc Chagall, #NFDB
713:Great grief makes sacred those upon whom its hand is laid. Joy may elevate, ambition glorify, but sorrow alone can consecrate. ~ Horace Greeley, #NFDB
714:He regards it as the highest insult for the wicked to boast of His covenant while profaning His sacred Name by their whole lives. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
715:I really believe that we have a responsibility, almost a sacred responsibility, to the animals that share this planet with us. ~ Emmylou Harris, #NFDB
716:It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
717:It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness. ~ Kenneth Tynan, #NFDB
718:Life is usually loved more than our most sacred love. In that knowledge lies the beginning of our cruelty and of our survival. ~ Josephine Hart, #NFDB
719:Sitting alone, listening to the sound of your breath, the beating of your heart is a reminder that you are sacred and blessed. ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
720:The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
721:There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
722:There is no place like Calvary for creating confidence. The air of that sacred hill brings health to trembling faith. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
723:When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
724:DON’T DIVIDE YOUR LIFE INTO SACRED AND SECULAR, HEAVENLY AND EARTHLY, CHRISTIAN AND HUMAN REALMS. DEVOTE THEM ALL TO CHRIST. ~ Michael E Wittmer, #NFDB
725:Drummond appreciated his guest's initial silence, his respect for the ancient, sacred act of imbibing. Drink first, talk later. ~ Jean Zimmerman, #NFDB
726:I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
727:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #NFDB
728:Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
729:The author of the document would one day come to believe that it was sacred scripture and that his writing desk was a holy object. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
730:The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. ~ Theodor Adorno, #NFDB
731:There is in the Sacred Heart the symbol and express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love in return. ~ Pope Leo XIII, #NFDB
732:There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
733:...the right to think, to speak, and to write in freedom and without fear is ultimately a more sacred thing than any religion. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, #NFDB
734:Whatever happens to me in life, I must believe that somewhere, In the mess or madness of it all, There is a sacred potential— ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
735:When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
736:All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
737:As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
738:birch twigs, and a willow binding. The ash is protective, the birch is purifying, and the willow is sacred to the Goddesss. Of ~ Scott Cunningham, #NFDB
739:Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
740:Holiness is the thing I never saw coming that makes me catch my breath because I know the sacred has interrupted my isolation. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
741:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #NFDB
742:The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling on its own, a prime movement, a sacred Yes. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
743:All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
744:And indeed, what aim in life is more important and sacred than a father’s? To what should one adhere, if not to one’s family? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
745:Anyone who listens to the world, anyone who seeks the sacred in the ordinary events of life, has “problems about how to believe. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
746:A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred the human law in himself, his own individual will. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
747:Each creature has a universally unique name, a sacred identity.
If you know and call them by that name, they will definitely reply. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
748:If you think one thing is sacred but you cannot stand the other, if you love the Creator but hate the creation, that is vulgarity. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
749:I have always said that a studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
750:Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
751:Laughter is more sacred than prayer, dancing more spiritual than chanting mantras, loving existence more cosmic than going to a church. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
752:one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves protect the wings. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
753:The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015]. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
754:The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
755:We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
756:When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
757:I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
758:If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
759:Jocelyn recognized reading as a sacred pastime and usually wouldn't interrupt Clary in the middle of a book, even to yell at her. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
760:Look upon paintings with eyes of mystery rather than judgement. Support the need to enter into the sacred space beyond evaluation. ~ Michele Cassou, #NFDB
761:The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor. ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
762:There is no cause half so sacred as the cause of the people. There is no idea so uplifting as the idea of the service of humanity. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
763:The third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of . . . the sacred and inviolable rights of private property. ~ William Blackstone, #NFDB
764:To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination. ~ Simon Callow, #NFDB
765:We look at adoption as a very sacred exchange. It is not done lightly on either side. I would dedicate my life for this child. ~ Jamie Lee Curtis, #NFDB
766:All nights are sacred nights to make confession and resolve and prayer; all days are sacred days to wake new gladness in the sunny air. ~ Helen Hunt, #NFDB
767:... hatred is never an answer, and ... death nullifies all answers. There is nothing sacred, nothing uplifting, in hatred or in death. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
768:indeed no virtue of pragmatism was possible in matters of the soul, and might even prove anathema to the very notion of the sacred. ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
769:In pursuing a ‘way,’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate. ~ Morinosuke Kawaguchi, #NFDB
770:I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
771:It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. ~ Black Elk, #NFDB
772:Maybe it’s sentiment, but all my life I’ve believed that the Diyin Dine’é put us between the four sacred mountains for a reason. ~ Rebecca Roanhorse, #NFDB
773:The problem is, most people don't like to hear suggestions that directly confront or run counter to their most sacred beliefs. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
774:To impose taxes when the public exigencies require them is an obligation of the most sacred character, especially with a free people. ~ James Monroe, #NFDB
775:I am trying to prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; not that the Church is not sacred -- but that the whole Earth is. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
776:Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another. ~ Vimala Thakar, #NFDB
777:One can be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ without denying the flickers of the sacred in followers of Yahweh, or Kali, or Krishna ~ Leonard Sweet, #NFDB
778:That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
779:You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. It is an honor to be in that sacred space in some children’s brains. ~ Daniel Handler, #NFDB
780:Each being is sacred - meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being. ~ Starhawk, #NFDB
781:Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
782:JOSS-STICKS- Small sticks burned by the Chinese in their pagan tomfoolery, in imitation of certain sacred rites of our holy religion. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
783:Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
784:myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
785:There are not two histories, one profane and one sacred, 'juxtaposed' or 'closely linked.' Rather there is only one human destiny. ~ Gustavo Gutierrez, #NFDB
786:Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
787:What legendary travelers have taught us since Pausanius and Marco Polo is that the art of travel is the art of seeing what is sacred. ~ Phil Cousineau, #NFDB
788:Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another? ~ Mary Astell, #NFDB
789:Because of their sacred gift of translating and embodying energy, empaths are able to spot their soul mates or twin flames a mile away. ~ Aletheia Luna, #NFDB
790:Critical to any practice of sacred psychology is training in multiple imageries to facilitate the inner realism of journeys of the soul. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
791:Instead of angry protesters shaking our fists at a secular culture, we should be joyful singers transforming the secular with the sacred. ~ Brian Zahnd, #NFDB
792:I tread in the footsteps of illustrious men... in receiving from the people the sacred trust confided to my illustrious predecessor. ~ Martin Van Buren, #NFDB
793:Jocelyn recognized reading as a sacred pastime and usually wouldn’t interrupt Clary in the middle of a book, even to yell at her. The ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
794:Never own defeat in a sacred cause and make up your minds henceforth that you will be pure and that you will find a response from God. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
795:Now is the time when we must renew ourselves and live as if we and all of life is sacred, and as if everything we do makes a difference. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
796:The world indeed is sacred; but paradoxically, one cannot see the sacredness of the world until one discovers that it is a divine play. ~ Mircea Eliade, #NFDB
797:Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
798:As disciples of Christ, we have a sacred obligation to uphold His laws and commandments and the covenants which we take upon ourselves. ~ Robert D Hales, #NFDB
799:But your life is yours, singular and sacred, and you should be with the person who makes it feel that way every blessed second you live it. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
800:He had come to shock the people out of their complacency. This was evident in his every word. There were no sacred sheep in his flock. ~ Taylor Caldwell, #NFDB
801:Nothing Sacred”: we forget at our ease, sometimes, and in the pleasure of shared laughter, just how noble and hard-won this motto can be. ♦ ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
802:She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
803:Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another's life. ~ Margaret Fuller, #NFDB
804:This-our love for each other-was the most sacred of things my hearts had ever known. And I was willing to do whatever it took to preserve it. ~ Nely Cab, #NFDB
805:To the truly ethical man, all of life is sacred, including forms of life that from the human point of view may seem lower than ours. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
806:"Your life is yours, singular and sacred, and you should be with the person who makes it feel that way every blessed second you live it." ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
807:I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces. ~ Michel Hazanavicius, #NFDB
808:. . . it seemed to me that where others had prayed before to their God, in their joy or in their agony, was of itself a sacred place. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
809:It’s ego – the false self – that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true. ~ Jed McKenna, #NFDB
810:I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (1860), #NFDB
811:Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, #NFDB
812:Scripture: From the Latin scriptura, meaning “writings”; refers to sacred texts, but more specifically, the Bible as the Word of God written. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
813:Since the Goddess always has been honored in sacred groves, it is understandable that patriarchs, then as now, leaned toward deforestation. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
814:The Lord of glory flashes forth! And reality grows sacred, the handiwork of God, the stuff that contained the Word, the Son of God. ~ James Calvin Schaap, #NFDB
815:This is what our love is––a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds. ~ Aberjhani, #NFDB
816:Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
817:At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
818:Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart. ~ Joan D Chittister, #NFDB
819:But, then, every gesture made by a human being is sacred and full of consequences, and that makes me think even more about what I am doing. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
820:It sounds corny to say, but the theater is sacred; something transcendent can occur, and when it does, everyone grows. It's a true communion. ~ Val Kilmer, #NFDB
821:Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
822:Not matter what your sacred or religious book is, it's not how well you know the book, it's how well you're in alignment with the author. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
823:The singing of hymns and the rendition of selections from the great sacred oratorios by ward choirs all enhance the spirit of worship. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
824:The world is starving for leaders who are not afraid to dismantle the sacred and precious beliefs, which hold us as prisoners of the past. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
825:Wind is the sacred music of the leaves; wherever and whenever the wind blows, over there leaves start their holy dancing frantically! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
826:Arnold Schwarzenegger has come out against gay marriage. He said marriage is a sacred union between a groupie and any number of body builders. ~ Bill Maher, #NFDB
827:For it is the explicit statement of Sacred Scripture that one who is outside of tribulation is outside the condition and hope of salvation. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
828:Loving a warrior is hard. Dying in the line of duty is an honor to them. They would rather take that road than to dishonor their sacred oath ~ Ronie Kendig, #NFDB
829:Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders. ~ John le Carre, #NFDB
830:The peace within and flowing from sacred spaces and architecture places is clothed in forgiveness, renunciation, and reconciliation. ~ Norris Brock Johnson, #NFDB
831:The voting records of virtually every member of Congress reveal that the oath of office is more a ceremonial gesture than a sacred commitment. ~ Tom Coburn, #NFDB
832:To deal only with the superficial trivia without seeing deeper, more tender issues is to trample on the sacred ground of another's heart. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
833:we really want to see change in the world and find a common, sacred meeting place, we can practice forgiveness rather than against-ness. ~ Iyanla Vanzant, #NFDB
834:With a heavy heart, I turned and walked away. I knew that as long as I lived I'd never forget the two little graves and the sacred red fern. ~ Wilson Rawls, #NFDB
835:allies are essential; that commitments are so sacred that by nature they should be rare; and that grandstanding rarely gets anything done. ~ Alice Schroeder, #NFDB
836:All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
837:Emergent strategy is a way that all of us can begin to see the world in life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us. ~ Adrienne Brown, #NFDB
838:For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244) ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
839:In the context of real life, the Bible seems refreshingly whole, an honest reflection on humanity in relation to the sacred and the profane. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
840:It was from Buber’s other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
841:Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it. ~ Benjamin Carson, #NFDB
842:Satan is willing to have us worship anything, however sacred - the Bible, the crucifix, the church - if only we do not worship God Himself. ~ Dwight L Moody, #NFDB
843:The world is starving for leaders who are not afraid to dismantle the sacred and precious beliefs, which hold us as prisoners of the past. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
844:...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
845:We would live together and weave out lives into one another's and hold on to a sacred sisterhood that only a handful of women ever experienced. ~ Kiera Cass, #NFDB
846:Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again. ~ Lev Grossman, #NFDB
847:I accept the Organic Trinity of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal with as much authority as I accept the Holy Trinity. Both are sacred. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
848:If you declare a particular river as sacred, what will other rivers think of this? Be just! All rivers give you life and all are sacred! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
849:...language is sacred. It has glory, even in ordinary speech. The way most people use it, it's like a winged horse pulling a junk wagon. ~ Robert K Tanenbaum, #NFDB
850:No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
851:The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter. ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
852:The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
853:There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
854:To be the altar boy at the first Mass of the day was a sacred initiation rite. It was like being hazed at a fraternity, only more Catholic. ~ Ian Morgan Cron, #NFDB
855:What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
856:"With love in our hearts, we find even the most mundane thing sacred and beautiful. We become kinder and gentler even to a complete stranger." ~ Haemin Sunim, #NFDB
857:EACH THOUGHT, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
858:She had given herself away. If she wanted herself back, there had to be pieces of her, sacred and proprietary, that no one else could ever have. ~ Sonja Yoerg, #NFDB
859:The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter. ~ Sara Maitland, #NFDB
860:The essence of every form is the deathless. Even the essence of a blade of grass is the deathless. And that's why the world of form is sacred. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
861:The image I have sketched views Jesus differently: rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, he is one of many mediators of the sacred. ~ Marcus Borg, #NFDB
862:To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
863:A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place". ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
864:At ten, she learned that no address was permanent, at twelve, that no promise was sacred, and at sixteen, that there was no such thing as safe. ~ Barbara Davis, #NFDB
865:How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, #NFDB
866:NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF Friend you stand on sacred ground THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE ~ Paulette Jiles, #NFDB
867:Now is the time to know that all that you do is sacred... Now is the time for you to deeply compute the impossibility that there is anything but grace. ~ Hafez, #NFDB
868:Prayer gives a channel to the pent-up sorrows of the soul, they flow away, and in their stead streams of sacred delight pour into the heart. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
869:[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
870:When we dream with the courage of our soul, we dream sacred dreams - fresh, creative, and able to infuse us with passion and courage to act. ~ Alberto Villoldo, #NFDB
871:Anything that we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not really explain anything. ~ Ernst F Schumacher, #NFDB
872:"Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
873:God is not a person; God is a sacred personification of one or more deeply significant dimensions of reality. If we miss this we miss everything! ~ Michael Dowd, #NFDB
874:No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the
truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,#NFDB
875:Once you know about these things, you will also love them, because you will see that without a sense of the sacred, you are less than a man. ~ Thomas Yellowtail, #NFDB
876:The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word. ~ Elie Wiesel, #NFDB
877:When you hold your cup and drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, it’s like you’re performing a sacred ritual, and that is a prayer. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
878:You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
879:Deceivers are the most dangerous members of society. They trifle with the best affections of our nature, and violate the most sacred obligations. ~ George Crabbe, #NFDB
880:Let me be serious: divorce is a sacred institution between a man and a woman who hate each other. God wanted Adam to pay alimony to Eve, not Steve. ~ Lewis Black, #NFDB
881:"One can appreciate and celebrate each moment—there's nothing more sacred. There's nothing more vast or absolute. In fact, there's nothing more!!" ~ Pema Chödrön, #NFDB
882:People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
883:The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. ~ Adam Smith, #NFDB
884:They considered all of life to be part of a great mystery and knew there was no way to separate the secular from the sacred or science from spirit. ~ Susan Gregg, #NFDB
885:Allow the hammer of pain to split open the stone armor of your hardness; exposing the tenderness and beauty of your sweet spirit and sacred heart. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
886:Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
887:Half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in their mistaken belief there is any human relationship more sacred than friendship.. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
888:One can appreciate & celebrate each moment — there’s nothing more sacred. There’s nothing more vast or absolute. In fact, there’s nothing more! ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
889:One can appreciate & celebrate each moment — there’s nothing more sacred. There’s nothing more vast or absolute. In fact, there’s nothing more! ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
890:People with theories of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their kind, for no time or place is sacred from their devastating elucidations. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
891:Sanctum, a holy or sacred place. What could be more sacred than possessing the power of your own true thoughts? Sanctum. It is both lock and key. ~ Madeleine Roux, #NFDB
892:The Forum was the city’s political, commercial, and legal heart, but it was also its spiritual center, a space more sacred than the city itself. ~ Anthony Everitt, #NFDB
893:The peasant also found another use for this sacred object. 'He says of the icon: "It's good for praying -- and you can cover the pots with it too. ~ Orlando Figes, #NFDB
894:This is a fast love culture, where people fall in and out of something so sacred you wonder if it has the same meaning it did a hundred years ago. ~ Tarryn Fisher, #NFDB
895:This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
896:where no idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos. ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
897:Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
898:For several long moments we remained locked together, and I think I covered her hair with small sacred kisses, her perfume crucifying me with memories. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
899:Labor is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God! ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
900:Life tears at us and scars us as children so we adopt facades and masks to hide this part of us, to keep this sacred part of ourselves from the pain. ~ Jon Foreman, #NFDB
901:Other than our love our labor is one of the most sacred gifts we can give. When your labor is your love, life is sacred. Love what you do or change. ~ Tony Robbins, #NFDB
902:The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
903:You’re not my client. You never have been. And even if you were, I’d break every fucking rule I’ve ever held sacred just to be inside you right now. ~ Leisa Rayven, #NFDB
904:I hate everything approaching temperamental inspiration,'sacred fire'and all those attributes of genius which serve only as cloaks for untidy minds. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
905:I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
906:It is our sacred duty to transmit unimpaired to our posterity the blessings of liberty which were bequeathed to us by the founders of the Republic. ~ Andrew Johnson, #NFDB
907:It was funny, she was thinking, how something that had seemed sentimental and important, and even more - almost sacred - could turn into nothing at all ~ Rona Jaffe, #NFDB
908:The divine feminine knows that a birth sometimes demands a death, and that the personal self sometimes has to die if the world is to be made sacred. ~ Sally Kempton, #NFDB
909:What is sacred is what is worthy of our reverence, what evokes awe and wonder in the human heart, and what when contemplated transforms us utterly. ~ Phil Cousineau, #NFDB
910:I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients. ~ Gustave Courbet, #NFDB
911:Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
912:Strange how my body and its purity have become the town's sacred possessions, yet they spare me no pity. It's as if they were the ones wronged, not me. ~ Julie Berry, #NFDB
913:This is a fast love culture, where people
fall in and out of something so sacred you wonder if it has the same meaning it did a hundred years ago. ~ Tarryn Fisher,#NFDB
914:you wanted to talk to me about SHCH.’ Sacred Heart Children’s Home, Nelson works out silently. He hates acronyms. Whitcliffe, of course, loves them. ~ Elly Griffiths, #NFDB
915:All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? ~ Margaret Mitchell, #NFDB
916:Half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in their mistaken belief that there is any human relationship more sacred than friendship. ~ Helen Oyeyemi, #NFDB
917:He had committed hanky-panky with paperwork, and if something in the System is committed to paper, it becomes transubstantiated into a Sacred Relic. To ~ Jeff Lindsay, #NFDB
918:How well does your experience of the sacred in nature enable you to cope more effectively with the problems of mankind when you come back to the city? ~ Willi Unsoeld, #NFDB
919:One of the vilest secrets of the MacHeaths was that they would purposely maim young pups, hoping to gain a place in the Watch of the Sacred Volcanoes. ~ Kathryn Lasky, #NFDB
920:Stay with friends who support you in these. Talk with them about sacred texts, and how you are doing, and how they are doing, and keep your practices together. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
921:Symbols become sacred to people because they represent loyalties deeper than words can express. That’s why they hate to see their symbols violated. ~ Richard Holloway, #NFDB
922:The Children's Justice Campaign reminds us of our sacred obligation as adults to raise ourselves into consciousness so that our children may thrive. ~ Shefali Tsabary, #NFDB
923:The wounding becomes sacred when we are willing to release our old stories and to become the vehicles through which the new story may emerge into time. ~ Jean Houston, #NFDB
924:True power—not to be confused with worldly power—is found at that beautiful
and sacred spot where will and surrender merge into an unstoppable force. ~ Darren Main,#NFDB
925:What is sacred is what is worthy of our reverence, what evokes awe and wonder in the human heart, and what, when contemplated, transforms us utterly. ~ Phil Cousineau, #NFDB
926:Whenever myths on sacred subjects are incongruous in thought...they summon us not to believe them literally but to study and track down their hidden meaning. ~ Julian, #NFDB
927:A brave captain of Spahis cannot risk this, even to gratify a pretty woman, which is, in my opinion, one of the most sacred obligations in the world. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
928:Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
929:By all that is sacred in our hope for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system! ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
930:Can the dead hear our prayers? When the words come floating up, do they go straight to God's sacred domain, or does all of heaven know our desperation? ~ Eishes Chayil, #NFDB
931:Our minds and hearts are free to believe everything or nothing at all - and it is our duty to protect and perpetuate this sacred culture of freedom. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
932:There is something wonderfully sacred that happens when a girl chooses to realize that being set aside is actually God’s call for her to be set apart. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
933:The urge to fall to the ground, rip my heart out of my chest and hold it out like a sacred offering was overwhelming. /Take it! Take it all!/ I’d cry. ~ Mariana Zapata, #NFDB
934:They were hollow words. I think God heard this and knew. Promises should be sacred; I think I cursed myself by making one I did not intend to keep. ~ Tess Uriza Holthe, #NFDB
935:Those desiring speedily to be
A refuge for themselves and others
Should make the interchange of "I" and "other,"
And thus embrace a sacred mystery. ~ ntideva,#NFDB
936:When the Sacred Masculine is combined with the sacred feminine inside each of us, we create the 'sacred marriage' of compassion and passion in ourselves. ~ Matthew Fox, #NFDB
937:when we have our first sight of the Kaaba, the black-shrouded cube in Mecca that is our most sacred place, any wish in your heart is granted by God. ~ Malala Yousafzai, #NFDB
938:After the decline of the Mysteries, when the sacred books fell into the hands of the profane, the subtler values were lost. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
939:Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - for fertilizer . Get the point? Constancy isn't. ~ Jonathan Gash, #NFDB
940:He who practices Tasawwuf without learning Sacred Law corrupts his faith, while he who learns Sacred Law without practicing Tasawwuf corrupts himself. ~ Malik ibn Anas, #NFDB
941:She was my sacred angel that I could never violate.
Reira was my sanctuary.
I needed something solid like that in this dirty, disappointing world. ~ Ai Yazawa,#NFDB
942:Whatever your relationship is to your sacred tradition in the West, you have some relationship to the Bible if only through the names of the characters. ~ Anita Diament, #NFDB
943:And like an echo, God often uses the repetitive events and themes in daily life to get my attention and draw me closer to himself." - The Sacred Echo ~ Margaret Feinberg, #NFDB
944:But one should pray in one's heart during a sacred ceremony; this is the purpose of the ceremony, to purify the participants both inside and outside. ~ Thomas Yellowtail, #NFDB
945:If marriage really is a sacred institution, then why is the government controlling it, especially in a nation that affirms separation of church and state? ~ Tony Campolo, #NFDB
946:It is a great affront to God to jest with sacred things, particularly to make sport with the word and ordinances of God, or to treat them with lightness, ~ Matthew Henry, #NFDB
947:And by the Sacred Parchment, I swear that if I reveal the secrets of The Stonecutters, may my stomach become bloated and my head be plucked of all but three hairs ~ Homer, #NFDB
948:By sighing and saying, “Remember when” too many times, one can fall into the trap of believing the present holds nothing sacred, the past nothing profane. ~ Kevin Smokler, #NFDB
949:General Dempsy despaired. The prophecies were impossible to argue since no proof could be offered to discredit them. They were sacred and above reproach. ~ Brian Rathbone, #NFDB
950:Grant me one hour on love’s most sacred shores
To clasp the bosom that my soul adores,
Lie heart to heart and merge my soul with yours. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,#NFDB
951:I don't know how many sacred cows there are today. I think there's a little confusion between humor and gross passing for humor. That's kind of regrettable. ~ Bob Newhart, #NFDB
952:I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become One Circle again. ~ Crazy Horse, #NFDB
953:Their house, their son, her arms, were fortress walls against the desert night. Their bed was a sacred and secret space guarded by dark arts from history. ~ Max Gladstone, #NFDB
954:Both travelling to holy spots and listening to sacred stories are believed to reduce the burden of karmic debts and increase the load of karmic equity. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
955:Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
956:From no source has the author drawn more conspicuously than from the sacred Scriptures. From all these extracts from the Bible I make no apology. ~ William Holmes McGuffey, #NFDB
957:Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them. ~ Clive Barker, #NFDB
958:If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound. ~ John Cage, #NFDB
959:in the ancient African tradition women are the sacred key to life. They carry, then push all life into existence. They are a metaphor for wisdom. Midnight ~ Sister Souljah, #NFDB
960:Love, when it is a sacred quest, is a space of resurrection and repair. It does more than help us survive a soulless world; it helps us to transform. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
961:That’s what her kind of politics is all about, right? The past is this sacred, glorified thing? Even though it never really existed in the first place.” I ~ Matthew Norman, #NFDB
962:The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
963:There are certain promises you make that are more sacred than anything that happens in a court of law, I don't care how many Bibles you put your hand on. ~ Paul Castellano, #NFDB
964:You’re a nice girl, Livia. Love is sacred. Hold onto it. I know a lot at my age. Everything else fails you—money, possessions, sex. But love never fails. ~ Debra Anastasia, #NFDB
965:An authentic updating of sacred music can take place only in the lineage of the great tradition of the past, of Gregorian chant and of sacred polyphony. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
966:But once in a while the best believer recognises the
impulse to set his religion in order, to sweep the temple
of his thoughts and trim the sacred lamp. ~ Henry James,#NFDB
967:Food sacred to the manes or to the gods must be given to a man distinguished by sacred knowledge, for hands, smeared with blood, cannot be cleansed with blood. ~ Guru Nanak, #NFDB
968:The future of the world depends on the full restoration of the Sacred Feminine in all its tenderness, passion, divine ferocity, and surrendered persistence. ~ Andrew Harvey, #NFDB
969:THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
970:We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is something valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. ~ E E Cummings, #NFDB
971:All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
972:As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation. ~ Ch gyam Trungpa, #NFDB
973:As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation. ~ Chogyam Trungpa, #NFDB
974:be with me in the sacred witchery
of almostness which May makes follow soon
on the sweet heels of passed afterday,
clothe thy soul’s coming merely ~ E E Cummings,#NFDB
975:Breathing is meditation; life is a meditation. You have to breathe in order to live, so breathing is how you get in touch with the sacred space of your heart. ~ Willow Smith, #NFDB
976:By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings. ~ Emile Durkheim, #NFDB
977:Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
978:God's children are God's children anywhere and everywhere, and shall be even unto the end. Nothing can sever that sacred tie, or divide us from his heart. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
979:I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being. ~ Starhawk, #NFDB
980:I write on sacred stories, symbols and rituals of all cultures - European, American and Chinese - but my audiences, typically, like me to focus on India. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
981:Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment--where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels--this moment shows us that what is real is sacred ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
982:Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
983:Once you start to question your life you get to a higher level of awareness. It's like turning a light on-voila you see you have choices and choices are sacred. ~ Naomi Judd, #NFDB
984:Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance. ~ Louis Agassiz, #NFDB
985:The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code. ~ Mary Karr, #NFDB
986:We can bring our spiritual practice into the streets, into our communities, when we see each realm as a temple, as a place to discover that which is sacred. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
987:When Fashion hath once Established, what Folly or craft began, Custom makes it Sacred, and 'twill be thought impudence or madness, to contradict or question it. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
988:For we must not build temples according to the same rules to all gods alike, since the performance of the sacred rites varies with the various gods. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, #NFDB
989:I have known it to be a sacred and beautiful place, hallowed by human endeavor and energies, crossed with love and the continual weave of human circumstance. ~ Mike McCormack, #NFDB
990:In her extraordinary book, Ordinarily Sacred, Lynda Sexson teaches us how to catch the appearance of the sacred in the most ordinary objects and circumstances. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
991:In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
992:It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
993:I Wholeheartedly believe that when we are fully engaged in parenting, regardless of how imperfect, vulnerable, and messy it is, we are creating something sacred. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
994:Our Pastoral solicitude induces us to earnestly protect and preserve in everything and especially in the sacred rites of the Church the best and old norm. ~ Pope Clement VIII, #NFDB
995:That in controversies respecting property, and in suits between man and man, the ancient trial by jury is preferable to any other, and ought to be held sacred. ~ George Mason, #NFDB
996:The Ladies of the Sacred Heart hung a thousand veils between their little charges and reality. Thérèse despised them for confounding virtue with ignorance. ~ Fran ois Mauriac, #NFDB
997:The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
998:The Seeker, The Search, The Sacred by Guy Finley is a very wise book, filled with inspiration to help you dramatically improve your life. I highly recommend it. ~ Daniel Amen, #NFDB
999:The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality. ~ David Cronenberg, #NFDB
1000:Today, what is important for us is to realize that the old sacred ways are correct, and that if we do not follow them we will be lost and without a guide. ~ Thomas Yellowtail, #NFDB
1001:We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable. ~ Joyce Carol Oates, #NFDB
1002:Who, under pressing temptations to lie, adheres to truth, nor to the profane betrays aught of a sacred trust, is near the summit of wisdom and virtue. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater, #NFDB
1003:And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1004:Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity? Why would you refuse to give this joy to anyone? Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups! They swim the huge fluid freedom. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1005:Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me. ~ Joan Miro, #NFDB
1006:Black women would become at least doubly victimized, thoroughly entrapped by a sexist and racist sacred dualistic ideology that implied their inhumanity. ~ Kelly Brown Douglas, #NFDB
1007:Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment. —Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1008:In the sacred precinct of that dwelling where the despotic woman wields the sceptre of fierce neatness, one treads as if he carried his life in his hands. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
1009:Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touched by God." ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1010:Sprinkled along the waste of years Full many a soft green isle appears: Pause where we may upon the desert road, Some shelter is in sight, some sacred safe abode. ~ John Keble, #NFDB
1011:The brain was the single thing that remained sacred among the Psy. To rewire that would equal the erasure of the individual, making the PsyNet a true hive mind. ~ Nalini Singh, #NFDB
1012:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ~ Betty Edwards, #NFDB
1013:Twice a week we attended a political ‘seminar’, where we were continually told that we were doing our sacred duty to help make the border totally secure. ~ Svetlana Alexievich, #NFDB
1014:Among the Dagara, darkness is sacred. It is forbidden to illuminate it, for light scares the Spirit away…. The one exception to this rule is the bonfire. ~ Malidoma Patrice Som, #NFDB
1015:Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity? Why would you refuse to give this love to anyone? Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups! They swim the huge fluid freedom. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1016:Art cannot be looked at as an elite, sacred event anymore. It has to be embraced as an accessible, popular form, which is what I believe theater is at its roots. ~ Diane Paulus, #NFDB
1017:If you put your heart against the earth with me, in serving every creature, our Beloved will enter you from our sacred realm and we will be, we will be so happy. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1018:It was my life — like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
1019:Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth. Through all of them runs, like a red thread, the hidden Science of attaining and maintaining wakefulness. ~ Gustav Meyrink, #NFDB
1020:The body is a sacred garment. It's your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor. ~ Martha Graham, #NFDB
1021:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1022:They desecrate Riora’s sacred temple! She will be enraged.”
“Oh, gods, look at the marble. We are all beyond doomed.”
“Somebody put a plant in front of it! ~ Kresley Cole,#NFDB
1023:We needn't be saddened with the impossible weight of managing the entire biosphere, but we must meet the challenge of living in balance with the sacred elements. ~ David Suzuki, #NFDB
1024:Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man. ~ Max Stirner, #NFDB
1025:Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it. ~ Edward Snowden, #NFDB
1026:I begin to suspect," said the curate, after a pause, "that the common transactions of life are the most sacred channels for the spread of the heavenly leaven. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
1027:I believe democracy requires a 'sacred contract' between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works. ~ Bill Moyers, #NFDB
1028:It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be. ~ Cheryl Strayed,#NFDB
1029:On many occasions when I am dancing I've felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists ! ~ Michael Jackson, #NFDB
1030:The world is a sacred vessel. It should not be meddled with. It should not be owned. If you try to meddle with it you will ruin it. If you try to own it you will lose it ~ Laozi, #NFDB
1031:What I adore is the juxtaposition of high tech and low tech. It's sort of like I love the sacred and the profane. I love to put these extremes in the same hopper. ~ Julie Taymor, #NFDB
1032:But, strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers. ~ William Robertson Smith, #NFDB
1033:I dare say you will think it an absurd prejudice; but a human body, to me, is a sacred thing; I don’t like to see it treated irreverently and made hideous. ~ Ethel Lilian Voynich, #NFDB
1034:The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard. ~ Abraham H Maslow, #NFDB
1035:There is something wonderfully sacred that happens when a girl chooses to realize that being set aside is actually God’s call for her to be set apart. Sometimes, ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
1036:Yes, a peculiar trait of holding certain symbols as sacred and intimately tied to one’s own identity is that they can often become more important than human life. No ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1037:Carrying a child is a sacred thing. There is a bond established between mother and child in the womb that lasts forever. The truth of this bond can never be erased. ~ Daniel Black, #NFDB
1038:Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation. ~ Edward Bellamy, #NFDB
1039:I learned that myth doesn't mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1040:I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1041:Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights! ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
1042:...the great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
1043:We should remember in our dealings with animals that they are a sacred trust to us from our Heavenly Father. They are dumb and cannot speak for themselves. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
1044:All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it. ~ Caspar David Friedrich, #NFDB
1045:And yet, the fact that we are no longer killing people for heresy in the West suggests that bad ideas, however sacred, cannot survive the company of good ones forever. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1046:Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa, #NFDB
1047:If you take out of your statutes, your constitution, your family life all that is taken from the Sacred Book, what would there be left to bind society together? ~ Benjamin Harrison, #NFDB
1048:Inevera raised an eyebrow. “You suggest I mislead the council of Damaji about what I see in the sacred dice?” Abban smiled. “Damajah, please. Do not insult us both. ~ Peter V Brett, #NFDB
1049:In most cultures, eating together has far more symbolic value than simply “grabbing a bite to eat.” Sharing a meal together can often be viewed as a sacred event. ~ David Livermore, #NFDB
1050:I venerate the man whose heart is warm, Whose hands are pure, whose doctrine and whose life, Coincident, exhibit lucid proof That he is honest in the sacred cause. ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
1051:Prayer is the forerunner of mercy. Turn to sacred history, and you will find that scarecely ever did a great mercy come to this world unheralded by supplication. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
1052:The first time I went to see a Second City show, I was in awe of everything. I just wanted to touch the same stage that Gilda Radner had walked on. It was sacred ground. ~ Tina Fey, #NFDB
1053:[T]he period between four and six in the morning is called the Brahmamuhurta, the Brahmic time, or divine period, and is a very sacred time to meditate. (140) ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
1054:The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience. ~ William O Douglas, #NFDB
1055:We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection. ~ Joseph Goebbels, #NFDB
1056:From the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: Oh Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong, and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1057:the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #NFDB
1058:We have so theologized the passion and death of this sacred man that we no longer see the slow unraveling of His tissue, the spread of gangrene, His raging thirst. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
1059:And for the sake of humility--a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves. ~ David Dark, #NFDB
1060:And symbol of some native cosmic strength,
A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,
A silent flame-eyed mass of living force. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,#NFDB
1061:From Santi's earthly tomb with demon's hole, 'Cross Rome the mystic elements unfold. The path of light is laid, the sacred test, Let angels guide you on your lofty quest. ~ Dan Brown, #NFDB
1062:If you keep your heart immersed always in the depth of that holy love, your heart is sure to remain ever full to overflowing with the Divine fervour of sacred love. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
1063:In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
1064:I think theatres will always remain a sacred place where people go for something live and experience things live, which is very different than the experience of film. ~ Susan Stroman, #NFDB
1065:I value devotion and fidelity, and doubt if it matters whether the object falls short. What you do and what you are is what matters. Your loyalty is as sacred as mine. ~ Ellis Peters, #NFDB
1066:Marriage is one of the most sacred human institutions. I asked our Senators, as many South Dakotans have done, to protect marriage as a union between a man and a woman. ~ Mike Rounds, #NFDB
1067:Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood? ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
1068:The august Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé defined poetry as a hermetic practice: “Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery. ~ Alex Ross, #NFDB
1069:Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1070:Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before. ~ Aspen Matis, #NFDB
1071:Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived? ~ William Butler Yeats, #NFDB
1072:When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.5 No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
1073:You do not know what all around you see in Esther Summerson, how many hearts she touches and awakens, what sacred admiration and what love she wins. --Mr. Woodcourt ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1074:You have abandoned yourself to a Seducer’s lust; You have defiled the sacred habit by your impurity; and still dare you think yourself deserving my compassion? Hence, ~ Matthew Lewis, #NFDB
1075:A Punjabi mother, her son and food form a triad as sacred as Brahma, Mahesh and Vishnu, and cannot be interfered with as I learnt in the early years of my marriage. I ~ Twinkle Khanna, #NFDB
1076:Class struggle: external peace, international solidarity, peace among peoples. This is the sacred slogan of international socialist democracy that liberates nations. ~ Karl Liebknecht, #NFDB
1077:Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1078:It was surprising to hear it from his lips, my plain, ordinary name spoken as it never had been before, with awe, lite it was sacred, like treasure. Like I was treasure. ~ Mary Calmes, #NFDB
1079:Let's pass more gun control laws and buy metal detectors for every public school in the land - anything but tell kids that life is sacred, because its Creator deems it so. ~ Don Feder, #NFDB
1080:“The Intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind a faithful servant; we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ” ~ Albert Einstein@vegsource, #NFDB
1081:The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1082:There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1083:Always discriminate. Whenever the mind goes after anything other than God, consider it as transient and surrender the mind at the sacred feet of the Lord. ~ Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi, #NFDB
1084:A monument of grace, A sinner saved by blood; The streams of love I trace Up to the Fountain, God; And in His sacred bosom see Eternal thoughts of Love to me. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1085:An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography) ~ Allen Ginsberg, #NFDB
1086:Declare today "sacred timeoff limits to everyone, unless invited by you. Take care of your personal wants and needs. Say no, graciously but firmly, to others' demands." ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
1087:I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian - for me - for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
1088:I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin. ~ Stephen Greenblatt, #NFDB
1089:Luther, the hero of Worms, the champion of the sacred rights of conscience, was, in words, the most violent, but in practice, the least intolerant, among the Reformers. ~ Philip Schaff, #NFDB
1090:Salvation is also a sacred covenant. We might have cause to worry if God honored His covenant to save us the same way many people these days honor their marriage vows. ~ Doug Batchelor, #NFDB
1091:The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
1092:There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
1093:There is nothing inherently sacred about moral codes. Like the wooden idols of long ago, they are the work of human hands, and what man has made, man can destroy! ~ Anton Szandor LaVey, #NFDB
1094:Truly great companies understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not. ~ James C Collins, #NFDB
1095:We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred. ~ Satish Kumar, #NFDB
1096:When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1097:Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself to be a patriot because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia, which is sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed. ~ Edward Said, #NFDB
1098:The only Messiah still credible after the death camps would be one who wanted to come but could not because humans failed to invite the sacred stranger into existence. ~ Richard Kearney, #NFDB
1099:To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred. ~ Joan D Chittister, #NFDB
1100:When I choose a man to be My priest, I choose him at the same time to be a privileged friend of My Sacred Heart. I desire the friendship of My priests and I offer them Mine. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1101:All Sacred Scriptures is but one book, and that one book is Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ. ~ Hugh of Saint Victor, #NFDB
1102:Before we’re born, we select a series of goals and lessons for our time on Earth. This is a form of sacred contract that determines what type of life we’re going to live. ~ Doreen Virtue, #NFDB
1103:Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity. ~ Robert Fulghum, #NFDB
1104:I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect. ~ Kate Grenville, #NFDB
1105:Of all the myriads of God, Daridranarayana is the most sacred inasmuch as it represents the untold millions of the poor people as distinguished from the few rich people. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1106:sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1107:The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word. ~ James Dwight Dana, #NFDB
1108:We can choose to move with God, further into justice and wholeness, or we can choose to prop up the world’s dead systems, baptizing injustice and power in sacred language. ~ Sarah Bessey, #NFDB
1109:All the sacred Scriptures of the world have become corrupted, but the Ineffable or Absolute has never been corrupted, because no one has ever been able to express It in human speech. ~ id, #NFDB
1110:A sense of beauty is every hindrance to a soldier; yet there would be no soldiers - or none such soldier had not men dead and living cherished and handed on the sacred fire. ~ Ivor Gurney, #NFDB
1111:As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
1112:Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
1113:English translations of most of the texts are found in the Sacred Books of the East series (1879–1910), which is now in the public domain and easily accessible online. ~ Stephen E Flowers, #NFDB
1114:In Tibet there were practitioners in retreat who so strongly reflected on impermanence that they would not wash their dishes after supper. —PALTRUL RINPOCHE’S SACRED WORD ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1115:In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge,#NFDB
1116:I've never been a fan of funerals for more than the obvious reasons. Of the emotions, mourning in particular feels like something that should be sacred and intensely private. ~ Penny Reid, #NFDB
1117:Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds. ~ Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, #NFDB
1118:[T]he period between four and six in the morning is called the Brahmamuhurta, the Brahmic time, or divine period, and is a very sacred time to meditate. (140) ~ Swami Satchidananda, #NFDB
1119:[T]his is what I would like to talk about: the hubris, the inflation, the insanity of separating ourselves from the sacred. ~ Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, #NFDB
1120:Unless we are complete ingrates, the lives of all those men that preceded us should be seen as sacred. Their collective existence paved the way for our own time on Earth. Because ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1121:When the female voice is repressed and stifled, the entire community can easily find themselves cut off from the sacred feminine, depriving themselves of the full image of god. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
1122:You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow. And I can understand why you're angry, but you can't blame me. You can't hate me for taking your word. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
1123:But there is not space to mention all my friends and indeed there are things about them hidden behind the wings of the cherubim, things to sacred to set forth in cold print. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
1124:Every form of life is sacred. It is not possible to have an activity that is not sacred...Coming to see everything as sacred and honouring everything is spiritual development. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
1125:If sacred places are spared the ravages of war... then make all places sacred. And if the holy people are to be kept harmless from war... then make all people holy. ~ J Michael Straczynski, #NFDB
1126:It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them. ~ James A Garfield, #NFDB
1127:I weave through all these happy, smiling faces, knowing that we have put on the best show we could—and I do love putting on a good performance, whether sacred or profane. Log ~ L A Meyer, #NFDB
1128:Our sacred contract is not a literal document. That's the first thing to understand. We could think of our sacred contract as a spiritual document that our soul recognizes. ~ Caroline Myss, #NFDB
1129:Satan has frightened men from reading the sacred writings, and has rendered Holy Scriptures contemptible, so as to ensure his poisonous philosophy to prevail in the church. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
1130:The act of civil disobedience is the act of taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistance. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
1131:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. —Albert Einstein ~ Gary Klein, #NFDB
1132:The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect. And he was right. But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty. ~ Dennis Lehane, #NFDB
1133:the sacred reality is not simply transcendent, “out there,” but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute honor and respect. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
1134:What they say about a breakthrough is completely an illusion. They are sending their warplanes to fly very low in order to have vibrations on these sacred places. ~ Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf, #NFDB
1135:As ministers our greatest temptation is toward too many words. They weaken our faith and make us lukewarm. But silence is a sacred discipline, a guard of the Holy Spirit. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
1136:Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1137:Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1138:If individuals start to walk on the path of spirit and feel a sense of the sacred connectedness, then social, economic and political problems will also begin to get resolved. ~ Satish Kumar, #NFDB
1139:Is it not laughable that we believe in a sacred,infrangible law—thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not kill—in an existence characterized by perpetual lying and perpetual murder? ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1140:It is impossible for one man both to labor day and night to get a living, and at the same time give himself to the study of sacred learning as the preaching office requires. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
1141:I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer--not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. [p, 355] ~ Kim Edwards, #NFDB
1142:...sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1143:The entire party and country should hurl into the fire and break the neck of anyone who dared trample underfoot the sacred edict of the party on the defense of women's rights. ~ Enver Hoxha, #NFDB
1144:The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the founding of the world: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence. ~ Mircea Eliade, #NFDB
1145:The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. ~ Mary Brave Bird, #NFDB
1146:Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred, we will not only deny the identity of Europe. We will also fail in providing a service to others to which they are entitled. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1147:A girl is held in trust, another’s treasure; To arms of love my child to-day is given; And now I feel a calm and sacred pleasure; I have restored the pledge that came from heaven. ~ K lid sa, #NFDB
1148:By all you hold sacred, by all you hold dear, by your love that is lost, by your hope that lives, for the sake of the Almighty, take me out of this and save my soul from guilt! ~ Bram Stoker, #NFDB
1149:Every man's story is important, eternal and sacred. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1150:Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
1151:Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed. ~ Desiderius Erasmus, #NFDB
1152:People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive. ~ E O Wilson, #NFDB
1153:She was lost in the breeziness of her secular existence and couldn't land anywhere. Nothing was sacred. Nothing could stop her long enough to reflect sufficiently on her life. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
1154:True beauty is a ray That springs from the sacred depths of the soul, and illuminates the body, just as life springs from the kernel of a stone and gives colour and scent to a flower. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1155:When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. ~ Cheryl Strayed, #NFDB
1156:Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
1157:Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1158:Everyone now has a sacred cow in the tax code. For my money, the most sacred thing of all is our country and its growth, but the sacred cows have turned into a pack of wolves. ~ Ari Fleischer, #NFDB
1159:For love that is not requited in equal measure is not love at all; it is not sacred. And holding on to the ideal of such love can keep us from finding the one that is true. ~ Kathleen McGowan, #NFDB
1160:I must learn to kill to be truly human. I must learn the sacred part of life that my Western culture has so well hidden from me: the meaning of death that is in life in food. ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
1161:It is our sacred duty," says Napoleone, "to instil into all the European peoples the idea of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And if necessary - with the help of cannon! ~ Annemarie Selinko, #NFDB
1162:Love is large; love defies limits. People talk about the sanctity of love -- love is by definition sacred. Not some love between some people, but all love between all people. ~ Jennifer Beals, #NFDB
1163:O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age
Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Fragment - To Byron
,#NFDB
1164:Thanks be to God, Who gives us suffering
as sacred remedy for all our sins,
that best and purest essence which prepares
the strong in spirit for divine delights! ~ Charles Baudelaire,#NFDB
1165:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. —ALBERT EINSTEIN ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1166:To be positive at all times is to ignore all that is important, sacred or valuable. To be negative at all times is to be threatened by ridiculousness and instant discredibility. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
1167:Apparently God takes reception of Holy Communion seriously. Apparently some things are more sacred than politics. Apparently it's all or nothing when it comes to being Catholic. ~ Carl E Olson, #NFDB
1168:For her sake Florentino Ariza had violated his sacred principle of never paying, and she had violated hers of never doing it for free of charge, even with her husband. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1169:For whenever unbaptized persons die confessing Christ, this confession is of the same efficacy for the remission of sins as if they were washed in the sacred font of baptism. ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
1170:Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls. ~ Diana Butler Bass, #NFDB
1171:Indeed, baptism is a vow, a sacred vow of the believer to follow Christ. Just as a wedding celebrates the fusion of two hearts, baptism celebrates the union of sinner with Savior. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
1172:I thought that if I could ever do a background check on myself, I knew exactly what I'd do with it. I wouldn't even read it, just take it somewhere sacred and set it on fire. ~ Catherine Lacey, #NFDB
1173:It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. ~ George H Smith, #NFDB
1174:It was fatiguing, but nothing was sacred to the Kerch except trade, so she'd gone out of her way to make the risk much higher than the reward when it came to disrespecting her. ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1175:Sacredness, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder. What intrigues me, though, is that it has always seemed to me that the less we hold sacred, the more fiercely we protect it. ~ Tyler Dilts, #NFDB
1176:So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer. ~ John William Draper, #NFDB
1177:The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes. ~ Salman Rushdie, #NFDB
1178:The more you devote yourself to study of the sacred utterances, the richer will be your understanding of them, just as the more the soil is tilled, the richer the harvest. ~ Isidore of Seville, #NFDB
1179:With each breath in, we breathe in life; each exhalation breathes out connection to all living things. There is no part of our lives that is not part of the sacred. “Re-member. ~ T Thorn Coyle, #NFDB
1180:With me living forty-five minutes away, Tumblr is supposed to be sacred ground where our friendship is cemented. Unfollowing me is the same as saying, ‘I don’t like you anymore. ~ Angie Thomas, #NFDB
1181:For all the sensitive and empathic souls out there who feel overwhelmed, isolated, depressed or lost in this world. May you discover just how strong, gifted, and sacred you are. ~ Aletheia Luna, #NFDB
1182:God the Father, the supreme Architect, had already built this cosmic home we behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead, by the laws of His mysterious wisdom. ~ Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, #NFDB
1183:Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1184:Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art. ~ William Zinsser, #NFDB
1185:Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. After the listening you become accountable for the sacred knowledge that has been shared. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
1186:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a world that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift. —ALBERT EINSTEIN ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1187:The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk
Wrapped in interpretation’s silken strings:
A credo sealed up its spiritual sense. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#NFDB
1188:Truth, holiness, joy, knowledge, love, these are all beams of the sacred light, but we cannot give them forth unless in private we receive oil from God the Holy Ghost. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1189:Cultural appropriation is especially egregious when it involves the co-optation of spiritual ceremonies and the inappropriate use of lands deemed sacred by Native peoples. ~ Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, #NFDB
1190:Every woman is a priestess if she loves life and can work magic on herself and those who are sacred to her. It’s time for women to remind themselves of the powers they have inside. ~ Nina George, #NFDB
1191:Hast thou not learnd what thou art often told, A truth still sacred, and believed of old, That no success attends on spears and swords Unblest, and that the battle is the Lords? ~ William Cowper, #NFDB
1192:He comes into that part of our being that is our treasure, that sacred space within us, hidden under all the fears, walls and anger in us so that we may grow in the spirit of love. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
1193:It's man's most basic and sacred stewardship-to serve as the guardian of his own behavior. And it's man's blackest and most fundamental evil to try and overthrow that stewardship ~ Gerald N Lund, #NFDB
1194:owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1195:The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1196:The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect. ~ Felix Adler, #NFDB
1197:The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country. ~ James Otis, #NFDB
1198:They use a training manual instead of sacred scriptures, with promotion and a high salary as their equivalent of enlightenment and paradise. A new religion for a pragmatic age. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1199:War is a sin. War is the highest degree of immorality. War is inhuman insanity for it kills sacred human lives wholesale. How can there still be any war on our miraculous planet? ~ Robert Muller, #NFDB
1200:With sharpen'd sight pale Antiquaries pore, Th' inscription value, but the rust adore. This the blue varnish, that the green endears; The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
1201:You never need to defend yourself or your desires to anyone, as those inner feelings are Spirit speaking to you. Those thoughts are sacred, so don't ever let anyone trample on them. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
1202:Africa and Europe responded more sensibly but differently. Life has never been sacred in Africa and those who went sight-seeing on targets got little bleeding-heart treatment. ~ Robert A Heinlein, #NFDB
1203:Americans are an honest people, we expect a fair deal. I know that a lot of other cultures used to think that was naive and even childish, but it's one of our most sacred principles. ~ Max Brooks, #NFDB
1204:Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process. ~ Sidney Poitier, #NFDB
1205:Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept no dogma, no cant. There are too many people walking around thinking they're sacred cows, and they're only half right. ~ Rosie DiManno, #NFDB
1206:Hire myself out to whom? What beast must I worship? What sacred images should I destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lies am I supposed to believe? March through whose blood? ~ Arthur Rimbaud, #NFDB
1207:I say from time to time that the vote is precious. It's almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool or instrument that we have in a democratic society. And we must use it. ~ John Lewis, #NFDB
1208:Marriage is sacred. It was created to be the wedding portrait of Christ and His Bride hung over the blazing fireplace of judgment. A match made in Heaven, a contract signed in blood. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
1209:The Yirkalla aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia hear sacred song words in the babbling of babies. To them, songs are never composed but only discovered: all songs exist already. ~ Philip Ball, #NFDB
1210:Visualize a house that’s opening its front door to you and welcoming you to bask in the sacred warmth of its interior, and imagine leaving all angst and fear behind as you walk in. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1211:We have a tradition in Tibet. Sacred craziness. Men and women who act in a strange way. People think they are fools, but their wisdom, in fact, is more than those we call normal. ~ Roland Merullo, #NFDB
1212:Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this love to anyone?
Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim in the huge, fluid freedom. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
1213:But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes. ~ Kamel Daoud, #NFDB
1214:For me, personally, I think drugs are sacred and should be used for work. That's what I believe in. Drugs have a real shamanistic value. I can handle drugs. I've never had a problem. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
1215:History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth. ~ Miguel de Cervantes, #NFDB
1216:Taking off your shoes is a sacred ritual. It is a hallowed moment of remembering the goodness of space and time. It is a way of celebrating the holy ground on which you stand. ~ Macrina Wiederkehr, #NFDB
1217:This fierce defender of private property—this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants—expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
1218:This "human thing" is the permanent process of seeking the sacred through revealing what is hidden. It is an ever ongoing and indefinite process of understanding and interpretation. ~ Curtis White, #NFDB
1219:We’ve lost our ability to see anything sacred or unique in what it means to be human. And we’ve lost our capacity to believe in anything that we can’t measure with our tools. As ~ Charles J Chaput, #NFDB
1220:Whoever wishes to be truly a man, must abandon all preoccupation by the wish to please the world. There is nothing more sacred or more fecund than the curiosity of an independent spirit. ~ Emerson, #NFDB
1221:116. "To be positive at all times is to ignore all that is important, sacred and valuable. To be negative at all times is to be threatened by ridiculousness and instant discreditably. ~ Kurt Cobain, #NFDB
1222:Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
1223:Don't stop to ask whether the animal or plant you meet deserves your sympathy, or how much it feels, or even whether it can feel at all: respect it and consider all life sacred. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
1224:God very commonly takes on the character of a husband to us. Indeed, the union by which he binds us to himself when he receives us into the bosom of the church is like sacred wedlock. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
1225:Never forget that the most sacred right on this earth is mans right to have the earth to till with his own hands, the most sacred sacrifice the blood that a man sheds for this earth. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1226:Paganism sacralizes and thereby exalts this world whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies and thereby retreats from this world. Paganism is based on the idea of the sacred. ~ Alain de Benoist, #NFDB
1227:Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1228:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” — Albert Einstein “And ~ Tom Ayling, #NFDB
1229:There are four questions of value in life... What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living "for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is same. Only love. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB
1230:Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you. ~ Haj Amin al Husseini, #NFDB
1231:As a spirit schooled to power, his perception stems from one absolute. Universal harmony begins with recognition that the life in an ordinary pebble is as sacred as conscious selfhood. ~ Janny Wurts, #NFDB
1232:As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1233:Freedom is not a gift nor does it simply exist for us to have, but rather it is a sacred duty, and its blessed yield of hope is born from none other than the blood of the innocent. ~ Bryant H McGill, #NFDB
1234:I swear to you on any kind of sacred whateverthefuck you favor: if I live through this I will absolutely start taking your advice."
"That'll look nice on your headstone. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover,#NFDB
1235:It is fucking crazy to hold on to one moment and say that’s the moment that was pure and sacred, and it can only be like that, and I’ll kill you if you try to change anything. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1236:Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1237:Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher. ~ Gene Spafford, #NFDB
1238:Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation. ~ Alan Cohen, #NFDB
1239:Suddenly, it's all too much. Bryn and the bump watch. Vanessa with my high school yearbook. The idea that nothing's sacred. Everything's fodder. That my life belongs to anyone but me. ~ Gayle Forman, #NFDB
1240:To us, many situations in Scripture involve a punishment that was too severe for the crime. But Why do we feel this way? We don't understand what it means for something to be "sacred. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
1241:And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1242:Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace or after ages of conflict and war, but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred. ~ Edward Everett, #NFDB
1243:I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, #NFDB
1244:I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Est s, #NFDB
1245:In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead. ~ Mary Hunter Austin, #NFDB
1246:In this way the sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
1247:We need not only read Sacred Scripture, but learn it as well and grow up in it. Realize that nothing is written in Scripture unnecessarily. Not to read Sacred Scripture is a great evil. ~ Saint Basil, #NFDB
1248:I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1249:It was fatiguing, but nothing was sacred to the Kerch except trade, so she’d gone out of her way to make the risk much higher than the reward when it came to disrespecting her. Rojakke ~ Leigh Bardugo, #NFDB
1250:No woman should ever lie about another woman. You've violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression? ~ John Green, #NFDB
1251:Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1252:spirits bring contentment for a time carry us closer to the sacred moving through bitterness our yearning to hold on to moments of ecstasy where we imagine we hear clearly destiny calling ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
1253:The biblical texts that we Christians have used for centuries to justify our hostility toward the Jews need to be banished forever from the sacred writings of the Christian church. ~ John Shelby Spong, #NFDB
1254:The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow; and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
1255:The meeting points the sacred hair dissever From the fair head, forever, and forever! Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, And screams of horror rend th' affrighted skies. ~ Alexander Pope, #NFDB
1256:There is a palpable relief when I teach the perspective of nobility, of training in compassion, of non-religious ways to transform suffering and nurture our sacred connection to life. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1257:Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah of Persia's horse,and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1258:When human body itself is made of flesh, where is the need to consume the flesh of birds and animals? You should partake of only sacred food. Only then you will have sacred feelings. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
1259:An asana should be a kind of meditation in form or movement. Therefore, we should always put our minds into a sacred space of silence, observation, and detachment while performing Yoga. ~ David Frawley, #NFDB
1260:I feel in the depths of my soul that it is the highest, most sacred, and most irreversible part of my obligation to preserve the union of these states, although it may cost me my life. ~ Andrew Jackson, #NFDB
1261:I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. ~ Ernest Hemingway, #NFDB
1262:I recognized everything, the waterfall and the lakes, the trees and paths. But they had forgotten me. That was bitter and I cried a lot. One should never return to sacred places. ~ Marianne Fredriksson, #NFDB
1263:I shared with him my deep conviction that life is not a possession. Nor is life merely a contract between the living. Life is a sacred contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1264:I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the viceof religion, is one with that of the private life. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1265:It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither. ~ Richard Ford, #NFDB
1266:No woman should ever lie about another woman! You've violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?! ~ John Green, #NFDB
1267:No woman should ever lie about another woman! You’ve violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?! ~ John Green, #NFDB
1268:Vengeance succeeds in spanning generations and encompassing the world. It transcends time and space. One should not be surprised that in the ancient world vengeance was taken to be sacred. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
1269:When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1270:All the sacred Scriptures of the world have become corrupted, but the Ineffable or Absolute has never been corrupted, because no one has ever been able to express It in human speech. ~ Sri Ramakrishna?, #NFDB
1271:Each person is sacred, no matter what his or her culture, religion, handicap, or fragility. Each person is created in God’s image; each one has a heart, a capacity to love and to be loved. ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
1272:In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred. It is a prayer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present. ~ Amelia Atwater Rhodes, #NFDB
1273:In the company of these friends, questions and doubts were met with sympathy, not fear. No one felt the need to correct or understand or approve. We just listened, and it was sacred. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
1274:Just as you wouldn't leave the house without taking a shower, you shouldn't start the day without at least 10 minutes of sacred practice: prayer, meditation, inspirational reading. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1275:Know that the mirror of the heart is boundless. . . Here, opinions become silent, otherwise they will lead you into errors. . . for the heart is sacred - even more the heart is sacredness itself. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
1276:Life (ayu) is the combination (samyoga) of body, senses, mind and reincarnating soul. Ayurveda is the most sacred science of life, beneficial to humans both in this world and the world beyond. ~ Charaka, #NFDB
1277:The Buddha said, ‘Gripped by fear, men go to the sacred mountains and sacred groves, sacred trees and shrines.’ I am not afraid of death, my lady. I need no god to comfort me in my fear. ~ Conn Iggulden, #NFDB
1278:There's a vulnerability in music but you've also got to protect your sacred place and have a place you can still retire to that no one else knows about. So that's a thing I just try to balance. ~ Kimbra, #NFDB
1279:Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to import them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
1280:True beauty is a ray
That springs from the sacred depths of the soul,
and illuminates the body, just as life
springs from the kernel of a stone and
gives colour and scent to a flower. ~ Rumi,#NFDB
1281:188 Driven by fear, people run for security to mountains and forests, to sacred spots and shrines. 189 But none of these can be a safe refuge, because they cannot free the mind from fear. 190 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1282:An ideology can be defined as a group of beliefs that individuals borrow; most people borrow an ideology by identifying with a social group ... with a body of sacred documents and heroes. ~ Robert E Lane, #NFDB
1283:anyone doubts the infinite mercy of God, let him have a look at these sacred places. How much hypocrisy and irreligion does the Prince of Yogis suffer to be perpetrated in His holy name? ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1284:Healing the sick was once considered a sacred gift bestowed on mortals by the gods. Let the investors find their recompense in the good they have done and not in monetary returns alone. ~ E A Bucchianeri, #NFDB
1285:He is encompassed himself, in the steering clasp of hand on shoulder and scrubber-fluffed noggin bobbing in prayer to the gods of cock, filled with grace from the sacred font of the phallus. ~ Hal Duncan, #NFDB
1286:I'm interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn't deserve being glorified. Something that's forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object. ~ Edward Ruscha, #NFDB
1287:My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the pest. ~ Steve Irwin, #NFDB
1288:Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1289:Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them. ~ Steven Johnson, #NFDB
1290:He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook. ~ Max Stirner, #NFDB
1291:I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, #NFDB
1292:Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate, gives us access to the Creator to reveal hidden things and invites us to seek out our sacred responsibility to perceive God’s unscripted presence here and now. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
1293:Marriage is sacred. And the Bible says that God hates divorce. He hates it because he wants better for you. He never intended for you to have a broken marriage of a broken home. He loves you. ~ Glenn Beck, #NFDB
1294:My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
1295:Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred. ~ Charles Frazier, #NFDB
1296:Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man. ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
1297:The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
1298:A Comanche don’t wear a wolf sign unless he’s somebody important. The wolf is sacred to ’em, their brother. No woman would have a medallion like that unless her man marked her with it. ~ Catherine Anderson, #NFDB
1299:Albert Einstein put it best: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. ~ Betty Edwards, #NFDB
1300:All of the larger than life questions about our presence here on earth and what gifts we have to offer are spiritual questions. To seek answers to these questions is to seek a sacred path. ~ Lauren Artress, #NFDB
1301:Avoid the profane novelty of words, St. Paul says (I Timothy 6:20) ... For if novelty is to be avoided, antiquity is to be held tight to; and if novelty is profane, antiquity is sacred. ~ Vincent of Lerins, #NFDB
1302:Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred Host we hail; Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
1303:in order to fully awaken, we have to dissolve the false dichotomy between secular and spiritual truths, and start to view ourselves, each other, and the world we share as sacred, 24/7/365. ~ Ethan Nichtern, #NFDB
1304:I've always tried to have a rule that you shouldn't make fun of innocent people who can't defend themselves. I find that a little unseemly and distasteful. But nothing's really sacred to me. ~ Bob Odenkirk, #NFDB
1305:Sacred bleeding fuck,” I said, because, I mean its one thing to know your crazy hocus brother sees ghosts, and a whole different thing when you find out they’re telling him bedtime stories. ~ Sarah Monette, #NFDB
1306:Cedar,” he said. “Pine. Spruce. Laurel.” “Yeah. So?” “They’re supposed to be sacred.” He touched them again, each in turn. “Wisdom. Strength. Courage. Perseverance. You’re supposed to burn them. ~ John Hart, #NFDB
1307:For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture. ~ William of Ockham, #NFDB
1308:I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally violatible and I think that's partly a carryover from the way I deal with structures to the way I deal with photography. ~ Gordon Matta Clark, #NFDB
1309:In short, superheroes balance the forces of light and dark, rage and serenity, and the sacred and the profane within themselves and from it forge an identity that is powerful and purposeful. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1310:In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
1311:Run my dear, from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings. Run like hell my dear, from anyone likely to put a sharp knife into the sacred, tender vision of your beautiful heart. ~ Hafez, #NFDB
1312:See the judge upon the bench who tries the case as best he can, see the wise and wicked ones who feed upon life's sacred fire, see the soldier with his gun who must be dead to be admired. ~ Gordon Lightfoot, #NFDB
1313:The Lord has given us a table at which to feast, not an altar on which a victim is to be offered; He has not consecrated priests to make sacrifice, but servants to distribute the sacred feast. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
1314:Time, whose millioned accidents creep in betwixt vows, and change decrees of kings, tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharpest intents, divert strong minds to the course of altering things. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
1315:Together in Britain we have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish. Guard that sacred flame my brother Blackshirts until it illuminates Britain and lights again the Paths of Mankind. ~ Oswald Mosley, #NFDB
1316:To theology, … only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), Lecture 2, p. 11., #NFDB
1317:In every religion, there are those who would drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort it's most sacred teachings - preaching intolerance and resorting to violence. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
1318:Let every knee bend before Thee, O greatness of my God, so supremely humbled in the Sacred Host. May every heart love Thee, every spirit adore Thee and every will be subject to Thee! ~ Margaret Mary Alacoque, #NFDB
1319:The men know that black women are women at the very least; magical at their zenith and biblical at the core, being with a black woman was as sacred as dousing oneself in holy water. That ~ Bernice L McFadden, #NFDB
1320:Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind's desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
1321:When we spend time in silence, we can hear the voice of our soul whispering its sacred message and encouraging us to make choices that bring us more happiness, health, love, meaning, and peace. ~ David Simon, #NFDB
1322:When you plead the name of Christ, you plead that which shakes the gates of hell and that which the hosts of heaven obey, and God Himself feels the sacred power of that divine plea. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1323:Within days of Lenin’s death, the ex-seminarian had unveiled the winning formula he would pursue: zealously dedicating his life and the entire party to fulfillment of Lenin’s sacred “behest. ~ Stephen Kotkin, #NFDB
1324:A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. ~ Albert Schweitzer, #NFDB
1325:A man must go on a quest / to discover the sacred fire / in the sanctuary of his own belly / to ignite the flame in his heart / to fuel the blaze in the hearth / to rekindle his ardor for the earth ~ Sam Keen, #NFDB
1326:Aouda fastened her great eyes, “clear as the sacred lakes of the Himalaya,” upon him; but the intractable Fogg, as reserved as ever, did not seem at all inclined to throw himself into this lake. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1327:At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1328:Even before baptism, a child or an adult can have the Holy Ghost testify to their hearts of sacred truth. They must act on that testimony to retain it, but it will guide them toward goodness. ~ Henry B Eyring, #NFDB
1329:Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. ~ Maude Barlow, #NFDB
1330:Gary Zukav in The Seat of the Soul sums it up beautifully: The underlying premise of a spiritual partnership is a sacred commitment between the partners to assist each other’s spiritual growth. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1331:Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act. ~ Paul Hawken, #NFDB
1332:I am against abortion; I think that life is sacred and we should take a position of being against abortion. I think it is wrong to take human life. I think that human life starts at conception. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
1333:I'm not convinced about marriage. Divorce is so easy, and that fact that gay people are not allowed to marry takes much of the meaning out of it. Committing yourself to one person is sacred. ~ Natalie Portman, #NFDB
1334:Nobody gives you respect in this life. You must take it, you must earn it, and then you must hold it sacred, because no matter how hard respect is to attain, it can be lost in an instant. ~ Jennifer A Nielsen, #NFDB
1335:That's the sacred intent of life, of God--to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
1336:The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
1337:There is a reason why the founding generation of American settler-colonialists, in preserving the right to a jury trial, described it as “sacred,” “inviolable,” “ancient,” and “inestimable. ~ Marc Lamont Hill, #NFDB
1338:When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties. ~ Marquis de Lafayette, #NFDB
1339:Does one scent appeal more than another? Do you prefer this flavor, or that feeling? Is your practice sacred and your work profane? Then your mind is separated: from itself, from oneness, from the Tao. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
1340:Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of "The Lord of the Rings". You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold. ~ Lynne Truss, #NFDB
1341:I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
1342:I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits ~ Brene Brown, #NFDB
1343:If all things were made through Him, clearly so must the splendid revelations have been which were made to the fathers and prophets, and became to them the symbols of the sacred mysteries of religion. ~ Origen, #NFDB
1344:Nothing has changed in Russia since Ivan the Terrible when it comes to the divide between the people and the state. The state demands a sacred willingness to make sacrifices from the people. ~ Vladimir Sorokin, #NFDB
1345:Res sacros non modo manibus attingi, sed ne cogitatione quidem violari fas fuit. - Things sacred should not only be untouched with the hands, but unviolated in thought. ~ Cicero, Orationes in Verrem. II. 4. 45, #NFDB
1346:Some people cashed in their dreams a dime on the dollar and some kept them close and as sacred as the night. I wasn’t sure if I even had a dream left. I felt like I only had sins to confess. ~ Michael Connelly, #NFDB
1347:There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1348:You are doing something very sacred here, something very daring, during your life upon the earth. You are defining yourself, and then creating yourself anew, in each golden moment of now. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
1349:Alas! it is but little we have done for our Master's glory. Our winter has lasted all too long. We are as cold as ice when we should feel a summer's glow and bloom with sacred flowers. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1350:Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly. ~ John Dos Passos, #NFDB
1351:It was the same scolding any child receives. Stay out of the neighbor’s garden. Don’t tease the Bentons’ sheep. Don’t play tag among the thousand spinning knives of your people’s sacred tree. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
1352:I will go to the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, but I shall go not as a member of the MacHeath clan — no, I shall go as a free runner. I reject you. I deny you, I refuse and repudiate you as my clan. ~ Kathryn Lasky, #NFDB
1353:Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them. ~ Salvador Dal, #NFDB
1354:One of the psychological reasons why decent people shrink from vulgar sex discussion is because by its very nature it is not a communicable kind of knowledge... It is too sacred to be profaned. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
1355:Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing. ~ Leonard Cohen, #NFDB
1356:Sacred Sibyl!” I cried. “Madam, there is something wrong with your midsection!”
The woman stopped, mystified, and looked down at her hugely swollen belly. “Well, I’m seven months pregnant. ~ Rick Riordan,#NFDB
1357:The diversity we see in the Bible reflects the inevitably changing circumstances of the biblical writers across the centuries as they grappled with their sacred yet ancient and ambiguous tradition. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
1358:The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1359:Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. ~ Jon Krakauer, #NFDB
1360:What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1361:For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. 2 Timothy 3:2 ~ Tony Dungy, #NFDB
1362:However, he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
1363:Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them. ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
1364:Much though he recites the sacred texts, but acts not accordingly, that heedless man is like a cowherd who only counts the cows of others - he does not partake of the blessings of the holy life. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
1365:Our English word “vocation” comes from the Latin word voca, meaning “to call.” The Reformers saw our vocations, whether “secular” or “sacred,” as callings by God to assist in his care for the earth. ~ J D Greear, #NFDB
1366:Priestly was the first (unless it was Becarria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth--that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation. ~ Jeremy Bentham, #NFDB
1367:SACRED, adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose; having a divine character; inspiring solemn thoughts or emotions; as... the Cow in India; the Crocodile, the Cat and the Onion of ancient Egypt. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
1368:The Economist, a magazine so giddy about its urgency that it refers to itself as a ‘newspaper’ and not a ‘magazine’, describes the sacred Shiva Lingam at Amarnath as a ‘penis-shaped lump of ice’. ~ Vamsee Juluri, #NFDB
1369:The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonored shroud. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
1370:The problem with most intimate relationships is that they are not romantic. They do not involve a deeper knowing, and thus there is diminished possibility of sacred, transformative sharing. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1371:To teach our children is a personal duty; we cannot delegate it to Sunday School Teachers, or other friendly aids, these can assist us, but cannot deliver us from the sacred obligation; ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1372:If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1373:In this new world, this day and forever, then, we are not only Thebans - we are all Stepsons. We are all one Sacred Band. If you will have us. And mine will fight by yours, henceforth, as brothers. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
1374:Let him avoid ,the acquisition of wealth and ,the gratification of his desires, if they are opposed to the sacred law, and even lawful acts which may cause pain in the future or are offensive to men. ~ Guru Nanak, #NFDB
1375:Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1376:The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species. ~ Julian Jaynes, #NFDB
1377:There is a crying need today to have this truth heralded throughout the land that youth especially may appreciate and hold the freedom of the individual as sacred as did our revolutionary fathers. ~ David O McKay, #NFDB
1378:We are all in Christs energy. We are all in the divine plan. We are all on the sacred journey, if you want to put it into some very spiritual words. And I like to sing about it, so thats what I do. ~ Jon Anderson, #NFDB
1379:When the three of them stepped inside, they were greeted by the Muzak version of "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance. Vlad and Henry exchanged looks of horror, and Vlad sighed. "Is nothing sacred? ~ Heather Brewer, #NFDB
1380:Yet simple souls, their faith it knows no stint:
Things least to be believed are most preferred.
All counterfeits, as from truth's sacred mint,
Are readily believed if once put down in print ~ John Clare,#NFDB
1381:Advocates of capitalism like to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1382:As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language. ~ Thomas More, #NFDB
1383:For a large part of human history, people didn't really know how a woman's body worked. This is mainly because for much of human history, a woman's body was either too sacred or too sexual to study. ~ Lucy Knisley, #NFDB
1384:For all karaoke freaks around the nation, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is one of those sacred anthems. It’s the kind of song that announces, “Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today. ~ Rob Sheffield, #NFDB
1385:History is nothing. It can be recycled or thrown away completely. It isn’t this sacred treasure chest I mistook it to be. We were something, but history isn’t enough to keep something alive forever. ~ Adam Silvera, #NFDB
1386:Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
1387:If we are to help heal the world, we need to remember that it is a sacred place. Our actions need to be positive statements, reminders that even in the worst times there is a world worth struggling for. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
1388:My library was -- all libraries are -- a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real. ~ Andr Brink, #NFDB
1389:“Sexual union has the virtue of expressing ‘the union of ineffable godhead with humanity,’ the fact that it ‘already possesses in human experience an intrinsic fitness for symbolizing the sacred event.” ~ Bataille, #NFDB
1390:That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1391:It should be for you a sacred day when one of your people dies. You must then keep his soul as I shall teach you…for if this soul is kept, it will increase in you your concern and love for your neighbor. ~ Ben Bova, #NFDB
1392:Our heart knows what our mind has forgotten - it knows the sacred that is within all that exists, and through a depth of feeling we can once again experience this connection, this belonging. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, #NFDB
1393:The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1394:They’ll read and sing a sacred song,
And make a prayer both loud and long,
And teach the right and do the wrong,
Hailing htthe brother, sister, throng,
With words of heavenly union. ~ Frederick Douglass,#NFDB
1395:Confuse the sacred and secular in your environment. Create a liminal, neither here nor there, milieu. It is always in the liminal places that significant things happen, so work at creating liminality. ~ Thomas Moore, #NFDB
1396:Energy doesn't come to us so much from the things around us-although we can absorb energy directly from some plants and sacred sites. Sacred energy comes from our connection to the divine inside us. ~ James Redfield, #NFDB
1397:I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred. ~ Roger Nash Baldwin, #NFDB
1398:May the wisdom that you’ve gleaned from this book continue to uplift, educate, and inspire you on your sacred journey as an empath. You are beautiful, sacred, and perfect just as you are. Be blessed. ~ Aletheia Luna, #NFDB
1399:My feet will tread soft as a deer in the forest. My mind will be clear as water from the sacred well. My heart will be strong as a great oak. My spirit will spread an eagle's wings, and fly forth. ~ Juliet Marillier, #NFDB
1400:Stage fright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness... It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense - that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success. ~ Charles Rosen, #NFDB
1401:Swallowing the open field -- pheasant's cry [2652.jpg] -- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger
~ Yamei, Swallowing
,#NFDB
1402:The convent of the sacred order of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster had once been a dank and dark medieval castle but was now, after a lick of paint and a few throw pillows, a dank and dark convent. ~ Jasper Fforde, #NFDB
1403:The present age ... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence ... for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1404:There are hopes, the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description; too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should only be known through the sympathy of hearts. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1405:There are only four questions of importance in life: What is sacred, of what is the spirit made, what is worth living for, and what is worth dying for. The answer to all of them is the same. Only LOVE. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1406:The sacred stillness of your brilliant heart
has as the myriad wonders masqueraded.
But if you knew this secret from the start,
then you'd have quit this Game before you played it. ~ Eric Micha el Leventhal,#NFDB
1407:We yearn, as spirit children of our Heavenly Father, for that joy which we once had with Him in the life before this one. His desire is to grant us that sacred wish for unity out of His love for us. ~ Henry B Eyring, #NFDB
1408:A generation ago [the Democratic Party] stood for progressive change. Now they defend every federal program as if each were sacred. They have become the most conservative force in American politics. ~ Thomas Friedman, #NFDB
1409:If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, why should he integrate animality into this sacred human emotion?...Is love incompelete without it?...Is love the name of physical excersize ? ~ Saadat Hasan Manto, #NFDB
1410:I love Australia passionately. I love our landscape. It's influenced most of my work, really. Almost everything I've written is about the landscape. Trying to find, the sacred, the spiritual in it. ~ Peter Sculthorpe, #NFDB
1411:I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human consciousness. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
1412:Music is a sacred, a divine, a God-like thing, and was given to man by Christ to lift our hearts up to God, and make us feel something of the glory and beauty of God, and of all which God has made. ~ Charles Kingsley, #NFDB
1413:To others in my family, the dog was something of a sacred object that had prolonged my father's life and helped to steady the rest of us. He was a fine dog, and after him, my father had no other dog. ~ Norman Maclean, #NFDB
1414:Why do they even call it that, "saving yourself"? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It's not like virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of "being saved" from intercourse. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
1415:for others gating remains very open, especially among young children, artists, schizophrenics, specialists of the sacred such as shamans and Buddhist masters, and those ingesting psychotropics. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, #NFDB
1416:I think the attribute of the church that is most seriously under attack in our day is its Apostolicity, because there has been a wholesale rejection within the church of the authority of sacred Scripture. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
1417:I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1418:I used to make a nest in the closet of my bedroom with pillows and blankets and a flashlight and a book. My own tiny world, sacred and inviolate, where I could reign entirely at my own whim and discretion. ~ Tim Pratt, #NFDB
1419:I want you to remember my lips beneath your fingers and how you told me things you never told another soul. I want you to know that I have kept sacred, everything you had entrusted in me and I always will. ~ Lang Leav, #NFDB
1420:No calamity happens to those who eagerly follow auspicious customs and the rule of good conduct, to those who are always careful of purity, and to those who mutter ,sacred texts and offer burnt oblations. ~ Guru Nanak, #NFDB
1421:Our society is so much about fidelity being this thing that's sacred, and people are miserable. They're suicidal. It brings more depression than anything else on earth, probably. Sorry to say that, guys. ~ Julie Delpy, #NFDB
1422:What the hell are you doing, trooper?” he managed to bark, his pronounced Adam's apple bobbing furiously.
“Performing the ministry of the sacred Inquisition,” I told him, and shot him through the head. ~ Dan Abnett,#NFDB
1423:A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
1424:I can assure you, that the gallant hearts that throb beneath its sacred folds, will only be content, when this glorious banner is planted first and foremost in the coming struggle for our independence. ~ John Bell Hood, #NFDB
1425:Is that what I am? I don’t know what the hell I am anymore."
"Oh, bullshit. You’re a guy, a human being. Just another poor son of a bitch who doesn’t want to be alone when the sacred ginmill closes. ~ Lawrence Block,#NFDB
1426:I would definitely return to Austria. They were all good experiences for me, but definitely Austria because there were some ancient Celtic, sacred sites that were in the forest that were quite beautiful. ~ Nicolas Cage, #NFDB
1427:Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, #NFDB
1428:Our eyes and ears can deceive us, our hearts don’t always have the best judgment, and our hormones can lead us astray. But our thoughts are sacred! We have to listen them because they’re the rational part. ~ Cara Stein, #NFDB
1429:Science is not a sacred cow-but there are a large number of would-be sacred cowherds busily devoting quantities of time, energy and effort to the task of making it one, so they can be sacred cowherds. ~ John W Campbell, #NFDB
1430:The man's large hand still rested on the deer's head . . . "To kill a creature such as this is a sacred thing. It must only be done when there is a true necessity. And you must ask pardon of the spirit. ~ John Stephens, #NFDB
1431:The sole of the foot is sacred for the Grass people. It's called the "sole of the foot" because it's the sole (or only) body part that enjoys the constant relationship with the surface of plants. ~ Timoth e de Fombelle, #NFDB
1432:Above all, we know that there’s a physical basis for every psychological attribute we have: if just the right spot gets damaged, we can lose just about anything in our mental repertoire, no matter how sacred. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
1433:Sacred and secret things happen in the waiting. Moments of heaven touch earth, breathe life into babies inside their mamas and bread sitting on my counter. The work is invisible, but the result is not. ~ Emily P Freeman, #NFDB
1434:We (Christians) are always in the presence of God. There is never a non-sacred moment! His presence never diminishes. Our awareness of His presence may falter, but the reality of His presence never changes. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
1435:it’s a structured way of engaging with the sacred. It’s a container for such engagement to happen. It’s a protocol by which we can maintain right relationship in our direct engagements with the sacred. ~ Galina Krasskova, #NFDB
1436:The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas—but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred. ~ A J Jacobs, #NFDB
1437:The process of shaping the child, shapes also the mother herself. Reverence for her sacred burden calls her to all that is pure and good, that she may teach primarily by her own humble, daily example. ~ Elisabeth Elliot, #NFDB
1438:These warriors of the Sacred Band were inscrutable; they loved their war and death and picking through the bones of time to sort out right from wrong, good from bad, holy from profane, honor from dishonor. ~ Janet Morris, #NFDB
1439:Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1440:Everybody thinks of baseball as a sacred cow. When you have the nerve to challenge it, people look down their noses at you. There are a lot of things wrong with a lot of industries....baseball is one of them. ~ Curt Flood, #NFDB
1441:Far-stretching, endless Time
Brings forth all hidden things,
And buries that which once did shine.
The firm resolve falters, the sacred oath is shattered;
And let none say, "It cannot happen here". ~ Sophocles,#NFDB
1442:I therefore suggested that WWF should invite leaders from the major religions to meet together to discuss what - if any - responsibility they felt they had for the natural environment as a "sacred" entity. ~ Prince Philip, #NFDB
1443:Maslow puts it, “The great lesson from the true mystics . . . [is] that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s backyard. ~ Phil Jackson, #NFDB
1444:Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others. ~ Ben Sasse, #NFDB
1445:And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1446:Buddha's body accepts it... winter rain [2652.jpg] -- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger
~ Kobayashi Issa, Buddhas body
,#NFDB
1447:The body of Saint Mark, supposedly preserved in the basilica was the central point of the configuration between the ducal palace, the market, and the Arsenal. This was the sacred geometry of Venetian power. ~ Peter Ackroyd, #NFDB
1448:There is something almost sacred about a great library because it represents the preservation of the wisdom, the learning, and the pondering of men and women of all the ages, accumulated under one roof. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
1449:Anna took her solace where she always did. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy, able to turn loneliness into aloneness, and so make it, if not sacred, at least bearable. ~ Nevada Barr, #NFDB
1450:Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them. ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
1451:From my point of view, humanity is one living being. Male-female - we complement each other in a sacred communion. But once again, respect is the key. Respect is what makes the sacred communion possible. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz, #NFDB
1452:In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
1453:It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of teaching have not yet entirely strangled that sacred spirit of curiosity and inquiry, for this delicate plant needs freedom no less than stimulation. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1454:Know that all times are Holy, that every religion holds truth, that each tradition is sacred, and that it is in the simple sharing of love that we make our beliefs come alive, and our dreams come true. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
1455:more brave in despising gold as yet undiscovered, and so best situated while hidden in the earth, than in forcing it out for the uses of mankind, with a hand ready to make depredations on everything that is sacred. ~ Horace, #NFDB
1456:Public opinion actually applauds the young woman venturing into the business world, but it still obstinately (and quite illogically) protects the young man in his sacred right to know nothing of housework. ~ Crystal Eastman, #NFDB
1457:The fact that 98 percent of women in [the U.S.] who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives. ~ Melinda Gates, #NFDB
1458:There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief. ~ Francis Weller, #NFDB
1459:The sacred is not in heaven or far away. It is all around us, and small human rituals can connect us to its presence. And of course the greatest challenge (and gift) is to see the sacred in each other. ~ Alma Luz Villanueva, #NFDB
1460:The words I AM are your sacred identification as God- your highest self. Take care how you use this terms because saying anything after I AM that's incongruent with God is really taking the Lord's name in vain! ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
1461:All the troubles of the Church, all the evils in the world, flow from this source: that men do not by clear and sound knowledge and serious consideration penetrate into the truths of Sacred Scripture. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #NFDB
1462:Everything was too bright, too loud, too fast. I was used to streets with no electric lights, devoid of noise pollution. This world seemed mad in comparison. My sordid, sacred SciLo, my prison and my home. ~ Samantha Shannon, #NFDB
1463:My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event. ~ Joyelle McSweeney, #NFDB
1464:Next to the word 'Nature,' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth. ~ Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, #NFDB
1465:Some places[/people] are like that: they can suffer through wars, persecutions, and indifference, but they still remain sacred. Finally someone comes along, senses that something is missing, and rebuilds them. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1466:This vision of life is deeply centered in God, the sacred. So it was for Jesus. So it is in all of the enduring religions of the world. What makes Christianity Christian is centering in God as known in Jesus. ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
1467:You trusted me and that I would never betray. Trust, much like a woman’s love and affection, and brotherly friendship, is a sacred thing, and should never be lightly given nor abused nor taken for granted. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
1468:All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. ~ Strobe Talbott, #NFDB
1469:I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!” - The Narrator. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, #NFDB
1470:It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular; it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
1471:No sacrifice is worth the name unless it is a joy. Sacrifice and a long face go ill together. Sacrifice is 'making sacred'. He must be a poor specimen of humanity who is in need of sympathy for his sacrifice. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1472:Pippin was crowned the first king of the Carolingian dynasty in the city of Soissons, in a brand-new sacred ceremony that involved anointing with holy oil in the manner of an Old Testament theocratic king.* ~ Susan Wise Bauer, #NFDB
1473:There is a sacred realm of privacy for every man and woman where he makes his choices and decisions-a realm of his own essential rights and liberties into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude. ~ Geoffrey Fisher, #NFDB
1474:The words I AM are your sacred identification as God- your highest self. Take care how you use this terms because saying anything after I AM that's incongruent with God is really taking the Lord's name in vain! ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1475:This was the joy that the world sought--sacred and pagan all at once. A union between two dissimilars into a seamless one. A picture of love and deep satisfaction. An ecstatic glimpse of the beatific vision. ~ Sylvain Reynard, #NFDB
1476:To abandon your shield is the basest of crimes; nor may a man thus disgraced be present at the sacred rites, or enter their council; many, indeed, after escaping from battle, have ended their infamy with the halter. ~ Tacitus, #NFDB
1477:you’re damn right it’d be something caves of ice and ancestral war voices prophesying about damsels and sacred rivers screaming beware and your hair would float and ugh hang on two seconds there’s a guy here ~ Mallory Ortberg, #NFDB
1478:geniza is that these works, like people, are living things, possessing an element of the sacred about them—and therefore when they “die,” or become worn out, they must be honored and protected from profanation. ~ Adina Hoffman, #NFDB
1479:I believe [...] that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
1480:Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or their place, until you've exterminated their resident monsters. ~ David Quammen, #NFDB
1481:Much of our planning is like waiting to swim in a dry ravine. Many of our activities are like housekeeping in a dream. Delirious with fever, one does not recognize the fever. —PALTRUL RINPOCHE’S SACRED WORD IF ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1482:Our minds of infinite possibilities have been plowed, seeded and cultivated by every word, institution and sacred belief we hold dear, to produce a foul harvest of exclusion, apathy, brute domination and death. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
1483:What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore, #NFDB
1484:And let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that God and man may talk together; for "we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the divine saying." ~ Saint Ambrose of Milan, #NFDB
1485:Energy doesn't come to us so much from the things around us—
although we can absorb energy directly from some plants and
sacred sites. Sacred energy comes from our connection to the
divine inside us. ~ James Redfield,#NFDB
1486:Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement. ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
1487:I don't care whether it was once sacred or not, I HATE WHAT I DO. It's destroying my soul, making me lose touch with myself, teaching me that pain is a reward, that money buys everything and justifies everything. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1488:If you look at language merely as craft you are committing lèse-majesté towards your own sacred tools. You’ve got to have the proper respect—you’ve got to feel awed in its presence (see, I say “awed,” not “sacred”). ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
1489:In certain tantric rituals the candidate is first beaten by his guru, hashish forced down him, and he is taken at midnight to a dark cemetery for sacred sexual intercourse. Thus he achieves union with his god. ~ Peter J Carroll, #NFDB
1490:In your personal morality code, make it the most serious kind of sin to tell a lie to yourself. Allow nothing to be as sacred as your own word. Make this one change in your life, and your whole life will change. ~ Mike Hernacki, #NFDB
1491:It took me whole decades to appreciate the depth and true value of yoga. Sacred texts supported my discoveries, but it was not they that signposted the way. What I learned through yoga, I found out through yoga. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
1492:Learn to turn to each person as the most sacred person on Earth, to each moment as the most sacred moment that has ever been given to us. Then perhaps we are awake a bit more, perhaps breathing together with God. ~ Reshad Feild, #NFDB
1493:Love binds people too, in matrimony's sacred bonds where chaste lovers are met, and friends cement their trust and friendship. How happy is mankind, if the love that orders the stars above rules, too, in your hearts. ~ Boethius, #NFDB
1494:While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
1495:I do keep him at the back of my mind for those times I get me hopes raised about something. So then I can slap myself into reality and remind myself of what happens when you let someone into your sacred space. ~ Melina Marchetta, #NFDB
1496:If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory. ~ Daniel Taylor, #NFDB
1497:It is useless to grow pale ever the holy Scriptures end the sacred Shastras without a spirit of discrimination exempt from all passions. No spiritual progress can be made without discrimination and renunciation ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
1498:No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1499:Part of faith is believing every life has a purpose: that’s why life is so sacred to Christians. And we believe that not only other innocent lives have their purpose ... but that our own lives have a purpose as well. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1500:The people are the best guardians of their own rights and it is the duty of their executive to abstain from interfering in or thwarting the sacred exercise of the lawmaking functions of their government. ~ William Henry Harrison, #NFDB
273 Poetry
119 Occultism
98 Integral Yoga
63 Fiction
55 Yoga
42 Philosophy
36 Christianity
26 Psychology
19 Mysticism
17 Mythology
12 Hinduism
7 Philsophy
6 Baha i Faith
4 Sufism
4 Science
3 Theosophy
3 Buddhism
1 Zen
1 Thelema
1 Kabbalah
1 Integral Theory
1 Education
1 Alchemy
105 Sri Aurobindo
54 James George Frazer
42 Percy Bysshe Shelley
41 Sri Ramakrishna
41 Aleister Crowley
34 The Mother
29 William Wordsworth
27 Nolini Kanta Gupta
26 H P Lovecraft
21 Saint Augustine of Hippo
21 Carl Jung
18 John Keats
16 William Butler Yeats
15 Walt Whitman
13 Satprem
13 Aldous Huxley
12 Ovid
12 Friedrich Schiller
10 Jorge Luis Borges
9 Vyasa
9 Plato
7 Swami Vivekananda
7 Robert Browning
7 Ralph Waldo Emerson
7 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
7 Lalla
7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
7 Baha u llah
6 Swami Krishnananda
6 Friedrich Nietzsche
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Kabir
5 Joseph Campbell
5 Anonymous
4 Saint Teresa of Avila
4 Plotinus
4 Lucretius
4 Jordan Peterson
4 Edgar Allan Poe
3 Symeon the New Theologian
3 Rabindranath Tagore
3 Jalaluddin Rumi
3 George Van Vrekhem
3 Franz Bardon
3 Bokar Rinpoche
3 Alice Bailey
2 William Blake
2 Saint Therese of Lisieux
2 Saint John of Climacus
2 Saint Hildegard von Bingen
2 Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Paul Richard
2 Patanjali
2 Mirabai
2 Mechthild of Magdeburg
2 Mahendranath Gupta
2 Kobayashi Issa
2 Ken Wilber
2 Jean Gebser
2 Ibn Arabi
2 Henry David Thoreau
2 Hafiz
2 Farid ud-Din Attar
2 Catherine of Siena
2 Bulleh Shah
54 The Golden Bough
42 Shelley - Poems
40 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
29 Wordsworth - Poems
26 Lovecraft - Poems
23 Savitri
21 Magick Without Tears
21 City of God
18 Keats - Poems
16 Yeats - Poems
15 Liber ABA
14 Whitman - Poems
13 The Perennial Philosophy
12 Schiller - Poems
12 Metamorphoses
10 The Synthesis Of Yoga
9 Vishnu Purana
9 Talks
9 Mysterium Coniunctionis
9 Labyrinths
8 The Secret Of The Veda
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
8 Collected Poems
7 Words Of Long Ago
7 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
7 Emerson - Poems
7 Browning - Poems
6 Vedic and Philological Studies
6 The Study and Practice of Yoga
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 Essays On The Gita
6 Crowley - Poems
6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
6 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
5 The Human Cycle
5 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
5 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
5 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
5 Prayers And Meditations
5 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
5 Goethe - Poems
4 Words Of The Mother III
4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
4 The Bible
4 Poe - Poems
4 Of The Nature Of Things
4 Maps of Meaning
4 Aion
4 5.1.01 - Ilion
3 The Practice of Psycho therapy
3 The Book of Certitude
3 Tara - The Feminine Divine
3 Raja-Yoga
3 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
3 Preparing for the Miraculous
3 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
3 On the Way to Supermanhood
3 Letters On Yoga IV
3 Let Me Explain
3 Initiation Into Hermetics
3 Hymn of the Universe
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
3 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
3 Anonymous - Poems
2 Walden
2 Twilight of the Idols
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 Tagore - Poems
2 Symposium
2 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
2 Questions And Answers 1954
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
2 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
2 On Education
2 Liber Null
2 Kena and Other Upanishads
2 Faust
2 Essays Divine And Human
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
2 Bhakti-Yoga
2 Arabi - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 04
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
SRI RAMAKRISHNA, the God-man of modern India, was born at Kamarpukur. This village in the Hooghly District preserved during the last century the idyllic simplicity of the rural areas of Bengal. Situated far from the railway, it was untouched by the glamour of the city. It contained rice-fields, tall palms, royal banyans, a few lakes, and two cremation grounds. South of the village a stream took its leisurely course. A mango orchard dedicated by a neighbouring zemindar to the public use was frequented by the boys for their noonday sports. A highway passed through the village to the great temple of Jagannath at Puri, and the villagers, most of whom were farmers and craftsmen, entertained many passing holy men and pilgrims. The dull round of the rural life was broken by lively festivals, the observance of sacred days, religious singing, and other innocent pleasures.
About his parents Sri Ramakrishna once said: "My mother was the personification of rectitude and gentleness. She did not know much about the ways of the world; innocent of the art of concealment, she would say what was in her mind. People loved her for her open-heartedness. My father, an orthodox brahmin, never accepted gifts from the sudras. He spent much of his time in worship and meditation, and in repeating God's name and chanting His glories. Whenever in his daily prayers he invoked the Goddess Gayatri, his chest flushed and tears rolled down his cheeks. He spent his leisure hours making garlands for the Family Deity, Raghuvir."
--
Ten years after his coming to Kamarpukur, Khudiram made a pilgrimage on foot to Rameswar, at the southern extremity of India. Two years later was born his second son, whom he named Rameswar. Again in 1835, at the age of sixty, he made a pilgrimage, this time to Gaya. Here, from ancient times, Hindus have come from the four corners of India to discharge their duties to their departed ancestors by offering them food and drink at the sacred footprint of the Lord Vishnu. At this holy place Khudiram had a dream in which the Lord Vishnu promised to he born as his son. And Chandra Devi, too, in front of the Siva temple at Kamarpukur, had a vision indicating the birth of a divine child. Upon his return the husband found that she had conceived.
It was on February 18, 1836, that the child, to be known afterwards as Ramakrishna, was born. In memory of the dream at Gaya he was given the name of Gadadhar, the "Bearer of the Mace", an epithet of Vishnu. Three years later a little sister was born.
--
At the age of nine Gadadhar was invested with the sacred thread. This ceremony conferred upon him the privileges of his brahmin lineage, including the worship of the Family Deity, Raghuvir, and imposed upon him the many strict disciplines of a brahmin's life. During the ceremony of investiture he shocked his relatives by accepting a meal cooked by his nurse, a sudra woman. His father would never have dreamt of doing such a thing But in a playful mood Gadadhar had once promised this woman that he would eat her food, and now he fulfilled his plighted word. The woman had piety and religious sincerity, and these were more important to the boy than the conventions of society.
Gadadhar was now permitted to worship Raghuvir. Thus began his first training in meditation. He so gave his heart and soul to the worship that the stone image very soon appeared to him as the living Lord of the Universe. His tendency to lose himself in contemplation was first noticed at this time. Behind his boyish light-heartedness was seen a deepening of his spiritual nature.
--
Sri Ramakrishna — henceforth we shall call Gadadhar by this familiar name —1 came to the temple garden with his elder brother Ramkumar, who was appointed priest of the Kali temple. Sri Ramakrishna did not at first approve of Ramkumar's working for the sudra Rasmani. The example of their orthodox father was still fresh in Sri Ramakrishna's mind. He objected also to the eating of the cooked offerings of the temple, since, according to orthodox Hindu custom, such food can be offered to the Deity only in the house of a brahmin. But the holy atmosphere of the temple grounds, the solitude of the surrounding wood, the loving care of his brother, the respect shown him by Rani Rasmani and Mathur Babu, the living presence of the Goddess Kali in the temple, and; above all, the proximity of the sacred Ganges, which Sri Ramakrishna always held in the highest respect, gradually overcame his disapproval, and he began to feel at home.
Within a very short time Sri Ramakrishna attracted the notice of Mathur Babu, who was impressed by the young man's religious fervour and wanted him to participate in the worship in the Kali 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 jewelry of the temple. Mathur had to wait for a suitable occasion.
--
The worship in the temple intensified Sri Ramakrishna's yearning for a living vision of the Mother of the Universe. He began to spend in meditation the time not actually employed in the temple service; and for this purpose he selected an extremely solitary place. A deep jungle, thick with underbrush and prickly plants, lay to the north of the temples. Used at one time as a burial ground, it was shunned by people even during the day-time for fear of ghosts. There Sri Ramakrishna began to spend the whole night in meditation, returning to his room only in the morning with eyes swollen as though from much weeping. While meditating, he would lay aside his cloth and his brahminical thread. Explaining this strange conduct, he once said to Hriday: "Don't you know that when one thinks of God one should be freed from all ties? From our very birth we have the eight fetters of hatred, shame, lineage, pride of good conduct, fear, secretiveness, caste, and grief. The sacred thread reminds me that I am a brahmin and therefore superior to all. When calling on the Mother one has to set aside all such ideas." Hriday thought his uncle was becoming insane.
As his love for God deepened, he began either to forget or to drop the formalities of worship. Sitting before the image, he would spend hours singing the devotional songs of great devotees of the Mother, such as Kamalakanta and Ramprasad. Those rhapsodical songs, describing the direct vision of God, only intensified Sri Ramakrishna's longing. He felt the pangs of a child separated from its mother. Sometimes, in agony, he would rub his face against the ground and weep so bitterly that people, thinking he had lost his earthly mother, would sympathize with him in his grief. Sometimes, in moments of scepticism, he would cry: "Art Thou true, Mother, or is it all fiction — mere poetry without any reality? If Thou dost exist, why do I not see Thee? Is religion a mere fantasy and art Thou only a figment of man's imagination?" Sometimes he would sit on the prayer carpet for two hours like an inert object. He began to behave in an abnormal manner
--
It is said that samadhi, or trance, no more than opens the portal of the spiritual realm. Sri Ramakrishna felt an unquenchable desire to enjoy God in various ways. For his meditation he built a place in the northern wooded section of the temple garden. With Hriday's help he planted there five sacred trees. The spot, known as the Panchavati, became the scene of many of his visions.
As his spiritual mood deepened he more and more felt himself to be a child of the Divine Mother. He learnt to surrender himself completely to Her will and let Her direct him.
--
Totapuri arrived at the Dakshineswar temple garden toward the end of 1864. Perhaps born in the Punjab, he was the head of a monastery in that province of India and claimed leadership of seven hundred sannyasis. Trained from early youth in the disciplines of the Advaita Vedanta, he looked upon the world as an illusion. The gods and goddesses of the dualistic worship were to him mere fantasies of the deluded mind. Prayers, ceremonies, rites, and rituals had nothing to do with true religion, and about these he was utterly indifferent. Exercising self-exertion and unshakable will-power, he had liberated himself from attachment to the sense-objects of the relative universe. For forty years he had practised austere discipline on the bank of the sacred Narmada and had finally realized his identity with the Absolute. Thenceforward he roamed in the world as an unfettered soul, a lion free from the cage. Clad in a loin-cloth, he spent his days under the canopy of the sky alike in storm and sunshine, feeding his body on the slender pittance of alms. He had been visiting the estuary of the Ganges. On his return journey along the bank of the sacred river, led by the inscrutable Divine Will, he stopped at Dakshineswar.
Totapuri, discovering at once that Sri Ramakrishna was prepared to be a student of Vedanta, asked to initiate him into its mysteries. With the permission of the Divine Mother, Sri Ramakrishna agreed to the proposal. But Totapuri explained that only a sannyasi could receive the teaching of Vedanta. Sri Ramakrishna agreed to renounce the world, but with the stipulation that the ceremony of his initiation into the monastic order be performed in secret, to spare the feelings of his old mother, who had been living with him at Dakshineswar.
--
In the burning flame before him Sri Ramakrishna performed the rituals of destroying his attachment to relatives, friends, body, mind, sense-organs, ego, and the world. The leaping flame swallowed it all, making the initiate free and pure. The sacred thread and the tuft of hair were consigned to the fire, completing his severance from caste, sex, and society. Last of all he burnt in that fire, with all that is holy as his witness, his desire for enjoyment here and hereafter. He uttered the sacred mantras giving assurance of safety and fearlessness to all beings, who were only manifestations of his own Self. The rites completed, the disciple received from the guru the loin-cloth and ochre robe, the emblems of his new life.
The teacher and the disciple repaired to the meditation room near by. Totapuri began to impart to Sri Ramakrishna the great truths of Vedanta.
--
One day, when guru and disciple were engaged in an animated discussion about Vedanta, a servant of the temple garden came there and took a coal from the sacred fire that had been lighted by the great ascetic. He wanted it to light his tobacco. Totapuri flew into a rage and was about to beat the man. Sri Ramakrishna rocked with laughter. "What a shame!" he cried. "You are explaining to me the reality of Brahman and the illusoriness of the world; yet now you have so far forgotten yourself as to be about to beat a man in a fit of passion. The power of maya is indeed inscrutable!" Totapuri was embarrassed.
About this time Totapuri was suddenly laid up with a severe attack of dysentery. On account of this miserable illness he found it impossible to meditate. One night the pain became excruciating. He could no longer concentrate on Brahman. The body stood in the way. He became incensed with its demands. A free soul, he did not at all care for the body. So he determined to drown it in the Ganges. Thereupon he walked into the river. But, lo! He walks to the other bank." (This version of the incident is taken from the biography of Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Saradananda, one of the Master's direct disciples.) Is there not enough water in the Ganges? Standing dumbfounded on the other bank he looks back across the water. The trees, the temples, the houses, are silhouetted against the sky. Suddenly, in one dazzling moment, he sees on all sides the presence of the Divine Mother. She is in everything; She is everything. She is in the water; She is on land. She is the body; She is the mind. She is pain; She is comfort. She is knowledge; She is ignorance. She is life; She is death. She is everything that one sees, hears, or imagines. She turns "yea" into "nay", and "nay" into "yea". Without Her grace no embodied being can go beyond Her realm. Man has no free will. He is not even free to die. Yet, again, beyond the body and mind She resides in Her Transcendental, Absolute aspect. She is the Brahman that Totapuri had been worshipping all his life.
--
On January 27, 1868, Mathur Babu with a party of some one hundred and twenty-five persons set out on a pilgrimage to the sacred places of northern India. At Vaidyanath in Behar, when the Master saw the inhabitants of a village reduced by poverty and starvation to mere skeletons, he requested his rich patron to feed the people and give each a piece of cloth. Mathur demurred at the added expense. The Master declared bitterly that he would not go on to Benares, but would live with the poor and share their miseries. He actually left Mathur and sat down with the villagers. Whereupon Mathur had to yield. On another occasion, two years later, Sri Ramakrishna showed a similar sentiment for the poor and needy. He accompanied Mathur on a tour to one of the latter's estates at the time of the collection of rents. For two years the harvests had failed and the tenants were in a state of extreme poverty. The Master asked Mathur to remit their rents, distribute help to them, and in addition give the hungry people a sumptuous feast. When Mathur grumbled, the Master said: "You are only the steward of the Divine Mother. They are the Mother's tenants. You must spend the Mother's money. When they are suffering, how can you refuse to help them? You must help them." Again Mathur had to give in. Sri Ramakrishna's sympathy for the poor sprang from his perception of God in all created beings. His sentiment was not that of the humanist or philanthropist. To him the service of man was the same as the worship of God.
The party entered holy Benares by boat along the Ganges. When Sri Ramakrishna's eyes fell on this city of Siva, where had accumulated for ages the devotion and piety of countless worshippers, he saw it to be made of gold, as the scriptures declare. He was visibly moved. During his stay in the city he treated every particle of its earth with utmost respect. At the Manikarnika Ghat, the great cremation ground of the city, he actually saw Siva, with ash-covered body and tawny matted hair, serenely approaching each funeral pyre and breathing into the ears of the corpses the mantra of liberation; and then the Divine Mother removing from the dead their bonds. Thus he realized the significance of the scriptural statement that anyone dying in Benares attains salvation through the grace of Siva. He paid a visit to Trailanga Swami, the celebrated monk, whom he later declared to be a real paramahamsa, a veritable image of Siva.
--
From Vrindavan the Master had brought a handful of dust. Part of this he scattered in the Panchavati; the rest he buried in the little hut where he had practised meditation. "Now this place", he said, "is as sacred as Vrindavan."
In 1870 the Master went on a pilgrimage to Nadia, the birth-place of Sri Chaitanya. As the boat by which he travelled approached the sand-bank close to Nadia, Sri Ramakrishna had a vision of the "two brothers", Sri Chaitanya and his companion Nityananda, "bright as molten gold" and with haloes, rushing to greet him with uplifted hands. "There they come! There they come!" he cried. They entered his body and he went into a deep trance.
--
Sri Ramakrishna, dressed in a red-bordered dhoti, one end of which was carelessly thrown over his left shoulder, came to Jaygopal's garden house accompanied by Hriday. No one took notice of the unostentatious visitor. Finally the Master said to Keshab, "People tell me you have seen God; so I have come to hear from you about God." A magnificent conversation followed. The Master sang a thrilling song about Kali and forthwith went into samadhi. When Hriday uttered the sacred "Om" in his ears, he gradually came back to consciousness of the world, his face still radiating a divine brilliance. Keshab and his followers were amazed. The contrast between Sri Ramakrishna and the Brahmo devotees was very interesting. There sat this small man, thin and extremely delicate. His eyes were illumined with an inner light. Good humour gleamed in his eyes and lurked in the corners of his mouth. His speech was Bengali of a homely kind with a slight, delightful stammer, and his words held men enthralled by their wealth of spiritual experience, their inexhaustible store of simile and metaphor, their power of observation, their bright and subtle humour, their wonderful catholicity, their ceaseless flow of wisdom. And around him now were the sophisticated men of Bengal, the best products of Western education, with Keshab, the idol of young Bengal, as their leader.
Keshab's sincerity was enough for Sri Ramakrishna. Henceforth the two saw each other frequently, either at Dakshineswar or at the temple of the Brahmo Samaj. Whenever the Master was in the temple at the time of divine service, Keshab would request him to speak to the congregation. And Keshab would visit the saint, in his turn, with offerings of flowers and fruits.
--
While the devotees were returning to the garden house, carrying the urn with the sacred ashes, a calm resignation came to their souls and they cried, "Victory unto the Guru!"
The Holy Mother was weeping in her room, not for her husband, but because she felt that Mother Kali had left her. As she was about to put on the marks of a Hindu widow, in a moment of revelation she heard the words of faith, "I have only passed from one room to another."
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
a practice which might be called sacred prostitution.
In the common practice of meditation the idea is to
--
the sacred writings.
It is useless to enquire into His nature; to do so leads
--
stag of a mystical or sacred nature.
The Stag-beetle must not be identified with the one
--
the point of the sacred lance into the Holy Grail, is
distinguished from its misinterpretation by modern
01.01 - The Symbol Dawn, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A sacred yearning lingered in its trace,
The worship of a Presence and a Power
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the Animal browses in the sacred fence
And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
On the heart's altar dim the sacred fire.
An old pull of subconscious cords renews;
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In an age when Reason was considered as the highest light given to man, Tagore pointed to the Vision of the mystics as always the still greater light; when man was elated with undreamt-of worldly success, puffed up with incomparable material possessions and powers, Tagore's voice rang clear and emphatic in tune with the cry of the ancients: "What shall I do with all this mass of things, if I am not made immortal by that?" When men, in their individual as well as collective egoism, were scrambling for earthly gains and hoards, he held before them vaster and cleaner horizons, higher and deeper ways of being and living, maintained the sacred sense of human solidarity, the living consciousness of the Divine, one and indivisible. When the Gospel of Power had all but hypnotised men's minds, and Superman or God-man came to be equated with the Titan, Tagore saw through the falsehood and placed in front and above all the old-world eternal verities of love and self-giving, harmony and mutuality, sweetness and light. When pessimism, cynicism, agnosticism struck the major chord of human temperament, and grief and frustration and death and decay were taken as a matter of course to be the inevitable order of earthlylifebhasmantam idam shariramhe continued to sing the song of the Rishis that Ananda and Immortality are the breath of things, the birth right of human beings. When Modernism declared with a certitude never tobe contested that Matter is Brahman, Tagore said with the voice of one who knows that Spirit is Brahman.
Tagore is in direct line with those bards who have sung of the Spirit, who always soared high above the falsehoods and uglinesses of a merely mundane life and lived in the undecaying delights and beauties of a diviner consciousness. Spiritual reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis, under the figure or mode of eternity. Well, Tagore can be said to see things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats indeed spoke of truth being beauty and beauty truth. But there is a great difference in the outlook and inner experience. A worshipper of beauty, unless he rises to the Upanishadic norm, is prone to become sensuous and pagan. Keats was that, Kalidasa was that, even Shelley was not far different. The spiritual vein in all these poets remains secondary. In the old Indian master, it is part of his intellectual equipment, no doubt, but nothing much more than that. In the other two it comes in as strange flashes from an unknown country, as a sort of irruption or on the peak of the poetic afflatus or enthousiasmos.
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And there the tables of the sacred Law,
There is the Book of Being's index page;
01.06 - On Communism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Against this tyranny of the group, this absolute rule of the collective will, the human mind rose in revolt and the result was Individualism. For whatever may be the truth and necessity of the Collective, the Individual is no less true and necessary. The individual has his own law and urge of being and his own secret godhead. The collective godhead derides the individual godhead at its peril. The first movement of the reaction, however, was a run to the other extremity; a stern collectivism gave birth to an intransigent individualism. The individual is sacred and inviolable, cost what it may. It does not matter what sort of individuality one seeks, it is enough if the thing is there. So the doctrine of individualism has come to set a premium on egoism and on forces that are disruptive of all social bonds. Each and every individual has the inherent right, which is also a duty, to follow his own impetus and impulse. Society is nothing but the battle ground for competing individualities the strongest survive and the weakest go to the wall. Association and co-operation are instruments that the individual may use and utilise for his own growth and development but in the main they act as deterrents rather than as aids to the expression and expansion of his characteristic being. In reality, however, if we probe sufficiently deep into the matter we find that there is no such thing as corporate life and activity; what appears as such is only a camouflage for rigorous competition; at the best, there maybe only an offensive and defensive alliancehumanity fights against nature, and within humanity itself group fights against group and in the last analysis, within the group, the individual fights against the individual. This is the ultimate Law-the Dharma of creation.
Now, what such an uncompromising individualism fails to recognise is that individuality and ego are not the same thing, that the individual may have his individuality intact and entire and yet sacrifice his ego, that the soul of man is a much greater thing than his vital being. It is simply ignoring the fact and denying the truth to say that man is only a fighting animal and not a loving god, that the self within the individual realises itself only through competition and not co-operation. It is an error to conceive of society as a mere parallelogram of forces, to suppose that it has risen simply out of the struggle of individual interests and continues to remain by that struggle. Struggle is only one aspect of the thing, a particular form at a particular stage, a temporary manifestation due to a particular system and a particular habit and training. It would be nearer the truth to say that society came into being with the demand of the individual soul to unite with the individual soul, with the stress of an Over-soul to express itself in a multitude of forms, diverse yet linked together and organised in perfect harmony. Only, the stress for union manifested itself first on the material plane as struggle: but this is meant to be corrected and transcended and is being continually corrected and transcended by a secret harmony, a real commonality and brotherhood and unity. The individual is not so self-centred as the individualists make him to be, his individuality has a much vaster orbit and fulfils itself only by fulfilling others. The scientists have begun to discover other instincts in man than those of struggle and competition; they now place at the origin of social grouping an instinct which they name the herd-instinct: but this is only a formulation in lower terms, a translation on the vital plane of a higher truth and reality the fundamental oneness and accord of individuals and their spiritual impulsion to unite.
0 1958-09-19, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Something the modern world has completely lost is the sense of the sacred.
Ever since my childhood, I have spent my time veiling myself: one veil over another veil over another veil, so as to remain invisible. Because to see me without the true attitude is the great sin. Anyway, sin in the sense Sri Aurobindo defines itmeaning that things are no longer in their place.
0 1962-03-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I was speaking about newspapers and magazines and the outside world. I said, I dont want the outside world to scoff at something sacred. Thats all.
Of course.
0 1963-01-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Ive had this experience even just recently. All that comes to me from people who have dedicated their lives to spiritual life, people who do a yoga in the traditional way, who are very solemn, who see adversaries everywhere, obstacles everywhere, taboos everywhere, prohibitions everywhere, oh, how they complicate life and how far they are from the Divine! I saw this the other day with someone you know. With that kind of people, you should not do this, should not do that, should not At such and such time you must not do this, on such and such day you must not do that; you should not eat this, you should not And then, for heavens sake, dont you go mixing your daily life with your sacred life!thats how you dig an abyss.
Its the exact, exact opposite of what I feel now: no matter what happens something wrong in the body, something wrong with people, something wrong in circumstancesinstantly, the first movement: O my sweet Lord, my Beloved! And I laugh! And then all is well. I did this the other day (its spontaneous and instantaneous, it isnt thought out or willed or plannednone of itit just happens), it happened the other day (I dont recall the details but it was over a circumstance that hardly seemed sacred): I saw myself, and I started laughing. I said, But look! I dont need to be serious, I dont need to be solemn!
As soon as it comes (Mother makes a solemn face), I get suspicious, I say to myself, Oh, something is wrong, some influence or other must have entered the atmosphere that shouldnt be there. All that remorse, all that regret, all that ooh! The sense of indignity, of fault and, going a little farther, the sense of sinoh, that! That seems to me to belong to another age, a Dark Age.
0 1963-01-30, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
0 1965-09-18, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The fight in which we are engaged is not like the wars of old in which when the King or leader fell, the army fled. The King whom we follow to the war today is our own Motherland, the sacred and imperishable; the leader of our onward march is the Almighty Himself.
May 11, 1907
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So what should be done there (and what I am trying to do) is the same work of receptive silence and to let inspiration, the inspirational consciousness, gather the necessary elements. For that we must be very tranquil. We must be very supple, in the sense of surrendered; I mean, allow as little habitual activity as possible to mix inbe almost like an automaton. But with the full perception of the consciousness trying to be expressed, so that nothing gets mixed in with it. Thats the most important thing: to receive this consciousness and hold it like really like something sacred, without anything getting mixed in with it, like that. So then, there is a problem of attraction, we could say, and of concretization in the formula.4 I always tell myself that if I knew many languages, it would make use of all that; unfortunately I know only two (I know only two thoroughly) and I have only very superficial and minimal glimpses of two or three others thats not enough. Only, I have been in contact with very different methods: the method of the Far East and the Sanskrit method, and of course the methods of the West. It does give a sort of base, but its not sufficient I am at the opposite extreme from erudition. I have always felt that erudition shrivels up thoughtit parches the brain. (But I have great respect for scholars, oh! indeed, and I seek their advice, but for myself it wont do!)
Once, very long ago, when Sri Aurobindo was telling me about himself, that is, of his childhood, his education, I put the question to him, I asked him, Why am I, as an individual being, so mediocre? I can do anything; all that I have tried to do I have done, but never in a superior way: always like this (gesture to an average level). Then he answered me (at the time I took it as a kindness or commiseration), Thats because it gives great supplenessa great suppleness and a vast scope; because those who have perfection are concentrated and specialized. As I said, I took it simply like a caress to comfort a child. But now I realize that the most important thing is not to have any fixity: nothing should be set, definitive, like the sense of a perfection in the realization that puts a total stop to the forward march. The sense of incapacity (with the meaning I said of mediocrity, of something by no means exceptional) leaves you in a sort of expectation (gesture of aspiration upward) of something better. And then, the most important thing is supplenesssuppleness, suppleness. Suppleness and breadth: reject nothing as useless or bad or inferiornothing; set nothing up as really superior and beautifulnothing. Remain ever open, ever open.
0 1969-07-26, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And there the tables of the sacred Law.
The symbol powers of number and of form,
0 1971-12-27, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
A disciple in America had sent a cartoon published in an American newspaper showing Bangladesh (East Pakistan) bloody and gored by the horns of a furious Indian sacred cow, equipped with Soviet weapons. When the drawing was shown to Mother by Sujata, she angrily rejected it, sweeping it off her knees: Take it away. Then, a few moments later, she asked for the drawing back, took a pen and wrote across the drawing: This is disgustingly untrue, the way one performs an occult act to destroy or neutralize something.
***
02.02 - Rishi Dirghatama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo says: "In the deep and mystic style of the Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra as in Vashishtha's even harmonies we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates."
Rig Veda, 1. 164. 5.
02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Then sinks the sacred orgy of delight,
The blaze of passion and the tide of power
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her worshippers proclaim her sacred right.
A red-tiaraed Falsehood they revere,
02.07 - The Descent into Night, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A table seemed of high Heaven's sacred code.
A formal practice mailed and iron-shod
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Once a companion of the sacred Fire,
The mortal perishes to God and Light,
--
In the vacant precincts of the sacred Fire,
In front of the reredos in the mystic rite
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A sacred legacy from the great dead past
Or the one road that God has made for life,
03.01 - The Pursuit of the Unknowable, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And cannot fill the spirit's sacred thirst.
Although of One these forms of greatness are
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
THEN suddenly there rose a sacred stir.
Amid the lifeless silence of the Void
03.06 - The Pact and its Sanction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The government in modern times represents indeed the executive power of the nation, itself is composed of the three social elements we speak of. First of all, the high or top-ranking officials, as they are called, who can think out and initiate a policy; next, the intermediate services who form the dynamic limb of the organism; lastly, there is the rung of the subordinate services. Here too the difficulty is with the intermediate grade. It is there that the "disaffected" are born and breddisaffected not because of grievances or injustices done, but because of the urge of ideals and purposes, ideas and designs. The subordinate manpostman, railwayman, clerk, school master, daily labourerhas no ambitions, is not tortured by nostalgic notions: left to themselves, these people accommodate themselves to circumstances and take things as they come without worrying too much. But the point is that they are never left to themselves. It is told to themnot without reason, though that they do not live, they vegetate: they are dead, otherwise they would be living and kicking. The rousing of the masses has always been the sacred mission of all reformers and saviours of humanity. For they form the bulk of humanity and its future is bound up with their destiny.
The whole difficulty centres upon the question: who rouses whom, and what is the principle that is meant to rouse. There is a slogan that incited the Red Terror of the French Revolution; there is the other one which inspired the Nazis; there is still another one rampant that had the seal and sanction of Stalin and his politburo. These have spread their dark wings and covered the saviour light. On the other hand, the voice of the Vedic Rishi that hymned the community of faith and speech and act, the kindly light that Buddha carried to suffering humanity, the love and sacrifice of Christ showing and embleming the way of redemption, the saints and sages in our own epoch who have visioned the ideal of human unity in a divine humanity, even secular leaders who labour for "one world", "a brave new world"all point to the other line of growth and development that man can follow and must and shall follow. The choice has to be made and the right direction given. In India today, there are these two voices put against each other and clear in their call: one asks for unity and harmony, wideness and truth, the other its contrary working for separativeness, disintegration, narrowness, and make-believe and falsehood. One must have the courage and the sagacity to fix one's loyalty and adhesion.
04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
A mediating ray had touched the earth
04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But like a sacred symbol's was that cult.
Admired, unsought, intangible to the grasp
04.03 - The Call to the Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A gold-leaf palimpsest of sacred births,
A grave world-symbol chiselled out of life.
05.03 - Satyavan and Savitri, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And hear her wisdom in thy sacred voice.
The child of the Void shall be reborn in God,
--
And the mutter of the priest-wind's sacred verse,
Amid the choral whispering of the leaves
05.28 - God Protects, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Have life and property then no value in the eye of God? To the divine consciousness are these things mere my, transient objects of ignorance, ties that bind the soul to earth and have to be cut away and thrown behind? We at least do not hold that opinion. We hold that life and property are valuable, they are significant: they become so in reference to the individual who has them. The life that is dedicated to the Divine, the life that is in some way connected with the higher consciousness, through which something of the world of light and delight comes down into our mortality acquires a special worth and naturally calls for divine protection. Likewise the property placed at the service of the Divine, which is used as an instrument for the Divine's own work upon earth, the Divine will surely protect, for it is then part of his grandeur and glory, aishwarya. Life and property become indeed sacred and inviolable when they are put at the disposal of the Divine for his use in the fulfilment of the cosmic design. As we know, life and property under present conditions upon earth are possessions of the undivine forces, they are weapons through which God's enemies hold sway over earth. Therefore life and property that seek to be on God's side run a great risk, they are in the domain of the hostiles and therefore need special protection. The Divine extends that protection, but under conditions for his rule in the material field is not yet absolute. The Asura too extends his protection to his agents, and his protection appears sometimes, if not often, more effective; for the present world is under his domination and all forces and beings obey him; God and the godly have to admit his terms and work out their design on that basis.
The conditions under which the Divine's protection can come are simple enough, but difficult to fulfil completely and thoroughly. The ideal conditions that ensure absolute safety are an absolute trust and reliance on the Divine Force, a tranquillity and fearlessness that nothing shakes, .whatever the appearances at the moment, the spirit and attitude of an unreserved self-giving that whatever one is and one has is God's. Between that perfect state at the peak of consciousness and the doubting and hesitant and timid mind at the lower end that of St. Peter, forexample, at his weakest moment there are various gradations of the conditions fulfilled and the protection given is variable accordingly. Not that the Divine Grace acts or has to act according to any such hard and fast rule of mechanics, there is no such mathematical Law of Protection in the scheme of Providence. And yet on the whole and generally speaking Providence, Divine Intervention, acts more or less successfully according to the degree of the soul's wakefulness on the plane that needs and possesses the protection.
06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Armoured with love and faith and sacred joy,
A traveller to the Eternal's house,
07.03 - The Entry into the Inner Countries, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The sacred Book lay on its sanctified desk
Wrapped in interpretation's silken strings:
07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A sacred darkness brooded now within,
The world was a deep darkness great and nude.
--
Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,
The air trembled with passion and delight.
--
The mystic cavern in the sacred hill
And knew the dwelling of her secret soul.
--
A sacred beast lay prone below her feet,
528
--
Made life and body mirrors of sacred joy
And all the emotions gave themselves to God.
09.02 - The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And made his sacred floor my human heart.
My God is will and triumphs in his paths,
10.02 - The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This sacred legend and immortal myth?
It is a conscious yearning of thy flesh,
10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But for his work and mine, our sacred charge.
Our lives are God's messengers beneath the stars;
1.009 - Perception and Reality, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Here we go to a realm where the revelations of the ancient masters, which are embodied in the sacred scriptures, become our guide. Otherwise we shall be blind we will know nothing. The great masters who are the Gurus of mankind, who had plumbed the depths of being and had vision of the cosmic mystery, tell us something which the intellect cannot explain inductively, logically or scientifically. Our individual existence is caused by something which is prior to the manifestation of individuality and, therefore, let not the individual intellect interfere with this subject.
The masters, whose records we have in such scriptures as the Upanishads, for example, tell us that there is a cosmic mystery behind this operation of individuality namely, the diversification of the Comic Principle. We cannot ask as to why it happened, because the intellect is interfering here. We are asking the reason why the intellect is there at all, and why individuality is there at all. That question cannot be asked because this intellect is an effect of individuality, and now we are trying to find the cause thereof. "Unbridled intellect is an obstacle," says Sankara in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, because the intellect will insist that there is diversity. It will oblige us to accept that individuality is real, objects are real, our relationships to them must be real, and so forth. So we should not take the advice of the intellect hereafter. The mystery of cosmic manifestation, which is the diversification of the cosmic principle, is regarded as the controlling principle behind the existence and the functioning of the individual.
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
777 is practically unpurchaseable: copies fetch 10 or so. Nearly all important correspondences are in Magick Table I. The other 2 books are being sent at once. "Working out games with numbers." I am sorry you should see no more than this. When you are better equipped, you will see that the Qabalah is the best (and almost the only) means by which an intelligence can identify himself. And Gematria methods serve to discover spiritual truths. Numbers are the network of the structure of the Universe, and their relations the form of expression of our Understanding of it.*[G1] In Greek and Hebrew there is no other way of writing numbers; our 1, 2, 3 etc. comes from the Phoenicians through the Arabs. You need no more of Greek and Hebrew than these values, some sacred words knowledge grows by use and books of reference.
One cannot set a pupil definite tasks beyond the groundwork I am giving you, and we should find this correspondence taking clear shape of its own accord. You have really more than you can do already. And I can only tell you what the right tasks out of hundreds are by your own reactions to your own study and practice.
1.00b - INTRODUCTION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning of the sacred words. For this reason, when
selecting material to illustrate the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy, as they were
1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In reality, magic is a sacred science, it is, in the very true sense the sum of all knowledge because it teaches how to know and utilize the sovereign rules. There is no difference between magic and mystic or any other conception of the name. Wherever au thentic initiatio n is at stake, one has to proceed on the same basis, according to the same rules, irrespective of the name given by this or that creed. Considering the universal polarity rules of good and evil, active and passive, light and shadow, each science can serve good as well as bad purposes. Let us take the example of a knife, an object that virtually ought to be used for cutting bread only, which, however, can become a dangerous weapon in the hands of a murderer. All depends on the character of the individual. This principle goes just as well for all the spheres of the occult sciences. In my book I have chosen the term of magician for all of my disciples, it being a symbol of the deepest initiation and the highest wisdom.
Many of the readers will know, of course, that the word tarot does not mean a game of cards, serving mantical purposes, but a symbolic book of initiation which contains the greatest secrets in a symbolic form. The first tablet of this book introduces the magician representing him as the master of the elements and offering the key to the first Arcanum, the secret of the ineffable name of Tetragrammaton*, the quabbalistic
--
*Tetragrammaton literally means the four-letter word. It was a subterfuge to avoid the sin of uttering the sacred name YHVH (Yahveh) or Jehova as it later became when the vowels of another word were combined with the consonants of YHVH.
But I would never dare to say that my book describes or deals with all the magic or mystic problems. If anyone should like to write all about this sublime wisdom, he ought to fill folio volumes. It can, however, be affirmed positively that this work is indeed the gate to the true initiation, the first key to using the universal rules. I am not going to deny the fact of fragments being able to be found in many an authors publications, but not in a single book will the reader find so exact a description of the first Tarot card.
--
Therefore only people endowed with exceptional faculties, a poor preferred minority seemed to be able to gain this sublime knowledge. Thus a great many of serious seekers of the truth had to go through piles of books just to catch one pearl of it now and again. The one, however, who is earnestly interested in his progress and does not pursue this sacred wisdom from sheer curiosity or else is yearning to satisfy his own lust, will find the right leader to initiate him in this book. No incarnate adept, however high his rank may be, can give the disciple more for his start than the present book does. If both the honest trainee and the attentive reader will find in this book all they have been searching for in vain all the years, then the book has fulfiled its purpose completely.
The Author.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
In the Planet. In the planet there will be found a similar organ or receiver within its etheric body, the locality of which is not for exoteric publication and cannot therefore be revealed. It is connected with the location of the two poles, north and south, and is the centre around which the globe rotates, and is the source of the legend of a sacred fertile land within the sphere of polar influences. The mythic land of exceeding fertility, of abundant [84] luxuriance, and of phenomenal growth, vegetable, animal and human would naturally lie where prana is received. It is the esoteric Garden of Eden, the land of physical perfection. Surface radiation demonstrates, after distribution, as planetary prana.
In Man. The organ of reception is the spleen through its etheric counterpart. After distribution over the entire body via the etheric network it demonstrates in surface radiation as the health aura.
--
Again in the solar system itself similar action will eventuate at the close of a Mahamanvantara. The Logos will withdraw within Himself, abstracting His three major principles. [xxxvii]37 His body of manifestation the Sun [87] and the seven sacred Planets, all existing in etheric matterwill withdraw from objectivity and become obscured. From the usual physical standpoint, the light of the system will go out. This will be succeeded by a gradual inbreathing until He shall have gathered all unto Himself; the etheric will cease to exist, and the web will be no more. Full consciousness will be achieved, and in the moment of achievement existence or entified manifestation will cease. All will be reabsorbed within the Absolute; pralaya, [xxxviii]38 or the cosmic heaven of rest will then ensue, and the Voice of the Silence will be heard no more. The reverberations of the WORD will die away, and the "Silence of the High Places" will reign supreme.
II. THE NATURE OF PRANA
--
The etheric web is composed of the intricate weaving of this vitalised cord, and apart from the seven centres [99] within the web (which correspond to the sacred centres, and of which the spleen is frequently counted as one) it has the two above mentioned, which makewith the spleena triangle of activity. The etheric web of the solar system is of an analogous nature, and likewise has its three receptive centres for cosmic prana. The mysterious band in the heavens, which we call the Milky Way, (S. D. II.250) is closely connected with cosmic prana, or that cosmic vitality or nourishment which vitalises the solar etheric system.
2. The assimilator of prana.
--
Viewed from the planetary standpoint the same conditions will be perceived, and the etheric planetary body [105] (which is fundamentally the body in the case of the sacred planets, of which the Earth is not one) will have its functional disorders, which will affect its reception of prana, will suffer its organic troubles which may affect its distribution, and those disorders which permit of trouble in the etheric web, which forms the ring-pass-not for the involved planetary Spirit. Here I would point out that in the case of the planetary Spirits Who are on the divine evolutionary arc, the Heavenly Men Whose bodies are planets, the etheric web does not form a barrier, but (like the Karmic Lords on a higher plane) They have freedom of movement outside the bounds of the planetary web within the circumference of the solar ring-pass-not. [xlvii]46
Again from the systemic standpoint, these same effects may be observed, functionally, this time in connection with the cosmic centre; organically, in connection with the sum total of the planetary systems; and statically, in connection with the solar or logoic ring-pass-not.
--
This fourth earth chain is in this connection one of the most important, for it is the appointed place for the domination of the etheric body by the human monad, with the aim in view of both human and planetary escape from limitations. This earth chain, though not one of the seven sacred planetary chains, is of vital importance at this time to the planetary Logos, who temporarily employs it as a medium of incarnation, and of expression. This fourth round finds the solution of its strenuous and chaotic life in the very simple fact of the shattering of [115] the etheric web in order to effect liberation, and permit a later and more adequate form to be employed.
A further chain of ideas may be followed up in the remembrance that the fourth ether is even now being studied and developed by the average scientist, and is already somewhat harnessed to the service of man; that the fourth subplane of the astral plane is the normal functioning ground of the average man and that in this round escape from the etheric vehicle is being achieved; that the fourth subplane of the mental plane is the present goal of endeavor of one-fourth of the human family; that the fourth manvantara will see the solar ring-pass-not offering avenues of escape to those who have reached the necessary point; that the four planetary Logoi will perfect Their escape from Their planetary environment, and will function with greater ease on the cosmic astral plane, paralleling on cosmic levels the achievement of the human units who are the cells in Their bodies.
--
k. It is to be observed that just as in man the dense physical body in its three gradesdense, liquid and gaseousis not recognised as a principle, so in the cosmic sense the physical (dense) astral (liquid) and mental (gaseous) levels are likewise regarded as non-existing, and the solar system has its location on the fourth ether. The seven sacred planets are composed of matter of this fourth ether, and the seven Heavenly Men, whose bodies they are, function normally on the fourth plane of the system, the buddhic or the fourth cosmic ether. When man has attained the consciousness of the buddhic plane, he has raised his consciousness to that of the Heavenly Man in whose body he is a cell. This is achieved at the fourth Initiation, the liberating initiation. At the fifth Initiation he ascends with the Heavenly Man on to the fifth plane (from the human standpoint), the atmic, and at the sixth he has dominated the second cosmic ether and has monadic consciousness and continuity of function. At the seventh Initiation he dominates the entire sphere of matter contained in the lowest cosmic plane, escapes from all etheric contact, and functions on the cosmic astral plane.
The past solar system saw the surmounting of the three lowest cosmic physical planes viewed from the matter standpoint and the co-ordination of the dense threefold physical form in which all life is found, dense matter, liquid matter, gaseous matter. A correspondence may be seen here in the work achieved in the first three rootraces. [lviii]56, [lix]57
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
c. On the fourth etheric physical plane, where the sacred planets, the dense bodies in etheric matter of the Heavenly Men, are to be found.
DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES - Part 2
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"The secret of the Fire lies hid in the second letter of the sacred Word. The mystery of life is concealed within the heart. When the lower point vibrates, when the sacred Triangle glows, when the point, the middle centre, and the apex likewise burn, then the two triangles the greater and the lessermerge with one flame which burneth up the whole."
"The fire within the lesser fire findeth its progress much impelled when the circle of the moving and the unmoving, of the lesser wheel within the greater wheel that moveth not in Time, findeth a twofold outlet; it then shineth with the glory of the twofold One and of His sixfold brother. Fohat rusheth through space. He searcheth for his complement. [173] The breath of the unmoving one, and the fire of the One Who seeth the whole from the beginning rush to meet each other, and the unmoving becomes the sphere of activity."
--
a. Hearing. This, very appropriately, is the first sense to be manifested; the first aspect of manifestation is that of sound, and necessarily therefore we would expect sound to be the first thing noticed by man on the physical plane, the plane of densest manifestation, and of the most marked effects of sound, regarding it as a creating factor. Pre-eminently the physical plane is the plane of hearing and hence the sense ascribed to the lowest plane of evolution, and of each of the five planes. On this seventh or lowest plane man has to come to full cognisance of the effect of the sacred Word as it is in process of sounding forth. As it reverberates throughout the system, it drives matter into its appointed place, and on the physical plane finds its point of deepest materiality and of most concrete demonstration. The key for man to discover and turn, concerns itself with the revealing of the mystery of:
a. His own sound.
1.00f - DIVISION F - THE LAW OF ECONOMY, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
This Law of Economy has several subsidiary laws which govern its effects on the different grades of matter. As said before, this is the Law swept into action by the sounds as uttered by the Logos. The sacred Word, or the uttered Sound of the Creator, exists in different forms, and though in reality but one Word, has several syllables. The syllables all together form a solar [217] phrase; separated they form certain words of power, producing different effects. [xciv] 92
The great WORD that peals through one hundred years of Brahma or persists in reverberation throughout a solar system, is the sacred sound of A U M. In differentiation and as heard in time and space, each of those three mystic letters stands for the first letter of a subsidiary phrase, consisting of various sounds. One letter, with a sequence of four sounds, makes up the vibration or note of Brahma, which is the intelligence aspect dominant in matter. Hence the mystery hidden in [218] the pentagon, in the fifth principle of mind, and in the five planes of human evolution. These five letters when sounded forth on the right note, give the key to the true inwardness of matter and also to its control,this control being based on the right interpretation of the Law of Economy.
Another phrase, this time of seven letters, or a letter for each of the seven Heavenly Men, embodies the sound or note of the Vishnu aspect, the second aspect logoic, the form-building aspect. By its correct or partial sounding, by its complete or incomplete reverberation, are the forms built and adapted. The Law of Attraction finds expression in the manipulation of matter and its welding into form for the use of Spirit.
1.00 - Introduction to Alchemy of Happiness, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
"Ghazzali," says Tholuck, "if ever any man have deserved the name, was truly a divine, and he may justly he placed on a level with Origen, so remarkable was he for learning and ingenuity, and gifted with such a rare faculty for the skillful and worthy exposition of doctrine. All that is good, noble and sublime, which his great soul had compassed, he bestowed upon Mohammedanism; and he adorned the doctrines of the Koran with so much piety and learning, that, in the form given them by him, they seem in my opinion worthy the assent of Christians. Whatsoever was most excellent in the philosophy of Aristotle or in the Soofi mysticism, he discreetly adapted to the Mohammedan theology. From every school, he sought the [8] means of shedding light and honor upon religion; while his sincere piety and lofty conscientiousness imparted to all his writings a sacred majesty. He was the first of Mohammedan divines." (Bibliotheca Sacra, vi, 233).
Sale, in the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Koran, shows that he had discovered the peculiar traits of Ghazzali's mind; for wherever he gives an explanation of the Mussulman creed, peculiarly consonant to universal reason and opposed to superstition, it will be found that he quotes from him.1
1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
The Lord hath ordained that those of you who are able shall make pilgrimage to the sacred House, and from this He hath exempted women as a mercy on His part. He, of a truth, is the All-Bountiful, the Most Generous.
33
--
Exile and imprisonment are decreed for the thief, and, on the third offence, place ye a mark upon his brow so that, thus identified, he may not be accepted in the cities of God and His countries. Beware lest, through compassion, ye neglect to carry out the statutes of the religion of God; do that which hath been bidden you by Him Who is compassionate and merciful. We school you with the rod of wisdom and laws, like unto the father who educateth his son, and this for naught but the protection of your own selves and the elevation of your stations. By My life, were ye to discover what We have desired for you in revealing Our holy laws, ye would offer up your very souls for this sacred, this mighty, and most exalted Faith.
46
--
To none is it permitted to mutter sacred verses before the public gaze as he walketh in the street or marketplace; nay rather, if he wish to magnify the Lord, it behoveth him to do so in such places as have been erected for this purpose, or in his own home. This is more in keeping with sincerity and godliness. Thus hath the sun of Our commandment shone forth above the horizon of Our utterance. Blessed, then, be those who do Our bidding.
109
--
Ye have been forbidden in the Book of God to engage in contention and conflict, to strike another, or to commit similar acts whereby hearts and souls may be saddened. A fine of nineteen mithqals of gold had formerly been prescribed by Him Who is the Lord of all mankind for anyone who was the cause of sadness to another; in this Dispensation, however, He hath absolved you thereof and exhorteth you to show forth righteousness and piety. Such is the commandment which He hath enjoined upon you in this resplendent Tablet. Wish not for others what ye wish not for yourselves; fear God, and be not of the prideful. Ye are all created out of water, and unto dust shall ye return. Reflect upon the end that awaiteth you, and walk not in the ways of the oppressor. Give ear unto the verses of God which He Who is the sacred Lote-Tree reciteth unto you. They are assuredly the infallible balance, established by God, the Lord of this world and the next. Through them the soul of man is caused to wing its flight towards the Dayspring of Revelation, and the heart of every true believer is suffused with light. Such are the laws which God hath enjoined upon you, such His commandments prescribed unto you in His Holy Tablet; obey them with joy and gladness, for this is best for you, did ye but know.
149
Recite ye the verses of God every morn and eventide. Whoso faileth to recite them hath not been faithful to the Covenant of God and His Testament, and whoso turneth away from these holy verses in this Day is of those who throughout eternity have turned away from God. Fear ye God, O My servants, one and all. Pride not yourselves on much reading of the verses or on a multitude of pious acts by night and day; for were a man to read a single verse with joy and radiance it would be better for him than to read with lassitude all the Holy Books of God, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting. Read ye the sacred verses in such measure that ye be not overcome by languor and despondency. Lay not upon your souls that which will weary them and weigh them down, but rather what will lighten and uplift them, so that they may soar on the wings of the Divine verses towards the Dawning-place of His manifest signs; this will draw you nearer to God, did ye but comprehend.
150
1.00 - Preface, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Should there be those who are so unfortunate as to possess no such sacred sanctuary of their own, one builded with their own hands, I humbly offer this well-tended garden of Pomegranates which has been bequea thed to me. I hope that therein may be gathered a few little shoots, a rare flower or two, or some ripe fruit which may serve as the nucleus or the wherewithal for the planting of such a secret garden of the mind, without which there is no peace, nor joy, nor happiness.
It is fitting that a note of appreciation to my predecessors in Qabalistic research should accompany this work, in which I have endeavoured to present an exposition of the basic principles underlying the Qabalah, to serve as a text- book for its study. I have scrupulously avoided contention and unnecessary controversy.
10.11 - Savitri, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the creation of white-breasts-aura in sacred luxury 6
White thinness uncovered on the cover
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
they were in possession as very sacred and secret things,
not to be disclosed to the unfit who would misunderstand,
--
itself. More than that, all human activity whether sacred
or secular (which is really a modern distinction) was to
1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the sacred Established Order, the immobilists forbid the earth to
move. Nothing changes, they say or can change. The raft must drift
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
i Tribal lore is always sacred and dangerous. All esoteric teach-
ings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche,
--
images. Their temples and their sacred writings proclaim in
image and word the doctrine hallowed from of old, making it
--
made a breach in the protective wall of sacred images, and since
then one image after another has crumbled away. They became
1.01 - BOOK THE FIRST, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
From sacred oracles they seek relief;
And to Cephysus' brook their way pursue:
--
And be the sacred guardian of the gate.
Secure from thunder, and unharm'd by Jove,
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
N ANCIENT times the Veda was revered as a sacred book
of wisdom, a great mass of inspired poetry, the work of
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There can be no doubt that in the beginning there was a worship of the Powers of the physical world, the Sun, Moon, Heaven and Earth, Wind, Rain and Storm etc., the sacred Rivers and a number of Gods who presided over the workings of Nature.
That was the general aspect of the ancient worship in Greece, Rome, India and among other ancient peoples. But in all these countries these gods began to assume a higher, a psychological function; Pallas Athene who may have been originally a Dawn-Goddess springing in flames from the head of Zeus, the Sky-God, Dyaus of the Veda, has in classical Greece a higher function and was identified by the Romans with their Minerva, the Goddess of learning and wisdom; similarly, Saraswati, a river Goddess, becomes in India the goddess of wisdom, learning and the arts and crafts: all the Greek deities have undergone a change in this direction - Apollo, the Sun-God, has become a god of poetry and prophecy, Hephaestus the Fire-God a divine smith, god of labour. In India the process was arrested half-way, and the Vedic Gods developed their psychological functions but retained more fixedly their external character and for higher purposes gave place to a new pantheon. They had to give precedence to Puranic deities who developed out of the early company but assumed larger cosmic functions, Vishnu, Rudra, Brahma - developing from the Vedic Brihaspati, or Brahmanaspati, - Shiva, Lakshmi, Durga. Thus in India the change in the gods was less complete, the earlier deities became the inferior divinities of the Puranic pantheon and this was largely due to the survival of the Rig Veda in which their psychological and their external functions co-existed and are both given a powerful emphasis; there was no such early literary record to maintain the original features of the Gods of Greece and Rome.
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Elsewhere in the Riks the Vedic Word is described (X.71) as that which is supreme and the topmost height of speech, the best and the most faultless. It is something that is hidden in secrecy and from there comes out and is manifested. It has entered into the truth-seers, the Rishis, and it is found by following the track of their speech. But all cannot enter into its secret meaning. Those who do not know the inner sense are as men who seeing see not, hearing hear not, only to one here and there the Word desiring him like a beautifully robed wife to a husb and lays open her body. Others unable to drink steadily of the milk of the Word, the Vedic cow, move with it as with one that gives no milk, to him the Word is a tree without flowers or fruits. This is quite clear and precise; it results from it beyond doubt that even then while the Rig Veda was being written the Riks were regarded as having a secret sense which was not open to all. There was an occult and spiritual knowledge in the sacred hymns and by this knowledge alone, it is said, one can know the truth and rise to a higher existence. This belief was not a later tradition but held, probably, by all and evidently by some of the greatest Rishis such as Dirghatamas and Vamadeva.
The tradition, then, was there and it was prolonged after the
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
Scarcely five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, an unmistakable reorganization of our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up the three-dimensionality of space. This discovery is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the unperspectival age. These definitions, by recognizing a fundamental characteristic of these eras, lead to the further appropriate definition of the age of the dawning new consciousness as the aperspectival age, a definition supported not only by the results of modern physics, but also by developments in the visual arts and literature, where the incorporation of time as a fourth dimension into previously spatial conceptions has formed the initial basis for manifesting the new.Aperspectival is not to be thought of as merely the opposite or negation of perspectival; the antithesis of perspectival is unperspectival. The distinction in meaning suggested by the three terms unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival is analogous to that of the terms illogical, logical, and alogical or immoral, moral, and amoral. We have employed here the designation aperspectival to clearly emphasize the need of overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and negation. The so-called primal words (Urworte), for example, evidence two antithetic connotations: Latin altus meant high as well as low; sacer meant sacred as well as cursed. Such primal words as these formed an undifferentiated psychically-stressed unity whose bivalent nature was definitely familiar to the early Egyptians and Greeks. This is no longer the case with our present sense of language; consequently, we have required a term that transcends equally the ambivalence of the primal connotations and the dualism of antonyms or conceptual opposites.
Hence we have used the Greek prefix a- in conjunction with our Latin-derived word perspectival in the sense of an alpha privativum and not as an alpha negativum, since the prefix has a liberating character (privativum, derived from Latin privare, i.e., to liberate). The designation aperspectival, in consequence, expresses a process of liberation from the exclusive validity of perspectival and unperspectival, as well as pre-perspectival limitations. Our designation, then, does not attempt to unite the inherently coexistent unperspectival and perspectival structures, nor does it attempt to reconcile or synthesize structures which, in their deficient modes, have become irreconcilable. If aperspectival were to represent only a synthesis it would imply no more than perspectival-rational and it would be limited and only momentarilyvalid, inasmuch as every union is threatened by further separation. Our concern is with integrality and ultimately with the whole; the word aperspectival conveys our attempt to deal with wholeness. It is a definition which differentiates a perception of reality that is neither perspectivally restricted to only one sector nor merely unperspectivally evocative of a vague sense of reality.
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Kaballah ; S. L. McGregor Mathers, the translator of por- tions of the Zohar and The sacred Magic of Abramelin the
Mage ; Madame Blavatsky, that lion-hearted woman who brought Eastern esoteric philosophy to the attention of western students ; Arthur Edward Waite, who made available expository summaries of various of the Qabalistic works ; and the poet Aleister Crowley to whose Liber 777 and Sepher Sephiroth, among many other fine philosophic writings, I am in no little degree indebted - all these have provided a wealth of vital information which could be utilized for the construction of a philosophical alphabet.
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Maitreya said, Master! I have been instructed by you in the whole of the Vedas, and in the institutes of law and of sacred science: through your favour, other men, even though they be my foes, cannot accuse me of having been remiss in the acquirement of knowledge. I am now desirous, oh thou who art profound in piety! to hear from thee, how this world was, and how in future it will be? what is its substance, oh Brahman, and whence proceeded animate and inanimate things? into what has it been resolved, and into what will its dissolution again occur? how were the elements manifested? whence proceeded the gods and other beings? what are the situation and extent of the oceans and the mountains, the earth, the sun, and the planets? what are the families of the gods and others, the Menus, the periods called Manvantaras, those termed Kalpas, and their subdivisions, and the four ages: the events that happen at the close of a Kalpa, and the terminations of the several ages[11]: the histories, oh great Muni, of the gods, the sages, and kings; and how the Vedas were divided into branches (or schools), after they had been arranged by Vyāsa: the duties of the Brahmans, and the other tribes, as well as of those who pass through the different orders of life? All these things I wish to hear from you, grandson of Vaśiṣṭha. Incline thy thoughts benevolently towards me, that I may, through thy favour, be informed of all I desire to know. Parāśara replied, Well inquired, pious Maitreya. You recall to my recollection that which was of old narrated by my father's father, Vaśiṣṭha. I had heard that my father had been devoured by a Rākṣas employed by Visvāmitra: violent anger seized me, and I commenced a sacrifice for the destruction of the Rākṣasas: hundreds of them were reduced to ashes by the rite, when, as they were about to be entirely extirpated, my grandfather Vaśiṣṭha thus spake to me: Enough, my child; let thy wrath be appeased: the Rākṣasas are not culpable: thy father's death was the work of destiny. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains by arduous exertions, of fame, and of devout austerities; and prevents the attainment of heaven or of emancipation. The chief sages always shun wrath: he not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of these unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed. Mercy is the might of the righteous[12].
Being thus admonished by my venerable grandsire, I immediately desisted from the rite, in obedience to his injunctions, and Vaśiṣṭha, the most excellent of sages, was content with me. Then arrived Pulastya, the son of Brahmā[13], who was received by my grandfather with the customary marks of respect. The illustrious brother of Pulaha said to me; Since, in the violence of animosity, you have listened to the words of your progenitor, and have exercised clemency, therefore you shall become learned in every science: since you have forborne, even though incensed, to destroy my posterity, I will bestow upon you another boon, and, you shall become the author of a summary of the Purāṇas[14]; you shall know the true nature of the deities, as it really is; and, whether engaged in religious rites, or abstaining from their performance[15], your understanding, through my favour, shall be perfect, and exempt from). doubts. Then my grandsire Vaśiṣṭha added; Whatever has been said to thee by Pulastya, shall assuredly come to pass.
--
[1]: An address of this kind, to one or other Hindu divinity, usually introduces Sanscrit compositions, especially those considered sacred. The first term of this mantra or brief prayer, Om or Omkāra, is well known as a combination of letters invested by Hindu mysticism with peculiar sanctity. In the Vedas it is said to comprehend all the gods; and in the Purāṇas it is directed to be prefixed to all such formulæ as that of the text. Thus in the Uttara Khaṇḍa of the Pādma Purāṇa: 'The syllable Om, the mysterious name, or Brahma, is the leader of all prayers: let it therefore, O lovely-faced, (Śiva addresses Durgā,) be employed in the beginning of all prayers:' According to the same authority, one of the mystical imports of the term is the collective enunciation of Viṣṇu expressed by A, of Srī his bride intimated by U, and of their joint worshipper designated by M. A whole chapter of the Vāyu Purāṇa is devoted to this term. A text of the Vedas is there cited: 'Om, the monosyllable Brahma;' the latter meaning either the Supreme Being or the Vedas collectively, of which this monosyllable is the type. It is also said to typify the three spheres of the world, the three holy fires, the three steps of Viṣṇu, &c.-Frequent meditation upon it, and repetition of it, ensure release from worldly existence. See also Manu, II. 76. Vāsudeva, a name of Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa, is, according to its grammatical etymology, a patronymic derivative implying son of Vasudeva. The Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas, however, devise other explanations: see the next chapter, and again, b. VI. c. 5.
[2]: In this stanza occurs a series of the appellations of Viṣṇu: 1. Puṇḍarīkākṣa, having eyes like a lotus, or heart-pervading; or Puṇḍarīka is explained supreme glory, and Akṣa imperishable: the first is the most usual etymon. 2. Vīswabhāvana, the creator of the universe, or the cause of the existence of all things. 3. Hṛṣīkeśa, lord of the senses. 4. Mahā puruṣa, great or supreme spirit; puruṣa meaning that which abides or is quiescent in body (puri sété), 5. Pūrvaja, produced or appearing before creation; the Orphic πρωτογόνος. In the fifth book, c. 18, Viṣṇu is described by five appellations, which are considered analogous to these; or, 1. Bhūtātmā, one with created things, or Puṇḍarīkākṣa; 2. Pradhānātmā, one with crude nature, or Viśvabhāvana; 3. Indriyātmā, one with the senses, or Hṛṣikeśa; 4. Paramātmā, supreme spirit, or Mahāpuruṣa; and Ātmā, soul; living soul, animating nature and existing before it, or Pūrvaja.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness
16
--
representing the word is formed of radicals meaning something like head-going. The sacred book of
Taoism, the Tao te Ching, begins by saying that the Tao that can be talked about is not the real Tao: in
1.01 - MASTER AND DISCIPLE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
'Repeat that sacred word', said the teacher, 'and do no harm to anybody'. As he was about to depart, the brahmachari said, 'I shall see you again.'
"Some days passed and the cowherd boys noticed that the snake would not bite. They threw stones at it. Still it showed no anger; it behaved as if it were an earthworm. One day one of the boys came close to it, caught it by the tail, and, whirling it round and round, dashed it again and again on the ground and threw it away. The snake vomited blood and became unconscious. It was stunned. It could not move. So, thinking it dead, the boys went their way.
"Late at night the snake regained consciousness. Slowly and with great difficulty it dragged itself into its hole; its bones were broken and it could scarcely move. Many days passed. The snake became a mere skeleton covered with a skin. Now and then, at night, it would come out in search of food. For fear of the boys it would not leave its hole during the day-time. Since receiving the sacred word from the teacher, it had given up doing harm to others. It maintained its life on dirt, leaves, or the fruit that dropped from the trees.
"About a year later the brahmachari came that way again and asked after the snake.
1.01 - On Love, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for Gods sacred feast.
*****
1.01 - ON THE THREE METAMORPHOSES, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation-that is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred "No" even to
duty-for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To
--
the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey: the lion is needed for such prey.
But say, my brothers, what can the child do that
--
wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes." For the game
of creation, my brothers, a sacred "Yes" is needed: the
spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been
1.01 - Our Demand and Need from the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HE WORLD abounds with scriptures sacred and profane, with revelations and half-revelations, with religions and philosophies, sects and schools and systems. To these the many minds of a half-ripe knowledge or no knowledge at all attach themselves with exclusiveness and passion and will have it that this or the other book is alone the eternal Word of
God and all others are either impostures or at best imperfectly inspired, that this or that philosophy is the last word of the reasoning intellect and other systems are either errors or saved only by such partial truth in them as links them to the one true philosophical cult. Even the discoveries of physical Science have been elevated into a creed and in its name religion and spirituality banned as ignorance and superstition, philosophy as frippery and moonshine. And to these bigoted exclusions and vain wranglings even the wise have often lent themselves, misled by some spirit of darkness that has mingled with their light and overshadowed it with some cloud of intellectual egoism or spiritual pride. Mankind seems now indeed inclined to grow a little modester and wiser; we no longer slay our fellows in the name of God's truth or because they have minds differently trained or differently constituted from ours; we are less ready to curse and revile our neighbour because he is wicked or presumptuous enough to differ from us in opinion; we are ready even to admit that Truth is everywhere and cannot be our sole monopoly; we are beginning to look at other religions and philosophies for the truth and help they contain and no longer merely in order to damn them as false or criticise what we conceive to be their errors. But we are still apt to declare that our truth gives us the supreme knowledge which other religions or philosophies
--
have missed or only imperfectly grasped so that they deal either with subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things or can merely prepare less evolved minds for the heights to which we have arrived. And we are still prone to force upon ourselves or others the whole sacred mass of the book or gospel we admire, insisting that all shall be accepted as eternally valid truth and no iota or underline or diaeresis denied its part of the plenary inspiration.
It may therefore be useful in approaching an ancient Scripture, such as the Veda, Upanishads or Gita, to indicate precisely the spirit in which we approach it and what exactly we think we may derive from it that is of value to humanity and its future. First of all, there is undoubtedly a Truth one and eternal which we are seeking, from which all other truth derives, by the light of which all other truth finds its right place, explanation and relation to the scheme of knowledge. But precisely for that reason it cannot be shut up in a single trenchant formula, it is not likely to be found in its entirety or in all its bearings in any single philosophy or scripture or uttered altogether and for ever by any one teacher, thinker, prophet or Avatar. Nor has it been wholly found by us if our view of it necessitates the intolerant exclusion of the truth underlying other systems; for when we reject passionately, we mean simply that we cannot appreciate and explain. Secondly, this Truth, though it is one and eternal, expresses itself in Time and through the mind of man; therefore every Scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Moreover, in the statement of the Truth the actual form given to it, the system and arrangement, the metaphysical and intellectual mould, the precise expression used must be largely subject to the mutations of Time and cease to have the same force; for the human intellect modifies itself always; continually dividing and putting together it is obliged to shift its divisions continually and to rearrange its syntheses; it is always leaving old expression and symbol for new or, if it uses the old, it so changes its connotation or at least
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
One. These, for instance, are the authors of the sacred
Scriptures; therefore the Scriptures are proof, and, if any such
1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
. the sacred objects they had were secured, and
launched their horses. Rifles rang out. There were
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and of Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity. The identity of Brahman and Atman is affirmed in hundreds of sacred texts.
Caste, creed, family and lineage do not exist in Brahman. Brahman has neither name nor form, transcends merit and demerit, is beyond time, space and the objects of sense-experience. Such is Brahman, and thou art That. Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness.
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When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition (i.e. when he believes in religious rites and the letter of the scriptures, as though they were intrinsically sacred), knowledge of Reality cannot arise in him.
The wise say that this threefold way is like an iron chain, binding the feet of him who aspires to escape from the prison-house of this world. He who frees himself from the chain achieves Deliverance.
1.01 - The Cycle of Society, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic institution of the fourfold order, caturvara, miscalled the system of the four castes,for caste is a conventional, vara a symbolic and typal institution. We are told that the institution of the four orders of society was the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes. Very possibly;1 but the important point is that it was not so regarded and could not be so regarded by the men of that age. For while we are satisfied when we have found the practical and material causes of a social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only subordinately for its material factors and looked always first and foremost for its symbolic, religious or psychological significance. This appears in the Purushasukta of the Veda, where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Sury, would have built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline. We read always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefa thers and it is therefore that we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To us poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing courtesan but a priestess in Gods house commissioned not to spin fictions but to image difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and the superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creators body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms,a freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of savage communities because these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development. One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders, expressingto employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our modern understanding the Divine as knowledge in man, the Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic principles, the Wisdom that conceives the order and principle of things, the Power that sanctions, upholds and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon temperament and psychic type2 with a corresponding ethical discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic function.3 But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first, the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual; the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but subordinated to the spiritual and religious idea. The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.
1.01 - The King of the Wood, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis,
or Diana of the Wood. The lake and the grove were sometimes known as
--
a small crater-like hollow on the mountain side. In this sacred
grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day,
--
Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire would seem to have
been tended by Vestal Virgins, for the head of a Vestal in
--
Porta Capena at Rome, where another sacred spring of Egeria gushed
from a dark cavern. Every day the Roman Vestals fetched water from
--
for by Cato the Elder, that the sacred grove was dedicated to Diana
by a certain Egerius Baebius or Laevius of Tusculum, a Latin
--
bay, which it shelters from the open sea, rises Poseidon's sacred
island, its peaks veiled in the sombre green of the pines. On this
--
of Damia and Auxesia out of sacred olive wood, and no sooner had
they done so and set them up than the earth bore fruit again.
--
is right, was Virbius. In his character of the founder of the sacred
grove and first king of Nemi, Virbius is clearly the mythical
--
the sacred tree which he guarded with his life was supposed, as
seems probable, to be her special embodiment, her priest may not
--
beech-tree in another sacred grove of Diana on the Alban hills. He
embraced it, he kissed it, he lay under its shadow, he poured wine
--
of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and
immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of
--
mated with an old Roman king in the sacred grove; further, that
Diana of the Wood herself had a male companion Virbius by name, who
1.01 - The Rape of the Lock, #The Rape of the Lock, #unset, #Zen
Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride.
Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here
1.01 - To Watanabe Sukefusa, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
There is also the story of a priest who was passing an old shrine late one night and saw crowds of tall, strange-looking people within the precincts. Their heads were wrapped in yellow silk and they were sweeping and cleaning the approaches to the shrine with sacred branches of the sakaki tree.
They kept working through the night, muttering words like, "Ahh! How disgusting," and "Oh! How unclean." Approaching them, the priest said, "Why are you cleaning and purifying this place with such great care?"
"Since you ask," one of them replied, "an unfilial son has defiled this shrine. See over there where he entered through the sacred hedge and walked through the sacred precincts. Now we must dig up every particle of earth that his feet contaminated, down to a depth of seven feet, and dispose of it. But that fellow will soon receive his just reward from the lord of heaven." By the time he had finished speaking, light was appearing in the morning sky, and he and all the other strange beings had vanished. Not long afterward in that same area, a man was struck and killed by a single bolt of lightning.
There is another story about a priest who went to an ancient shrine for an overnight retreat. In the deepening silence he heard the sound of a fleet horse galloping by. Presently, a rider pulled up before the shrine and proclaimed in a harsh voice, "Greetings to the fellow inside the shrine. We have vowed to take you from here. Come out this instant!"
10.27 - Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Consciousness essentially is always and everywhere the same. Its own quality is unvarying but in its expression there is growth and development, an increase in intensity and amplitude. The light that your candle gives and the light that comes from the sun are not different in quality but they differ in expression or manifestation, because of the receptacle, the seat or abode of the light. The Vedic fire was lighted on a sacred altar, that is the seat for the God from where to manifest himself. There was a regular ceremony for the preparation of the seat (Barhi) and the value and the success of the sacrifice depended largely on a proper preparation of the seat. The seat, the basic status also indicates that there is an ascending movement of the sacrifice. The sacrifice symbolises consciousness and radiant energy, mounting and travelling upward and forward; the progress or ascent of consciousness means bringing out its inherent potential strength that is behind and within and placing it in front as power of expression. As I have said, if consciousness in matter is like a light of single candle power, on the level of life it becomes a light of multiple candle power and in the mind this multiple power is again multiplied. In this way the consciousness finally attains its solar incandescence on the highest height of the being.
When we speak of the dimensions of consciousness, it means these different levels or status of ascending expression. They also form according to the mode of expression each one a world of its own. We may compare the mounting consciousness to a growing tree, it is the same sap-substance that appears at the outset as a seed, then as the seed opens out and develops it appears or throws up a stem or trunk and as it proceeds it throws up branches and higher up leaves and then flowers and fruit. Apparently however different and diverse these formulations, they are but expressions of the same sap-substance in the original seed. Even so an original seed-consciousness is the basis and essential reality of all the forms in the material universe.
1.02 - BOOK THE SECOND, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Once, as the sacred infant she survey'd,
The God was kindled in the raving maid,
1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
From the point of view of this Absolute, one can with equally good reason affirm that God is or that He is not, that He is the unique or that He is beyond number, that He is inseparable from the universe or that He is without relation to the universe. He is being if all outside Him is non-being, He is non-being if universe exists. So is He defined in certain sacred books of the East.
***
--
If, restoring to the Hebrew characters their numerical value and hidden sense, we analyse the text, then we must thus read the first word of Genesis, The primary duality was in the beginning. For the sign B which corresponds to the second figure in our numerical system, represents a double original principle which the succeeding letter Resh characterises as the very head and supreme Cause of formation. And by a remarkable, though fortuitous coincidence, we find that the sacred book of Islam, like the sacred book of Judaism commences, in the initial of its first word, with the sign of duality. The first word B-Sem-Lillah (Bismillah) placed at the head of the Koran can, when its elements are decomposed, be interpreted, Two is the name of Allah.
And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter Alif, the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter He, the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,by the two pronouns He and She.
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
familiar world is a sacred space, surrounded by chaos (populated, variously, by demons, reptiles, spirits and
barbarians none of whom are really distinguishable). The world of order and chaos might be regarded as
--
The dwelling is Babylon, center of civilization, mythic sacred space, dedicated in perpetuity to Marduk.
The mythic tale of the Enuma elish describes the nature of the eternal relationship between the
--
universe within which the sacred has already manifested itself, in which, consequently, the breakthrough from plane to plane has become possible and repeatable. It is not difficult to see why the
religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment. The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same
time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and
--
and communication with the world of the gods is ensured; the space of the altar becomes a sacred space.
But the meaning of the ritual is far more complex, and if we consider all of its ramifications, we shall
--
homage. As Goddess of the Snake, she was sacred in ancient Crete, and worshipped by the Romans. Her
modern equivalents remain extant in Bali and India. Kali, Hindu Goddess portrayed in Figure 34:
1.02 - Priestly Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the sacred
Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the sacred Rites. In
republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was
--
various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred
slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and
1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The individualistic age of Europe was in its beginning a revolt of reason, in its culmination a triumphal progress of physical Science. Such an evolution was historically inevitable. The dawn of individualism is always a questioning, a denial. The individual finds a religion imposed upon him which does not base its dogma and practice upon a living sense of ever verifiable spiritual Truth, but on the letter of an ancient book, the infallible dictum of a Pope, the tradition of a Church, the learned casuistry of schoolmen and Pundits, conclaves of ecclesiastics, heads of monastic orders, doctors of all sorts, all of them unquestionable tribunals whose sole function is to judge and pronounce, but none of whom seems to think it necessary or even allowable to search, test, prove, inquire, discover. He finds that, as is inevitable under such a regime, true science and knowledge are either banned, punished and persecuted or else rendered obsolete by the habit of blind reliance on fixed authorities; even what is true in old authorities is no longer of any value, because its words are learnedly or ignorantly repeated but its real sense is no longer lived except at most by a few. In politics he finds everywhere divine rights, established privileges, sanctified tyrannies which are evidently armed with an oppressive power and justify themselves by long prescription, but seem to have no real claim or title to exist. In the social order he finds an equally stereotyped reign of convention, fixed disabilities, fixed privileges, the self-regarding arrogance of the high, the blind prostration of the low, while the old functions which might have justified at one time such a distribution of status are either not performed at all or badly performed without any sense of obligation and merely as a part of caste pride. He has to rise in revolt; on every claim of authority he has to turn the eye of a resolute inquisition; when he is told that this is the sacred truth of things or the comm and of God or the immemorial order of human life, he has to reply, But is it really so? How shall I know that this is the truth of things and not superstition and falsehood? When did God comm and it, or how do I know that this was the sense of His comm and and not your error or invention, or that the book on which you found yourself is His word at all, or that He has ever spoken His will to mankind? This immemorial order of which you speak, is it really immemorial, really a law of Nature or an imperfect result of Time and at present a most false convention? And of all you say, still I must ask, does it agree with the facts of the world, with my sense of right, with my judgment of truth, with my experience of reality? And if it does not, the revolting individual flings off the yoke, declares the truth as he sees it and in doing so strikes inevitably at the root of the religious, the social, the political, momentarily perhaps even the moral order of the community as it stands, because it stands upon the authority he discredits and the convention he destroys and not upon a living truth which can be successfully opposed to his own. The champions of the old order may be right when they seek to suppress him as a destructive agency perilous to social security, political order or religious tradition; but he stands there and can no other, because to destroy is his mission, to destroy falsehood and lay bare a new foundation of truth.
But by what individual faculty or standard shall the innovator find out his new foundation or establish his new measures? Evidently, it will depend upon the available enlightenment of the time and the possible forms of knowledge to which he has access. At first it was in religion a personal illumination supported in the West by a theological, in the East by a philosophical reasoning. In society and politics it started with a crude primitive perception of natural right and justice which took its origin from the exasperation of suffering or from an awakened sense of general oppression, wrong, injustice and the indefensibility of the existing order when brought to any other test than that of privilege and established convention. The religious motive led at first; the social and political, moderating itself after the swift suppression of its first crude and vehement movements, took advantage of the upheaval of religious reformation, followed behind it as a useful ally and waited its time to assume the lead when the spiritual momentum had been spent and, perhaps by the very force of the secular influences it called to its aid, had missed its way. The movement of religious freedom in Europe took its stand first on a limited, then on an absolute right of the individual experience and illumined reason to determine the true sense of inspired Scripture and the true Christian ritual and order of the Church. The vehemence of its claim was measured by the vehemence of its revolt from the usurpations, pretensions and brutalities of the ecclesiastical power which claimed to withhold the Scripture from general knowledge and impose by moral authority and physical violence its own arbitrary interpretation of sacred Writ, if not indeed another and substituted doctrine, on the recalcitrant individual conscience. In its more tepid and moderate forms the revolt engendered such compromises as the Episcopalian Churches, at a higher degree of fervour Calvinistic Puritanism, at white heat a riot of individual religious judgment and imagination in such sects as the Anabaptist, Independent, Socinian and countless others. In the East such a movement divorced from all political or any strongly iconoclastic social significance would have produced simply a series of religious reformers, illumined saints, new bodies of belief with their appropriate cultural and social practice; in the West atheism and secularism were its inevitable and predestined goal. At first questioning the conventional forms of religion, the mediation of the priesthood between God and the soul and the substitution of Papal authority for the authority of the Scripture, it could not fail to go forward and question the Scripture itself and then all supernaturalism, religious belief or suprarational truth no less than outward creed and institute.
For, eventually, the evolution of Europe was determined less by the Reformation than by the Renascence; it flowered by the vigorous return of the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality of the one rather than by the Hebraic and religio-ethical temperament of the other. The Renascence gave back to Europe on one hand the free curiosity of the Greek mind, its eager search for first principles and rational laws, its delighted intellectual scrutiny of the facts of life by the force of direct observation and individual reasoning, on the other the Romans large practicality and his sense for the ordering of life in harmony with a robust utility and the just principles of things. But both these tendencies were pursued with a passion, a seriousness, a moral and almost religious ardour which, lacking in the ancient Graeco-Roman mentality, Europe owed to her long centuries of Judaeo-Christian discipline. It was from these sources that the individualistic age of Western society sought ultimately for that principle of order and control which all human society needs and which more ancient times attempted to realise first by the materialisation of fixed symbols of truth, then by ethical type and discipline, finally by infallible authority or stereotyped convention.
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
that place on Earth, a sacred mystery without precedence
was enacted on which humanitys future depended? In his
1.02 - The Refusal of the Call, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
The reply to this question would remain the same throughout the mythologies of the world. For, as is written so frequently in the sacred pages of the Koran: "Well able is Allah to save." The sole problem is what the machinery of the miracle is to be. And that is a secret to be opened only in the following stages of this
Arabian Nights' entertainment.
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
By such observation of his fellow-creatures, the student may easily lapse into a moral fault. He may become cold-hearted. Every conceivable effort must be made to prevent this. Such observation should only be practiced by one who has already risen to the level on which complete certainty is found that thoughts are real things. He will then no longer allow himself to think of his fellow-men in a way that is incompatible with the highest reverence for human dignity and human liberty. The thought that a human being could be merely an object of observation must never for a moment be entertained. Self-education must see to it that this insight into human nature should go hand in hand with an unlimited respect for the personal privilege of each individual, and with the recognition of the sacred and inviolable nature of that which dwells in each human being. A feeling
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1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
This intense desire evident at the turn of the sixteenth century to conquer space, and to break through the flat ancient cavern wall, is exemplified not only by he transition from sacred fresco painting to that on canvas, but even by the most minute and mundane endeavours. It was around this time that lace was first introduced; and here we see that even the fabric could no longer serve merely as a surface, but had to be broken open, as it were, to reveal the visibility of the background or substratum. Nor is it accidental that in those years of the discovery of space via perspective, the incursions into the various spatial worlds mentioned above brought on with finality a transformation of the world into a spatial, that is, a sectored world. The previous unity breaks apart; not only is the world segmented and fragmented, but the age of colonialism and the other divisions begins: schisms and Splits in the church, conquests and power politics, unbounded technology, and all types of emancipations.
The over-emphasis an space and spatiality that increases with every century since 1500is at once the greatness as well as the weakness of perspectival man. His over-emphasis on the "objectively" external, a consequence of an excessively visual orientation, leads not only to rationalization and haptification but to an unavoidable hypertrophy of the "I," which is in confrontation with the external world. This exaggeration of the "I" amounts to what we may call an ego-hypertrophy: the "I" must be increasingly emphasized, indeed over-emphasized in order for it to be adequate to the ever-expanding discovery of space. At the same time, the increasing materialization and haptification of space which confronts the ego occasions a corresponding rigidification of the ego itself. The expansion of space brings on the gradual expansion and consequent disintegration of the "I" on the one hand, preparing favorable circumstances for collectivism. On the other hand, the haptification of space rigidifies and encapsulates the "I," with the resultant possibility of isolation evident in egocentrism.
1.02 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to this effect: Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again. I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homers requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the airto a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light. That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, All intelligences awake with the morning. Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something.
1.031 - Intense Aspiration, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
What we should do is, together with our effort at change of physical atmosphere, also try to bring about a gradual change in our internal atmosphere by resorting to certain spiritual disciplines, such as the utilisation of the time on hand for certain definite chosen purposes. When we live in a particular place we have left our homes and have come to Uttarkashi, for instance how do we use our time? Do we go about from place to place, chatting? Then we should go back to our home and stay there. Why do we come to Uttarkashi? We have to utilise the time for a purpose which is more intimate to the object on hand than the way in which we lived earlier. Generally, people take to mantra purascharana a disciplined type of chanting of the mantra that has been given to them by their Guru and sacred study of scriptures, such as the Srimad Bhagavata or the Ramayana, or any other holy text which is conducive to pinpointing the mind on the liberation of the soul, which is the ultimate objective.
Another great helpful factor is observing mouna or not talking, or at least talking only when it is necessary. Talking only when it is necessary means we will talk only when it is absolutely impossible to avoid talking; otherwise, we will not talk. Why do we go on talking with everyone? There is no necessity. We should regard ourselves as real seekers and not merely as jokers with truth, and try to open our mouths only when it is necessary, and otherwise not open our mouths. It is necessary to open the mouth only when it has some connection with the purpose for which we have come here. When it has no connection, why do we talk? We should keep our mouths closed. This is not only a spiritual discipline but also a very helpful method of conserving energy, because much of the energy is lost in talking. If we do not speak for three days continuously, we will see what difference it makes. We will feel that there is so much of strength in us that we can walk even long distances without any feeling of fatigue. All our energy goes in speaking unnecessarily to anyone and anything that is in front of us, on any subject whatsoever.
1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The mantra, when it is chanted, generates a force which is the object of the realisation of the sadhaka. A mantra has a chandas, or the combining feature, which is the determining factor of the particular shape that the effect takes, and so the mantra determines the deity, and vice versa. So we have a deity, or the aim or the goal of the mantra, and the chandas of the mantra, as well as another thing altogether, namely, the discoverer of the mantra has some say in this matter. The discoverer of the mantra is called the rishi of the mantra. A rishi is a seer of the mantra not merely a composer like a writer, or an author, or a poet but a seer into the truth of a mantra, to whom the mantra, in its truth, has been revealed in his meditations; and so the will of the seer also is present there. So, according to our tradition, when we chant a mantra we remember the rishi of the mantra, the chandas of the mantra, and the deity of the mantra. Rishis, chandas, devata these three are always remembered before the mantra is chanted, so that we have the grace of these divine precedents of the sacred mantra that we are going to chant, because these are the causes behind the action that the mantra takes.
The mantra that Patanjali particularly refers to in his sutra is pranava or omkara. This is something very difficult to understand and cannot easily be explained however much we may try, because these are very great secrets which are invisible to the eyes and, therefore, ordinarily incapable of explanation. It is believed that the chanting of pranava or Om, in the prescribed manner, sets up a novel type of vibration in the system, which is free from every kind of distraction or particularisation in respect of any external object. Every name in this world particularises itself in respect of an external object, such as tree, mountain, sun, moon, star, etc. they are external objects. But here, the object of pranava or Om is not any given object in particular. It is a general being, and anything that is general is also harmonious. Hence the chanting of pranava or Om in the prescribed manner, with the required intonation, produces a generalised harmonious vibration in the entire physical and psychological system, and this is what is conducive to the concentration of the mind in meditation, because meditation is nothing but the harmonious condition of the mind.
1.03 - Bloodstream Sermon, #The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, #Bodhidharma, #Buddhism
the sacred Self, the Immortal, the Great Sage. Its names vary but
not its essence. Buddhas vary too, but none leaves his own mind.
1.03 - Hymns of Gritsamada, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
8. Come with thy knowledge, O Conscious Fire, and fill us; perform the unbroken order of the sacrifice. Take thy seat on the sacred grass of our altar.
20 Or, free from all littleness,
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the West, the mystics went some way towards liberating Christianity from its unfortunate servitude to historic fact. (or, to be more accurate, to those various mixtures of contemporary record with subsequent inference and phantasy, which have, at different epochs, been accepted as historic fact). From the writings of Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck, of Boehme, William Law and the Quakers, it would be possible to extract a spiritualized and universalized Christianity, whose narratives should refer, not to history as it was, or as someone afterwards thought it ought to be, but to processes forever unfolded in the heart of man. But unfortunately the influence of the mystics was never powerful enough to bring about a radical Mahayanist revolution in the West. In spite of them, Christianity has remained a religion in which the pure Perennial Philosophy has been overlaid, now more, now less, by an idolatrous preoccupation with events and things in timeevents and things regarded not merely as useful means, but as ends, intrinsically sacred and indeed divine. Moreover such improvements on history as were made in the course of centuries were, most imprudently, treated as though they themselves were a part of historya procedure which put a powerful weapon into the hands of Protestant and, later, of Rationalist controversialists. How much wiser it would have been to admit the perfectly avowable fact that, when the sternness of Christ the Judge had been unduly emphasized, men and women felt the need of personifying the divine compassion in a new form, with the result that the figure of the Virgin, mediatrix to the mediator, came into increased prominence. And when, in course of time, the Queen of Heaven was felt to be too awe-inspiring, compassion was re-personified in the homely figure of St. Joseph, who thus became me thator to the me thatrix to the me thator. In exactly the same way Buddhist worshippers felt that the historic Sakyamuni, with his insistence on recollectedness, discrimination and a total dying to self as the principal means of liberation, was too stern and too intellectual. The result was that the love and compassion which Sakyamuni had also inculcated came to be personified in Buddhas such as Amida and Maitreyadivine characters completely removed from history, inasmuch as their temporal career was situated somewhere in the distant past or distant future. Here it may be remarked that the vast numbers of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, of whom the Mahayanist theologians speak, are commensurate with the vastness of their cosmology. Time, for them, is beginningless, and the innumerable universes, every one of them supporting sentient beings of every possible variety, are born, evolve, decay and the, only to repeat the same cycleagain and again, until the final inconceivably remote consummation, when every sentient being in all the worlds shall have won to deliverance out of time into eternal Suchness or Buddhahood This cosmological background to Buddhism has affinities with the world picture of modern astronomyespecially with that version of it offered in the recently published theory of Dr. Weiszcker regarding the formation of planets. If the Weiszcker hypothesis is correct, the production of a planetary system would be a normal episode in the life of every star. There are forty thousand million stars in our own galactic system alone, and beyond our galaxy other galaxies, indefinitely. If, as we have no choice but to believe, spiritual laws governing consciousness are uniform throughout the whole planet-bearing and presumably life-supporting universe, then certainly there is plenty of room, and at the same time, no doubt, the most agonizing and desperate need, for those innumerable redemptive incarnations of Suchness, upon whose shining multitudes the Mahayanists love to dwell.
For my part, I think the chief reason which prompted the invisible God to become visible in the flesh and to hold converse with men was to lead carnal men, who are only able to love carnally, to the healthful love of his flesh, and afterwards, little by little, to spiritual love.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
In body and body kindled the sacred birth ...
A few shall see what none yet understands;
1.03 - Questions and Answers, #Book of Certitude, #unset, #Zen
ANSWER: The sacred verse sufficeth. He saith, exalted be His Word: "Should the deceased leave no offspring, their share shall revert to the House of Justice" etc. and "Should the deceased leave offspring, but none of the other categories of heirs that have been specified in the Book, they shall receive two thirds of the inheritance and the remaining third shall revert to the House of Justice" etc. In other words, where there are no offspring, their allotted portion of the inheritance reverteth to the House of Justice; and where there are offspring but the other categories of heirs are lacking, two thirds of the inheritance pass to the offspring, the remaining third reverting to the House of Justice. This ruling hath both general and specific application, which is to say that whenever any category of this latter class of heirs is absent, two thirds of their inheritance pass to the offspring and the remaining third to the House of Justice.
8. QUESTION: Concerning the basic sum on which Huququ'llah is payable.
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ANSWER: All are charged with obedience to the Kitab-i-Aqdas; whatsoever is revealed therein is the Law of God amid His servants. The injunction on pilgrims to the sacred House to shave the head hath been lifted.
11. QUESTION: If intercourse take place between a couple during their year of patience, and they become estranged again thereafter, must they recommence their year of patience, or may the days preceding the intercourse be included in the reckoning of the year? And once divorce hath taken place, is it necessary that a further period of waiting be observed?
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ANSWER: It is an obligation to make pilgrimage to one of the two sacred Houses; but as to which, it is for the pilgrim to decide.
26. QUESTION: Concerning the dowry.
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27. QUESTION: Concerning the sacred verse: "If, however, news should reach her of her husband's death", etc.
ANSWER: With reference to waiting a "fixed number of months" a period of nine months is intended.
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ANSWER: By pilgrimage to the sacred House, which is enjoined upon men, is intended both the Most Great House in Baghdad and the House of the Primal Point in Shiraz; pilgrimage to either of these Houses sufficeth. They may thus make pilgrimage to whichever lieth nearer to the place where they reside.
30. QUESTION: Concerning the verse: "he who would take into his service a maid may do so with propriety."
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31. QUESTION: Concerning the sacred verse: "The Lord hath prohibited ... the practice to which ye formerly had recourse when thrice ye had divorced a woman."
ANSWER: The reference is to the law which previously made it necessary for another man to marry such a woman before she could again be wedded to her former husband; this practice hath been prohibited in the Kitab-i-Aqdas.
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ANSWER: He saith, exalted be He: "Should the deceased leave no offspring, their share shall revert to the House of Justice..." In conformity with this sacred verse, the residence and personal clothing of the deceased revert to the House of Justice.
42. QUESTION: The ordinance of Huququ'llah is revealed in the Kitab-i-Aqdas. Is the residence, with the accompanying fixtures and necessary furnishings, included in the property on which Huquq is payable, or is it otherwise?
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46. QUESTION: With reference to the sacred verse, "God hath prescribed matrimony unto you", is this prescription obligatory or not?
ANSWER: It is not obligatory.
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ANSWER: Many Tablets were revealed and dispatched in their original form without being checked and reviewed. Consequently, as bidden, they were again read out in the Holy Presence, and brought into conformity with the grammatical conventions of the people in order to forestall the cavils of opponents of the Cause. Another reason for this practice is that the new style inaugurated by the Herald, may the souls of all else but Him be offered up for His sake, was seen to be marked by substantial latitude in adherence to the rules of grammar; sacred verses therefore were then revealed in a style which is for the most part in conformity with current usage for ease of understanding and concision of expression.
58. QUESTION: Concerning the blessed verse, "When travelling, if ye should stop and rest in some safe spot, perform ye ... a single prostration in place of each unsaid Obligatory Prayer": is this compensation for the Obligatory Prayer missed by reason of insecure circumstances, or is obligatory prayer completely suspended during travel, and doth the prostration take its place?
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ANSWER: That which hath been revealed in the Kitab-i-Aqdas concerneth a different Obligatory Prayer. Some years ago a number of the ordinances of the Kitab-i-Aqdas including that Obligatory Prayer were, for reasons of wisdom, The Tablet containing the three Obligatory Prayers now in use recorded separately and sent away together with other sacred writings, for the purposes of preservation and protection. Later these three Obligatory Prayers were revealed.
64. QUESTION: In determining time, is it permissible to rely on clocks and watches?
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68. QUESTION: Concerning the sacred verse: "Recite ye the verses of God every morn and eventide."
ANSWER: The intention is all that hath been sent down from the Heaven of Divine Utterance. The prime requisite is the eagerness and love of sanctified souls to read the Word of God. To read one verse, or even one word, in a spirit of joy and radiance, is preferable to the perusal of many Books.
1.03 - Reading, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him,my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet
1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the emu totem paint on the ground the sacred design of their totem,
especially the parts of the emu which they like best to eat, namely,
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from the sacred mission. With this intention they subject themselves
to severe restrictions like those imposed upon their husbands.
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plantain tree, which then becomes sacred until the fruit has
ripened, when it is plucked to furnish a sacred feast for the
family. Among the Cherokees the navel-string of a girl is buried
1.03 - The End of the Intellect, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
would see him seated there in the same posture for hours on end, his eyes fixed on his book, like a yogi lost in the contemplation of the Divine, unaware of all that went on around him. Even if the house had caught fire, it would not have broken this concentration." He read English, Russian, German, and French novels, but also, in ever larger numbers, the sacred books of India, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, although he had never been in a temple except as an observer. "Once, having returned from the College," one of his friends recalls, "Sri Aurobindo sat down, picked up a book at random and started to read, while Z and some friends began a noisy game of chess. After half an hour, he put the book down and took a cup of tea.
We had already seen him do this many times and were waiting eagerly for a chance to verify whether he read the books from cover to cover or only scanned a few pages here and there. Soon the test began. Z
opened the book, read a line aloud and asked Sri Aurobindo to recite what followed. Sri Aurobindo concentrated for a moment, and then repeated the entire page without a single mistake. If he could read a hundred pages in half an hour, no wonder he could go through a case of books in such an incredibly short time." But Sri Aurobindo did not stop at the translations of the sacred texts; he began to study Sanskrit,
which, typically, he learned by himself. When a subject was known to be difficult or impossible, he would refuse to take anyone's word for it, whether he were a grammarian, pandit, or clergyman, and would insist upon trying it himself. The method seemed to have some merit,
1.03 - The Gods, Superior Beings and Adverse Forces, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Your ego, at the slightest thing that displeases it, is in the habit of opening the door of your being to an evil spirit of arrogant and impudent disbelief which passes its time in throwing mud and filth on all that is sacred and beautiful and especially on the aspiration of your soul and the help from the Divines Grace.
If this is allowed to continue, it will end in a sure catastrophe and ruin. Strong steps must be taken to put an end to this, and for that the collaboration of your soul is needed. It must wake up and join in the fight against the ego by resolutely closing the door to this evil spirit.
1.03 - The Human Disciple, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is as he gazes that the revelation of the meaning of a civil and domestic war comes home to him, a war in which not only men of the same race, the same nation, the same clan, but those of the same family and household stand upon opposite sides. All whom the social man holds most dear and sacred, he must meet as enemies and slay, - the worshipped teacher and preceptor, the old friend, comrade and companion in arms, grandsires, uncles, those who stood in the relation to him of father, of son, of grandson, connections by blood and connections by marriage,
- all these social ties have to be cut asunder by the sword. It is not that he did not know these things before, but he has
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The first result is a violent sensational and physical crisis which produces a disgust of the action and its material objects and of life itself. He rejects the vital aim pursued by egoistic humanity in its action, - happiness and enjoyment; he rejects the vital aim of the Kshatriya, victory and rule and power and the government of men. What after all is this fight for justice when reduced to its practical terms, but just this, a fight for the interests of himself, his brothers and his party, for possession and enjoyment and rule? But at such a cost these things are not worth having. For they are of no value in themselves, but only as a means to the right maintenance of social and national life and it is these very aims that in the person of his kin and his race he is about to destroy. And then comes the cry of the emotions. These are they for whose sake life and happiness are desired, our "own people". Who would consent to slay these for the sake of all the earth, or even for the kingdom of the three worlds? What pleasure can there be in life, what happiness, what satisfaction in oneself after such a deed? The whole thing is a dreadful sin, - for now the moral sense awakens to justify the revolt of the sensations and the emotions. It is a sin, there is no right nor justice in mutual slaughter; especially are those who are to be slain the natural objects of reverence and of love, those without whom one would not care to live, and to violate these sacred feelings can be no virtue, can be nothing but a heinous crime. Granted that the offence, the aggression, the first sin, the crimes of greed and selfish passion which have brought things to such a pass came from the other side; yet armed resistance to wrong under such circumstances would be itself a sin and
The Human Disciple
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
origin within the dark womb of the oyster. Its Yetsiratic title is " The Sanctifying Intelligence " ; its sacred plants, the Cypress, Lily, and Opium Poppy ; and the Tarot cards appropriate are the four Threes. Its symbol is the brooding dove - the true Shechinah, or Holy Spirit. The letter of
Tetragrammaton is the first Heh n, and the Tarot attribu- tion is the four Queens.
--
The animals sacred to Chesed are the Unicorn and the
Horse, the latter because Poseidon in legend created the horse and taught men the noble art of managing horses by the bridle. Its plants are the Pine, Olive, and Shamrock ; its stone the Amethyst and Sapphire ; Blue is its colour, and the Tarot attri butions are the four Fours, its metal being Tin, and its perfume Cedar.
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Scourge, and Burin, all suggesting warfare and blood- letting. Its metal is Iron, and its sacred tree the Oak, both these attri butions being quite obvious as implying strength.
In fact, the quality of Geburah is summed up in the general idea of strength and power and force.
--
Tobacco and the Nettle are correspondences, both because of their fiery and stinging nature. Its colour is red, obviously martial ; and hence the ruby, which is bright scarlet, is harmonious. Its sacred creature is the legendary
Basilisk of the staring eye, and the Tarot cards are the four Fives. According to the Sepher Yetsirah , Geburah is named " The Radical Intelligence ".
--
Dionysius is another god in the category of 6, because of his youth and gracious form, combining effeminate softness and beauty, or because of his cultivation of the vine which, ceremonially used in the Eleusinian mysteries, produced a spiritual intoxication analogous to the mystical state. It may be, too, because Dionysius is said to have transformed himself into a lion, which is the sacred animal of Tipharas, being the king of wild beasts, and regality has always been depicted in the form of the lion. Astrological reasons may explain this parallelism for 0 Sol is exalted in the zodiacal sign of SL Leo, the Lion, which was considered to be a creative symbol of the fierce mien of the midsummer sun.
Bacchus, another name of Dionysius for purposes of worship, is the god of intoxication, of inspiration, a giver
--
In addition to the lion, the sacred animal of Tipharas is the fabulous Phoenix who tears open her breast so that her seven young ones may feed upon the blood stream and vitality issuing from her wound. The Pelican has a similar legend attached to it. They both suggest the idea of a
Redeemer giving his life for others, and Murray gives in his Introductory Notes above mentioned, an interesting anecdote with a very similar implication :
1.03 - THE STUDY (The Exorcism), #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
The sacred tones that my soul embrace,
This bestial noise is out of place.
1.03 - The Syzygy - Anima and Animus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
mated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the mar-
riage of mother and son. What, after all, has commonplace
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
17:It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment between the two terms been wanting even from the most extreme philosophies. But all have lived in the shadow of the great Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. The general conception of existence has been permeated with the Buddhistic theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of bondage and liberation, bondage by birth, liberation by cessation from birth. Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavan4 or the high beatitude of Brahmaloka,5 beyond all manifestations in some ineffable Nirvana6 or where all separate experience is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable Existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints and teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination, have borne always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal, - renunciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.
18:For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit - and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the Anchorite may seem to have passed or to be passing - it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contri bution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.
1.03 - VISIT TO VIDYASAGAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Vidyasagar was very reticent about giving religious instruction to others. He had studied Hindu philosophy. Once, when M. had asked him his opinion of it, Vidyasagar had said, "I think the philosophers have failed to explain what was in their minds." But in his daily life he followed all the rituals of Hindu religion and wore the sacred thread of a brahmin.
About God he had once declared: "It is indeed impossible to know Him. What, then, should be our duty? It seems to me that we should live in such a way that, if others followed our example, this very earth would be heaven. Everyone should try to do good to the world."
--
Suppose a man has seen the ocean, and somebody asks him, 'Well, what is the ocean like?' The first man opens his mouth as wide as he can and says: 'What a sight! What tremendous waves and sounds!' The description of Brahman in the sacred books is like that. It is said in the Vedas that Brahman is of the nature of Bliss - It is Satchidananda.
"Suka and other sages stood on the shore of this Ocean of Brahman and saw and touched the water. According to one school of thought they never plunged into it.
1.040 - Re-Educating the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
This is the purpose of satsanga, listening to discourses of a spiritual and philosophical nature, study of sacred scriptures, svadhyaya, etc. Direct meditation is impossible, for reasons well known; therefore, we go to satsangas and listen to discourses touching upon various subjects, though within a limited circle. The subjects are variegated and yet limited to certain features. Similar is the case with study. If we study the Srimad Bhagavata, or the Ramayana, or the Bhagavadgita, the mind is given a large scope to think of many ideas and to bring into it notions of various features of reality. Though there is a variety presented in the study of a scripture of this kind, this variety is ultimately limited to a particular pattern of thinking.
The whole of the Srimad Bhagavata, to give only one concrete example, is filled with thousands of ideas expressed in various ways. Though these ideas are many, they are kindred, essentially. Therefore, the chaotic movement of the mind is brought to an end, and the first step is taken in bringing the mind under control by allowing it to think of sympathetic thoughts, though they may be variegated in their structure. There are several members in a family. Each person is different from the other one is tall, one is short, one is very active, another is idle, one is working outside, one is working inside, one is a man, and another is a woman. There are all sorts of persons in a family, but yet they are kindred spirits there is a sympathy of character among them. This is the reason why we call them a family, though they are individuals of different natures altogether. Likewise is any type of organisation it may be an institution; it may be a parliament; it may be a government or it may even be an army it may be anything. In the army we have thousands of people of different natures, yet they are brought together by a single ideal.
1.04 - ADVICE TO HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "After I had experienced samdhi, my mind craved intensely to hear only about God. I would always search for places where they were reciting or explaining the sacred books, such as the Bhagavata, the Mahabharata, and the Adhytma Rmyana. I used to go to Krishnakishore to hear him read the Adhytma Rmyana.
Krishnakishore's faith
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"Once Krishnakishore asked me, 'Why have you cast off the sacred thread?' In those days of God-vision I felt as if I were passing through the great storm of win, and everything had blown away from me. No trace of my old self was left. I lost all consciousness of the world. I could hardly keep my cloth on my body, not to speak of the sacred thread! I said to Krishnakishore, 'Ah, you will understand if you ever happen to be as intoxicated with God as I was.'
"And it actually came to pass. He too passed through a God-intoxicated state, when he would repeat only the word 'Om' and shut himself up alone in his room. His relatives thought he was actually mad, and called in a physician. Ram Kaviraj of Natagore came to see him. Krishnakishore said to the physician, 'Cure me, sir, of my malady, if you please, but not of my Om.' (All laugh.)
--
MASTER: "There are two classes of. yogis: the bahudakas and the kutichakas. The bahudakas roam about visiting various holy places and have not yet found peace of mind. But the kutichakas, having visited all the sacred places, have quieted their minds. Feeling serene and peaceful, they settle down in one place and no longer move about. In that one place they are happy; they don't feel the need of going to any sacred place. If one of them ever visits a place of pilgrimage, it is only for the purpose of new inspiration.
"I had to practise each religion for a time - Hinduism, Islam, Christianity. Furthermore, I followed the paths of the Saktas, Vaishnavas, and Vedantists. I realized that there is only one God toward whom all are travelling; but the paths are different.
--
"I went to Syamakunda and Radhakunda in a palanquin and got out to visit the holy Mount Govardhan. At the very sight of the mount I was overpowered with divine emotion and ran to the top. I lost all consciousness of the world around me. The residents of the place helped me to come down. On my way to the sacred pools of Syamakunda and Radhakunda, when I saw the meadows, the trees, the shrubs, the birds, and the deer, I was overcome with ecstasy. My clothes became wet with tears. I said: 'O Krishna! Everything here is as it was in the olden days. You alone are absent.'
Seated inside the palanquin I lost all power of speech. Hriday followed the palanquin.
--
About eleven o'clock the Master took his meal, the offerings from temple of Kli. After taking his noonday rest he resumed his conversation with the devotees. Every now and then he uttered the holy word "Om" or repeated the sacred names of the deities.
After sunset the evening worship was performed in the temples. Since it was the day of Vijaya, the devotees first saluted the Divine Mother and then took the dust of the Master's feet.
1.04 - A Leader, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But what are we to do when we are driven by events and when we are faced with adversaries who will not shrink even from mass slaughter in the hope of overcoming us? But that they can never do. Though we may perish to the last man, we shall not falter in the sacred task that has fallen to us, we shall not betray the holy cause which we have sworn in our heart of hearts to serve to the last breath.
These few words had been spoken with sombre determination, while the face of this obscure hero was marked with such noble mysticism that I would not have been astonished to see the martyrs crown of thorns encircling his brow.
1.04 - BOOK THE FOURTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And act thy sacred orgies o'er and o'er.
But Mineus' daughters, while these rites were pay'd,
1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
6, 329). There is a line in the margin of Jung's copy by these verses in the sacred Books of the
The Red Book
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The all too Protestant satirist forgot that God is in the hog trough no less than in the conventionally sacred image. Lift the stone and you will find me, affirms the best known of the Oxyrhinchus Logia of Jesus, cleave the wood, and I am there. Those who have personally and immediately realized the truth of this saying and, along with it, the truth of Brahmanisms That art thou are wholly delivered.
The Sravaka (literally hearer, the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to contemplatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation. Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons. However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself.
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The doctrine that God is in the world has an important practical corollary the sacredness of Nature, and the sinfulness and folly of mans overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator. Sub-human lives and even things are to be treated with respect and understanding, not brutally oppressed to serve our human ends.
The ruler of the Southern Ocean was Shu, the ruler of the Northern Ocean was Hu, and the ruler of the Centre was Chaos. Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Chaos, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said: Men all have seven orifices for the purpose of seeing, hearing, eating and breathing, while this ruler alone has not a single one. Let us try to make them for him. Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day. At the end of seven days Chaos died.
1.04 - KAI VALYA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The power of words. There are certain sacred words called
124
1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of Osiris or reveal his sacred legend, if the god proved
contumacious. Similarly in India at the present day the great Hindoo
1.04 - Te Shan Carrying His Bundle, #The Blue Cliff Records, #Yuanwu Keqin, #Zen
15. The sacred tortoise is dragging his tail;" he deserves thirty blows.
How many blows to the back of the head would it take for this
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
predicated on the assumption that every individual is sacred. This belief was already extant in its nascent
form, among the ancient Egyptians, and provides the very cornerstone of Judeo-Christian civilization.
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consequence of emergent disbelief in central presumption nothing remains sacred. This process
becomes evidently manifest, from the empirical viewpoint, during a riot. When law and order are held
--
and physician. The Asian shaman was master of religious life, embodiment and keeper of the sacred
doctrine, dominant authority and creator of culture.
--
When sacred Night sweeps heavenward, she takes
the glad, the winsome day, and folding it,
--
metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in
which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of
1.04 - The Control of Psychic Prana, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The first lesson is just to brea the in a measured way, in and out. That will harmonise the system. When you have practiced this for some time, you will do well to join to it the repetition of some word as "Om," or any other sacred word. In India we use certain symbolical words instead of counting one, two, three, four. That is why I advise you to join the mental repetition of the "Om," or some other sacred word to the Pranayama. Let the word flow in and out with the breath, rhythmically, harmoniously, and you will find the whole body is becoming rhythmical. Then you will learn what rest is. Compared with it, sleep is not rest. Once this rest comes the most tired nerves will be calmed down, and you will find that you have never before really rested.
The first effect of this practice is perceived in the change of expression of one's face; harsh lines disappear; with calm thought calmness comes over the face. Next comes beautiful voice. I never saw a Yogi with a croaking voice. These signs come after a few months' practice. After practicing the above mentioned breathing for a few days, you should take up a higher one. Slowly fill the lungs with breath through the Id, the left nostril, and at the same time concentrate the mind on the nerve current. You are, as it were, sending the nerve current down the spinal column, and striking violently on the last plexus, the basic lotus which is triangular in form, the seat of the Kundalini. Then hold the current there for some time. Imagine that you are slowly drawing that nerve current with the breath through the other side, the Pingal, then slowly throw it out through the right nostril. This you will find a little difficult to practice. The easiest way is to stop the right nostril with the thumb, and then slowly draw in the breath through the left; then close both nostrils with thumb and forefinger, and imagine that you are sending that current down, and striking the base of the Sushumn; then take the thumb off, and let the breath out through the right nostril. Next inhale slowly through that nostril, keeping the other closed by the forefinger, then close both, as before. The way the Hindus practice this would be very difficult for this country, because they do it from their childhood, and their lungs are prepared for it. Here it is well to begin with four seconds, and slowly increase. Draw in four seconds, hold in sixteen seconds, then throw out in eight seconds. This makes one Pranayama. At the same time think of the basic lotus, triangular in form; concentrate the mind on that centre. The imagination can help you a great deal. The next breathing is slowly drawing the breath in, and then immediately throwing it out slowly, and then stopping the breath out, using the same numbers. The only difference is that in the first case the breath was held in, and in the second, held out. This last is the easier one. The breathing in which you hold the breath in the lungs must not be practiced too much. Do it only four times in the morning, and four times in the evening. Then you can slowly increase the time and number. You will find that you have the power to do so, and that you take pleasure in it. So very carefully and cautiously increase as you feel that you have the power, to six instead of four. It may injure you if you practice it irregularly.
1.04 - The Crossing of the First Threshold, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
into the sacred zone of the universal source. At Lykaion was an
oracle, presided over by the nymph Erato, whom Pan inspired,
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The beliefs and conclusions of today are, in these rapid and unsettled times, seldom the beliefs and conclusions of tomorrow. In religion, in thought, in science, in literature we march daily over the bodies of dead theories to enthrone fresh syntheses and worship new illuminations. The realms of scholarship are hardly more quiet and secure than these troubled kingdoms; and in that realm nowhere is the soil so boggy, nowhere does scholastic ingenuity disport itself with such light fantastic footsteps over such a quaking morass of hardy conjecture and hasty generalisation as in the Sanscrit scholarship of the last century. But the Vedic question at least seemed to have been settled. It was agreedfirmly enough, it seemed that the Vedas were the sacred chants of a rude, primitive race of agriculturists sacrificing to very material gods for very material benefits with an elaborate but wholly meaningless & arbitrary ritual; the gods themselves were merely poetical personifications of cloud & rain & wind, lightning & dawn and the sky & fire to which the semi-savage Vedic mind attributed by crude personal analogy a personality and a presiding form, the Rishis were sacrificing priests of an invading Aryan race dwelling on the banks of the Panjab rivers, men without deep philosophical or exalted moral ideas, a race of frank cheerful Pagans seeking the good things of life, afraid of drought & night & various kinds of devils, sacrificing persistently & drinking vigorously, fighting the black Dravidians whom they called the Dasyus or robbers,crude prototypes these of Homeric Greek and Scandinavian Viking.All this with many details of the early civilisation were supposed to be supplied by a philological and therefore scientificexamination of the ancient text yielding as certain results as the interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyph and Persian inscription. If there are hymns of a high moral fervour, of a remarkable philosophical depth & elevation, these are later compositions of a more sophisticated age. In the earlier hymns, the vocabulary, archaic and almost unintelligible, allows an adroit & industrious scholarship waving in its hand the magic wand of philology to conjure into it whatever meaning may be most suitable to modern beliefs or preferable to the European temperament. As for Vedanta, it can be no clue to the meaning of the mantras, because the Upanishads represent a spiritual revolt against Vedic naturalism & ceremonialism and not, as has been vainly imagined for some thousands of years, the fulfilment of Vedic truth. Since then, some of these positions have been severely shaken. European Science has rudely scouted the claims of Comparative Philology to rank as a Science; European Ethnology has dismissed the Aryo-Dravidian theory of the philologist & tends to see in the Indian people a single homogeneous race; it has been trenchantly suggested and plausibly upheld that the Vedas themselves offer no evidence that the Indian races were ever outside India but even prove the contraryan advance from the south and not from the north. These theories have not only been suggested & widely approved but are gaining upon the general mind. Alone in all this overthrow the European account of Vedic religion & Vedic civilisation remains as yet intact & unchallenged by any serious questioning. Even in the minds of the Indian people, with their ancient reverence for Veda, the Europeans have effected an entire divorce between Veda & Vedanta. The consistent religious development of India has been theosophic, mystical, Vedantic. Its beginnings are now supposed to have been naturalistic, materialistic, Pagan, almost Graeco-Roman. No satisfactory explanation has been given of this strange transformation in the soul of a people, and it is not surprising that theories should have been started attri buting to Vedanta & Brahmavada a Dravidian origin. Brahmavada was, some have confidently asserted, part of the intellectual property taken over by the Aryan conquerors from the more civilised races they dispossessed. The next step in this scholars progress might well be some counterpart of Sergis Mediterranean theory,an original dark, pacific, philosophic & civilised race overwhelmed by a fairskinned & warlike horde of Aryan savages.
The object of this book is to suggest a prior possibility,that the whole European theory may be from beginning to end a prodigious error. The confident presumption that religion started in fairly recent times with the terrors of the savage, passed through stages of Animism & Nature worship & resulted variously in Paganism, monotheism or the Vedanta has stood in the way of any extension of scepticism to this province of Vedic enquiry. I dispute the presumption and deny the conclusions drawn from it. Before I admit it, I must be satisfied that a system of pure Nature worship ever existed. I cannot accept as evidence Sun & Star myth theories which, as a play of ingenious scholastic fancy, may attract the imagination, but are too haphazard, too easily self-contented, too ill-combined & inconsequent to satisfy the scientific reason. No other religion of which there is any undisputed record or sure observation, can be defined as a system of pure Nature worship. Even the savage-races have had the conception of gods & spirits who are other than personified natural phenomena. At the lowest they have Animism & the worship of spirits, ghosts & devils. Ancestor-worship & the cult of snake & four-footed animal seem to have been quite as old as any Nature-gods with whom research has made us acquainted. In all probability the Python was worshipped long before Apollo. It is therefore evident that even in the lowest religious strata the impulse to personify Nature-phenomena is not the ruling cult-idea of humanity. It is exceedingly unlikely that at any time this element should have so far prevailed as to cast out all the others so as to create a type of cult confined within a pure & rigid naturalism. Man has always seen in the universe the replica of himself. Unless therefore the Vedic Rishis had no thought of their subjective being, no perception of intellectual and moral forces within themselves, it is a psychological impossibility that they should have detected divine forces behind the objective world but none behind the subjective.
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The immediate or at any rate the earliest known successors of the Rishis, the compilers of the Brahmanas, the writers of theUpanishads give a clear & definite answer to this question.The Upanishads everywhere rest their highly spiritual & deeply mystic doctrines on the Veda.We read in the Isha Upanishad of Surya as the Sun God, but it is the Sun of spiritual illumination, of Agni as the Fire, but it is the inner fire that burns up all sin & crookedness. In the Kena Indra, Agni & Vayu seek to know the supreme Brahman and their greatness is estimated by the nearness with which they touched him,nedistham pasparsha. Uma the daughter of Himavan, the Woman, who reveals the truth to them is clearly enough no natural phenomenon. In the Brihadaranyaka, the most profound, subtle & mystical of human scriptures, the gods & Titans are the masters, respectively, of good and of evil. In the Upanishads generally the word devah is used as almost synonymous with the forces & functions of sense, mind & intellect. The element of symbolism is equally clear. To the terms of the Vedic ritual, to their very syllables a profound significance is everywhere attached; several incidents related in the Upanishads show the deep sense then & before entertained that the sacrifices had a spiritual meaning which must be known if they were to be conducted with full profit or even with perfect safety. The Brahmanas everywhere are at pains to bring out a minute symbolism in the least circumstances of the ritual, in the clarified butter, the sacred grass, the dish, the ladle. Moreover, we see even in the earliest Upanishads already developed the firm outlines and minute details of an extraordinary psychology, physics, cosmology which demand an ancient development and centuries of Yogic practice and mystic speculation to account for their perfect form & clearness. This psychology, this physics, this cosmology persist almost unchanged through the whole history of Hinduism. We meet them in the Puranas; they are the foundation of the Tantra; they are still obscurely practised in various systems of Yoga. And throughout, they have rested on a declared Vedic foundation. The Pranava, the Gayatri, the three Vyahritis, the five sheaths, the five (or seven) psychological strata, (bhumi, kshiti of the Vedas), the worlds that await us, the gods who help & the demons who hinder go back to Vedic origins.All this may be a later mystic misconception of the hymns & their ritual, but the other hypothesis of direct & genuine derivation is also possible. If there was no common origin, if Greek & Indian separated during the naturalistic period of the common religion supposed to be recorded in the Vedas it is surprising that even the little we know of Greek rites & mysteries should show us ideas coincident with those of Indian Tantra & Yoga.
When we go back to the Veda itself, we find in the hymns which are to us most easily intelligible by the modernity of their language, similar & decisive indications. The moralistic conception of Varuna, for example, is admitted even by the Europeans. We even find the sense of sin, usually supposed to be an advanced religious conception, much more profoundly developed in prehistoric India than it was in any other old Aryan nation even in historic times. Surely, this is in itself a significant indication. Surely, this conception cannot have become so clear & strong without a previous history in the earlier hymns. Nor is it psychologically possible that a cult capable of so advanced an idea, should have been ignorant of all other moral & intellectual conceptions reverencing only natural forces & seeking only material ends. Neither can there have been a sudden leap filled up only by a very doubtful henotheism, a huge hiatus between the naturalism of early Veda and the transcendentalism of the Vedic Brahmavada admittedly present in the later hymns. The European interpretation in the face of such conflicting facts threatens to become a brilliant but shapeless monstrosity. And is there no symbolism in the details of the Vedic sacrifice? It seems to me that the peculiar language of the Veda has never been properly studied or appreciated in this connection. What are we to say of the Vedic anxiety to increase Indra by the Soma wine? Of the description of Soma as the amritam, the wine of immortality, & of its forces as the indavah or moon powers? Of the constant sense of the attacks delivered by the powers of evil on the sacrifice? Of the extraordinary powers already attri buted to the mantra & the sacrifice? Have the neshtram potram, hotram of the Veda no symbolic significance? Is there no reason for the multiplication of functions at the sacrifice or for the subtle distinctions between Gayatrins, Arkins, Brahmas? These are questions that demand a careful consideration which has never yet been given for the problems they raise.
--
Even this confirmation may not be sufficient. For although the new version may have the immense superiority of a clear depth & simplicity supported & confirmed by a minute & consistent scientific experimentation, although it may explain rationally & simply most or all of the passages which have baffled the older & the newer, the Eastern & the Western scholars, still the confirmation may be discounted as a personal test applied in the light of a previous conclusion. If, however, there is a historical confirmation as well, if it is found that Veda has exactly the same psychology & philosophy as Vedanta, Purana, Tantra & ancient & modern Yoga & all of them indicate the same Vedic results which we ourselves have discovered in our experience, then we may possess our souls in peace & say to ourselves that we have discovered the meaning of Veda; its true meaning if not all its significance. Nor need we be discouraged, if we have to disagree with Sayana & Yaska in the actual rendering of the hymns no less than with the Europeans. Neither of these great authorities can be held to be infallible. Yaska is an authority for the interpretation of Vedic words in his own age, but that age was already far subsequent to the Vedic & the sacred language of the hymns was already to him an ancient tongue. The Vedas are much more ancient than we usually suppose. Sayana represents the scholarship & traditions of a period not much anterior to our own. There is therefore no authoritative rendering of the hymns. The Veda remains its own best authority.
But all this triple labour is a work of great responsibility, minute research and an immense & meticulous industry. Meanwhile I hold myself justified in opening the way by a purely hypothetical entrance into the subject, suggesting possibilities for the present rather than seeking to enforce a settled opinion. There is a possible theory that may be proposed, certain provisional details of it that may be formulated. A few initial stones may be laid down to help in crossing by a convenient ford this great stream of the Veda.
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(11) The Yajna has two parts, mantra & tantrasubjective & objective; in the outer sacrifice the mantra is the Vedic hymn and the tantra the oblation; in the inner the mantra is the meditation or the sacred formula, the tantra the putting forth of the power generated by mantra to bring about some successful spiritual, intellectual, vital or mental activity of which the gods have their share.
(12) The mantra consists of gayatra, brahma and arka, the formulation of thought into rhythmic speech to bring about a spiritual force or result, the filling of the soul (brahma) with the idea & name of the god of the mantra, the use of the mantra for effectuation of the external object or the activity desired.
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The passage devoted to her occupies the three final & culminating verses of the sacred poem. Pavaka nah Saraswati vajebhir vajinivati Yajnam vashtu dhiyavasuh. Chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam Yajnam dadhe Saraswati. Maho arnas Saraswati prachetayati ketuna Dhiyo visva vi rajati. Now there is here mention in the last verse of a flowing water, arnas, whether sea or river, but this can be no material stream, since plainly the rest of the passage can only refer to a goddess whose functions are subjective. She is dhiyavasuh, stored or rich with understanding, she is the impelling power of truths, she is the awakener of or to right thoughts. She awakens something or brings it forward into consciousness (pra-chetayati) by the perceptive intelligence and she governs or shines through all the movements of the fixing & discerning mind. There are too many words here that do ordinarily & ought here to bear a purely subjective sense for any avoidance of the clear import of the passage. We start then with the conception of Saraswati as a goddess of mind, if not the goddess of mind and we have then to determine what are her functions or activities as indicated in this important passage and for what purpose she has been summoned by the son of Visvamitra to this sacrifice.
What exact sense are we to apply to vajebhir vajinivati when it is spoken of a subjective Power? It is a suggestion I shall make and work out hereafter by application to all the hundreds of passages in which the word occurs that vaja in the Veda means a substantial, firm & copious condition of being, well-grounded & sufficient plenty in anything material, mental or spiritual, any substance, wealth, chattels, qualities, psychological conditions.
--
For we perceive at once that the yajna here can be no material sacrifice, no mere pouring out of the Soma-wine on the sacred flame to the gods of rain & cloud, star & sunshine.
Saraswati is not even here the goddess of speech whose sole function is to inspire & guide the singer in his hymn. In other passages she may be merely Bharati,theMuse. But here there are greater depths of thought & soul-experience. She has to do things which mere speech cannot do. And even if we were to take her here as the divine Muse, still the functions asked of her are too great, there is too little need of all these high intellectual motions, for a mere invitation to Rain&Star Gods to share in a pouring of the Soma-wine. She could do that without all this high intellectual & spiritual labour. Even, therefore, if it be a material sacrifice whichMadhuchchhanda is offering, its material aspects can be no more than symbolical. Unless indeed the rest of the hymn contradicts the intellectual & spiritual purport which we have discovered in these closing verses, fullon the face of them & accepting the plainest & most ordinary meaning for each single word in themof deep psychological knowledge, moral & spiritual aspiration & a supreme poetical art.
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The master word of the address to the Aswins is the verb chanasyatam, take your delight. The Aswins, as I understand them, are the masters of strength, youth, joy, swiftness, pleasure, rapture, the pride and glory of existence, and may almost be described as the twin gods of youth and joy. All the epithets applied to them here support this view. They are dravatpani subhaspati, the swift-footed masters of weal, of happiness and good fortune; they are purubhuja, much enjoying; their office is to take and give delight, chanasyatam. So runs the first verse, Aswin yajwaririsho dravatpani subhaspati, Purubhuja chanasyatam. O Aswins, cries Madhuchchhanda, I am in the full rush, the full ecstasy of the sacrificial action, O swift-footed, much-enjoying masters of happiness, take in me your delight. Again they are purudansasa, wide-distributing, nara, strong. O strong wide-distributing Aswins, continues the singer, with your bright-flashing (or brilliantly-forceful) understanding take pleasure in the words (of the mantra) which are now firmly settled (in the mind). Aswina purudansasa nara shaviraya dhiya, Dhishnya vanatam girah. Again we have the stress on things subjective, intellectual and spiritual. The extreme importance of the mantra, the inspired & potent word in the old Vedic religion is known nor has it diminished in later Hinduism. The mantra in Yoga is only effective when it has settled into the mind, is asina, has taken its seat there and become spontaneous; it is then that divine power enters into, takes possession of it and the mantra itself becomes one with the god of the mantra and does his works in the soul and body. This, as every Yogin knows, is one of the fundamental ideas not only in the Rajayogic practice but in almost all paths of spiritual discipline. Here we have the very word that can most appropriately express this settling in of the mantra, dhishnya, combined with the word girah. And we know that the gods in the Veda are called girvanah, those who delight in the mantra; Indra, the god of mental force, is girvahas, he who supports or bears the mantra. Why should Nature gods delight in speech or the god of thunder & rain be the supporter or bearer of any kind of speech? The hymns? But what is meant by bearing the hymns? We have to give unnatural meanings to vanas & vahas, if we wish to avoid this plain indication. In the next verse the epithets are dasra, bountiful, which, like wide-distributing is again an epithet appropriate to the givers of happiness, weal and youth, rudravartani, fierce & impetuous in all their ways, and Nasatya, a word of doubtful meaning which, for philological reasons, I take to mean gods of movement.As the movement indicated by this and kindred words n, (natare), especially meant a gliding, floating, swimming movement, the Aswins came to be especially the protectors of ships & sailors, and it is in this capacity that we find Castor & Polydeuces (Purudansas) acting, their Western counterparts, the brothers of Helen (Sarama), the swift riders of the Roman legend. O givers, O lords of free movement, runs the closing verse of this invocation, come to the outpourings of my nectar, be ye fierce in action;I feel full of youthful vigour, I have prepared the sacred grass,if that indeed be the true & early meaning of barhis. Dasra yuvakavah suta nasatya vriktabarhishah, Ayatam rudravartani. It is an intense rapture of the soul (rudravartani) which Madhuchchhandas asks first from the gods.Therefore his first call is to the Aswins.
Next, it is to Indra that he turns. I have already said that in my view Indra is the master of mental force. Let us see whether there is anything here to contradict the hypothesis. Indra yahi chitrabhano suta ime tu ayavah, Anwibhis tana putasah. Indrayahi dhiyeshito viprajutah sutavatah Upa brahmani vaghatah. Indrayahi tutujana upa brahmani harivah Sute dadhishwa nas chanah. There are several important words here that are doubtful in their sense, anwi, tana, vaghatah, brahmani; but none of them are of importance for our present purpose except brahmani. For reasons I shall give in the proper place I do not accept Brahma in the Veda as meaning speech of any kind, but as either soul or a mantra of the kind afterwards called dhyana, the object of which was meditation and formation in the soul of the divine Power meditated on whether in an image or in his qualities. It is immaterial which sense we take here. Indra, sings the Rishi, arrive, O thou of rich and varied light, here are these life-streams poured forth, purified, with vital powers, with substance. Arrive, O Indra, controlled by the understanding, impelled forward in various directions to my soul faculties, I who am now full of strength and flourishing increase. Arrive, O Indra, with protection to my soul faculties, O dweller in the brilliance, confirm our delight in the nectar poured. It seems to me that the remarkable descriptions dhiyeshito viprajutah are absolutely conclusive, that they prove the presence of a subjective Nature Power, not a god of rain & tempest, & prove especially a mind-god. What is it but mental force which comes controlled by the understanding and is impelled forward by it in various directions? What else is it that at the same time protects by its might the growing & increasing soul faculties from impairing & corrupting attack and confirms, keeps safe & continuous the delight which the Aswins have brought with them? The epithets chitrabhano, harivas become at once intelligible and appropriate; the god of mental force has indeed a rich and varied light, is indeed a dweller in the brilliance. The progress of the thought is clear. Madhuchchhanda, as a result of Yogic practice, is in a state of spiritual & physical exaltation; he has poured out the nectar of vitality; he is full of strength & ecstasy This is the sacrifice he has prepared for the gods. He wishes it to be prolonged, perhaps to be made, if it may now be, permanent. The Aswins are called to give & take the delight, Indra to supply & preserve that mental force which will sustain the delight otherwise in danger of being exhausted & sinking by its own fierceness rapidly consuming its material in the soul faculties. The state and the movement are one of which every Yogin knows.
1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
The animal appropriate to Aleph is the Eagle, the king of the birds, since we learn from classical mythology that the Eagle was sacred to Jupiter ; whose sacrifices, I may add, generally consisted of bulls and cows. Its element is
Air A, rushing aimlessly hither and thither, always pressing or tending in a downward direction.
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Mastic, Mace, and Storax are the perfumes of this twelfth Path ; the Agate is its jewel ; Vervain its sacred plant. The Ibis is its sacred bird, which ages ago was observed to have the curious habit of standing on one leg for long periods of time, and to the fertile imagination of the ancients this suggested the absorption in profound meditation. In Yoga practice there is a posture called the
Ibis wherein the practitioner balances himself on one leg.
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Aloes are its perfumes ; the Moonstone and Pearl being its jewels. The Dog is sacred to Gimel, probably because the huntress Artemis always had hounds in attendance. The
Bow and Arrow, for the same reason, is its symbolic magical instrument.
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In India we see the sacred bull revered as typifying Shiva in his creative aspect ; also as glyphed in their temples by an erect Lingam. Here, the Goddess of Marriage, and
Hymen, the god carrying the nuptial veil, are also corres- pondences.
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Its sacred animal is the Sphinx, whose expression of enigma combining male, female, and animal qualities is an apt symbol of the Great Work brought to perfection. The
Sepher Yetsirah names Ches " The House of Influence " ; the Lotus is its flower, Onycha its perfume, Maroon its colour, and Amber its jewel.
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Spiritual Dryness or " The Dark Night of the Soul ", wherein all one's powers are held temporarily in abeyance gathering, in reality, strength to shoot up and blossom forth in the light of the Spiritual Sun. Its sacred animal is, therefore, the Beetle, representing the Egyptian God
Khephra, the Beetle-God of the Midnight Sun symbolizing
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Its sacred creature is the Dolphin, its colour Buff, and its jewel the Pearl. The Pearl is referred to Pisces be- cause of its cloudy brilliance as contrasted with the trans- parency of other jewels, thus reminding one somewhat of the astral plane with its cloudy forms and semi-opaque visions as opposed to the flashes of formless light apper- taining to purely spiritual planes.
XVIII. - The Moon, is its Tarot card, describing a mid- night landscape on which the moon is shining. Standing between two towers a jackal and a wolf, with muzzles
1.04 - The Praise, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
KAILASH: a sacred mountain in Western Tibet,
looked upon as Chakrasamvara's dwelling by
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This, in short, is the demand made on us, that we should turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice. Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal. All our actions, not less the smallest and most ordinary and trifling than the greatest and most uncommon and noble, must be performed as consecrated acts. Our individualised nature must live in the single consciousness of an inner and outer movement dedicated to Something that is beyond us and greater than our ego. No matter what the gift or to whom it is presented by us, there must be a consciousness in the act that we are presenting it to the one divine Being in all beings. Our commonest or most grossly material actions must assume this sublimated character; when we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass away from us. In any great labour, in any high discipline, in any difficult or noble enterprise, whether undertaken for ourselves, for others or for the race, it will no longer be possible to stop short at the idea of the race, of ourselves or of others. The thing we are doing must be consciously offered as a sacrifice of works, not to these, but either through them or directly to the One Godhead; the Divine Inhabitant who was hidden by these figures must be no longer hidden but ever present to our soul, our mind, our sense. The workings and results of our acts must be put in the hands of that One in the feeling that that Presence is the Infinite and Most High by whom alone our labour and our aspiration are possible. For in his being all takes place; for him all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on his altar. Even in those things in which Nature is herself very plainly the worker and we only the witnesses of her working and its containers and supporters, there should be the same constant memory and insistent consciousness of a work and of its divine Master. Our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective practice must carry in them three results that are of a central importance for our spiritual ideal. It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love. There is bound up with it a growing sense of the Divine in all things, a deepening communion with the Divine in all our thought, will and action and at every moment of our lives, a more and more moved consecration to the Divine of the totality of our being. Now these implications of the Yoga of works are also of the very essence of an integral and absolute Bhakti. The seeker who puts them into living practice makes in himself continually a constant, active and effective representation of the very spirit of self-devotion, and it is inevitable that out of it there should emerge the most engrossing worship of the Highest to whom is given this service. An absorbing love for the Divine Presence to whom he feels an always more intimate closeness, grows upon the consecrated worker. And with it is born or in it is contained a universal love too for all these beings, living forms and creatures that are habitations of the Divinenot the brief restless grasping emotions of division, but the settled selfless love that is the deeper vibration of oneness. In all the seeker begins to meet the one Object of his adoration and service. The way of works turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind can imagine.
1.053 - A Very Important Sadhana, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All meditation is freedom from distraction by directing the energy in one specified manner, and it is also freedom from every other motive, purpose or incentive. Since the senses are accustomed to contemplation on objects and will not so easily yield to this advice, another suggestion is given namely, a daily practice of sacred study, or svadhyaya. If you cannot do japa or meditation, or cannot concentrate the mind in any way, then take to study not of any book at random from the library, but of a specific sacred text which is supposed to be a moksha shastra, the study of which will generate aspiration in the mind towards the liberation of the soul.
A daily recitation with the understanding of the meaning of such hymns as the Purusha Sukta from the Veda, for instance, is a great svadhyaya, as Vachaspati Mishra, the commentator on the Yoga Sutras, mentions. Also, the Satarudriya which we chant daily in the temple without perhaps knowing its meaning is a great meditation if it is properly understood and recited with a proper devout attitude of mind. Vachaspati Mishra specifically refers to two great hymns of the Veda the Purusha Sukta and the Satarudriya which he says are highly purifying, not only from the point of view of their being conducive to meditation or concentration of mind, but also in other purifying processes which will take place in the body and the whole system due to the chanting of these mantras. These Veda mantras are immense potencies, like atom bombs, and to handle them and to energise the system with their forces is a spiritual practice by itself. This is one suggestion.
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The point is that if you cannot do anything else, at least do this much. Take to regular study so that your day is filled with divine thoughts, philosophical ideas and moods which are spiritual in some way or the other. You may closet yourself in your study for hours together and browse through these profound texts, whatever be the nature of their presentation, because all these philosophical and spiritual presentations through the scriptures and the writings of other masters have one aim namely, the analysis of the structure of things, and enabling the mind to know the inner reality behind this structure. There is a threefold prong provided by Patanjali in this connection wherein he points out that self-control the control of the senses, austerity, or tapas together with svadhyaya, or study of sacred scriptures, will consummate in the adoration of God as the All-reality.
The idea that God is extra-cosmic and outside us, incapable of approach, and that we are likely not to receive any response from Him in spite of our efforts at prayer, etc. all these ideas are due to certain encrustations in the mind, the tamasic qualities which cover the mind and make it again subtly tend towards objects of sense. The desire for objects of sense, subtly present in a very latent form in the subconscious level, becomes responsible for the doubt in the mind that perhaps there is no response from God. This is because our love is not for God it is for objects of sense, and for status in society and enjoyments of various types in the world. And when, through austerity, or tapas, we have put the senses down with the force of our thumb, there is a temporary cessation of their activity.
1.05 - BOOK THE FIFTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Their sacred water, charming to the sight;
Their ancient groves, dark grottos, shady bow'rs,
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From whence she came, and why a sacred well.
The Story of Arethusa
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And home the youth her sacred dragons drives.
The Pierides transform'd to Magpies
The chosen Muse here ends her sacred lays;
The nymphs unanimous decree the bays,
1.05 - Buddhism and Women, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
of the sacred letter AH, symbol of the buddha's
speech, spontaneously appeared on her tongue.
1.05 - CHARITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The passage from what St. Bernard calls the carnal love of the sacred humanity to the spiritual love of the Godhead, from the emotional love that can only unite lover and beloved in act to the perfect charity which unifies them in spiritual substance, is reflected in religious practice as the passage from meditation, discursive and affective, to infused contemplation. All Christian writers insist that the spiritual love of the Godhead is superior to the carnal love of the humanity, which serves as introduction and means to mans final end in unitive love-knowledge of the divine Ground; but all insist no less strongly that carnal love is a necessary introduction and an indispensable means. Oriental writers would agree that this is true for many persons, but not for all, since there are some born contemplatives who are able to harmonize their starting point with their goal and to embark directly upon the Yoga of Knowledge. It is from the point of view of the born contemplative that the greatest of Taoist philosophers writes in the following passage.
Those men who in a special way regard Heaven as Father and have, as it were, a personal love for it, how much more should they love what is above Heaven as Father! Other men in a special way regard their rulers as better than themselves and they, as it were, personally die for them. How much more should they die for what is truer than a rulerl When the springs dry up, the fish are all together on dry land. They then moisten each other with their dampness and keep each other wet with their slime. But this is not to be compared with forgetting each other in a river or lake.
1.05 - Hymns of Bharadwaja, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5. When the sacred grass has been plucked with prostration of surrender to the Fire, when the ladle of the purification full of the light-offering has been set to its labour, when the home has been reached in the house of Earth and the sacrifice lodged like an eye in the sun, -
6. O Son of Force, O Fire, kindling with the gods thy fires, Priest of the call, priest with thy many flame-armies, dispense to us the Treasures; shining with light let us charge beyond the sin and the struggle.
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1. In the midmost of the gated house Fire, the Priest of the call, the King of the sacred seat and the whip of swiftness, to sacrifice to Earth and Heaven! This is the Son of Force in whom is the Truth; he stretches out from afar with his light like the sun.
2. When a man sacrifices in thee, O King, O Lord of sacrifice, when he does well his works in the wise and understanding Fire like Heaven in its all-forming labour, triple thy session; thy speed is as if of a deliverer, when thou comest to give the sacrifice whose offerings are man's human fullnesses.
1.05 - MORALITY AS THE ENEMY OF NATURE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
and knows how to use to its own advantage all that which the sacred
craziness of priests and the morbid reason in priests, rejects; to
1.05 - On painstaking and true repentance which constitute the life of the holy convicts; and about the prison., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
4 Lit. the sacred illness.
5 Deuteronomy xv, 12 ff.
1.05 - Prayer, #Hymn of the Universe, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
where as at a sacred spring. His heart burned
within him. His body lies hidden in the earth in
1.05 - The Activation of Human Energy, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the Universe. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like
the blood of spiritual evolution. (H.E., pp. 32-4.)
1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in and through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for continually the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation. Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this' defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On the other side. Science and Art and the knowledge of life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance.
A Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams they are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself In the human creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered to the Highest and to none else, to the Divine shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those that are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a distance, or between the fuel that burns strongly or brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede the ardour of the fire by their damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But otherwise, apart from this division, all activities of knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily to be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms and processes of things, those which concern the life of men and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge, -- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expressions-all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning. The Yogin's aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its works, to express that One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from the high motive. The Yogin's distinction from other men is this that he lives in a higher and vaster spiritual consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then spring from there: it must not be made in the mind, -- for it is a greater truth and vision than mental man's that he has to express or rather that presses to express itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but for a divine purpose.
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This then is the true relation between divine and human knowledge; it is not a separation into disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of the consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested in the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or mental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga if it proceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence of the timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of Eternal in Time. It is evident that the need of a concentration indispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make it necessary for the seeker to gather together his energies and focus them only on that which will help the transition and to leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly turned towards the one object. He may find that this or that pursuit of human knowledge with which he was accustomed to deal by the surface power of the mind still brings him, by reason of this tendency or habit, out of the depths to the surface or down from the heights which he has climbed or is nearing, to lower levels. These activities then may have to be intermitted or put aside until secure in a higher consciousness he is able to turn its powers on all the mental fields; then, subjected to that light or taken up into it, they are turned, by the transformation of his consciousness, into a province of the spiritual and divine. All that cannot be so transformed or refuses to be part of a divine consciousness he will abandon without hesitation, but not from any preconceived prejudgment of its emptiness or its incapacity to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed mental test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow no unalterable rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind according to his feeling, insight or experience until the greater Power and Light are there to turn their unerring scrutiny on all that is below and choose or reject their material out of what the human evolution has prepared for the divine labour.
How precisely or by what stages this progression and change will take place must depend on the form, need and powers of the individual nature. In the spiritual domain the essence is always one, but there is yet an infinite variety and, at any rate in the integral Yoga, the rigidity of a strict and precise mental rule is seldom applicable; for, even when they walk in the same direction, no two natures proceed on exactly the same lines, in the same series of steps or with quite identical stages of their progress. It may yet be said that a logical succession of the states of progress would be very much in this order. First, there is a large turning in which all the natural mental activities proper to the individual nature are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and dedicated by the soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to the divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being and a bringing down of the Light and Power proper to some new height of consciousness gained by its upward effort into the whole action of the knowledge. Here there may be a strong concentration on the inward central change of the consciousness and an abandonment of a large part of the outward-going mental life or else its relegation to a small and subordinate place. At different stages it or parts of it may be taken up again from time to time to see how far the new inner psychic and spiritual consciousness can be brought into its movements, but that compulsion of the temperament or the nature which, in human beings, necessitates one kind of activity or another and makes it seem almost an indispensable portion of the existence, will diminish and eventually no attachment will be left, no lower compulsion or driving force felt anywhere. Only the Divine will matter, the Divine alone will be the one need of the whole being; if there is any compulsion to activity it will be not that of implanted desire or of force of Nature, but the luminous driving of some greater Consciousness-Force which is becoming more and more the sole motive power of the whole existence. On the other hand, it is possible at any period of the inner spiritual progress that one may experience an extension rather than a restriction of the' activities; there may be an opening of new capacities of mental creation and new provinces of knowledge by the miraculous touch of the Yoga-shakti. Aesthetic feeling, the power of artistic creation in one field or many fields together, talent or genius of literary expression, a faculty of metaphysical thinking, any power of eye or ear or hand or mind-power may awaken where none was apparent before. The Divine within may throw these latent riches out from the depths in which they were hidden or a Force from above may pour down its energies to equip the instrumental nature for the activity or the creation of which it is meant to be a channel or a builder. But, whatever may be the method or the course of development chosen by the hidden Master of the Yoga, the common culmination of this stage is the growing consciousness of him above as the mover, decider, shaper of all the movements of the mind and all the activities of knowledge.
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As the light of each of these higher powers is turned upon the human activities of knowledge, any distinction of sacred and profane, human and divine, begins more and more to fade until it is finally abolished as otiose; for whatever is touched and thoroughly penetrated by the Divine Gnosis is transfigured and becomes a movement of its own Light and Power, free from the turbidity and limitations of the lower intelligence. It is not a separation of some activities, but a transformation of them all by the change of the informing consciousness that is the way of liberation, an ascent of the sacrifice of knowledge to a greater and ever greater light and force. All the works of mind and intellect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, then again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the overmind radiance, and these transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit.
If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition -- for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind -- has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart, -- the secret heart-cave, hrdaye gunayam, as the Upanishads put it, -- and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle.
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As in the works of knowledge, so in dealing with the workings of the heart, we are obliged to make a preliminary distinction between two categories of movements, those that are either moved by the true soul or aid towards its liberation and rule in the nature and those that are turned to the satisfaction of the unpurified vital nature. But the distinctions ordinarily laid down in this sense are of little use for the deep or spiritual purpose of Yoga. Thus a division can be made between religious emotions and mundane feelings and it can be laid down as a rule of spiritual life that the religious emotions alone should be cultivated and all worldly feelings and passions must be rejected and fall away from our existence. This in practice would mean the religious life of the saint or devotee, alone with the Divine or linked only to others in a common God-love or at the most pouring out the fountains of a sacred, religious or pietistic love on the world outside. But religious emotion itself is too constantly invaded by the turmoil and obscurity of the vital movements and it is often either crude or narrow or fanatical or mixed with movements that are not signs of the spirit's perfection. It is evident besides that even at the best an intense figure of sainthood clamped in rigid hieratic lines is quite other than the wide ideal of an integral Yoga. A larger psychic and emotional relation with God and the world, more deep and plastic in its essence, more wide and embracing in its movements, more capable of taking up in its sweep the whole of life, is imperative.
A wider formula has been provided by the secular mind of mall of which the basis is the ethical sense; for it distinguishes between the emotions sanctioned by the ethical sense and those that are egoistic and selfishly common and mundane. It is the works of altruism, philanthropy, compassion, benevolence, humanitarianism, service, labour for the well-being of man and all creatures that are to be our Ideal; to shuffle off the coil of egoism and grow into a soul of self-abnegation that lives only or mainly for others or for humanity as a whole is the way of man's inner evolution according to this doctrine. Or if this is too secular and mental to satisfy the whole of our being, since there is a deeper religious and spiritual note there that is left out of account by the humanitarian formula, a religio-ethical foundation can be provided for it -and such was indeed its original basis. To the inner worship of the Divine or the Supreme by the devotion of the heart or to the pursuit of the Ineffable by the seeking of a highest knowledge can be added a worship through altruistic works or a preparation through acts of love, of benevolence, of service to mankind or to those around us. It is indeed by the religio-ethical sense that the law of universal goodwill or universal compassion or of love and service to the neighbour, the Vedantic, the Buddhistic, the Christian ideal, was created; only by a sort of secular refrigeration extinguishing the fervour of the religious element in it could the humanitarian ideal disengage itself and become the highest plane of a secular system of mental and moral ethics. For in the religious system this law of works is a means that ceases when its object is accomplished or a side issue; it is a part of the cult by which one adores and seeks the Divinity or it is a penultimate step of the excision of self in the passage to Nirvana. In the secular ideal it is promoted into an object in itself; it becomes a sign of the moral perfection of the human being, or else it is a condition for a happier state of man upon earth, a better society, a more united life of the race. But none of these things satisfy the demand of the soul that is placed before us by the integral Yoga.
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But the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure towards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the new-born godhead within us. In the first long stage of its growth and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection, tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, on all beauty and gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at their best and at their worst how fallen and stamped with the mark of ego and self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the imitation of a soul movement. At once, emerging, it is ready and eager to break all the old ties and imperfect emotional activities and replace them by a greater spiritual Truth of love and oneness. It may still admit the human forms and movements, but on condition that they are turned towards the One alone. It accepts only the ties that are helpful, the heart's reverence for the Guru, the union of the God-seekers, a spiritual compassion for the ignorant human and animal world and its peoples, the joy and happiness and satisfaction of beauty that comes from the perception of the Divine everywhere. It plunges the nature inward towards its meeting with the immanent Divine in the heart's secret centre and, while that call is there, no reproach of egoism, no mere outward summons of altruism or duty or philanthropy or service will deceive or divert it from its sacred longing and its obedience to the attraction of the Divinity within it. It lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Ignorance. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or any vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down the entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or their perversions and reveal to them their abounding share of the intimacy and the oneness and the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture.
All true truths of Love and of the works of Love the psychic being accepts in their place; but its flame mounts always upward and it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth and the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign of the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns life into a state of suffering and misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too all the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
defines around us a sacred space into which nothing unbearably foreign is allowed. Culture is generated by
the process whose essential features have been captured in the pervasive and recurrent myths of the hero.
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as sacred and untouchable, emanating from adults and lasting forever. Every suggested alteration strikes
the child as a transgression.
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something external to the individual and consequently sacred to him; then, as he gradually makes it his
own, it comes to that extent to be felt as the free product of mutual agreement and an autonomous
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The second-stage child, who accepts the presuppositions of his cultural sub-tradition as sacred and
untouchable, thinks in the same manner as the classic, partially hypothetical, pre-experimental or
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children, a rule is a sacred reality because it is traditional; for the older ones it depends upon mutual
agreement.567 Joseph Rychlak comments:
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Mineral substances shared in the sacredness attaching to the Earth-Mother. Very early on we are
confronted with the notion that ores grow in the belly of the earth, after the manner of embryos.
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hold to be at once alive and sacred, and in their labours they pursue the transformation of matter, its
perfection and its transmutation.616
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Eliade, M. (1957). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy (W.R. Trask, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton
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between secular and sacred literature that is one of our main themes.
If we look at the prophetic writers of the Old Testament, beginning with Amos, the affiliation of primitive and
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authority. As early as Elizabethan times there were critics who suggested that the distinction between sacred and
secular inspiration might be less rigid than generally assumed. George Puttenham, writing in the 1580s, pointed to
1.05 - The Magical Control of the Weather, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
withering for want of rain, the members of the sacred Buffalo
Society fill a large vessel with water and dance four times round
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graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It often happens,
too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the
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led their sheep to sacred ground, and there they separated the lambs
from their dams, that their plaintive bleating might touch the heart
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kindled. No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic
ceremony is being performed. When the Sulka of New Britain wish to
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banyan or a casuarina, in a sacred place.
The offering made by the Brahman in the morning is supposed to
1.05 - THE MASTER AND KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
About four o'clock in the afternoon the steamboat with Keshab and his Brahmo followers cast anchor in the Ganges alongside the Kli temple at Dakshineswar. The passengers saw in front of them the bathing-ghat and the chandni. To their left, in the temple compound, stood six temples of iva, and to their right another group of six iva temples. The white steeple of the Kli temple, the tree-tops of the Panchavati, and the silhouette of pine-trees stood high against the blue autumn sky. The gardens between the two nahabats were filled with fragrant flowers, and along the bank of the Ganges were rows of flowering plants. The blue sky was reflected in the brown water of the river, the sacred Ganges, associated with the most ancient traditions of Aryan civilization. The outer world appeared soft and serene, and the hearts of the Brahmo devotees were filled with peace.
Master in samdhi
1.05 - True and False Subjectivism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is necessary, if we are not to deceive ourselves, to note that even in this field what Germany has done is to systematise certain strong actual tendencies and principles of international action to the exclusion of all that either professed to resist or did actually modify them. If a sacred egoism and the expression did not come from Teutonic lipsis to govern international relations, then it is difficult to deny the force of the German position. The theory of inferior and decadent races was loudly proclaimed by other than German thinkers and has governed, with whatever assuaging scruples, the general practice of military domination and commercial exploitation of the weak by the strong; all that Germany has done is to attempt to give it a wider extension and more rigorous execution and apply it to European as well as to Asiatic and African peoples. Even the severity or brutality of her military methods or of her ways of colonial or internal political repression, taken at their worst, for much once stated against her has been proved and admitted to be deliberate lies manufactured by her enemies, was only a crystallising of certain recent tendencies towards the revival of ancient and mediaeval hardheartedness in the race. The use and even the justification of massacre and atrocious cruelty in war on the ground of military exigency and in the course of commercial exploitation or in the repression of revolt and disorder has been quite recently witnessed in the other continents, to say nothing of certain outskirts of Europe.9 From one point of view, it is well that terrible examples of the utmost logic of these things should be prominently forced on the attention of mankind; for by showing the evil stripped of all veils the choice between good and evil instead of a halting between the two will be forced on the human conscience. Woe to the race if it blinds its conscience and buttresses up its animal egoism with the old justifications; for the gods have shown that Karma is not a jest.
But the whole root of the German error lies in its mistaking life and the body for the self. It has been said that this gospel is simply a reversion to the ancient barbarism of the religion of Odin; but this is not the truth. It is a new and a modern gospel born of the application of a metaphysical logic to the conclusions of materialistic Science, of a philosophic subjectivism to the objective pragmatic positivism of recent thought. Just as Germany applied the individualistic position to the realisation of her communal subjective existence, so she applied the materialistic and vitalistic thought of recent times and equipped it with a subjective philosophy. Thus she arrived at a bastard creed, an objective subjectivism which is miles apart from the true goal of a subjective age. To show the error it is necessary to see wherein lies the true individuality of man and of the nation. It lies not in its physical, economic, even its cultural life which are only means and adjuncts, but in something deeper whose roots are not in the ego, but in a Self one in difference which relates the good of each, on a footing of equality and not of strife and domination, to the good of the rest of the world.
1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Vishwamitra as in Vasishtha's even harmonies we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates.
From this peculiarity of the Vedic compositions it results that the method of interpretation which I have described can be equally well illustrated from a number of scattered Suktas selected from the ten Mandalas or from any small block of hymns by a single Rishi. If my purpose were to establish beyond all possibility of objection the interpretation which I am now offering, a much more detailed and considerable work would
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A certain principle of thought-development also has not been absent from the arrangement of these Vedic hymns. The opening Mandala seems to have been so designed that the general thought of the Veda in its various elements should gradually unroll itself under the cover of the established symbols by the voices of a certain number of Rishis who almost all rank high as thinkers and sacred singers and are, some of them, among the most famous names of Vedic tradition. Nor can it be by accident that the tenth or closing Mandala gives us, with an even greater miscellaneity of authors, the last developments of the thought of the Veda and some of the most modern in language of its Suktas.
It is here that we find the Sacrifice of the Purusha and the great
1.06 - BOOK THE SIXTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And offer'd incense in the sacred flame.
Mean-while, surrounded with a courtly guard,
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The tim'rous throng their sacred rites forbore,
And from their heads the verdant laurel tore;
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They act his rites, with sacred rapture fir'd:
By night, the tinkling cymbals ring around,
1.06 - Magicians as Kings, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
principal functions are sacred or magical.
When we pass from Australia to New Guinea we find that, though the
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Fans esteem the smith's craft sacred, and none but chiefs may meddle
with it.
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ancient Egypt the sacred kings were blamed for the failure of the
crops, but the sacred beasts were also held responsible for the
course of nature. When pestilence and other calamities had fallen on
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were spoken of as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine
and their chariots sacred; and it was thought that the reign of a
good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley,
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till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings. But the great
social revolution which thus begins with democracy and ends in
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground. This new-found life is more abundant than the other, and of a different and higher kind. Its possession is liberation into the eternal, and liberation is beatitude. Necessarily so; for the Brahman, who is one with the Atman, is not only Being and Knowledge, but also Bliss, and, after Love and Peace, the final fruit of the Spirit is Joy. Mortification is painful, but that pain is one of the pre-conditions of blessedness. This fact of spiritual experience is sometimes obscured by the language in which it is described. Thus, when Christ says that the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be entered except by those who are as little children, we are apt to forget (so touching are the images evoked by the simple phrase) that a man cannot become childlike unless he chooses to undertake the most strenuous and searching course of self-denial. In practice the comm and to become as little children is identical with the comm and to lose ones life. As Traherne makes clear in the beautiful passage quoted in the section on God in the World, one cannot know created Nature in all its essentially sacred beauty, unless one first unlearns the dirty devices of adult humanity. Seen through the dung-coloured spectacles of self-interest, the universe looks singularly like a dung-heap; and as, through long wearing, the spectacles have grown on to the eyeballs, the process of cleansing the doors of perception is often, at any rate in the earlier stages of the spiritual life, painfully like a surgical operation. Later on, it is true, even self naughting may be suffused with the joy of the Spirit. On this point the following passage from the fourteenth-century Scale of Perfection is illuminating.
Many a man hath the virtues of humility, patience and charity towards his neighbours, only in the reason and will, and hath no spiritual delight nor love in them; for ofttimes he feeleth grudging, heaviness and bitterness for to do them, but yet nevertheless he doth them, but tis only by stirring of reason for dread of God. This man hath these virtues in reason and will, but not the love of them in affection. But when, by the grace of Jesus and by ghostly and bodily exercise, reason is turned into light and will into love, then hath he virtues in affection; for he hath so gnawn on the bitter bark or shell of the nut that at length he hath broken it and now feeds on the kernel; that is to say, the virtues which were first heavy for to practise are now turned into a very delight and savour.
1.06 - Origin of the four castes, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Formerly, oh best of Brahmans, when the truth-meditating Brahmā was desirous of creating the world, there sprang from his mouth beings especially endowed with the quality of goodness; others from his breast, pervaded by the quality of foulness; others from his thighs, in whom foulness and darkness prevailed; and others from his feet, in whom the quality of darkness predominated. These were, in succession, beings of the several castes, Brahmans, Kṣetriyas, Vaisyas, and Śūdras, produced from the mouth, the breast, the thighs, and the feet of Brahmā[2]. These he created for the performance of sacrifices, the four castes being the fit instruments of their celebration. By sacrifices, oh thou who knowest the truth, the gods are nourished; and by the rain which they bestow, mankind are supported[3]: and thus sacrifices, the source of happiness, are performed by pious men, attached to their duties, attentive to prescribed obligations, and walking in the paths of virtue. Men acquire (by them) heavenly fruition, or final felicity: they go, after death, to whatever sphere they aspire to, as the consequence of their human nature. The beings who were created by Brahmā, of these four castes, were at first endowed with righteousness and perfect faith; they abode wherever they pleased, unchecked by any impediment; their hearts were free from guile; they were pure, made free from soil, by observance of sacred institutes. In their sanctified minds Hari dwelt; and they were filled with perfect wisdom, by which they contemplated the glory of Viṣṇu[4]. After a while (after the Tretā age had continued for some period), that portion of Hari which has been described as one with Kāla (time) infused into created beings sin, as yet feeble though formidable, or passion and the like: the impediment of soul's liberation, the seed of iniquity, sprung from darkness and desire. The innate perfectness of human nature was then no more evolved: the eight kinds of perfection, Rasollāsā and the rest, were impaired[5]; and these being enfeebled, and sin gaining strength, mortals were afflicted with pain, arising from susceptibility to contrasts, as heat and cold, and the like. They therefore constructed places of refuge, protected by trees, by mountains, or by water; surrounded them by a ditch or a wall, and formed villages and cities; and in them erected appropriate dwellings, as defences against the sun and the cold[6]. Having thus provided security against the weather, men next began to employ themselves in manual labour, as a means of livelihood, (and cultivated) the seventeen kinds of useful grain-rice, barley, wheat, millet, sesamum, panic, and various sorts of lentils, beans, and pease[7]. These are the kinds cultivated for domestic use: but there are fourteen kinds which may be offered in sacrifice; they are, rice, barley, Māṣa, wheat, millet, and sesamum; Priya
gu is the seventh, and kulattha, pulse, the eighth: the others are, Syāmāka, a sort of panic; Nīvāra, uñcultivated rice; Jarttila, wild sesamum; Gavedukā (coix); Markata, wild panic; and (a plant called) the seed or barley of the Bambu (Venu-yava). These, cultivated or wild, are the fourteen grains that were produced for purposes of offering in sacrifice; and sacrifice (the cause of rain) is their origin also: they again, with sacrifice, are the great cause of the perpetuation of the human race, as those understand who can discriminate cause and effect. Thence sacrifices were offered daily; the performance of which, oh best of Munis, is of essential service to mankind, and expiates the offences of those by whom they are observed. Those, however, in whose hearts the dross of sin derived from Time (Kāla) was still more developed, assented not to sacrifices, but reviled both them and all that resulted from them, the gods, and the followers of the Vedas. Those abusers of the Vedas, of evil disposition and conduct, and seceders from the path of enjoined duties, were plunged in wickedness[8]. The means of subsistence having been provided for the beings he had created, Brahmā prescribed laws suited to their station and faculties, the duties of the several castes and orders[9], and the regions of those of the different castes who were observant of their duties. The heaven of the Pitris is the region of devout Brahmans. The sphere of Indra, of Kṣetriyas who fly not from the field. The region of the winds is assigned to the Vaisyas who are diligent in their occupations and submissive. Śūdras are elevated to the sphere of the Gandharvas. Those Brahmans who lead religious lives go to the world of the eighty-eight thousand saints: and that of the seven Ṛṣis is the seat of pious anchorets and hermits. The world of ancestors is that of respectable householders: and the region of Brahmā is the asylum of religious mendicants[10]. The imperishable region of the Yogis is the highest seat of Viṣṇu, where they perpetually meditate upon the supreme being, with minds intent on him alone: the sphere where they reside, the gods themselves cannot behold. The sun, the moon, the planets, shall repeatedly be, and cease to be; but those who internally repeat the mystic adoration of the divinity, shall never know decay. For those who neglect their duties, who revile the Vedas, and obstruct religious rites, the places assigned after death are the terrific regions of darkness, of deep gloom, of fear, and of great terror; the fearful hell of sharp swords, the hell of scourges and of a waveless sea[11].
1.06 - The Four Powers of the Mother, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
11:And yet it is not easy to meet the demand of this enchanting Power or to keep her presence. Harmony and beauty of the mind and soul, harmony and beauty of the thoughts and feelings, harmony and beauty in every outward act and movement, harmony and beauty of the life and surroundings, this is the demand of Mahalakshmi. Where there is affinity to the rhythms of the secret world-bliss and response to the call of the AllBeautiful and concord and unity and the glad flow of many lives turned towards the Divine, in that atmosphere she consents to abide. But all that is ugly and mean and base, all that is poor and sordid and squalid, all that is brutal and coarse repels her advent. Where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come; where they are mixed and disfigured with baser things, she turns soon to depart or cares little to pour her riches. If she finds herself in men's hearts surrounded with selfishness and hatred and jealousy and malignance and envy and strife, if treachery and greed and ingratitude are mixed in the sacred chalice, if grossness of passion and unrefined desire degrade devotion, in such hearts the gracious and beautiful Goddess will not linger. A divine disgust seizes upon her and she withdraws, for she is not one who insists or strives; or, veiling her face, she waits for this bitter and poisonous devil's stuff to be rejected and disappear before she will found anew her happy influence. Ascetic bareness and harshness are not pleasing to her nor the suppression of the heart's deeper emotions and the rigid repression of the soul's and the life's parts of beauty. For it is through love and beauty that she lays on men the yoke of the Divine. Life is turned in her supreme creations into a rich work of celestial art and all existence into a poem of sacred delight; the world's riches are brought together and concerted for a supreme order and even the simplest and commonest things are made wonderful by her intuition of unity and the breath of her spirit. Admitted to the heart she lifts wisdom to pinnacles of wonder and reveals to it the mystic secrets of the ecstasy that surpasses all knowledge, meets devotion with the passionate attraction of the Divine, teaches to strength and force the rhythm that keeps the might of their acts harmonious and in measure and casts on perfection the charm that makes it endure for ever.
12:MAHASARASWATI is the Mother s Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature. Maheshwari lays down the large lines of the worldforces, Mahakali drives their energy and impetus, Mahalakshmi discovers their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides over their detail of organisation and execution, relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasaraswati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker. This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless. For the will in her works is scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable; leaning over us she notes and touches every little detail, finds out every minute defect, gap, twist or incompleteness, considers and weighs accurately all that has been done and all that remains still to be done hereafter. Nothing is too small or apparently trivial for her attention; nothing however impalpable or disguised or latent can escape her. Moulding and remoulding she labours each part till it has attained its true form, is put in its exact place in the whole and fulfils its precise purpose. In her constant and diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things her eye is on all needs at once and the way to meet them and her intuition knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and successfully determines the right instrument, the right time, the right conditions and the right process. Carelessness and negligence and indolence she abhors; all scamped and hasty and shuffling work, all clumsiness and a peu pres and misfire, all false adaptation and misuse of instruments and faculties and leaving of things undone or half done is offensive and foreign to her temper. When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten, no part has been misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty condition; all is solid, accurate, complete, admirable. Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation. Therefore of all the Mother s powers she is the most long-suffering with man and his thousand imperfections. Kind, smiling, close and helpful, not easily turned away or discouraged, insistent even after repeated failure, her hand sustains our every step on condition that we are single in our will and straightforward and sincere; for a double mind she will not tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to drama and histrionics and self-deceit and pretence. A mother to our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil counsellor and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile the clouds of gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding always of the ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine, she is firm, quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge that drives us towards the integrality of the higher nature. All the work of the other Powers leans on her for its completeness; for she assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of detail and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.
1.06 - The Literal Qabalah, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
desire of the writer to be drawn into the maelstrom of con- troversy with regard to the character or nature of Jesus, the individual sacred to Christians ; nor is it his intention to engage in polemics as to whether Jesus actually lived, whether he was a great Adept, or simply a solar myth, as many of the exponents of the higher criticism claim. The
Qabalah simply uses the name nn> Yeheshua because it implies a certain philosophy descriptive of certain of its prime theorems. This is a point which must be remem- bered. The name refers to a definite type, and not to anv individual.
1.06 - The Sign of the Fishes, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
themselves in fish-skins, to the sacred fish-meals in the cult of the
Phoenician goddess Derceto-Atargatis and the obscurities of the
--
ass is sacred to the Egyptian Set. 33 In the early texts, however,
the ass is the attribute of the sun-god and only later became an
--
64 Musaeum hermeticum (1678), p. 212: "Our stone is called the sacred rock, and
is understood or signified in four ways." Cf. Ephesians 3:18. The Pyramid Text
--
shepherd" mentioned in the inscription is Attis, the Lord of the sacred Ram
and the thousand-eyed shepherd of glittering stars. One of his special forms
1.06 - Wealth and Government, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In this material world, for men, money is more sacred than the
Divines Will.
1.075 - Self-Control, Study and Devotion to God, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The svadhyaya that is referred to here is not reading in a library. It is not going to the library and reading any book that is there on the shelf. It is a holy resort to a concentrated form of study of a chosen scripture. It may be even two or three texts it does not matter which will become the object of ones daily concentration and meditation, because what is known as svadhyaya,or Self-study, or holy study, or sacred study is a form of meditation itself in a little diffused form.
The scriptures are supposed to contain all the knowledge that is necessary for the realisation of the Self. It is a spiritual text that we are supposed to study, which is meant by the word svadhyaya. It is not any kind of book. A holy scripture is supposed to be a moksha shastra. A scripture which expounds the nature of, as well as the means to, the liberation of the soul is called a moksha shastra. This is to be studied. All the ways and means to the liberation of the Self should be expounded in the scripture; and the glorious nature of the ideal of perfection, God-realisation that also is to be expounded in it. The means and the end should be delineated in great detail. Such is the text to be resorted to in svadhyaya. By a gradual and daily habituation of oneself to such a study, there is a purification brought about automatically. Inasmuch as it is nothing but meditation that we are practising in a different way, it is supposed to bring us in contact with the ideal.
1.07 - BOOK THE SEVENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And grace thy guilt with wedlock's sacred name.
Pull off the coz'ning masque, and oh! in time
--
'Tis sacred to the monarch of the sky:
How many there, with unregarded tears,
--
Prepar'd to strike, and shed the sacred blood,
The Gods themselves the mortal stroke bestow,
--
Yet both the earth and sacred oak I kist,
And scarce cou'd hope, yet still I hop'd the best;
--
By all the sacred bonds of plighted love,
By all your rev'rence to the Pow'rs above,
1.07 - Incarnate Human Gods, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
considered as sacred as the god, and was called, during this period,
_atua,_ god, though at other times only denominated _taura_ or
--
here refer, consists in the use of a sacred tree or plant. Thus in
the Hindoo Koosh a fire is kindled with twigs of the sacred cedar;
and the Dainyal or sibyl, with a cloth over her head, inhales the
--
prophetess ate the sacred laurel and was fumigated with it before
she prophesied. The Bacchanals ate ivy, and their inspired fury was
--
Apollo, which stood in a sacred cave at Hylae near Magnesia, was
thought to impart superhuman strength. sacred men, inspired by it,
leaped down precipices, tore up huge trees by the roots, and carried
--
and accordingly consulted them as oracles. Their sacred women, we
are told, looked on the eddying rivers and listened to the murmur or
--
God by the people. He dwelt on a sacred mountain and acted as
adviser to the king.
--
engaged in his sacred duties. From the moment that the crescent moon
appeared faintly in the sky, the king and all his subjects were at
--
on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred
person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of
--
the cause of truth was too sacred, and the value of the church
property too considerable, to allow the Brahmans to contemplate with
--
of the evolution of that sacred kingship which attained its highest
form, its most absolute expression, in the monarchies of Peru and
--
and gradually develops into a sacred king, his old magical functions
falling more and more into the background and being exchanged for
1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
I had no access to the work or to any of his other writings till that year. Though all the works must have been lying on the table or in the drawers, I had to curb my strong impulse to have a peep into the legend of Savitri. For we were in his room for a different purpose and it would have been a breach of trust on our part to lay hands on his sacred private property. The chance came in 1940, first only to place the requisite manuscripts before him, then gradually to work as a scribe. I still distinctly remember the day when, sitting on the bed with the table in front of him, he remarked: "You will find in the drawers long exercise books with coloured covers. Bring them." I think I went wrong in the first attempt, the second one met with his smiling approval. What he actually did with them, I cannot say, for he was working all alone, and we were sitting behind. I guess that he must have been giving a first reading to all the versions, for there were quite a number. He had already written to us before his accident that he had recast the first Book about ten times. Perhaps he was going through these and making a selection of the lines and passages for the final version. Then a few months after and at this time he was sitting in the morning in a chair he told me that he needed some exercise books. Without informing the Mother about it, I at once ran to the market and bought two or three exercise books from Manikachetty. He accepted them with a smile and I was happy to find that he used them for copying Savitri. At the end of one of the books he has written: "Last draft of Savitri, Sep.6, 1942." In another exercise book, containing matter up to the end of The Book of the Divine Mother, only at the end of Canto V of Book I, the date written is: April 24, 1944. (This, as you see, was the morning of the Darshan day). From these two dates we can surmise that from 1940, the year in which we presume he took up the work on Savitri, to 1944, he continued working on the first three Books. Now, how much new material did he add to them? We know from his letter to Amal that Book II at any rate, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, was just a small passage. Here now we find the fully lengthened and developed Book running into 15 Cantos. The third Book, The Book of the Divine Mother, was also written probably for the first time, for he wrote to Amal in 1946: "...there is also a third sufficiently long Book, The Book of the Divine Mother."
The next step in the development was his re-copying the entire three Books on big white sheets of paper, in two columns in fine handwriting. There is one date at the end of The Book of the Divine Mother: May 7, 1944, which suggests that the copying of the entire three Books had taken about a year. When this was completed I was called in. Perhaps because his eye-sight was getting dim, I was asked to read to him this final copy. Now began alterations and additions in my hand on the manuscript itself. I regret to say that they marred the clean beauty of the original, and I realise now that it was a brutal act of sacrilege on my part, tantamount to desecration of the carved images on the temple wall. But I cannot imagine either how else I could have inserted so many corrections and additions, one line, one word here, two there, more elsewhere, throughout the entire length. We know how prodigious were the corrections and revisions in so far as Savitri was concerned. One is simply amazed at the enormous pains he has taken to raise Savitri to his ideal of perfection. I wonder if any other poet can be compared with him in this respect. He gave me the example of Virgil who, it seems, wrote six lines in the morning, and went on correcting them during the rest of the day. Even so, his Aeneid runs not even half the length of the first three Books of Savitri. Along with all these revisions, Sri Aurobindo added, on separate small sheets of paper, long passages written in his own hand up to the Canto, The Kingdom of the Greater Mind, Book II. All this work was completed, I believe, by the end of 1944.
1.07 - THE MASTER AND VIJAY GOSWAMI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
IT WAS AFTERNOON. Sri Ramakrishna was sitting on his bed after a short noonday rest. Vijay, Balaram, M., and a few other devotees were sitting on the floor with their faces toward the Master. They could see the sacred river Ganges through the door.
Since it was winter all were wrapped up in warm clothes. Vijay had been suffering from colic and had brought some medicine with him.
--
They said to the messenger, 'Ask the king to come to see us.' After consultation, the king and his ministers arranged marriages for them. From then on the king didn't have to send for them. They would come to him of themselves and say: 'Your Majesty, we have come with our blessings. Here are the sacred flowers of the temple. Deign to accept them.' They came to the palace, for now they always wanted money for one thing or another: the building of a house, the rice-taking ceremony of their babies, or the rituals connected with the beginning of their children's education.
Story of twelve hundred nedas
--
At the approach of evening Sri Ramakrishna went out to look at the sacred river. The lamp was lighted in his room. The Master chanted the hallowed name of the Divine Mother and meditated on Her. Then the evening worship began in the various temples.
The sound of gongs, floating on the air, mingled with the murmuring voice of the river.
1.07 - The Three Schools of Magick 2, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The purest documents of the White School are found in the sacred Books of Thelema. The doctrine is given in excellent perfection both in the book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent and the book of Lapis Lazuli. A single passage is adequate to explain the formula.
Moreover I behld a vision of a river. There was a little boat thereon; and in it under purple sails was a golden woman, an image of Asi wrought in finest gold. Also the river was of blood, and the boat of shining steel. Then I loved her; and, loosing my girdle, cast myself into the stream.
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In connection with the Mahayanist view that words play an important and even creative part in the evolution of unregenerate human nature, we may mention Humes arguments against the reality of causation. These arguments start from the postulate that all events are loose and separate from one another and proceed with faultless logic to a conclusion that makes complete nonsense of all organized thought or purposive action. The fallacy, as Professor Stout has pointed out, lies in the preliminary postulate. And when we ask ourselves what it was that induced Hume to make this odd and quite unrealistic assumption that events are loose and separate, we see that his only reason for flying in the face of immediate experience was the fact that things and happenings are symbolically represented in our thought by nouns, verbs and adjectives, and that these words are, in effect, loose and separate from one another in a way which the events and things they stand for quite obviously are not. Taking words as the measure of things, instead of using things as the measure of words, Hume imposed the discrete and, so to say, pointilliste pattern of language upon the continuum of actual experiencewith the impossibly paradoxical results with which we are all familiar. Most human beings are not philosophers and care not at all for consistency in thought or action. Thus, in some circumstances they take it for granted that events are not loose and separate, but co-exist or follow one another within the organized and organizing field of a cosmic whole. But on other occasions, where the opposite view is more nearly in accord with their passions or interests, they adopt, all unconsciously, the Humian position and treat events as though they were as independent of one another and the rest of the world as the words by which they are symbolized. This is generally true of all occurrences involving I, me, mine. Reifying the loose and separate names, we regard the things as also loose and separatenot subject to law, not involved in the network of relationships, by which in fact they are so obviously bound up with their physical, social and spiritual environment. We regard as absurd the idea that there is no causal process in nature and no organic connection between events and things in the lives of other people; but at the same time we accept as axiomatic the notion that our own sacred ego is loose and separate from the universe, a law unto itself above the moral dharma and even, in many respects, above the natural law of causality. Both in Buddhism and Catholicism, monks and nuns were encouraged to avoid the personal pronoun and to speak of themselves in terms of circumlocutions that clearly indicated their real relationship with the cosmic reality and their fellow creatures. The precaution was a wise one. Our responses to familiar words are conditioned reflexes. By changing the stimulus, we can do something to change the response. No Pavlov bell, no salivation; no harping on words like me and mine, no purely automatic and unreflecting egotism. When a monk speaks of himself, not as I, but as this sinner or this unprofitable servant, he tends to stop taking his loose and separate selfhood for granted, and makes himself aware of his real, organic relationship with God and his neighbours.
In practice words are used for other purposes than for making statements about facts. Very often they are used rhetorically, in order to arouse the passions and direct the will towards some course of action regarded as desirable. And sometimes, too, they are used poetically that is to say, they are used in such a way that, besides making a statement about real or imaginary things and events, and besides appealing rhetorically to the will and the passions, they cause the reader to be aware that they are beautiful. Beauty in art or nature is a matter of relationships between things not in themselves intrinsically beautiful. There is nothing beautiful, for example, about the vocables, time, or syllable. But when they are used in such a phrase as to the last syllable of recorded time, the relationship between the sound of the component words, between our ideas of the things for which they stand, and between the overtones of association with which each word and the phrase as a whole are charged, is apprehended, by a direct and immediate intuition, as being beautiful.
1.08 - Adhyatma Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
31. Have faith in your own Self, in the existence of Brahman, in the teachings of your Preceptor, in the sacred Scriptures. Then alone can you attain Self-realisation.
32. Behold the Lord in the effulgence of the sun, in the fragrance of flowers, in the brilliance of fire, in the sapidity of water, in the birds, beasts, in the air, ether, in the mind, intellect, in the heart, in the sound, in music.
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
I ignore completely, at this stage of exegesis, the charms and amulets which comprise a greater part of such Qabal- istic works as Sepher Ratsiel haMaloch and The Greater Key of King Solomon. My references are in the main directed towards the spiritual thaumaturgy manifested in, for example, The sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and such invocations as " The Bornless One ", " Liber Israfel " ; the latter being an adaptation from the Book of the Dead ; and the powerful fragments of lyrical ritual found in the Dee manuscripts. When a man endeavours to perfect his meditation, the rebellion of the human will and the Ruach is violent, and only by experience can one discover the almost diabolical ingenuity of the mind in attempting to escape from control. There are methods of training that will, by which it is more or less easy to check one's progress. Magical ritual is a mnemonic process devoted to this end. I say mnemonic advisedly, to answer objections to " apparatus " employed by the Practical Qabalist.
By each act, word, and thought, the one object of the ceremony - the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel- is being constantly indicated. Every fumigation, invocation, banishing and circumambulation is simply a reminder of the single purpose until - after symbol upon symbol, emotion after emotion having been added - the supreme moment arrives, and every nerve of the body, every force-channel of the Nephesch and Ruach is strained in one overwhelming orgasm, one ecstatic rush of the Will and Soul in the pre- determined direction.
--
The Initiates, realizing that man had never lived not by bread alone but in the consciousness of the ever-living Gods, and by the spirit of the Sun and Moon and Earth in their revolutions, restored in secret the sacred days and feasts, almost as the Greek pagans had them, with the sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight pauses for worship - the four great daily stations of the Sun. Then the ancient cycle of
Easter, with the crucifixion or conception of the Solar God ; then Pentecost, and nine months later Christmas, his re- birth. For centuries prior to the Christian era nations had lived in this cosmic rhythm under the guidance of their
1.08 - BOOK THE EIGHTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
Her country, and her parent, sacred ties!
Can nor my love, nor proffer'd presents find
--
We sacred rivers, wheresoe'er begun,
End in thy lot, and to thy empire run.
--
We crave to serve before your sacred shrine,
And offer at your altars rites divine:
--
To fell with gashing steel the sacred tree.
But whilst they, lingring, his commands delay'd,
1.08 - Departmental Kings of Nature, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
THE PRECEDING investigation has proved that the same union of sacred
functions with a royal title which meets us in the King of the Wood
--
homage were omitted. Like many other sacred kings, of whom we shall
read in the sequel, the Kings of Fire and Water are not allowed to
--
rich stuffs to wrap the sacred sword.
Contrary to the common usage of the country, which is to bury the
1.08 - Origin of Rudra: his becoming eight Rudras, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
"In former times, Dakṣa commenced a holy sacrifice on the side of Himavān, at the sacred spot Ga
gadvāra, frequented by the Ṛṣis. The gods, desirous of assisting at this solemn rite, came, with Indra at their head, to Mahādeva, and intimated their purpose; and having received his permission, departed in their splendid chariots to Ga
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"Then from the gloom emerged fearful and numerous forms, shouting the cry of battle; who instantly broke or overturned the sacrificial columns, trampled upon the altars, and danced amidst the oblations. Running wildly hither and thither, with the speed of wind, they tossed about the implements and vessels of sacrifice, which looked like stars precipitated from the heavens. The piles of food and beverage for the gods, which had been heaped up like mountains; the rivers of milk; the banks of curds and butter; the sands of honey and butter-milk and sugar; the mounds of condiments and spices of every flavour; the undulating knolls of flesh and other viands; the celestial liquors, pastes, and confections, which had been prepared; these the spirits of wrath devoured or defiled or scattered abroad. Then falling upon the host of the gods, these vast and resistless Rudras beat or terrified them, mocked and insulted the nymphs and goddesses, and quickly put an end to the rite, although defended by all the gods; being the ministers of Rudra's wrath, and similar to himself[6]. Some then made a hideous clamour, whilst others fearfully shouted, when Yajña was decapitated. For the divine Yajña, the lord of sacrifice, then began to fly up to heaven, in the shape of a deer; and Vīrabhadra, of immeasurable spirit, apprehending his power, cut off his vast head, after he had mounted into the sky[7]. Dakṣa the patriarch, his sacrifice being destroyed, overcome with terror, and utterly broken in spirit, fell then upon the ground, where his head was spurned by the feet of the cruel Vīrabhadra[8]. The thirty scores of sacred divinities were all presently bound, with a band of fire, by their lion-like foe; and they all then addressed him, crying, 'Oh Rudra, have mercy upon thy servants: oh lord, dismiss thine anger.' Thus spake Brahmā and the other gods, and the patriarch Dakṣa; and raising their hands, they said, 'Declare, mighty being, who thou art.' Vīrabhadra said, 'I am not a god, nor an Āditya; nor am I come hither for enjoyment, nor curious to behold the chiefs of the divinities: know that I am come to destroy the sacrifice of Dakṣa, and that I am called Vīrabhadra, the issue of the wrath of Rudra. Bhadrakālī also, who has sprung from the anger of Devī, is sent here by the god of gods to destroy this rite. Take refuge, king of kings, with him who is the lord of Umā; for better is the anger of Rudra than the blessings of other gods.'
"Having heard the words of Vīrabhadra, the righteous Dakṣa propitiated the mighty god, the holder of the trident, Maheśvara. The hearth of sacrifice, deserted by the Brahmans, had been consumed; Yajña had been metamorphosed to an antelope; the fires of Rudra's wrath had been kindled; the attendants, wounded by the tridents of the servants of the god, were groaning with pain; the pieces of the uprooted sacrificial posts were scattered here and there; and the fragments of the meat-offerings were carried off by flights of hungry vultures, and herds of howling jackals. Suppressing his vital airs, and taking up a posture of meditation, the many-sighted victor of his foes, Dakṣa fixed his eyes every where upon his thoughts. Then the god of gods appeared from the altar, resplendent as a thousand suns, and smiled upon him, and said, 'Dakṣa, thy sacrifice has been destroyed through sacred knowledge: I am well pleased with thee:' and then he smiled again, and said, 'What shall I do for thee; declare, together with the preceptor of the gods.'
"Then Dakṣa, frightened, alarmed, and agitated, his eyes suffused with tears, raised his hands reverentially to his brow, and said, 'If, lord, thou art pleased; if I have found favour in thy sight; if I am to be the object of thy benevolence; if thou wilt confer upon me a boon, this is the blessing I solicit, that all these provisions for the solemn sacrifice, which have been collected with much trouble and during a long time, and which have now been eaten, drunk, devoured, burnt, broken, scattered abroad, may not have been prepared in vain.' 'So let it be,' replied Hara, the subduer of Indra. And thereupon Dakṣa knelt down upon the earth, and praised gratefully the author of righteousness, the three-eyed god Mahādeva, repeating the eight thousand names of the deity whose emblem is a bull."
1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
in the presence of God, following a sacred custom that goes far back into
pre-Christian times.
1.08 - RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It should, however, be remarked that, within its own ecclesiastical fold, Catholicism has been almost as tolerant as Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism. Nominally one, each of these religions consists, in fact, of a number of very different religions, covering the whole gamut of thought and behaviour from fetishism, through polytheism, through legalistic monotheism, through devotion to the sacred humanity of the Avatar, to the profession of the Perennial Philosophy and the practice of a purely spiritual religion that seeks the unitive knowledge of the Absolute Godhead. These tolerated religions-within-a-religion are not, of course, regarded as equally valuable or equally true. To worship polytheistically may be ones dharma; nevertheless the fact remains that mans final end is the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, and all the historical formulations of the Perennial Philosophy are agreed that every human being ought, and perhaps in some way or other actually will, achieve that end. All souls, writes Father Garrigou-Lagrange, receive a general remote call to the mystical life; and if all were faithful in avoiding, as they should, not merely mortal but venial sin, if they were, each according to his condition, docile to the Holy Ghost, and if they lived long enough, a day would come when they would receive the proximate and efficacious vocation to a high perfection and to the mystical life properly so called. With this statement Hindu and Buddhist theologians would probably agree; but they would add that every soul will in fact eventually attain this high perfection. All are called, but in any given generation few are chosen, because few choose themselves. But the series of conscious existences, corporeal or incorporeal, is indefinitely long; there is therefore time and opportunity for everyone to learn the necessary lessons. Moreover, there will always be helpers. For periodically there are descents of the Godhead into physical form; and at all times there are future Buddhas ready, on the threshold of reunion with the Intelligible Light, to renounce the bliss of immediate liberation in order to return as saviours and teachers again and again into the world of suffering and time and evil, until at last every sentient being shall have been delivered into eternity.
The practical consequences of this doctrine are clear enough. The lower forms of religion, whether emotional, active or intellectual, are never to be accepted as final. True, each of them comes naturally to persons of a certain kind of constitution and temperament; but the dharma or duty of any given individual is not to remain complacently fixed in the imperfect religion that happens to suit him; it is rather to transcend it, not by impossibly denying the modes of thought, behaviour and feeling that are natural to him, but by making use of them, so that by means of nature he may pass beyond nature. Thus the introvert uses discrimination (in the Indian phrase), and so learns to distinguish the mental activities of the ego from the principial consciousness of the Self, which is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground. The emotional extravert learns to hate his father and mother (in other words to give up his selfish attachment to the pleasures of indiscriminately loving and being loved), concentrates his devotion on the personal or incarnate aspect of God, and comes at last to love the Absolute Godhead by an act, no longer of feeling, but of will illuminated by knowledge. And finally there is that other kind of extravert, whose concern is not with the pleasures of giving or receiving affection, but with the satisfaction of his lust for power over things, events and persons. Using his own nature to transcend his own nature, he must follow the path laid down in the Bhagavad Gita for the bewildered Arjuna the path of work without attachment to the fruits of work, the path of what St. Franois de Sales calls holy indifference, the path that leads through the forgetting of self to the discovery of the Self.
1.08 - Stead and the Spirits, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Considerable attention has been attracted and excitement created by the latest development of Mr. W. T. Steads agency for communicant spirits which he calls Julias Bureau. The supposed communications of Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield and other distinguished politicians on the question of the Budget have awakened much curiosity, ridicule and even indignation. The ubiquitous eloquence of Lord Curzon has been set flowing by what he considers this unscrupulous method of pressing the august departed into the ranks of Liberal electioneering agents, and he has penned an indignant letter to the papers in which there is much ornate Curzonian twaddle about sacred mysteries and the sanctities of the grave. If there is anything at all in the alleged communications from departed souls which have become of increasing interest to the European world, it ought to be fairly established that the grave is nothing but a hole in the earth containing a rotting piece of matter with which the spirit has no farther connection, and that the spirit is very much the same after death as before, takes much interest in small, trivial and mundane matters and is very far from regarding his new existence as a solemn, sacred and mysterious affair. If so, we do not see why we either should approach the departed spirit with long and serious faces or with any more unusual feelings than curiosity, interest and eagerness to acquire knowledge of the other world and communication with those we knew and loved in this, in fact, the ordinary human and earthly feelings existing between souls sundered by time and space, but still capable of communication. But Lord Curzon still seems to be labouring under the crude Christian conception of the blessed dead as angels harping in heaven whose spotless plumes ought not to be roughly disturbed by human breath and of spiritual communication as a sort of necromancy, the spirit of Mr. Gladstone being summoned from his earthy bed and getting into it again and tucking himself up comfortably in his coffin after Julia and Mr. Stead have done with him. We should have thought that in the bold and innovating mind of Indias only Viceroy these coarse European superstitions ought to have been destroyed long ago.
It is not, however, Lord Curzon but Mr. Stead and the spirits with whom we have to deal. We know Mr. Stead as a pushing and original journalist, not always over-refined or delicate either in his actions or expressions, skilful in the advertisement of his views, excitable, earnest, declamatory, loud and even hysterical, if you will, in some of his methods, but certainly neither a liar nor a swindler. He does and says what he believes and nothing else. It is impossible to dismiss his Bureau as an imposture or mere journalistic rclame. It is impossible to dismiss the phenomena of spirit communications, even with all the imposture that unscrupulous money-makers have imported into them, as unreal or a deception. All that can reasonably be said is that their true nature has not yet been established beyond dispute. There are two conceivable explanations, one that of actual spirit communication, the other that of vigorously dramatised imaginary conversations jointly composed with wonderful skill and consistency by the subconscious minds, whatever that may be, of the persons present, the medium being the chief dramaturge of this subconscious literary Committee. This theory is so wildly improbable and so obviously opposed to the nature of the phenomena themselves, that only an obstinate unwillingness to admit new facts and ideas can explain its survival, although it was natural and justifiable in the first stages of investigation. There remains the explanation of actual spirit communication. But even when we have decided on this hypothesis as the base of our investigation, we have to be on our guard against a multitude of errors; for the communications are vitiated first by the errors and self-deceptions of the medium and the sitters, then by the errors and self-deceptions of the communicant spirits, and, worst of all, by deliberate deceit, lies and jugglery on the part of the visitants from the other world. The element of deceit and jugglery on the part of the medium and his helpers is not always small, but can easily be got rid of. Cheap scepticism and cheaper ridicule in such matters is only useful for comforting small brains and weak imaginations with a sense of superiority to the larger minds who do not refuse to enquire into phenomena which are at least widespread and of a consistently regular character. The true attitude is to examine carefully the nature of the phenomena, the conditions that now detract from their value and the possibility of removing them and providing perfect experimental conditions which would enable us to arrive at a satisfactory scientific result. Until the value of the communications is scientifically established, any attempt to use them for utilitarian, theatrical or yet lighter purposes is to be deprecated, as such misuse may end in shutting a wide door to potential knowledge upon humanity.
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
:::The relations of the Soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away-means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it-one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear.
:::If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the Soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the Soul is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.5
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Going within and beyond even this pure Source and pure Spirit-which is totally formless, boundless, unmanifest-the Self/Spirit awakens to an identity with, and as, all Form, all manifestation (gross, subtle, and causal), whether high or low, ascending or descending, sacred or profane, manifest or unmanifest, finite or infinite, temporal or eternal. This is not a particular stage among other stages-not their Goal, not their Source, not their Summit-but rather the Ground or Suchness or Isness of all stages, at all times, in all dimensions: the Being of all beings, the Condition of all conditions, the Nature of all natures. And that is the Nondual.
I have chosen Meister Eckhart and Sri Ramana Maharshi to illustrate both of these "stages" (causal and nondual), since we find in both of them not only a breakthrough to the causal, but also through the causal to the ultimate or Nondual, and as inadequate and misleading as words here invariably are, at least an indication of these two "movements" can be clearly and unmistakably discerned in both of these extraordinary sages.
1.08 - The Four Austerities and the Four Liberations, #On Education, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This leads us quite naturally to liberation in action. For, in ones action, one must be free from all social conventions, all moral prejudices. However, this does not mean that one should lead a life of licence and dissoluteness. On the contrary, one imposes on oneself a rule that is far stricter than all social rules, for it tolerates no hypocrisy and demands a perfect sincerity. Ones entire physical activity should be organised to help the body to grow in balance and strength and beauty. For this purpose, one must abstain from all pleasure-seeking, including sexual pleasure. For every sexual act is a step towards death. That is why from the most ancient times, in the most sacred and secret schools, this act was prohibited to every aspirant towards immortality. The sexual act is always followed by a longer or shorter period of unconsciousness that opens the door to all kinds of influences and causes a fall in consciousness. But if one wants to prepare oneself for the supramental life, one must never allow ones consciousness to slip into laxity and inconscience under the pretext of pleasure or even of rest and relaxation. One should find relaxation in force and light, not in darkness and weakness. Continence is therefore the rule for all those who aspire for progress. But especially for those who want to prepare themselves for the supramental manifestation, this continence must be replaced by a total abstinence, achieved not by coercion and suppression but by a kind of inner alchemy, as a result of which the energies that are normally used in the act of procreation are transmuted into energies for progress and integral transformation. It is obvious that for the result to be total and truly beneficial, all sexual impulses and desires must be eliminated from the mental and vital consciousness as well as from the physical will. All radical and durable transformation proceeds from within outwards, so that the external transformation is the normal, almost inevitable result of this process.
A decisive choice has to be made between lending the body to Natures ends in obedience to her demand to perpetuate the race as it is, and preparing this same body to become a step towards the creation of the new race. For it is not possible to do both at the same time; at every moment one has to decide whether one wants to remain part of the humanity of yesterday or to belong to the superhumanity of tomorrow.
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Are we then to conclude that the reverence for the Vedas & the belief in the continued authority of the Vedas is really no more than an ancient superstition or a tradition which has survived its truth? Those who know the working of the human mind, will be loth to hasten to that conclusion. Great masses of men, great nations, great civilisations have an instinct in these matters which seldom misleads them. In spite of forgetfulness, through every misstatement, surviving all cessation of precise understanding, something in them still remembers their origin and holds fast to the vital truth of their being. According to the Europeans, there is a historical truth at the basis of the old persistent tradition, but a historical truth only, a truth of origin, not of present actuality. The Vedas are the early roots of Indian religion, of Indian civilisation; but they have for a long time past ceased to be their present foundation or their intellectual substance. It is rather the Upanishads & the Puranas that are the living Scriptures of mediaeval and modern Hinduism. But if, as we contend, the Upanishads & the Puranas only give us in other language, later symbols, altered forms of thought the same religious truths that we find differently stated in the Rigveda, this shifting of the immediate point of derivation will make no real difference. The waters we drink are the same whether drawn at their clear mountain sources or on their banks in the anchorites forest or from ghats among the faery temples and fantastic domes of some sacred city.The Hindus belief remains to him unshaken.
But in the last century a new scholarship has invaded the country, the scholarship of aggressive & victorious Europe, which for the first time denies the intimate connection and the substantial identity of the Vedas & the later Scriptures. We ourselves have made distinctions of Jnanakanda & Karmakanda, Sruti & Smriti, but we have never doubted that all these are branches of a single stock. But our new Western Pandits & authorities tell us that we are in error. All of us from ancient Yajnavalkya to the modern Vaidika have been making a huge millennial mistake. European scholarship applying for the first time the test of a correct philology to these obscure writings has corrected the mistake. It has discovered that the Vedas are of an entirely different character from the rest of our Hindu development. For our development has been Pantheistic or transcendental, philosophical, mystic, devotional, sombre, secretive, centred in the giant names of the Indian Trinity, disengaging itself from sacrifice, moving towards asceticism. The Vedas are naturalistic, realistic, ritualistic, semi-barbarous, a sacrificial worship of material Nature-powers, henotheistic at their highest, Pagan, joyous and self-indulgent. Brahma & Shiva do not exist for the Veda; Vishnu & Rudra are minor, younger & unimportant deities. Many more discoveries of a startling nature, but now familiar to the most ignorant, have been successfully imposed on our intellects. The Vedas, it seems, were not revealed to great & ancient Rishis, but composed by the priests of a small invading Aryan race of agriculturists & warriors, akin to the Greeks & Persians, who encamped, some fifteen hundred years before Christ, in the Panjab.
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There has already been, indeed, a local movement towards the rehabilitation of the Veda. Swami Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, preached a monotheistic religion founded on a new interpretation of the sacred hymns. But this important attempt, successful & vigorous in the Panjab, is not likely to comm and acceptance among the more subtle races of the south & east. It was based like the European rendering on a system of philology,the Nirukta of Yaska used by the scholastic ingenuity & robust faith of Dayananda to justify conclusions far-reaching & even extravagant, to which it is difficult to assent unless we are offered stronger foundations.Moreover, by rejecting the authority of all later Scriptures and scouting even the Upanishads because they transcend the severity of his monotheistic teaching, Dayananda cut asunder the unity of Hindu religion even more fatally than the Europeans & by the slenderness of vision & the poverty of spiritual contents, the excessive simplicity of doctrine farther weakened the authority of this version for the Indian intellect. He created a sect & a rendering, but failed to rehabilitate to the educated mind in India the authority of the Vedas. Nevertheless, he put his finger on the real clue, the true principle by which Veda can yet be made to render up its long-guarded secret. A Nirukta, based on a wider knowledge of the Aryan tongues than Dayananda possessed, more scientific than the conjectural philology of the Europeans, is the first condition of this great recovery. The second is a sympathy & flexibility of intelligence capable of accepting passively & moulding itself to the mentality of the men of this remote epoch.
If indeed the philology of the Europeans were an exact science or its conclusions inevitable results from indisputable premises, there would be no room for any reopening of the subject. But the failure of comparative philology to develop a sound scientific basis & to create a true science of language has been one of the conspicuous intellectual disappointments of the nineteenth century. There can be no denial of that failure. This so-called science is scouted by scientific minds and even the possibility of an etymological science has been disputed. The extravagances of the philological sun myth weavers have been checked by a later method which prefers the evidence of facts to the evidence of nouns & adjectives. The later ethnological theories ignore the conclusions & arguments of the philologists. The old theory of Aryan, Semite, Dravidian & Turanian races has everywhere been challenged and is everywhere breached or rejected. The philologists have indeed established some useful identities and established a few rules of phonetical modification and detrition. But the rest is hypothesis and plausible conjecture. The capacity of brilliant conjecture, volatile inference and an ingenious imagination have been more useful to the modern Sanscrit scholar than rigorous research, scientific deduction or patient and careful generalisation. We are therefore at liberty even on the ground of European science & knowledge to hesitate before the conclusions of philological scholarship.
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Moreover, even their moralised gods were only the superficial & exterior aspect of the Greek religion. Its deeper life fed itself on the mystic rites of Orpheus, Bacchus, the Eleusinian mysteries which were deeply symbolic and remind us in some of their ideas & circumstances of certain aspects of Indian Yoga. The mysticism & symbolism were not an entirely modern development. Orpheus, Bacchus & Demeter are the centre of an antique and prehistoric, even preliterary mind-movement. The element may have been native to Greek religious sentiment; it may have been imported from the East through the Aryan races or cultures of Asia Minor; but it may also have been common to the ancient systems of Greece & India. An original community or a general diffusion is at least possible. The double aspect of exoteric practice and esoteric symbolism may have already been a fundamental characteristic of the Vedic religion. Is it entirely without significance that to the Vedic mind men were essentially manu, thinkers, the original father of the race was the first Thinker, and the Vedic poets in the idea of their contemporaries not merely priests or sacred singers or wise bards but much more characteristically manishis & rishis, thinkers & sages?We can conceive with difficulty such ideas as belonging to that undeveloped psychological condition of the semi-savage to which sacrifices of propitiation & Nature-Gods helpful only for material life, safety & comfort were all-sufficient. Certainly, also, the earliest Indian writings subsequent to Vedic times bear out these indications. To the writers of the Brahmanas the sacrificial ritual enshrined an elaborate symbolism. The seers of the Upanishad worshipped Surya & Agni as great spiritual & moral forces and believed the Vedic hymns to be effective only because they contained a deep knowledge & a potent spirituality. They may have been in errormay have been misled by a later tradition or themselves have read mystic refinements into a naturalistic text. But also & equally, they may have had access to an unbroken line of knowledge or they may have been in direct touch or in closer touch than the moderns with the mentality of the Vedic singers.
The decision of these questions will determine our whole view of Vedic religions and decide the claim of the Veda to be a living Scripture of Hinduism. It is of primary importance to know what in their nature and functions were the gods of the Veda. I have therefore made this fundamental question form the sole subject matter of the present volume. I make no attempt here to present a complete or even a sufficient justification of the conclusions which I have been led to. Nor do I present my readers with a complete enquiry into the nature & functions of the Vedic pantheon. Such a justification, such an enquiry can only be effected by a careful philological analysis & rendering of the Vedic hymns and an exhaustive study of the origins of the Sanscrit language. That is a labour of very serious proportions & burdened with numerous difficulties which I have begun and hope one day to complete myself or to leave to others ready for completion. But in the present volume I can only attempt to establish a prima facie [case] for a reconsideration of the whole question. I offer the suggestion that the Vedic creed & thought were not a simple, but a complex, not a barbarous but a subtle & advanced, not a naturalistic but a mystic & Vedantic system.
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Nevertheless existence is not simple in its infinite oneness. Matter is prithivi, tanu or tanva (terra), a wide yet formal extension of being; but behind matter and containing it is a term of being, not formal though instrumentally creative of form, measuring & containing it, mind, mati or manas. Mind itself is biune in movement, modified mind working in direct relation to material life (anu, the Vedantic prana) and moulding itself to its requirements in order to seize and enjoy it, and pure mind above and controlling it. For each of these three subjective principles there must exist in the nature of things an objective world in which it fulfils its tendencies and in which beings of that particular order of consciousness can live and manifest themselves. The three worlds, tribhuvana, trailokya are called in Vedic terminology, Bhu, the material world, Bhuvar, the intermediate world and Swar, the pure blissful mental world,Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, earth, the lower heavens and paradise, are the three sacred & mighty vyahritis of the Veda, and the great Vedic formula OM Bhur Bhuvah Swah expressive of our manifest existence triply founded in matter, mind-in-sense & vital movement and pure mind, still resounds in the Indian consciousness & comes with a solemnity, ill-understood but felt, to the descendants of the ancient Rishis. They persist in later belief as three inferior worlds of the Purana, constituents of the aparardha, or lower hemisphere of conscious existence, in which the Vedantic principles of matter, life & mind, anna, prana and manas severally predominate and determine the conditions of existence. Bhuvar & Swar are the two heavens, the double firmament, ubhe rodasi so frequently mentioned in the sacred verses.
But why, it might be asked, should each subjective order or stratum of consciousness necessarily involve the co-existence of a corresponding order of beings & objective world-stratum? For the modern mind, speculative & introspective like the Vedic, is yet speculative within the limits of sensational experience and therefore unable to believe in, even if it can conceive of existence, least of all of an objective existence under conditions different from those [with] which we are familiar and of which our senses assure us. We may therefore admit the profundity & subtlety of the subjective distinction, but we shall be apt to regard the belief in objective worlds & beings unseen by our senses as either an early poetic fancy or a crude superstition of savages. But the Vedic mentality, although perfectly rational, stood at the opposite pole of ideas from the modern and its subjective consciousness admitted a class of experiences which we reject and cut short the moment they begin to present themselves by condemning them as hallucinations. The idea of modern men that the ancients evolved their gods by a process of poetic imagination, is an error due to inability to understand an alien mentality & unwillingness to investigate from within those survivals of it which still subsist though with difficulty under modern conditions. Encouraging this order of phenomena, fostering & developing carefully the states of mind in which they were possible and the movements of mind & sense by which they were effected, the Vedic Rishis saw and communed with the gods and threw themselves into the worlds of which they had the conception. They believed in them for the same reason that Joan of Arc believed in her saints & her voices, Socrates in his daemon or Swedenborg in his spirits, because they had constant experience of them and of the validity both of the experiences and of the instruments of mind & sense by which they were maintained in operation. They would have answered a modern objector that they had as good a proof of them as the scientist has of the worlds & the different orders of life revealed to his optical nerve by microscope & telescope. Some of them might even question whether these scientific discoveries were not optical illusions due to the excitation of the nerve by the instruments utilised! We may, similarly, get rid of the Vedic experiences, disbelieve and discount them, saying that they missed one essential instrument of truth, the sceptical distrust of their instruments,but we cannot argue from them in the minds that received them a childish irrationality or a savage superstition. They trusted, like us, their experience, believed their mind & senses and argued logically from their premisses.
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If the Veda is a great religious and psychological document and not an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants passages which preserve, in spite of the unavoidable difficulties of an archaic language, their ancient truth on their surface. The totality of the Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, constant in its ideas and unchanging in its terms that we may hope from even one such text a help considerably beyond the measure of its actual length & scope in fixing the nature of theVedic outlook and helping us to some clue to the secret of its characteristic expressions. Our desideratum is a passage in which the god of the Riks must be a mental or moral Power, the thoughts religious, intellectual or psychological in their substance, the expressions insistent in their clear superphysical intention.We will begin with a striking passage in a hymn, put by Vyasa very early in the order of his collection.It is the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhanda, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the three closing riks of the hymn are the indicative passage
Saraswati, a name familiar to the religious conceptions of the race from our earliest eras, & of incessant occurrence in poetic phraseology and image, is worshipped yearly even at the present day in all provinces of the peninsula no less than those many millenniums ago in the prehistoric dawn of our religion and literature. Consistently, subsequent to the Vedic times, she has been worshipped everywhere & is named in all passages as a goddess of speech, poetry, learning and eloquence. Epic, Purana and the popular imagination know her solely as this deity of speech & knowledge. She ranks therefore in the order of religious ideas with the old Hellenic conceptions of Pallas, Aphrodite or the Muses; nor does any least shadow of the material Nature-power linger to lower the clear intellectuality of her powers and functions. But there is also a river Saraswati or several rivers of that name. Therefore, the doubt suggests itself: In any given passage may it not be the Aryan river, Saraswati, which the bards are chanting? even if they sing of her or cry to her as a goddess, may it not still be the River, so dear, sacred & beneficent to them, that they worship? Or even where she is clearly a goddess of speech and thought, may it not be that the Aryans, having had originally no intellectual or moral conceptions and therefore no gods of the mind and heart, converted, when they did feel the need, this sacred flowing River into a goddess of sacred flowing song? In that case we are likely to find in her epithets & activities the traces of this double capacity.
For the rest, Sayana in this particular passage lends some support [to] this suggestion of Saraswatis etymological good luck; for he tells us that Saraswati has two aspects, the embodied goddess of Speech and the figure of a river. He distributes, indeed, these two capacities with a strange inconsistency and in his interpretation, as in so many of these harsh & twisted scholastic renderings, European & Indian, of the old melodious subtleties of thought & language, the sages of the Veda come before us only to be convicted of a baffling incoherence of sense and a pointless inaptness of language. But possibly, after all, it is the knowledge of the scholar that is at fault, not the intellect of the Vedic singers that was confused, stupid and clumsy! Nevertheless we must consider the possibility that Sayanas distribution of the sense may be ill-guided, & yet his suggestion about the double role of the goddess may in itself be well-founded. There are few passages of the ancient Sanhita, into which these ingenuities of the ritualistic & naturalistic interpretations do not pursue us. Our inquiry would protract itself into an intolerable length, if we had at every step to clear away from the path either the heavy ancient lumber or the brilliant modern rubbish. It is necessary to determine, once for all, whether the Vedic scholars, prve ntan uta, are guides worthy of trustwhe ther they are as sure in taste & insight as they are painstaking and diligent in their labour,whether, in a word, these ingenuities are the outcome of an imaginative licence of speculation or a sound & keen intuition of the true substance of Veda. Here is a crucial passage. Let us settle at least one side of the account the ledger of the great Indian scholiast.
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What then is maho arnas? Is it the great sea of general being, substance of general existence out of which the substance of thought & speech are formed? It is possible; but such an interpretation is not entirely in consonance with the context of this passage. The suggestion I shall advance will therefore be different. Mahas, as a neuter adjective, means great,maho arnas, the great water; but mahas may be equally a noun and then maho arnas will mean Mahas the sea. In some passages again, mahas is genitive singular or accusative plural of a noun mah; maho arnas may well be the flowing stream or flood of Mah, as in the expression vasvo arnavam, the sea of substance, in a later Sukta.We are therefore likely to remain in doubt unless we can find an actual symbolic use of either word Mah or Mahas in a psychological sense which would justify us in supposing this Maho Arnas to be a sea of substance of knowledge rather than vaguely the sea of general substance of being. For this is the significance which alone entirely suits the actual phraseology of the last Rik of the Sukta. We find our clue in the Taittiriya Upanishad. It is said there that there are three recognised vyahritis of the Veda, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swah, but the Rishi Mahachamasya affirmed a fourth. The name of this doubtful fourth vyahriti is Mahas. Now the mystic vyahritis of the Veda are the shabdas or sacred words expressing objectively the three worlds, subjectively mentalised material being, mentalised vital being & pure mental being, the three manifest states of our phenomenal consciousness. Mahas, therefore, must express a fourth state of being, which is so much superior to the other three or so much beyond the ordinary attainment of our actual human consciousness that it is hardly considered in Vedic thought a vyahriti, whatever one or two thinkers may have held to the contrary. What do we know of this Mahas from Vedantic or later sources? Bhuh, Bhuvah, Swar of the Veda rest substantially upon the Annam, Prana, Manas, matter, life & mind of the Upanishads. But the Upanishads speak of a fourth state of being immediately aboveManas, preceding it therefore & containing it, Vijnanam, ideal knowledge, and a fifth immediately above Vijnanam, Ananda or Bliss. Physically, these five are the pancha kshitayah, five earths or dwelling-places, of the Rig Veda and they are the pancha koshas, five sheaths or bodies of the Upanishads. But in our later Yogic systems we recognise seven earths, seven standing grounds of the soul on which it experiences phenomenal existence. The Purana gives us their names [the names of the two beyond the five already mentioned], Tapas and Satya, Energy&Truth. They are the outward expressions of the two psychological principles, Self-Awareness &Self-Being (Chit&Sat) which with Ananda, Self-Bliss, are the triune appearance in the soul of the supreme Existence which the Vedanta calls Brahman. Sat, Chit & Ananda constitute to Vedantic thought the parardha or spiritual higher half [of] our existence; in less imaginative language, we are in our supreme existence self-existence, self-awareness & self-delight. Annam, Prana & Manas constitute to Vedantic thought the aparardha or lower half; again, in more abstract speech, we are in our lower phenomenal existence mind, life & matter. Vijnana is the link; standing in ideal knowledge we are aware, looking upward, of our spiritual existence, looking downward, we pour it out into the three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvah & Swar, mental, vital & material existence, the phenomenal symbols of our self-expression. Objectively vijnana becomes mahat, the great, wide or extended state of phenomenal being,called also brihat, likewise signifying vast or great,into which says the Gita, the Self or Lord casts his seed as into a womb in order to engender all these objects & creatures. The Self, standing in vijnanam or mahat, is called the Mahan Atma, the great Self; so that, if we apply the significance [of] these terms to the Vedic words mah, mahas, mahi, mahn, then, even accepting mahas as an adjective and maho arnas in the sense of the great Ocean, it may very well be the ocean of the ideal or pure ideative state of existence in true knowledge which is intended, the great ocean slumbering in our humanity and awakened by the divine inspiration of Saraswati. But have we at all the right to read these high, strange & subtle ideas of a later mysticism into the primitive accents of the Veda? Let us at least support for a while that hypothesis. We may very well ask, if not from the Vedic forefa thers, whence did the Aryan thinkers get these striking images, this rich & concrete expression of the most abstract ideas and persist in them even after the Indian mind had rarefied & lifted its capacity to the height of the most difficult severities & abstractions known to any metaphysical thinking? Our hypothesis of a Vedic origin remains not only a possible suggestion but the one hypothesis in lawful possession of the field, unless a foreign source or a later mixed ideation can be proved. At present this later ideation may be assumed, it has not been & cannot be proved. The agelong tradition of India assigns the Veda as the source & substance of our theosophies; Brahmana, Aranyaka, Upanishad & Purana as only the interpretation & later expression; the burden of disproof rests on those who negative the tradition.
Vjebhir vjinvat and maho arnas are therefore fixed in their significance. The word vashtu in the tenth Rik offers a difficulty. It is equivalent to vahatu, says the Brahmana; to kmayatu, says Sayana; but, deferring to the opinion of the Brahmana, he adds that it means really kmayitw vahatu. Undoubtedly the root va means in classical Sanscrit to desire; but from the evidence of the classical Sanscrit we have it established that in more ancient times its ordinary meaning must have been to subdue or control; for although the verb has lost this sense in the later language, almost all its derivatives bear that meaning & the sense of wish, will or desire only persists in a few of them, va, wish and possibly va, a woman. It is this sense which agrees best with the context of the tenth rik and is concealed in the vahatu of the Brahmanas. There is no other difficulty of interpretation in the passage.
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If the Vedas have a deep religious and psychological significance such as I have attributed to them, if they are not, as the disciples of the Europeans suppose, an early hymnal of savage ceremonies, there must be in the long procession of the sacred chants, in the fixed formulae and individual variations of these voluminous songs to a small number of strongly characterised deities, some individual riks, some occasional passages, some entire hymns, even, which, in spite of the difficulties of an archaic diction & the concealing veil of a changed vocabulary, still bear the ancient truth on their very surface. The totality of the Rig Veda is so closely knit in its mentality, so constant in its common terms, so fixed & unchanging in its principal ideas that even one such rik, passage or hymn ought to exceed the limits of its single text & shed a wide light over the whole surface of Vedic thought & phraseology. Is there any such passage easily discoverable? There is one, I think, which occurs very early in the collection and by the nature of its presiding deity, its strongly subjective purport & its clear and striking language seems to fulfil our desideratum. It occurs in the third sukta of the first Mandala. Madhuchchhandas, son of the famous Visvamitra, is the seer; Saraswati is the goddess; the last three riks of the hymn constitute the indicative passage.
In Saraswati we have a deity with subjective functions the first desideratum in our enquiry. Still, there is a doubt, a difficulty. Saraswati of the Epics & Puranas, Saraswati, as she is worshipped today throughout India is, no doubt, a purely subjective goddess and presides only over intellectual and immaterial functions. She is our Lady of Speech, the Muse, the goddess of Poetry, Art and Learning. Saraswati, the flowing, is also the name of more than one river in modern India, but especially of the sacred stream in upper India supposed to join secretly in their confluence the waters of theGanges and Yamuna and form with them the holy Triveni or triple braid of waters in which the ceremonial ablution of the devotee is more potent than at almost any other Indian place of pilgrimage and gives the richest spiritual fruit to the believing pilgrim. But in our modern religious ideas there is no real connexion, except of name, between the goddess and the river. In the Veda also there is a Saraswati who is the goddess of speech; in the Veda also there seems to be an ancient river Saraswati, although this stream is placed by Vedic scholars in the Panjab and not in the vicinity of Prayaga and Ayodhya. Were these two deities,for every river and indeed every natural object was to the Vedic Rishis a divine being,the same goddess Saraswati? Sayana accepts, even in this passage, their identity; she is, he tells us, [].1 If this identity were accepted, we would have to ask ourselves by what process of subjective metamorphosis a material Panjab river came to be the deity of Speech, the female power of Brahma, the Muse and tutelar goddess of scholar and poet. Or was not rather the goddess of speech eponymous of the river and subsequently imaged in it by the Vedic symbolists? But before we descend to these ulterior questions, we must first know for certain whether Sayana is right in his identification of the river and the Muse. First of all, are they the same in this passage? secondly, are they the same in any passage of the Veda? It is to the first question alone that we need address ourselves for the present; for on its solution depends the whole purport, value and helpfulness of these three Riks for the purposes of our enquiry into the sense and secret of the Vedas.
Blank in MS; in his commentary on the passage under discussion, Sayana describes Saraswati as: dvividh . . . vigrahavaddevat nadrp ca.Ed.
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For what functions are they called to the Sacrifice by Madhuchchhanda? First, they have to take delight in the spiritual forces generated in him by the action of the internal Yajna. These they have to accept, to enter into them and use them for delight, their delight and the sacrificers, yajwarr isho .. chanasyatam; a wide enjoyment, a mastery of joy & all pleasant things, a swiftness in action like theirs is what their advent should bring & therefore these epithets are attached to this action. Then they are to accept the words of the mantra, vanatam girah. In fact, vanatam means more than acceptance, it is a pleased, joyous almost loving acceptance; for vanas is the Latin venus, which means charm, beauty, gratification, and the Sanscrit vanit means woman or wife, she who charms, in whom one takes delight or for whom one has desire. Therefore vanatam takes up the idea of chanasyatam, enlarges it & applies it to a particular part of the Yajna, the mantras, the hymn or sacred words of the stoma. The immense effectiveness assigned to rhythmic Speech & the meaning & function of the mantra in the Veda & in later Yoga is a question of great interest & importance which must be separately considered; but for our present purpose it will be sufficient to specify its two chief functions, the first, to settle, fix, establish the god & his qualities & activities in the Sacrificer,this is the true meaning of the word stoma, and, secondly, to effectualise them in action & creation subjective or objective,this is the true meaning of the words rik and arka. The later senses, praise and hymn were the creation of actual ceremonial practice, and not the root intention of these terms of Veda. Therefore the Aswins, the lords of force & joy, are asked to take up the forces of the sacrifice, yajwarr isho, fill them with their joy & activity and carry that joy & activity into the understanding so that it becomes avra, full of a bright and rapid strength.With that strong, impetuously rapid working they are to take up the words of the mantra into the understanding and by their joy & activity make them effective for action or creation. For this reason the epithet purudansas is attached to this action, abundantly active or, rather, abundantly creative of forms into which the action of the yajwarr ishah is to be thrown. But this can only be done as the Sacrificer wishes if they are in the acceptance of the mantra dhishny, firm and steady.Sayana suggests wise or intelligent as the sense of dhishnya, but although dhishan, like dh, can mean the understanding & dhishnya therefore intelligent, yet the fundamental sense is firm or steadily holding & the understanding is dh or dhishan because it takes up perceptions, thoughts & feelings & holds them firmly in their places.Vehemence & rapidity may be the causes of disorder & confusion, therefore even in their utmost rapidity & rapture of action & formation the Aswins are to be dhishnya, firm & steady. This discipline of a mighty, inalienable calm supporting & embracing the greatest fierceness of action & intensity of joy, the combination of dhishny & rudravartan , is one of the grandest secrets of the old Vedic discipline. For by this secret men can enjoy the world as God enjoys it, with unstinted joy, with unbridled power, with undarkened knowledge.
Therefore the prayer to the Aswins concludes: The Soma is outpoured; come with your full bounty, dasr & your fierce intensity, rudravartan. But what Soma? Is it the material juice of a material plant, the bitter Homa which the Parsi priests use today in the ceremonies enjoined by the Zendavesta? Does Sayanas interpretation give us the correct rendering? Is it by a material intoxication that this great joy & activity & glancing brilliance of the mind joined to a great steadfastness is to be obtained? Yuvkavah, says Sayana, means mixed & refers to the mixing of other ingredients in the Soma wine. Let us apply again our usual test. We come to the next passage in which the word yuvku occurs, the fourth rik of the seventeenth Sukta, Medhatithi Kanwas hymn to Indra & Varuna.
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We have reached a subjective sense for yuvku. But what of vriktabarhishah? Does not barhih always mean in the Veda the sacred grass strewn as a seat for the gods? In the Brahmanas is it not so understood and have [we] not continually the expression barhishi sdata? I have no objection; barhis is certainly the seat of the Gods in the sacrifice, stritam nushak, strewn without a break. But barhis cannot originally have meant Kusha grass; for in that case the singular could only be used to indicate a single grass and for the seat of the Gods the plural barhnshi would have to be used,barhihshu sdata and not barhishi sdata.We have the right to go behind the Brahmanas and enquire what was the original sense of barhis and how it came to mean kusha grass. The root barh is a modified formation from the root brih, to grow, increase or expand, which we have in brihat. From the sense of spreading we may get the original sense of seat, and because the material spread was usually the Kusha grass, the word by a secondary application came to bear also that significance. Is this the only possible sense of barhis? No, for we find it interpreted also as sacrifice, as fire, as light or splendour, as water, as ether. We find barhana & barhas in the sense of strength or power and barhah or barham used for a leaf or for a peacocks tail. The base meaning is evidently fullness, greatness, expansion, power, splendour or anything having these attri butes, an outspread seat, spreading foliage, the outspread or splendid peacocks tail, the shining flame, the wide expanse of ether, the wide flow of water. If there were no other current sense of barhis, we should be bound to the ritualistic explanation. Even as it is, in other passages the ritualistic explanation may be found to stand or be binding; but is it obligatory here? I do not think it is even admissible. For observe the awkwardness of the expression, sut vriktabarhishah, wine of which the grass is stripped of its roots. Anything, indeed, is possible in the more artificial styles of poetry, but the rest of this hymn, though subtle & deep in thought, is sufficiently lucid and straightforward in expression. In such a style this strained & awkward expression is an alien intruder. Moreover, since every other expression in these lines is subjective, only dire necessity can compel us to admit so material a rendering of this single epithet. There is no such necessity. Barhis means fundamentally fullness, splendour, expansion or strength & power, & this sense suits well with the meaning we have found for yuvkavah. The sense of vrikta is very doubtful. Purified (cleared, separated) is a very remote sense of vrij or vrich & improbable. They can both mean divided, distributed, strewn, outspread, but although it is possible that vriktabarhishah means their fullness outspread through the system or distributed in the outpouring, this sense too is not convincing. Again vrijana in the Veda means strong, or as a noun, strength, energy, even a battle or fight. Vrikta may therefore [mean] brought to its highest strength. We will accept this sense as a provisional conjecture, to be confirmed or corrected by farther enquiry, and render the line The Soma distillings are replete with energy and brought to their highest fullness.
But to what kind of distillings can such terms be applied? The meaning of Soma & the Vedic ideas about this symbolic wine must be examined by themselves & with a greater amplitude. All we need ask here [is], is there any indication in this hymn itself, that the Soma like everything else in the Sukta is subjective & symbolic? For, if so, our rendering, which at present is clouded with doubt & built on a wide but imperfectly solid foundation, will become firm & established. We have the clear suggestion in the next rik, the first of the three addressed to Indra. Sut ime tw yavah. Our question is answered. What has been distilled? Ime yavah. These life-forces, these vitalities. We shall find throughout the Veda this insistence on the life, vitality,yu or jva; we shall find that the Soma was regarded as a life-giving juice, a sort of elixir of life, or nectar of immortality, something at least that gave increased vitality, established health, prolonged youth. Of such an elixir it may well be said that it is yuvku, full of the force of youth in which the Aswins must specially delight, vriktabarhish, raised to its highest strength & fullness so that the gods who drink of it, become in the man in whom they enter and are seated, increased, vriddha, to the full height of their function and activity,the Aswins to their utmost richness of bounty, their intensest fiery activity. Nectarjuices, they are called, indavah, pourings of delight, yavah, life forces, amritsah, elixirs of immortality.
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When we look carefully at the passage before us, we find an expression which strikes one as a very extraordinary phrase in reference to a god of lightning and rain. Indryhi, says Madhuchchhanda, dhiyeshito viprajtah. On any ordinary acceptance of the meaning of words, we have to render this line, Come, O Indra, impelled by the understanding, driven by the Wise One. Sayana thinks that vipra means Brahmin and the idea is that Indra is moved to come by the intelligent sacrificing priests and he explains dhiyeshito, moved to come by our understanding, that is to say, by our devotion. But understanding does not mean devotion and the artificiality of the interpretation is apparent.We will, as usual, put aside the ritualistic & naturalistic traditions and see to what the natural sense of the words themselves leads us. I question the traditional acceptance of viprajta as a compound of vipra & jta; it seems tome clearly to be vi prajtah, driven forward variously or in various directions. I am content to accept the primary sense of impelled for ishita, although, whether we read dhiy ishito with the Padapatha, or dhiy shito, it may equally well mean, controlled by the understanding; but of themselves the expressions impelled & driven forward in various paths imply a perfect control.We have then, Come, O Indra, impelled (or controlled, governed) by the understanding and driven forward in various paths. What is so driven forward? Obviously not the storm, not the lightning, not any force of material Nature, but a subjective force, and, as one can see at a glance, a force of mind. Now Indra is the king of Swar and Swar in the symbolical interpretation of the Vedic terms current in after times is the mental heaven corresponding to the principle of Manas, mind. His name means the Strong. In the Puranas he is that which the Rishis have to conquer in order to attain their goal, that which sends the Apsaras, the lower delights & temptations of the senses to bewilder the sage and the hero; and, as is well known, in the Indian system of Yoga it is the Mind with its snares, sensuous temptations & intellectual delusions which is the enemy that has to be overcome & the strong kingdom that has to be conquered. In this passage Indra is not thought of in his human form, but as embodied in the principle of light or tejas; he is harivas, substance of brightness; he is chitrabhnu, of a rich & various effulgence, epithets not easily applicable to a face or figure, but precisely applicable to the principle of mind which has always been supposed in India to be in its material element made of tejas or pure light.We may conclude, therefore, that in Indra, master of Swarga, we have the divine lord of mental force & power. It is as this mental power that he comes sutvatah upa brahmni vghatah, to the soul-movements of the chanter of the sacred song, of the holder of the nectar-wine. He is asked to come, impelled or controlled by the understanding and driven forward by it in the various paths of sumati & snrit, right thinking & truth. We remember the image in the Kathopanishad in which the mind & senses are compared to reins & horses and the understanding to the driver. We look back & see at once the connection with the function demanded of the Aswins in the preceding verses; we look forward & see easily the connection with the activity of Saraswati in the closing riks. The thought of the whole Sukta begins to outline itself, a strong, coherent and luminous progression of psychological images begins to emerge.
Brahmni, says Sayana, means the hymnal chants; vghatah is the ritwik, the sacrificial priest. These ritual senses belong to the words but we must always inquire how they came to bear them. As to vghat, we have little clue or evidence, but on the system I have developed in another work (the Origins of Aryan Speech), it may be safely concluded that the lost roots vagh & vgh, must have conveyed the sense of motion evident in the Latin vagus & vagari, wandering & to wander & the sense of crying out, calling apparent in the Latin vagire, to cry, & the Sanscrit vangh, to abuse, censure. Vghat may mean the sacrificial priest because he is the one who calls to the deity in the chant of the brahma, the sacred hymn. It may also mean one who increases in being, in his brahma, his soul, who is getting vja or substance.
The word Brahma is a great word in Indian thought, the greatest of all the words in which Indian spirituality has expressed itself; it means in the Upanishads, in all later literature, the Brahman, the Supreme & the All, the Spirit of Things & the sole reality. We need not ask ourselves, as yet, whether this crowning conception has any place in the Vedic hymns; all we need ask is whether Brahman in the Rigveda means hymn & only hymn or whether it has some sense by which it could pass naturally into the great Vedantic conception of the supreme Spirit. My suggestion is that Brahma in the Rigveda means often the soul, the psuche of the Greeks, animus of the Romans, as distinguished from the manas, mens or . This sense it must have borne at some period of Indian thought antecedent to the Upanishads; otherwise we cannot explain the selection of a word meaning hymn or speech as the great fundamental word of Vedanta, the name of the supreme spiritual Reality. The root brih, from which it comes, means, as we have seen in connection with barhis, to be full, great, to expand. Because Brahman is like the ether extending itself in all being, because it fills the body & whole system with its presence, therefore the word brahma can be applied to the soul or to the supreme Spirit, according as the idea is that of the individual spirit or the supreme Existence. It is possible also that the Greek phren, mind, phronis, etc may have derived from this root brih (the aspirate being thrown back on the initial consonant),& may have conveyed originally the same association of ideas. But are we justified in supposing that this use of Brahma in the sense of soul dates back to the Rigveda? May it not have originated in the intermediate period between the period of the Vedic hymns and the final emergence of the Upanishads? In most passages brahma can mean either hymn or soul; in some it seems to demand the sole sense of hymn. Without going wholly into the question, I shall only refer the reader to the hymn ofMedhatithi Kanwa, to Brahmanaspati, the eighteenth of the first Mandala, and the epithets and functions there attri buted to the Master of the Brahman. My suggestion is that in the Rigveda Brahmanaspati is the master of the soul, primarily, the master of speech, secondarily, as the expression of the soul. The immense importance attached to Speech, the high place given to it by the Vedic Rishis not only as the expression of the soul, but that which best increases & expands its substance & power in our life & being, is one of the most characteristic features of Vedic thought. The soul expresses itself through conscious knowledge & in thought; speech stands behind thought & connects knowledge with its expression in idea. It is through Vak that the Lord creates the world.
1.08 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
KEDR: "It is said in the Bhagavata that Vysa asked God's forgiveness for his three transgressions. He said: 'O Lord, Thou art formless, but I have thought of Thee in my meditation as endowed with form; Thou art beyond speech, but I have sung Thee hymns; Thou art the All-pervading Spirit, but I have made pilgrimages to sacred places.
Be gracious, O Lord, and forgive these three transgressions of mine.'"
1.08 - The Supreme Will, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
6:There is still left the moral law or the ideal and these, even to many who think themselves free, appear for ever sacred and intangible. But the sadhaka, his gaze turned always to the heights, will abandon them to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express; all moral qualities are only a poor and rigid travesty of his spontaneous and illimitable perfection. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire; for it belongs to the quality of vital passion, impulsion or drive of propensity in us (rajogun.a) and is extinguished with the transformation of that mode of Nature. But neither must the aspirant remain subject to the gilded or golden chain of a conventional or a habitual or a mentally ordered or even a high or clear sattwic virtue. That will be replaced by something profounder and more essential than the minor inadequate thing that men call virtue. The original sense of the word was manhood and this is a much larger and deeper thing than the moral mind and its structures. The culmination of Karmayoga is a yet higher and deeper state that may perhaps be called "soulhood", - for the soul is greater than the man; a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue. But this supreme Truth cannot be forced to inhabit the petty edifices of the practical reason or even confined in the more dignified constructions of the larger ideative reason that imposes its representations as if they were pure truth on the limited human intelligence. This supreme Love will not necessarily be consistent, much less will it be synonymous, with the partial and feeble, ignorant and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement; the mind's partial attainment cannot dictate its terms to the soul's supreme fulfilment.
7:At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil its movement in the sadhaka according to the essential law or way of his own nature. For that is the special aspect of the divine Nature, the particular power of the supreme Shakti, out of which his soul has emerged into the Play, not limited indeed by the forms of this law or way, for the soul is infinite. But still its stuff of nature bears that stamp, evolves fluently along those lines or turns around the spiral curves of that dominating influence. He will manifest the divine Truth-movement according to the temperament of the sage or the lion-like fighter or the lover and enjoyer or the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (gunas) that may constitute the form given to his being by its own inner urge. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which men will see in him and not a conduct cut, chalked out, artificially regulated, by any lesser rule or by any law from outside.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
This is why the physical life, the individuals participation in the universal light of consciousness has always been considered by popular intuition no less than by the inspiration of poets and thinkers the supreme and sacred boon and all birth is celebrated as a victory, for it is indeed a victory of life and light over the obscurity of the inconscient.
So long as that underworld of subconscient forces whose sole issue is the narrow door opened by physical life on this infinite is not exhausted, the creatures first duty of solidarity and of charity to the creature is to awaken it to the plenitude of existence and light, to enlarge the field of this life that liberates.
1.08 - The Three Schools of Magick 3, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
It is forbidden here to discuss the nature of The Book of the Law, the sacred Scripture of Thelema. Even after forty years of close expert examination, it remains to a great extent mysterious; but the little we know of it is enough to show that it is a sublime synthesis of all Science and all ethics. It is by virtue of this Book that man may attain a degree of freedom hitherto never suspected to be possible, a spiritual development altogether beyond anything hitherto known; and, what is really more to the point, a control of external nature which will make the boasted achievements of the last century appear no more than childish preliminaries to an incomparably mighty manhood.
It has been said by some that the Law of Thelema appeals only to the lite of humanity. No doubt here is this much in that assertion, that only the highest can take full advantage of the extraordinary opportuni- ties which it offers. At the same time, "the Law is for all." Each in his degree, every man may learn to realise the nature of his own being, and to develop it in freedom. It is by this means that the White School of Magick can justify its past, redeem its present, and assure its future, by guaranteeing to every human being a life of Liberty and of Love.
1.09 - ADVICE TO THE BRAHMOS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The sacred Om, from space arisen,
Is the resounding drum.
--
MASTER: "You talk glibly about prema. But is it such a commonplace thing? There are two characteristics of prema. First, it makes one forget the world. So intense is one's love of God that one becomes unconscious of outer things. Chaitanya had this ecstatic love; he 'took a wood for the sacred grove of Vrindvan and the ocean for the dark waters of the Jamuna'. Second, one has no feeling of 'my-ness' toward the body, which is so dear to man. One wholly gets rid of the feeling that the body is the soul.
Indications of God-realization
--
I dug a pit in the sacred land of earth;
And now the dark water of death gushes forth!
--
" 'As is a man's feeling of love, so is his gain.' Once two friends were going along the street, when they saw some people listening to a reading of the Bhagavata. 'Come, friend', said the one to the other. 'Let us hear the sacred book.' So saying he went in and sat down. The second man peeped in and went away. He entered a house of ill fame. But very soon he felt disgusted with the place. 'Shame on me!' he said to himself. 'My friend has been listening to the sacred word of Hari; and see where I am!'
But the friend who had been listening to the Bhagavata also became disgusted. 'What a fool I am!' he said. 'I have been listening to this fellow's blah-blah, and my friend is having a grand time.' In course of time they both died. The messenger of Death came for the soul of the one who had listened to the Bhagavata and dragged it off to hell. The messenger of God came for the soul of the one who had been to the house of prostitution and led it up to heaven.
--
As the music came to a close the Master said, "Bhagavata-Bhakta-Bhagavan", and bowed low to the devotees seated on all sides. He touched with his forehead the ground made holy by the singing of the sacred music.
It was now about half past nine in the evening. Surendra entertained the Master and the devotees with a sumptuous feast. When it was time to take leave of their host, the Master, the devotees, and Surendra entered the worship hall and stood before the image.
1.09 - BOOK THE NINTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
He rends the sacred altar from the plain;
Oete's wide forests echo with his cries:
--
The sacred honours of the heav'nly seat,
Ev'n he shall own his deeds deserve the sky,
--
The silent God: the sacred crocodile;
And, last, a long procession moving on,
--
Let not thy sacred oracles be vain.
That Iphis lives, that I myself am free
1.09 - Concentration - Its Spiritual Uses, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
When two of our perceptions do not contradict each other, we call it proof. I hear something, and if it contradicts something already perceived, I begin to fight it out, and do not believe it. There are also three kinds of proof. Pratyaksha, direct perception; whatever we see and feel, is proof, if there has been nothing to delude the senses. I see the world; that is sufficient proof that it exists. Secondly, Anumna, inference; you see a sign, and from the sign you come to the thing signified. Thirdly, ptavkya, the direct evidence of the Yogis, of those who have seen the truth. We are all of us struggling towards knowledge. But you and I have to struggle hard, and come to knowledge through a long tedious process of reasoning, but the Yogi, the pure one, has gone beyond all this. Before his mind, the past, the present, and the future are alike, one book for him to read; he does not require to go through the tedious processes for knowledge we have to; his words are proof, because he sees knowledge in himself. These, for instance, are the authors of the sacred scriptures; therefore the scriptures are proof. If any such persons are living now their words will be proof. Other philosophers go into long discussions about Aptavakya and they say, "What is the proof of their words?" The proof is their direct perception. Because whatever I see is proof, and whatever you see is proof, if it does not contradict any past knowledge. There is knowledge beyond the senses, and whenever it does not contradict reason and past human experience, that knowledge is proof. Any madman may come into this room and say he sees angels around him; that would not be proof. In the first place, it must be true knowledge, and secondly, it must not contradict past knowledge, and thirdly, it must depend upon the character of the man who gives it out. I hear it said that the character of the man is not of so much importance as what he may say; we must first hear what he says. This may be true in other things. A man may be wicked, and yet make an astronomical discovery, but in religion it is different, because no impure man will ever have the power to reach the truths of religion. Therefore we have first of all to see that the man who declares himself to be an pta is a perfectly unselfish and holy person; secondly, that he has reached beyond the senses; and thirdly, that what he says does not contradict the past knowledge of humanity. Any new discovery of truth does not contradict the past truth, but fits into it. And fourthly, that truth must have a possibility of verification. If a man says, "I have seen a vision," and tells me that I have no right to see it, I believe him not. Everyone must have the power to see it for himself. No one who sells his knowledge is an Apta. All these conditions must be fulfilled; you must first see that the man is pure, and that he has no selfish motive; that he has no thirst for gain or fame. Secondly, he must show that he is superconscious. He must give us something that we cannot get from our senses, and which is for the benefit of the world. Thirdly, we must see that it does not contradict other truths; if it contradicts other scientific truths reject it at once. Fourthly, the man should never be singular; he should only represent what all men can attain. The three sorts of proof are, then, direct sense-perception, inference, and the words of an Apta. I cannot translate this word into English. It is not the word "inspired", because inspiration is believed to come from outside, while this knowledge comes from the man himself. The literal meaning is "attained".
1.09 - Legend of Lakshmi, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
ga, and Kūrma Purāṇas. The Vāyu and Padma have much the same narrative as that of our text; and so have the Agni and Bhāgavata, except that they refer only briefly to the anger of Durvāsas, without narrating the circumstances; indicating their being posterior, therefore, to the original tale. The part, however, assigned to Durvāsas appears to be an embellishment added to the original, for no mention of him occurs in the Matsya P. nor even in the Hari Vaṃśa, neither does it occur in what may be considered the oldest extant versions of the story, those of the Rāmāyana and Mahābhārata: both these ascribe the occurrence to the desire of the gods and Daityas to become immortal. The Matsya assigns a similar motive to the gods, instigated by observing that the Daityas slain by them in battle were restored to life by Śukra with the Sañjīvinī, or herb of immortality, which he had discovered. The account in the Hari Vaṃśa is brief and obscure, and is explained by the commentator as an allegory, in which the churning of the ocean typifies ascetic penance, and the ambrosia is final liberation: but this is mere mystification. The legend of the Rāmāyana is translated, vol. I. p. 410. of the Serampore edition; and that of the Mahābhārata by Sir C. Wilkins, in the notes to his translation of the Bhāgavata Gītā. See also the original text, Cal. ed. p. 40. It has been presented to general readers in a more attractive form by my friend H. M. Parker, in his Draught of Immortality, printed with other poems, Lond. 1827. The Matsya P. has many of the stanzas of the Mahābhārata interspersed with others. There is some variety in the order and number of articles produced from the ocean. As I have observed elsewhere (Hindu Theatre, I. 59. Lond. ed.), the popular enumeration is fourteen; but the Rāmāyana specifies but nine; the Mahābhārata, nine; the Bhāgavata, ten; the Padma, nine; the Vāyu, twelve; the p. 78 Matsya, perhaps, gives the whole number. Those in which most agree, are, 1. the Hālāhala or Kālakūta poison, swallowed by Śiva: 2. Vārunī or Surā, the goddess of wine, who being taken by the gods, and rejected by the Daityas, the former were termed Suras, and the latter Asuras: 3. the horse Uccaiśśravas, taken by Indra: 4. Kaustubha, the jewel worn by Viṣṇu: 5. the moon: 6. Dhanwantari, with the Amrita in his Kamaṇḍalu, or vase; and these two articles are in the Vāyu considered as distinct products: 7. the goddess Padmā or Śrī: 8. the Apsarasas, or nymphs of heaven: 9. Surabhi, or the cow of plenty: 10. the Pārijāta tree, or tree of heaven: 11. Airāvata, the elephant taken by Indra. The Matsya adds, 12. the umbrella taken by Varuna: 13. the earrings taken by Indra, and given to Aditī: and apparently another horse, the white horse of the sun: or the number may be completed by counting the Amrita separately from Dhanwantari. The number is made up in the popular lists by adding the bow and the conch of Viṣṇu; but there does not seem to be any good authority for this, and the addition is a sectarial one: so is that of the Tulaśī tree, a plant sacred to Kṛṣṇa, which is one of the twelve specified by the Vāyu P. The Uttara Khanda of the Padma P. has a peculiar enumeration, or, Poison; Jyeṣṭhā or Alakṣmī, the goddess of misfortune, the elder born to fortune; the goddess of wine; Nidrā, or sloth; the Apsarasas; the elephant of Indra; Lakṣmī; the moon; and the Tulaśī plant. The reference to Mohinī, the female form assumed by Viṣṇu, is very brief in our text; and no notice is taken of the story told in the Mahābhārata and some of the Purāṇas, of the Daitya Rāhu's insinuating himself amongst the gods, and obtaining a portion of the Amrita: being beheaded for this by Viṣṇu, the head became immortal, in consequence of the Amrita having reached the throat, and was transferred as a constellation to the skies; and as the sun and moon detected his presence amongst the gods, Rāhu pursues them with implacable hatred, and his efforts to seize them are the causes of eclipses; Rāhu typifying the ascending and descending nodes. This seems to be the simplest and oldest form of the legend. The equal immortality of the body, under the name Ketu, and his being the cause of meteorical phenomena, seems to have been an after-thought. In the Padma and Bhāgavata, Rāhu and Ketu are the sons of Sinhikā, the wife of the Dānava Viprachitti.
[9]: The four Vidyās, or branches of knowledge, are said to be, Yajña vidyā, knowledge or performance of religious rites; Mahā vidyā, great knowledge, the worship of the female principle, or Tāntrika worship; Guhya vidyā, knowledge of mantras, mystical prayers, and incantations; and Ātma vidyā, knowledge of soul, true wisdom.
1.09 - PROMENADE, #Faust, #Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #Poetry
If sacred or profane it be;
So here she guessed, from every gem,
1.09 - Saraswati and Her Consorts, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Saraswati means, "she of the stream, the flowing movement", and is therefore a natural name both for a river and for the goddess of inspiration. But by what process of thought or association does the general idea of the river of inspiration come to be associated with a particular earthly stream? And in the Veda it is not a question of one river which by its surroundings, natural and legendary, might seem more fitly associated with the idea of sacred inspiration than any other. For here it is a question not of one, but of seven rivers always associated together in the minds of the Rishis and all of them released together by
94
1.09 - The Ambivalence of the Fish Symbol, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
temples had pools with sacred fishes in them which no one was
allowed to touch. 14 Similarly, meals of fish were ritually eaten
--
been dismembered by Typhon (Set). 20 Barbels were sacred to
Typhon, who is "that part of the soul which is passionate, im-
--
20 The oxyrhynchus fish was regarded as sacred all over Egypt. Cf. Budge, The
Gods of the Egyptians, II, p. 382; Plutarch, De Iside, cap. XLIX (Babbitt trans.,
1.09 - The Secret Chiefs, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
as Vergil, that mighty seer and magician of Rome at her perihelion says in his First Book of the Aenead. (Vergil whose every line is also an Oracle, the leaves of his book more sacred, more significant, more sure than those of the Cumaean Sibyl!)
These powers move in dimensions of time and space quite other than those with which we are familiar. Their values are incomprehensible to us. To a Secret Chief, wielding this weapon, "The nice conduct of a clouded cane" might be infinitely more important than a war, famine and pestilence such as might exterminate a third part of the race, to promote whose welfare is the crux of His oath, and the sole reason of His existence!
1.09 - The Worship of Trees, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
which the Ladon hurries to join the sacred Alpheus, and were still,
down to a few years ago, mirrored in the dark blue waters of the
--
glade, which still survives in the name of Nemi. sacred groves were
common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct
--
At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred
grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. The hea then Slavs
--
busy centre of Roman life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was
worshipped down to the days of the empire, and the withering of its
--
one of the most sacred objects in Rome. Whenever the tree appeared
to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a hue and cry which was
--
worship was performed for the most part in sacred groves, which were
always enclosed with a fence. Such a grove often consisted merely of
--
was the sacred tree, beside which everything else sank into
insignificance. Before it the worshippers assembled and the priest
--
trees. The Dieri tribe of Central Australia regard as very sacred
certain trees which are supposed to be their fathers transformed;
--
his repose. Among the Ignorrotes, every village has its sacred tree,
in which the souls of the dead forefa thers of the hamlet reside.
--
China, a sacred tree stands at the entrance of every village, and
the inhabitants believe that it is tenanted by the soul of their
--
hea then Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of
women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that with
--
if a tree in the sacred grove is felled the sylvan gods evince their
displeasure by withholding rain. In order to procure rain the
--
every village has its sacred grove, and "the grove deities are held
responsible for the crops, and are especially honoured at all the
--
would perish. The Gallas dance in couples round sacred trees,
praying for a good harvest. Every couple consists of a man and
--
the coco-nut is esteemed one of the most sacred fruits, and is
called Sriphala, or the fruit of Sri, the goddess of prosperity. It
--
farm. No one would pluck a single leaf of the sacred tree, any
injury to which was punished by ill-luck or sickness. Pregnant women
--
make themselves garments out of the bark of a certain sacred tree,
because they believe that this tree delivers them from the dangers
1.1.05 - The Siddhis, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Siddhis, but recognised them as a part, though not the most important part of Yogic accomplishment, and used them with an abundant and unhesitating vigour. They are recognised in our sacred books, formally included in Yoga by so devotional a Purana as the Bhagawat, noted and some of their processes carefully tabled by Patanjali. Even in the midnight of the Kali great Siddhas and saints have used them more sparingly, but with power and effectiveness. It would be difficult for many of them to do otherwise than use the siddhis since by the very fact of their spiritual elevation, these powers have become not exceptional movements, but the ordinary processes of their thought and action. It is by the use of the siddhis that the Siddhas sitting on the mountains help the world out of the heart of their solitude and silence. Jesus Christ made the use of the siddhis a prominent feature of his pure, noble and spiritual life, nor did he hesitate to communicate them to his disciples - the laying of hands, the healing of the sick, the ashirvada, the abhishap, the speaking with many tongues were all given to them. The day of Pentecost is still kept holy by the Christian Church. Joan of Arc used her siddhis to liberate France. Socrates had his siddhis, some of them of a very material nature. Men of great genius are usually born with some of them and use them unconsciously. Even in natures far below the power and clarity of genius we see their occasional or irregular operation. The West, always avid of knowledge, is struggling, sadly hampered by misuse and imposture, to develop them and gropes roughly for the truth about them in the phenomena of hypnotism, clairvoyance, telepathy, vouched for by men and women of great intellectuality and sincerity. Returning
Eastwards, where only their right practice has been understood, the lives of our saints northern and southern are full of the record of Siddhis. Sri Ramakrishna, whose authority is quoted against
1.10 - BOOK THE TENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
If here 'tis granted sacred truth to tell:
I come not curious to explore your Hell;
--
Then first ('tis said) by sacred verse subdu'd,
The Furies felt their cheeks with tears bedew'd:
--
And to Carthaean nymphs was sacred held.
His beamy head, with branches high display'd,
--
Slaughter'd before the sacred altars, bled.
Pygmalion off'ring, first approach'd the shrine,
--
Ye Gods, ye sacred laws, my soul defend
From such a crime as all mankind detest,
--
Confound so many sacred names in one,
Thy brother's mother! Sister to thy son!
--
Secure the sacred quiet of thy mind,
And keep the sanctions Nature has design'd.
--
The sacred statues trembled with surprize,
The tow'ry Goddess, blushing, veil'd her eyes;
1.10 - Harmony, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
From within that silence in him a silence that is not empty, not an absence of noise, not a cold and toneless blank, but the smooth breadth of the open sea, an extreme of sweetness that fills him and needs neither words nor thought nor comprehension: it is instant comprehension, the embracing of everything, the absolute here and now. So what could be missing? the seeker, the newborn to be, begins to see the mental play. First, he sees that those thousands of thoughts, gray or blue or paler, do not actually emanate from any brain. Rather, they float in midair, as it were. They are currents, vibrations, which are translated into thoughts in our heads when we capture them, as waves are translated into music or words or images into our television sets; and everything shifts and moves and whirls at different levels, flows universally over our motley little frontiers: captured in English, German, French; colored yellow, black, or blue depending on the height of our antenna; rhythmic, broken, or scattered into a powdering of microscopic thoughts depending on our level of reception; musical, grating, or discordant depending on our clarity or complication. But the seeker, the listener, does not try to pick up one channel or another, to turn the dials of his machine to capture this or that he is tuned in to the infinite, focused on a little flame in the center, so sweet and full, free from interference and preference. He needs only one thing: that that flame in him burn and burn, that that flowing pass again and again through his clearing, without words, without mental meaning, and yet full of meaning and of all meaning, as if it were the very source of meaning. And, at times, without his thinking or wanting it, something comes and strikes him: a little vibration, a little note alighting on his still waters and leaving a whole train of waves. And if he leans a little, to see, stretches toward that little eddy (or that slight note, that point calling out, that rip in the expanse of his being), a thought appears, a feeling, an image or a sensation as though there were really no dividing line between one mode of translation and another; there is just something vibrating, a more or less clear rhythm, a more or less pure light being lit in him, a shadow, a heaviness, an uneasiness, sometimes a glittering little rocket, dancing and light as a powdering of sunshine on the sea, an outpouring of tenderness, a fleeting smile and sometimes a great, solemn rhythm that seems to rise from the depths of time, immense, poignant, eternal, which calls up the unique sacred chant of the world. And It flows effortlessly. There is no need to think or want; the only need is to be again, to burn in unison with a single little flame that is like the very fire of the world. And, when necessary, just for a second, a little note comes knocking at his window, and there comes exactly the right thought, the impulse for the required action, the right or left turn that will open up an unexpected trail and a whole chain of answers and new opportunities. The seeker, the fervent one, then intimately understands the invocation of this five or six-thousand-year-old Vedic poet: O Fire, let there be created in us the correct thought that springs from Thee.24
But wrong thoughts, too, are a surprising source of discoveries. As a matter of fact, more and more, he realizes that this kind of distinction is meaningless. What, in the end, is not for our own good? What does not ultimately turn out to be our greater good? The wrong paths are part of the right one and pave a broader way, a larger view of our indivisible estate. The only wrong is not to see; it is the vast grayness of the terra incognita of our limited maps. And we indeed limit our maps. We have attributed those thoughts, feelings, reactions and desires to the little Mississippi flowing through our lands, to the thriving Potomac rivers lined with stone buildings and fortresses and indeed, they have got into the habit of running through those channels, cascading here or there, boiling a little farther below, or disappearing into our marshes. It is a very old habit, going back even before us or the ape, or else a scarcely more recent one going back to our schooldays, our parents or yesterday's newspaper. We have opened paths, and the current follows them it follows them obstinately. But for the demechanized seeker, the meanders and points of entry begin to become more visible. He begins to distinguish various levels in his being, various channeling centers, and when the current passes through the solar plexus or through the throat, the reactions or effects are different. But, mostly, he discovers with surprise that it is one and the same current everywhere, above or below, right or left, and those which we call thought, desire, will or emotion are various infiltrations of the same identical thing, which is neither thought nor desire nor will nor anything of the sort, but a trickle, a drop or a cataract of the same conscious Energy entering here or there, through our little Potomac or muddy Styx, and creating a disaster or a poem, a millipede's quiver, a revolution, a gospel or a vain thought on the boulevard we could almost say at will. It all depends on the quality of our opening and its level. But the fundamental fact is that this is an Energy, in other words, a Power. And thus, very simply, quite simply, we have the all-powerful source of all possible changes in the world. It is as we will it! We can tune in either here or there, create harmony or cacophony; not a single circumstance in the world, not one fateful event, not one so-called ineluctable law, absolutely nothing can prevent us from turning the antenna one way or the other and changing this muddy and disastrous flood into a limpid stream, instantly. We just have to know where we open ourselves. At every moment of the world and every second, in the face of every dreadful circumstance, every prison we have locked ourselves alive in, we can, in one stroke, with a single cry for help, a single burst of prayer, a single true look, a single leap of the little flame inside, topple all our walls and be born again from top to bottom. Everything is possible. Because that Power is the supreme Possibility.
1.10 - The Image of the Oceans and the Rivers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But we need not depend entirely on hypothesis and inference, however strong and entirely convincing. As in the hymn of Vamadeva we have seen that the rivers, ghr.tasya dharah., are there not rivers of clarified butter or rivers of physical water, but psychological symbols, so we find in other hymns the same compelling evidence as to the image of the seven rivers. For this purpose I will examine one more hymn, the first Sukta of the third Mandala sung by the Rishi Vishwamitra to the god Agni; for here he speaks of the seven rivers in language as remarkable and unmistakable as the language of Vamadeva about the rivers of clarity. We shall find precisely the same ideas recurring in quite different contexts in the chants of these two sacred singers.
1.10 - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The history of the Veda is one of the most remarkable & paradoxical phenomena of human experience. In the belief of the ancient Indians the three Vedas, books believed to be inspired directly from the source of all Truth, books at any rate of an incalculable antiquity and of a time-honoured sanctity, were believed to be the repositories of a divine knowledge. The man who was a Veda knower, Vedavid, had access to the deepest knowledge about God and existence. He knew the one thing that was eternally true, the one thing thoroughly worth knowing. The right possession of the ancient hymns was not supposed to be possible by a superficial reading, not supposed to result directly even from a mastery of the scholastic aids to a right understanding,grammar, language, prosody, astronomy, ritual, pronunciation,but depended finally and essentially on explanation by a fit spiritual teacher who understood the inner sense that was couched in the linguistic forms & figures of the Scriptures. The Veda so understood was held to be the fountain, the bedrock, the master-volume of all true Hinduism; that which accepted not the Veda, was and must be instantly departure from the right path, the true truth. Even when the material & ritualistic sense of the Veda had so much dominated & hidden in mens ideas of it its higher parts that to go beyond it seemed imperative, the reverence for this ancient Scripture remained intact. At the time when the Gita in its modern form was composed, we find this double attitude dominant. There is a strong censure of the formalists, the ritualists, who constantly dispute about the Veda and hold it as a creed that there is no other truth and who apply it only for the acquisition of worldly mastery and enjoyments, but at the same time the great store of spiritual truth in the old sacred writings and their high value are never doubted or depreciated. There is in all the Vedas as much utility to the Brahma-knower as to one who would drink there is utility in a well flooded with water on all its sides. Krishna speaking as God Himself declares I alone am He who is to be known by all the Vedas; I am He who made Vedanta and who know the Veda. The sanctity and spiritual value of the Vedas could not receive a more solemn seal of confirmation. It is evident also from this last passage that the more modern distinction which grew upon the Hindu mind with the fading of Vedic knowledge, the distinction by which the old Rigveda and Sama and Yajur are put aside as ritualistic writings, possessing a value only for ceremonial of sacrifice, and all search for spiritual knowledge is confined to the Vedanta, was unrecognised & even unknown to the writer of the Gita. To him the Vedas are writings full of spiritual truth; the language of the line Vedaish cha sarvair aham eva vedyo, the significance of the double emphasis in the etymological sense of knowledge in Vedavid, the knower of the book of knowledge as well as in vedair vedyo are unmistakable. Other means of knowledge even more powerful than study of the Vedas the Gita recognises; but in its epoch the Veda even as apart from the Upanishads still held its place of honour as the repository of the high and divine knowledge; it still bore upon it the triple seal of the Brahmavidya.
When was this traditional honour first lost or at least tarnished and the ancient Scripture relegated to the inferior position it occupies in the thought of Shankaracharya? I presume there can be little doubt that the chief agent in this work of destruction was the power of Buddhism. The preachings of Gautama and his followers worked against Vedic knowledge by a double process. First, by entirely denying the authority of the Veda, laying a violent stress on its ritualistic character and destroying the general practice of formal sacrifice, it brought the study of the Veda into disrepute as a means of attaining the highest good while at the same time it destroyed the necessity of that study for ritualistic purposes which had hitherto kept alive the old Vedic studies; secondly, in a less direct fashion, by substituting for a time at least the vernacular tongues for the old simple Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically impossible. For the Vedas were written in an ancient form of the literary tongue the real secret of which had already been to a great extent lost even to the learned; such knowledge of it as remained, subsisted with difficulty by means of a laborious memorising and a traditional scholarship, conservative indeed but still slowly diminishing and replacing more & more real knowledge by uncertainty, disputed significance and the continuously increasing ingenuities of the ritualist, the grammarian and the sectarian polemical disputant. When after the fall of the Buddhistic Mauryas, feeble successors of the great Asoka, first under Pushyamitra and his son and afterwards under the Guptas, Hinduism revived, a return to the old forms of the creed and the old Vedic scholarship was no longer possible. The old pre-Buddhistic Sanscrit was, to all appearance, a simple, vigorous, living language understood though not spoken by the more intelligent of the common people just as the literary language of Bengal, the language of Bankim Chandra, is understood by every intelligent Bengali, although in speech more contracted forms and a very different vocabulary are in use. But the new Sanscrit of the revival tended to be more & more a learned, scholarly, polished and rhetorical tongue, certainly one of the most smooth, stately & grandiose ever used by human lips, but needing a special & difficult education to understand its grammar, its rhetoric, its rolling compounds and its long flowing sentences. The archaic language of the Vedas ceased to be the common study even of the learned and was only mastered, one is constrained to believe with less & less efficiency, by a small number of scholars. An education in which it took seven years to master the grammar of the language, became inevitably the grave of all true Vedic knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, Sanscrit as the more common & popular means of religious propaganda and by giving them a literary position and repute, it made a general return to the old generality of the Vedic studies practically impossible. For the Vedas were written in an ancient form of the literary tongue the real secret of which had already been to a great extent lost even to the learned; such knowledge of it as remained, subsisted with difficulty by means of a laborious memorising and a traditional scholarship, conservative indeed but still slowly diminishing and replacing more & more real knowledge by uncertainty, disputed significance and the continuously increasing ingenuities of the ritualist, the grammarian and the sectarian polemical disputant. When after the fall of the Buddhistic Mauryas, feeble successors of the great Asoka, first under Pushyamitra and his son and afterwards under the Guptas, Hinduism revived, a return to the old forms of the creed and the old Vedic scholarship was no longer possible. The old pre-Buddhistic Sanscrit was, to all appearance, a simple, vigorous, living language understood though not spoken by the more intelligent of the common people just as the literary language of Bengal, the language of Bankim Chandra, is understood by every intelligent Bengali, although in speech more contracted forms and a very different vocabulary are in use. But the new Sanscrit of the revival tended to be more & more a learned, scholarly, polished and rhetorical tongue, certainly one of the most smooth, stately & grandiose ever used by human lips, but needing a special & difficult education to understand its grammar, its rhetoric, its rolling compounds and its long flowing sentences. The archaic language of the Vedas ceased to be the common study even of the learned and was only mastered, one is constrained to believe with less & less efficiency, by a small number of scholars. An education in which it took seven years to master the grammar of the language, became inevitably the grave of all true Vedic knowledge. Veda ceased to be the pivot of the Hindu religion, and its place was taken by the only religious compositions which were modern enough in language and simple enough in style to be popular, the Puranas. Moreover, the conception of Veda popularised by Buddhism, a Scripture of ritual and of animal sacrifice, persisted in the popular mind even after the decline of Buddhism and the revival of great philosophies ostensibly based on Vedic authority. It was under the dominance of this ritualistic conception that Sayana wrote his great commentary which has ever since been to the Indian Pundit the one decisive authority on the sense of Veda. The four Vedas have definitely taken a subordinate place as karmakanda, books of ritual; and to the Upanishads alone, in spite of occasional appeals to the text of the earlier Scriptures, is reserved that aspect of spiritual knowledge & teaching which alone justifies the application to any human composition of the great name of Veda.
But in spite of this great downfall the ancient tradition, the ancient sanctity survived. The people knew not what Veda might be; but the old idea remained fixed that Veda is always the fountain of Hinduism, the standard of orthodoxy, the repository of a sacred knowledge; not even the loftiest philosopher or the most ritualistic scholar could divest himself entirely of this deeply ingrained & instinctive conception. To complete the degradation of Veda, to consummate the paradox of its history, a new element had to appear, a new form of intelligence undominated by the ancient tradition & the mediaeval method to take possession of Vedic interpretation. European scholarship which regards human civilisation as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander and ending today with Haeckel and Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily primitive culture and primitive culture as necessarily half-savage culture, has turned the light of its Comparative Philology & Comparative Mythology on the Veda. The result we all know. Not only all vestige of sanctity, but all pretension to any kind of spiritual knowledge or experience disappears from the Veda. The old Rishis are revealed to us as a race of ignorant and lusty barbarians who drank & enjoyed and fought, gathered riches & procreated children, sacrificed and praised the Powers of Nature as if they were powerful men & women, and had no higher hope or idea. The only idea they had of religion beyond an occasional sense of sin and a perpetual preoccupation with a ritual barbarously encumbered with a mass of meaningless ceremonial details, was a mythology composed of the phenomena of dawn, night, rain, sunshine and harvest and the facts of astronomy converted into a wildly confused & incoherent mass of allegorical images and personifications. Nor, with the European interpretation, can we be proud of our early forefa thers as poets and singers. The versification of the Vedic hymns is indeed noble and melodious,though the incorrect method of writing them established by the old Indian scholars, often conceals their harmonious construction,but no other praise can be given. The Nibelungenlied, the Icelandic Sagas, the Kalewala, the Homeric poems, were written in the dawn of civilisation by semi-barbarous races, by poets not superior in culture to the Vedic Rishis; yet though their poetical value varies, the nations that possess them, need not be ashamed of their ancient heritage. The same cannot be said of the Vedic poems presented to us by European scholarship. Never surely was there even among savages such a mass of tawdry, glittering, confused & purposeless imagery; never such an inane & useless burden of epithets; never such slipshod & incompetent writing; never such a strange & almost insane incoherence of thought & style; never such a bald poverty of substance. The attempt of patriotic Indian scholars to make something respectable out of the Veda, is futile. If the modern interpretation stands, the Vedas are no doubt of high interest & value to the philologist, the anthropologist & the historian; but poetically and spiritually they are null and worthless. Its reputation for spiritual knowledge & deep religious wealth, is the most imposing & baseless hoax that has ever been worked upon the imagination of a whole people throughout many millenniums.
Is this, then, the last word about the Veda? Or, and this is the idea I write to suggest, is it not rather the culmination of a long increasing & ever progressing error? The theory this book is written to enunciate & support is simply this, that our forefa thers of early Vedantic times understood the Veda, to which they were after all much nearer than ourselves, far better than Sayana, far better than Roth & Max Muller, that they were, to a great extent, in possession of the real truth about the Veda, that that truth was indeed a deep spiritual truth, karmakanda as well as jnanakanda of the Veda contains an ancient knowledge, a profound, complex & well-ordered psychology & philosophy, strange indeed to our modern conception, expressed indeed in language still stranger & remoter from our modern use of language, but not therefore either untrue or unintelligible, and that this knowledge is the real foundation of our later religious developments, & Veda, not only by historical continuity, but in real truth & substance is the parent & bedrock of all later Hinduism, of Vedanta, Sankhya, Nyaya, Yoga, of Vaishnavism & Shaivism&Shaktism, of Tantra&Purana, even, in a remoter fashion, of Buddhism & the later unorthodox religions. From this quarry all have hewn their materials or from this far-off source drawn unknowingly their waters; from some hidden seed in the Veda they have burgeoned into their wealth of branchings & foliage. The ritualism of Sayana is an error based on a false preconception popularised by the Buddhists & streng thened by the writers of the Darshanas,on the theory that the karma of the Veda was only an outward ritual & ceremony; the naturalism of the modern scholars is an error based on a false preconception encouraged by the previous misconceptions of Sayana,on the theory of the Vedas [as] not only an ancient but a primitive document, the production of semi-barbarians. The Vedantic writers of the Upanishads had alone the real key to the secret of the Vedas; not indeed that they possessed the full knowledge of a dialect even then too ancient to be well understood, but they had the knowledge of the Vedic Rishis, possessed their psychology, & many of their general ideas, even many of their particular terms & symbols. That key, less & less available to their successors owing to the difficulty of the knowledge itself & of the language in which it was couched and to the immense growth of outward ritualism, was finally lost to the schools in the great debacle of Vedism induced by the intellectual revolutions of the centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era.
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The modern world cares little for orthodox Hindu opinion, for the opinion of its Pandits or for the ancient authority of its received guides; putting these things aside as the heavy and now useless baggage of the dead past it moves on free and unhampered to its objective, seeking ever fresh vistas of undiscovered knowledge. But a Hindu writer, still holding the faith of his ancestors, owes a certain debt to the immediate past, not so much as to hamper his free enquiry and outlook upon truth, but enough to demand from him a certain respect for whatever in it is really respectworthy and some attempt to satisfy his coreligionists that in opening out a fresh outlook on ancient knowledge he is not uprooting truths that are essential to their common religion. Nothing in those truths compels us to accept the plenary authority of Sayana or the ritualistic interpretation of the Vedas. The hymns of the Veda are, for us, inspired truth and therefore infallible; it follows that the only interpretative authority on them which can claim also to be infallible is one which itself works by the faculty of divine inspiration. The only works for which the ordinary tradition claims this equal authority are the Brahmanas, Aranyakas & Upanishads. Even among these authorities, if we accept them as all and equally inspired and authoritative, and on this point Hindus are not in entire agreement,the Brahmanas which deal with the ceremonial detail of Vedic sacrifice, are authoritative for the ritual only; for the inner sense the Upanishads are the fit authority. Sayana can lay claim to no such sanctity for his opinions. He is no ancient Rishi, nor even an inspired religious teacher, but a grammarian and scholar writing in the twelfth century after Christ several millenniums subsequent to the Rishis to whom Veda was revealed. By his virtues & defects as a scholar his interpretation must be judged. His erudition is vast, his industry colossal; he has so occupied the field that everyone who approaches the Veda must pass to it under his shadow; his commentary is a mine of knowledge about Vedic Sanscrit and full of useful hints for the interpretation of Veda. But there the tale of his merits ends. Other qualities are needed for a successful Vedic commentary which in Sayana are conspicuous by their absence; and his defects as a critic are almost as colossal as his industry and erudition. He is not a disinterested mind seeking impartially the truth of Veda but a professor of the ritualistic school of interpretation intent upon reading the traditional ceremonial sense into the sacred hymns; even so he is totally wanting in consistency, coherence and settled method. Not only is he frequently uncertain of himself, halts and qualifies his interpretation with an alternative or not having the full courage of his ritualistic rendering introduces it as a mere possibility,these would be meritorious failings,but he wavers in a much more extraordinary fashion, forcing the ritualistic sense of a word or passage where it cannot possibly hold, abandoning it unaccountably where it can well be sustained. The Vedas are masterpieces of flawless literary style and logical connection. But Sayana, like many great scholars, is guiltless of literary taste and has not the least sense of what is or is not possible to a good writer. His interpretation of any given term is seldom consistent even in similar passages of different hymns, but he will go yet farther and give two entirely different renderings to the same word though occurring in successive riks & in an obviously connected strain of thought. The rhythm and balance of a sentence is nothing to him, he will destroy it ruthlessly in order to get over a difficulty of interpretation; he will disturb the arrangement of a sentence sometimes in the most impossible manner, connecting absolutely disconnected words, breaking up inseparable connections, inserting a second and alien sentence in between the head & tail of the first, and creating a barbarous complexity & confusion where the symbolic movement of the Rishis, unequalled in its golden ease, lucidity and straightforwardness, demands an equal lucidity & straightforwardness in the commentator. A certain rough coherence of thought he attempts to keep, but his rendering makes oftenest a clumsy sense & not unoften no ascertainable sense at all; while he has no scruple in breaking up the coherence entirely in favour of his ritualism. These are, after all, faults common in a scholastic mentality, but even were they less prominent & persistent in him than I have found them to be, they liberate us from all necessity for an exaggerated deference to his authority as an interpreter. Nor, indeed, were Sayana an ideal commentator, could he possibly be relied upon to give us the true sense of Veda; for the language of these hymns, whatever the exact date of their Rishis, goes back to an immense antiquity and long before Sayana the right sense of many Vedic words and the right clue to many Vedic allusions and symbols were lost to the scholars of India. Much indeed survived in tradition, but more had been lost or disfigured, and the two master clues, intellectual & spiritual, on which we can yet rely for the recovery of these losses, a sound philology and the renewal in ourselves of the experiences which form the subject of the Vedic hymns, were the one entirely wanting, the other grown more & more inaccessible with time not only to the Pandit but to the philosopher. Even in our days the sound philology is yet wanting, though the seeds have been sown & even the first beginnings made; nor are the Vedic experiences any longer pursued in their entirety by the Indian Yogins who have learned to follow in this Kali Yuga less difficult paths and more modern systems.
But the ritualistic interpretation of the Rigveda does not stand on the authority of Sayana alone. It is justified by Shankaracharyas rigid division of karmakanda and jnanakanda and by a long tradition dating back to the propaganda of Buddha which found in the Vedic hymns a great system of ceremonial or effective sacrifice and little or nothing more. Even the Brahmanas in their great mass & minuteness seem to bear unwavering testimony to the pure ritualism of the Veda. But the Brahmanas are in their nature rubrics of directions to the priests for the right performance of the outward Vedic sacrifice,that system of symbolic & effective offerings to the gods of Soma-wine, clarified butter or consecrated animals in which the complex religion of the Veda embodied itself for material worship,rubrics accompanied by speculative explanations of old ill-understood details & the popular myths & traditions that had sprung up from obscure allusions in the hymns. Whatever we may think of the Brahmanas, they merely affirm the side of outward ritualism which had grown in a huge & cumbrous mass round the first simple rites of the Vedic Rishis; they do not exclude the existence of deeper meanings & higher purposes in the ancient Scripture. Not only so, but they practically affirm them by including in the Aranyakas compositions of a wholly different spirit & purpose, the Upanishads, compositions professedly intended to bring out the spiritual gist and drift of the earlier Veda. It is clear therefore that to the knowledge or belief of the men of those times the Vedas had a double aspect, an aspect of outward and effective ritual, believed also to be symbolical,for the Brahmanas are continually striving to find a mystic symbolism in the most obvious details of the sacrifice, and an aspect of highest & divine truth hidden behind these symbols. The Upanishads themselves have always been known as Vedanta. This word is nowadays often used & spoken of as if it meant the end of Veda, in the sense that here historically the religious development commenced in the Rigveda culminated; but obviously it means the culmination of Veda in a very different sense, the ultimate and highest knowledge & fulfilment towards which the practices & strivings of the Vedic Rishis mounted, extricated from the voluminous mass of the Vedic poems and presented according to the inner realisation of great Rishis like Yajnavalkya & Janaka in a more modern style and language. It is used much in the sense in which Madhuchchhandas, son of Viswamitra, says of Indra, Ath te antamnm vidyma sumatnm, Then may we know something of thy ultimate right thinkings, meaning obviously not the latest, but the supreme truths, the ultimate realisations. Undoubtedly, this was what the authors of the Upanishads themselves saw in their work, statements of supreme truth of Veda, truth therefore contained in the ancient mantras. In this belief they appeal always to Vedic authority and quote the language of Veda either to justify their own statements of thought or to express that thought itself in the old solemn and sacred language. And with regard to this there are spoken these Riks.
In what light did these ancient thinkers understand the Vedic gods? As material Nature Powers called only to give worldly wealth to their worshippers? Certainly, the Vedic gods are in the Vedanta also accredited with material functions. In the Kena Upanishad Agnis power & glory is to burn, Vayus to seize & bear away. But these are not their only functions. In the same Upanishad, in the same apologue, told as a Vedantic parable, Indra, Agni & Vayu, especially Indra, are declared to be the greatest of the gods because they came nearest into contact with the Brahman. Indra, although unable to recognise the Brahman directly, learned of his identity from Uma daughter of the snowy mountains. Certainly, the sense of the parable is not that Dawn told the Sky who Brahman was or that material Sky, Fire & Wind are best able to come into contact with the Supreme Existence. It is clear & it is recognised by all the commentators, that in the Upanishads the gods are masters not only of material functions in the outer physical world but also of mental, vital and physical functions in the intelligent living creature. This will be directly evident from the passage describing the creation of the gods by the One & Supreme Being in the Aitareya Upanishad & the subsequent movement by which they enter in the body of man and take up the control of his activities. In the same Upanishad it is even hinted that Indra is in his secret being the Eternal Lord himself, for Idandra is his secret name; nor should we forget that this piece of mysticism is founded on the hymns of the Veda itself which speak of the secret names of the gods. Shankaracharya recognised this truth so perfectly that he uses the gods and the senses as equivalent terms in his great commentary. Finally in the Isha Upanishad,itself a part of the White Yajur Veda and a work, as I have shown elsewhere, full of the most lofty & deep Vedantic truth, in which the eternal problems of human existence are briefly proposed and masterfully solved,we find Surya and Agni prayed to & invoked with as much solemnity & reverence as in the Rigveda and indeed in language borrowed from the Rigveda, not as the material Sun and material Fire, but as the master of divine God-revealing knowledge & the master of divine purifying force of knowledge, and not to drive away the terrors of night from a trembling savage nor to burn the offered cake & the dripping ghee in a barbarian ritual, but to reveal the ultimate truth to the eyes of the Seer and to raise the immortal part in us that lives before & after the body is ashes to the supreme felicity of the perfected & sinless soul. Even subsequently we have seen that the Gita speaks of the Vedas as having the supreme for their subject of knowledge, and if later thinkers put it aside as karmakanda, yet they too, though drawing chiefly on the Upanishads, appealed occasionally to the texts of the hymns as authorities for the Brahmavidya. This could not have been if they were merely a ritual hymnology. We see therefore that the real Hindu tradition contains nothing excluding the interpretation which I put upon the Rigveda. On one side the current notion, caused by the immense overgrowth of ritualism in the millennium previous to the Christian era and the violence of the subsequent revolt against it, has been fixed in our minds by Buddhistic ideas as a result of the most formidable & damaging attack which the ancient Vedic religion had ever to endure. On the other side, the Vedantic sense of Veda is supported by the highest authorities we have, the Gita & the Upanishads, & evidenced even by the tradition that seems to deny or at least belittle it. True orthodoxy therefore demands not that we should regard the Veda as a ritualist hymn book, but that we should seek in it for the substance or at least the foundation of that sublime Brahmavidya which is formally placed before us in the Upanishads, regarding it as the revelation of the deepest truth of the world & man revealed to illuminated Seers by the Eternal Ruler of the Universe.
Modern thought & scholarship stands on a different foundation. It proceeds by inference, imagination and conjecture to novel theories of old subjects and regards itself as rational, not traditional. It professes to rebuild lost worlds out of their disjected fragments. By reason, then, and without regard to ancient authority the modern account of the Veda should be judged. The European scholars suppose that the mysticism of the Upanishads was neither founded upon nor, in the main, developed from the substance of the Vedas, but came into being as part of a great movement away from the naturalistic materialism of the early half-savage hymns. Unable to accept a barbarous mummery of ritual and incantation as the highest truth & highest good, yet compelled by religious tradition to regard the ancient hymns as sacred, the early thinkers, it is thought, began to seek an escape from this impasse by reading mystic & esoteric meanings into the simple text of the sacrificial bards; so by speculations sometimes entirely sublime, sometimes grievously silly & childish, they developed Vedanta. This theory, simple, trenchant and attractive, supported to the European mind by parallels from the history of Western religions, is neither so convincing nor, on a broad survey of the facts, so conclusive as it at first appears. It is certainly inconsistent with what the old Vedantic thinkers themselves knew and thought about the tradition of the Veda. From the Brahmanas as well as from the Upanishads it is evident that the Veda came down to the men of those days in a double aspect, as the heart of a great body of effective ritual, but also as the repository of a deep and sacred knowledge, Veda and not merely worship. This idea of a philosophic or theosophic purport in the hymns was not created by the early Hindu mystics, it was inherited by them. Their attitude to the ritual even when it was performed mechanically without the possession of this knowledge was far from hostile; but as ritual, they held it to be inferior in force and value, avaram karma, a lower kind of works and not the highest good; only when performed with possession of the knowledge could it lead to its ultimate results, to Vedanta. By that, says the Chhandogya Upanishad, both perform karma, both he who knows this so and he who knows not. Yet the Ignorance and the Knowledge are different things and only what one does with the knowledge,with faith, with the Upanishad,that has the greater potency. And in the closing section of its second chapter, a passage which sounds merely like ritualistic jargon when one has not the secret of Vedic symbolism but when that secret has once been revealed to us becomes full of meaning and interest, the Upanishad starts by saying The Brahmavadins say, The morning offering to the Vasus, the afternoon offering to the Rudras and the evening offering to the Adityas and all the gods,where then is the world of the Yajamana? (that is to say, what is the spiritual efficacy beyond this material life of the three different sacrifices & why, to what purpose, is the first offered to the Vasus, the second to the Rudras, the third to the Adityas?) He who knows this not, how should he perform (effectively) ,therefore knowing let him perform. There was at any rate the tradition that these things, the sacrifice, the god of the sacrifice, the world or future state of the sacrificer had a deep significance and were not mere ritual arranged superstitiously for material ends. But this deeper significance, this inner Vedic knowledge was difficult and esoteric, not known easily in its profundity and subtlety even by the majority of the Brahmavadins themselves; hence the searching, the mutual questionings, the record of famous discussions that occupy so much space in the Upanishadsdiscussions which, we shall see, are not intellectual debates but comparisons of illuminated knowledge & spiritual experience.
If this traditionlet us call it mystic or esoteric for want of a less abused wordwas already formed at the time of the Brahmanas and Upanishads, when and how did it originally arise? Two possibilities present themselves. The tradition may have grown up gradually in the period between the Vedic hymns and the exegetical writings or else the esoteric sense may have already existed in the Veda itself and descended in a stream of tradition to the later mystics, developing, modifying itself, substituting new terms for oldas is the way of traditions. The former is, practically, the European theory.We are told that this spiritual revolution, this movement away from ritual Nature-worship to Brahmavada, begun in the seed in the later Vedic hymns, is found in a more developed state in the Upanishads & culminated in Buddha. In these writings and in the Brahmanas some record can be found of the speculations by which the development was managed. If it prove to be so, if these ancient writings are really the result of progressive intellectual speculation departing from crude & imperfect beginnings of philosophic thought, the European theory justifies itself to the reason and can no longer easily be disputed. But is this the true character of the Upanishads? It seems to me that in most of their dealings with our religions and our philosophical literature European scholars have erred by imposing their own familiar ideas and the limits of their own mentality on the history of an alien mentality and an alien development. Nowhere has this error been more evident than in the failure to realise the true nature of the Upanishads. In India we have never developed, but only affirmed thought by philosophical speculation, because we have never attached to the mere intellectual idea the amazingly exaggerated value which Europe has attached to it, but regarded it only as a test of the logical value to be attached to particular intellectual statements of truth. That is not truth to us which is merely well & justly thought out & can be justified by ratiocinative argument; only that is truth which has been lived & seen in the inner experience. We meditate not to get ideas, but in order to experience, to realise. When we speak of the Jnani, the knower, we do not mean a competent and logical thinker full of wise or of brilliant ideas, but a soul which has seen and lived & spoken in himself with the living truth. Ratiocination is freely used by the later philosophers, but only for the justification against opponents of the ideas already formed by their own meditation or the meditation of others, Rishis, gurus, ancient Vedantins; it is not itself a sufficient means towards the discovery of truth, but at best a help. The ideas of our great thinkers are not mere intellectual statements or even happy or great intuitions; they are based upon spiritual experiences formalised by the intellect into a philosophy. Shankaras passionate advocacy of the idea of Maya as an explanation of life was not merely the ardour of a great metaphysician enamoured of a beautiful idea or a perfect theory of life, but the passion of a man with a deep & vast spiritual experience which he believed to be the sole means of human salvation. Therefore philosophy in India, instead of tending as in Europe to ignore or combat religion, has always been itself deeply religious. In Europe Buddha and Shankara would have become the heads of metaphysical schools & ranked with Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche1 as strong intellectual influences; in India they became, inevitably, the founders of great religious sects, immense moral & spiritual forces;inevitably because Europe has made thought its highest & noblest aim, while India seeks not after thought but soul-vision and inner experience and even in the realm of ideas believes that they can & ought to be seen & lived inwardly rather than merely thought and allowed indirectly to influence outward action. This has been the mentality of our race for ages.Was the mentality of our Vedic forefa thers entirely different from our own? Was it, as Western scholars seem to insist, a European mentality, the mentality of incursive Western savages, (it is Sergis estimate of the Aryans), changed afterwards by the contact with the cultured & reflective Dravidians into something new and strange, rationality changing to mysticism, materialism to a metaphysical spirituality? If so, the change had already been effected when the Upanishads were written. We speak of the discussions in the Upanishads; but in all truth the twelve Upanishads contain not a single genuine discussion. Only once in that not inconsiderable mass of literature, is there something of the nature of logical argument brought to the support of a philosophical truth. The nature of debate or logical reasoning is absent from the mentality of the Upanishadic thinkers. The grand question they always asked each other was not What hast thou thought out in this matter? or What are thy reasonings & conclusions? but What dost thou know? What hast thou seen in thyself? The Vedantic like the Vedic Rishi is a drashta & srota, not a manota, a kavi, not a manishi. There is question, there is answer; but solely for the comparison of inner knowledge & experience; never for ratiocinative argument, for disputation, for the battles of the logician. Always, knowledge, spiritual vision, experience are what is demanded; and often a questioner is turned back because he is not yet prepared in soul to realise the knowledge of the master. For all knowledge is within us and needs only to be awakened by the fit touch which opens the eyes of the soul or by the powerful revealing word.We find throughout the Vedic era always the same method, always the same theory of knowledge; they persist indeed in India to the present day and later habits of metaphysical debate unknown to the Vedic Brahmavadins have never been able to dethrone them from their primaeval supremacy. Let a man present never so finely reasoned a system of metaphysical philosophy, few will turn to hear, none leave his labour to receive, but let a man say as in the old Vedantic times I have experienced, my soul has seen, & hundreds in India will yet leave all to share in this new light of the eternal Truth.
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European scholars believe that they have fixed finally the meaning of Veda. Using as their tools the Sciences of Comparative Philology & Comparative Mythology, itself a part of the strangely termed Science of Comparative Religion, they have excavated for us out of the ancient Veda a buried world, a forgotten civilisation, lost names of kings and nations, wars & battles, institutions, social habits & cultural ideas which the men of Vedantic times & their forerunners never dreamed were lying concealed in the revered & sacred words used daily by them in their worship and the fount and authority for their richest spiritual experiences deepest illuminated musings. The picture these discoveries constitute is a remarkable composition, imposing in its mass, brilliant and attractive in its details. The one lingering objection to them is a possible doubt of the truth of these discoveries, the soundness of the methods used to arrive at them. Are the conclusions of Vedic scholarship so undoubtedly true or so finally authoritative as to preclude a totally different hypothesis even though it may lead possibly to an interpretation which will wash out every colour & negative every detail of this great recovery? We must determine, first, whether the foundations of the European theory of Veda are solid & certain fact or whether it has been reared upon a basis of doubtful inference and conjecture. If the former, the question of the Veda is closed, its problem solved; if the latter, the European results may even then be true, but equally they may be false and replaceable by a more acceptable theory and riper conclusions.
We ought at least to free our minds of one misconception which has a very strong hold of the average Indian mind and blocks up the way for free investigation & the formation of a strong & original school of Indian scholars better circumstanced than the Europeans for determining the truth about our past and divining its difficult secrets. The triumphant & rapid march of the physical sciences in Europe has so mastered our intellects and dazzled our eyes, that we are apt to extend the unquestioned finality which we are accustomed to attach to the discoveries & theories of modern Science, to all the results of European research & intellectual activity. Even in Europe itself, we should remember, there is no such implicit acceptance. The theories of today are there continually being combated and overthrown by the theories of tomorrow. Outside the range of the physical sciences & even in some portions of that splendid domain the whole of European knowledge is felt more & more to be a mass of uncertain results ephemeral in their superstructure, shifting in their very foundations. For the Europeans have that valuable gift of intellectual restlessness which, while it often stands in the way of mans holding on to abiding truth, helps him to emerge swiftly out of momentarily triumphant error. In India on the other hand we have fallen during the last few centuries into a fixed habit of unquestioning deference to authority. We used to hold it, & some still hold it almost an impiety to question Shankaras interpretation of the Upanishads, or Sayanas interpretation of the Veda, and now that we are being torn out of this bondage, we fall into yet more absurd error by according, if not an equal reverence, yet an almost equal sense of finality to the opinions of Roth & Max Muller. We are ready to accept all European theories, the theory of an Aryan colonisation of a Dravidian India, the theory of the Nature-worship and henotheism of the Vedic Rishis, the theory of the Upanishads as a speculative revolt against Vedic materialism & ritualism, as if these hazardous speculations were on a par in authority & certainty with the law of gravitation and the theory of evolution. We are most of us unaware that in Europe it is disputed and very reasonably disputed whether, for instance, any such entity as an Aryan race ever existed. The travail of dispute & uncertainty in which the questions of Vedic scholarship & ethnology are enveloped is hidden from us; only the over-confident statement of doubtful discoveries and ephemeral theories reaches our knowledge.
--
Nor does the philological reasoning on which the astronomical interpretation of Vedic hymns is supported, inspire, when examined, or deserve any more certain confidence. To identify the Aswins with the two sons of the Greek Dyaus, Kastor and Polydeuces, and again these two pairs conjecturally with two stars of the constellation Gemini is easy & carries with it a great air of likelihood; but an air of likelihood is not proof. We need more for anything like rational conviction or certainty. In the Veda there are a certain number of hymns to the Aswins & a fair number also of passages in which they are described and invoked; if indeed the purport of their worship is astronomical and the sense of their personality in the Veda merely a fiction about the stars and if they really bore that aspect to the Vedic Rishis, all these passages, & all their epithets, actions, functions & the prayers offered to them ought to be entirely explicable on that theory; or if other ideas have crept in, we must be shown what are these ideas, how they have crept in, in what way these are in the minds of the ancient Rishis superimposed on the original astronomical conception and reconciled with it. Then only can we accept it as a proved probability, if not a proved certainty, that the Aswins are the constellation Gemini and, in that known character, worshipped in the sacred chants. For we must remember that the Aswins might easily have been the constellation Gemini in an original creed & yet be worshipped in a quite different character at the time of the Vedic Rishis. In the Vedic hymns as they are at present rendered whether by Sayana or by Roth, there is no clear statement of this character of the Aswins; the whole theory rests on metaphor and parable, and it is easy to see how dangerous, how open to the flights of mere ingenuity is the system of interpretation by metaphor. There ought to be at least a kernel of direct statement in the loose & uncertain mass of metaphor. We are told that the Aswins are lords of light, ubhaspat, and certainly the starry Twins are luminous; they are rudravartan, which interpreted of the red path, may very well apply to stars moving through heaven; they are somewhere described as vrisharath, bull-charioted, & Gemini is next in order & vicinity to Taurus, the constellation of the bull; Sry, daughter of the Sun, mounts on their chariot & Sry is very possibly such & such a star whose motion may be described by this figurative ascension; the Aswins get honey from the bees and there is a constellation near Gemini called by the Greeks the Bees whose light falls on the Twins. All this is brilliant, attractive, captivating; it does immense credit to the ingenuity of the human intellect. But if we examine sceptically the proofs that are offered us, we find ourselves face to face with amass of ingenious & hazardous guesses; it is not explained why the Aswins particularly more than other gods, should have this distinctive epithet of ubhaspat, as peculiar to them in the Veda as is sahasaspati to Agni; rudra in the sense of red is a novel & conjectural significance; vrisharatha interpreted consistently as bull-charioted in connection with Taurus, would make hopeless ravages in the sense of other passages of the Veda; the identification of Sry, daughter of the Sun is unproved, it is an airy conjecture depending on the proof of the identity of the Aswins not itself proving it; madhu in the passage about the Bees need not mean honey and much more probably means the honeyed wine of Soma, the rendering bees is one of the novel, conjectural & highly doubtful suggestions of European scholarship. All the other proofs that are heaped on us are of a like nature & brilliantly flimsy ingenuity, & we end our sceptical scrutiny admiring, but still sceptical. We feel after all that an accumulation of conjectures does not constitute proof and that a single clear & direct substantial statement in one sense or the other would outweigh all these ingenious inferences, these brilliant imaginings. To begin with a hypothesis is always permissible,it is the usual mode of scientific discovery; but a hypothesis must be supported by facts. To support it by a mass of other hypotheses is to abuse & exceed the permissibility of conjecture in scientific research.
I have thus dwelt on the fragility of the European theory in this introduction because I wish to avoid in the body of the volume the burden of adverse discussion with other theories & rival interpretations. I propose to myself an entirely positive method,the development of a constructive rival hypothesis, not the disproof of those which hold the field. But, since they do hold the field, I am bound to specify before starting those general deficiencies in them which disqualify them at least from prohibiting fresh discussion and shutting out an entirely new point of departure. Possibly Sayana is right and the Vedas are only the hymn-book of a barbarous & meaningless mythological ritual. Possibly, the European theory is more correct and the Vedic religion & myth was of the character of a materialistic Nature worship & the metaphorical, poetical & wholly fanciful personification of heavenly bodies & forces of physical Nature. But neither of these theories is so demonstrably right, that other hypotheses are debarred from appearing and demanding examination. Such a new hypothesis I wish to advance in the present volume. The gods of the Veda are in my view Nature Powers, but Powers at once of moral & of physical Nature, not of physical Nature only; moreover their moral aspect is the substantial part of their physiognomy, the physical though held to be perfectly real & effective, is put forward mainly as a veil, dress or physical type of their psychological being. The ritual of the Veda is a symbolic ritual supposed by those who used it to be by virtue of its symbolism practically effective of both inner & outer results in life & the world. The hymnology of the Veda rests on the ancient theory that speech is in itself both morally & physically creative & effective, the secret executive agent of the divine powers in manifesting & compelling mental & material phenomena. The substance of the Vedic hymns is the record of certain psychological experiences which are the natural results, still attainable & repeatable in our own experience, of an ancient type of Yoga practised certainly in India, practised probably in ancient Greece, Asia Minor & Egypt in prehistoric times. Finally, the language of the Vedas is an ambiguous tongue, with an ambiguity possible only to the looser fluidity belonging to the youth of human speech & deliberately used to veil the deeper psychological meaning of the Riks. I hold that it was the traditional knowledge of this deep religious & psychological character of the Vedas which justified in the eyes of the ancient Indians the high sanctity attached to them & the fixed idea that these were the repositories of an august, divine & hardly attainable truth.
1.11 - BOOK THE ELEVENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
For sacred rites of mild religion made,
Are flung promiscuous at the poet's head.
--
And, from those sacred lips, whose thrilling sound
Fierce tygers, and insensate rocks cou'd wound,
--
Attempts the head, and sacred locks embru'd
With clotted gore, and still fresh-dropping blood.
--
The sea-Gods he with sacred rites adores,
Then a libation on the ocean pours;
--
And oft before the sacred altars came,
To pray for him, who was an empty name.
--
Disturb with nightly noise the sacred peace;
Nor beast of Nature, nor the tame are nigh,
--
To whom the Goddess thus: O sacred rest,
Sweet pleasing sleep, of all the Pow'rs the best!
1.11 - The Change of Power, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
This subconscious resistance is very difficult to describe. It has a thousand faces, as many as there are individuals, and for each the color is different, the syndrome, so to say, is different. Each one of us has his particular drama, with its staging, preferred situations, puppetry of Grand Guignol. But it is one and the same puppet show under all colors, one and the same story behind all the words and the same resistance everywhere. It is the resistance, the point that says no. It does not reveal itself immediately; it is elusive, cunning. In fact, we really believe it loves drama. It is its raison d'tre and the salt of its life, and, if it no longer had any drama to grind out, it would make up some it is the dramatist of all excellence. It is perhaps even the great dramatist of all this chaotic and painful life that we see. But each of us harbors his little man of the big man of sorrow,27 as Sri Aurobindo used to call him. The drama of the world will stop when we begin to put a stop to our own little drama. But the clever puppet slips between our fingers. Driven off the mental stage where it ran its explanatory and questioning machinery it is a tireless questioner; it asks questions for the pleasure of asking, and if all its questions were answered, it would come up with more, for it is also a great doubter ousted from the mind, it sinks down one degree further to play its number on the vital stage. There it is on more solid ground. (The further it descends, the stronger it becomes, and all the way down at the bottom, it is the very image of strength, the knot par excellence, the irreducible point, the absolute NO.) We are all more or less familiar with its tricks on the vital stage: its great game of passion and desire, sympathy and antipathy, hate and love but in fact they are the two faces of the same food, and it savors evil as much as good, suffering as much as joy; it is just a way of swallowing in one direction or another. Even charity and philanthropy serves its purpose. It grows fatter either way. The more virtuous it is, the harder it is. Idealism and patriotism, sacred or less sacred causes are its clever victuals. It has mastered the art of dressing itself in superb motives; it can be found at the parties of charity volunteers and Peace conferences but of course Peace never comes, for if by some miracle Peace ever came, or the eradication of all poverty on earth, what would it do for a living? Driven off that stage, it sinks one degree lower and disappears into the dungeons of the subconscious. Not for long. There it begins to become clear, so to say, and show its real face. It has grown very small, very hard, a sort of grinning caricature: the grisly Elf, as Sri Aurobindo calls it.
Man] harbours within him a grisly Elf
1.11 - The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
in their houses and in the sacred fig-tree. Under the tree lies a
large flat stone, which serves as a sacrificial table. On it the
1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But that is the end of a long and difficult journey, and the Master of works does not wait till then to meet the seeker on the path of Yoga and put his secret or half-shown Hand upon him and upon his inner life and actions. Already he was there in the world as the Originator and Receiver of works behind the dense veils of the Inconscient, disguised in force of Life, visible to the Mind through symbol godheads and figures. It may well be in these disguises that he first meets the soul destined to the way of the integral Yoga. Or even, wearing still vaguer masks, he may be conceived by us as an Ideal or mentalised as an abstract Power of Love, Good, Beauty or Knowledge; or, as we turn our feet towards the Way, he may come to us veiled as the call of Humanity or a Will in things that drives towards the deliverance of the world from the grasp of Darkness and Falsehood and Death and Suffering-the great quaternary of the Ignorance. Then, after we have entered the path, he envelops us with his wide and mighty liberating Impersonality or moves near to us with the face and form of a personal Godhead. In and around us we feel a Power that upholds and protects and cherishes; we hear a Voice that guides; a conscious Will greater than ourselves rules us; an imperative Force moves our thought and actions and our very body; an ever-widening Consciousness assimilates ours, a living Light of Knowledge lights all within, or a Beatitude invades us; a Mightiness presses from above, concrete, massive and overpowering, and penetrates and pours itself into the very stuff of our nature; a Peace sits there, a Light, a Bliss, a Strength, a Greatness. Or there are relations, personal, intimate as life itself, sweet as love, encompassing like the sky, deep like deep waters. A Friend walks at our side; a Lover is with us in our heart's secrecy; a Master of the Work and the Ordeal points our way; a Creator of things uses us as his instrument; we are in the arms of the eternal Mother All these more seizable aspects in which the Ineffable meets us are truths and not mere helpful symbols or useful imaginations; but as we progress, their first imperfect formulations in our experience yield to a larger vision of the one Truth that is behind them. At each step their mere mental masks are shed and they acquire a larger, a profounder, a more intimate significance. At last on the supramental borders all these Godheads combine their sacred forms and, without at all ceasing to be, coalesce together. On this path the Divine Aspects have not revealed themselves only in order to be cast away, they are not temporary spiritual conveniences or compromises with an illusory Consciousness or dream-figures mysteriously cast upon us by the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute; on the contrary, their power increases and their absoluteness reveals itself as they draw near to the Truth from which they issue.
For that now superconscient Transcendence is a Power as well as an Existence. The supramental Transcendence is not a vacant Wonder, but an inexpressible which contains for ever all essential things that have issued from it; it holds them there in their supreme everlasting reality and their own characteristic absolutes. The diminution, division, degradation that create here the sense of an unsatisfactory puzzle, a mystery of Maya, themselves diminish and fall from us in, our ascension, and the Divine Powers assume their real forms and appear more and more as the terms of a Truth in process of realisation here. A soul of the Divine is here slowly awaking out of its involution and concealment in the material Inconscience. The Master of our works is not a Master of illusions, but a supreme Reality who is working out his self-expressive realities delivered slowly from the cocoons of the Ignorance in which for the purposes of an evolutionary manifestation they were allowed for a while to slumber. For the supramental Transcendence is not a thing absolutely apart and unconnected with our present existence. It is a greater Light out of which all this has come for the adventure of the Soul lapsing into the Inconscience and emerging out of it, and, while that adventure proceeds, it waits superconstient above our minds till it can become conscious in us. Hereafter it will unveil itself and by the unveiling reveal to us all the significance of our own being and our works; for it will disclose the Divine whose fuller manifestation in the world will release and accomplish that covert significance.
1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Another day I learnt of a good man named Dina Mukherji, living at Baghbazar near the bridge. He was a devotee. I asked Mathur to take me there. Finding me insistent, he took me to Dina's house in a carriage. It was a small place. The arrival of a rich man in a big carriage embarrassed the inmates. We too were embarrassed. That day Dina's son was being invested with the sacred thread. The house was crowded, and there was hardly any place for Dina to receive us. We were about to enter a side room, when someone cried out: 'Please don't go into that room. There are ladies there.' It was really a distressing situation. Returning, Mathur Babu said, 'Father, I shall never listen to you again.' I laughed.
"Oh, what a state I passed through! Once Kumar Singh gave a feast to the sadhus and invited me too. I found a great many holy men assembled there. When I sat down for the meal, several sadhus asked me about myself. At once I felt like leaving them and sitting alone. I wondered why they should bother about all that. The sadhus took their seats. I began to eat before they had started. I heard several of them remark, 'Oh!
--
"I loved to hear the reading of sacred books such as the Ramayana and Bhagavata. If the readers had any affectations, I could easily imitate them and would entertain others with my mimicry.
"I understood the behaviour of women very well and imitated their words and intonations. I could easily recognize immoral women. Immoral widows part their hair in the middle and perform their toilet with great care. They have very little modesty. The way they sit is so different! But let's not talk of worldly things any more."
--
MASTER (to the devotees): "You see, by leading a householder's life a man needlessly dissipates his mental powers. The loss he thus incurs can be made up if he takes to monastic life. The first birth is a gift of the father; then comes the second birth, when one is invested with the sacred thread. There is still another birth at the time of being initiated into monastic life. The two obstacles to spiritual life are 'woman' and 'gold'.
Attachment to 'woman' diverts one from the way leading to God. Man doesn't know what it is that causes his downfall. Once, while going to the Fort, I couldn't see at all that I was driving down a sloping road; but when the carriage went inside the Fort, I realized how far down I had come. Alas! Women keep men deluded. Captain says, 'My wife is full of wisdom.' The man possessed by a ghost does not realize it. He says, 'Why, I am all right!' "
1.11 - Woolly Pomposities of the Pious Teacher, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Observe, I pray, the paramount importance of memory. From one point of view (bless your heart!) you are nothing at all but a bundle of memories. When you say "this is happening now," you are a falsifier of God's sacred truth! When I say "I see a horse", the truth is that "I record in those terms my private hieroglyphic interpretation of the unknown and unknowable phenomenon (or 'point-event') which has more or less recently taken place at the other end of my system of receiving impressions."
(Is this clear? I do hope so; if not, make me go on at it until it is.)
1.12 - BOOK THE TWELFTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
On the side-altar, cens'd with sacred smoke,
And bright with flaming fires; The Gods, he cry'd,
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
first or supreme Breath; elsewhere in the sacred writings it is spoken of as the chief Breath or the Breath of the mouth, mukhya,
asanya; it is that which carries in it the Word, the creative expression. In the body of man there are said to be five workings of
1.12 - Independence, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The power of words. There are certain sacred words called Mantras, which have power, when repeated under proper conditions, produce these extraordinary powers. We are living in the midst of such a mass of miracles, day and night, that we do not think anything of them. There is no limit to man's power, the power of words and the power of mind.
Mortification. You find that in every religion mortification and asceticisms have been practised. In these religious conceptions the Hindus always go to the extremes. You will find men with their hands up all their lives, until their hands wither and die. Men keep standing, day and night, until their feet swell, and if they live, the legs become so stiff in this position that they can no more bend them, but have to stand all their lives. I once saw a man who had kept his hands raised in this way, and I asked him how it felt when he did it first. He said it was awful torture. It was such torture that he had to go to a river and put himself in water, and that allayed the pain for a little while. After a month he did not suffer much. Through such practices powers (Siddhis) can be attained.
1.12 - Sleep and Dreams, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo and of his help given through an intimate and true relation, even though veiled to the outer consciousness. This is a precious experience worth being kept in the most sacred corner of the remembrance.
The six couches: the seats, basis of the powers of creation (6).
1.12 - THE FESTIVAL AT PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Similarly, the sky looks blue from a distance. But look at the atmosphere near you; it has no colour. The nearer you come to God, the more you will realize that He has neither name nor form. If you move away from the Divine Mother, you will find Her blue, like the grass-flower. Is Syama male or female? A man once saw the image of the Divine Mother wearing a sacred thread. He said to the worshipper: 'What? You have put the sacred thread on the Mother's neck!' The worshipper said: 'Brother, I see that you have truly known the Mother. But I have not yet been able to find out whether She is male or female; that is why I have put the sacred thread on Her image.'
"That which is Syama is also Brahman. That which has form, again, is without form.
1.12 - The Sacred Marriage, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
object:1.12 - The sacred Marriage
author class:James George Frazer
--
XII. The sacred Marriage
1. Diana as a Goddess of Fertility
--
improbability in the supposition that the sacred grove at Nemi may
have been the scene of an annual ceremony of this sort. Direct
--
were commonly in groves, indeed every grove was sacred to her, and
she is often associated with the forest god Silvanus in dedications.
--
prayers of women in travail. In her sacred grove at Nemi, as we have
seen, she was especially worshipped as a goddess of childbirth, who
--
if the sacred nuptials were celebrated every year, the parts of the
divine bride and bridegroom being played either by their images or
--
Brimo has brought forth a sacred boy Brimos," by which he meant,
"The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty." The corn-mother in
--
were enacted in the sacred drama. This revelation of the reaped corn
appears to have been the crowning act of the mysteries. Thus through
--
to the sacred grove at Cura. There they ate and drank merrily all
night, and next morning they cut a square piece of turf in the grove
--
then the men repair to the sacred grove (_sarna_), while the women
assemble at the house of the village priest. After sacrificing some
--
to become fruitful." Thus the sacred Marriage of the Sun and Earth,
personated by the priest and his wife, is celebrated as a charm to
--
the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees. If the girls
do not repair to the huts of their own accord in sufficient numbers,
1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The planes of consciousness are characterized not only by different intensities of luminous vibrations, but by different sound-vibrations or rhythms one can hear when one has that "ear of ears" the Veda speaks of. Sounds or images, lights or forces or beings are various aspects of the same Existence manifesting differently and in varying intensities according to the plane. The farther one descends the ladder of consciousness, the more fragmented become the sound-vibrations, as well as the light, the beings, and the forces. On the vital plane, for example, one can hear the discordant and jarring vibrations of life, like certain types of music issuing from this plane or certain types of vital painting or poetry, which all express that broken and highly colored rhythm. The higher one rises, the more harmonious, unified and streamlined the vibrations become, such as certain great notes of Beethoven's string quartets, which seem to draw us upward, breathlessly, to radiant heights of pure light. The force of the music is no longer a matter of volume or multi-hued outbursts, but of a higher inner tension. The higher frequency of vibration turns the multi-hued rainbow to pure white, to a note so high that it seems motionless, as if captured in eternity, one single sound-light-force which is perhaps akin to the sacred Indian syllable OM [the] Word concealed in the upper fire.35 "In the beginning was the Word," the Christian Scriptures also say.
There exists in India a secret knowledge based upon sounds and the differences of vibratory modes found on different planes of consciousness. If we pronounce the sound OM, for example, we clearly feel its vibrations enveloping the head centers, while the sound RAM affects the navel center. And since each of our centers of consciousness is in direct contact with a plane, we can, by the repetition of certain sounds (japa), come into contact with the corresponding plane of consciousness.200 This is the basis of an entire spiritual discipline, called "tantric" because it originates from sacred texts known as Tantra. The basic or essential sounds that have the power to establish the contact are called mantras. The mantras, usually secret and given to the disciple by his Guru,201 are of all kinds (there are many levels within each plane of consciousness), and may serve the most contradictory purposes. By combining certain sounds, one can at the lower levels of consciousness generally at the vital level come in contact with the corresponding forces and acquire many strange powers: some mantras can cause death (in five minutes, with violent vomiting), some mantras can strike with precision a particular part or organ of the body, some mantras can cure, some mantras can start a fire, protect, or cast spells. This type of magic, or chemistry of vibrations, derives simply from a conscious handling of the lower vibrations. But there is a higher magic, which also derives from handling vibrations, on higher planes of consciousness. This is poetry, music, the spiritual mantras of the Upanishads and the Veda, the mantras given by a Guru to his disciple to help him come consciously into direct contact with a special plane of consciousness, a force or a divine being. In this case, the sound holds in itself the power of experience and realization it is a sound that makes one see.
Similarly, poetry and music, which are but unconscious processes of handling these secret vibrations, can be a powerful means of opening up the consciousness. If we could compose conscious poetry or music through the conscious manipulation of higher vibrations, we would create masterpieces endowed with initiatory powers. Instead of a poetry that is a fantasy of the intellect and a nautch-girl of the mind,202 as Sri Aurobindo put it, we would create a mantric music or poetry to bring the gods into our life. 203 For true poetry is action; it opens little inlets in the consciousness we are so walled in, so barricaded! through which the Real can enter. It is a mantra of the Real,204 an initiation. This is what the Vedic rishis and the seers of the Upanishads did with their mantras, which have the power of communicating illumination to one who is ready. 205 This is what Sri Aurobindo has explained in his Future Poetry and what he has accomplished himself in Savitri.
Mantras, great poetry, great music, or the sacred Word, all come from the overmind plane. It is the source of all creative or spiritual activity (the two cannot be separated: the categorical divisions of the intellect vanish in this clear space where everything is sacred, even the profane). We might now attempt to describe the particular vibration or rhythm of the overmind. First, as anyone knows who has the capacity to enter more or less consciously in contact with the higher planes a poet, a writer, or an artist it is no longer ideas one perceives and tries to translate when one goes beyond a certain level of consciousness: one hears. Vibrations, or waves, or rhythms, literally impose themselves and take possession of the seeker, and subsequently garb themselves with words and ideas, or music, or colors, during the descent. But the word or idea, the music or color is merely a result, a byproduct: it only gives a body to that first, highly compelling vibration. If the poet, the true one, next corrects and recorrects his draft, it is not to improve the form, as it were, or to find a more adequate expression, but to capture the vibrating life behind more accurately; if the true vibration is absent, all the magic disintegrates, as a Vedic priest mispronouncing the mantra of the sacrifice. When the consciousness is transparent, the sound can be heard distinctly, and it is a seeing sound, as it were, a sound-image or a sound-idea, which inseparably links hearing to vision and thought within the same luminous essence. All is there, self-contained, within a single vibration. On all the intermediate planes higher mind, illumined or intuitive mind the vibrations are generally broken up as flashes, pulsations, or eruptions, while in the overmind they are great notes.
They have neither beginning nor end, and they seem to be born out of the Infinite and disappear into the Infinite 206 ; they do not "begin" anywhere, but rather flow into the consciousness with a kind of halo of eternity, which was vibrating beforeh and and continues to vibrate long afterward, like the echo of another voyage behind this one:
1.12 - TIME AND ETERNITY, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
His sacred Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various forms of reverence. His sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or external reverence as that there should be a growth in the essence of the matter in all sects. The growth of the essence of the matter assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech, to wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reasons only; for the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another. He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law af Piety, as accepted by other people.
Edict of Asoka
1.13 - BOOK THE THIRTEENTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
But scale, with steep ascent, the sacred place;
With wand'ring steps to search the cittadel,
--
Drag'd by her sacred hair; the trembling train
Of matrons to their burning temples fly:
--
Each sacred bur then thro' the flames convey'd.
With young Ascanius, and this only prize,
--
The sacred shrubs, which eas'd Latona's pain,
The palm, and olive, and the votive fane.
--
When first mine eyes these sacred walls beheld,
A son, and twice two daughters crown'd thy bliss?
--
Th' inquiring Trojans sought the sacred shrine;
The mystick Pow'r commands them to explore
1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
vision is a continuation of the sacred myth: the daughter-bride
has become a mother and bears the Father in the shape of the
--
the lingam (phallus) stands in the sacred cavity of the adyton (Holy of Holies), in
the garbha griha (house of the womb). This pundit was a Tantrist (scholastic;
1.13 - The Kings of Rome and Alba, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
that in the sacred grove at Nemi, where the powers of vegetation and
of water manifested themselves in the fair forms of shady woods,
--
particular, especially at her sacred grove of Nemi. Perhaps, then,
Egeria was the fairy of a spring that flowed from the roots of a
--
nuptials of Numa and Egeria we have a reminiscence of a sacred
marriage which the old Roman kings regularly contracted with a
--
Egeria points to a sacred grove rather than to a house as the scene
of the nuptial union, which, like the marriage of the King and Queen
--
scene of the marriage was no other than the sacred grove of Nemi,
and on quite independent grounds we have been led to suppose that in
--
they may originally have been invested with a sacred character of
the same general kind, and may have held office on similar terms. To
--
For the eagle was the bird of Jove, the oak was his sacred tree, and
the face of his image standing in his four-horse chariot on the
--
beside a sacred oak, venerated by shepherds, to which the king
attached the spoils won by him from the enemy's general in battle.
We are expressly told that the oak crown was sacred to Capitoline
Jupiter; a passage of Ovid proves that it was regarded as the god's
--
crown was sacred to Jupiter and Juno on the Capitol, so we may
suppose it was on the Alban Mount, from which the Capitoline worship
--
If at any time of the year the Romans celebrated the sacred marriage
of Jupiter and Juno, as the Greeks commonly celebrated the
--
naturally play the part of the heavenly bridegroom at the sacred
marriage, while his queen would figure as the heavenly bride, just
--
union in the sacred grove raises a presumption that at Rome in the
regal period a ceremony was periodically performed exactly analogous
--
many a country lane a faded image of the sacred marriage lingers in
the rustic pageantry of May Day.
1.13 - THE MASTER AND M., #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
As it was the first day after the full moon, the moonlight soon flooded the tops of the trees and temples, and touched with silver the numberless waves of the sacred river.
The Master returned to his room. After bowing to the Divine Mother, he clapped his hands and chanted the sweet names of God. A number of holy pictures hung on the walls of the room. Among others, there were pictures of Dhruva, Prahlada, Kli, Radha-Krishna, and the coronation of Rma. The Master bowed low before the pictures and repeated the holy names. Then he repeated the holy words, "Brahma-tm-Bhagavan; Bhagavata-Bhakta-Bhagavan; Brahma-akti, akti-Brahma; Veda, Purana, Tantra, Git, Gayatri." Then he said: "I have taken refuge at Thy feet, O Divine Mother; not I, but Thou. I am the machine and Thou art the Operator", and so on.
--
"Haladhri's father was a great devotee. At bathing-time he would stand waist-deep in the water and meditate on God, uttering the sacred mantra; then the tears would flow from his eyes.
Krishnakishore's faith in God
--
Did Haladhri ask what would be gained by visiting a holy man? By repeating the name of Krishna or Rma a man transforms his physical body into a spiritual body. To such a man everything is the embodiment of Spirit. To him Krishna is the embodiment of Spirit, and His sacred Abode is the embodiment of Spirit.' He also said, 'A man who utters the name of Krishna or Rma even once reaps the result of a hundred sandhyas.'
"One of his sons chanted the name of Rma on his death-bed. Krishnakishore said, 'He has nothing to worry about; he has chanted the name of Rma.' But now and then he wept. After all, it was the death of his own son.
--
"Is the Primal Energy man or woman? Once at Kamarpukur I saw the worship of Kli in the house of the Lahas. They put a sacred thread.11 on the image of the Divine Mother. One man asked, 'Why have they put the sacred thread on the Mother's person?'
The master of the house said: 'Brother, I see that you have rightly understood the Mother. But I do not yet know whether the Divine Mother is male or female.'
--
"Don't mix intimately with brahmin pundits. Their only concern is to earn money. I have seen brahmin priests reciting the Chandi while performing the swastyayana. It is hard to tell whether they are reading the sacred book or something else. They turn half the pages without reading them. (All laugh.)
"A nail-knife suffices to kill oneself. One needs sword and shield to kill others. That is the purpose of the sastras.
1.14 - Descendants of Prithu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
PRITHU had two valiant sons, Antarddhi and Pālī[1]. The son of Antarddhāna, by his wife Sikhaṇḍiṇī, was Havirdhāna, to whom Dhiṣaṇā, a princess of the race of Agni, bore six sons, Prācīnaverhis, Śukra, Gaya, Kṛṣṇa, Vraja, and Ajina[2]. The first of these was a mighty prince and patriarch, by whom mankind was multiplied after the death of Havirdhāna. He was called Prācīnaverhis from his placing upon the earth the sacred grass, pointing to the east[3]. At the termination of a rigid penance the married Savarṇā, the daughter of the ocean, who had been previously betrothed to him, and who had by the king ten sons, who were all styled Pracetasas, and were skilled in military science: they all observed the same duties, practised religious austerities, and remained immersed in the bed of the sea for ten thousand years.
Maitreya said:-
--
[3]: The text is, ###. Kuśa or varhis is properly 'sacrificial grass' (Poa); and Prācināgra, literally, 'having its tips towards the east;' the direction in which it should be placed upon the ground, as a seat for the gods on occasion of offerings made to them. The name therefore intimates, either that the practice originated with him, or, as the commentator explains it, that he was exceedingly devout, offering sacrifices or invoking p. 107 the gods every where. The Hari Vaṃśa adds a verse to that of our text, reading, ###, which Mons. Langlois has rendered, 'Quand il marchoit sur la terre les pointes de cousa etoient courbées vers l'Orient;' which he supposes to mean, 'Que ce prince avait tourné ses pensées et porté sa domination vers l'Orient:' a supposition that might have been obviated by a little further consideration of the verse of Manu to which he refers. "If he have sitten on culms of grass with their points towards the east," &c. The commentary explains the passage as above, referring ### to ### not to ### as, ###. 'He was called Prācinavarhis, because his sacred grass, pointing east, was going upon the very earth, or was spread over the whole earth.' The text of the Bhāgavata also explains clearly what is meant: 'By whose sacred grass, pointing to the east, as he performed sacrifice after sacrifice, the whole earth, his sacrificial ground, was overspread.'
1.14 - INSTRUCTION TO VAISHNAVS AND BRHMOS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER (to M. and the others): "Well, these people practise so much japa and go to so many sacred places, but why are they like this? Why, do they make no progress? In their case it seems as if the year consists of eighteen months.
"Once I said to Harish: 'What is the use of going to Benares if one does not feel restless for God? And if one feels that longing, then this very place is Benares.'
--
"What faith Krishnakishore had! At Vrindvan a low-caste man drew water for him from a well. Krishnakishore said to him, 'Repeat the name of iva.' After the man had repeated the name of iva, Krishnakishore unhesitatingly drank the water. He used to say, 'If a man chants the name of God, does he need to spend money any more for the atonement of his sins? How foolish!' He was amazed to see people worshipping God with the sacred tulsi-leaf in order to get rid of their illnesses. At the bathing-ghat here he said to us, 'Please bless me, that I may pass my days repeating Rma's holy name.'
Whenever I went to his house he would dance with joy at the sight of me. Rma said to Lakshmana, 'Brother, whenever you find people singing and dancing in the ecstasy of divine love, know for certain that I am there.' Chaitanya is an example of such ecstatic love. He laughed and wept and danced and sang in divine ecstasy. He was an Incarnation. God incarnated Himself through Chaitanya."
1.14 - The Succesion to the Kingdom in Ancient Latium, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
by his successor the king of the sacred Rites, the foregoing
discussion has led us to the following conclusions. He represented
--
to their successors the Kings of the sacred Rites.
But we have still to ask, What was the rule of succession to the
--
ceremony of a sacred marriage for the purpose of causing the crops
to grow and men and cattle to be fruitful and multiply. Thus they
--
performance of those sacred rites and ceremonies on which, even more
than on the despatch of his civil and military duties, the safety
--
Comitium, and when it was over the King of the sacred Rites fled
from the Forum. We may conjecture that the Flight of the King was
--
likely that in acting thus the King of the sacred Rites was merely
keeping up an ancient custom which in the regal period had been
--
a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the
fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic. If I am right in
--
both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the
godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the
1.15 - Prayers, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
O Lord, most humbly I pray that I may be at the height of my endeavour, that nothing in me, conscious or unconscious, may betray Thee by failing to serve in Thy sacred mission.
With a solemn devotion I salute Thee.
1.15 - The Worship of the Oak, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
in the gloomy valley. In Boeotia, as we have seen, the sacred
marriage of Zeus and Hera, the oak god and the oak goddess, appears
--
In ancient Italy every oak was sacred to Jupiter, the Italian
counterpart of Zeus; and on the Capitol at Rome the god was
--
the Druids esteemed nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the
oak on which it grew; they chose groves of oaks for the scene of
--
bore the pure Celtic name of Drynemetum, "the sacred oak grove" or
"the temple of the oak." Indeed the very name of Druids is believed
--
In the religion of the ancient Germans the veneration for sacred
groves seems to have held the foremost place, and according to Grimm
--
equivalent of the Norse Thor; for a sacred oak near Geismar, in
Hesse, which Boniface cut down in the eighth century, went among the
--
Amongst the Slavs also the oak appears to have been the sacred tree
of the thunder god Perun, the counterpart of Zeus and Jupiter. It is
--
often been pointed out. Oaks were sacred to him, and when they were
cut down by the Christian missionaries, the people loudly complained
--
of the sacred wood. Men sacrificed to oak-trees for good crops,
while women did the same to lime-trees; from which we may infer that
1.16 - Dianus and Diana, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
fallen on evil days, represented a long line of sacred kings who had
once received not only the homage but the adoration of their
--
at Rome, with wood of the sacred oak. If this was so at Nemi, it
becomes probable that the hallowed grove there consisted of a
--
Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough. Now the oak was the sacred tree of
Jupiter, the supreme god of the Latins. Hence it follows that the
--
impossible that the King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred oak a
little lower down the mountain, was the lawful successor and
--
oak-god Jupiter and mated with the oak-goddess Diana in the sacred
grove. An echo of their mystic union has come down to us in the
--
be said to be bound up with that of the sacred tree. Thus he not
only served but embodied the great Aryan god of the oak; and as an
--
tribes who composed the Latin League, the sacred grove is known to
have been an object of their common reverence and care. And just as
1.16 - The Season of Truth, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
There still remains the irritating secret of the transition between the body of light and this body of darkness, that body of truth and this mortal body. We have spoken of transfusion or perhaps reabsorption of one into the other, and also of transmutation of one by the other. But these are words that hide our ignorance. How will this husk, as She who continued Sri Aurobindo's work used to call it (and who dared the perilous adventure, the last great saltus of material evolution), be opened, give way to that long-nurtured flower of fire? How will that new material substance the substance of the new world make its appearance, materialize? For it is already there; it will not fall from the sky. It is already radiating for those who have the truth-vision. It has been built, condensed, by the flame of aspiration of a few bodies. It almost seems as if a mere nothing would be enough to bring it out into the open, visible and tangible to all but we do not know what that nothing is, that impalpable veil, that ultimate screen, or what will make it fall. It is nothing, really, scarcely a husk, and behind, throbbing and vibrating, is the new world, so intense, radiant and warm, with such a swift rhythm and vivid light, so much more vivid and true than the earth's present light that one really wonders how living in this old callous, narrow, thick and awkward substance is still possible, and that the entire life as it is does seem like an old dried-up husk, thin and flat and colorless, a sort of caricature of the real life, a two-dimensional image of another material world full of depths and vibrancy, of superimposed and fused meanings, of real life, real joy, real movement. Here, outside, there are only little puppets of being moving about, passing figures in a shadow dance, lit up by something else, cast by something else, which is the life of their shadow, the light of their night, the sacred meaning of their futile little gesture, the real body of their pale silhouette. And yet, it is a material world, absolutely material, not some glorious fiction, not a hallucination with eyes closed, not a vague area of little saints. It is there. It is like real matter, Sri Aurobindo used to say. It is knocking at our doors, seeking to exist for our eyes and in our bodies, hammering away at the world, as if the great eternal Image were trying to enter the small one, the true world to enter this caricature which is coming to grief on all sides, the Truth of matter to enter this false and illusory coating as though the illusion were actually on this side, in this false look at matter, this false mental structure which prevents us from seeing things as they are. For they already are, as the fullness of the moon already is, only hidden to our shadow vision.
This solidity of the shadow, this effectiveness of the illusion, is probably the little nothing that stands in the way. Could the caterpillar have prevented itself from seeing a linear world, so concrete and objective for it, so incomplete and subjective for us? Our earth is not complete; our life is not complete; our matter itself is not complete. It is knocking, knocking to become one and full. It could well be that the whole falsehood of the earth lies in its false look, which results in a false life, a false action, a false being that is not, that cries out to be, that knocks and knocks on our doors and on the doors of the world. And yet, this husk does exist it suffers, it dies. It is not an illusion, even if, behind, lies the light of its shadow, the source of its gesture, the real face of its mask. What prevents the connection?... Perhaps simply something in the old substance that still takes itself for its shadow instead of taking itself for its sun perhaps is it only a matter of a conversion of our material consciousness, of its total and integral changeover from the small shadow to the great Person? A changeover which is like a death, a swing into such a radical otherness that it amounts to a disintegration of the old fellow. An instantaneous death-resurrection? A sudden other view, a plunge into Life true life which abolishes or unrealizes the old shadow?
1.16 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Who is singing Hari's name upon the sacred Ganges' bank?
Is it Nitai that has come, the giver of heavenly love?
--
MUKHERJI: "It is good to read sacred books like the Git."
MASTER: "But what will you gain by mere reading? Some have heard of milk, some have seen it, and there are some, besides, who have drunk it. God can indeed be seen; what is more, one can talk to Him.
--
MASTER: "Attaining that love, the devotee sees everything full of Spirit and Consciousness. To him 'Krishna is Consciousness, and His sacred Abode is also Consciousness'. The devotee, too, is Consciousness. Everything is Consciousness. Very few people attain such love."
DR. MADHU: "The love transcending the three gunas means, in other words, that the devotee is not under the control of any of the gunas."
1.17 - Astral Journey Example, How to do it, How to Verify your Experience, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Let us suppose that you have been making an invocation, or shall we call it an investigation, and suppose you want to interpret a passage of Bach. To play this is the principal weapon of your ceremony. In the course of your operation, you assume your astral body and rise far above the terrestrial atmosphere, while the music continues softly in the background. You open your eyes, and find that it is night. Dark clouds are on the horizon; but in the zenith is a crown of constellations. This light helps you, especially as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, to take in your surroundings. It is a bleak and barren landscape. Terrific mountains rim the world. In the midst looms a cluster of blue-black crags. Now there appears from their recesses a gigantic being. His strength, especially in his hands and in his loins, it terrifying. He suggests a combination of lion, mountain goat and serpent; and you instantly jump to the idea that this is one of the rare beings which the Greeks called Chimaera. So formidable is his appearance that you consider it prudent to assume an appropriate god-form. But who is the appropriate god? You may perhaps consider it best, in view of your complete ignorance as to who he is and where you are, to assume the god-form of Harpocrates, as being good defence in any case; but of course this will not take you very far. If you are sufficiently curious and bold, you will make up your mind rapidly on this point. This is where your daily practice of the Qabalah will come in useful. You run through in your mind the seven sacred planets. The very first of them seems quite consonant with what you have so far seen. Everything suits Saturn well enough. To be on the safe side, you go through the others; but this is a very obvious case Saturn is the only planet that agrees with everything. The only other possibility will be the Moon; but there is no trace noticeable of any of her more amiable characteristics. You will therefore make up your mind that it is a Saturnian god-form that you need. Fortunate indeed for you that you have practiced daily the assumption of such forms! Very firmly, very steadily, very slowly, very quietly, you transform your normal astral appearance into that of Sebek. The Chimaera, recognizing your divine authority, becomes less formidable and menacing in appearance. He may, in some way, indicate his willingness to serve you. Very good, so far; but it is of course the first essential to make sure of his integrity. Accordingly you begin by asking his name. This is vital; because if he tells you the truth, it gives you power over him. But if, on the other hand, he tells you a lie, he abandons for good and all his fortress. He becomes rather like a submarine whose base has been destroyed. He may do you a lot of mischief in the meantime, of course, so look out!
Well then, he tells you that his name is Ottillia. Shall we try to spell it in Greek or in Hebrew. By the sound of the name and perhaps to some extent by his appearance one might plump for the former; but after all the Greek Qabalah is so unsatisfactory. We give Hebrew the first chance we start with Ayin Teth Yod Lamed Yod Aleph H. Let us try this lettering for a start. It adds up to 135. I daresay that you don't remember what the Sepher Sephiroth tells you about the number; but as luck will have it, there is no need to inquire; for 135 = 3 x 45. Three is the number, is the first number of Saturn, and 45 the last. (The sum of the numbers in the magic square of Saturn is 45.) That corresponds beautifully with everything you have got so far; but then of course you must know if he is "one of the beliving Jinn." Briefly, is he a friend or an enemy? You accordingly say to him "The word of the Law is " It turns out that he doesn't understand Greek at all, so you were certainly right in choosing Hebrew. You put it to him, "What is the word of the Law?" and he replies darkly. "The word of the Law is Thora." That means nothing to you; any one might know as much as that, Thora being the ordinary word for the sacred Law of Israel, and you accordingly ask him to spell it to make sure you have heard aright; and he gives you the letters, perhaps by speaking them, perhaps by showing them: Teth, Resh, Ayin. You add these up and get 279. This again is divisible by the Saturnian 3, and the result is 93; in other words, he has been precisely right. On the plane of Saturn one may multiply by three and therefore he has given you the correct word "Thelema" in a form unfamiliar to you. You man now consider yourself satisfied of his good faith, and may proceed to inspect him more closely. The stars above his head suggest the influence of Binah, whose number also is three, while the most striking thing about him is the core of his being: the letter Yod. (One does not count the termination "AH": being a divine suffix it represents the inmost light and the outermost light.) This Yod, this spark of intense brilliance, is of the pale greenish gold which one sees (in this world) in the fine gold leaf of Tibet. It glows with ever greater intensity as you concentrate upon observing him, which you could not do while you were preoccupied with investigating his credentials.
Confidence being thus established, you inquire why he as appeared to you at this time and at this place; and the answer to this question is of course your original idea, that is to say, he is presenting to you in other terms that "mountainous Fugue" which invoked him. You listen to him with attention, make such enquiries as seem good to you, and record the proceedings.
1.17 - God, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
Let us approach the idea of God from a magicians standpoint. To the plain man the idea of God serves as a support for his spirit just not to entangle himself in uncertainty or get out of his depth. Therefore his God always remains something inconceivable, intangible, and incomprehensible to him. It is quite otherwise with the magician who knows his God in all aspects. He holds his God in awe as he knows himself to have been created in its image, consequently to be a part of God. He sees his lofty ideal, his first duty and his sacred objective in the union with the Godhead, in becoming the God-man. The rise to this sublime goal shall be described later on. The synthesis of this mystic union with God consists in developing the divine ideas, from the lowest up to the highest steps, in such a degree as to attain the union with the universal.
Everyone is at liberty to abandon his individuality or to retain it. Such genii usually return to earth entrusted with a definite sacred task or mission.
In this rise, the initiated magician is a mystic at the same time. Only performing this union and giving up his individuality, he voluntarily enters into dissolution which in the mystic wording is called mystic death.
1.17 - Legend of Prahlada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Again established in the dwelling of his preceptor, Prahlāda gave lessons himself to the sons of the demons, in the intervals of his leisure. "Sons of the offspring of Diti," he was accustomed to say to them, "hear from me the supreme truth; nothing else is fit to be regarded; nothing, else here is an object to be coveted. Birth, infancy, and youth are the portion of all creatures; and then succeeds gradual and inevitable decay, terminating with all beings, children of the Daityas, in death: this is manifestly visible to all; to you as it is to me. That the dead are born again, and that it cannot be otherwise, the sacred texts are warrant: but production cannot be without a material cause; and as long as conception and parturition are the material causes of repeated birth, so long, be sure, is pain inseparable from every period of existence. The simpleton, in his inexperience, fancies that the alleviation of hunger, thirst, cold, and the like is pleasure; but of a truth it is pain; for suffering gives delight to those whose vision is darkened by delusion, as fatigue would be enjoyment to limbs that are incapable of motion[3]. This vile body is a compound of phlegm and other humours. Where are its beauty, grace, fragrance, or other estimable qualities? The fool that is fond of a body composed of flesh, blood, matter, ordure, urine, membrane, marrow, and bones, will be enamoured of hell. The agreeableness of fire is caused by cold; of water, by thirst; of food, by hunger: by other circumstances their contraries are equally agreeable[4]. The child of the Daitya who takes to himself a wife introduces only so much misery into his bosom; for as many as are the cerished affections of a living creature, so many are the thorns of anxiety implanted in his heart; and he who has large possessions in his house is haunted, wherever he goes, with the apprehension that they may be lost or burnt or stolen. Thus there is great pain in being born: for the dying man there are the tortures of the judge of the deceased, and of passing again into 'the womb. If you conclude that there is little enjoyment in the embryo state, you must then admit that the world is made up of pain. Verily I say unto you, that in this ocean of the world, this sea of many sorrows, Viṣṇu is your only hope. If ye say, you know nothing of this; 'we are children; embodied spirit in bodies is eternal; birth, youth, decay, are the properties of the body, not of the soul[5].' But it is in this way that we deceive ourselves. I am yet a child; but it is my purpose to exert myself when I am a youth. I am yet a youth; but when I become old I will do what is needful for the good of my soul. I am now old, and all my duties are to be fulfilled. How shall I, now that my faculties fail me, do what was left undone when my strength was unimpaired?' In this manner do men, whilst their minds are distracted by sensual pleasures, ever propose, and never attain final beatitude: they die thirsting[6]. Devoted in childhood to play, and in youth to pleasure, ignorant and impotent they find that old age is come upon them. Therefore even in childhood let the embodied soul acquire discriminative wisdom, and, independent of the conditions of infancy, youth, or age, strive incessantly to be freed. This, then, is what I declare unto you; and since you know that it is not untrue, do you, out of regard to me, call to your minds Viṣṇu, the liberator from all bondage. What difficulty is there in thinking upon him, who, when remembered, bestows prosperity; and by recalling whom to memory, day and night, all sin is cleansed away? Let all your thoughts and affections be fixed on him, who is present in all beings, and you shall laugh at every care. The whole world is suffering under a triple affliction[7]. 'What wise man would feel hatred towards beings who are objects of compassion? If fortune be propitious to them, and I am unable to partake of the like enjoyments, yet wherefore should I cerish malignity towards those who are more prosperous than myself: I should rather sympathise with their happiness; for the suppression of malignant feelings is of itself a reward[8]. If beings are hostile, and indulge in hatred, they are objects of pity to the wise, as encompassed by profound delusion. These are the reasons for repressing hate, which are adapted to the capacities of those who see the deity distinct from his creatures. Hear, briefly, what influences those who have approached the truth. This whole world is but a manifestation of Viṣṇu, who is identical with all things; and it is therefore to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but as the same with themselves. Let us therefore lay aside the angry passions of our race, and so strive that we obtain that perfect, pure, and eternal happiness, which shall be beyond the power of the elements or their deities, of fire, of the sun, of the moon, of wind, of Indra, of the regent of the sea; which shall be unmolested by spirits of air or earth; by Yakṣas, Daityas, or their chiefs; by the serpent-gods or monstrous demigods of Swerga; which shall be uninterrupted by men or beasts, or by the infirmities of human nature; by bodily sickness and disease[9], or hatred, envy, malice, passion, or desire; which nothing shall molest, and which every one who fixes his whole heart on Keśava shall enjoy. Verily I say unto you, that you shall have no satisfaction in various revolutions through this treacherous world, but that you will obtain placidity for ever by propitiating Viṣṇu, whose adoration is perfect calm. What here is difficult of attainment, when he is pleased? Wealth, pleasure, virtue, are things of little moment. Precious is the fruit that you shall gather, be assured, from the exhaustless store of the tree of true wisdom."
Footnotes and references:
1.17 - M. AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
It was nine o'clock in the morning. Sri Ramakrishna was talking to M. near the bel-tree at Dakshineswar. This tree, under which the Master had practised the most austere sadhana, stood in the northern end of the temple garden. Farther north ran a high wall, and just outside was the government magazine. West of the bel-tree was a row of tall pines that rustled in the wind. Below the trees flowed the Ganges, and to the south could be seen the sacred grove of the Panchavati. The dense trees and underbrush hid the temples. No noise of the outside world reached the bel-tree.
MASTER (to M.): "But one cannot realize God without renouncing 'woman and gold'."
1.17 - The Burden of Royalty, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
they are obliged to take an uncommon care of their sacred persons,
and to do such things, which, examined according to the customs of
--
will they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open
air, and the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There
--
eat his food out of these sacred dishes, it would swell and inflame
his mouth and throat. The like ill effect is dreaded from the
Dairi's sacred habits; for they believe that if a layman should wear
them, without the Emperor's express leave or command, they would
--
as a sacred being, but "he is held in leash by a crowd of
restrictions, which regulate his behaviour like that of the emperor
--
part of his garments; no fire except a sacred fire might be taken
out of his house; he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened
--
priest of the sacred dairy, is subject to a variety of irksome and
burdensome restrictions during the whole time of his incumbency,
which may last many years. Thus he must live at the sacred dairy and
may never visit his home or any ordinary village. He must be
--
of him, and everything that he chanced to touch became sacred or
tabooed. When he and the king met, the monarch had to sit down on
--
origin, this sacred personage possessed no political authority, and
if he ventured to meddle with affairs of state it was at the risk of
--
may pass that way. This division of power between a sacred and a
secular ruler is to be met with wherever the true negro culture has
1.17 - The Seven-Headed Thought, Swar and the Dashagwas, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Indra marches with them saran.yubhih., as travellers on the path, sakhibhih., comrades, r.kvabhih. and kavibhih., seers and singers of the sacred chant, but also satvabhih., fighters in the battle.
They are frequently spoken of by the appellation nr. or vra, as when Indra is said to win the luminous herds asmakebhih. nr.bhih., "by our men". Streng thened by them he conquers in the journey and reaches the goal, naks.ad-dabham taturim. This journey or march proceeds along the path discovered by Sarama, the hound of heaven, the path of the Truth, r.tasya panthah., the great path, mahas pathah., which leads to the realms of the Truth.
--
periods of the sacrifice of the Navagwas and it is effected by the force of the Soma-wine and the sacred Word.
The drinking of the Soma-wine as the means of strength, victory and attainment is one of the pervading figures of the
--
Only the theory we are enouncing, a theory not brought in from outside but arising straight from the language and the suggestions of the hymns themselves, can unite this varied imagery and bring an easy lucidity and coherence into this apparent tangle of incongruities. In fact, once the central idea is grasped and the mentality of the Vedic Rishis and the principle of their symbolism are understood, no incongruity and no disorder remain. There is a fixed system of symbols which, except in some of the later hymns, does not admit of any important variations and in the light of which the inner sense of the Veda everywhere yields itself up readily enough. There is indeed a certain restricted freedom in the combination of the symbols, as in those of any fixed poetical imagery, - for instance, the sacred poems of the Vaishnavas; but the substance of thought behind is constant, coherent and does not vary.
1.18 - Asceticism, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
In the interest of his mago-mystic development, the magician must be moderate in eating and drinking, and observe a reasonable mode of life. It is impossible to fix precise rules or prescriptions, the magic way of life being quite individual. Each and all must know best what agrees or disagrees with them. It is a sacred duty to keep the balance everywhere. There are three kinds of asceticism: (1), intellectual or mental asceticism, (2) psychic or astral asceticism, 93) physical or material asceticism. The first kind has to do with the discipline of thoughts, the second kind is engaged in ennobling the soul through control of passions and instincts, and the third kind is concerned with harmonizing the body through a moderate and natural way of life.
Without these three kinds of asceticism, which must be developed at the same tie and parallel to each other, a correct magical rise is unthinkable. To avoid any one-sided development, none of the three kinds may be neglected, and none of them may prevail. Further information about how to accomplish this task will be given in the practical training course of this book.
1.18 - Hiranyakasipu's reiterated attempts to destroy his son, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
THE Dānavas, observing the conduct of Prahlāda, reported it to the king, lest they should iñcur his displeasure. He sent for his cooks, and said to them, "My vile and unprincipled son is now teaching others his impious doctrines: be quick, and put an end to him. Let deadly poison be mixed up with all his viands, without his knowledge. Hesitate not, but destroy the wretch without delay." Accordingly they did so, and administered poison to the virtuous Prahlāda, as his father had commanded them. Prahlāda, repeating the name of the imperishable, ate and digested the food in which the deadly poison had been infused, and suffered no harm from it, either in body or mind, for it had been rendered innocuous by the name of the eternal. Beholding the strong poison digested, those who had prepared the food were filled with dismay, and hastened to the king, and fell down before him, and said, "King of the Daityas, the fearful poison given by us to your son has been digested by him along with his food, as if it were innocent. Hiraṇyakaśipu, on hearing this, exclaimed, "Hasten, hasten, ministrant priests of the Daitya race! instantly perform the rites that will effect his destruction!" Then the priests went to Prahlāda, and, having repeated the hymns of the Sāma-Veda, said to him, as he respectfully hearkened, "Thou hast been born, prince, in the family of Brahmā, celebrated in the three worlds, the son of Hiraṇyakaśipu, the king of the Daityas; why shouldest thou acknowledge dependance upon the gods? why upon the eternal? Thy father is the stay of all the worlds, as thou thyself in turn shalt be. Desist, then, from celebrating the praises of an enemy; and remember, that of all venerable preceptors, a father is most venerable." Prahlāda replied to them, "Illustrious Brahmans, it is true that the family of Marīci is renowned in the three worlds; this cannot be denied: and I also admit, what is equally indisputable, that my father is mighty over the universe. There is no error, not the least, in what you have said, 'that a father is the most venerable of all holy teachers:' he is a venerable instructor, no doubt, and is ever to be devoutly reverenced. To all these things I have nothing to object; they find a ready assent in my mind: but when you say, 'Why should I depend upon the eternal?' who can give assent to this as right? the words are void of meaning." Having said thus much, he was silent a while, being restrained by respect to their sacred functions; but he was unable to repress his smiles, and again said, "What need is there of the eternal? excellent! What need of the eternal? admirable! most worthy of you who are my venerable preceptors! Hear what need there is of the eternal, if to hearken will not give you pain. The fourfold objects of men are said to be virtue, desire, wealth, final emancipation. Is he who is the source of all these of no avail? Virtue was derived from the eternal by Dakṣa, Marīci, and other patriarchs; wealth has been obtained front him by others; and by others, the enjoyment of their desires: whilst those who, through true. wisdom and holy contemplation, have come to know his essence, have been released from their bondage, and have attained freedom from existence for ever. The glorification of Hari, attainable by unity, is the root of all riches, dignity, renown, wisdom, progeny, righteousness, and liberation. Virtue, wealth, desire, and even final freedom, Brahmans, are fruits bestowed by him. How then can it be said, 'What need is there of the eternal?' But enough of this: what occasion is there to say more? You are my venerable preceptors, and, speak ye good or evil, it is not for my weak judgment to decide." The priests said to him, "We preserved you, boy, when you were about to be consumed by fire, confiding that you would no longer eulogize your father's foes: we knew not how unwise you were: but if you will not desist from this infatuation at our advice, we shall even proceed to perform the rites that will inevitably destroy you." To this menace, Prahlāda answered, "What living creature slays, or is slain? what living creature preserves, or is preserved? Each is his own destroyer or preserver, as he follows evil or good[1]."
Thus spoken to by the youth, the priests of the Daitya sovereign were incensed, and instantly had recourse to magic incantations, by which a female form, enwreathed with fiery flame, was engendered: she was of fearful aspect, and the earth was parched beneath her tread, as she approached Prahlāda, and smote him with a fiery trident on the breast. In vain! for the weapon fell, broken into a hundred pieces, upon the ground. Against the breast in which the imperishable Hari resides the thunderbolt would be shivered, much more should such a weapon be split in pieces. The magic being, then directed against the virtuous prince by the wicked priest, turned upon them, and, having quickly destroyed them, disappeared. But Prahlāda, beholding them perish, hastily appealed to Kṛṣṇa, the eternal, for succour, and said, "Oh Janārddana! who art every where, the creator and substance of the world, preserve these Brahmans from this magical and insupportable fire. As thou art Viṣṇu, present in all creatures, and the protector of the world, so let these priests be restored to life. If, whilst devoted to the omnipresent Viṣṇu, I think no sinful resentment against my foes, let these priests be restored to life. If those who have come to slay me, those by whom poison was given me, the fire that would have burned, the elephants that would have crushed, and snakes that would have stung me, have been regarded by me as friends; if I have been unshaken in soul, and am without fault in thy sight; then, I implore thee, let these, the priests of the Asuras, be now restored to life." Thus having prayed, the Brahmans immediately rose up, uninjured and rejoicing; and bowing respectfully to Prahlāda, they blessed him, and said, "Excellent prince, may thy days be many; irresistible be thy prowess; and power and wealth and posterity be thine." Having thus spoken, they withdrew, and went and told the king of the Daityas all that had passed.
1.18 - M. AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Arriving at the garden, the Master got out of the carriage and accompanied Ram and the other devotees to the sacred tulsi-grove. Standing near it, he said: "How nice! It is a fine place. You can easily meditate on God here."
Sri Ramakrishna sat down in the house, which stood to the south of the lake. Ram offered him a plate of fruit and sweets which he enjoyed with the devotees. After a short time he went around the garden.
--
M. listened silently to the conversation. Looking at him, the Master asked the Tantrik devotee, "Can a man attain perfection without the help of a vija mantra, a sacred word from the guru?"
TANTRIK: "Yes, he can if he has faith-faith in the words of the guru."
1.18 - The Human Fathers, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HESE characteristics of the Angiras Rishis seem at first sight to indicate that they are in the Vedic system a class of demigods, in their outward aspect personifications or rather personalities of the Light and the Voice and the Flame, but in their inner aspect powers of the Truth who second the gods in their battles. But even as divine seers, even as sons of Heaven and heroes of the Lord, these sages represent aspiring humanity. True, they are originally the sons of the gods, devaputrah., children of Agni, forms of the manifoldly born Brihaspati, and in their ascent to the world of the Truth they are described as ascending back to the place from whence they came; but even in these characteristics they may well be representative of the human soul which has itself descended from that world and has to reascend; for it is in its origin a mental being, son of immortality (amr.tasya putrah.), a child of Heaven born in Heaven and mortal only in the bodies that it assumes. And the part of the Angiras Rishis in the sacrifice is the human part, to find the word, to sing the hymn of the soul to the gods, to sustain and increase the divine Powers by the praise, the sacred food and the
Soma-wine, to bring to birth by their aid the divine Dawn, to win the luminous forms of the all-radiating Truth and to ascend to its secret, far and high-seated home.
1.18 - The Perils of the Soul, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
THE FOREGOING examples have taught us that the office of a sacred
king or priest is often hedged in by a series of burdensome
1.19 - GOD IS NOT MOCKED, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the past the nations of Christendom persecuted in the name of their faith, fought religious wars and undertook crusades against infidels and heretics; today they have ceased to be Christian in anything but name, and the only religion they profess is some brand of local idolatry, such as nationalism, state-worship, boss-worship and revolutionism. From these fruits of (among other things) historic Christianity, what inferences can we draw as to the nature of the tree? The answer has already been given in the section on Time and Eternity. If Christians used to be persecutors and are now no longer Christians, the reason is that the Perennial Philosophy incorporated in their religion was overlaid by wrong beliefs that led inevitably, since God is never mocked, to wrong actions. These wrong beliefs had one element in commonnamely, an overvaluation of happenings in time and an undervaluation of the everlasting, timeless fact of eternity. Thus, belief in the supreme importance for salvation of remote historical events resulted in bloody disputes over the interpretation of the not very adequate and often conflicting records. And belief in the sacredness, nay, the actual divinity, of the ecclesiastico-politico-financial organizations, which developed after the fall of the Roman Empire, not only added bitterness to the all too human struggles for their control, but served to rationalize and justify the worst excesses of those who fought for place, wealth and power within and through the Church. But this is not the whole story. The same overvaluation of events in time, which once caused Christians to persecute and fight religious wars, led at last to a wide-spread indifference to a religion that, in spite of everything, was still in part preoccupied with eternity. But nature abhors a vacuum, and into the yawning void of this indifference there flowed the tide of political idolatry. The practical consequences of such idolatry, as we now see, are total war, revolution and tyranny.
Meanwhile, on the credit side of the balance sheet, we find such items as the following: an immense increase in technical and governmental efficiency and an immense increase in scientific knowledgeeach of them a result of the general shift of Western mans attention from the eternal to the temporal order, first within the sphere of Christianity and then, inevitably, outside it.
1.19 - Tabooed Acts, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of the sacred _Yoni,_ through which the person to be regenerated is
to pass." Such an image of pure gold was made at the prince's
1.19 - THE MASTER AND HIS INJURED ARM, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Neither right nor wrong doing am I, neither pleasure nor pain, Nor the mantra, the sacred place, the Vedas, the sacrifice; Neither the act of eating, the eater, nor the food: I am Pure Knowledge and Bliss: I am iva! I am iva!
Death or fear I have none, nor any distinction of caste; Neither father nor mother nor even a birth have I; Neither friend nor comrade, neither disciple nor guru: I am Pure Knowledge and Bliss: I am iva! I am iva!
1.200-1.224 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Sivaratri day which is held sacred even now.
In the sphere of speech Pranava (the mystic sound AUM) represents the transcendental (nirguna) and the Panchakshari (the five-syllabled mantra) represents the immanent aspect (saguna).
1.201 - Socrates, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
209e Athenians as the procreator of your laws, and other men are similarly honoured in many other places in Greece and beyond, who by their many fine achievements have procreated virtue of every kind. Many sacred cults have been set up in their honour because of the nature of those children, but none has ever yet been set up because of mortal children.
These are aspects of the mystery of love195 that perhaps you too,
12.01 - The Return to Earth, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All that is sacred in the world drew near
To her divine passivity of mood.
--
If to fill these thou lift thy sacred flight,
My human earth will still demand thy bliss.
--
Once sacred to secluded loneliness
With violent breaking of its virgin sleep.
1.20 - RULES FOR HOUSEHOLDERS AND MONKS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Again, how much a man suffers for his wife! Still he believes that there is no other relative so near. Look at the sad plight of a husband. Perhaps he earns twenty rupees a month and is the father of three children. He hasn't the means to feed them well. His roof leaks, but he hasn't the wherewithal to repair it. He cannot afford to buy new books for his son. He cannot invest his son with the sacred thread. He begs a few pennies from his different friends.
The ideal of a spiritual family
--
Sri Ramakrishna then explained the sacred Word "Om" and the true Knowledge of Brahman and the state of mind after the attainment of Brahmajnana.
MASTER: "The sound Om is Brahman. The rishis and sages practised austerity to realize that Sound-Brahman. After attaining perfection one hears the sound of this eternal Word rising spontaneously from the navel.
--
"What a nice state of mind Captain has developed! He looks like a rishi when he is seated to perform worship. He performs the rati with lighted camphor and recites beautiful hymns. When he rises from his seat after finishing the worship, his eyes are swollen from emotion, as if bitten by ants. Besides, he always devotes himself to the study of the sacred books, such as the Git and the Bhagavata. Once I used one or two English words before him, and that made him angry. He said, 'English-educated people are profane.' "
After a while Adhar said humbly to the Master: "Sir, you haven't been to our place for a long time. The drawing-room smells worldly and everything else appears to be steeped in darkness."
1.20 - Tabooed Persons, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
that if any one else ate his food out of these sacred dishes, his
mouth and throat would become swollen and inflamed. The same ill
--
against. His sacred organism, so delicate that a touch may disorder
it, is also, as it were, electrically charged with a powerful
--
killed by the magical power which pervades his sacred person. But
since contact with him is sometimes unavoidable, they have devised a
--
fed himself with his own hands after touching the sacred person of a
superior chief or anything that belonged to him, he would swell up
--
for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire,
which would pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it
--
superstition erected round the persons of sacred chiefs a real,
though at the same time purely imaginary barrier, to transgress
--
THUS regarding his sacred chiefs and kings as charged with a
mysterious spiritual force which so to say explodes at contact, the
--
with a certain fear and horror. For example, sacred kings and
priests in Polynesia were not allowed to touch food with their
--
the persons to whom the things belong are sacred or what we might
call unclean and polluted. As the garments which have been touched
by a sacred chief kill those who handle them, so do the things which
have been touched by a menstruous women. An Australian blackfellow,
--
on sacred ground; during the time of her seclusion she was debarred
from touching provisions, and had to be fed by another. Further, if
--
out on the war-path they were sacred or taboo in the highest degree,
and they and their friends at home had to observe strictly many
--
were sacred, and they had to practise continence and a custom of
personal cleanliness of which the original motive, if we may judge
--
we have seen that the vessels and clothes of the sacred Mikado, of
women at childbirth and menstruation, and of persons defiled by
--
The general effect of the taboos laid on sacred chiefs, mourners,
women at childbirth, men on the war-path, and so on, is to seclude
--
is sacred, that is, it is one whose life is commonly spared from
motives of superstition. Yet the treatment of the sacrilegious
1.20 - Talismans - The Lamen - The Pantacle, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
You must on no account attempt to use the squares given in the Book of the sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage until you have succeeded in the Operation. More, unless you mean to perform it, and are prepared to go to any length to do so, you are a fool to have the book in your possession at all. Those squares are liable to get loose and do things on their own initiative; and you won't like it.
The late Philip Haseltine, a young composer of genius, used one of these squares to get his wife to return to him. He engraved it neatly on his arm. I don't know how he proceeded to set to work; but his wife came back all right, and a very short time afterwards he killed himself.
1.20 - Visnu appears to Prahlada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[3]: The days of full and new moon are sacred with all sects of Hindus: the eighth and twelfth days of the lunar half month were considered holy by the Vaiṣṇavas, as appears from the text. The eighth maintains its character in a great degree from the eighth of Bhādra being the birthday of Kṛṣṇa; but the eleventh, in more recent Vaiṣṇava works, as the Brahma Vaivartta P., has taken the place of the twelfth, and is even more sacred than the eighth.
[4]: Or any solemn gift; that of a cow is held particularly sacred; but it implies accompaniments of a more costly character, ornaments and gold.
[5]: The legend of Prahlāda is inserted in detail in the Bhāgavata and Nāradīya Purāṇas, and in the Uttara Khaṇḍa of the Padma: it is adverted to more briefly in the Vāyu, Li
1.21 - Tabooed Things, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
chosen with special reference to those sacred chiefs, kings and
priests, who, more than anybody else, live fenced about by taboo as
--
naturally leads to a prohibition to touch their sacred persons. Thus
it was unlawful to lay hands on the person of a Spartan king: no one
--
became sacred, and the person thus honoured had to wear a visible
mark (generally a cord of red silk) for the rest of his life. Above
--
which was considered sacred, was made and had to be kept in repair
without the use of iron or bronze. It was expressly provided by law
--
divine, and it is therefore right that his sacred spirit should not
be exposed to the risk of being cut or wounded whenever it quits his
--
necessarily becomes taboo or sacred. In New Zealand anything upon
which even a drop of a high chief's blood chances to fall becomes
taboo or sacred to him. For instance, a party of natives having come
to visit a chief in a fine new canoe, the chief got into it, but in
--
canoe, which at once became sacred to him. The owner jumped out,
dragged the canoe ashore opposite the chief's house, and left it
--
MANY peoples regard the head as peculiarly sacred; the special
sanctity attri buted to it is sometimes explained by a belief that it
--
it was not the Marquesan chiefs only whose heads were sacred. The
head of every Marquesan was taboo, and might neither be touched nor
--
was in this state, became sacred and was deposited in a consecrated
place railed in for the purpose at the child's house. If a branch of
--
Tahitian was always sacred, he never carried anything on it, and to
touch it was an offence. So sacred was the head of a Maori chief
that "if he only touched it with his fingers, he was obliged
--
part from whence it was taken." On account of the sacredness of his
head a Maori chief "could not blow the fire with his mouth, for the
breath being sacred, communicated his sanctity to it, and a brand
might be taken by a slave, or a man of another tribe, or the fire
--
WHEN the head was considered so sacred that it might not even be
touched without grave offence, it is obvious that the cutting of the
--
common to all, but sacred persons have more to fear from them than
ordinary people, so the precautions taken by them are
--
contact with a sacred head, he may not touch food with them or
engage in any other employment; he is fed by another person with
food cooked over a sacred fire. He cannot be released from the taboo
before the following day, when he rubs his hands with potato or fern
root which has been cooked on a sacred fire; and this food having
been taken to the head of the family in the female line and eaten by
--
Zealand the most sacred day of the year was that appointed for
hair-cutting; the people assembled in large numbers on that day from
--
all of which were sacred to the fetish and therefore inviolable.
These cairns of sacred stones, he further learned, were simply a
precaution against witchcraft, for if a man were not thus careful in
--
Footprint of Buddha on the sacred hill at Prabat. They are then
presented to the priests, who are supposed to make them into brushes
--
of this kind which are laid upon sacred or tabooed persons, such as
kings and priests, are still more numerous and stringent. We have
1.21 - The Spiritual Aim and Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not as a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment upon earth, not only in heavens beyond, which after all it need not have left if it had no divine business here in the world of physical, vital and mental nature. It will therefore regard the life, mind and body neither as ends in themselves, sufficient for their own satisfaction, nor as mortal members full of disease which have only to be dropped off for the rescued spirit to flee away into its own pure regions, but as first instruments of the soul, the yet imperfect instruments of an unseized diviner purpose. It will believe in their destiny and help them to believe in themselves, but for that very reason in their highest and not only in their lowest or lower possibilities. Their destiny will be, in its view, to spiritualise themselves so as to grow into visible members of the spirit, lucid means of its manifestation, themselves spiritual, illumined, more and more conscious and perfect. For, accepting the truth of mans soul as a thing entirely divine in its essence, it will accept also the possibility of his whole being becoming divine in spite of Natures first patent contradictions of this possibility, her darkened denials of this ultimate certitude, and even with these as a necessary earthly starting-point. And as it will regard man the individual, it will regard too man the collectivity as a soul-form of the Infinite, a collective soul myriadly embodied upon earth for a divine fulfilment in its manifold relations and its multitudinous activities. Therefore it will hold sacred all the different parts of mans life which correspond to the parts of his being, all his physical, vital, dynamic, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, intellectual, psychic evolution, and see in them instruments for a growth towards a diviner living. It will regard every human society, nation, people or other organic aggregate from the same standpoint, sub-souls, as it were, means of a complex manifestation and self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the divine Reality, the conscious Infinite in man upon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly of one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma.
But it will not seek to enforce even this one uplifting dogma by any external compulsion upon the lower members of mans natural being; for that is nigraha, a repressive contraction of the nature which may lead to an apparent suppression of the evil, but not to a real and healthy growth of the good; it will rather hold up this creed and ideal as a light and inspiration to all his members to grow into the godhead from within themselves, to become freely divine. Neither in the individual nor in the society will it seek to imprison, wall in, repress, impoverish, but to let in the widest air and the highest light. A large liberty will be the law of a spiritual society and the increase of freedom a sign of the growth of human society towards the possibility of true spiritualisation. To spiritualise in this sense a society of slaves, slaves of power, slaves of authority, slaves of custom, slaves of dogma, slaves of all sorts of imposed laws which they live under rather than live by them, slaves internally of their own weakness, ignorance and passions from whose worst effect they seek or need to be protected by another and external slavery, can never be a successful endeavour. They must shake off their fetters first in order to be fit for a higher freedom. Not that man has not to wear many a yoke in his progress upward; but only the yoke which he accepts because it represents, the more perfectly the better, the highest inner law of his nature and its aspiration, will be entirely helpful to him. The rest buy their good results at a heavy cost and may retard as much as or even more than they accelerate his progress.
1.22 - ADVICE TO AN ACTOR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
God, the scripture, and the devotee are identical "Keshab conducted the prayer that evening at the bathing-ghat on the river. After the worship I said to him: 'It is God who manifests Himself, in one aspect, as the scriptures; therefore one should worship the sacred books, such as the Vedas, the Puranas, and the Tantras. In another aspect He has become the devotee. The heart of the devotee is God's drawing-room. One can easily find one's master in the drawing-room. Therefore, by worshipping His devotee, one worships God Himself.'
"Keshab and his followers listened to my words with great attention. It was a full-moon night. The sky was flooded with light. We were seated in the open court at the top of the stairs leading to the river. I said, 'Now let us all chant, "Bhagavata-Bhakta-Bhagavan." '
1.22 - Dominion over different provinces of creation assigned to different beings, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
kāra) in its twofold division, into elements and organs of sense, in the emblems of his conch-shell and his bow. In his hand Viṣṇu holds, in the form of his discus, the mind, whose thoughts (like the weapon) fly swifter than the winds. The necklace of the deity Vaijayantī, composed of five precious gems[8], is the aggregate of the five elemental rudiments. Janārddana bears, in his numerous shafts, the faculties both of action and of perception. The bright sword of Achyuta is holy wisdom, concealed at some seasons in the scabbard of ignorance. In this manner soul, nature, intellect, egotism, the elements, the senses, mind, ignorance, and wisdom, are all assembled in the person of Hṛṣikeśa. Hari, in a delusive form, embodies the shapeless elements of the world, as his weapons and his ornaments, for the salvation of mankind[9]. Puṇḍarikākṣa, the lord of all, assumes nature, with all its products, soul and all the world. All that is wisdom, all that is ignorance, all that is, all that is not, all that is everlasting, is centred in the destroyer of Madhu, the lord of all creatures. The supreme, eternal Hari is time, with its divisions of seconds, minutes, days, months, seasons, and years: he is the seven worlds, the earth, the sky, heaven, the world of patriarchs, of sages, of saints, of truth: whose form is all worlds; first-born before all the first-born; the supporter of all beings, himself self-sustained: who exists in manifold forms, as gods, men, and animals; and is thence the sovereign lord of all, eternal: whose shape is all visible things; who is without shape or form: who is celebrated in the Vedanta as the Rich, Yajush, Sāma, and Atharva Vedas, inspired history, and sacred science. The Vedas, and their divisions; the institutes of Manu and other lawgivers; traditional scriptures, and religious manuals[10]; poems, and all that is said or sung; are the body of the mighty Viṣṇu, assuming the form of sound. All kinds of substances, with or without shape, here or elsewhere, are the body of Viṣṇu. I am Hari. All that I behold is Janārddana; cause and effect are from none other than him. The man who knows these truths shall never again experience the afflictions of worldly existence.
Thus, Brahman, has the first portion of this Purāṇa been duly revealed to you: listening to which, expiates all offences. The man who hears this Purāṇa obtains the fruit of bathing in the Puṣkara lake[11] for twelve years, in the month of Kārtik. The gods bestow upon him who hears this work the dignity of a divine sage, of a patriarch, or of a spirit of heaven.
1.22 - EMOTIONALISM, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the light of what has been said above, we can understand the peculiar spiritual dangers by which every kind of predominantly emotional religion is always menaced. A hell-fire faith that uses the theatrical techniques of revivalism in order to stimulate remorse and induce the crisis of sudden conversion; a saviour cult that is for ever stirring up what St. Bernard calls the amor carnalis or fleshly love of the Avatar and personal God; a ritualistic mystery-religion that generates high feelings of awe and reverence and aesthetic ecstasy by means of its sacraments and ceremonials, its music and its incense, its numinous darknesses and sacred lightsin its own special way, each one of these runs the risk of becoming a form of psychological idolatry, in which God is identified with the egos affective attitude towards God and finally the emotion becomes an end in itself, to be eagerly sought after and worshipped, as the addicts of a drug spend life in the pursuit of their artificial paradise. All this is obvious enough. But it is no less obvious that religions that make no appeal to the emotions have very few adherents. Moreover, when pseudo-religions with a strong emotional appeal make their appearance, they imme thately win millions of enthusiastic devotees from among the masses to whom the real religions have ceased to have a meaning or to be a comfort. But whereas no adherent of a pseudo-religion (such as one of our current political idolatries, compounded of nationalism and revolutionism) can possibly go forward into the way of genuine spirituality, such a way always remains open to the adherents of even the most highly emotionalized varieties of genuine religion. Those who have actually followed this way to its end in the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground constitute a very small minority of the total. Many are called; but, since few choose to be chosen, few are chosen. The rest, say the oriental exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, earn themselves another chance, in circumstances more or less propitious according to their deserts, to take the cosmic intelligence test. If they are saved, their incomplete and undefinitive deliverance is into some paradisal state of freer personal existence, from which (directly or through further incarnations) they may go on to the final release into eternity. If they are lost, their hell is a temporal and temporary condition of thicker darkness and more oppressive bondage to self-will, the root and principle of all evil.
We see, then, that if it is persisted in, the way of emotional religion may lead, indeed, to a great good, but not to the greatest. But the emotional way opens into the way of unitive knowledge, and those who care to go on in this other way are well prepared for their task if they have used the emotional approach without succumbing to the temptations which have beset them on the way. Only the perfectly selfless and enlightened can do good that does not, in some way or other, have to be paid for by actual or potential evils. The religious systems of the world have been built up, in the main, by men and women who were not completely selfless or enlightened. Hence all religions have had their dark and even frightful aspects, while the good they do is rarely gratuitous, but must, in most cases, be paid for, either on the nail or by instalments. The emotion-rousing doctrines and practices, which play so important a part in all the worlds organized religions, are no exception to this rule. They do good, but not gratuitously. The price paid varies according to the nature of the individual worshippers. Some of these choose to wallow in emotionalism and, becoming idolaters of feeling, pay for the good of their religion by a spiritual evil that may actually outweigh that good. Others resist the temptation to self-enhancement and go forward to the mortification of self, including the selfs emotional side, and to the worship of God rather than of their own feelings and fancies about God. The further they go in this direction, the less they have to pay for the good which emotionalism brought them and which, but for emotionalism, most of them might never have had.
1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
common use, a secret or sacred name which is bestowed by the older
men upon him or her soon after birth, and which is known to none but
--
Indian is a sacred thing, not to be divulged by the owner himself
without due consideration. One may ask a warrior of any tribe to
--
4. Names of Kings and other sacred Persons tabooed
WHEN we see that in primitive society the names of mere commoners,
--
harm the names of sacred kings and priests. Thus the name of the
king of Dahomey is always kept secret, lest the knowledge of it
--
of the name of the chief of the tribe, it becomes sacred and may no
longer be used in its ordinary signification as the name of a tree,
--
by a petty chief with his own sacred name. Yet there are tribes and
people who submit to this tyranny of words as their fathers did
--
his life becomes sacred and may not be pronounced under pain of
death. Further, words in the common language which bear any
resemblance to the forbidden name also become sacred and have to be
replaced by others. Persons who uttered these forbidden words were
--
a chief is held so sacred that, when it happens to be a common word,
it may not be used in the language, and another has to be found to
--
by being applied to the vulgar fluid as well as to his sacred
person. This taboo naturally produced a plentiful crop of synonyms
--
anonymous, having lost their old names and acquired new and sacred
titles. From two inscriptions found at Eleusis it appears that the
--
wont, attended by all his company of gods, the sacred serpent stung
him, and the god opened his mouth and cried, and his cry went up to
--
might never be uttered, not even in the sacred rites. A certain
Valerius Soranus, who dared to divulge the priceless secret, was put
1.22 - The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We have then to return to the pursuit of an ancient secret which man, as a race, has seen only obscurely and followed after lamely, has indeed understood only with his surface mind and not in its heart of meaning, and yet in following it lies his social no less than his individual salvation,the ideal of the kingdom of God, the secret of the reign of the Spirit over mind and life and body. It is because they have never quite lost hold of this secret, never disowned it in impatience for a lesser victory, that the older Asiatic nations have survived so persistently and can now, as if immortal, raise their faces towards a new dawn; for they have fallen asleep, but they have not perished. It is true that they have for a time failed in life, where the European nations who trusted to the flesh and the intellect have succeeded; but that success, speciously complete but only for a time, has always turned into a catastrophe. Still Asia had failed in life, she had fallen in the dust, and even if the dust in which she was lying was sacred, as the modern poet of Asia has declared,though the sacredness may be doubted,still the dust is not the proper place for man, nor is to lie prostrate in it his right human attitude. Asia temporarily failed not because she followed after things spiritual, as some console themselves by saying,as if the spirit could be at all a thing of weakness or a cause of weakness,but because she did not follow after the spirit sufficiently, did not learn how entirely to make it the master of life. Her mind either made a gulf and a division between life and the Spirit or else rested in a compromise between them and accepted as final socio-religious systems founded upon that compromise. So to rest is perilous; for the call of the Spirit more than any other demands that we shall follow it always to the end, and the end is neither a divorce and departure nor a compromise, but a conquest of all by the spirit and that reign of the seekers after perfection which, in the Hindu religious symbol, the last Avatar comes to accomplish.
This truth it is important to note, for mistakes made on the path are often even more instructive than the mistakes made by a turning aside from the path. As it is possible to superimpose the intellectual, ethical or aesthetic life or the sum of their motives upon the vital and physical nature, to be satisfied with a partial domination or a compromise, so it is possible to superimpose the spiritual life or some figure of strength or ascendency of spiritual ideas and motives on the mental, vital and physical nature and either to impoverish the latter, to impoverish the vital and physical existence and even to depress the mental as well in order to give the spiritual an easier domination, or else to make a compromise and leave the lower being to its pasture on condition of its doing frequent homage to the spiritual existence, admitting to a certain extent, greater or less, its influence and formally acknowledging it as the last state and the finality of the human being. This is the most that human society has ever done in the past, and though necessarily that must be a stage of the journey, to rest there is to miss the heart of the matter, the one thing needful. Not a humanity leading its ordinary life, what is now its normal round, touched by spiritual influences, but a humanity aspiring whole-heartedly to a law that is now abnormal to it until its whole life has been elevated into spirituality, is the steep way that lies before man towards his perfection and the transformation that it has to achieve.
1.23 - FESTIVAL AT SURENDRAS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Krishna, God Incarnate, lived the years of His boyhood in Vrindvan as a cowherd. He tended His cows on the green meadows along the bank of the Jamuna and played His flute. The milkmaids could not resist the force of His divine attraction. At the sound of His flute they would leave their household duties and go to the bank of the sacred river.
Their love for Krishna destroyed their attachment to worldly things. Neither the threats of their relatives nor the criticism of others could make them desist from seeking the company of Krishna. In the love of the gopis for Krishna there was not the slightest trace of worldliness. It was the innate attraction of God for pure souls, as of the magnet for iron. The author of the Bhagavata has compared this love to the all-consuming love of a woman for her beloved. Before the on rush of that love all barriers between man and God are swept away. The devotee surrenders himself completely to his Divine Beloved and in the end becomes one with Him.
--
During many a moonlit night Krishna would dance with Radha and the gopis in the sacred groves of Vrindvan, and on such occasions the gopis would experience the highest religious ecstasy. At the age of eleven Krishna was called to be the king of Mathura. He left the gopis, promising them, however, His divine vision whenever they concentrated on Him in their hearts.
For centuries and centuries the lovers of God in 1ndia have been worshipping the Divine by recreating in themselves the yearning of the gopis for Krishna. Many of the folk-songs of India have as their theme this sweet episode of Krishna's life. Sri Chaitanya revived this phase of Hindu religious life by his spiritual practice and his divine visions. In his ecstatic music Chaitanya assumed the role of Radha and manifested the longing to be united with Krishna. For a long period Sri Ramakrishna also worshipped God as his beloved Krishna, looking on himself as one of the gopis or as God's handmaid.
--
M: "Yes, sir, that is true. Chaitanya, too, experienced a similar feeling. He mistook a forest for the sacred grove of Vrindvan, and the dark water of the ocean for the blue Jamuna"
MASTER: "Ah! If anyone has but a particle of such prema! What yearning! What love!
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Some days later the youth threw away his sacred thread and appeared before Sri Bhagavan with his limbs shaking, which the young man later described as his Bliss (ananda). Sri Bhagavan told him not to make a habit of sitting in front of Him in the hall and ordered him out. Furthermore He continued: Even a fledgling is protected by the parent birds only till such time it grows its wings. It is not protected for ever. Similarly with devotees. I have shown the way. You must now be able to follow it up and find peace wherever you are.
The young man thinks that Sri Bhagavan gave him upadesa in the following words: The self (i.e. ego) must be subdued by oneself.
--
M.: It has a deep significance. There are 43 corners with sacred syllables in them. Its worship is a method for concentration of mind. The mind is wont to move externally. It must be checked and turned within. Its habit is to dwell on names and forms, for all external objects possess names and forms. Such names and forms are made symbolic mental conceptions in order to divert the mind from external objects and make it dwell within itself. The idols, mantras, yantras, are all meant to give food to the mind in its introvert state, so that It may later become capable of being concentrated, after which the superb state is reached automatically.
20th April, 1937
1.24 - PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
PUNDIT: "How far did you go in visiting the sacred places?"
MASTER: "Oh, I visited a few places. (With a smile) But Hazra went farther and also climbed higher. He visited Hrishikesh, but I didn't go so far or so high.
1.24 - RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith and devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds ba the and from which they have, so to speak, been crystallized out into personalities more or less fully developed, according to the more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. (Of this psychic medium an eminent contemporary philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, has written, in an essay on telepathy contri buted to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, as follows. We must therefore consider seriously the possibility that a persons experience initiates more or less permanent modifications of structure or process in something which is neither his mind nor his brain. There is no reason to suppose that this substratum would be anything to which possessive adjectives, such as mine and yours and his, could properly be applied, as they can be to minds and animated bothes. Modifications which have been produced in the substratum by certain of Ms past experience are activated by Ns present experiences or interests, and they become cause factors in producing or modifying Ns later experiences.) Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent existence, possessing its own derived and secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith and devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something out there, as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith and love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get peoples prayers answered. Ultimately, of course, I alone am the giver, in the sense that all this happens in accordance with the divine laws governing the universe in its psychic and spiritual, no less than in its material, aspects. Nevertheless, the devas (those imperfect forms under which, because of their own voluntary ignorance, men worship the divine Ground) may be thought of as relatively independent powers. The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith and devotion lose their intensity, the devas sicken and finally the. Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints and Virgins and relics have lost the power and the second-hand psychic objectivity which they once possessed. Thus, when Chaucer lived and wrote, the deva called Thomas Becket was giving to any Canterbury pilgrim, who had sufficient faith, all the boons he could ask for. This once-powerful deity is now stone-dead; but there are still certain churches in the West, certain mosques and temples in the East, where even the most irreligious and un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely numinous presence. It would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that this presence is the presence of that God who is a Spirit and must be worshipped in spirit; it is rather the psychic presence of mens thoughts and feelings about the particular, limited form of God, to which they have resorted according to the impulse of their inborn naturethoughts and feelings projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts and feeling of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime. The presence in these consecrated buildings, the presence evoked by the performance of traditional rites, the presence inherent in a sacramental object, name or formulaall these are real presences, but real presences, not of God or the Avatar, but of something which, though it may reflect the divine Reality, is yet less and other than it.
Dulcis Jesu memoria
1.24 - The Killing of the Divine King, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
would seem to be the worship which they pay to their sacred or
divine kings, whether dead or alive. These are believed to be
--
eight years the king's sacred powers needed to be renewed by
intercourse with the godhead, and that without such a renewal he
1.25 - On the destroyer of the passions, most sublime humility, which is rooted in spiritual feeling., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
4. The appearance of this sacred vine is one thing during the winter of the passions, another in the spring of fruit-blossom, yet another in the actual harvest of the virtues. Yet all these different stages concur in gladness and fruit-bearing, and therefore they all have their own signs and sure evidence of fruit to come. For as soon as the cluster of holy humility begins to blossom within us, we at once begin, though with an effort, to hate all human glory and praise, and to banish from ourselves irritation and anger. In proportion as this queen of virtues makes progress in our soul by spiritual growth, so we regard all the good deeds accomplished by us as nothing, or rather as an abomination, assuming that
1 St. John Chrysostom says: The gifts of God are so great that people can scarcely ever believe it. And it is not surprising if they cannot understand them till they know by experience. (On 1 Timothy, Homily 4.)
1.25 - SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In India the repetition of the divine name or the mantram (a short devotional or doctrinal affirmation) is called japam and is a favourite spiritual exercise among all the sects of Hinduism and Buddhism. The shortest mantram is OMa spoken sym bol that concentrates within itself the whole Vedanta philosophy. To this and other mantrams Hindus attribute a kind of magical power. The repetition of them is a sacramental act, conferring grace ex opere operato. A similar efficacity was and indeed still is attri buted to sacred words and formulas by Buddhists, Moslems, Jews and Christians. And, of course, just as traditional religious rites seem to possess the power to evoke the real presence of existents projected into psychic objectivity by the faith and devotion of generations of worshippers, so too long-hallowed words and phrases may become channels for conveying powers other and greater than those belonging to the individual who happens at the moment to be pronouncing them. And meanwhile the constant repetition of this word GOD or this word LOVE may, in favourable circumstances, have a profound effect upon the subconscious mind, inducing that selfless one-pointedness of will and thought and feeling, without which the unitive knowledge of God is impossible. Furthermore, it may happen that, if the word is simply repeated all whole, and not broken up or undone by discursive analysis, the Fact for which the word stands will end by presenting itself to the soul in the form of an integral intuition. When this happens, the doors of the letters of this word are opened (to use the language of the Sufis) and the soul passes through into Reality. But though all this may happen, it need not necessarily happen. For there is no spiritual patent medicine, no pleasant and infallible panacea for souls suffering from separateness and the deprivation of God. No, there is no guaranteed cure; and, if used improperly, the medicine of spiritual exercises may start a new disease or aggravate the old. For example, a mere mechanical repetition of the divine name can result in a kind of numbed stupefaction that is as much below analytical thought as intellectual vision is above it. And because the sacred word constitutes a kind of prejudgment of the experience induced by its repetition, this stupefaction, or some other abnormal state, is taken to be the imme thate awareness of Reality and is idolatrously cultivated and hunted after, with a turning of the will towards what is supposed to be God before there has been a turning of it away from the self.
The dangers which beset the practicer of japam, who is insufficiently mortified and insufficiently recollected and aware, are encountered in the same or different forms by those who make use of more elaborate spiritual exercises. Intense concentration on an image or idea, such as is recommended by many teachers, both Eastern and Western, may be very helpful for certain persons in certain circumstances, very harmful in other cases. It is helpful when the concentration results in such mental stillness, such a silence of intellect, will and feeling, that the divine Word can be uttered within the soul. It is harmful when the image concentrated upon becomes so hallucinatingly real that it is taken for objective Reality and idolatrously worshipped; harmful, too, when the exercise of concentration produces unusual psycho-physical results, in which the person experiencing them takes a personal pride, as being special graces and divine communications. Of these unusual psycho-physical occurrences the most ordinary are visions and auditions, foreknowledge, telepathy and other psychic powers, and the curious bodily phenomenon of intense neat. Many persons who practise concentration exercises experience this heat occasionally. A number of Christian saints, of whom the best known are St. Philip Neri and St. Catherine of Siena, have experienced it continuously. In the East techniques have been developed whereby the accession of heat resulting from intense concentration can be regulated, controlled and put to do useful work, such as keeping the contemplative warm in freezing weather. In Europe, where the phenomenon is not well understood, many would-be contemplatives have experienced this heat, and have imagined it to be some special divine favour, or even the experience of union, and being insufficiently mortified and humble, have fallen into idolatry and a God-eclipsing spiritual pride.
--
In other words intense concentration on any image (even if the image be a sacred symbol, like the lotus) or on any idea, from the idea of hell to the idea of some desirable virtue or its apotheosis in one of the divine attri butes, is always concentration on something produced by ones own mind. Sometimes, in mortified and recollected persons, the act of concentration merges into the state of openness and alert passivity, in which true contemplation becomes possible. But sometimes the fact that the concentration is on a product of the concentrators own mind results in some kind of false or incomplete contemplation. Suchness, or the divine Ground of all being, reveals itself to those in whom there is no ego-centredness (nor even any alter-ego-centredness) either of will, imagination, feeling or intellect.
I say, then, that introversion must be rejected, because extraversion must never be admitted; but one must live continuously in the abyss of the divine Essence and in the nothingness of things; and if at times a man finds himself separated from them (the divine Essence and created nothingness) he must return to them, not by introversion, but by annihilation.
--
Benet of Canfield, the English Capuchin who wrote The Rule of Perfection and was the spiritual guide of Mme. Acarie and Cardinal Brulle, hints in his treatise at a method by which concentration on an image may be made to lead up to imageless contemplation, blind beholding, love of the pure divinity. The period of mental prayer is to begin with intense concentration on a scene of Christs passion; then the mind is, as it were, to abolish this imagination of the sacred humanity and to pass from it to the formless and attri buteless Godhead which that humanity incarnates. A strikingly similar exercise is described in the Bardo Thdol or Tibetan Book of the Dead (a work of quite extraordinary profundity and beauty, now fortunately available in translation with a valuable introduction and notes by Dr. Evans-Wentz).
Whosoever thy tutelary deity may be, meditate upon the form for much timeas being apparent, yet non-existent in reality, like a form produced by a magician. Then let the visualization of the tutelary deity melt away from the extremities, till nothing at all remaineth visible of it; and put thyself in the state of the Clearness and the Voidnesswhich thou canst not conceive as something and abide in that state for a little while. Again meditate upon the tutelary deity; again meditate upon the Clear Light; do this alternately. Afterwards allow thine own intellect to melt away gradually, beginning from the extremities.
--
We come now to what may be called the spiritual exercises of daily life. The problem, here, is simple enoughhow to keep oneself reminded, during the hours of work and recreation, that there is a good deal more to the universe than that which meets the eye of one absorbed in business or pleasure? There is no single solution to this problem. Some kinds of work and recreation are so simple and unexactive that they permit of continuous repetition of sacred name or phrase, unbroken thought about divine Reality, or, what is still better, uninterrupted mental silence and alert passivity. Such occupations as were the daily task of Brother Lawrence (whose practice of the presence of God has enjoyed a kind of celebrity in circles otherwise completely uninterested in mental prayer or spiritual exercises) were almost all of this simple and unexacting kind. But there are other tasks too complex to admit of this constant recollectedness. Thus, to quote Eckhart, a celebrant of the mass who is over-intent on recollection is liable to make mistakes. The best way is to try to concentrate the mind before and afterwards, but, when saying it, to do so quite straightforwardly. This advice applies to any occupation demanding undivided attention. But undivided attention is seldom demanded and is with difficulty sustained for long periods at a stretch. There are always intervals of relaxation. Everyone is free to choose whether these intervals shall be filled with day-dreaming or with something better.
Whoever has God in mind, simply and solely God, in all things, such a man carries God with him into all his works and into all places, and God alone does all his works. He seeks nothing but God, nothing seems good to him but God. He becomes one with God in every thought. Just as no multiplicity can dissipate God, so nothing can dissipate this man or make him multiple.
1.26 - FESTIVAL AT ADHARS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. Balarm and several other devotees got into a country boat to return to Calcutta. It was ebb-tide in the Ganges. A gentle breeze was blowing from the south, covering the bosom of the sacred river with ripples.
M. looked at the scene a long time. As the boat disappeared in the direction of Calcutta, he came back to the Master.
--
Presently the Master left them, going in the direction of the pine-trees. After a few minutes M. and Ltu, standing in the Panchavati, saw the Master coming back toward them. Behind him the sky was black with the rain-cloud. Its reflection in the Ganges made the water darker. The disciples felt that the Master was God Incarnate, a Divine Child five years old, radiant with the smile of innocence and purity. Around him were the sacred trees of the Panchavati under which he had practised spiritual discipline and had beheld visions of God. At his feet flowed the sacred river Ganges, the destroyer of man's sins. The presence of this God-man charged the trees, shrubs, flowers, plants, and temples with spiritual fervour and divine joy.
Sri Ramakrishna returned to his room and sat on the small couch. He began to praise a medicine that a certain brahmachari had prepared for him. Referring to this man, Hazra said: "He is now entangled in many worldly anxieties. What a shame! Look at Nabai Chaitanya of Konnagar. Though a householder, he has put on a red cloth."
--
Adhar and M. returned to the Master's room. Adhar had been to Chittagong, in East Bengal, on official duty. He was telling the Master about his visit to the Chandranath Hills and Sitakunda, sacred places of Chittagong.
ADHAR: "Near Sitakunda I visited a well where I saw fire in the water. It is always burning on the water with leaping tongues."
1.26 - Sacrifice of the Kings Son, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
in a sacred grove of Ares. Meanwhile at home an oracle had commanded
that King Athamas himself should be sacrificed as an expiatory
1.27 - AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"According to the akti cult the siddha is called a koul, and according to the Vednta, a paramahamsa. The Bauls call him a sai. They say, 'No one is greater than a sai.' The sai is a man of supreme perfection. He doesn't see any differentiation in the world. He wears a necklace, one half made of cow bones and the other of the sacred tulsi-plant. He calls the Ultimate Truth 'lekh', the 'Incomprehensible One'. The Vedas call It 'Brahman'.
About the jivas the Bauls say, 'They come from lekh and they go unto lekh.'
--
Yet, when I chant Thy sacred name, alas! my poor heart quakes with fright.
I spend my life a slave to sin; how can I find a refuge, then, O Lord, within Thy holy way?
1.27 - Guido da Montefeltro. His deception by Pope Boniface VIII., #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
Nor the high office, nor the sacred orders,
In him regarded, nor in me that cord
1.27 - Succession to the Soul, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
appears designed to convey to him the same sacred and worshipful
spirit which animated all his predecessors, one after the other, on
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Some days later the youth threw away his sacred thread and appeared before Sri Bhagavan with his limbs shaking, which the young man later described as his Bliss (ananda). Sri Bhagavan told him not to make a habit of sitting in front of Him in the hall and ordered him out. Furthermore He continued: Even a fledgling is protected by the parent birds only till such time it grows its wings. It is not protected for ever. Similarly with devotees. I have shown the way. You must now be able to follow it up and find peace wherever you are.
273
1.30 - Adonis in Syria, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was sacred to
him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a little
--
year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So
year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while
1.31 - Adonis in Cyprus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the goddess the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry. The sacred
precinct was crowded with women waiting to observe the custom. Some
--
was served by a multitude of sacred harlots at Comana in Pontus, and
crowds of men and women flocked to her sanctuary from the
--
of Pygmalion points to a ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the
king wedded the image of Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that
--
with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple, who played
Astarte to his Adonis. If that was so, there is more truth than has
--
perhaps all sanctuaries of the great Asiatic goddess where sacred
prostitution was practised, might be well stocked with human
1.32 - The Ritual of Adonis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
roses; the cruel thorns tore her tender flesh, and her sacred blood
dyed the white roses for ever red. It would be idle, perhaps, to lay
1.33 - The Gardens of Adonis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the Redeemer. Such sacred dramas are well fitted to impress the
lively imagination and to stir the warm feelings of a susceptible
--
defiling the sacred spot. In this he may have been mistaken. If
Adonis was indeed, as I have argued, the spirit of the corn, a more
1.34 - The Myth and Ritual of Attis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred city
Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which embodied the mighty
--
the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis,
in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of
--
great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was entrusted
to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a corpse with
--
bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood.
The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and
--
and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to
Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed
--
priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his
festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of Blood
--
too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with
impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of conspirators thought to
--
image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the stream. On
returning from their bath, the wain and the oxen were strewn with
--
defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism the devotee,
crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit,
1.35 - Attis as a God of Vegetation, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
stooped to meet it. For the same reason, perhaps, ivy was sacred to
Attis; at all events, we read that his eunuch priests were tattooed
--
into the sacred vaults of Demeter for the purpose of quickening the
ground and the wombs of women.
1.35 - The Tao 2, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
When I walked across China in 1905-6, I was fully armed and accoutred by the above qualifications to attack the till-then-insoluble problem of the Chinese conception of religious truth. Practical studies of the psychology of such Mongolians as I had met in my travels, had already suggested to me that their acentric conception of the universe might represent the correspondence in consciousness of their actual psychological characteristics. I was therefore prepared to examine the doctrines of their religious and philosophic Masters without prejudice such as had always rendered nugatory the efforts of missionary sinologists; indeed, all oriental scholars with the single exception of Rhys Davids. Until his time, translators had invariable assumed, with absurd naivt, or (more often) arrogant bigotry, that a Chinese writer must be putting forth either a more or less distorted and degraded variation of some Christian conception, or utterly puerile absurdities. Even so great a man as Max Mller, in his introduction to the Upanishads, seems only half inclined to admit that the apparent triviality and folly of many passages in these so-called sacred writings might owe their appearance to our ignorance of the historical and religious circumstances, a knowledge of which would render them intelligible.
During my solitary wanderings among the mountainous wastes of Yun Nan, the spiritual atmosphere of China penetrated my consciousness, thanks to the absence of any intellectual impertinences from the organ of knowledge. The Tao Teh King revealed its simplicity and sublimity to my soul, little by little, as the conditions of my physical, no less than of my spiritual life, penetrated the sanctuaries of my spirit. The philosophy of Lao Tze communicated itself to me, in despite of the persistent efforts of my mind to compel it to conform with my preconceived notions of what the text must mean. This process, having thus taken root in my innermost intuition during those tremendous months of wandering Yun Nan, grew continually throughout succeeding years. Whenever I found myself able once more to withdraw myself from the dissipations and distractions which contact with civilization forces upon a man, no matter how vigorously he may struggle against their insolence, to the sacred solitude of he desert, whether among the sierras of Spain or the sands of the Sahara, I found that the philosophy of Lao Tze resumed its sway upon my soul, subtler and stronger on each successive occasion.
But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people. It was therefore during my exile in America that the doctrines of Lao Tze developed most rapidly in my soul, ever forcing their way outwards until I felt it imperious, nay inevitable, to express them in terms of conscious thought.
1.36 - Human Representatives of Attis, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
rites, and died a violent death on her sacred tree, the pine, may we
not detect a close resemblance to Attis, the favourite shepherd or
--
hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree, and that this
barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated into the form in which it
--
were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human
victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to death by hanging or
--
annually hanged in effigy in her sacred grove of Condylea among the
Arcadian hills, and there accordingly she went by the name of the
--
year by year on the sacred but fatal tree.
1.38 - The Myth of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Osiris. But the sacred bulls, the one called Apis and the other
Mnevis, were dedicated to Osiris, and it was ordained that they
1.38 - Woman - Her Magical Formula, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Obey my prophet! follow out the ordeals of my knowledge! seek me only! Then the joys of my love will redeem ye from all pain. This is so: I swear it by the vault of my body; by my sacred heart and tongue; by all I can give, by all I desire of ye all. [32]
...the Law is for all. [34]
1.39 - Prophecy, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Now then this two-in-One letter Moon symbol = old style capital SigmaSun symbol = capital Theta, is the third Key to this Law; and on the discovery of that fact, after years of constant seeking, what sudden splendours of Truth, sacred as secret, blazed in the midnight of my mind! Observe now; "...this circle squared in its failure is a key also."[75] Now I knew that in the value of the letters ALHIM,[76] 'the Gods', the Jews had concealed a not quite correct value of , the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, to 4 places of decimals: 3.1415; nearer would be 3.1416. If I prefix our Key, 31 putting Sun and Moon conjoined, Set or Satan, before the old Gods, I get 3.141593, correct to six places, Six being my own number and that of Horus the Sun.[77]
And one more, this time an actual prediction.
1.39 - The Ritual of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed by
the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god her husband.
--
beginning of the sacred Egyptian year, and was regularly celebrated
by a festival which did not shift with the shifting official year.
--
cows were sacred to her, and she was regularly depicted with the
horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman with the head of a
--
probable that the boy who figured in the sacred drama played the
part, not of Osiris, but of his son Horus; but as the death and
1.400 - 1.450 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: It has a deep significance. There are 43 corners with sacred syllables in them. Its worship is a method for concentration of mind. The mind is wont to move externally. It must be checked and turned within. Its habit is to dwell on names and forms, for all external objects possess names and forms. Such names and forms are made symbolic mental conceptions in order to divert the mind from external objects and make it dwell within itself. The idols, mantras, yantras, are all meant to give food to the mind in its introvert state, so that It may later become capable of being concentrated, after which the superb state is reached automatically.
395
--
II. THONDARADIPODI (Bhaktanghrirenu) ALWAR: One who delights in the dust of the feet of devotees. A devotee (of this name) was keeping a plot of land in which he grew tulasi, the sacred basil, made garlands of it, and supplied the same to the God in the temple.
He remained a bachelor and was respected for his life and conduct.
1.40 - The Nature of Osiris, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
was sacred to him, and was called his plant because it is always
green.
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
II. THONDARADIPODI (Bhaktanghrirenu) ALWAR: One who delights in the dust of the feet of devotees. A devotee (of this name) was keeping a plot of land in which he grew tulasi, the sacred basil, made garlands of it, and supplied the same to the God in the temple.
He remained a bachelor and was respected for his life and conduct.
--
D.: Is it to sit silent or to read sacred books or to concentrate the mind?
Bhakti helps concentration. People fall at the feet of the bhakta. If it does not happen he feels disappointed and his bhakti fades.
--
A visitor asked Sri Bhagavan: People give some names to God and say that the name is sacred and repetitions of the name bestow merit on the individual. Can it be true?
M.: Why not? You bear a name to which you answer. But your body was not born with that name written on it, nor did it say to anyone that it bore such and such a name. And yet a name is given to you and you answer to that name, because you have identified yourself
--
Shiyali. He left the boy on the bank of the sacred tank and went in to bathe. As he dipped in the water the boy, not finding his father, began to cry out. Immediately Siva and Parvati appeared in a vimana. Siva told Parvati to feed the boy with her milk. So she drew out milk in a cup and handed it to the boy. He drank it and was happy.
The father as he came out of the water saw the boy smiling and with streaks of milk round his lips. So he asked the boy what happened to him. The boy did not answer. He was threatened and the boy sang songs. They were hymns in praise of Siva who appeared before him.
--
The arrogant minister was kept informed of all the happenings by spies of his own. He tried to foil the other ministers. He waited for the king to come out of the palace so that he might report himself to the king. On one occasion he climbed up a tree, hid himself among the branches and awaited the king. The king came out that night in the palanquin and the man in hiding jumped down in front of the palanquin and shouted his identity. The companion of the king was equally resourceful. He at once took out a handful of sacred ashes (vibhuti) from his pocket and scattered it in the air so that the king was obliged to close his eyes. The companion shouted victory (jai) to the king and ordered the band to play so that the other mans shout was drowned in the noise. He also ordered the palanquin-bearers to move fast and he himself sang incantations to keep off evil spirits. The king was thus left under the impression that the dead mans ghost was playing pranks with him.
The disappointed man became desperate and retired into the forest for tapasya (austerities). After a long time the king happened to go hunting. He came across the former minister seated in deep contemplation. But he hastened away from the spot lest the ghost should molest him.
--
Sanandana, Sanathkumara and Sanatsujata. They asked their creator why they were brought into existence. Brahma said: I must create the universe. But I want to go to do tapas for realising the Self. You are brought forth in order that you may create the universe. That will be by multiplying yourselves. They did not like the idea. They wondered why they should take the trouble on themselves. It is natural for one to seek the source. They therefore wanted to regain their source and be happy. So they did not obey the commands of Brahma but left him. They desired guidance for realisation of the Self. They were the best equipped individuals for Self-Realisation. Guidance should be only from the best of Masters. Who could it be but Siva - the yogiraja. Siva appeared before them sitting under the sacred banyan tree. Being yogiraja should
He practise yoga? He went into samadhi as He sat; He was in Perfect
--
Ram. An orthodox priest was shocked at the unholy mention of the sacred name and so reprimanded him and ordered him to be silent when he answered calls of nature.
Tukaram said, All right! and remained mute. But at once there arose the name of Rama from every pore of Tukaram and the priest was horrified by the din. He then prayed to Tukaram
--
Dr. Emile Gatheir, S. J., Professor of Philosophy at the sacred Heart
College, Shembaganur, Kodaikanal, asked: Can you kindly give me
--
M.: It means studying the sacred lore.
D.: But there is the special virtue of the Gurus presence.
--
of being with the Guru, studying the sacred books and worshipping
God with forms, and by these awakening is attained.
--
Kaundinya was another rishi for whose sake the sacred river began to
flow there. It goes by the name of the rishi i.e., Kaundinya river which
--
The village had a sacred tank in front of the temple, which was the
spot of the eddy created by the spear of Siva. Even now the waters in
1.43 - Dionysus, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred
rites. His tragic story is thus told by the poet Nonnus. Zeus in the
--
to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of
flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god
--
that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred
rites, and the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces,
--
on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal
or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only
exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to
1.43 - The Holy Guardian Angel is not the Higher Self but an Objective Individual, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
It it were not so, there would be no point in The sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
Apart from any theoretical speculation, my Sammasiti and analytical work has never led to so much as a hint of the existence of the Guardian Angel. He is not to be found by any exploration of oneself. It is true that the process of analysis leads finally to the realization of oneself as no more than a point of view indistinguishable in itself from any other point of view; but the Holy Guardian Angel is in precisely the same position. However close may be the identities in millions of ways, no complete identification is ever obtainable.
1.44 - Demeter and Persephone, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Celeus himself, and moreover she revealed to them her sacred rites
and mysteries. Blessed, says the poet, is the mortal man who has
--
of Demeter and Persephone was acted as a sacred drama in the
mysteries of Eleusis.
1.44 - Serious Style of A.C., or the Apparent Frivolity of Some of my Remarks, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
It is all difficult, dammed difficult; but if it must be that one's most sacred shrine be profaned, let it be the clean assault of laughter rather than the slimy smear of sactimoniousness!
There, or thereabouts, we must leave it. "Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh;" and I cannot sing the words of an epithalamium to the music of a dirge.
1.450 - 1.500 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Is it to sit silent or to read sacred books or to concentrate the mind?
Bhakti helps concentration. People fall at the feet of the bhakta. If it does not happen he feels disappointed and his bhakti fades.
1.47 - Lityerses, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
wooden post in a sacred grove, dance wildly round it with brandished
knives, then, falling on the living animal, hack it to shreds and
--
taking very good aim. Soon the sacred grove, so lately a scene of
tumult, is silent and deserted except for a few people who remain to
1.49 - Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
herself in animal form. The pig was sacred to her; in art she was
portrayed carrying or accompanied by a pig; and the pig was
--
chasms of Demeter and Persephone," which appear to have been sacred
caverns or vaults. In these caverns or vaults there were said to be
--
Certainly the pig ranked as a sacred animal among the Syrians. At
the great religious metropolis of Hierapolis on the Euphrates pigs
--
and eating of an animal implies that the animal is sacred, and that,
as a general rule, it is spared.
--
supposition that the pig was sacred; neither rule must, and one rule
cannot, be explained on the supposition that the pig was unclean.
--
originally sacred; the reason for not eating them was that they were
divine.
--
explained except by the supposition that the pig was a sacred animal
which was eaten sacramentally by his worshippers once a year.
The view that in Egypt the pig was sacred is borne out by the very
facts which, to moderns, might seem to prove the contrary. Thus the
--
about the animals and plants which they deem most sacred. Thus in
the island of Wetar (between New Guinea and Celebes) people believe
--
examples prove that the eating of a sacred animal is often believed
to produce leprosy or other skin-diseases; so far, therefore, they
support the view that the pig must have been sacred in Egypt, since
the effect of drinking its milk was believed to be leprosy.
--
after reading the sacred scriptures. Before coming forth from the
tabernacle after the sin-offering, the high priest had to wash
--
touching sacred objects. Various ceremonies were performed for the
purpose of removing this contagion. We have seen, for example, how
in Tonga a man who happened to touch a sacred chief, or anything
personally belonging to him, had to perform a certain ceremony
--
with a sacred object in New Zealand. In short, primitive man
believes that what is sacred is dangerous; it is pervaded by a sort
of electrical sanctity which communicates a shock to, even if it
--
inflammation of the eyes. Yet the crocodile is their most sacred
object; they call it their father, swear by it, and celebrate it in
their festivals. The goat is the sacred animal of the Madenassana
Bushmen; yet "to look upon it would be to render the man for the
--
on a different footing from the ordinary sacred animals whose
worships were purely local. But whatever the original relation of
--
a certain length of time which was prescribed by the sacred books,
and on the expiry of which he was drowned in a holy spring. The
--
excluding horses from his sacred grove. For myth changes while
custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did
--
exclusion it might be inferred that horses could not be the sacred
animals or embodiments of the god of the grove. But the inference
would be rash. The goat was at one time a sacred animal or
embodiment of Athena, as may be inferred from the practice of
--
this was that the goat injured the olive, the sacred tree of Athena.
So far, therefore, the relation of the goat to Athena is parallel to
--
in Egypt rams were sacred and were not sacrificed. But on one day in
the year a ram was killed, and its skin was placed on the statue of
--
inhabitants of two wards--the sacred Way and the Subura--contended
with each other who should get the head. If the people of the sacred
Way got it, they fastened it to a wall of the king's house; if the
--
is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition that the sacred
grove of Aricia, like the Field of Mars at Rome, may have been the
1.50 - Eating the God, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the new fruits. The public or sacred square was carefully swept of
even the smallest crumbs of previous feasts, "for fear of polluting
--
quantity of the old year's food to the outside of the sacred square.
These provisions were then fetched in and set before the famished
--
round the sacred arbour, under which burned the new fire. The
ceremonies lasted eight days, during which the strictest continence
--
circles, danced round the sacred fire. Lastly, all the people
smeared themselves with white clay and bathed in running water. They
--
from fear of polluting the sacred food in their stomachs by contact
with common food; but the third day they hold a great feast.
--
thereby to prevent the sacred food from being polluted by contact
with common food in the stomach of the eater. For the same reason
1.51 - Homeopathic Magic of a Flesh Diet, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
not to touch it with their hands, as it is considered sacred; it is
cut up in small pieces and eaten raw, the bits being conveyed to the
1.52 - Family - Public Enemy No. 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The one serious grimoire of the Middle Ages is The Book of the sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. He makes no bone about it. He even condescends to point out the family as the most serious of all the obstacles to the performance of the Operation, and he gives the correct psychological reasons why this should be so. You said it yourself! "Family pressure" was your pungent and pertinent expression. Just so.
I think that "family" should include any body of persons with common interests which they expect or wish you to share. One's old school or university, the regiment, the golf club, the business, the party, the country: any of these may dislike very much your absorption in affairs alien to their own. But the family is the classic type, because its pull is so potent and persistent. It began when you gave your first yell; your personality is deliberately wrenched and distorted to the family code; and their zoology is so inadequate that they always feel sure that their Ugly Duckling is a Black Sheep. Even for their Fool they find a use: he can be invaluable in the Church of in the Army, where docile incompetence is the sure key to advancement.
--
In the Brahmin caste, the aspirant to Yoga makes it a rule to fulfill his duties to the family and the State; once those jobs are definitely done, he cuts the painter, and becomes Sannyasi. Many a Maharajah, many a Wazir, to say nothing of less responsible people, plan their lives from their earliest days of wearing the sacred Cord as Brahmacharyi, with these ambitions carefully mapped out; and when the right moment comes for him to disappear into the jungle the rest is Silence.
A sound scheme: that is, provided that one has full confidence in the General Theory. But we Caucasians happen not to believe in the Vedas, at least not in the dyed-in-the-wool sense which comes natural to the budding Brahmin; as to "our own" why our own? scriptures, no intelligent person takes them seriously any more. Some folk whittle away merrily, and fashion a Saviour in their own images; others strain the text and concoct a symbolic interpretation which is more or less satisfying as can be done with any bunch of legends. But such devices leave us without Accepted Authority, and without that nobody is going to gamble away his life. Thus the Path for men of spiritual integrity begins with absolute scepticism. Our methods must be exclusively inductive.
1.52 - Killing the Divine Animal, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
1. Killing the sacred Buzzard
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that many communities which have
--
2. Killing the sacred Ram
THE RUDE Californian rite which we have just considered has a close
--
buried it in a sacred tomb. The custom was explained by a story that
Zeus had once exhibited himself to Hercules clad in the fleece and
--
3. Killing the sacred Serpent
WEST AFRICA appears to furnish another example of the annual killing
of a sacred animal and the preservation of its skin. The negroes of
Issapoo, in the island of Fernando Po, regard the cobra-capella as
--
4. Killing the sacred Turtles
IN THE CALIFORNIAN, Egyptian, and Fernando Po customs the worship of
--
infer that he had formed one of the sacred embassy.
"'So you went to Ka-thlu-el-lon, did you?' I asked.
--
spoon, and drinking-cup, and grabbing from a sacred meal-bowl whole
handfuls of the contents, hurriedly followed the turtle about the
--
bring "their otherselves, the tortoises," from the sacred lake
Kothluwalawa, to which the souls of the dead are believed to repair.
--
5. Killing the sacred Bear
DOUBT also hangs at first sight over the meaning of the
--
are set up on sacred posts outside the huts, and are treated with
much respect: libations of millet beer, and of _sake,_ an
--
are also fastened to the sacred posts outside the huts; they are
regarded as charms against evil spirits, and are consulted as
--
described as a sacred animal of the Aino, nor yet as a totem; for
they do not call themselves bears, and they kill and eat the animal
--
comforts it by assuring the animal that many of the sacred whittled
sticks (_inao_) and plenty of cakes and wine will be sent with it on
--
long pole beside the sacred wands (_inao_) outside of the house,
where it remains till nothing but the bare white skull is left.
--
the house-god in his sacred corner of the hut. Meanwhile the
housewife, who had nursed the bear, sat by herself, silent and sad,
--
libations were offered at the _inao_ (_inabos_) or sacred wands
which stand outside of an Aino hut. These wands are about a couple
--
bear was taken before the sacred wands, a stick was put in his
mouth, nine men knelt on him and pressed his neck against a beam. In
--
the cage, but in front of the sacred wands. At this dance the old
women, who had been merry a moment before, again shed tears freely.
--
a pole beside the sacred wands. The stick with which the bear had
been gagged was also fastened to the pole, and so were the sword and
--
off his head and paws and keep them as sacred things. A banquet on
the flesh and blood of the bear follows. Women were formerly
--
bear's flesh, and the fire must be kindled by a sacred apparatus of
flint and steel, which belongs to the clan and is handed down from
--
the dogs and also by the souls of the sacred whittled sticks, which
figure prominently at the festival.
1.53 - Mother-Love, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
But in "refined" strata? That cock won't fight, O thou Aspirant to the sacred Wisdom! It's very often worse; for under the anaesthetic, the most delicately-minded ladies of high social position and religious repute are apt to pour forth floods of filth which would disgust the coarsest harridans of slum-land!
This is the final fact: so long as our life is bound to that of the animal and vegetable worlds, so that we are bondslaves born to their quite ineradicable habits, so long are we dragged back from every flight of fancy or imagination such as would break the chains that anchor us to mud.
1.53 - The Propitation of Wild Animals By Hunters, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
should the alligator take a human life, revenge becomes a sacred
duty of the living relatives, who will trap the man-eater in the
--
eats some of it, and with the rest kindles the sacred fire in the
sweating house. "No Indian may take a salmon before this dance is
1.54 - Types of Animal Sacrament, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
with the eating of a sacred substance, since the perjured person
cannot possibly escape the avenging god whom he has taken into his
--
certain degree held sacred" and "is treated with great kindness,
even with a degree of adoration, by the people." They never eat the
--
wood, where it is killed with a club made from the sacred tree of
the Todas (the _Millingtonia_). A sacred fire having been made by
the rubbing of sticks, the flesh of the calf is roasted on the
--
to show that the lamb slain is a sacred or divine animal, whose
death is mourned by his worshippers, just as the death of the sacred
buzzard was mourned by the Californians and the death of the Theban
--
2. Processions with sacred Animals
THE FORM of communion in which the sacred animal is taken from house
to house, that all may enjoy a share of its divine influence, has
--
with the sacred snake is observed by a Snake tribe in the Punjaub.
Once a year in the month of September the snake is worshipped by all
1.550 - 1.600 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
The arrogant minister was kept informed of all the happenings by spies of his own. He tried to foil the other ministers. He waited for the king to come out of the palace so that he might report himself to the king. On one occasion he climbed up a tree, hid himself among the branches and awaited the king. The king came out that night in the palanquin and the man in hiding jumped down in front of the palanquin and shouted his identity. The companion of the king was equally resourceful. He at once took out a handful of sacred ashes (vibhuti) from his pocket and scattered it in the air so that the king was obliged to close his eyes. The companion shouted victory ('jai') to the king and ordered the band to play so that the other man's shout was drowned in the noise. He also ordered the palanquin-bearers to move fast and he himself sang incantations to keep off evil spirits. The king was thus left under the impression that the dead man's ghost was playing pranks with him.
The disappointed man became desperate and retired into the forest for tapasya (austerities). After a long time the king happened to go hunting. He came across the former minister seated in deep contemplation. But he hastened away from the spot lest the ghost should molest him.
--
Sanandana, Sanathkumara and Sanatsujata. They asked their creator why they were brought into existence. Brahma said: "I must create the universe. But I want to go to do tapas for realising the Self. You are brought forth in order that you may create the universe. That will be by multiplying yourselves." They did not like the idea. They wondered why they should take the trouble on themselves. It is natural for one to seek the source. They therefore wanted to regain their source and be happy. So they did not obey the commands of Brahma but left him. They desired guidance for realisation of the Self. They were the best equipped individuals for Self-Realisation. Guidance should be only from the best of Masters. Who could it be but Siva - the yogiraja. Siva appeared before them sitting under the sacred banyan tree. Being yogiraja should
546
--
Ram". An orthodox priest was shocked at the unholy mention of the sacred name and so reprimanded him and ordered him to be silent when he answered calls of nature.
Tukaram said, "All right!" and remained mute. But at once there arose the name of Rama from every pore of Tukaram and the priest was horrified by the din. He then prayed to Tukaram
1.55 - The Transference of Evil, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
may take the pestilence on itself. Then they strangle it in a sacred
place and imagine that they have rid themselves of the camel and of
--
as a dedicated sacred animal." The idea of this ceremony is, that
the sins of the deceased enter the calf, or that the task of his
--
his limbs in a sacred well hard by, dropped fourpence into it as an
offering, walked thrice round the well, and thrice repeated the
1.57 - Public Scapegoats, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
possesses a sacred cow. When the country is threatened with war,
famine, or any other public calamity, the chiefs of the village
require a particular family to surrender their sacred cow to serve
as a scapegoat. The animal is driven by the women to the brink of
--
originally all cattle, bulls as well as cows, were held sacred by
the Egyptians. For not only were all cows esteemed holy by them and
--
bulls were originally, as cows were always, esteemed sacred by the
Egyptians, and that the slain bull upon whose head they laid the
--
in the jungle, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain and
maintained him in luxury for a year. At the end of the year he was
--
given dexterity, advanced from the crowd and thrust a sacred spear
into the victim's side, piercing his heart. From the manner in which
1.58 - Do Angels Ever Cut Themselves Shaving?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
On one occasion the following experiment was carried out. A certain Adept was to make use of the sacred Vapour, and when the time seemed ripe, to answer such questions as should be put to him by his Scribe. Presently, after about an hour's silence, the Scribe asked: "Is communication possible?"
But this he meant merely to enquire whether it would now be in order for him to begin to ask his prepared list of questions.
1.58 - Human Scapegoats in Classical Antiquity, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred
garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole city,
1.59 - Killing the God in Mexico, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
had been spread in profusion on the floor of the sacred chamber.
While she stood there all the elders and nobles came in a line, one
--
Lastly, the concluding act of the sacred drama, in which the body of
the dead Maize Goddess was flayed and her skin worn, together with
all her sacred insignia, by a man who danced before the people in
this grim attire, seems to be best explained on the hypothesis that
1.60 - Between Heaven and Earth, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
I am right, was one of those sacred kings or human divinities on
whose life the welfare of the community and even the course of
--
that his sacred life, transmitted in unabated force to his
successor, may renew its youth, and thus by successive transmissions
--
the ground on which they trod became sacred. In travelling from
place to place they were carried on the shoulders of sacred men.
They were always accompanied by several pairs of these sanctified
--
But besides persons who are permanently sacred or tabooed and are
therefore permanently forbidden to touch the ground with their feet,
--
that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or
tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a
physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged
just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the
--
in order to preserve the charge from running to waste, the sacred or
tabooed personage must be carefully prevented from touching the
--
certain sacred herbs and roots. The Stseelis Indians of British
Columbia imagined that if a menstruous woman were to step over a
1.61 - The Myth of Balder, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
performers of the sacred rite. That the Norse story of Balder was a
myth of this sort will become probable if we can prove that
1.62 - The Fire-Festivals of Europe, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
pitch barrels placed in front of the sacred Hospital. In Greece,
too, the custom of kindling fires on St. John's Eve and jumping over
--
Samhain, and from this sacred flame all the fires in Ireland were
rekindled. Such a custom points strongly to Samhain or All Saints'
1.64 - Magical Power, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
This is particularly true of moral and political reform. Hitler would have got exactly nowhere if he had been content to announce his evangel; he became master of Germany, and, for a time, of nearly all Europe, by playing upon existing instruments of human passion; the revenge-lust of Central Europe, the panic of the Blimps and Junkers, the discontent of the property-lacking classes, the pride and ambition of the Prussian military clique, and so on. When he had used them to the full, he callously flung them to the wolves. But make no mistake! The Magical Power behind all his actions lay in himself. He had succeeded in making himself a prophet, like Mohammed; even a symbol, like the Cross of the His magical technique was indescribably admirable; he adopted the Swastika, the Hammer of Thor, the distinctive dress, the slogan, the gestures, the greeting; he even imposed a sacred Book upon the people. If that book had only been more mystic and incomprehensible, instead of reasonable, diffuse, and intolerably dull, he might have done better. As it was, he came within an ace of capturing England, even before he came to power in Germany; and it was American money that saved the Nazi party at the most critical moment. Cleverest move of all, he gave the world something to hate; the Communist and the Jew.
His only trouble was that he couldn't count on his fingers! I perceive that I am turning into the late Samuel Smiles; having given you an example to imitate but don't forget your arithmetic! let me initiate you into one of two other secrets of power!
--
Here is another of those Eastern stories for you! A certain Yogi thought it would be an admirable achievement to walk across the Ganges. After forty years he succeeded, and went off to his Guru to demonstrate his power, and receive his due meed of praise. It so happened that this Guru was rather like myself, at least in he matter of his Nasty Temper; and when the disciple came gaily striding back across the sacred Stream, expecting compliments, he was met with: "Well, I think you're a perfect fool all these years, your neighbours have been going to and fro on a raft for a couple of pice!"
The moral, dear child, is that such powers are never to be considered as the main object; it ought in fact to be obvious from the start that any one's True Will must be deeper and more comprehensive than any mere technical achievement. I will go further and say that any such endeavour must be a magical mistake, like cherishing a gun or a clock or a fishing-rod for its own sake, and not for the use that one can make of it. Indeed, that remark goes to the root of the matter; for all these powers, if we understand them properly, are natural by-products of one's real Great Work. My own experience was very convincing on this point; for one power after another came popping up when it was least wanted, and I saw at once that they represented so many leaks in my boat. They argued imperfect insulation.
1.65 - Balder and the Mistletoe, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
wizards, esteem nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree
on which it grows, provided only that the tree is an oak. But apart
from this they choose oak-woods for their sacred groves and perform
no sacred rites without oak-leaves; so that the very name of Druids
may be regarded as a Greek appellation derived from their worship of
--
an especially sacred tree."
Thus the Aino agree with the Druids in regarding mistletoe as a cure
--
who revered the plant so highly, the sacred mistletoe may have
acquired a double portion of its mystic qualities at the solstice in
--
was annually burned in them. Midsummer was the season sacred to
Balder, and the Swedish poet Tegner, in placing the burning of
--
to say, the text of the sacred drama which was acted year by year as
a magical rite to cause the sun to shine, trees to grow, crops to
--
particular kind of sacred tree. But of all European trees none has
such claims as the oak to be considered as pre-eminently the sacred
tree of the Aryans. We have seen that its worship is attested for
--
method is still used in Europe for kindling sacred fires such as the
need-fire, and that most probably it was formerly resorted to at all
--
that the need-fire, or other sacred fire, should be made by the
friction of a particular kind of wood; and when the kind of wood is
--
appears to be generally the oak. But if the sacred fire was
regularly kindled by the friction of oak-wood, we may infer that
--
perpetual fire which burned under the sacred oak at the great
Lithuanian sanctuary of Romove. Further, that oak-wood was formerly
--
had to be killed--when the sacred tree had to be burnt--it was
necessary to begin by breaking off the mistletoe. For so long as the
--
harmless from its surface. But once tear from the oak its sacred
heart--the mistletoe--and the tree nodded to its fall. And when in
1.67 - The External Soul in Folk-Custom, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
an animal which had been sacrificed, and they were held sacred. A
magician had fastened them to the roof to protect the house and its
--
Town in Calabar kept his soul in a sacred grove near a spring of
water. When some Europeans, in frolic or ignorance, cut down part of
--
After a birth the Maoris used to bury the navel-string in a sacred
place and plant a young sapling over it. As the tree grew, it was a
--
Near Eket in North Calabar there is a sacred lake, the fish of which
are carefully preserved because the people believe that their own
--
totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal or
plant of his clan. For if a savage seriously believes that his life
--
man receives from his father a sacred stick (_churinga_), with
which, he is told, his spirit was associated in the remotest past.
--
the sacred implement is kept from the sight of women. While they are
not in use, the bull-roarers are stowed away in the men's
--
they were beslobbered. Soon they marched back to the sacred
enclosure as if come to life, clean, fresh, and garlanded, swaying
1.68 - The God-Letters, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The subject is closely bound up with Mantra-Yoga, and with Invocation. You will doubtless have noticed (for instance) that many chapters of the Q'uran have the letter L for a leit-motif. Islam attaches immense importance to this liquid L, as it appears in Allah (compare the Hebrew L-Gods, AL, Aloah, Elohim, A'alion, etc., and look up the L-idea in your Book of Thoth, and in Magick, pp. 331 sqq.[136]) and other peculiarly sacred names and words.
Before cursing my way to dinner oh! how I hate the need of food unless I am practising the "Ninth Art" and disguise myself as a gourmet I must mention the letter M. This is the only letter that can be pronounced with the lips firmly closed; it is the beginning of speech, and so the Mother of the Alphabet. (Distinguish from N, the letter of the Female). Look up Magick again; Chapter VII (pp. 45-49) gives a good account of M in discussing AUM. Note, too, the root MU "to be silent," form which we have the words Mystic, Mystery and others. As the letter of the Mother it appears to this day in nature everywhere, the first call of the child to "Mamma." In nearly every language, moreover, the word for Mother is based on M. Madar, Mere, Mutter, Umm, AMA or AIMA and the rest.
1.68 - The Golden Bough, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
the plant in which the life of the sacred tree was concentrated
should not be exposed to the risk incurred by contact with the
--
the oak at Romove, was probably fed with the sacred oak-wood; and
thus it would be in a great fire of oak that the King of the Wood
--
recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak. In other
words, the oak may have seemed to him the original storehouse or
--
on the sacred oak in the dells of Nemi. If that was so, we need not
wonder that the priest guarded with drawn sword the mystic bough
1.69 - Farewell to Nemi, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
goals than the sacred grove at Nemi. Some of these paths we have
followed a little way; others, if fortune should be kind, the writer
--
received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The
temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of
1.70 - Morality 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Now then, I hope that we have succeeded in clarifying this exceptionally muddy marish water of morality from most of its alien and toxic dirt; too often the Aspirant to the sacred Wisdom finds no firm path under his feet; the Bog of Respectability mires him who sought the Garden of Delights; soon the last bubbles burst from his choked lungs; he is engulfed in the Slough of Despond.
In the passive elements of Earth and Water is no creative virtue to cleanse themselves from such impurity as they chance to acquire; it is therefore of cardinal importance to watch them, guard them, keep their Purity untainted and unsoiled; shall the Holy Grail brim with poison of Asps, and the golden Paten be defiled with the Bread of Iniquity? Come Fire, come Air, cleanse ye and kindle the pure instruments, that Spirit may indwell, inform, inspire the whole, the One Continuous Sacrament of Life!
17.11 - A Prayer, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thereupon questioned by his Divine Consort who is All-awareness, who is one and identical with him, he uttered five sacred scriptures with his five mouths, the scriptures which are the essence of the true spiritual knowledge. He introduced, established and spread them through the great preceptors, divine or human, through those who are perfect or realised Beings, for the supreme good of the world. This is what is called Tantric Process.
Thus in the path of Tantra, widely extended as it is through the long tradition of its preceptors; the meditative concentration on the image, the repetition of the sacred formulas, Mantra-Japa, and other various methods mentioned in different scriptures are meant to provide easy ways suited to the sadhaks of the different natures. They make no difference to the fundamental Truth and principle which remains always the same. And this is called Sri Vidya which is the essential substance of all the sacred Scriptures, the essence of the four great steps of Tantra (Charya, Kriya, Jnana and Yoga) expounded in all its precepts.
This High Knowledge (Vidya) has been very secretly taught by the different branches of Yajurveda in their hymns and their Upanishadic versions. It has been mysteriously revealed by the various branches of Rigveda in their hymns or their Upanishadic versions. It is mystically awakened through a certain subtle duct in the body, evoked by manifold metrical hymns of the Sarna Veda. This Vidya is commonly found in all the Vedas. It is the essence of all Vedic mantras, Brahmanas and Upanishads. It is the Queen of the Shaktichakra, a wave of supremely great light, a form or embodiment of supreme consciousness. This is a mystic truth inherited from a tradition of Gurus.
The tradition enjoins that to realise this Maha-Vidya a sadhaka should take an initiation and do the ceremonial worship as directed. And when initiated by a true adept he must first meditate on the Holy Feet, Sri Mahapaduka, uttering the sacred words that mean "I adore the Sri Mahapaduka in the eight-petalled white lotus that looks upward, that has twelve extremities and that is established within the womb of the thousand-petalled lotus, spread out like an umbrella and facing downward. The great Holy Feet is possessed of all sciences, embodies the Powers of all deities. It represents the three strides of the holy preceptor in the three centres, the crown (Brahma-randhra), the heart and the lower abdomen, even as it is richly decorated with resplendent ornaments."
Then the sadhak must contemplate the Twin Deity, Shiva and Parvati, the aggregate of all the gods, and possessed of the Gnostic Light displayed in the burning of the three cities of demons. They wear red and white garlands and garments, ointments and ornaments. They shower the desirable boon of divine protection with the twin hands outstretched in mysterious gesture of lotus embrace; delightful face and eyes they have, the mind enraptured in knowledge and bliss, their form is the very image of the supreme Guru, with his' red and white lotus-feet.
1.75 - The AA and the Planet, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
She nearly always referred to the authors of these messages as "They:" when asked who "They" were, she would say haltingly and stupidly "the gods," or some equally unhelpful term. But she was always absolutely clear and precise as to the instructions. The New Aeon was to supersede the old; my special job was to preserve the sacred Tradition, so that a new Renaissance might in due season rekindle the hidden Light. I was accordingly to make a Quintessence of the Ancient Wisdom, and publish it in as permanent a form as possible. This I did in The Equinox. I should perhaps have been strictly classical, and admitted only the "Publication in Class "A", "A-B", "B" and "D" material. But I had the idea that it would be a good plan to add all sorts of other stuff, so that people who were not in any way interested in the real Work might preserve their copies.
This by the way: the essence this letter is to show that "They", not one person but a number acting in concert, not only foresaw a planet-wide catastrophe, but were agreed on measures calculated to assure the survival of the Wisdom worth saving until the time, perhaps three hundred or six hundred years later, when a new current should revive the shattered thought of mankind.
18.03 - Tagore, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In this sacred service of worship.
My adoration leaps out in music
1.81 - Method of Training, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Of other writers, you have The Book of the sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, and any of the works of Eliphaz Lvi. But that's all.
But I suppose you knew all this long ago. It may help if I try to expound the essence of these two Methods in very simple language, and very different language. By contrast and comparison, you should be able, without reading even one of all those books, to get a perfectly clear idea in perspective of "what's coming to you!"
1.83 - Epistola Ultima, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The Book of the sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, 374
MacGregor Mathers
19.01 - The Twins, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Many may be the sacred texts he recites, but if, in his delusion, he does not act up to them, then he becomes like a cowherd who counts only others' cattle; he does not share in the holy disciplehood.
[20]
Very few may be the sacred texts he recites, but if he carries out in practice the Teaching, then abandoning passion and ill-will and delusion, possessing the right knowledge, the consciousness wholly freed, seeking nothing either here or elsewhere, he shares in the holy disciplehood.
Or, for they have false apprehensions in view.
19.05 - The Fool, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Kusa grass has in India a sacred character. To eat food with the tip of Kusa-blade is taken symbolically here as an act of asceticism.
***
1912 12 05p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to disturb you and the Eternal will manifest; have perfect equality in face of all and the Eternal will be there. Yes, we should not put too much intensity, too much effort into our seeking for Thee; the effort and intensity become a veil in front of Thee; we must not desire to see Thee, for that is still a mental agitation which obscures Thy Eternal Presence; it is in the most complete Peace, Serenity and Equality that all is Thou even as Thou art all, and the least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle to Thy manifestation. No haste, no inquietude, no tension, Thou, nothing but Thou, without any analysis or any objectivising, and Thou art there without a possible doubt, for all becomes a Holy Peace and a sacred Silence.
And that is better than all the meditations in the world.
1914 02 20p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Lord, very humbly I pray to Thee that I may be equal to my task, that nothing in me, conscious or unconscious, may betray Thee by neglecting to serve Thy sacred mission.
In a silent devotion, I bow to Thee.
1915 11 07p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But what grandeur, what sovereign beauty lie in the depth of this outer anguish all formed of narrow egoism; what splendour dwells within this waiting, grown sacred through deep contemplation, when the walls of personal blindness have fallen and the individual consciousness has taken its flight into immensity to unite with Thy eternal consciousness.
This sorrowful world kneels before Thee, O Lord, in mute supplication; Matter, tortured, takes shelter at Thy feet, its last and only refuge; and imploring Thee thus, it adores Thee, Thee whom it neither knows nor understands! Its prayer rises like the cry of one in a last agony; what is disappearing feels vaguely the possibility of living once again in Thee; the earth awaits Thy decree in a grandiose prostration. Listen, listen: its voice implores and supplicates to Thee. What will be Thy decree, what is Thy sentence? O Lord of Truth, this individual world blesses Thy truth which it does not yet know, but which it calls, and to which it adheres with all the joyful energy of its living forces.
1915 11 26p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Then was the physical body seized, first in its lower members and next the whole of it, by a sacred trembling which made all personal limits fall away little by little even in the most material sensation. The being grew in greatness progressively, methodically, breaking down every barrier, shattering every obstacle, that it might contain and manifest a force and a power which increased ceaselessly in immensity and intensity. It was as a progressive dilatation of the cells until there was a complete identification with the earth: the body of the awakened consciousness was the terrestrial globe moving harmoniously in ethereal space. And the consciousness knew that its global body was thus moving in the arms of the universal Being, and it gave itself, it abandoned itself to It in an ecstasy of peaceful bliss. Then it felt that its body was absorbed in the body of the universe and one with it; the consciousness became the consciousness of the universe, immobile in its totality, moving infinitely in its internal complexity. The consciousness of the universe sprang towards the Divine in an ardent aspiration, a perfect surrender, and it saw in the splendour of the immaculate Light the radiant Being standing on a many-headed serpent whose body coiled infinitely around the universe. The Being in an eternal gesture of triumph mastered and created at one and the same time the serpent and the universe that issued from him; erect on the serpent he dominated it with all his victorious might, and the same gesture that crushed the hydra enveloping the universe gave it eternal birth. Then the consciousness became this Being and perceived that its form was changing once more; it was absorbed into something which was no longer a form and yet contained all forms, something which, immutable, sees,the Eye, the Witness. And what It sees, is. Then this last vestige of form disappeared and the consciousness itself was absorbed into the Unutterable, the Ineffable.
The return towards the consciousness of the individual body took place very slowly in a constant and invariable splendour of Light and Power and Felicity and Adoration, by successive gradations, but directly, without passing again through the universal and terrestrial forms. And it was as if the modest corporeal form had become the direct and immediate vesture, without any intermediary, of the supreme and eternal Witness.1
1917 09 24p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
How is it possible that having seen all that I have seen, experienced all that I have experienced, after I have been led up even to the most sacred sanctuary of Thy knowledge and communion with Thee, Thou hast made of me so utterly common an instrument in such ordinary circumstances? In truth, O Lord, Thy ends are unfathomable and pass my understanding.
Why, when Thou hast placed in my heart the pure diamond of Thy perfect Felicity, sufferest Thou its surface to reflect the shadows which come from outside and so leave unsuspected and, it would seem, ineffective the treasure of Peace Thou hast granted me? Truly all this is a mystery and confounds my understanding.
19.18 - On Impurity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The sacred word rusts if it is never recited, a house rusts if it is never cleaned, the fair body rusts if it is slothful, a sentinel rusts if he is negligent.
[8]
1929-04-14 - Dangers of Yoga - Two paths, tapasya and surrender - Impulses, desires and Yoga - Difficulties - Unification around the psychic being - Ambition, undoing of many Yogis - Powers, misuse and right use of - How to recognise the Divine Will - Accept things that come from Divine - Vital devotion - Need of strong body and nerves - Inner being, invariable, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yoga is not more dangerous to the people of the West than to those of the East. Everything depends upon the spirit with which you approach it. Yoga does become dangerous if you want it for your own sake, to serve a personal end. It is not dangerous, on the contrary, it is safety and security itself, if you go to it with a sense of its sacredness, always remembering that the aim is to find the Divine.
Dangers and difficulties come in when people take up Yoga not for the sake of the Divine, but because they want to acquire power and under the guise of Yoga seek to satisfy some ambition. If you cannot get rid of ambition, do not touch the thing. It is fire that burns.
1929-04-28 - Offering, general and detailed - Integral Yoga - Remembrance of the Divine - Reading and Yoga - Necessity, predetermination - Freedom - Miracles - Aim of creation, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You can read sacred books and yet be far away from the Divine; and you can read the most stupid productions and be in touch with the Divine. It is not possible to get an idea of what the transformed consciousness and its movements are until you have had a taste of the transformation. There is a way of consciousness in union with the Divine in which you can enjoy all you read, as you can all you observe, even the most indifferent books or the most uninteresting things. You can hear poor music, even music from which one would like to run away, and yet you can, not for its outward self but because of what is behind, enjoy it. You do not lose the distinction between good music and bad music, but you pass through either into that which it expresses. For there is nothing in the world which has not its ultimate truth and support in the Divine. And if you are not stopped by the appearance, physical or moral or aesthetic, but get behind and are in touch with the Spirit, the Divine Soul in things, you can reach beauty and delight even through what affects the ordinary sense only as something poor, painful or discordant.
Can it be said in justification of ones past that whatever has happened in ones life had to happen?
1929-07-28 - Art and Yoga - Art and life - Music, dance - World of Harmony, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Look again at what the moderns have made of the dance; compare it with what the dance once was. The dance was once one of the highest expressions of the inner life; it was associated with religion and it was an important limb in sacred ceremony, in the celebration of festivals, in the adoration of the Divine. In some countries it reached a very high degree of beauty and an extraordinary perfection. In Japan they kept up the tradition of the dance as a part of the religious life and, because the strict sense of beauty and art is a natural possession of the Japanese, they did not allow it to degenerate into something of lesser significance and smaller purpose. It was the same in India. It is true that in our days there have been attempts to resuscitate the ancient Greek and other dances; but the religious sense is missing in all such resurrections and they look more like rhythmic gymnastics than dance.
Today Russian dances are famous, but they are expressions of the vital world and there is even something terribly vital in them. Like all that comes to us from that world, they may be very attractive or very repulsive, but always they stand for themselves and not for the expression of the higher life. The very mysticism of the Russians is of a vital order. As technicians of the dance they are marvellous; but technique is only an instrument. If your instrument is good, so much the better, but so long as it is not surrendered to the Divine, however fine it may be, it is empty of the highest and cannot serve a divine purpose. The difficulty is that most of those who become artists believe that they stand on their own legs and have no need to turn to the Divine. It is a great pity; for in the divine manifestation skill is as useful an element as anything else. Skill is one part of the divine fabric, only it must know how to subordinate itself to greater things.
1929-08-04 - Surrender and sacrifice - Personality and surrender - Desire and passion - Spirituality and morality, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In our Yoga there is no room for sacrifice. But everything depends on the meaning you put on the word. In its pure sense it means a consecrated giving, a making sacred to the Divine. But in the significance that it now bears, sacrifice is something that works for destruction; it carries about it an atmosphere of negation. This kind of sacrifice is not fulfilment; it is a deprivation, a self-immolation. It is your possibilities that you sacrifice, the possibilities and realisations of your personality from the most material to the highest spiritual range. Sacrifice diminishes your being. If physically you sacrifice your life, your body, you give up all your possibilities on the material plane; you have done with the achievements of your earthly existence.
In the same way you can morally sacrifice your life; you give up the amplitude and free fulfilment of your inner existence. There is always in this idea of self-immolation a sense of forcing, a constriction, an imposed self-denial. This is an ideal that does not give room for the souls deeper and larger spontaneities. By surrender we mean not this but a spontaneous self-giving, a giving of all your self to the Divine, to a greater Consciousness of which you are a part. Surrender will not diminish, but increase; it will not lessen or weaken or destroy your personality, it will fortify and aggrandise it. Surrender means a free total giving with all the delight of the giving; there is no sense of sacrifice in it. If you have the slightest feeling that you are making a sacrifice, then it is no longer surrender. For it means that you reserve yourself or that you are trying to give, with grudging or with pain and effort, and have not the joy of the gift, perhaps not even the feeling that you are giving. When you do anything with the sense of a compression of your being, be sure that you are doing it in the wrong way. True surrender enlarges you; it increases your capacity; it gives you a greater measure in quality and in quantity which you could not have had by yourself. This new greater measure of quality and quantity is different from anything you could attain before: you enter into another world, into a wideness which you could not have entered if you did not surrender. It is as when a drop of water falls into the sea; if it still kept there its separate identity, it would remain a little drop of water and nothing more, a little drop crushed by all the immensity around, because it has not surrendered. But, surrendering, it unites with the sea and participates in the nature and power and vastness of the whole sea.
--- Overview of adj sacred
The adj sacred has 5 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
1. (4) sacred ::: (concerned with religion or religious purposes; "sacred texts"; "sacred rites"; "sacred music")
2. (1) sacred ::: (worthy of respect or dedication; "saw motherhood as woman's sacred calling")
3. (1) consecrated, sacred, sanctified ::: (made or declared or believed to be holy; devoted to a deity or some religious ceremony or use; "a consecrated church"; "the sacred mosque"; "sacred elephants"; "sacred bread and wine"; "sanctified wine")
4. hallowed, sacred ::: (worthy of religious veneration; "the sacred name of Jesus"; "Jerusalem's hallowed soil")
5. sacred ::: ((often followed by `to') devoted exclusively to a single use or purpose or person; "a fund sacred to charity"; "a morning hour sacred to study"; "a private office sacred to the President")
--- Similarity of adj sacred
5 senses of sacred
Sense 1
sacred (vs. profane)
=> divine
=> ineffable, unnameable, unspeakable, unutterable
=> inspirational
=> inviolable, inviolate, sacrosanct
=> numinous
=> quasi-religious
=> religious, spiritual
=> reverend, sublime
=> sacral
=> taboo, tabu
Also See-> consecrated#1, consecrate#1, dedicated#2; heavenly#3; pious#1
Sense 2
sacred
=> worthy (vs. unworthy)
Sense 3
consecrated, sacred, sanctified
=> holy (vs. unholy)
Sense 4
hallowed, sacred
=> holy (vs. unholy)
Sense 5
sacred
=> dedicated (vs. undedicated)
--- Antonyms of adj sacred
5 senses of sacred
Sense 1
sacred (vs. profane)
profane (vs. sacred), secular
=> laic, lay, secular
=> profanatory
Sense 2
sacred
INDIRECT (VIA worthy) -> unworthy
Sense 3
consecrated, sacred, sanctified
INDIRECT (VIA holy) -> unholy, unhallowed
Sense 4
hallowed, sacred
INDIRECT (VIA holy) -> unholy, unhallowed
Sense 5
sacred
INDIRECT (VIA dedicated) -> undedicated
--- Pertainyms of adj sacred
5 senses of sacred
Sense 1
sacred (vs. profane)
Sense 2
sacred
Sense 3
consecrated, sacred, sanctified
Sense 4
hallowed, sacred
Sense 5
sacred
--- Derived Forms of adj sacred
5 senses of sacred
Sense 1
sacred (vs. profane)
RELATED TO->(noun) sacredness#1
=> sacredness
Sense 2
sacred
RELATED TO->(noun) sacredness#1
=> sacredness
Sense 3
consecrated, sacred, sanctified
RELATED TO->(noun) sacredness#1
=> sacredness
Sense 4
hallowed, sacred
RELATED TO->(noun) sacredness#1
=> sacredness
Sense 5
sacred
RELATED TO->(noun) sacredness#1
=> sacredness
--- Grep of noun sacred
doctor of sacred theology
sacred college
sacred cow
sacred fig
sacred ibis
sacred lotus
sacred mushroom
sacred scripture
sacred text
sacred trinity
sacred writing
sacredness
Wikipedia - Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Adur Gushnasp -- Major Zoroastrian sacred fire
Wikipedia - Aegle marmelos -- Species of tree, considered sacred by Hindus
Wikipedia - A Sacred Duty
Wikipedia - Australian Aboriginal sacred site -- Places deemed significant and meaningful by Aboriginal Australians based on their beliefs
Wikipedia - Avesta -- Zoroastrian compendium of sacred literature
Wikipedia - Baba Nanak Shrine -- Shrine in Baghdad, Iraq; a sacred site in Sikhism
Wikipedia - BahaM-JM- -- Pilgrimage to several BahaM-JM-
Wikipedia - Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Brussels
Wikipedia - Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pondicherry
Wikipedia - Blasphemy -- Insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for a religious deity or sacred person or thing
Wikipedia - Bodhi Tree -- Sacred fig tree & origin site of Buddhism
Wikipedia - Book of Mormon -- Sacred text of the <!-- Do not change to a specific denomination. The term "Latter Day Saint movement" encompasses all the different denominations. -->Latter Day Saint movement
Wikipedia - Brockes Passion (Handel) -- 1712 sacred oratorio by Handel
Wikipedia - Brothers of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Camerlengo of the Sacred College of Cardinals
Wikipedia - Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles
Wikipedia - Category:Sacred Heart devotions
Wikipedia - Category:Sacred places and times in Catholic canon law
Wikipedia - Category:Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Cat hair mustache puzzle -- Puzzle from video game Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned
Wikipedia - Chanunpa -- Lakota sacred ceremonial pipe
Wikipedia - Children of Mary of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Church of the Sacred Heart (Bronx)
Wikipedia - Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Ermesinde)
Wikipedia - Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (New York City)
Wikipedia - Congregation for Indulgences and Sacred Relics
Wikipedia - Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
Wikipedia - Convent of the Sacred Heart (New York City)
Wikipedia - Country Day School of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Criticism of Mormon sacred texts
Wikipedia - Cypress of Kashmar -- Sacred tree in Zoroastrian legend
Wikipedia - Daniel and the Sacred Harp
Wikipedia - Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals
Wikipedia - Doctor of Sacred Theology
Wikipedia - Doctor of sacred theology
Wikipedia - Donar's Oak -- Sacred tree of the Germanic pagans
Wikipedia - Draft:Sacred Art Museum -- Art museum in Alcamo, Italy
Wikipedia - Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart (Nebraska) -- Scbool in Omaha, Nebraska
Wikipedia - Dvaraka -- Sacred historical city and pilgrimage site associated with Hindu God Krishna
Wikipedia - Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Feast of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Five Sacred Mountains
Wikipedia - Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy
Wikipedia - Forty-Nine Martyrs of Scetis -- Christian monks of the monasteries of Scetis in Egypt who were massacred by Berbers in 444
Wikipedia - Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Ganga Sagar (urn) -- Sacred relic which belonged to Guru Gobind Singh
Wikipedia - Gathas -- Sacred hymns of Zarathushtra
Wikipedia - Golden Temple -- Temple in Amritsar, India; the most sacred site in Sikhism
Wikipedia - Govardhan Hill -- Sacred Hindu site in Uttar Pradesh, India
Wikipedia - Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Haoma -- Zoroastrian sacred plant and drink
Wikipedia - Haurietis aquas -- 1956 encyclical on the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Herbert Kelly -- 19th and 20th-century Anglican priest and founder of the Society of the Sacred Mission
Wikipedia - Hugh McGraw -- American Sacred Harp singer
Wikipedia - International School of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Internet Sacred Text Archive -- Website dedicated to the preservation of electronic public domain texts
Wikipedia - Invading the Sacred -- 2007 book
Wikipedia - Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi -- Sacred tree in Sri Lanka
Wikipedia - Licentiate of Sacred Theology
Wikipedia - List of Sacred Games episodes -- Episodes of Sacred Games
Wikipedia - List of sacred objects in Japanese mythology
Wikipedia - List of To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts episodes -- Wikipedia list article
Wikipedia - Luakini -- Native Hawaiian sacred place where people were sacrificed
Wikipedia - Mantra -- Sacred utterance or sound used in meditation, often repeated
Wikipedia - Marae -- Communal or sacred place in Polynesian societies
Wikipedia - Mass (music) -- Form of sacred musical composition
Wikipedia - Master of Sacred Theology -- Academic qualification
Wikipedia - Matilde of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Matzevah -- Sacred pillar in the Hebrew Bible
Wikipedia - Messiah (Handel) -- 1741 sacred oratorio by Handel
Wikipedia - Missionaries of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
Wikipedia - Missionaries of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Most Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church (Hawi, Hawaii)
Wikipedia - Mount Meru -- Sacred mountain of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu cosmology
Wikipedia - Movements (sacred dances)
Wikipedia - Naked and Sacred (song) -- 1995 single by Chynna Phillips
Wikipedia - National shrine -- Designation given to a Catholic church or a sacred place to recognize its special historical, cultural, or religious significance
Wikipedia - Nothing Sacred (film) -- 1937 film by William A. Wellman
Wikipedia - Notre Pere -- A sacred motet by Maurice DuruflM-CM-)
Wikipedia - Om -- Sacred sound and spiritual symbol in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism
Wikipedia - Order of the Sacred Treasure -- Honor bestowed by government of Japan
Wikipedia - O Sacred Head, Now Wounded
Wikipedia - Pancha Tirtha of Puri -- five sacred bathing spots of Puri, Odisha
Wikipedia - Pericope -- Set of verses that forms one coherent unit or thought; usually of sacred scripture
Wikipedia - Philomelos of Phocis -- General of the Phocians in the Third Sacred War; brother of Onomarchus and son of Theotimus
Wikipedia - Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology
Wikipedia - Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music
Wikipedia - Pranava yoga -- Meditation on the sacred mantra Om
Wikipedia - Prayer of Consecration to the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Priest -- Person authorized to lead the sacred rituals of a religion
Wikipedia - Q-D-M-EM- -- Triconsonantal Semitic root meaning "sacred, holy"
Wikipedia - Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars -- Television anime
Wikipedia - Religion -- Sacred belief system
Wikipedia - Religious of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Rigveda -- First of the four sacredM-BM- canonicalM-BM- texts (M-EM-^[ruti) ofM-BM- Hinduism
Wikipedia - Sacred and Profane Love (film) -- 1921 film
Wikipedia - Sacred architecture
Wikipedia - Sacred Band of Thebes
Wikipedia - Sacred Bones Records -- American record label
Wikipedia - Sacred Books of the East -- 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious texts, edited by Max Muller
Wikipedia - Sacred bundle -- Wrapped collection of sacred items, held by a designated carrier, used in indigenous American ceremonial cultures
Wikipedia - Sacred Clowns -- Novel by Tony Hillerman
Wikipedia - Sacred College
Wikipedia - Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints
Wikipedia - Sacred Congregation of Rites
Wikipedia - Sacred Conversation (Bellini, Madrid, 1505-1510) -- Painting by Giovanni Bellini
Wikipedia - Sacred cow (idiom)
Wikipedia - Sacred dance -- Use of dance in religious ceremonies and rituals
Wikipedia - Sacred Falls State Park -- Closed park in Hawaii and site of an accident in 1999
Wikipedia - Sacred Falls -- Champion Thoroughbred racehorse
Wikipedia - Sacred fig
Wikipedia - Sacred Games (novel) -- 2006 thriller novel by Vikram Chandra
Wikipedia - Sacred Games (soundtrack) -- 2018 soundtrack album by various artists
Wikipedia - Sacred Games (TV series) -- Indian crime thriller television series
Wikipedia - Sacred garden
Wikipedia - Sacred Gate -- Gate in the city wall of Classical Athens
Wikipedia - Sacred geometry -- Symbolic and sacred meanings ascibed to certain geometric shapes
Wikipedia - Sacred Grove (Latter Day Saint movement)
Wikipedia - Sacred grove -- Grove of trees of special religious importance to a particular culture
Wikipedia - Sacred Harp -- Tradition of sacred choral music, originating in New England in the 18th century and carried on in the Southern U.S., using tunebooks printed in shape notes
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Academy Bryn Mawr -- Private, all-female school in Pennsylvania, United States
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Basilica, Timaru -- Church in South Canterbury, New Zealand
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Cathedral (disambiguation)
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington -- Church in Wellington Central City, New Zealand
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Hawi
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Catholic College -- Secondary school in Sefton, UK
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Catholic School, Camberwell -- Roman Catholic secondary school located in Camberwell, England
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Cemetery -- Roman Catholic cemetery in Florissant, Missouri
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church (disambiguation)
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church, Levuka -- Church building in Levuka, Fiji
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church (Lombard, Illinois) -- Roman Catholic church in Lombard, Illinois, USA
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church, Manama -- Roman Catholic church in Bahrain
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church, Plumbridge -- Catholic church in Plumbridge, Northern Ireland
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church-Punahou -- United States historic place
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Church (Staten Island)
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart High School (California)
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart High School (New Jersey) -- Defunct Catholic high school in Cape May County, New Jersey, United States
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart High School (Yonkers, New York)
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart, Minnesota -- City in Minnesota, United States
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church (Sandino, Cuba) -- Catholic parish church in Sandino, Cuba
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Parish Kamuning
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, Hindsford
Wikipedia - Sacred Hearts Academy
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart School in Tokyo -- Private girls school in Tokyo, Japan
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart School (Lombard, Illinois) -- Roman Catholic elementary school in Lombard, Illinois, USA
Wikipedia - Sacred Heart -- Christian devotion symbolising the love of Jesus Christ
Wikipedia - Sacred history
Wikipedia - Sacred kingfisher -- Species of bird
Wikipedia - Sacred king
Wikipedia - Sacred language -- Language that is cultivated for religious reasons
Wikipedia - Sacred Lie -- 1955 film
Wikipedia - Sacred lotus in religious art -- Attribute in certain Indian religions
Wikipedia - Sacred marriage
Wikipedia - Sacred Microdistillery -- British distillery
Wikipedia - Sacred Mountains of China -- list
Wikipedia - Sacred mountains
Wikipedia - Sacred mountain
Wikipedia - Sacred Mysteries
Wikipedia - Sacred mysteries -- Inexplicable or secret religious phenomena
Wikipedia - Sacred Nagi Tree of Kumano Hayatama Taisha -- Natural Monument of Japan
Wikipedia - Sacred Paws -- Scottish rock band
Wikipedia - Sacred prostitution -- Sexual rite performed in the context of religious worship
Wikipedia - Sacred Relic of St. George
Wikipedia - Sacred Scriptures Bethel Edition -- Sacred Name Bible
Wikipedia - Sacred Scripture
Wikipedia - Sacred scripture
Wikipedia - Sacred Silence (1919 film) -- 1919 film by Harry F. Millarde
Wikipedia - Sacred-texts.com
Wikipedia - Sacred texts
Wikipedia - Sacred text
Wikipedia - Sacred Tradition
Wikipedia - Sacred tradition -- The foundation of the doctrinal and spiritual authority of the Christian Church and of the Bible in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrian, and Anglican traditions
Wikipedia - Sacred travel
Wikipedia - Sacred tree at Uppsala
Wikipedia - Sacred trees and groves in Germanic paganism and mythology
Wikipedia - Sacred tree -- Tree which a community deems to hold religious significance
Wikipedia - Sacred (video game)
Wikipedia - Sacred Waters (1932 film) -- 1932 film
Wikipedia - Sacred Waters (1960 film) -- 1960 film
Wikipedia - Sacred Way -- Ancient road in Greece
Wikipedia - Sacred -- Dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity
Wikipedia - Saidu Sharif Stupa -- Sacred Buddhist area near Saidu Sharif, Pakistan
Wikipedia - Sarpa Kavu -- Traditional natural sacred spaces in South India
Wikipedia - Scapular of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary -- Catholic devotional object
Wikipedia - Scapular of the Sacred Heart -- Catholic devotional object
Wikipedia - Schools of the Sacred Heart (Louisiana) -- Catholic girls school in Louisiana
Wikipedia - Seal of Muhammad -- Sacred Islamic relic
Wikipedia - Sidrat al-Muntaha -- Sacred tree in Islamic scripture, marking the boundary which no creation can pass
Wikipedia - Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Sisters of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Society of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - St Matthew Passion -- 1727 sacred oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach
Wikipedia - Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart
Wikipedia - Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office
Wikipedia - Tapu (Polynesian culture) -- Polynesian traditional concept denoting something holy or sacred
Wikipedia - Template talk:Sacred Heart of Jesus
Wikipedia - Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart -- Italian Discalced Carmelite nun, mystic and saint
Wikipedia - The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
Wikipedia - The Dreaming -- Sacred era in Australian Aboriginal mythology
Wikipedia - The Killing of a Sacred Deer -- 2017 psychological thriller film by Yorgos Lanthimos
Wikipedia - The Sacred and Profane Love Machine -- Novel by Iris Murdoch
Wikipedia - The Sacred Flame (1929 film) -- 1929 film
Wikipedia - The Sacred Flame (1931 film) -- 1931 film
Wikipedia - The Sacred Mound -- 1993 film
Wikipedia - The Sacred Riana -- Indonesian magician and illusionist
Wikipedia - The Sacred Trusts
Wikipedia - Thirteen Buddhas of Awaji Island -- 13 Buddhist sacred sites on Awaji Island, HyM-EM-^Mgo Prefecture, Japan
Wikipedia - Tibetan Buddhist canon -- A loosely defined list of sacred texts recognized by various schools of Tibetan Buddhism
Wikipedia - University of the Sacred Heart Gulu -- Private university in Uganda
Wikipedia - Vibhuti -- Sacred ash worn on forehead in Hinduism
Wikipedia - Violence and the Sacred -- 1972 book by RenM-CM-) Girard
Wikipedia - VM-CM-) (shrine) -- A shrine or sacred place in Germanic paganism.
Wikipedia - Wakan Tanka -- Lakota word for the sacred or the divine
Wikipedia - White Buffalo Calf Woman -- Sacred woman of supernatural origin, central to the Lakota religion
Wikipedia - White buffalo -- American bison considered sacred in several Native American religions
Wikipedia - Witch Tree -- Sacred tree in Ojibwe culture
Wikipedia - Yata no Kagami -- Sacred mirror that is part of the Imperial Regalia of Japan
Wikipedia - Yeha-Noha -- 1994 single by Sacred Spirit
Wikipedia - Yu-Gi-Oh! The Sacred Cards -- Game Boy Advance game based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime
Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart ::: Born: July 15, 1747; Died: March 7, 1770; Occupation: Saint;
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Integral World - "Devotional Thickness", The Sacredness of Human Longing, David Lane and Andrea Diem-Lane
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https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-sacred-measure-of-432000-as-key-of.html
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-sacred-measure-of-432000-part-2.html
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-sacred-measure-of-432000-part-3.html
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-sacred-measure-of-432000-part-4.html
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-sacred-measure-of-432000-part-5.html
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-sacred-measure-of-432000-addendum.html
https://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-sacred-geometry-of-vimy-crop-circle.html
wiki.auroville - Sacred_Groves
Dharmapedia - Invading_the_Sacred
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/FullmetalAlchemistTheSacredStarOfMilos
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/MatoiTheSacredSlayer
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/RegaliaTheThreeSacredStars
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/SacredSeven
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/FireEmblemTheSacredStones
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/MadwomanOfTheSacredHeart
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/TheSacredAndTheProfane
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/NothingSacred
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheKillingOfASacredDeer
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LightNovel/TheSacredBlacksmith
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/DarkSacredNight
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/SacredDruidBlood
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/SacredMonster
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheSacredArtOfStealing
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredBowAndArrows
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredCow
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredFirstKiss
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredFlames
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredHospitality
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredLanguage
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredLiterature
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SacredScripture
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSacredDarkness
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnicornsAreSacred
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/ToTheAbandonedSacredBeasts
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/SacredWarrior
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/SmallvilleS04E15Sacred
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/EvolutionTheWorldOfSacredDevice
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Videogame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/KenseiSacredFist
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Sacred
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Sacred2FallenAngel
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Sacred3
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SacredEarthSeries
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SydneyHunterAndTheSacredTribe
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/YuGiOhTheSacredCards
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/SacredSpirit123
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Tropers/SacredSturgeon
https://knowyourarchetypes.com/sacred-prostitute-archetype/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Sacred-Chao.svg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Sacred_Heart_1770.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Sacred_lotus_Nelumbo_nucifera.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:SL_Kandy_asv2020-01_img34_Sacred_Tooth_Temple.jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/File:Sweet_stories_of_God;_in_the_language_of_childhood_and_the_beautiful_delineations_of_sacred_art_(1899)_(14751566596).jpg
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sacred
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sacredness
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Exchange_between_Saint_Francis_and_Lady_Poverty
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Exchange_of_Saint_Francis_with_Lady_Poverty
Scrubs (2001 - 2010) - an American medical comedy-drama television series created by Bill Lawrence that aired from October 2, 2001, to March 17, 2010, on NBC and later ABC. The series follows the lives of employees at the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital, which later becomes a Teaching Hospital. The title is a play on surg...
Gun Frontier (2002 - 2002) - It is a harsh and barren wasteland, where the weak aren't allowed to dream. It is also a sacred land for true men, for there is no place a man can feel more alive. This is the Gun Frontier. Sea Pirate Captain Harlock and the errant samurai, Tochiro arrive in the United States on the Western Frontier...
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation(1997) - The evil Outworld emperor Shao Kahn has broken the sacred rules of the tournament and resurrects a queen named Sindel to open his portals to merge the two realms into one. Liu Kang and his comrades have only six days to stop Kahn and save both realms before they bring destruction on Earthrealm. Unle...
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade(1989) - Indiana Jones returns again, and again this time, to save the world from the Nazis. In this film, the Nazis have kidnapped Indy's father, Professor Henry Jones, for his diary, which contains maps and first-hand accounts of many of the world's most sacred and hidden items. One of these such items, th...
Ernest Goes to Africa(1997) - Slapstick handyman Ernest is in love and wants to buy a bauble for his gal Renee, so he goes to a local flea market and buys a couple of shiny faux jewels. He has no idea that they are real and that they were stolen from a sacred African idol by a crooked adventurer. He also does not know that a vil...
Nothing Sacred(1937) - Certain she was dying from radium poisoning, Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) is delighted to learn from her doctor that it was a false alarm. But when dapper and desperate New York City reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) shows up looking for a story about a young girl braving terminal illness, Hazel d...
Momotaro, Sacred Sailors(1945) - After successfully bombing Pearl Harbor, Momotaro over sees construction of a Japanese base with the help of his animal fleet along with some new recruits & volunteers. Their new mission is to attack the American troops occupying the island of Sulawesi.
Cut And Run(1985) - A reporter and her cameraman connect a surviving Jonestown leader and a TV exec's missing son to a drug war where jungle installations are being massacred by an army of natives and a skilled white assassin.
Hollywood Boulevard(1976) - Joe Dante directs this story of the glamour, the glitter, the magical allure of Hollywood... and not a speck of it rubs off on Miracle Pictures, where "If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle." This is a hilarious tribute to the unsung heroes who grind out the B movies massacred by critics, but nurse...
The Black Bunch(1973) - In Africa, four native women join and are hired to find a wealthy man's son who has disappeared, and use the opportunity to get revenge on a gang of mercenaries who have massacred the inhabitants of the womens' village.
The Court Jester(1956) - In medieval England, a king and his family have been massacred and a strugggle has begun to give the throne to its rightful heir, a baby carrying the royal birthmark of a purple pimpernal on his posterior. Meanwhile, Hubert Hawkins is a former carnival entertainer who plans to steal the throne for h...
Murphy's War(1971) - A lone survivor from a British naval ship is obsessed with getting revenge on a German U-boat crew that massacred his shipmates in the water.
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos(2011) - A fugitive alchemist with mysterious abilities leads the Elric brothers to a distant valley of slums inhabited by the Milos, a proud people struggling against bureaucratic exploitation.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/10156/Sacred_Seven -- Action, Sci-Fi, Super Power, School
https://myanimelist.net/anime/10842/Fullmetal_Alchemist__The_Sacred_Star_of_Milos_Specials --
https://myanimelist.net/anime/11635/Sacred_Seven__Shirogane_no_Tsubasa -- Action, School, Sci-Fi, Super Power
https://myanimelist.net/anime/13927/Sacred_Seven__Shirogane_no_Tsubasa_Picture_Drama -- Action, Comedy, School, Sci-Fi, Super Power
https://myanimelist.net/anime/32961/Regalia__The_Three_Sacred_Stars -- Action, Sci-Fi, Mecha
https://myanimelist.net/anime/9135/Fullmetal_Alchemist__The_Sacred_Star_of_Milos -- Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Magic, Military, Shounen
https://myanimelist.net/manga/14439/Touhou_Sangetsusei__Oriental_Sacred_Place
https://myanimelist.net/manga/2159/Demon_Sacred
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) ::: 6.4/10 -- Passed | 1h 19min | Action, Adventure, Comedy | 23 June 1955 (USA) -- Two bumbling Americans stumble on the discovery of a lifetime when their search for a mummy leads them to a sacred medallion that holds the key to buried treasure. Director: Charles Lamont Writers: Lee Loeb (story), John Grant (screenplay) Stars:
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995) ::: 6.4/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 30min | Adventure, Comedy, Crime | 10 November 1995 (USA) -- Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, returns from a spiritual quest to investigate the disappearance of a rare white bat, the sacred animal of a tribe in Africa. Director: Steve Oedekerk Writers:
EarthBound (1994) ::: 8.9/10 -- Mother 2: Ggu no gyakushuu (original title) -- EarthBound Poster -- Ness, a boy from Onett, Eagleland, teams up with new friends to defeat an Evil Destroyer named Giygas. During the epic pursuits, Ness and his allies attempt to find the sacred Eight Melodies. Director: Shigesato Itoi Writers:
Embrace of the Serpent (2015) ::: 7.9/10 -- El abrazo de la serpiente (original title) -- (Colombia) Embrace of the Serpent Poster -- The story of the relationship between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his people, and two scientists who work together over the course of forty years to search the Amazon for a sacred healing plant. Director: Ciro Guerra
Guardian of the Sacred Spirit ::: Seirei no moribito (original tit ::: TV-PG | 25min | Animation, Action, Adventure | TV Series (2007- ) Episode Guide 26 episodes Guardian of the Sacred Spirit Poster -- The Second Empress hires a spear-wielding woman to save her son from the Mikado (emperor) who believes the young prince is possessed by a water demon foretold to bring a terrible drought upon the land should he live.
Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016) ::: 6.8/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 50min | Animation, Action, Adventure | 9 July 2016 (Japan) -- King Regis, who oversees the land of Lucis, commands his army of soldiers to protect the kingdom from the Niflheim empire's plans to steal the sacred crystal which gives Lucis its magic and power. Director: Takeshi Nozue Writers:
Matoi the Sacred Slayer ::: TV-14 | Animation, Action, Comedy | TV Series (2016- ) Episode Guide 12 episodes Matoi the Sacred Slayer Poster Add a Plot Stars: Nobuyuki Hiyama, Ayako Kawasumi, Naomi Ohzora Add to Watchlist
Mission Kashmir (2000) ::: 6.7/10 -- R | 2h 34min | Action, Drama, Thriller | 27 October 2000 (India) -- A police officer adopts the son and sole survivor of a family he has massacred while pursuing a terrorist. After some time the foster son finds out what the stepfather did. Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra Writers:
Murphy's War (1971) ::: 6.8/10 -- GP | 1h 47min | Drama, War | 14 January 1971 (UK) -- A lone survivor from a British naval ship is obsessed with getting revenge on a German U-boat crew that massacred his shipmates in the water. Director: Peter Yates Writers: Max Catto (novel), Stirling Silliphant (screenplay) Stars:
Nothing Sacred (1937) ::: 6.9/10 -- Passed | 1h 17min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy | 26 November 1937 (USA) -- An eccentric woman learns she is not dying of radium poisoning as earlier assumed, but when she meets a reporter looking for a story, she feigns sickness again for her own profit. Director: William A. Wellman Writers:
Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003) ::: 7.2/10 -- Ong-bak (original title) -- Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior Poster -- When the head of a statue sacred to a village is stolen, a young martial artist goes to the big city and finds himself taking on the underworld to retrieve it. Director: Prachya Pinkaew Writers:
Scrubs ::: TV-14 | 22min | Comedy, Drama | TV Series (20012010) -- In the unreal world of Sacred Heart Hospital, intern John "J.D." Dorian learns the ways of medicine, friendship and life. Creator: Bill Lawrence
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) ::: 7.5/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 26min | Adventure, Drama, Romance | 1 August 1931 (USA) -- On the South Pacific island of Bora Bora, a young couple's love is threatened when the tribal chief declares the girl a sacred virgin. Director: F.W. Murnau Writers: F.W. Murnau (told by), Robert J. Flaherty (told by) (as R.J. Flaherty) Stars:
The Book of Eli (2010) ::: 6.9/10 -- R | 1h 58min | Action, Adventure, Drama | 15 January 2010 (USA) -- A post-apocalyptic tale, in which a lone man fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind. Directors: Albert Hughes (as The Hughes Brothers), Allen Hughes (as The Hughes Brothers) Writer:
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) ::: 7.0/10 -- R | 2h 1min | Drama, Horror, Mystery | 3 November 2017 (USA) -- Steven, a charismatic surgeon, is forced to make an unthinkable sacrifice after his life starts to fall apart, when the behavior of a teenage boy he has taken under his wing turns sinister. Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Writers:
https://totheabandonedsacredbeasts.fandom.com/
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Fennoscandian_War_(Sacred_Accord)
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Manchego_War_(Sacred_Accord)
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Accord
https://animanga.fandom.com/wiki/Matoi_the_Sacred_Slayer
https://animanga.fandom.com/wiki/Regalia:_The_Three_Sacred_Stars
https://animanga.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Seven
https://animanga.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_Blacksmith
https://characters.fandom.com/wiki/Iria_(Sacred_Age_Odysselya_II)
https://characters.fandom.com/wiki/Meyer_(Sacred_Age_Odysselya_II)
https://comunidad.fandom.com/wiki/Usuario_Blog:SacredOwl/Presentando_las_nuevas_Reglas_para_wikis_y_Pol
https://comunidad.fandom.com/wiki/Usuario:SacredOwl
https://dancedancerevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Oath
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Smallville_(TV_Series)_Episode:_Sacred
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Apprentice_Sacred_Targe
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Harness
https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Chao
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Armistice
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Beneficence
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_circle
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_flame
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Shielding
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Word
https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Message_Wall:SacredOwl
https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Heart_of_Jesus_University
https://duelmasters.fandom.com/wiki/Duel_Masters_Sacred_Lands:_Episode_Listing
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/A_Very_Sacred_Formula
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Blood_and_the_Sacred_Words
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Garden_of_the_Sacred_Numbers
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Kyne's_Sacred_Trials
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Ground
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Leap_Grotto
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Prey,_Hunt_Profane
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Rites_of_the_Stonechewers
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Springs
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Witness
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Thoughts_on_the_Sacred_Numbers
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Enhance:_Sacred_Armor
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/In_the_Thicket_of_It:_A_Sacred_Essence
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Weapons_of_the_Nizari
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Shadeweaver's_Thicket:_Secret_of_Sacred_Burough
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Trial_of_the_Sacred_Spirits
https://evolutionaryspirituality.fandom.com/wiki/Making_your_own_Stone_Circle_(Sacred_Space)
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_bog
https://fatalframe.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Water
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Aht_Urhgan_Mission_1:_Land_of_Sacred_Serpents
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Land_of_Sacred_Serpents
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Kindred's_Crest
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_City_of_Adoulin
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_Katana
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_Sapling
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Bandit_(The_Sacred_Stones)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Chapters_(Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones_Comic
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones/Translations
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Garcia_(The_Sacred_Stones)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_characters_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Classes_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_items_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Music_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Skills_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_weapons_in_Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Monica_(Sacred_Stones)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Of_Sacred_Blood
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Ross_(The_Sacred_Stones)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Coin
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Cowl
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Floral_Robe
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Galewind_Shoes
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Moonstone
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Power
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Snowmelt_Drop
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Stone_(chapter)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Stones_(objects)
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Weapon
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Weapons
https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_World
https://fma.fandom.com/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist:_The_Sacred_Star_of_Milos
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Grotto_of_Sacred_Thoughts
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Plaza_of_the_Sacred_Elephants
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Preparing_for_the_Sacred_Trust
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_flame
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_glyph
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_guardian
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_lizardfolk_poison
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Seer
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_urn
https://gabrielknight.fandom.com/wiki/Gabriel_Knight_3:_Blood_of_the_Sacred,_Blood_of_the_Damned
https://gabrielknight.fandom.com/wiki/Gabriel_Knight:_Blood_of_the_Sacred,_Blood_of_the_Damned_-_Prima's_Official_Strategy_Guide
https://gravityrush.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Gem
https://list.fandom.com/wiki/Religious_and_Sacred_Objects
https://list.fandom.com/wiki/Religious_Documents,_Sacred_Texts,_and_Scriptures
https://magi.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Palace
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Klingon_sacred_texts
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Ground
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Ground_(episode)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Marketplace
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Texts
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Ground
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_Chalice
https://monsterhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Land
https://monsterhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Pinnacle
https://monster-strike-enjp.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Grounds
https://mythus.fandom.com/wiki/To_the_Abandoned_Sacred_Beasts
https://nanatsu-no-taizai.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Treasure
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Double_Dragon_III:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_Sacred_Stones
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones/credits
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Arrow
https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Three_Sacred_Treasures
https://redstorm.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Animals
https://resonanceoffate.fandom.com/wiki/Chapter_9:_The_Sacred_Sign
https://rokkanoyuusha.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Instrument
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/Aoi_Aiba
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/Doctor_Kenmi
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/Knight_Kijima
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/Makoto_Kagami
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/Ruri_Aiba
https://sacredseven.fandom.com/wiki/Wakana
https://scrubs.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Heart_Hospital
https://smallville.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred
https://solaropposites.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sacred_Non-Repeating_Number
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/StarCraft_II:_This_Sacred_Land
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/This_Sacred_Land
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/This_Sacred_Land:_Part_2
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/This_Sacred_Land:_Part_3
https://starfox.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_RedEye_Teeth
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Gungan_Sacred_Place
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Gungan_sacred_place
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Circle
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Feast
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Horn_of_the_Soul_Trees
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Jedi_texts
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Villages
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Way
https://thesacredblacksmith.fandom.com/wiki/
https://toonami.fandom.com/wiki/Fullmetal_Alchemist:_The_Sacred_Star_of_Milos
https://totally-accurate-battle-simulator.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Elephant
https://totally-accurate-battle-simulator.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Elephant_Spear_Throw
https://totheabandonedsacredbeasts.fandom.com/wiki/
https://totheabandonedsacredbeasts.fandom.com/wiki/To_the_Abandoned_Sacred_Beasts_Wiki
https://valkyriecrusade.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Relic
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Guild_of_the_Sacred_Journey
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Kupala's_sacred_fire-flower
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Ritual_of_Sacred_Rebirth
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Band_of_the_Golden_Standard
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Dal'Rend's_Sacred_Charge
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Artifact
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Duty
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Grove
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Venerable_Dal'Rend's_Sacred_Charge
https://xtvclamp.fandom.com/wiki/Sacred_Sword
Akanesasu Shoujo -- -- DandeLion Animation Studio -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action School Sci-Fi -- Akanesasu Shoujo Akanesasu Shoujo -- The urban legend of the 4:44 ritual consists of using a radio player to produce frequencies in front of the Akeyuki Sacred Tree at exactly 4:44, transporting people to a different dimension. -- -- When Asuka Tsuchimiya and her friends—Nana Nanase, Mia Silverstone, Yuu Tounaka, and Chloe Morisu—decide to perform this ritual as an activity of the Crystal Radio Research Club, they are shocked when the ritual works. The five travel to a parallel world, known as a fragment, where they meet an unsettlingly familiar girl—Asuka's parallel-world self. This Asuka is dubbed as Seriouska due to her serious attitude and capability to fight. -- -- Seriouska tells them about the great danger that faces all the parallel worlds, the Twilight. As it strips the parallel worlds of all of its possibilities, Seriouska seeks the death of the man behind the Twilight, the Twilight King, to stop his onslaught over the multiverse. -- -- Akanesasu Shoujo follows the five girls as they learn to accept their true selves, all the while searching for the Twilight King. However, the solution to the invasive Twilight might be closer than they think. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Ponycan USA, Sentai Filmworks -- 30,286 6.46
Blood-C -- -- Production I.G -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Mystery Horror Supernatural Vampire School -- Blood-C Blood-C -- Peaceful schoolgirl by day, fearsome monster slayer by night, Saya Kisaragi is leading a split life. Equipped with a ceremonial sword given to her by her father for sacred tasks, she vanquishes every monster who dares threaten her quiet little village. But all too soon, Saya's reality and everything she believes to be true is tested, when she overhears the monsters speak of a broken covenant—something she knows nothing about. And then, unexpectedly, a strange dog appears; it asks her to whom she promised to protect the village, curious as to what would happen if she were to break that promise. Tormented by unexplainable visions and her world unraveling around her, we travel with Saya through her struggle to find a way to the truth in a village where nothing is as it seems. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- TV - Jul 8, 2011 -- 267,827 6.54
Deadman Wonderland -- -- Manglobe -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Horror Sci-Fi Shounen Supernatural -- Deadman Wonderland Deadman Wonderland -- It looked like it would be a normal day for Ganta Igarashi and his classmates—they were preparing to go on a class field trip to a certain prison amusement park called Deadman Wonderland, where the convicts perform dangerous acts for the onlookers' amusement. However, Ganta's life is quickly turned upside down when his whole class gets massacred by a mysterious man in red. Framed for the incident and sentenced to death, Ganta is sent to the very jail he was supposed to visit. -- -- But Ganta's nightmare is only just beginning. -- -- The young protagonist is thrown into a world of sadistic inmates and enigmatic powers, to live in constant fear of the lethal collar placed around his neck that is slowed only by winning in the prison's deathly games. Ganta must bet his life to survive in a ruthless place where it isn't always easy to tell friend from foe, all while trying to find the mysterious "Red Man" and clear his name, in Deadman Wonderland. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 982,221 7.21
Dog Days -- -- Seven Arcs -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Adventure Fantasy Magic -- Dog Days Dog Days -- Dog Days takes place in the world of Flonyard, an alternate Earth inhabited by beings who resemble humans, but also have the ears and tails of specific animals. The Republic of Biscotti, a union of dog-like citizens, has come under attack by the feline forces of the Galette Leo Knights. In an effort to save Biscotti, Princess Millhiore summons a champion from another world in order to defend her people. That champion is Cinque Izumi, a normal junior high student from Earth. -- -- Agreeing to assist Biscotti, Cinque retrieves a sacred weapon called the Palladion and prepares for war. In Flonyard, wars are fought with no casualties and are more akin to sports competitions with the goal of raising money for the participating kingdoms. Cinque is successful in his role as Biscotti’s champion, but learns that a summoned champion cannot be returned to their home world. The scientists of Biscotti will endeavor to find a way for Cinque to return home, but until they figure something out, he must serve Princess Millhiore by continuing to fight as Biscotti’s hero. -- TV - Apr 2, 2011 -- 166,546 6.94
Etotama -- -- Encourage Films, Shirogumi -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Comedy Fantasy -- Etotama Etotama -- Every 60 years, the heavens conduct a sacred ritual called ETM12. This custom involves selecting worthy Eto-musume—celestial beings representing different animals—to become one of the members of the Chinese zodiac, or Eto-shin. However, since the first ETM12 two thousand years ago, the original batch of Eto-shin reigns with no one being able to replace them. -- -- Nyaa-tan is a cat Eto-musume who aspires to become a member of the zodiac in the ongoing ETM12. Fulfilling her ambition requires her to secure 12 seals, one for each Eto-shin. To that end, she must win various types of battles using Sol/Lull—divine energy created by people's positive emotions. This task is not easy however, as her powers as an Eto-musume are far below the abilities of a single Eto-shin. As such, she needs a constant source of energy. -- -- But in a chance encounter, Nyaa-tan meets Takeru Amato, a man who has just transferred to the apartment where she is secretly staying. To Nyaa-tan's delight, Takeru discovers that he gives out high quality Sol/Lull—something that sets him apart from most people. With this, the story of Takeru and Nyaa-tan begins. As Takeru supports Nyaa-tan in her dreams, he meets the Eto-shin and begins to uncover a mysterious past. -- -- 70,946 6.84
Etotama -- -- Encourage Films, Shirogumi -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Comedy Fantasy -- Etotama Etotama -- Every 60 years, the heavens conduct a sacred ritual called ETM12. This custom involves selecting worthy Eto-musume—celestial beings representing different animals—to become one of the members of the Chinese zodiac, or Eto-shin. However, since the first ETM12 two thousand years ago, the original batch of Eto-shin reigns with no one being able to replace them. -- -- Nyaa-tan is a cat Eto-musume who aspires to become a member of the zodiac in the ongoing ETM12. Fulfilling her ambition requires her to secure 12 seals, one for each Eto-shin. To that end, she must win various types of battles using Sol/Lull—divine energy created by people's positive emotions. This task is not easy however, as her powers as an Eto-musume are far below the abilities of a single Eto-shin. As such, she needs a constant source of energy. -- -- But in a chance encounter, Nyaa-tan meets Takeru Amato, a man who has just transferred to the apartment where she is secretly staying. To Nyaa-tan's delight, Takeru discovers that he gives out high quality Sol/Lull—something that sets him apart from most people. With this, the story of Takeru and Nyaa-tan begins. As Takeru supports Nyaa-tan in her dreams, he meets the Eto-shin and begins to uncover a mysterious past. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Ponycan USA -- 70,946 6.84
Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 1 - Wandering; Agateram -- -- Signal.MD -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Supernatural Magic Fantasy -- Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 1 - Wandering; Agateram Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 1 - Wandering; Agateram -- An adaptation of the the Sixth Singularity, The Sacred Round Table Realm Camelot Singularity of Fate/Grand Order. -- Movie - Dec 5, 2020 -- 40,125 6.80
Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram -- -- Production I.G -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Supernatural Magic Fantasy -- Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram -- Part two of Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot - Wandering; Agateram; an adaptation of the the Sixth Holy Grail War, The Sacred Round Table Realm Camelot Singularity of Fate/Grand Order. -- -- (Source: TYPE-MOON Wiki) -- Movie - May 8, 2021 -- 29,606 N/A -- -- .hack//G.U. Trilogy -- -- CyberConnect2 -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Fantasy Game Sci-Fi -- .hack//G.U. Trilogy .hack//G.U. Trilogy -- Based on the CyberConnect2 HIT GAME, now will be released in a CG Movie! -- -- The Movie will be placed in the storyline of each .hack//G.U. games trilogy. The story follows Haseo, a player in the online MMORPG called The World:R2 at first depicted as a PKK (Player Killer Killer) known as the "Terror of Death", a former member of the disbanded Twilight Brigade guild. Haseo encounters Azure Kite (believing him to be Tri-Edge and blaming him for what happened to Shino) but is hopelessly outmatched. Azure Kite easily defeats Haseo and Data Drains him, reducing his level from 133 to 1 and leaving him without any items, weapons, or member addresses. He is left with a mystery on his hands as to the nature of the Data Drain and why Azure Kite is in possession of such a skill. -- -- Eventually Haseo gains the "Avatar" of Skeith. Acquiring the ability to call Skeith and wield his abilities, such as Data Drain. With Skeith as his strength, Haseo begins the quest for a way to save Shino. -- -- He is seen seeking out a PK (Player Killer) known as Tri-Edge, whose victims supposedly are unable to return to The World after he PKs them. Haseo's friend, Shino, was attacked six months prior to the events of the game by Tri-Edge, and the player herself, Shino Nanao, was left in a coma. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment, Funimation -- Movie - Mar 25, 2008 -- 29,585 7.13
Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram -- -- Production I.G -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Supernatural Magic Fantasy -- Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram -- Part two of Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot - Wandering; Agateram; an adaptation of the the Sixth Holy Grail War, The Sacred Round Table Realm Camelot Singularity of Fate/Grand Order. -- -- (Source: TYPE-MOON Wiki) -- Movie - May 8, 2021 -- 29,606 N/A -- -- Smile Precure! -- -- Toei Animation -- 48 eps -- Original -- Action Magic Fantasy Shoujo -- Smile Precure! Smile Precure! -- To teenager Miyuki Hoshizora, fairy tales are a world of wondrous encounters and happy endings. Inspired by her love for these stories, she lives every day searching for happiness. While running late on her first day of school as a transfer student, Miyuki meets Candy—a mysterious fairy from the world of fairy tales, Märchenland. However, when Candy disappears as quickly as she appeared, Miyuki is left believing the encounter was only a dream. -- -- After an eventful first day, Miyuki finds a mysterious library at school. While combing through the bookshelves, she is transported next to Candy, who claims to be searching for the so-called legendary warriors, Precure. When forced to protect Candy's and everyone else's happiness, Miyuki transforms into "Cure Happy," one of the Precure warriors! As Cure Happy, Miyuki is now tasked with finding the other legendary warriors and protecting the world from destruction, all while possibly discovering her very own happy ending. -- -- 29,388 6.71
Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram -- -- Production I.G -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Supernatural Magic Fantasy -- Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot 2 - Paladin; Agateram -- Part two of Fate/Grand Order: Shinsei Entaku Ryouiki Camelot - Wandering; Agateram; an adaptation of the the Sixth Holy Grail War, The Sacred Round Table Realm Camelot Singularity of Fate/Grand Order. -- -- (Source: TYPE-MOON Wiki) -- Movie - May 8, 2021 -- 29,606 N/A -- -- Wagaya no Oinari-sama. -- -- Zexcs -- 24 eps -- Light novel -- Adventure Fantasy Shounen Supernatural -- Wagaya no Oinari-sama. Wagaya no Oinari-sama. -- The Mizuchi bloodline has long been hunted by Yokai, or monsters. Toru and Noboru Takagami are descendents of this bloodline, and under their grandmother's discretion, are given a secret weapon to combat these monsters. It is Tenko Kugen, a fox deity who can take the shape of a man or woman at will. The mischievous deity is accompanied by a shrine maiden, Ko, who will both live with the Takagami brothers at their house. Life just got complicated. -- -- (Source: NIS America) -- -- Licensor: -- NIS America, Inc. -- TV - Apr 7, 2008 -- 29,375 7.21
Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Visual novel -- Action Fantasy Magic Supernatural -- Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly -- The Fifth Holy Grail War continues, and the ensuing chaos results in higher stakes for all participants. Shirou Emiya continues to participate in the war, aspiring to be a hero of justice who saves everyone. He sets out in search of the truth behind a mysterious dark shadow and its murder spree, determined to defeat it. -- -- Meanwhile, Shinji Matou sets his own plans into motion, threatening Shirou through his sister Sakura Matou. Shirou and Rin Toosaka battle Shinji, hoping to relieve Sakura from the abuses of her brother. But the ugly truth of the Matou siblings begins to surface, and many dark secrets are exposed. -- -- Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly continues to focus on the remaining Masters and Servants as they fight each other in the hopes of obtaining the Holy Grail. However, as darkness arises within Fuyuki City, even the state of their sacred war could be in danger. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - Jan 12, 2019 -- 224,860 8.59
Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Visual novel -- Action Fantasy Magic Supernatural -- Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly -- The Fifth Holy Grail War continues, and the ensuing chaos results in higher stakes for all participants. Shirou Emiya continues to participate in the war, aspiring to be a hero of justice who saves everyone. He sets out in search of the truth behind a mysterious dark shadow and its murder spree, determined to defeat it. -- -- Meanwhile, Shinji Matou sets his own plans into motion, threatening Shirou through his sister Sakura Matou. Shirou and Rin Toosaka battle Shinji, hoping to relieve Sakura from the abuses of her brother. But the ugly truth of the Matou siblings begins to surface, and many dark secrets are exposed. -- -- Fate/stay night Movie: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly continues to focus on the remaining Masters and Servants as they fight each other in the hopes of obtaining the Holy Grail. However, as darkness arises within Fuyuki City, even the state of their sacred war could be in danger. -- -- Movie - Jan 12, 2019 -- 224,860 8.59
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Drama Fantasy Magic Military Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos -- Chasing a runaway alchemist with strange powers, brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric stumble into the squalid valley of the Milos. The Milosians are an oppressed group that seek to reclaim their holy land from Creta: a militaristic country that forcefully annexed their nation. In the eye of the political storm is a girl named Julia Crichton, who emphatically wishes for the Milos to regain their strength and return to being a nation of peace. -- -- Befriending the girl, Edward and Alphonse find themselves in the midst of a rising resistance that involves the use of the very object they have been seeking all along—the Philosopher's Stone. However, their past experiences with the stone cause them reservation, and the brothers are unwilling to help. -- -- But as they discover the secrets behind Creta's intentions and questionable history, the brothers are drawn into the battle between the rebellious Milos, who desire their liberty, and the Cretan military, who seek absolute power. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Jul 2, 2011 -- 154,554 7.31
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Drama Fantasy Magic Military Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos -- Chasing a runaway alchemist with strange powers, brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric stumble into the squalid valley of the Milos. The Milosians are an oppressed group that seek to reclaim their holy land from Creta: a militaristic country that forcefully annexed their nation. In the eye of the political storm is a girl named Julia Crichton, who emphatically wishes for the Milos to regain their strength and return to being a nation of peace. -- -- Befriending the girl, Edward and Alphonse find themselves in the midst of a rising resistance that involves the use of the very object they have been seeking all along—the Philosopher's Stone. However, their past experiences with the stone cause them reservation, and the brothers are unwilling to help. -- -- But as they discover the secrets behind Creta's intentions and questionable history, the brothers are drawn into the battle between the rebellious Milos, who desire their liberty, and the Cretan military, who seek absolute power. -- -- Movie - Jul 2, 2011 -- 154,554 7.31
Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos Specials -- -- Bones -- 4 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Magic Fantasy -- Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos Specials Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos Specials -- To mark the July 2 opening of the Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos film, the Pia Eiga Seikatsu website posted an exclusive video "interview" with the stars of the film, Edward and Alphonse Elric (as voiced by Romi Park and Rie Kugimiya, respectively). In keeping with the spirit of Hiromu Arakawa's original manga and the two television anime, the interviewer has trouble early on in figuring out who the "Fullmetal Alchemist" is. (The interview has cameos by the other stars of the anime.) Also includes 3 "Study" sessions with "Professor" Mustang, teaching Winry and Hawkeye about Creta and Milos. -- ONA - Jun 10, 2011 -- 19,933 6.95
Ga-Rei: Zero -- -- AIC Spirits, Asread -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Super Power Supernatural Thriller -- Ga-Rei: Zero Ga-Rei: Zero -- In Japan, there exists a government agency known as the Supernatural Disaster Countermeasures Division (SDCD), whose duty is to protect the citizens from creatures unseen. They are able to dispatch these monsters swiftly and without alerting the general public. But currently, they face a different challenge: the betrayal of one of their own. -- -- After the death of her mother several years ago, Kagura Tsuchimiya has been fostered by the Isayama family and forms a close sister-like bond with their daughter Yomi. The two become inseparable, and together they work for the SDCD as highly skilled exorcists. However, as the stress and consequences of their sacred duty weigh on them both, and family politics come into play, Kagura and Yomi begin to slowly drift apart. One of them grows earnestly into her role as an exorcist, and the other heads down a dark path from which there may be no redemption... -- -- 208,318 7.63
Ga-Rei: Zero -- -- AIC Spirits, Asread -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Super Power Supernatural Thriller -- Ga-Rei: Zero Ga-Rei: Zero -- In Japan, there exists a government agency known as the Supernatural Disaster Countermeasures Division (SDCD), whose duty is to protect the citizens from creatures unseen. They are able to dispatch these monsters swiftly and without alerting the general public. But currently, they face a different challenge: the betrayal of one of their own. -- -- After the death of her mother several years ago, Kagura Tsuchimiya has been fostered by the Isayama family and forms a close sister-like bond with their daughter Yomi. The two become inseparable, and together they work for the SDCD as highly skilled exorcists. However, as the stress and consequences of their sacred duty weigh on them both, and family politics come into play, Kagura and Yomi begin to slowly drift apart. One of them grows earnestly into her role as an exorcist, and the other heads down a dark path from which there may be no redemption... -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 208,318 7.63
Gun Frontier -- -- Echo -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Drama Historical Sci-Fi Seinen -- Gun Frontier Gun Frontier -- It is a harsh and barren wasteland, where the weak aren't allowed to dream. It is also a sacred land for true men, for there is no place a man can feel more alive. This is the Gun Frontier. Sea Pirate Captain Harlock and the errant samurai, Tochiro arrive in the United States on the Western Frontier. Along with a mysterious woman they meet along the way, the two friends challenge sex rings, bandits, and corrupt sheriff. They are searching for a lost clan of Japanese immigrants, and they will tear Gun Frontier from end to end until they find it. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media, Media Blasters -- TV - Mar 28, 2002 -- 8,412 6.56
Hangyakusei Million Arthur -- -- J.C.Staff -- 10 eps -- Game -- Action Adventure Fantasy Magic -- Hangyakusei Million Arthur Hangyakusei Million Arthur -- Tales of old speak of the legends of Excalibur, a sacred sword. The sword is wielded by those who are worthy of its power, bestowing them extraordinary strength and granting them the title of Arthur. However, a divine miracle results in the creation of multiple Excaliburs, thus distorting the fabric of time. -- -- Aiming to revert time to its original course, a group of six Arthurs composed of Danchou, Renkin, Kakka, Yamaneko, Tekken, and Rurou are sent back in time when the abnormal Excaliburs were spawned. They are assigned with one sole task: to destroy the Excaliburs of the past—all of which total up to one million. -- -- 26,548 6.06
Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Fantasy Shounen Super Power -- Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge -- After completing their work at Yorknew City, Leorio Paladiknight and Kurapika investigate the rumored sightings of a boy with scarlet red eyes, as they believe this person to be a member of the now non-existent Kurta Clan. Kurapika hopes to find another survivor of the clan besides himself, but instead ends up losing both his eyes after an attack from someone who seems to be his childhood friend. -- -- Leorio tends to Kurapika's wounds, and then sends for both Gon Freecss and Killua Zoldyck to help retrieve Kurapika's eyeballs. However, their search brings them face-to-face with the infamous group of thieves known as Phantom Troupe—the same people who massacred the entire Kurta Clan five years ago for their scarlet eyes, which change color during moments of rage. -- -- Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge follows the boys' quest to locate their friend's eyes and catch the thief, causing them to delve deep into Phantom Troupe's past. And in doing so, they encounter a mysterious girl who appears to be linked to it all… -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- Movie - Jan 12, 2013 -- 134,052 7.24
Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Fantasy Shounen Super Power -- Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge -- After completing their work at Yorknew City, Leorio Paladiknight and Kurapika investigate the rumored sightings of a boy with scarlet red eyes, as they believe this person to be a member of the now non-existent Kurta Clan. Kurapika hopes to find another survivor of the clan besides himself, but instead ends up losing both his eyes after an attack from someone who seems to be his childhood friend. -- -- Leorio tends to Kurapika's wounds, and then sends for both Gon Freecss and Killua Zoldyck to help retrieve Kurapika's eyeballs. However, their search brings them face-to-face with the infamous group of thieves known as Phantom Troupe—the same people who massacred the entire Kurta Clan five years ago for their scarlet eyes, which change color during moments of rage. -- -- Hunter x Hunter Movie 1: Phantom Rouge follows the boys' quest to locate their friend's eyes and catch the thief, causing them to delve deep into Phantom Troupe's past. And in doing so, they encounter a mysterious girl who appears to be linked to it all… -- -- Movie - Jan 12, 2013 -- 134,052 7.24
Initial D Fifth Stage -- -- SynergySP -- 14 eps -- Manga -- Action Cars Sports Drama Seinen -- Initial D Fifth Stage Initial D Fifth Stage -- Taking place in the sacred land of street running Kanagawa, once more Takumi Fujiwara will show his driving skills in his now legendary Hachi-roku. -- TV - Nov 4, 2012 -- 96,981 8.08
InuYasha -- -- Sunrise -- 167 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Historical Demons Supernatural Magic Romance Fantasy Shounen -- InuYasha InuYasha -- Based on the Shogakukan award-winning manga of the same name, InuYasha follows Kagome Higurashi, a fifteen-year-old girl whose normal life ends when a demon drags her into a cursed well on the grounds of her family's Shinto shrine. Instead of hitting the bottom of the well, Kagome ends up 500 years in the past during Japan's violent Sengoku period with the demon's true target, a wish-granting jewel called the Shikon Jewel, reborn inside of her. -- -- After a battle with a revived demon accidentally causes the sacred jewel to shatter, Kagome enlists the help of a young hybrid dog-demon/human named Inuyasha to help her collect the shards and prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Joining Kagome and Inuyasha on their quest are the orphan fox-demon Shippo, the intelligent monk Miroku, and the lethal demon slayer Sango. Together, they must set aside their differences and work together to find the power granting shards spread across feudal Japan and deal with the threats that arise. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- 611,417 7.84
Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari -- -- AIC Spirits, BeSTACK -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Comedy Ecchi Fantasy Harem Mecha School -- Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari -- Kenshi Masaki has been kidnapped and brought to the world of Geminar by a mysterious group. To get back home, he agrees to help them assassinate the newly crowned empress of the Shtrayu Empire, Lashara Aasu XXVIII, using a giant robot called a Sacred Mechanoid. -- -- As her army fights them off, Lashara takes note of Kenshi's abilities and demands that her attacker be captured alive, only to find out that the pilot is male which is extremely rare on Geminar. Believing it to be a waste to kill him, she makes Kenshi her attendant. -- -- As the empress' new servant, Kenshi is required to accompany Lashara to the Holy Land, an academy where Sacred Mechanoid pilots hone their skills. His arrival attracts attention, but Kenshi is unaware that something sinister is brewing within the academy and it could plunge the entire world into war. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- OVA - May 22, 2009 -- 162,473 7.83
Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari -- -- AIC Spirits, BeSTACK -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Comedy Ecchi Fantasy Harem Mecha School -- Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari -- Kenshi Masaki has been kidnapped and brought to the world of Geminar by a mysterious group. To get back home, he agrees to help them assassinate the newly crowned empress of the Shtrayu Empire, Lashara Aasu XXVIII, using a giant robot called a Sacred Mechanoid. -- -- As her army fights them off, Lashara takes note of Kenshi's abilities and demands that her attacker be captured alive, only to find out that the pilot is male which is extremely rare on Geminar. Believing it to be a waste to kill him, she makes Kenshi her attendant. -- -- As the empress' new servant, Kenshi is required to accompany Lashara to the Holy Land, an academy where Sacred Mechanoid pilots hone their skills. His arrival attracts attention, but Kenshi is unaware that something sinister is brewing within the academy and it could plunge the entire world into war. -- -- OVA - May 22, 2009 -- 162,473 7.83
Juushin Enbu: Hero Tales -- -- Studio Flag -- 26 eps -- Manga -- Action Fantasy Shounen -- Juushin Enbu: Hero Tales Juushin Enbu: Hero Tales -- For citizens of the Ken Empire, justice is a myth. Lord Keiro, the deranged Shogun of the Imperial Army, blazes a trail of terror across the countryside in search of the sacred sword that will make him a god. Standing in his way is Taito, an omnipotent star reborn in human form—a young hero who vows to use his celestial strength to avenge those slaughtered by the villainous Shogun. -- -- Taito's mystical powers steer him toward a violent showdown with Keiro, and if used recklessly, his newfound abilities could shred the very fabric of his being. To master the art of control and become a heroic martial artist, Taito must seek the guidance of others like him: the seven star-born warriors with the strength to shatter a corrupt empire. -- -- (Source: RightStuf) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- TV - Oct 8, 2007 -- 23,680 6.85
Juushin Enbu: Hero Tales -- -- Studio Flag -- 26 eps -- Manga -- Action Fantasy Shounen -- Juushin Enbu: Hero Tales Juushin Enbu: Hero Tales -- For citizens of the Ken Empire, justice is a myth. Lord Keiro, the deranged Shogun of the Imperial Army, blazes a trail of terror across the countryside in search of the sacred sword that will make him a god. Standing in his way is Taito, an omnipotent star reborn in human form—a young hero who vows to use his celestial strength to avenge those slaughtered by the villainous Shogun. -- -- Taito's mystical powers steer him toward a violent showdown with Keiro, and if used recklessly, his newfound abilities could shred the very fabric of his being. To master the art of control and become a heroic martial artist, Taito must seek the guidance of others like him: the seven star-born warriors with the strength to shatter a corrupt empire. -- -- (Source: RightStuf) -- TV - Oct 8, 2007 -- 23,680 6.85
Kannagi -- -- A-1 Pictures, Ordet -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Comedy School Shounen Supernatural -- Kannagi Kannagi -- Based on a shounen manga by Takenashi Eri, serialised in Comic REX. -- -- Our unlucky protagonist, Jin, uses the trunk of a sacred tree to carve a statue for a school project. When he takes it outside, to his surprise it begins absorbing the surrounding earth and transforms into, hold your breath on this one, a girl! So like all similar setups this guardian deity is pretty pissed that her tree was cut down and lives with Jin while she takes out her anger on squashing bugs....er, cleaning the "Impurities." -- 140,179 7.32
Kannagi -- -- A-1 Pictures, Ordet -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Comedy School Shounen Supernatural -- Kannagi Kannagi -- Based on a shounen manga by Takenashi Eri, serialised in Comic REX. -- -- Our unlucky protagonist, Jin, uses the trunk of a sacred tree to carve a statue for a school project. When he takes it outside, to his surprise it begins absorbing the surrounding earth and transforms into, hold your breath on this one, a girl! So like all similar setups this guardian deity is pretty pissed that her tree was cut down and lives with Jin while she takes out her anger on squashing bugs....er, cleaning the "Impurities." -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment -- 140,179 7.32
Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya -- -- Toei Animation -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Adventure Fantasy Shounen -- Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya -- Zeus had a daughter named Athena, the goddess of war. A group of youths flocked to Athena fighting to protect her amidst heroic battles as her "Saints". Their proof of being a Saint laid with the battle protector known as Sacred Cloth. -- -- After a virtual eternity, a new struggle is about to unfold now again over the Cloth. A boy named Seiya has crossed way over to Greece to undergo the training to become a Saint and obtained the Cloth, Bronze cloth, the lowest position among Saints. Every Saint takes a constellation as their tutelary god. And Seiya's guardian star is Pegasus. Now, the saints gather together from all over the world to participate in the "Galatic War" - championship of Saints, aiming at the Gold Cloth, the symbol of ruler of the Saints. The curtain for Galatic War has been cut open. During the death battle between the Saints, Phoenix, the Black Saint, suddenly appeared on the scene and runs off with Gold Cloth in front of a full house in his ambition to become ruler of the world. Seiya and his fellow bronze cloth warriors go after Phoenix and his "Shadow Army" to retrieve the lost Gold Cloth... -- -- The battles waged among the saints, the strongest young men on earth, begin now! -- -- (Source: Toei Animation) -- ONA - Jul 19, 2019 -- 13,627 5.11
Koisuru Tenshi Angelique: Kokoro no Mezameru Toki -- -- Satelight -- 13 eps -- Game -- Adventure Comedy Drama Fantasy Magic Romance Sci-Fi Shoujo -- Koisuru Tenshi Angelique: Kokoro no Mezameru Toki Koisuru Tenshi Angelique: Kokoro no Mezameru Toki -- A young girl named Ange is summoned to a Sacred Land and is chosen as the Legendary Etoile, whose mission is to save the newly-born Cosmos of the Holy Beast, which has recently fallen under a crisis. With the support of nine Guardians (who have the power of nine elements), she embarks on a journey to save the dying land of the Holy Beast and to discover her true self. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- TV - Jul 8, 2006 -- 10,135 6.87
Last Exile: Ginyoku no Fam -- -- Gonzo -- 21 eps -- Original -- Action Adventure Sci-Fi -- Last Exile: Ginyoku no Fam Last Exile: Ginyoku no Fam -- "I've made up my mind! I'm going to steal that ship!" -- -- All source of life originates from the Grand Lake. -- -- At this very sacred lake, the battle between the Ades Federation and the Turan Kingdom has just begun. The Ades Federation, armed with massive battleships and its sights set on conquering the world, declares war on the Turan Kingdom. With the Federation's troops encroaching on their beloved country, Turan now lies on the brink of collapse. As this is happening, the princesses of Turan look on as a small vanship named Vespa cruises above their heads. -- -- "We shall now commandeer your flagship and take her from this battlefield. The choice is yours. Die here, or survive with us Sky Pirates!" -- -- The Vespa continues to weave through the barrage of bombs, while the fleets of the Federation close in on Turan. -- -- What are the motives of Luscinia, the man leading the Ades Federation into the war? And what is the secret behind "Exile"? -- -- (Source: Animax, edited) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 39,998 7.08
Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Magic Martial Arts -- Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid -- The series takes place four years after the events of Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, during which, magical girl Nanoha Takamachi rescued and adopted a young girl named Vivio, who is the reincarnation of the Sankt Kaiser, Olivie Segbrecht. After entering her fourth year of elementary school, Vivio is given her own intelligence device, Sacred Heart, and gains the power to transform using her adult Sankt Kaiser mode. She soon comes across a girl named Einhart Stratos who, similar to Vivio, is the descendant of another Sankt Kaiser ruler, Claus G.S. Ingvalt. As Einhart becomes determined to prove her fighting style is the strongest, Vivio befriends her and together with her friends, enters a martial arts tournament where they fight against various magical opponents and learn more about their past lives. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- 21,958 6.73
Mahoutsukai no Yome: Nishi no Shounen to Seiran no Kishi -- -- Studio Kafka -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Slice of Life Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Mahoutsukai no Yome: Nishi no Shounen to Seiran no Kishi Mahoutsukai no Yome: Nishi no Shounen to Seiran no Kishi -- The story takes place shortly before Cartaphilus took a nap and Chise became an auditor at the academy. -- -- Elias and his friends help Chise prepare for the academy, where in the middle of everyday life, Spriggan visits the mansion on a spooky horse with the words, "The appearance of the ghost hunting association is unusual this time." -- -- Gabriel, an ordinary boy who just moved from London, was bored of his environment of parting with friends, being in an unfamiliar location, and everything else. Sitting by the window and glancing beyond, he spotted a purple smoke and decided to chase after it, looking to escape his boredom. Though it should not, the world of the boy begins to converge with the wizards, who live on the other side behind a thick veil. -- -- (Source: MAL News) -- OVA - Sep 10, 2021 -- 18,799 N/A -- -- Ai Tenshi Densetsu Wedding Peach -- -- OLM -- 51 eps -- Manga -- Adventure Magic Comedy Romance Shoujo -- Ai Tenshi Densetsu Wedding Peach Ai Tenshi Densetsu Wedding Peach -- There are three known worlds—the human world, the angel world, and the devil world. The evil queen Raindevilla yearns to destroy the angel world with help or her many devil minions. The goddess Aphrodite sends an angel to the human world, Limone, to summon three love angels in the form of three school girls, Momoko Hanasaki, Yuri Tanima, and Hinagiku Tamano, who together become Angel Lilly, Angel Daisy, and Wedding Peach. The three girls must fight to overcome the evils of the devils, as well as their own lives, and restore peace to the angel world by gathering all pieces of the Sacred Four Somethings (or Saint Something Four) and defeat the evil queen once and for all. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films -- 18,769 6.68
Manyuu Hikenchou -- -- Hoods Entertainment -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Historical Ecchi Samurai Seinen -- Manyuu Hikenchou Manyuu Hikenchou -- The Edo period of Japan gave rise to a clan of warriors with a very specialized, magical skill. The clan was known as the Manyuu, and the skill was the ability to administer a sword strike that could shrink the size of a woman's breasts. This might not seem like an ability that could exert power over a land, but in Manyuu Hikenchou, large breasts denote status, wealth, fame, and influence. -- -- Grave concern has arisen in the Manyuu clan due to the actions of their chosen successor, Chifusa. Disgusted with the breast obsessed society that the Manyuu have created and perpetuated, Chifusa has not only deserted the clan, but also stolen the sacred scroll that details their techniques to growing and severing breasts. -- -- Fortunately, Chifusa is not completely alone. Her fellow warrior Kaede is sympathetic to her cause; a sympathy that could place her in considerable danger. Now wanted by the very clan that raised her, Chifusa must defend her life and Kaede's while seeking to undo the damage their brethren have done to the land. Along the way, Chifusa will discover that she harbors a power that goes far beyond the scope of her training, one that could help shape and change the land that she seeks to bring equality to. -- 61,109 6.22
Mononoke Hime -- -- Studio Ghibli -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Fantasy -- Mononoke Hime Mononoke Hime -- When an Emishi village is attacked by a fierce demon boar, the young prince Ashitaka puts his life at stake to defend his tribe. With its dying breath, the beast curses the prince's arm, granting him demonic powers while gradually siphoning his life away. Instructed by the village elders to travel westward for a cure, Ashitaka arrives at Tatara, the Iron Town, where he finds himself embroiled in a fierce conflict: Lady Eboshi of Tatara, promoting constant deforestation, stands against Princess San and the sacred spirits of the forest, who are furious at the destruction brought by the humans. As the opposing forces of nature and mankind begin to clash in a desperate struggle for survival, Ashitaka attempts to seek harmony between the two, all the while battling the latent demon inside of him. Princess Mononoke is a tale depicting the connection of technology and nature, while showing the path to harmony that could be achieved by mutual acceptance. -- -- -- Licensor: -- GKIDS -- Movie - Jul 12, 1997 -- 916,477 8.71
One Piece Movie 5: Norowareta Seiken -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Super Power Fantasy Shounen -- One Piece Movie 5: Norowareta Seiken One Piece Movie 5: Norowareta Seiken -- Luffy and crew go to an island searching for a legendary sword, said to be the most expensive in the world. Soon attacking marines and beautiful maidens split the crew. Zoro betrays the crew to help an old friend, Luffy and Usopp wander through a cave, and the rest help a village fight marines. When Zoro defeats Sanji he takes the sacred pearls that are the only defense against the evil sword that will plunge the world into darkness. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- Movie - Mar 6, 2004 -- 59,097 7.22
Pokemon Movie 15: Kyurem vs. Seikenshi -- -- OLM -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Adventure Comedy Drama Fantasy Kids -- Pokemon Movie 15: Kyurem vs. Seikenshi Pokemon Movie 15: Kyurem vs. Seikenshi -- Mythical Pokémon Keldeo wishes to join the Swords of Justice, a group of Pokémon traveling around the world, helping out those in need. To do so he must first harness the power of his horn and learn the move Sacred Sword, and he decides to challenge Kyurem, a Legendary Dragon residing in an abandoned mine located within an icy crater. Confident as he is at first, it soon occurs to Keldeo that he is not yet ready for the fight. -- -- Meanwhile, as Satoshi and his friends travel across the Unova region, they stumble across an injured Keldeo. At the same time, Kyurem goes on a rampage, drawing energy from other Legendary Pokémon and disturbing the balance of power in the entire region. -- -- Now backed by his new friends, Keldeo must overcome his weaknesses and face Kyurem once again, now with the fate of the world at stake. -- -- -- Licensor: -- The Pokemon Company International -- Movie - Jul 14, 2012 -- 35,912 6.43
Pokemon Movie 17: Hakai no Mayu to Diancie -- -- OLM -- 1 ep -- Game -- Adventure Kids Fantasy -- Pokemon Movie 17: Hakai no Mayu to Diancie Pokemon Movie 17: Hakai no Mayu to Diancie -- The story is set in Diamond Ore Country, of which Diancie is the princess.This is a country located deep underground, where the Pokémon Carbink live together in peace. The energy source of this country is a giant diamond called the Sacred Diamond, which can only be created by princess Diancie. However, the current princess doesn't yet possess the power to create such a diamond, and the current Sacred Diamond's power is soon going to run out, which would result in the end of the country. Diancie meets up with Ash and Pikachu, and set off together with them to search for the legendary Pokemon Xerneas, which possesses sacred power, but on the way, they find the cocoon where the Destruction Pokémon, Yveltal, who was said to have once destroyed life in Kalos, lies in wait. -- -- (Source: serebii.net) -- -- Licensor: -- The Pokemon Company International -- Movie - Jul 19, 2014 -- 30,648 6.46
Pokemon Movie 21: Minna no Monogatari -- -- OLM, Wit Studio -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Game Adventure Comedy Kids Fantasy -- Pokemon Movie 21: Minna no Monogatari Pokemon Movie 21: Minna no Monogatari -- As Satoshi continues his journey to become a Pokémon Master, he travels to Fura City to attend the annual Wind Festival. Pumped up, Satoshi and Pikachu are determined to win the festival's Get Race. Meanwhile, Kagachi, a show-off and a habitual liar, joins the competition at the request of his niece Lily. Having almost no knowledge about Pokémon, he manages to strike a deal with a socially awkward scientist named Torito in exchange for help with his upcoming speech. Following Kagachi's victory, Satoshi meets Risa, an ex-regional track and field champion looking to catch a Pokémon. However, during Torito's speech, Team Rocket strikes and manages to steal a capsule from his lab. -- -- Tragedy strikes one after another as the Wind Festival's Sacred Flame disappears! As they set off on a journey to find the culprit, Satoshi and the group meet many people on the way—including Zeraora, the Thunderclap Pokémon who was believed to be dead... -- -- -- Licensor: -- The Pokemon Company International -- Movie - Jul 13, 2018 -- 23,702 7.18
Quanzhi Fashi II -- -- - -- 12 eps -- Novel -- Action Magic Fantasy School -- Quanzhi Fashi II Quanzhi Fashi II -- After defeating Yu Ang at the cost of revealing his lightning element, Mo Fan has been granted seven days to train in the Underground Holy Spring, where it is said that one can greatly increase their power level. -- -- However, Mo Fan's training is abruptly cut short when fierce monsters mysteriously appear all around Bo City, something which should be impossible given the city’s border defenses. An emergency is declared, and Mo Fan is tasked with delivering the Underground Holy Spring—now condensed into a small bottle—to a special refuge zone that is protected from the havoc in the city. -- -- The path there is long, dangerous, and riddled with bloodthirsty beasts. To worsen matters, the malicious Black Order threatens to halt his advance. How will Mo Fan stop the sacred spring from falling into the wrong hands? -- -- ONA - Sep 15, 2017 -- 47,397 6.73
Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars -- -- Actas -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars -- In the country of Rimguard, a mysterious event shook the country and its people just 12 years prior. As time passed, memory of the incident began to fade while peace reigned over the land. Sisters Yui and Rena live a quiet life in the Enastria Empire until a large mecha suddenly attacks their peaceful home, changing everything. The girls become caught in a vortex of destiny and godly revival. -- -- (Source: FUNimation) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 26,299 5.99
Sacred Seven -- -- Sunrise -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Super Power School -- Sacred Seven Sacred Seven -- Alma Tandoji lives a lonely life. One day, Ruri Alba, a girl accompanied by her butler and maids, visits him. Knowing the power of Sacred Seven is latent within Alma, she asks him to lend her his powers. However, he refuses and drives her away since he injured many with his unusual strength in the past. -- -- Meanwhile, a fiendish Dark Stone creature suddenly appears in this peaceful town in the Kanto region. Only Alma's power of Sacred Seven can fight against it. But Alma just lets his power run amuck and things begin to get worse. Ruri raised her gemstone in order to release his true abilities, My Soul I give to you. -- -- With Ruri's wishes engraved in it, will Alma be able to defeat the Dark Stone? -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai, Sentai Filmworks -- 70,253 6.62
Saint Seiya -- -- Toei Animation -- 114 eps -- Manga -- Adventure Fantasy Sci-Fi Shounen -- Saint Seiya Saint Seiya -- In ancient times, a group of young men devoted their lives to protecting Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom and War. These men were capable of fighting without weapons—a swing of their fist alone was powerful enough to rip the very sky apart and shatter the earth beneath them. These brave heroes became known as Saints, as they could summon up the power of the Cosmos from within themselves. -- -- Now, in present day, a new generation of Saints is about to come forth. The young and spirited Seiya is fighting a tough battle for the Sacred Armor of Pegasus, and he isn't about to let anyone get in the way of him and his prize. Six years of hard work and training pay off with his victory and new title as one of Athena's Saints. -- -- But Seiya's endeavor doesn't end there. In fact, plenty of perils and dangerous enemies face him and the rest of the Saints throughout the series. What new quests await the heroes of the epic Saint Seiya saga? -- -- Licensor: -- ADV Films, DiC Entertainment, Flatiron Film Company -- TV - Oct 11, 1986 -- 149,298 7.76
Saint Seiya -- -- Toei Animation -- 114 eps -- Manga -- Adventure Fantasy Sci-Fi Shounen -- Saint Seiya Saint Seiya -- In ancient times, a group of young men devoted their lives to protecting Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom and War. These men were capable of fighting without weapons—a swing of their fist alone was powerful enough to rip the very sky apart and shatter the earth beneath them. These brave heroes became known as Saints, as they could summon up the power of the Cosmos from within themselves. -- -- Now, in present day, a new generation of Saints is about to come forth. The young and spirited Seiya is fighting a tough battle for the Sacred Armor of Pegasus, and he isn't about to let anyone get in the way of him and his prize. Six years of hard work and training pay off with his victory and new title as one of Athena's Saints. -- -- But Seiya's endeavor doesn't end there. In fact, plenty of perils and dangerous enemies face him and the rest of the Saints throughout the series. What new quests await the heroes of the epic Saint Seiya saga? -- TV - Oct 11, 1986 -- 149,298 7.76
Seiken no Blacksmith -- -- Manglobe -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Adventure Fantasy -- Seiken no Blacksmith Seiken no Blacksmith -- Forty-four years ago, the surviving nations of the Valbanil War declared peace and forbade the use of the devastating demon contracts that ravaged the land. Now, inexperienced knight Cecily Cambell is eager to follow the example of her family and protect the people of the city using the sword she inherited from her father. -- -- Her first challenge arises in the market. A crazed swordsman wreaks havoc upon civilians and Cecily jumps into action to restore order. Overwhelmed, her weapon shatters, but a skilled stranger wielding a strange-looking sword intervenes. With the situation diffused, Cecily heads to a local blacksmith in an effort to restore her family heirloom. However, she finds out that her savior—the blacksmith Luke Ainsworth—may be the only person capable of such intricate repairs. Determined to have her treasured sword repaired, she seeks out the man who rescued her. -- -- However, a group of bandits suddenly attack a convoy headed for the city. The assailants look inhuman, and an ice demon appears. Luke suspects the use of a demon contract and calls upon a sacred power to defeat them. Meanwhile, a shadowy hooded figure lurks, watching from a distance. Who is this mysterious evildoer, and what does his appearance mean for the pair? -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- TV - Oct 3, 2009 -- 152,067 6.73
Seirei no Moribito -- -- Production I.G -- 26 eps -- Novel -- Action Adventure Historical Fantasy -- Seirei no Moribito Seirei no Moribito -- On the precipice of a cataclysmic drought, the Star Readers of the Shin Yogo Empire must devise a plan to avoid widespread famine. It is written in ancient myths that the first emperor, along with eight warriors, slew a water demon to avoid a great drought and save the land that was to become Shin Yogo. If a water demon was to appear once more, its death could bring salvation. However, the water demon manifests itself within the body of the emperor's son, Prince Chagum—by the emperor's order, Chagum is to be sacrificed to save the empire. -- -- Meanwhile, a mysterious spear-wielding mercenary named Balsa arrives in Shin Yogo on business. After saving Chagum from a thinly veiled assassination attempt, she is tasked by Chagum's mother to protect him from the emperor and his hunters. Bound by a sacred vow she once made, Balsa accepts. -- -- Seirei no Moribito follows Balsa as she embarks on her journey to protect Chagum, exploring the beauty of life, nature, family, and the bonds that form between strangers. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Geneon Entertainment USA, Media Blasters, Sentai Filmworks, VIZ Media -- 181,438 8.16
Sentouin, Hakenshimasu! -- -- J.C.Staff -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Comedy Fantasy -- Sentouin, Hakenshimasu! Sentouin, Hakenshimasu! -- Always bring a gun to a sword fight! -- -- With world domination nearly in their grasp, the Supreme Leaders of the Kisaragi Corporation—an underground criminal group turned evil megacorp—have decided to try their hands at interstellar conquest. A quick dice roll nominates their chief operative, Combat Agent Six, to be the one to explore an alien planet...and the first thing he does when he gets there is change the sacred incantation for a holy ritual to the most embarrassing thing he can think of. -- -- But evil deeds are business as usual for Kisaragi operatives, so if Six wants a promotion and a raise, he'll have to work much harder than that! For starters, he'll have to do something about the other group of villains on the planet, who are calling themselves the "Demon Lord's Army" or whatever. After all, this world doesn't need two evil organizations! -- -- (Source: Yen Press, edited) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 116,577 7.15
Sol Levante -- -- Production I.G -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Fantasy -- Sol Levante Sol Levante -- A young warrior and her familiar search for the sacred place said to fulfill wishes. It's best not to anger the ancient guardians and spirits. -- -- (Source: Netflix) -- ONA - Apr 2, 2020 -- 12,118 5.05
Taimanin Asagi -- -- - -- 4 eps -- Visual novel -- Action Demons Hentai Martial Arts Supernatural -- Taimanin Asagi Taimanin Asagi -- The city streets of Tokyo are more dangerous than they’ve ever been before. Humans and demons exist side-by-side, with a sworn trust that they will not harm each other. But some humans have disregarded these sacred pledges and have teamed with demons to form groups and organizations, bent on death, destruction, and unholy human tragedy. -- -- To help quell this tide of evil, there exists a group of female ninjas who hunt down and slay those demons who mean to harm others. Asagi Igawa is one of these ninjas, or at least, she was. Her demon hunting days have been put aside in favor of being with her boyfriend, Sawaki. Unfortunately for the couple, Asagi’s past is not as far behind her as she would like to think. Her previously defeated nemesis, Oboro, has somehow come back from the grave to get revenge. -- -- Revenge in the twisted world of Taimanin Asagi is not something so simple as death however. By the time Oboro is done, Asagi and her shinobi sister Sakura will be sexually and physically transformed and tortured to the utter depths of depravity. Asagi is about to find out that none of her training as a ninja could ever prepare her for the power that pleasure holds when used as a weapon. -- OVA - Feb 24, 2007 -- 16,819 6.86
Yao Shen Ji -- -- Ruo Hong Culture -- 40 eps -- Novel -- Action Adventure Demons Romance Martial Arts Fantasy -- Yao Shen Ji Yao Shen Ji -- In his past life, although too weak to protect his home when it counted, out of grave determination Nie Li became the strongest Demon Spiritist and stood at the pinnacle of the martial world. However, he lost his life during the battle with the Sage Emperor and six deity-ranked beasts. -- -- His soul was then brought back to when he was still 13 years old. Although he's the weakest in his class with the lowest talent, having only a red soul realm and a weak one at that, with the aid of the vast knowledge which he accumulated from his previous life, he decided to train faster than anyone could expect. He also decided to help those who died nobly in his previous life to train faster as well. -- -- He aims to protect the city from the coming future of being devastated by demon beasts and the previous fate of ending up destroyed. He aims to protect his lover, friends, family and fellow citizens who died in the beast assault or its aftermath. And he aims to destroy the so-called Sacred family who arrogantly abandoned their duty and betrayed the city in his past life. -- -- (Source: Goodreads) -- ONA - May 9, 2017 -- 11,207 7.42
Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta -- -- Tatsunoko Production -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Super Power Supernatural Magic Shounen -- Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta -- Hundreds of years ago, the borders between the worlds of humans and youkai temporarily overlapped, resulting in many residents of both crossing over to the other side. In the years since this event, the city of Sakurashin has become a central hub for all inter-dimensional affairs—a result of both the sacred Seven Pillars around the city serving as a beacon for the youkai, and the efforts of the Hiizumi Life Counseling Office in keeping the townsfolk happy. This office is composed of Hime Yarizakura, the young mayor of the city; satori Ao Nanami, who can read people's minds; half-youkai Kotoha Isone, who can summon anything by speaking a word; oni siblings, Kyousuke and Touka Kishi; and the office director Akina Hiizumi, who inherited his family's ability to force youkai back to their world. -- -- Besides volunteer and arbitration work, the Life Counseling Office also suppresses any Strikes: rare occurrences where humans are suddenly infused with youkai powers and go on a rampage. But the appearance of a sinister man signals trouble as Strikes become increasingly common, political rivals make their moves, and malicious individuals descend upon the city. As the self-appointed defenders of Sakurashin, it's up to the Life Counseling Office to protect the idyllic city they call home! -- -- TV - Oct 6, 2013 -- 104,811 7.50
Zoids Genesis -- -- Shogakukan Music & Digital Entertainment -- 50 eps -- - -- Action Adventure Comedy Mecha Military -- Zoids Genesis Zoids Genesis -- Natural disasters have devastated planet Zi, killing off almost all life. A thousand years later humans have gradually re-established civilization, salvaging ancient Zoids through diving and mining efforts. In a village whose most previous item is a giant sword which they worship as a holy symbol. A teenage boy discovers an ancient Liger-type Zoid while on a deep water salvage operation. Suddenly the village is attacked by skeletal Bio-Zoids intent on stealing a powerful generator located in the village. Our teenage hero awakens the Liger and discovers that the town`s sacred sword is the Liger`s weapon, together they fight off the mysterious Bio-Zoids. At least for now... -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- TV - Apr 10, 2005 -- 13,965 7.23
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