classes ::: noun, God, Names of God,
children :::
branches ::: the Absolute

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object:the Absolute
word class:noun
class:God
class:Names of God

see also :::

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Enchiridion_text
Epigrams_from_Savitri
Full_Circle
Heart_of_Matter
Life_without_Death
Modern_Man_in_Search_of_a_Soul
Process_and_Reality
Savitri
The_Divine_Milieu
The_Life_Divine
The_Republic
The_Seals_of_Wisdom
The_Tarot_of_Paul_Christian
The_Wit_and_Wisdom_of_Alfred_North_Whitehead
Toward_the_Future

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.09_-_The_Absolute_Manifestation
1.10_-_The_Absolute_of_the_Being
1.jr_-_The_Absolute_works_with_nothing

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
00.03_-_Upanishadic_Symbolism
0.00_-_INTRODUCTION
0.00_-_The_Book_of_Lies_Text
0.04_-_The_Systems_of_Yoga
0.06_-_Letters_to_a_Young_Sadhak
0.09_-_Letters_to_a_Young_Teacher
01.03_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Souls_Release
01.04_-_Motives_for_Seeking_the_Divine
01.04_-_Sri_Aurobindos_Gita
01.04_-_The_Poetry_in_the_Making
01.04_-_The_Secret_Knowledge
01.08_-_Walter_Hilton:_The_Scale_of_Perfection
01.09_-_The_Parting_of_the_Way
0_1958-05-10
0_1958-10-10
0_1959-05-19_-_Ascending_and_Descending_paths
0_1961-02-11
0_1961-02-25
0_1961-03-27
0_1961-04-18
0_1961-04-25
0_1961-07-07
0_1961-08-18
0_1962-02-13
0_1962-05-15
0_1962-11-30
0_1962-12-04
0_1964-04-04
0_1964-05-17
0_1964-07-28
0_1964-10-24a
0_1966-03-26
0_1966-04-16
0_1967-01-14
0_1967-08-02
0_1967-09-30
0_1967-10-19
0_1967-10-21
0_1967-11-04
0_1968-03-16
0_1968-06-26
0_1968-06-29
0_1968-12-04
0_1969-02-15
0_1969-02-22
0_1969-05-24
0_1970-02-21
0_1970-10-24
0_1971-09-04
0_1971-10-16
0_1971-12-18
0_1972-03-29a
02.01_-_Metaphysical_Thought_and_the_Supreme_Truth
02.01_-_Our_Ideal
02.01_-_The_World-Stair
02.02_-_Lines_of_the_Descent_of_Consciousness
02.02_-_The_Kingdom_of_Subtle_Matter
02.04_-_The_Right_of_Absolute_Freedom
02.06_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Greater_Life
02.09_-_The_Paradise_of_the_Life-Gods
02.11_-_The_Kingdoms_and_Godheads_of_the_Greater_Mind
02.15_-_The_Kingdoms_of_the_Greater_Knowledge
03.01_-_Humanism_and_Humanism
03.01_-_The_Malady_of_the_Century
03.02_-_The_Philosopher_as_an_Artist_and_Philosophy_as_an_Art
03.03_-_The_House_of_the_Spirit_and_the_New_Creation
03.04_-_The_Vision_and_the_Boon
03.05_-_Some_Conceptions_and_Misconceptions
03.06_-_Divine_Humanism
03.08_-_The_Standpoint_of_Indian_Art
03.15_-_Origin_and_Nature_of_Suffering
04.03_-_Consciousness_as_Energy
04.09_-_Values_Higher_and_Lower
05.01_-_At_the_Origin_of_Ignorance
05.02_-_Gods_Labour
05.03_-_Bypaths_of_Souls_Journey
05.04_-_The_Measure_of_Time
05.05_-_Man_the_Prototype
05.06_-_Physics_or_philosophy
05.07_-_The_Observer_and_the_Observed
05.09_-_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience
05.11_-_The_Place_of_Reason
05.17_-_Evolution_or_Special_Creation
05.19_-_Lone_to_the_Lone
06.02_-_The_Way_of_Fate_and_the_Problem_of_Pain
06.05_-_The_Story_of_Creation
06.19_-_Mental_Silence
06.32_-_The_Central_Consciousness
07.03_-_This_Expanding_Universe
07.04_-_The_Triple_Soul-Forces
07.05_-_The_Finding_of_the_Soul
07.06_-_Nirvana_and_the_Discovery_of_the_All-Negating_Absolute
07.07_-_The_Discovery_of_the_Cosmic_Spirit_and_the_Cosmic_Consciousness
08.07_-_Sleep_and_Pain
08.08_-_The_Mind_s_Bazaar
08.16_-_Perfection_and_Progress
08.28_-_Prayer_and_Aspiration
08.37_-_The_Significance_of_Dates
09.11_-_The_Supramental_Manifestation_and_World_Change
10.01_-_The_Dream_Twilight_of_the_Ideal
10.02_-_Beyond_Vedanta
10.03_-_The_Debate_of_Love_and_Death
10.04_-_The_Dream_Twilight_of_the_Earthly_Real
1.00c_-_DIVISION_C_-_THE_ETHERIC_BODY_AND_PRANA
1.00c_-_INTRODUCTION
10.10_-_A_Poem
1.013_-_Defence_Mechanisms_of_the_Mind
1.01_-_Adam_Kadmon_and_the_Evolution
1.01_-_Introduction
1.01_-_Tara_the_Divine
1.01_-_THAT_ARE_THOU
1.01_-_The_Four_Aids
1.01_-_The_True_Aim_of_Life
1.02.2.1_-_Brahman_-_Oneness_of_God_and_the_World
1.02.3.1_-_The_Lord
1.024_-_Affiliation_With_Larger_Wholes
10.24_-_Savitri
1.025_-_Sadhana_-_Intensifying_a_Lighted_Flame
1.02_-_On_the_Knowledge_of_God.
1.02_-_Pranayama,_Mantrayoga
1.02_-_SADHANA_PADA
1.02_-_Self-Consecration
1.02_-_The_Age_of_Individualism_and_Reason
1.02_-_The_Eternal_Law
1.02_-_The_Great_Process
1.02_-_The_Magic_Circle
1.02_-_THE_NATURE_OF_THE_GROUND
1.02_-_The_Philosophy_of_Ishvara
1.02_-_The_Pit
1.02_-_The_Stages_of_Initiation
1.02_-_What_is_Psycho_therapy?
1.031_-_Intense_Aspiration
1.032_-_Our_Concept_of_God
1.03_-_APPRENTICESHIP_AND_ENCULTURATION_-_ADOPTION_OF_A_SHARED_MAP
1.03_-_Meeting_the_Master_-_Meeting_with_others
1.03_-_Preparing_for_the_Miraculous
1.03_-_.REASON._IN_PHILOSOPHY
1.03_-_Self-Surrender_in_Works_-_The_Way_of_The_Gita
1.03_-_THE_GRAND_OPTION
1.03_-_The_Sephiros
1.03_-_The_Uncreated
1.04_-_ADVICE_TO_HOUSEHOLDERS
1.04_-_GOD_IN_THE_WORLD
1.04_-_Nada_Yoga
1.04_-_Reality_Omnipresent
1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP
1.04_-_The_Core_of_the_Teaching
1.04_-_The_Crossing_of_the_First_Threshold
1.04_-_The_Praise
1.04_-_What_Arjuna_Saw_-_the_Dark_Side_of_the_Force
1.052_-_Yoga_Practice_-_A_Series_of_Positive_Steps
1.05_-_Problems_of_Modern_Psycho_therapy
1.05_-_The_Creative_Principle
1.05_-_The_Destiny_of_the_Individual
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
1.05_-_THE_MASTER_AND_KESHAB
1.05_-_THE_NEW_SPIRIT
1.05_-_True_and_False_Subjectivism
1.06_-_Quieting_the_Vital
1.06_-_The_Desire_to_be
1.06_-_The_Four_Powers_of_the_Mother
1.06_-_The_Sign_of_the_Fishes
1.07_-_Savitri
1.07_-_Standards_of_Conduct_and_Spiritual_Freedom
1.07_-_The_Ideal_Law_of_Social_Development
1.07_-_THE_.IMPROVERS._OF_MANKIND
1.07_-_The_Literal_Qabalah_(continued)
1.07_-_The_Magic_Wand
1.07_-_THE_MASTER_AND_VIJAY_GOSWAMI
1.07_-_The_Primary_Data_of_Being
1.08_-_Adhyatma_Yoga
1.08_-_Independence_from_the_Physical
1.08_-_Information,_Language,_and_Society
1.08_-_Introduction_to_Patanjalis_Yoga_Aphorisms
1.08_-_RELIGION_AND_TEMPERAMENT
1.08_-_Summary
1.08_-_The_Depths_of_the_Divine
1.08_-_The_Magic_Sword,_Dagger_and_Trident
1.08_-_THE_MASTERS_BIRTHDAY_CELEBRATION_AT_DAKSHINESWAR
1.08_-_The_Supreme_Will
1.08_-_The_Synthesis_of_Movement
1.096_-_Powers_that_Accrue_in_the_Practice
1.097_-_Sublimation_of_Object-Consciousness
1.098_-_The_Transformation_from_Human_to_Divine
1.09_-_Sleep_and_Death
1.09_-_Sri_Aurobindo_and_the_Big_Bang
1.09_-_The_Absolute_Manifestation
1.09_-_The_Pure_Existent
1.1.01_-_Seeking_the_Divine
1.1.01_-_The_Divine_and_Its_Aspects
11.01_-_The_Eternal_Day__The_Souls_Choice_and_the_Supreme_Consummation
1.1.02_-_The_Aim_of_the_Integral_Yoga
11.02_-_The_Golden_Life-line
1.1.04_-_Philosophy
11.05_-_The_Ladder_of_Unconsciousness
1.10_-_Concentration_-_Its_Practice
1.10_-_Harmony
1.10_-_The_Absolute_of_the_Being
1.10_-_THE_FORMATION_OF_THE_NOOSPHERE
1.10_-_The_Magical_Garment
1.10_-_THE_MASTER_WITH_THE_BRAHMO_DEVOTEES_(II)
1.10_-_The_Revolutionary_Yogi
1.10_-_THINGS_I_OWE_TO_THE_ANCIENTS
1.11_-_Correspondence_and_Interviews
1.11_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Problem
1.11_-_The_Change_of_Power
1.11_-_The_Kalki_Avatar
1.11_-_The_Master_of_the_Work
1.11_-_The_Reason_as_Governor_of_Life
1.11_-_The_Second_Genesis
1.1.2_-_Commentary
1.12_-_Delight_of_Existence_-_The_Solution
1.12_-_Love_The_Creator
1.12_-_SOME_REFLECTIONS_ON_THE_RIGHTS_OF_MAN
1.12_-_The_Divine_Work
1.12_-_THE_FESTIVAL_AT_PNIHTI
1.12_-_The_Superconscient
1.13_-_Reason_and_Religion
1.13_-_THE_HUMAN_REBOUND_OF_EVOLUTION_AND_ITS_CONSEQUENCES
1.13_-_THE_MASTER_AND_M.
1.13_-_The_Pentacle,_Lamen_or_Seal
1.13_-_Under_the_Auspices_of_the_Gods
1.14_-_INSTRUCTION_TO_VAISHNAVS_AND_BRHMOS
1.14_-_The_Limits_of_Philosophical_Knowledge
1.14_-_The_Structure_and_Dynamics_of_the_Self
1.14_-_The_Suprarational_Beauty
1.15_-_In_the_Domain_of_the_Spirit_Beings
1.15_-_LAST_VISIT_TO_KESHAB
1.15_-_The_Supramental_Consciousness
1.15_-_The_Suprarational_Good
1.15_-_The_Supreme_Truth-Consciousness
1.15_-_Truth
1.16_-_Advantages_and_Disadvantages_of_Evocational_Magic
1.16_-_The_Suprarational_Ultimate_of_Life
1.16_-_The_Triple_Status_of_Supermind
1.17_-_M._AT_DAKSHINEWAR
1.17_-_Religion_as_the_Law_of_Life
1.17_-_The_Divine_Soul
1.18_-_M._AT_DAKSHINESWAR
1.19_-_The_Curve_of_the_Rational_Age
12.02_-_The_Stress_of_the_Spirit
1.2.07_-_Surrender
12.10_-_The_Sunlit_Path
1.240_-_1.300_Talks
1.240_-_Talks_2
1.24_-_PUNDIT_SHASHADHAR
1.25_-_ADVICE_TO_PUNDIT_SHASHADHAR
1.25_-_SPIRITUAL_EXERCISES
1.26_-_FESTIVAL_AT_ADHARS_HOUSE
1.27_-_AT_DAKSHINESWAR
1.27_-_Structure_of_Mind_Based_on_that_of_Body
1.27_-_The_Sevenfold_Chord_of_Being
1.300_-_1.400_Talks
13.03_-_A_Programme_for_the_Second_Century_of_the_Divine_Manifestation
1.3.04_-_Peace
1.3.05_-_Silence
1.3.2.01_-_I._The_Entire_Purpose_of_Yoga
1.400_-_1.450_Talks
1.4.01_-_The_Divine_Grace_and_Guidance
1.439
1.63_-_Fear,_a_Bad_Astral_Vision
1.71_-_Morality_2
1.79_-_Progress
1914_01_11p
1914_02_15p
1914_03_23p
1914_04_23p
1914_05_29p
1914_08_28p
1914_09_22p
1915_05_24p
1951-03-12_-_Mental_forms_-_learning_difficult_subjects_-_Mental_fortress_-_thought_-_Training_the_mind_-_Helping_the_vital_being_after_death_-_ceremonies_-_Human_stupidities
1953-06-17
1953-07-29
1953-11-18
1954-03-03_-_Occultism_-_A_French_scientists_experiment
1954-05-12_-_The_Purusha_-_Surrender_-_Distinguishing_between_influences_-_Perfect_sincerity
1954-06-02_-_Learning_how_to_live_-_Work,_studies_and_sadhana_-_Waste_of_the_Energy_and_Consciousness
1954-10-06_-_What_happens_is_for_the_best_-_Blaming_oneself_-Experiences_-_The_vital_desire-soul_-Creating_a_spiritual_atmosphere_-Thought_and_Truth
1954-12-15_-_Many_witnesses_inside_oneself_-_Children_in_the_Ashram_-_Trance_and_the_waking_consciousness_-_Ascetic_methods_-_Education,_spontaneous_effort_-_Spiritual_experience
1955-04-13_-_Psychoanalysts_-_The_underground_super-ego,_dreams,_sleep,_control_-_Archetypes,_Overmind_and_higher_-_Dream_of_someone_dying_-_Integral_repose,_entering_Sachchidananda_-_Organising_ones_life,_concentration,_repose
1955-05-25_-_Religion_and_reason_-_true_role_and_field_-_an_obstacle_to_or_minister_of_the_Spirit_-_developing_and_meaning_-_Learning_how_to_live,_the_elite_-_Reason_controls_and_organises_life_-_Nature_is_infrarational
1955-06-29_-_The_true_vital_and_true_physical_-_Time_and_Space_-_The_psychics_memory_of_former_lives_-_The_psychic_organises_ones_life_-_The_psychics_knowledge_and_direction
1955-07-20_-_The_Impersonal_Divine_-_Surrender_to_the_Divine_brings_perfect_freedom_-_The_Divine_gives_Himself_-_The_principle_of_the_inner_dimensions_-_The_paths_of_aspiration_and_surrender_-_Linear_and_spherical_paths_and_realisations
1955-10-12_-_The_problem_of_transformation_-_Evolution,_man_and_superman_-_Awakening_need_of_a_higher_good_-_Sri_Aurobindo_and_earths_history_-_Setting_foot_on_the_new_path_-_The_true_reality_of_the_universe_-_the_new_race_-_...
1956-01-11_-_Desire_and_self-deception_-_Giving_all_one_is_and_has_-_Sincerity,_more_powerful_than_will_-_Joy_of_progress_Definition_of_youth
1956-08-01_-_Value_of_worship_-_Spiritual_realisation_and_the_integral_yoga_-_Symbols,_translation_of_experience_into_form_-_Sincerity,_fundamental_virtue_-_Intensity_of_aspiration,_with_anguish_or_joy_-_The_divine_Grace
1956-08-22_-_The_heaven_of_the_liberated_mind_-_Trance_or_samadhi_-_Occult_discipline_for_leaving_consecutive_bodies_-_To_be_greater_than_ones_experience_-_Total_self-giving_to_the_Grace_-_The_truth_of_the_being_-_Unique_relation_with_the_Supreme
1956-10-03_-_The_Mothers_different_ways_of_speaking_-_new_manifestation_-_new_element,_possibilities_-_child_prodigies_-_Laws_of_Nature,_supramental_-_Logic_of_the_unforeseen_-_Creative_writers,_hands_of_musicians_-_Prodigious_children,_men
1956-11-21_-_Knowings_and_Knowledge_-_Reason,_summit_of_mans_mental_activities_-_Willings_and_the_true_will_-_Personal_effort_-_First_step_to_have_knowledge_-_Relativity_of_medical_knowledge_-_Mental_gymnastics_make_the_mind_supple
1956-12-12_-_paradoxes_-_Nothing_impossible_-_unfolding_universe,_the_Eternal_-_Attention,_concentration,_effort_-_growth_capacity_almost_unlimited_-_Why_things_are_not_the_same_-_will_and_willings_-_Suggestions,_formations_-_vital_world
1956-12-19_-_Preconceived_mental_ideas_-_Process_of_creation_-_Destructive_power_of_bad_thoughts_-_To_be_perfectly_sincere
1957-06-26_-_Birth_through_direct_transmutation_-_Man_and_woman_-_Judging_others_-_divine_Presence_in_all_-_New_birth
1958-02-05_-_The_great_voyage_of_the_Supreme_-_Freedom_and_determinism
1958-02-26_-_The_moon_and_the_stars_-_Horoscopes_and_yoga
1958-06-04_-_New_birth
1958-09-24_-_Living_the_truth_-_Words_and_experience
1958_11_28
1960_02_17
1960_08_27
1961_05_22?
1967-05-24.1_-_Defining_the_Divine
1969_10_23
1.A_-_ANTHROPOLOGY,_THE_SOUL
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Dreams_in_the_Witch_House
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Haunter_of_the_Dark
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Horror_in_the_Museum
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Last_Test
1f.lovecraft_-_The_Temple
1f.lovecraft_-_Through_the_Gates_of_the_Silver_Key
1.hcyc_-_24_-_Why_should_this_be_better_(from_The_Shodoka)
1.he_-_Hakuins_Song_of_Zazen
1.he_-_The_Form_of_the_Formless_(from_Hakuins_Song_of_Zazen)
1.jm_-_The_Song_of_Perfect_Assurance_(to_the_Demons)
1.jr_-_The_Absolute_works_with_nothing
1.poe_-_Eureka_-_A_Prose_Poem
1.poe_-_The_Power_Of_Words_Oinos.
1.rb_-_Bishop_Blougram's_Apology
1.ww_-_Book_Fourth_[Summer_Vacation]
1.ww_-_Book_Seventh_[Residence_in_London]
20.04_-_Act_II:_The_Play_on_Earth
20.05_-_Act_III:_The_Return
2.01_-_Indeterminates,_Cosmic_Determinations_and_the_Indeterminable
2.01_-_On_Books
2.01_-_THE_ADVENT_OF_LIFE
2.01_-_The_Attributes_of_Omega_Point_-_a_Transcendent_God
2.01_-_The_Mother
2.01_-_The_Object_of_Knowledge
2.01_-_The_Road_of_Trials
2.01_-_The_Two_Natures
2.02_-_Brahman,_Purusha,_Ishwara_-_Maya,_Prakriti,_Shakti
2.02_-_THE_DURGA_PUJA_FESTIVAL
2.02_-_The_Status_of_Knowledge
2.03_-_Karmayogin__A_Commentary_on_the_Isha_Upanishad
2.03_-_The_Eternal_and_the_Individual
2.03_-_The_Naturalness_of_Bhakti-Yoga_and_its_Central_Secret
2.03_-_The_Purified_Understanding
2.03_-_The_Supreme_Divine
2.04_-_Concentration
2.04_-_Positive_Aspects_of_the_Mother-Complex
2.04_-_The_Divine_and_the_Undivine
2.04_-_The_Scourge,_the_Dagger_and_the_Chain
2.04_-_The_Secret_of_Secrets
2.05_-_Apotheosis
2.05_-_The_Divine_Truth_and_Way
2.05_-_The_Line_of_Light_and_The_Impression
2.05_-_VISIT_TO_THE_SINTHI_BRAMO_SAMAJ
2.06_-_On_Beauty
2.06_-_Reality_and_the_Cosmic_Illusion
2.06_-_The_Synthesis_of_the_Disciplines_of_Knowledge
2.06_-_The_Wand
2.06_-_WITH_VARIOUS_DEVOTEES
2.07_-_On_Congress_and_Politics
2.07_-_The_Knowledge_and_the_Ignorance
2.07_-_The_Supreme_Word_of_the_Gita
2.08_-_ALICE_IN_WONDERLAND
2.08_-_Memory,_Self-Consciousness_and_the_Ignorance
2.08_-_The_Sword
2.09_-_Human_representations_of_the_Divine_Ideal_of_Love
2.09_-_The_Release_from_the_Ego
2.0_-_THE_ANTICHRIST
2.1.01_-_God_The_One_Reality
2.1.02_-_Combining_Work,_Meditation_and_Bhakti
2.1.02_-_Nature_The_World-Manifestation
2.1.03_-_Man_and_Superman
2.1.1_-_The_Nature_of_the_Vital
2.11_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_The_Double_Aspect
2.11_-_WITH_THE_DEVOTEES_IN_CALCUTTA
2.12_-_The_Origin_of_the_Ignorance
2.12_-_The_Realisation_of_Sachchidananda
2.1.3.4_-_Conduct
2.13_-_Exclusive_Concentration_of_Consciousness-Force_and_the_Ignorance
2.13_-_The_Difficulties_of_the_Mental_Being
2.14_-_AT_RAMS_HOUSE
2.14_-_The_Origin_and_Remedy_of_Falsehood,_Error,_Wrong_and_Evil
2.14_-_The_Unpacking_of_God
2.15_-_CAR_FESTIVAL_AT_BALARMS_HOUSE
2.15_-_Reality_and_the_Integral_Knowledge
2.15_-_The_Cosmic_Consciousness
2.16_-_Oneness
2.16_-_The_Integral_Knowledge_and_the_Aim_of_Life;_Four_Theories_of_Existence
2.16_-_The_Magick_Fire
2.1.7.05_-_On_the_Inspiration_and_Writing_of_the_Poem
2.17_-_The_Progress_to_Knowledge_-_God,_Man_and_Nature
2.17_-_The_Soul_and_Nature
2.18_-_January_1939
2.18_-_SRI_RAMAKRISHNA_AT_SYAMPUKUR
2.19_-_Out_of_the_Sevenfold_Ignorance_towards_the_Sevenfold_Knowledge
2.19_-_THE_MASTER_AND_DR._SARKAR
2.2.03_-_The_Science_of_Consciousness
2.20_-_Nov-Dec_1939
2.20_-_The_Lower_Triple_Purusha
2.21_-_IN_THE_COMPANY_OF_DEVOTEES_AT_SYAMPUKUR
2.21_-_The_Order_of_the_Worlds
2.22_-_1941-1943
2.22_-_THE_MASTER_AT_COSSIPORE
2.22_-_The_Supreme_Secret
2.22_-_Vijnana_or_Gnosis
2.23_-_Man_and_the_Evolution
2.23_-_The_Core_of_the_Gita.s_Meaning
2.24_-_Gnosis_and_Ananda
2.24_-_THE_MASTERS_LOVE_FOR_HIS_DEVOTEES
2.24_-_The_Message_of_the_Gita
2.25_-_AFTER_THE_PASSING_AWAY
2.25_-_List_of_Topics_in_Each_Talk
2.25_-_The_Higher_and_the_Lower_Knowledge
2.26_-_Samadhi
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.28_-_The_Divine_Life
2.2.9.04_-_Plotinus
2.3.03_-_Integral_Yoga
2.3.1_-_Svetasvatara_Upanishad
2.4.01_-_Divine_Love,_Psychic_Love_and_Human_Love
2.4.2_-_Interactions_with_Others_and_the_Practice_of_Yoga
29.06_-_There_is_also_another,_similar_or_parallel_story_in_the_Veda_about_the_God_Agni,_about_the_disappearance_of_this
2_-_Other_Hymns_to_Agni
30.01_-_World-Literature
3.00.2_-_Introduction
30.03_-_Spirituality_in_Art
30.06_-_The_Poet_and_The_Seer
3.02_-_King_and_Queen
3.02_-_The_Psychology_of_Rebirth
3.03_-_Faith_and_the_Divine_Grace
3.03_-_THE_MODERN_EARTH
3.04_-_LUNA
3.04_-_On_Thought_-_III
3.05_-_SAL
3.05_-_The_Divine_Personality
3.06_-_The_Delight_of_the_Divine
3.07_-_The_Formula_of_the_Holy_Grail
3.08_-_The_Mystery_of_Love
3.0_-_THE_ETERNAL_RECURRENCE
3.1.01_-_Distinctive_Features_of_the_Integral_Yoga
31.01_-_The_Heart_of_Bengal
31.02_-_The_Mother-_Worship_of_the_Bengalis
3.11_-_Spells
3.14_-_Of_the_Consecrations
3.2.01_-_The_Newness_of_the_Integral_Yoga
32.01_-_Where_is_God?
3.2.03_-_Jainism_and_Buddhism
3.2.04_-_The_Conservative_Mind_and_Eastern_Progress
3.2.05_-_Our_Ideal
3.2.06_-_The_Adwaita_of_Shankaracharya
3.2.08_-_Bhakti_Yoga_and_Vaishnavism
3.2.2_-_Sleep
3.3.1_-_Illness_and_Health
3.6.01_-_Heraclitus
3.7.1.05_-_The_Significance_of_Rebirth
3.7.1.09_-_Karma_and_Freedom
3.7.2.04_-_The_Higher_Lines_of_Karma
3.7.2.05_-_Appendix_I_-_The_Tangle_of_Karma
3_-_Commentaries_and_Annotated_Translations
4.02_-_Humanity_in_Progress
4.03_-_The_Special_Phenomenology_of_the_Child_Archetype
4.04_-_The_Perfection_of_the_Mental_Being
4.08_-_The_Liberation_of_the_Spirit
4.0_-_NOTES_TO_ZARATHUSTRA
4.13_-_The_Action_of_Equality
4.19_-_The_Nature_of_the_supermind
4.1_-_Jnana
4.23_-_The_supramental_Instruments_--_Thought-process
4.25_-_Towards_the_supramental_Time_Vision
4.3.2.04_-_Degrees_in_the_Higher_Consciousness
4.3.2.05_-_The_Higher_Planes_and_the_Supermind
5.01_-_On_the_Mysteries_of_the_Ascent_towards_God
5.03_-_The_Divine_Body
5.1.01_-_Terminology
5.4.02_-_Occult_Powers_or_Siddhis
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
7.3.13_-_Ascent
7_-_Yoga_of_Sri_Aurobindo
9.99_-_Glossary
Aeneid
Big_Mind_(non-dual)
Big_Mind_(ten_perfections)
Blazing_P1_-_Preconventional_consciousness
Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness
BOOK_II._--_PART_I._ANTHROPOGENESIS.
BOOK_II._--_PART_III._ADDENDA._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_II._--_PART_II._THE_ARCHAIC_SYMBOLISM_OF_THE_WORLD-RELIGIONS
BOOK_I._--_PART_I._COSMIC_EVOLUTION
BOOK_I._--_PART_III._SCIENCE_AND_THE_SECRET_DOCTRINE_CONTRASTED
BOOK_I._--_PART_II._THE_EVOLUTION_OF_SYMBOLISM_IN_ITS_APPROXIMATE_ORDER
BOOK_XIV._-_Of_the_punishment_and_results_of_mans_first_sin,_and_of_the_propagation_of_man_without_lust
BS_1_-_Introduction_to_the_Idea_of_God
Conversations_with_Sri_Aurobindo
ENNEAD_01.01_-_The_Organism_and_the_Self.
ENNEAD_01.07_-_Of_the_First_Good,_and_of_the_Other_Goods.
ENNEAD_01.08_-_Of_the_Nature_and_Origin_of_Evils.
ENNEAD_02.09_-_Against_the_Gnostics;_or,_That_the_Creator_and_the_World_are_Not_Evil.
ENNEAD_03.01_-_Concerning_Fate.
ENNEAD_03.02_-_Of_Providence.
ENNEAD_03.05_-_Of_Love,_or_Eros.
ENNEAD_03.08b_-_Of_Nature,_Contemplation_and_Unity.
ENNEAD_04.02_-_How_the_Soul_Mediates_Between_Indivisible_and_Divisible_Essence.
ENNEAD_05.01_-_The_Three_Principal_Hypostases,_or_Forms_of_Existence.
ENNEAD_05.03_-_The_Self-Consciousnesses,_and_What_is_Above_Them.
ENNEAD_05.05_-_That_Intelligible_Entities_Are_Not_External_to_the_Intelligence_of_the_Good.
ENNEAD_05.06_-_The_Superessential_Principle_Does_Not_Think_-_Which_is_the_First_Thinking_Principle,_and_Which_is_the_Second?
ENNEAD_06.01_-_Of_the_Ten_Aristotelian_and_Four_Stoic_Categories.
ENNEAD_06.02_-_The_Categories_of_Plotinos.
ENNEAD_06.06_-_Of_Numbers.
ENNEAD_06.07_-_How_Ideas_Multiplied,_and_the_Good.
ENNEAD_06.08_-_Of_the_Will_of_the_One.
Liber_111_-_The_Book_of_Wisdom_-_LIBER_ALEPH_VEL_CXI
Liber_46_-_The_Key_of_the_Mysteries
Liber_71_-_The_Voice_of_the_Silence_-_The_Two_Paths_-_The_Seven_Portals
Phaedo
r1913_11_23
r1913_12_27
r1914_04_13
r1914_11_23
r1915_08_01
r1917_03_17
r1918_05_07
r1919_07_31
r1919_08_15
Sayings_of_Sri_Ramakrishna_(text)
SB_1.1_-_Questions_by_the_Sages
Sophist
Talks_001-025
Talks_026-050
Talks_051-075
Talks_125-150
Talks_151-175
Talks_176-200
Talks_225-239
Talks_500-550
Talks_600-652
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2
The_Act_of_Creation_text
Theaetetus
The_Anapanasati_Sutta__A_Practical_Guide_to_Mindfullness_of_Breathing_and_Tranquil_Wisdom_Meditation
The_Book_of_Certitude_-_P2
The_Coming_Race_Contents
The_Divine_Names_Text_(Dionysis)
The_Dwellings_of_the_Philosophers
the_Eternal_Wisdom
The_Fearful_Sphere_of_Pascal
The_Five,_Ranks_of_The_Apparent_and_the_Real
The_Last_Question
The_Logomachy_of_Zos
The_Pilgrims_Progress
The_Riddle_of_this_World
The_Zahir
Timaeus

PRIMARY CLASS

God
Names_of_God
SIMILAR TITLES
the Absolute

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

The Absolute ::: See The Veils of Negative Existence.

The Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature,—all this is what we mean by God.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 725



TERMS ANYWHERE

2. The amount of rotation anticlockwise that the initial line (positive x axis) must make on an argand diagram to form the line that contains the complex number in question. If the angle is reflex then the argument is considered negative, and the absolute value of the argument is the amount of clockwise rotation instead.

2. This view has affinities with, and has occasionally developed into, the notion of a World Mind or Absolute Mind as posited in Vedantic and Buddhist idealism, patristic and scholastic Christian theism, objective idealism, and absolute idealism. See Idealism, The Absolute. -- W.L.

Abheda-ahamkara: The pure ego that identifies itself with Brahman or the Absolute.

Abheda-jnana: Knowledge of the identity of the individual with the Absolute (Atman and Brahman).

Absolute ::: A term which unfortunately is much abused and often misused even in theosophical writings. It is aconvenient word in Occidental philosophy by which is described the utterly unconditioned; but it is apractice which violates both the etymology of the word and even the usage of some keen and carefulthinkers as, for instance, Sir William Hamilton in his Discussions (3rd edition, p.13n), who apparentlyuses the word absolute in the exactly correct sense in which theosophists should use it as meaning"finished," "perfected," "completed." As Hamilton observes: "The Absolute is diametrically opposed to,is contradictory of, the Infinite." This last statement is correct, and in careful theosophical writings theword Absolute should be used in Hamilton's sense, as meaning that which is freed, unloosed, perfected,completed.Absolute is from the Latin absolutum, meaning "freed," "unloosed," and is, therefore, an exact Englishparallel of the Sanskrit philosophical term moksha or mukti, and more mystically of the Sanskrit term socommonly found in Buddhist writings especially, nirvana -- an extremely profound and mysticalthought.Hence, to speak of parabrahman as being the Absolute may be a convenient usage for Occidentals whounderstand neither the significance of the term parabrahman nor the etymology, origin, and proper usageof the English word Absolute -- "proper" outside of a common and familiar employment.In strict accuracy, therefore, the student should use the word Absolute only when he means what theHindu philosopher means when he speaks of moksha or mukti or of a mukta -- i.e., one who has obtainedmukti or freedom, one who has arrived at the acme or summit of all evolution possible in any onehierarchy, although as compared with hierarchies still more sublime, such jivanmukta is but a merebeginner. The Silent Watcher in theosophical philosophy is an outstanding example of one who can besaid to be absolute in the fully accurate meaning of the word. It is obvious that the Silent Watcher is notparabrahman. (See also Moksha, Relativity)

Absolute, in European philosophy, is used somewhat loosely for the unconditional or boundless infinitude. On the other hand, Sir W. Hamilton (Disc 13n) considers the Absolute as “diametrically opposed to, . . . contradictory of, the Infinite,” which is correct from the standpoint of both etymology and abstract philosophy. Blavatsky uses the term both ways: sometimes equating it with infinity, at other times with the first cause or one divine substance-principle.

Absolute: In metaphysics and mystic philosophy, the Absolute is the ultimate referent of thought, the Unconditioned, the opposite of the Relative.

absolute reality ::: Sri Aurobindo: "I would myself say that bliss and oneness are the essential condition of the absolute reality, and love as the most characteristic dynamic power of bliss and oneness must support fundamentally and colour their activities; . . . .” Letters on Yoga

Absolute ::: Sri Aurobindo: “We mean by the Absolute something greater than ourselves, greater than the cosmos which we live in, the supreme reality of that transcendent Being which we call God, something without which all that we see or are conscious of as existing, could not have been, could not for a moment remain in existence. Indian thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to relativities . . . The Absolute is for us the Ineffable.” The Life Divine

ABSOLUTE. ::: The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited by a quality less void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the individual soul and all souls and more of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe.
Absolute Divine ::: personal, supreme and omnipresent Godhead, transcendent as well as universal, an infinite master of all relations and determinations upholding a million universes and pervading each with a single ray of his self-light.


Absolute ::: The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited by a qualitiless void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the individual soul and all souls and none of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 297


Absolute (the) ::: the supreme reality of that transcendent Being which we call God. Indian thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to relativities.

absolutism ::: n. --> The state of being absolute; the system or doctrine of the absolute; the principles or practice of absolute or arbitrary government; despotism.
Doctrine of absolute decrees.


Absolutism: The opposite of Relativism. Metaphysics: the theory of the Absolute (q.v.). Epistemology: the doctrine that objective or absolute, and not merely relative and human, truth is possible. Axiology: the view that standards of value (moral or aesthetic) are absolute, objective, superhuman, eternal Politics: Cult of unrestricted sovereignty located in the ruler. --W.L. Absolutistic Personalism: The ascription of personality to the Absolute. -- R.T.F.

Absolutism: The theory of the Absolute (q.v.); the view that standards of moral value are objective, absolute, superhuman and eternal.

absolutist ::: n. --> One who is in favor of an absolute or autocratic government.
One who believes that it is possible to realize a cognition or concept of the absolute. ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to absolutism; arbitrary; despotic;


acosmism ::: The philosophy that denies the reality of the Universe, seeing it as ultimately illusory, and only the infinite Unmanifest Absolute as real. In contrast to pantheism, acosmism begins with the recognition that there is only one Reality, which is infinite, non-dual, blissful, etc. Yet the phenomenal reality of which humans are normally aware is none of these things; it is in fact just the opposite—i.e., dualistic, finite, full of suffering and pain, and so on. And since the Absolute is the only reality, that means that everything that is not Absolute cannot be real. Thus, according to this viewpoint, the phenomenal dualistic world is ultimately an illusion ("Maya" to use the technical Indian term), irrespective of the apparent reality it possesses at the mundane or empirical level.

Adhyatman: (Skr. adhi, over and atman, s.v.) A term for the Absolute which gained popularity with the reading of the Bhagavad Gita (cf. 8.3) and which Ralph Waldo Emerson rendered appropriately "Oversoul" (cf. his essay The Oversoul). -- K.F.L.

Advaita: (Skr. "non-duality") The Vedantic (q.v.) doctrine of monism advocated by Sankara (q.v.) which holds the Absolute to be personal in relation to the world, especially the philosophically untutored, but supra-personal in itself (cf. nirguna, saguna); the world and the individual to be only relatively, or phenomenally, real; and salvation to consist in insight or jnana (q.v.) after dispelling the maya (q.v.) of separateness from the divine. -- K.F.L.

Ahadiyyah ::: The absolute oneness of existence.

Aima (Aramaic) ’Immā’ or ’Īmmā’. The great mother; corresponding in the Qabbalah to ’Abba’ (father) and having the metaphorical significance of the beginning or foundation of anything. Binah (understanding, intelligence), the third Sephirah, is termed the Heavenly Mother (’Imma’ ‘illa’ah): “the ‘woman with child’ of Revelation (xii.) was Aime, the great mother, or Binah, the third Sephiroth, ‘whose name is Jehovah’; and the ‘Dragon,’ who seeks to devour her coming child (the Universe), is the Dragon of absolute Wisdom — that Wisdom which, recognising the non-separateness of the Universe and everything in it from the Absolute All, sees in it no better than the great Illusion, Mahamaya, hence the cause of misery and suffering” (SD 2:384n).

Aja (Sanskrit) Aja [from a not + the verbal root jan to be born, produced] Unborn; title given to many of the primordial gods. In the Rig-Veda, the equivalent of the First Logos, which is a radiation or first manifestation on the plane of illusion of the cosmic One — the Absolute or cosmic paramatman. The Purusha-Sukta or Hymn of Man (RV 10:90) states that the thousand-headed Purusha is dismembered at the foundation of the world so that from his remains the universe might arise. This is the foundation of the later Christian symbol of the sacrificial lamb, for there is here a play on words: Aja the “unborn” — Purusha or manvantaric spirit — may also be derived from the verbal root aj (to drive, propel), whose meanings include a he-goat, a ram, and the sign Aries. Spirit disappears — dies, metaphorically — the more it becomes involved in cosmic matter, and hence the sacrifice of the unborn, the lamb, or the ram (cf TBL 56).

Aksara: Sanskrit for imperishable; a descriptive synonym for brahman (q.v.), the Absolute, in the Upanishads; it has also the meaning of “syllable.”

Aksara: (Skr.) "Imperishable", a descriptive synonym for brahman (q.v.), the Absolute, in the Upanishads (q.v.); has also the meaning of "syllable". -- K.F.L.

Alexander, Samuel: (1859-1938) English thinker who developed a non-psychic, neo-realistic metaphysics and synthesis. He makes the process of emergence a metaphysical principle. Although his inquiry is essentially a priori, his method is empirical. Realism at his hands becomes a quasi-materialism, an alternative to absolute idealism and ordinary materialism. It alms to combine the absoluteness of law in physics with the absolute unpredictability of emergent qualities. Whereas to the ancients and in the modern classical conception of physical science, the original stuff was matter and motion, after Minkowski, Einstein, Lorenz and others, it became indivisible space-time, instead of space and time.

Alexandrian-Roman Period. Fed by Eastern ideas, later Alexandrian-Roman thought was essentially idealistic. In neo-Pythagorean, Neo-Platonic and Alexandrian Christianity, matter was identified with non-being, and placed at the metaphysical antipodes with respect to God or the Absolute. Early Christianity identified itself with the personalistic theism of Israel, Pauline spiritualism, and the neo-Platonism of Alexandria.

Al-Hakam ::: The Absolute Judge whose judgment (verdict) is irresistibly applied.

Al-Haqq ::: The absolute and unequivocal reality! The source and essence of every function in manifestation!

All Indian doctrines orient themselves by the Vedas, accepting or rejecting their authority. In ranging from materialism to acosmism and nihilism, from physiologism to spiritualism, realism to idealism, monism to pluralism, atheism and pantheism, Hindus believe they have exhausted all possible philosophic attitudes (cf. darsana), which they feel supplement rather than exclude each other. A unnersal feature is the fusion of religion, metaphysics, ethics and psychology, due to the universal acceptance of a psycho-physicalism, further exemplified in the typical doctrines of karma and samsara (q.v.). Rigorous logic is nevertheless applied in theology where metaphvsics passes into eschatology (cf., e.g., is) and the generally accepted belief in the cyclic nature of the cosmos oscillating between srsti ("throwing out") and pralaya (dissolution) of the absolute reality (cf. abhasa), and in psychology, where epistemology seeks practical outlets in Yoga (q.v.). With a genius for abstraction, thinkers were and are almost invariably hedonistically motivated by the desire to overcome the evils of existence in the hope of attaining liberation (cf. moksa) and everlasting bliss (cf. ananda, nirvana). -- K.F.L.

allodium ::: n. --> Freehold estate; land which is the absolute property of the owner; real estate held in absolute independence, without being subject to any rent, service, or acknowledgment to a superior. It is thus opposed to feud.

All things in existence or non-existence are symbols of the Absolute created in self-consciousness (Chid-Atman); by Its symbols the Absolute can be known so far as the symbols reveal or hint at it, but even the knowledge of the whole sum of symbols does not amount to real knowledge of the Absolute. You can become Parabrahman; you cannot know Parabrahman. Becoming Parabrahman means going back through self-consciousness into Parabrahman, for you already are That, only you have projected yourself forward in self-consciousness into its terms or symbols, Purusha & Prakriti through which you uphold the universe. Th
   refore, to become Parabrahman void of terms or symbols you must cease out of the universe. By becoming Parabrahman void of Its self-symbols you do not become anything you are not already, nor does the universe cease to operate. It only means that God throws back out of the ocean of manifest consciousness one stream or movement of Himself into that from which all consciousness proceeded.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 103


Al-Muqtadir ::: The Determiner. The absolute possessor of all power pertaining to creation, governance, and disposition.

amalavijNAna. (T. dri ma med pa'i rnam shes; C. amoluo shi/wugou shi; J. amarashiki/mukushiki; K. amara sik/mugu sik 阿摩羅識/無垢識). In Sanskrit, "immaculate consciousness"; a ninth level of consciousness posited in certain strands of the YOGACARA school, especially that taught by the Indian translator and exegete PARAMARTHA. The amalavijNAna represents the intrusion of TATHAGATAGARBHA (womb or embryo of buddhahood) thought into the eight-consciousnesses theory of the YOGACARA school. The amalavijNAna may have antecedents in the notion of immaculate gnosis (amalajNAna) in the RATNAGOTRAVIBHAGA and is claimed to be first mentioned in STHIRAMATI's school of YogAcAra, to which ParamArtha belonged. The term is not attested in Sanskrit materials, however, and may be of Chinese provenance. The most sustained treatment of the concept appears in the SHE LUN ZONG, an exegetical tradition of Chinese Buddhism built around ParamArtha's translation of ASAnGA's MAHAYANASAMGRAHA (She Dasheng lun). ParamArtha compares amalavijNAna to the perfected nature (PARINIsPANNA) of consciousness, thus equating amalavijNAna with the absolute reality of thusness (TATHATA) and therefore rendering it the essence of all dharmas and the primary catalyst to enlightenment. As "immaculate," the amalavijNAna emulates the emphasis in tathAgatagarbha thought on the inherent purity of the mind; but as "consciousness," amalavijNAna could also be sited within the YogAcAra philosophy of mind as a separate ninth level of consciousness, now construed as the basis of all the other consciousnesses, including the eighth ALAYAVIJNANA. See also BUDDHADHATU; FOXING.

Anadi: (Skr.) Beginningless, said of the Absolute and the world. -- K.F.L.

and for itself: (Ger. an und für sich) An sich is the given primary, latent, undeveloped immediacy. The bare intrinsic and inherent essence of an object. Für sich is a greater, developed intensity of immediacy; an object genuinely independent either of consciousness or of other things; something for itself. In and for itself belongs to the Absolute alone. Its asserted independence is the developed result of its nature and as a system of internal relations it is independent of external relations. -- H.H.

An examination of desire and will leads to the same conclusion. These, too, betoken a self which fulfills itself in attaining an ideal. This ideal can be found only in the Absolute, revealed now not only as an absolute mind but as an absolute moral person, enshrining goodness and beauty as well as truth -- that is as God. -- B.A.G.F.

Aniyamsam Aniyasam (Sanskrit) Aṇīyāṃsam aṇīyasāṃ [from aṇu atom, minuteness; aṇīyāṃsam, accusative of aṇīyas, comparative of adjective aṇu + aṇīyasām genitive plural of aṇu] Philosophically, atomic of the atomic; otherwise the smallest of the small. A phrase lifted from one of the Hindu scriptures (cf VP 1:15n), without changing the first word to its nominative case. It is applied to the universal divinity whose vital intelligent essence is everywhere, to the absolutely spiritual atom which is the divine monad of every entity, great and small, in the cosmos. In Vedantic philosophy, often used as a name of Brahman, conceived as being smaller than the smallest atom and equivalently as greater than the greatest sphere or universe. The conception applies equally well to paramatman. This universality whether in infinitesimals or in cosmic reaches is expressed in the almost equivalent phrase anor aniyamsam (smaller than an atom) (BG 8:9); likewise, anor aniyan (smaller than the small) in combination with mahato mahiyan (greater than the great) in the Upanishads (Katha 1:2, 20; Svetasvatara 3:21).

AnunatvApurnatvanirdesa. (C. Buzeng bujian jing; J. Fuzofugengyo; K. Pujŭng pulgam kyong 不增不減經). In Sanskrit, the "Neither Increase nor Decrease Sutra," one of the earliest TATHAGATAGARBHA (embryo of the tathAgatas) scriptures, along with the TATHAGATAGARBHASuTRA and the sRĪMALA-DEVĪSIMHANADASuTRA. The text, only a single roll in length, was far more influential in the development of tathAgatagarbha thought in East Asia than its length might suggest. The complete text survives only in a Chinese translation made in 525 by BODHIRUCI (d. 527). Neither Sanskrit nor Tibetan recensions of the text are extant, although the RATNAGOTRAVIBHAGA includes many quotations from the scripture. The AnunatvApurnatvanirdesa explains the absolute identity between sentient beings and the DHARMAKAYA of the buddhas through the concept of tathAgatagarbha. According to the scripture, although sentient beings endure endless rebirths among the six destinies (GATI) because of afflictions (KLEsA), they in fact neither arise nor perish because they are all actually manifestations of the unchanging dharmakAya. Since sentient beings are therefore nothing other than the dharmakAya-and since the dharmakAya is unchanging, ever-present, and subject neither to increase nor to decrease-the sentient beings who possess the dharmakAya as their nature also "neither increase nor decrease." The scripture also explains that such wrong views as the notion that sentient beings are subject to increase or decrease are caused by not realizing that the realms of sentient beings and tathAgatas are in fact one and the same. When the dharmakAya is obscured by afflictions and resides in the suffering of SAMSARA, it is called a sentient being; when it is cultivating the perfections (PARAMITA) and developing a repugnance for the suffering of saMsAra, it is called a BODHISATTVA; when it is pure and free from all afflictions, it is called a tathAgata. Sentient beings, tathAgatagarbha, and dharmakAya are therefore merely different names for the one realm of reality (DHARMADHATU). The AnunatvApurnatvanirdesa thus emphasizes the immanent aspect of tathAgatagarbha, whereas the srīmAlAsutra emphasizes its transcendent aspect.

anuttara. ::: beyond which there is nothing; the Highest; the Supreme; the Absolute

archpresbytery ::: n. --> The absolute dominion of presbytery.

Arundhati-nyaya: The star Arundhati is rarely visible to the naked eye; to point it out, therefore, some very big star near it is shown at first as Arundhati; then it is rejected and a smaller star is pointed out as Arundhati and so on till the actual Arundhati is located. This method of leading from the gross to the more subtle is called Arundhati-nyaya. This method is followed specially in Indian philosophy where in the beginning men are goaded to have faith in the lower form of worship with the help of Agamas and Tantras; then guided to the Bhakti method or the dualistic religion of the Puranas; then, again, to the rigour of the Smritis, and finally, to the non-dual (Advaita) Vedanta of the Upanishads and Ajati-vada. (Compare this with the Bhramara-kita-nyaya which is a direct meditation on the Absolute at one stretch without any such preliminary stages of religion as in the case of the former.)

Asambhavana: Spiritual doubt; this is one of the three Pratibandhas that stand in the way of Self-realisation. This is a kind of doubt; improbability; impossibility of thought; “I know quite well that the Upanishads are uniform in proclaiming the oneness of the Absolute. But, how can that be in the face of the potent distinctiveness of Isvara, Jiva and the universe?” This is the kind of doubt that arises in the minds of the aspirants. This is removed by Manana or reflection. This is one of the three Bhavanas; vain thought; this is the kind of doubt as to how Brahman which is Akarta and Abhokta can become a Karta and a Bhokta as seen in the case of Jivas for practical purposes in daily life.

As formal institutions, the Mysteries had their earliest origin during the fourth root-race, Atlantis, after its fourth subrace. Indeed, the still more primitive roots of the Mysteries can be traced to a much earlier time, probably during the third subrace of the Atlanteans, when the rapid degeneration of mankind into the worship of matter had brought about the absolute need of segregating the nobler and finer spirits of the human race into groups or schools where they could, under the vows of inviolable secrecy, study the deeper mysteries of nature and their own oneness with the divine. From that time the Mysteries became with every subrace more and more secret and entrance into them became ever more difficult. After the fifth root-race came upon the scene, the Mysteries had become well established in all countries of the globe, and their rites and functions, both of the Greater and the Less, were conducted as functions of the State.

"As soon as we become aware of the Self, we are conscious of it as eternal, unborn, unembodied, uninvolved in its workings: it can be felt within the form of being, but also as enveloping it, as above it, surveying its embodiment from above, adhyaksa; it is omnipresent, the same in everything, infinite and pure and intangible for ever. This Self can be experienced as the Self of the individual, the Self of the thinker, doer, enjoyer, but even so it always has this greater character; its individuality is at the same time a vast universality or very readily passes into that, and the next step to that is a sheer transcendence or a complete and ineffable passing into the Absolute. The Self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe. The realisation of the Self is the straight and swift way towards individual liberation, a static universality, a Nature-transcendence. At the same time there is a realisation of Self in which it is felt not only sustaining and pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and identified in a free identity with all its becomings in Nature. Even so, freedom and impersonality are always the character of the Self. There is no appearance of subjection to the workings of its own Power in the universe, such as the apparent subjection of the Purusha to Prakriti. To realise the Self is to realise the eternal freedom of the Spirit.” The Life Divine

“As soon as we become aware of the Self, we are conscious of it as eternal, unborn, unembodied, uninvolved in its workings: it can be felt within the form of being, but also as enveloping it, as above it, surveying its embodiment from above, adhyaksa; it is omnipresent, the same in everything, infinite and pure and intangible for ever. This Self can be experienced as the Self of the individual, the Self of the thinker, doer, enjoyer, but even so it always has this greater character; its individuality is at the same time a vast universality or very readily passes into that, and the next step to that is a sheer transcendence or a complete and ineffable passing into the Absolute. The Self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe. The realisation of the Self is the straight and swift way towards individual liberation, a static universality, a Nature-transcendence. At the same time there is a realisation of Self in which it is felt not only sustaining and pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and identified in a free identity with all its becomings in Nature. Even so, freedom and impersonality are always the character of the Self. There is no appearance of subjection to the workings of its own Power in the universe, such as the apparent subjection of the Purusha to Prakriti. To realise the Self is to realise the eternal freedom of the Spirit.” The Life Divine

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).

asya (dasya; dasyam) ::: (in January 1913) the third of four degrees of dasya, "the dasya of the yantra [instrument], which cannot disobey, but is worked mechanically through an intermediate impulsion of Prakriti", this indirectness being what distinguishes it from quaternary dasya; (from September 1913 onwards, corresponding to the earlier triple dasya) the highest of three forms of dasya, "a complete subjection" to the isvara, with prakr.ti "only as a channel", a state resulting from the loss of the illusory "relative freedom which by us is ignorantly called free-will", in which "at each moment and in each movement the absolute freedom of the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity of our conscious and liberated nature"; it has three stages, one in which volition is "dominant in the consciousness not as free, but as accompanying & approving the movement", a second in which the control of prakr.ti is "dominant though as a compelled & compulsory agent of a remote or veiled Ishwara" and a third in which prakr.ti is purely a channel and "the compulsion from the Ishwara direct, omnipresent and immanent".

"A third step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought or the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the individual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him.” The Life Divine

“A third step is to find out that there is something in him other than his instrumental mind, life and body, not only an immortal ever-developing individual soul that supports his nature but an eternal immutable self and spirit, and to learn what are the categories of his spiritual being, until he discovers that all in him is an expression of the spirit and distinguishes the link between his lower and his higher existence; thus he sets out to remove his constitutional self-ignorance. Discovering self and spirit he discovers God; he finds out that there is a Self beyond the temporal: he comes to the vision of that Self in the cosmic consciousness as the divine Reality behind Nature and this world of beings; his mind opens to the thought or the sense of the Absolute of whom self and the individual and the cosmos are so many faces; the cosmic, the egoistic, the original ignorance begin to lose the rigidness of their hold upon him.” The Life Divine

Atindriya sukha: Happiness beyond the reach of the senses; the Bliss of Brahman or the Absolute.

"Atman and Brahman are the same"; "The Self is one and the same with the Absolute"; one of the Mahavakyas to be found in the Mandukya Upanishad of the Atharva Veda

atman brahman. :::"Self is Reality"; the unity of one's true Self with the transcendent Self, or Reality; Self-Reality; the unity of all living things with the Supreme; &

AUM ::: another spelling of the mystic syllable OM; its three letters,.28A, U and M, symbolise the states of brahman as, respectively, "the spirit of the gross and external" (virat.), "the spirit of the subtle and internal" (hiran.yagarbha), and "the spirit of the secret superconscient omnipotence" (prajña), while the syllable as a whole represents the Absolute (turiya), "the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self-existent above all manifestation in supernal being".

AUM. ::: Same as Om (showing the three syllables separately ::: a - the spirit of the gross and external, Virāt; u - the spirit of the subtle and internal, Taijasa; m - the spirit of the secret superconscient Omnipotence, Prājna ; am - the Absolute, Turīya).
The three letters represent the Brahman or Supreme Self in its three degrees of status, the Waking Soul, the Dream Soul and the Sleep Soul and the whole potent sound rises towards that which is beyond status as beyond activity.


A. While Nicholas of Cusa referred to God as "the absolute," the noun form of this term came into common use through the writings of Schelling and Hegel. Its adoption spread in France through Cousin and in Britain through Hamilton. According to Kant the Ideas of Reason seek both the absolute totality of conditions and their absolutely unconditioned Ground. This Ground of the Real Fichte identified with the Absolute Ego (q.v.). For Schelling the Absolute is a primordial World Ground, a spiritual unity behind all logical and ontological oppositions, the self-differentiating source of both Mind and Nature. For Hegel, however, the Absolute is the All conceived as a timeless, perfect, organic whole of self-thinking Thought. In England the Absolute has occasionally been identified with the Real considered as unrelated or "unconditioned" and hence as the "Unknowable" (Mansel, H. Spencer). Until recently, however, it was commonly appropriated by the Absolute Idealists to connote with Hegel the complete, the whole, the perfect, i.e. the Real conceived as an all-embracing unity that complements, fulfills, or transmutes into a higher synthesis the partial, fragmentary, and "self-contradictory" experiences, thoughts, purposes, values, and achievements of finite existence. The specific emphasis given to this all-inclusive perfection varies considerably, i.e. logical wholeness or concreteness (Hegel), metaphysical completeness (Hamilton), mystical feeling (Bradley), aesthetic completeness (Bosanquet), moral perfection (Royce). The Absolute is also variously conceived by this school as an all-inclusive Person, a Society of persons, and as an impersonal whole of Experience.

Ayam-atma-brahma: This Self is the Absolute; this is one of the four Upanishadic Great Sentences.

backward difference: A backward difference considers the absolute or directed difference between the value of a function (thus including the terms of a sequence) with a particular argument and the correponding value at a fixed interval prior to the nominated argument. With the following notations, f(x) is the function in question, x is the argument, h is the fixed interval while the nabla symbol (upside-down Greek capital Delta) represents the backward difference.

being ::: 1. The state or quality of having existence. 2. The totality of all things that exist. 3. One"s basic or essential nature; self. 4. All the qualities constituting one that exists; the essence. 5. A person; human being. 6. The Divine, the Supreme; God. Being, being"s, Being"s, beings, Beings, beings", earth-being"s, earth-beings, fragment-being, non-being, non-being"s, Non-Being, Non-Being"s, world-being"s.

Sri Aurobindo: "Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the free base of all cosmic existence.” *The Life Divine :::

   "The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” *The Life Divine

"What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc., by the Divine Power is the Becoming. The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming.” Letters on Yoga

"Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness.” The Upanishads :::

   "Our whole apparent life has only a symbolic value & is good & necessary as a becoming; but all becoming has being for its goal & fulfilment & God is the only being.” *Essays Divine and Human

"Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.” The Synthesis of Yoga*


Being and Nonbeing; Be-ness Equivalent to the Sanskrit sat, asat, and tat. Asat is “a philosophical term meaning ‘non-being,’ or rather non-be-ness. The ‘incomprehensible nothingness.’ Sat, the immutable, eternal, ever-present, and the one real ‘Be-ness’ (not Being) is spoken of as being born of Asat, and Asat begotten by ‘Sat.’ The unreal, or Prakriti, objective nature regarded as an illusion. Nature, or the illusive shadow of its one true essence” (TG 33). So asat or nonbeing is used both to denote that which precedes Being, and out of which Being is born — or vice versa; and to denote the illusory world in contrast with the essential or fundamental cosmic self. Sat (or asat) corresponds very largely with the Absolute of ordinary European philosophy, whereas Be-ness or nonbeing corresponds with the extremely metaphysical Vedic and Vedantic tat and parabrahman.

Beyond all these is the Absolute.

beyond ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads *

Beyond ::: “The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All here in the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annullation, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is sovran Mind of this mind, secret Life of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses.” The Upanishads

B. Generically "an absolute" or "the absolute" (pl. "absolutes") means the real (thing-in-itself) as opposed to appearance; substance, the substantival, reals (possessing aseity or self-existence) as opposed to relations; the perfect, non-comparative, complete of its kind; the primordial or uncaused; the independent or autonomous. Logic. Aristotelian logic involves such absolutes as the three laws of thought and changeless, objectively real classes or species, In Kantian logic the categories and principles of judgment are absolutes, i.e. a priori, while the Ideas of reason seek absolute totality and unity, In the organic or metaphysical logic of the Hegelian school, the Absolute is considered the ultimate terminus, referent, or subject of every judgment. Ethics and Axiology. Moral and axiological identified with the Real values, norms, principles, maxims, laws are considered absolutes when universally valid objects of acknowledgment, whether conditionally or unconditionally (e.g. the law of the best possible, the utilitarian greatest happiness principle, the Kantian categorical imperative).

Bhasya: (Skr. speaking) Commentary. Bheda: (Skr. different, distinct) Non-identity, particularly in reference to any philosophy of dualism which recognizes the existence of two opposed principles or admits of a difference between the essentially human and the Absolute. -- K.F.L.

bhava mukha. ::: an exalted state of spiritual experience, in which the aspirant keeps his mind on the borderline between the Absolute and the relative, contemplating the ineffable and attributeless Reality and also participating in the activities of the relative world, seeing in it the manifestation of Reality alone

bhutakoti. (T. yang dag pa'i mtha'; C. shiji; J. jissai; K. silche 實際). In Sanskrit, lit. "end," "limit," or perhaps "edge" or "apex" (KOtI) of "reality" (BHuTA); the "peak experience" or "ultimate state" that is realized in the experience of the absolute (PARAMARTHA). Both buddhas and ARHATs are said to reside in the bhutakoti, which in this context is synonymous with absolute truth (PARAMARTHASATYA). The DAZHIDU LUN (*MahAprajNApAramitAsAstra) glosses the term as follows: "In the term bhutakoti, "real" (bhuta) refers to the DHARMATA; because it is realized, it is called the "end" (koti)." While dharmatA as the "nature of reality" is used interchangeably with "things as they are" (TATHATA, yathAbhuta) to refer to the nature of reality itself, bhutakoti appears along with NIRVAnA to imply the "peak experience" or "ultimate state" that is reached in the realization of that nature of reality. The ABHISAMAYALAMKARA commentarial tradition also describes the bhutakoti as a limit that bodhisattvas must cross over. In those contexts bhutakoti is equivalent to the partial nirvAna of the arhat that bodhisattvas must avoid falling into, and hence is the extreme of tranquility. Bodhisattvas finally cross over that "reality limit" when they reach the state of full enlightenment.

Bliss and oneness are the essential condition of the absolute reality, and love as the most characteristic dynamic power of bliss and oneness must support fundamentally and colour their activities.

Brahman, Brahma: (Skr.) The impersonal, pantheistic world-soul, the Absolute, union with which is the highest goal of the Upanishads (q.v.) and Vedic (q.v.) thinking in general. It is occasionally identified with atman (q.v.) or made the exclusive reality (cf. brahma eva idam visvam; sarvam khalv idam brahma), thus laying the foundation for a deep mystic as well as rational insight into the connaturalness of the human and divine and an uncompromising monism which gave its impress to much of Hindu thinking. -- K.F.L.

Brahman: In Hinduism and occult philosophy, the Absolute. (Frequently, although incorrectly, referred to also as Brahma—q.v.).

brahman ::: (in the Veda) "the soul or soul-consciousness emerging from the secret heart of things" or "the thought, inspired, creative, full of the secret truth, which emerges from that consciousness and becomes thought of the mind"; (in Vedanta) the divine Reality, "the One [eka1] besides whom there is nothing else existent", the Absolute who is "at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements". Its nature is saccidananda, infinite existence (sat), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ananda), whose second element can also be described as consciousness-force (cit-tapas), making four fundamental principles of the integral Reality; brahman seen in all things in terms of these principles is called in the Record of Yoga the fourfold brahman, whose aspects form the brahma catus.t.aya. The complete realisation of brahman included for Sri Aurobindo not only the unification of the experiences of the nirgun.a brahman (brahman without qualities) and sagun.a brahman (brahman with qualities), but the harmonisation of the impersonal brahman which is "the spiritual material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe" with the personal isvara in the consciousness of parabrahman, the brahman in its supreme status as "a transcendent Unthinkable too great for any manifestation", which "is at the same time the living supreme Soul of all things" (purus.ottama) and the supreme Lord (paramesvara) and supreme Self (paramatman), "and in all these equal aspects the same single and eternal Godhead". Brahman is represented in sound by the mystic syllable OM.

brahmanishtha. ::: remaining steadfast in the Absolute; one who is firmly established in the supreme being, in the direct knowledge of the absolute Reality

Brahman: The Akhandaikarasa Satchidananda, the Absolute Reality; the Truth proclaimed in the Upanishads; the Supreme Reality that is one and indivisible, infinite, and eternal; all-pervading, changeless Existence; Existence-knowledge-bliss Absolute; the substratum of Jiva, Isvara and Maya; Absolute Consciousness; it is not only all-powerful but all-power itself; not only all-knowing and blissful, but all-knowledge and bliss itself.

brahman. ::: the impersonal, non-dual, Final Reality; infinite consciousness; the eternal witness; the absolute Self of all beings; oneness; the supreme Reality that is one and indivisible, uncreated, infinite and eternal; witnessing awareness; all-pervading, all-embracing, changeless existence that is entirely complete within Itself; the Supreme state which is attained here in this life by clear Self-enquiry, which arises in the Heart when association with a Satguru is gained

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]

Brahma-sakshatkara: Realisation of Brahman; direct experience of the Absolute Being.

Brahmavidya: Science of Brahman; knowledge of Brahman; learning pertaining to Brahman or the Absolute Reality.

brahmavidya. ::: science of Brahman; knowledge of Brahman, the supreme Reality; using reasoning to attain the absolute Truth

". . . the Absolute is not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond Time.” The Upanishads*

“… the Absolute is not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond Time.” The Upanishads

By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 18, Page: 93


Caitanya: Sanskrit for consciousness or intelligence; the universal intelligence or spirit; a quality near the in-it-self aspect of the Absolute Spirit, and hence sometimes a synonym for it.

Caitanya: (Skr.) Consciousness, "superconsciousness", a quality near the in-it-self aspect of the Absolute Spirit, and hence sometimes a synonym for it. -- K.F.L.

central difference: The absolute or directed difference between values whose argument are a fixed equal interval away from the nominated argument.

Ceugant, Cylch Y Ceugant (Welsh) The cycle of infinity, the Boundless. The highest of the three Druidic circles of existence: the world of the Absolute.

coefficient of variation: A measure of dispersion (standard deviation) normalised by the mean. (The absolute value of the mean is taken for a real variable to prevent the coefficient from being negative.)

Cosmic ::: Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 260


dhimahi. ::: "we meditate upon"; meditation or knowledge of the Absolute

dhyānamudrā. (T. mnyam bzhag gi phyag rgya; C. dingyin; J. join; K. chongin 定印). In Sanskrit, "gesture of meditation"; also sometimes written as dhyānimudrā. This MUDRĀ is formed with both hands resting in the lap, the back of the right hand resting on the palm of the left and both thumbs lightly touching. In this version, the right hand represents the world of enlightenment, which subdues the world of appearance symbolized by the left hand, or, alternatively, the absolute realm of reality in which NIRVĀnA and SAMSĀRA are nondual. This gesture may also be made with the left hand only, while the right hand is positioned in another mudrā. This gesture is commonly found in images of sĀKYAMUNI and AMITĀBHA buddhas and is also a basic hand position used in the practice of meditation.

Ein Sof ::: Name given to the Divine infinite in Kabbalistic thought. Early kabbalists conceived of the Ein Sof as the absolute perfection in which there is no distinction or plurality. While “God” may be thought of in relational or conceptual terms, the Ein Sof transcends these categories. Importantly, the infinite really is infinite — it does not end at the front of your brain, or anywhere else. Therefore, it is all there is.

Ekantika: Final or ultimate; the Absolute.

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.

elative ::: a. --> Raised; lifted up; -- a term applied to what is also called the absolute superlative, denoting a high or intense degree of a quality, but not excluding the idea that an equal degree may exist in other cases.

Enlightenment: When Kant, carried by the cultural enthusiasm of his time, explained "enlightenment" as man's coming of age from the state of infancy which rendered him incapable of using his reason without the aid of others, he gave only the subjective meaning of the term. Objectively, enlightenment is a cultural period distinguished by the fervent efforts of leading personalities to make reason the absolute ruler of human life, and to shed the light of knowledge upon the mind and conscience of any individual. Such attempts are not confined to a particular time, or nation, as history teaches; but the term is generally applied to the European enlightenment stretching from the early 17th to the beginning of the 19th century, especially fostered by English, Dutch, French, and German philosophers. It took its start in England from the empiricism of F. Bacon, Th. Hobbes, J. Locke, it found a religious version in the naturalism of Edw. H. Cherbury, J. Toland, M. Tindal, H. Bolingbroke, and the host of "freethinkers", while the Earl of Shaftesbury imparted to it a moral on the "light of reason". Not so constructive but radical in their sarcastic criticism of the past were the French enlighteners, showing that their philosophy got its momentum from the moral corruption at the royal court and abuse of kinglv power in France. Descartes' doctrine of the "clear and perspicuous ideas," Spinoza's critical attitude towards religion, and Leibniz-Wolff's "reasonable thinking" prepared the philosophy of P. Bayle, Ch. Montesquieu, F. M. Voltaire, and J. J. Rousseau. The French positive contribution to the subject was the "Encyclopedie ou Dictionaire raisonne des sciences, arts et metiers", 1751-72, in 28 volumes, edited by Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, Holbach, J. L. Lagrane, etc. What, in England and France, remained on the stage of mere ideas and utopic dreams became reality in the new commonwealth of the U.S.A. The "fathers of the constitution" were enlightened, outstanding among them B. Franklin, Th. Jefferson, J. Adams, A. Hamilton, and Th. Paine their foremost literary propagandist.

Eros: (Gr.) 1. Possessive desire or love, commonly erotic. 2. In Platonic thought, the driving force of life aspiring to the absolute Good; hence the motive underlying education, fine art, and philosophy. The connotation of aesthetic fascination, impersonality, and intense desire is retained in Plato's use of the term. Hence Eros is to be distinguished from the Indian Bhakti (selfless devotion), the Buddhist Metta (disinterested benevolence), the Confucian Jen (humanity, charity), and Ai (personal love), and the Christian Agapao (sacrificial, protective brotherly love), and Phileo (personal affection or fondness). -- W.L.

Eros: In Platonism, the driving force of life aspiring to the absolute Good.

Existence [from Latin exsisto standing forth, emerging] Although often used interchangeably with being, in theosophy being refers to abstract continuity in spirit, while existence means the phenomenal manifestation of an entity in the phenomenal worlds. Therefore being is the noumenon and existence is the phenomenon. Hence one can speak of the causes of existence (nidanas), or of all existences being dissolved. The Absolute, a cosmic hierarch, is defined with equal appropriateness as absolute existence and as non-existence. Non-existence is described as absolute being, existence, and consciousness (SD 1:39). Fichte makes a proper distinction between being (Seyn) and existence (Daseyn), the former being the noumenal One, and the latter the phenomenal manifold through which the One is known.

Fichte conceives the ultimate Ich as an absolute, unconditioned, simple ego which "posits" itself and its not-self in a series of intellectual acts. He emphasizes the dynamic, creative powers of the ego, its capacity for self-determination, the act in which the absolute subject creates the I. Self and not-self are products of the original activity of the conscious subject. Schelling conceives the I as a creation of the Absolute Idea. Hegel, however, treats the Ich as thought conceived as subject, as thinking, abstracted from all things perceived, willed or felt -- in short abstracted from all experience. As such it is universal abstract freedom, an ideal unity.

"First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evident to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or define it.” The Life Divine

“First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evident to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or define it.” The Life Divine

From the zero emanate an infinite number of cosmic Ones or monads. Every absolute is not only the hierarch of its own hierarchy, the One from which all subsequent differentiations emanate, but is also a cosmic jivanmukta, a released monad freed from the pull of the lower planes. Every monad at the threshold of paranirvana reassumes its primeval essence and becomes at one with the absolute of its own hierarchy once more. The absolute is thus the goal of evolution as well as the source, the highest divinity or Silent Watcher of the hierarchy of compassion, which forms the light side of a universe or cosmic hierarchy.

Further, the Buddha meant is not any particular Buddha but Adi-Bodhi or the First Logos, “whose primordial ray is Mahabuddhi, the Universal Seal, Alaya, whose flame is ubiquitous, and whose influence has a different sphere on each of the three forms of existence, because, once again, it is Universal Being itself or the reflex of the Absolute” (TG 343).

Gharb i mutlaq: Arabic for the absolute void; in Sufism, the plane of absolute inactual being.

god ::: “… the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature,—all this is what we mean by God, …” The Life Divine

God ::: the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifest in the Cosmos and Lord of Nature. God is the All and that which transcends the All.

god ::: Sri Aurobindo: ". . . the Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature, — all this is what we mean by God, . . . .” *The Life Divine

"Here we live in an organisation of mortal consciousness which takes the form of a transient world; there we are liberated into the harmonies of an infinite self-seeing which knows all world in the light of the eternal and immortal. The Beyond is our reality; that is our plenitude; that is the absolute satisfaction of our self-existence. It is immortality and it is ‘That Delight".” The Upanishads *beyond

“Here we live in an organisation of mortal consciousness which takes the form of a transient world; there we are liberated into the harmonies of an infinite self-seeing which knows all world in the light of the eternal and immortal. The Beyond is our reality; that is our plenitude; that is the absolute satisfaction of our self-existence. It is immortality and it is ‘That Delight’.” The Upanishads

I^A DEVATA, A conscious Personality of the Divine answering to the needs of the seeker’s own personality and show- ing to him as in a representative image what the Divine is or at least pointing him through itself to the Absolute.

“I am here with thee in thy chariot of battle revealed as the Master of Existence within and without thee and I repeat the absolute assurance, the infallible promise that I will lead thee to myself through and beyond all sorrow and evil. Whatever difficulties and perplexities arise, be sure of this that I am leading thee to a complete divine life in the universal and an immortal existence in the transcendent Spirit.” Essays on the Gita

Idea: (Gr. idea) This term has enjoyed historically a considerable diversity of usage. In pre-Platonic Greek: form, semblance, nature, fashion or mode, class or species. Plato (and Socrates): The Idea is a timeless essence or universal, a dynamic and creative archetype of existents. The Ideas comprise a hierarchy and an organic unity in the Good, and are ideals as patterns of existence and as objects of human desire. The Stoics: Ideas are class concepts in the human mind. Neo-Platonism: Ideas are archetypes of things considered as in cosmic Mind (Nous or Logos). Early Christianity and Scholasticism: Ideas are archetypes eternally subsistent in the mind of God. 17th Century: Following earlier usage, Descartes generally identified ideas with subjective, logical concepts of the human mind. Ideas were similarly treated as subjective or mental by Locke, who identified them with all objects of consciousness. Simple ideas, from which, by combination, all complex ideas are derived, have their source either in sense perception or "reflection" (intuition of our own being and mental processes). Berkeley: Ideas are sense objects or perceptions, considered either as modes of the human soul or as a type of mind-dependent being. Concepts derived from objects of intuitive introspection, such as activity, passivity, soul, are "notions." Hume: An Idea is a "faint image" or memory copy of sense "impressions." Kant: Ideas are concepts or representations incapable of adequate subsumption under the categories, which escape the limits of cognition. The ideas of theoretical or Pure Reason are ideals, demands of the human intellect for the absolute, i.e., the unconditioned or the totality of conditions of representation. They include the soul, Nature and God. The ideas of moral or Practical Reason include God, Freedom, and Immortality. The ideas of Reason cannot be sensuously represented (possess no "schema"). Aesthetic ideas are representations of the faculty of imagination to which no concept can be adequate.

identism ::: n. --> The doctrine taught by Schelling, that matter and mind, and subject and object, are identical in the Absolute; -- called also the system / doctrine of identity.

Identity-philosophy: In general the term has been applied to any theory which failed to distinguish between spirit and matter, subject and object, regarding them as an undifferentiated unity; hence such a philosophy is a species of monism. In the history of philosophy it usually signifies the system which has been called Identitätsphilosophie by Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling who held that spirit and nature are fundamentally the same, namely, the Absolute. Neither the ego nor the non-ego are the ultimate principles of being; they are both relative concepts which are contained in something absolute. This is the supreme principle of Absolute Identity of the ideal and the real. Reasoning does not lead us to the Absolute which can only be attained by immediate intellectual intuition. In it we find the eternal concepts of things and from it we can derive everything else. We are obliged to conceive the Absolute Identity as the indifference of the ideal and the real. Of course, this is God in Whom all opposites are united. He is the unity of thought and being, the subjective and the objective, form and essence, the general and infinite, and the particular and finite. This teaching is similar to that of Spinoza. -- J.J.R.

IGNORANCE. ::: Avidya, the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life that flow from it and all that is natural to the separative consciousness and the egoistic mind and life.

This Ignorance is the result of a movement by which the cosmic Intelligence separated itself from the light of the Supermind (the divine Gnosis) and lost the Truth.

Sevenfold Ignorance ::: If we look at this Ignorance in which ordinarily we live by the very circumstance of our separative existence in a material, ip a spatial and temporal universe, wc see that on its obscurer side it reduces itself, from whatever direction we look at or approach it, into the fact of a many- sided self-ignorance. We are Ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming ; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence — that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self ; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becom- ing in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence — that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming ; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-sclf — that is the tViTid, \Vie egoistic ignorance. V/c aie ignorant of oat eteinai becoming in Time ; we take this Uttle life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space for our beginning, our middle and our end, — that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is super-conscient, sub- conscient, intraconscient, circumcooscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence — that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming ; we take the mind or life or body or any two or all three tor our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to deter- mine sovereignly by its emergence from their operations, — that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoy- ment of our life in the world ; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.


ILLUSIONIST PHILOSOPHY In each world the monad consciousness apprehends reality totally differently. This is what was originally meant by the saying that all apprehension of reality is maya, or &

Immanence: (late Lat. Immanere, to remain in) The state of being immanent, present, or in dwelling. In Medieval Scholasticism a cause is immanent whose effects are exclusively within the agent, as opposed to transient. For Kant the immanent is experiential as opposed to non-experiential or transcendent. In modern metaphysics and theology immanence signifies presence (of essence, being, power, etc.), as opposed to absence. According to pantheism the essence of God or the Absolute is completely immanent in the world, i.e. is identical with it. According to Deism God is essentially absent or transcendent from the world. According to immanent theism He is both immanent (in presence and activity) and transcendent (in essence) with respect to it. Mysticism in its broadest sense posits the mutual immanence of the human and the divine. -- W.L.

Immanence: Latin for in-dwelling. In general philosophical terminology, this term refers to an activity producing its effects from within, or to an entity whose being within something else contributes to the existence of the latter. In theology, the term refers to the complete or partial identification of the Deity with the world. (The belief in the absolute immanence of God in the universe is equivalent to pantheism.) Mysticism in its broadest sense posits the mutual immanence of the human and the divine.

immortality ::: “By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature.” The Upanishads

Impersonalistic Idealism identifies ontological reality essentially with non-conscious spiritual principle, unconscious psychic agency, pure thought, impersonal or "pure" consciousness, pure Ego, subconscious Will, impersonal logical Mind, etc. Personalistic Idealism characterizes concrete reality as personal selfhood, i.e., as possessing self-consciousness. With respect to the relation of the Absolute or World-Ground (s.) to finite selves or centers of consciousness, varying degrees of unity or separateness are posited. The extreme doctrines are radical monism and radical pluralism. Monistic Idealism (pantheistic Idealism) teaches that the finite self is a part, mode, aspect, moment, appearance or projection of the One. Pluralistic Idealism defends both the inner privacy of the finite self and its relative freedom from direct or causal dependence upon the One. With respect to Cosmology, pure idealism is either subjective or objective. Subjective Idealism (acosmism) holds that Nature is merely the projection of the finite mind, and has no external, real existence. (The term "Subjective Idealism" is also used for the view that the ontologically real consists of subjects, i.e., possessors of experience.) Objective Idealism identifies an externally real Nature with the thought or activity of the World Mind, (In Germany the term "Objective Idealism" is commonly identified with the view that finite minds are parts -- modes, moments, projections. appearances, members -- of the Absolute Mind.) Epistemological Idealism derives metaphysical idealism from the identificition of objects with ideas. In its nominalistic form the claim is made that "To be is to be perceived." From the standpoint of rationalism it is argued that there can be no Object without a Subject. Subjects, relations, sensations, and feelings are mental; and since no other type of analogy remains by which to characterize a non-mental thing-in-itself, pure idealism follows as the only possible view of Being.

India. Intimations of advanced theism, both in a deistic and immanentistic form, are to be found in the Rig Veda. The early Upanishads in general teach variously realistic deism, immanent theism, and, more characteristically, mystical, impersonal idealism, according to which the World Ground (brahman) is identified with the universal soul (atman) which is the inner or essential self within each individual person. The Bhagavad Gita, while mixing pantheism, immanent theism, and deism, inclines towards a personahstic idealism and a corresponding ethics of bhakti (selfless devotion). Jainism is atheistic dualism, with a personalistic recognition of the reality of souls. Many of the schools of Buddhism (see Buddhism) teach idealistic doctrines. Thus a monistic immaterialism and subjectivism (the Absolute is pure consciousness) was expounded by Maitreya, Asanga, and Vasubandhu. The Lankavatarasutra combined monistic, immaterialistic idealism with non-absolutistic nihilism. Subjectivistic, phenomenalistic idealism (the view that there is neither absolute Pure Consciousness nor substantial souls) was taught by the Buddhists Santaraksita and Kamalasila. Examples of modern Vedantic idealism are the Yogavasistha (subjective monistic idealism) and the monistic spiritualism of Gaudapada (duality and plurality are illusion). The most influential Vedantic system is the monistic spiritualism of Sankara. The Absolute is pure indeterminate Being, which can only be described as pure consciousness or bliss. For the different Vedantic doctrines see Vedanta and the references there. Vedantic idealism, whether in its monistic and impersonalistic form, or in that of a more personalistic theism, is the dominant type of metaphysics in modern India. Idealism is also pronounced in the reviving doctrines of Shivaism (which see).

Indian Aesthetics: Art in India is one of the most diversified subjects. Sanskrit silpa included all crafts, fine art, architecture and ornament, dancing, acting, music and even coquetry. Behind all these endeavors is a deeprooted sense of absolute values derived from Indian philosophy (q.v.) which teaches the incarnation of the divine (Krsna, Shiva, Buddha), the transitoriness of life (cf. samsara), the symbolism and conditional nature of the phenomenal (cf. maya). Love of splendour and exaggerated greatness, dating back to Vedic (q.v.) times mingled with a grand simplicity in the conception of ultimate being and a keen perception and nature observation. The latter is illustrated in examples of verisimilous execution in sculpture and painting, the detailed description in a wealth of drama and story material, and the universal love of simile. With an urge for expression associated itself the metaphysical in its practical and seemingly other-worldly aspects and, aided perhaps by the exigencies of climate, yielded the grotesque as illustrated by the cave temples of Ellora and Elephanta, the apparent barbarism of female ornament covering up all organic beauty, the exaggerated, symbol-laden representations of divine and thereanthropic beings, a music with minute subdivisions of scale, and the like. As Indian philosophy is dominated by a monistic, Vedantic (q.v.) outlook, so in Indian esthetics we can notice the prevalence of an introvert unitary, soul-centric, self-integrating tendency that treats the empirical suggestively and by way of simile, trying to stylize the natural in form, behavior, and expression. The popular belief in the immanence as well as transcendence of the Absolute precludes thus the possibility of a complete naturalism or imitation. The whole range of Indian art therefore demands a sharing and re-creation of absolute values glimpsed by the artist and professedly communicated imperfectly. Rules and discussions of the various aspects of art may be found in the Silpa-sastras, while theoretical treatments are available in such works as the Dasarupa in dramatics, the Nrtya-sastras in dancing, the Sukranitisara in the relation of art to state craft, etc. Periods and influences of Indian art, such as the Buddhist, Kushan, Gupta, etc., may be consulted in any history of Indian art. -- K.F.L.

INFINITE—Self-existent and all-inclusive reality; unmeasured, undetermined, unlimited; independent of expression, yet including all expressions, or actualized things; the absolute.

Irony, Socratic: See Socratic method. Is, Isa, Isana, Isvara: (Skr.) "Lord", an example of the vacillating of Indian philosophy between theology and metaphysics. They often use such theistic nomenclature for the Absolute without always wishing to endow it as such with personal attributes except as may be helpful to a lower intelligence or to one who feels the need of worship and bhakti (q.v.). -- K.F.L.

Ishwara is supracosmic as well as intracosmic; He is that which exceeds and inhabits and supports all individuality; He is the supreme and universal Brahman, the Absolute, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha.8 But, very clearly, this is not the personal God of popular religions, a being limited by his qualities, individual and separate from all others; for all such personal gods are only limited representations or names and divine personalities of the one Ishwara. Neither is this the Saguna Brahman active and possessed of qualities, for that is only one side of the being of the Ishwara; the Nirguna immobile and without qualities is another aspect of His existence. Ishwara is Brahman the Reality, Self, Spirit, revealed as possessor, enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the universe and one with it, Pantheos, and yet superior to it, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Divine Transcendence.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 366-367


ista-deva(ta) ::: the chosen deity; the name and form elected by our nature for its worship; a conscious Personality of the Divine answering to the needs of the seeker's own personality and showing to him in a representative image what the Divine is or at least pointing him through himself to the Absolute.

It is customary to distinguish between the nature of truth and the tests for truth. There are three traditional theories as to the nature of truth, each finding virious expression in the works of different exponents. According to the correspondence theory, a proposition (or meaning) is true if there is a fact to which it corresponds. if it expresses what is the case. For example, "It is raining here now" is true if it is the case that it is raining here now; otherwise it is false. The nature of the relation of correspondence between fact and true proposition is variously described by different writers, or left largely undescribed. Russell in The Problems of Philosophy speaks of the correspondence as consisting of an identity of the constituents of the fact and of the proposition. According to the coherence theory (see H. H. Joachim: The Nature of Truth), truth is systematic coherence. This is more than logical consistency. A proposition is true insofar is it is a necessary constituent of a systematically coherent whole. According to some (e.g., Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Truth), this whole must be such that every element in it necessitates, indeed entails, every other element. Strictly, on this view, truth, in its fullness, is a characteristic of only the one systematic coherent whole, which is the absolute. It attaches to propositions as we know them and to wholes as we know them only to a degree. A proposition has a degree of truth proportionate to the completeness of the systematic coherence of the system of entities to which it belongs. According to the pragmatic theory of truth, a proposition is true insofar as it works or satisfies, working or satisfying being described variously by different exponents of the view. Some writers insist that truth chiracterizes only those propositions (ideas) whose satisfactory working has actually verified them; others state that only verifiability through such consequences is necessary. In either case, writers differ as to the precise nature of the verifying experiences required. See Pragmatism. --C.A.B. Truth, semantical: Closely connected with the name relation (q.v.) is the property of a propositional formula (sentence) that it expresses a true proposition (or if it has free variables, that it expresses a true proposition for all values of these variables). As in the case of the name relation, a notation for the concept of truth in this sense often cannot be added, with its natural properties, to an (interpreted) logistic system without producing contradiction. A particular system may, however, be made the beginning of a hierarchy of systems each containing the truth concept appropriate to the preceding one.

“It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence,—even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.” The Life Divine

“It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind’s highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.” The Life Divine

I would myself say that bliss and oneness are the essential condition of the absolute reality, and love as the most characteristic dynamic power of bliss and oneness must support fundamentally and colour their activities; …” Letters on Yoga

Jiva: (Skr.) Life; also the individual, conscious soul as distinguished from the universal soul or the Absolute. -- K.F.L.

Jnanakanda: The section of the Vedas dealing main with the eternal verities or the Absolute Truth; the Upanishads dealing with the Param Brahman.

Kamadeva (Sanskrit) Kāmadeva [from kāma desire + deva god, divinity] The Hindu god of love, one of the Visve-devas in the Hindu pantheon. As the Eros of Hesiod was connected in early Greek mythology with the world’s creation, and only afterwards became degraded into the passional Cupid, so was Kama in his original meaning as used in the Vedas, which gives the metaphysical and philosophical significance of his functions in the cosmos. Kama is the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness, that arose in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute. Kama “is in the Rig-Veda (x. 129) the personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation. He was the first movement that stirred the One, after its manifestation from the purely abstract principle, to create. ‘Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind; and which sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity’ ” (SD 2:176) — or manas with pure atma-buddhi. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.

Karanabrahman: The highest and the first manifestation of the Absolute; the Absolute qualified by Maya; Saguna Brahman.

Kevala: Alone; single; independent; the Absolute.

Kevala: Sanskrit for alone. A predicate or synonym of the Absolute in its unitary, free, autonomous, all-inclusive and universal aspect. The condition or state of being absolute and independent is kevalatva; one who meditates or has attained personal experience of it, is a kevalin.

Kevala: (Skr. alone) A predicate or synonym of the Absolute in its unitary, free, autonomous, all-inclusive and universal aspect. The condition or state of being absolute and independent is kevalatva, one who meditates on or has attained personal experience of it, is a kevalin. -- K.F.L.

kshetrajna. ::: the conscious principle known in the field of the body; the absolute witness aware of the three states of the self; waking, dream, and sleep

Kwan-shai-yin is often confused with Kwan-yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, the feminine Logos and counterpart of Kwan-shai-yin; but “Kwan-shai-yin — or the universally manifested voice ‘is active — male; and must not be confounded with Kwan-yin, or Buddhi the Spiritual Soul (the sixth Pr.) and the vehicle of its “Lord.” ’ It is Kwan-yin that is the female principle or the manifested passive, manifesting itself ‘to every creature in the universe, in order to deliver all men from the consequences of sin’ . . . while Kwan-shai-yin, ‘the Son identical with his Father’ is the absolute activity, hence — having no direct relation to objects of sense is — Passivity” (ML 344).

Legal Philosophy: Deals with the philosophic principles of law and justice. The origin is to be found in ancient philosophy. The Greek Sophists criticized existing laws and customs by questioning their validity: All human rules are artificial, created by enactment or convention, as opposed to natural law, based on nature. The theory of a law of nature was further developed by Aristotle and the Stoics. According to the Stoics the natural law is based upon the eternal law of the universe; this itself is an outgrowth of universal reason, as man's mind is an offshoot of the latter. The idea of a law of nature as being innate in man was particularly stressed and popularized by Cicero who identified it with "right reason" and already contrasted it with written law that might be unjust or even tyrannical. Through Saint Augustine these ideas were transmitted to medieval philosophy and by Thomas Aquinas built into his philosophical system. Thomas considers the eternal law the reason existing in the divine mind and controlling the universe. Natural law, innate in man participates in that eternal law. A new impetus was given to Legal Philosophy by the Renaissance. Natural Jurisprudence, properly so-called, originated in the XVII. century. Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Benedictus Spinoza, John Locke, Samuel Pufendorf were the most important representatives of that line of thought. Grotius, continuing the Scholastic tradition, particularly stressed the absoluteness of natural hw (it would exist even if God did not exist) and, following Jean Bodin, the sovereignty of the people. The idea of the social contract traced all political bodies back to a voluntary compact by which every individual gave up his right to self-government, or rather transferred it to the government, abandoning a state of nature which according to Hobbes must have been a state of perpetual war. The theory of the social compact more and more accepts the character of a "fiction" or of a regulative idea (Kant). In this sense the theory means that we ought to judge acts of government by their correspondence to the general will (Rousseau) and to the interests of the individuals who by transferring their rights to the commonwealth intended to establish their real liberty. Natural law by putting the emphasis on natural rights, takes on a revolutionary character. It played a part in shaping the bills of rights, the constitutions of the American colonies and of the Union, as well as of the French declaration of the rights of men and of citizens. Natural jurisprudence in the teachings of Christian Wolff and Thomasius undergoes a kind of petrification in the vain attempt to outline an elaborate system of natural law not only in the field of international or public law, but also in the detailed regulations of the law of property, of contract, etc. This sort of dogmatic approach towards the problems of law evoked the opposition of the Historic School (Gustav Hugo and Savigny) which stressed the natural growth of laws ind customs, originating from the mysterious "spirit of the people". On the other hand Immanuel Kant tried to overcome the old natural law by the idea of a "law of reason", meaning an a priori element in all existing or positive law. In his definition of law ("the ensemble of conditions according to which everyone's will may coexist with the will of every other in accordance with a general rule of liberty"), however, as in his legal philosophy in general, he still shares the attitude of the natural law doctrine, confusing positive law with the idea of just law. This is also true of Hegel whose panlogism seemed to lead in this very direction. Under the influence of epistemological positivism (Comte, Mill) in the later half of the nineteenth century, legal philosophy, especially in Germany, confined itself to a "general theory of law". Similarily John Austin in England considered philosophy of law concerned only with positive law, "as it necessarily is", not as it ought to be. Its main task was to analyze certain notions which pervade the science of law (Analytical Jurisprudence). In recent times the same tendency to reduce legal philosophy to logical or at least methodological tasks was further developed in attempting a pure science of law (Kelsen, Roguin). Owing to the influence of Darwinism and natural science in general the evolutionist and biological viewpoint was accepted in legal philosophy: comparative jurisprudence, sociology of law, the Freirecht movement in Germany, the study of the living law, "Realism" in American legal philosophy, all represent a tendency against rationalism. On the other hand there is a revival of older tendencies: Hegelianism, natural law -- especially in Catholic philosophy -- and Kantianism (beginning with Rudolf Stammler). From here other trends arose: the critical attitude leads to relativism (f.i. Gustav Radbruch); the antimetaphysical tendency towards positivism -- though different from epistemological positivism -- and to a pure theory of law. Different schools of recent philosophy have found their applications or repercussions in legal philosophy: Phenomenology, for example, tried to intuit the essences of legal institutions, thus coming back to a formalist position, not too far from the real meaning of analytical jurisprudence. Neo-positivism, though so far not yet explicitly applied to legal philosophy, seems to lead in the same direction. -- W.E.

Lyric: a. Literary genre pertaining to the absolute uniqueness of poets' sensations,

Macrocosm ::: The anglicized form of a Greek compound meaning "great arrangement," or more simply the greatordered system of the celestial bodies of all kinds and their various inhabitants, including theall-important idea that this arrangement is the result of interior orderly processes, the effects ofindwelling consciousnesses. In other and more modern phrasing the macrocosm is the vast universe,without definable limits, which surrounds us, and with particular emphasis laid on the interior, invisible,and ethereal planes. In the visioning or view of the ancients the macrocosm was an animate kosmicentity, an "animal" in the Latin sense of this word, as an organism possessing a directing and guidingsoul. But this was only the outward or exoteric view. In the Mystery schools of the archaic ages, themacrocosm was considered to be not only what is hereinbefore just stated, but also to consist moredefinitely and specifically of seven, ten, and even twelve planes or degrees of consciousness-substanceranging from the superdivine through all the intermediate stages to the physical, and even to degreesbelow the physical, these comprised in one kosmic organic unit, or what moderns would call a universe.In this sense of the word macrocosm is but another name for kosmic hierarchy, and it must beremembered in this connection that these hierarchies are simply countless in number and not only fill butactually compose and are indeed the spaces of frontierless SPACE.The macrocosm was considered to be filled full not only with gods, but with innumerable multitudes orarmies of evolving entities, from the fully self-conscious to the quasi-self-conscious downwards throughthe merely conscious to the "unconscious." Note well that in strict usage the term macrocosm was neverapplied to the Boundless, to boundless, frontierless infinitude, what the Qabbalists called Eyn-soph. Inthe archaic wisdom, the macrocosm, belonging in the astral world, considered in its causal aspect, wasvirtually interchangeable with what modern theosophists call the Absolute.

Mahamaya (Sanskrit) Mahāmāyā [from mahā great + māyā illusion] The great illusion; the manifested universe in its totality. “Esoteric philosophy, teaching an objective Idealism — though it regards the objective Universe and all in it as Maya, temporary illusion — draws a practical distinction between collective illusion, Mahamaya, from the purely metaphysical stand-point, and the objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this illusion lasts” (SD 1:631). The belief in the separateness of the universe, and everything in it, from the absolute divine All is one of the greatest delusions of mahamaya.

mahapralaya. ::: the final cosmic dissolution; the dissolution of all the worlds of relativity until nothing but the Absolute remains

Mahatma, mahatman: (Skr. great soul) Term of respect, as applied to Gandhi, for instance. In philosophy, the super-individual or transcendental self, or the Absolute. -- K.F.L.

Manifestation ::: The Absolute cannot indeed be bound in its nature to manifest a cosmos of relations, but neither can it be bound not to manifest any cosmos. It is not itself a sheer emptiness; for a vacant Absolute is no Absolute,—our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it: it bears in itself some ineffable essentiality of all that is and all that can be; and since it holds in itself this essentiality and this possibility, it must also hold in itself in some way of its absoluteness either the permanent truth or the inherent, even if latent, realisable actuality of all that is fundamental to our or the world’s existence. It is this realisable actuality actualized or this permanent truth deploying its possibilities that we call manifestation and see as the universe.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 664


master of Existence ::: Sri Aurobindo: "I am here with thee in thy chariot of battle revealed as the Master of Existence within and without thee and I repeat the absolute assurance, the infallible promise that I will lead thee to myself through and beyond all sorrow and evil. Whatever difficulties and perplexities arise, be sure of this that I am leading thee to a complete divine life in the universal and an immortal existence in the transcendent Spirit.” Essays on the Gita

  “Maya or illusion is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition. . . . Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyan-Chohans, are, in degree, of the nature of shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless screen; but all things are relatively real, for the cogniser is also a reflection, and the things cognised are therefore as real to him as himself. Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognise any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya” (SD 1:39-40).

Mohammedanism: The commonly applied term in the Occident to the religion founded by Mohammed. It sought to restore the indigenous monotheism of Arabia, Abraham's uncorrupted religion. Its essential dogma is the belief in the absolute unity of Allah. Its chief commandments are: profession of faith, ritual prayer, the payment of the alms tax, fasting and the pilgrimage. It has no real clerical caste, no church organization, no liturgy, and rejects monasticism. Its ascetic attitude is expressed in warnings against woman, in prohibition of nudity and of construction of splendid buildings except the house of worship; condemns economic speculation; praises manual labor and poverty; prohibits music, wine and pork, and the portrayal of living beings. -- H.H.

Mohammedanism: The commonly applied term in the Occident to the religion founded by Mohammed. It sought to restore the indigenous monotheism of Arabia, Abraham’s uncorrupted religion. Its essential dogma is the belief in the absolute unity of Allah. Its chief commandments are: profession of faith, ritual prayer, the payment of the alms tax, fasting and the pilgrimage. It has no real clerical caste, no church organization, no liturgy, and rejects monasticism. Its ascetic attitude is expressed in warnings against woman, in prohibition of nudity and of construction of splendid buildings except the house of worship; condemns economic speculation; praises manual labor and poverty; prohibits music, wine and pork, and the portrayal of living beings.

Moksha (Sanskrit) Mokṣa [from mokṣ to release, set free probably from the verbal root much] Freedom; freedom from sentient life for the reminder of a manvantara. Equivalent to nirvana, the absolute, mukti [from the verbal root much], the Palace of Love of the Zohar, the Gnostic Pleroma of Eternal Light, the Chinese nippang, and the Burmese neibban. “When a spirit, a monad, or a spiritual radical, has so grown in manifestation that it has first become a man, and is set free interiorly, inwardly, and from a man has become a planetary spirit or dhyan-chohan or lord of meditation, and has gone still higher to become interiorly a brahman, and from a brahman the Parabrahman for its hierarchy, then it is absolutely perfected, free, released: perfected for that great period of time which to us seems almost an eternity, so long is it, virtually incomputable by the human intellect. This is the Absolute: limited in comparison with things still more immense, still more sublime; but so far as we can think of it, ‘released’ or ‘freed’ from the chains or bonds of material existence” (Fund 183).

Ṁ tat sat ::: a mantra said to be "the triple definition" of the brahman: OM, also spelled AUM, is the "Word of Manifestation", symbolising "the outward-looking, the inward or subtle and the superconscient causal Purusha", indicated respectively by the letters A, U and M, while "the syllable as a whole brings out the fourth state, Turiya, which rises to the Absolute"; tat, That, "indicates the Absolute"; sat "indicates the supreme and universal existence in its principle". [cf.Gita 17.23]

Nameless Deity, Nameless One The real name of a thing is its essential characteristic, is itself; therefore that which is beyond all attributes must necessarily be nameless. It is nameless because incognizable; it is the One Reality, ’eyn soph, the Absolute. The expression may occasionally be applied to other beings whose name it is necessary to withhold, such as the Wondrous Being, who has to remain nameless (SD 1:207). See also WATCHER; WONDROUS BEING

Neo-Idealism: Primarily a name given unofficially to the Italian school of neo-Hegelianism headed by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, founded on a basic distinction that it proposes between two kinds of "concrete universals" (s.v.). In addition to the Hegelian concrete universal, conceived as a dialectical synthesis of two abstract opposltes, is posited a second type in which the component elements are "concretes" rather than dialectical abstracts, i.e. possess relative mutual independence and lack the characteristic of logical opposition. The living forms of Mind, both theoretical and practical, are universal in this latter sense. This implies that fine art, utility, and ethics do not comprise a dialectical series with philosophy at their head, i.e. they are not inferior forms of metaphysics. Thus neo-Idealism rejects Hegel's panlogism. It also repudiates his doctrine of the relative independence of Nature, the timeless transcendence of the Absolute with respect to the historical process, and the view that at any point of history a logically final embodiment of the Absolute Idea is achieved. -- W.L.

Neo-Platonism: The mystic philosophical system established by Plotinus (205-270 A.D.). Its center is the Godhead, the One, the Absolute Good, the Source, an undivided and undifferentiated Unity, from which a succession of emanations radiate out in stages of decreasing splendor and reality.

Neutrality of money - The doctrine that the money supply affects only the absolute level of prices and has no effect on relative prices and hence no effect on the allocation of resources or the distribution of income.

Nirguna: Sanskrit for “devoid of qualities” (guna), predicated as early as the Upanishads (q.v.) of the Absolute as its in-itself aspect (cf. saguna). The highest reality is conceived to be of such fullness, such transcendence that it has no part in the manifold of the phenomenal which is mere maya (q.v.) in Sankara’s philosophy in so far as it is esoteric.

Nirguna: (Skr.) "Devoid of qualities" (cf. guna), predicated as early as the Upanishads (q.v.) of the Absolute as its in-it-self aspect (cf. saguna). The highest reality is conceived to be of such fulness, such transcendence that it has no part in the manifold of the phenomenal which is mere maya (q.v.) in Sankara's (q.v.) philosophy in so far as it is esoteric. -- K.F.L.

Nirvana: In the Oriental philosophical doctrines, the absolute and final extinction of individuality, without loss of consciousness. In occult and esoteric philosophical terminology, the ultimate absolute existence and consciousness attained by the Ego of one who in his life achieved supreme perfection and holiness. It is defined as a condition in which all pain, suffering, mental anguish and, above all, samsara (q.v.) have ceased.

Nityayukta: Eternally united (with the Absolute).

Non-being Used to express the condition of things in pralaya, preceding manifestation. It corresponds to the Sanskrit asat, while sat corresponds to Being. Yet both non-being and a-sat are frequently used for non-existence. It is philosophically questionable to bracket non-being with the Absolute, or again to bracket Absolute with Being (though the latter is often justifiable) as the words absolute, being, and non-being do not correspond to infinity; for Absolute corresponds to the Sanskrit mukti or moksha, that which is freed from manifested existence; whereas infinitude comprehends both nonmanifestation and manifestation, being and non-being, sat and asat, the absolute and the bound. One of the best correspondences to infinity is the term coined by Blavatsky: Be-ness, or pure abstract attributeless esse.

No-number The Boundless, the Unmanifest, pure non-being, the cosmic zero in symbolism; from which proceeds the first manifest or number one, the cosmic monad, the latter the Absolute of its universe, these universes in infinity or no-number being innumerable.

Not to mix with others deprives of the test which contact with them imposes on the consciousness and the chance to progress in these respects. Mixing is unproStabJe from the spiriluaJ point of view when it is only to indulge the vital, chat, interchange vital movements etc. ; but abstentioa from all mixing and con- tact is also not desirable. It is only when the consciousness truly needs full retirement that such retirement can be made and even then it may be full but not absolute. For in the absolute retire- ment one lives a purely subjectiw life and the opportunity for extending the spiritual progress to the outer life and testing it thoroughly is not there.

Nous: In Neo-Platonism, theosophy and other occult doctrines, the Mind or Spirit, the first and most sublime stage of the emanations which issue forth from the Godhead, the Absolute Good, as light emanates from a luminous body. The Divine Mind in man. It is defined in the Rosicrucian Manual as “that energy, power and force emanating from the Source of all Life, possessing positive and negative polarity, manifesting it in vibrations of various rates of speed which, under certain conditions and obeying the dictates of natural law, establish the world of form, be that form visible or invisible.”

Objective idealism: A name for that philosophy which is based on the theory that both the subject and the object of knowledge are equally real and equally manifestations of the absolute or ideal. Earlier employed to describe Schelling's philosophy. Used independently by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) and A. N. Whitehead (1861-) to describe their varieties of realism. Subjective idealism supposes the world to consist of exemplifications of universals which have their being in the mind. Objective idealism supposes the world to consist of exemplifications of universals which have their being independent of the mind. -- J.K.F.

OM is the symbol of the triple Brahman, the outward-looking, the inward or subtle and the superconscient causal Purusha. Each letter A, U, M indicates one of these three in ascending order and the syllable as a whole brings out the fourth state, Turiya, which rises to the Absolute. OM is the initiating syllable pronounced at the outset as a benedictory prelude and sanction to all act of sacrifice, all act of giving and all act of askesis; it is a reminder that our work should be made an expression of the triple Divine in our inner being and turned towards him in the idea and motive.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 491


"otherness" &

Oversoul: This term is applied in occult philosophy as a synonym for Brahma, also as a synonym for group soul (q.v.), and as a name for the Absolute in its aspect of the reality which maintains all existence.

Parabrahman ::: God in His ultimate existence beyond all manifestation and all knowledge, is the Absolute Parabrahman.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 98


  “Parabrahman is intimately connected with Mulaprakriti. Their interaction and intermingling cause the first nebulous thrilling, if the words will pass, of the Universal Life when spiritual desire first arose in it in the beginnings of things. . . . Parabrahman is no entity, is no individual, or individualized being. It is a convenient technical word with conveniently vague philosophical significancy, implying whatever is beyond the Absolute or Brahman of any hierarchy. Just as Brahman is the summit of a kosmic Hierarchy, so, following the same line of thought, the Parabrahman is ‘whatever is beyond Brahman’ ” (OG 121).

Parabrahman(Sanskrit) ::: Para is a word meaning "beyond." Brahman (neuter) is sometimes used as the universal self orspirit; also called paramatman. Beyond Brahman is the para-Brahman. Note the deep philosophicalmeaning of this -- there is no attempt here to limit the illimitable, the ineffable, by adjectives. In theSanskrit Vedas and in the works deriving therefrom and belonging to the Vedic literary cycle, this"beyond" is called tat, "THAT," as this world of manifestations is called idam, "This."Parabrahman is intimately connected with mulaprakriti. Their interaction and intermingling cause thefirst nebulous thrilling, if the words will pass, of the universal life when spiritual desire first arose in it inthe beginnings of things. Parabrahman, therefore, literally means "beyond Brahman"; and strictlyspeaking it is Brahman to which the Occidental term Absolute should be applied. Parabrahman is noentity, is no individual or individualized being. It is a convenient technical word with conveniently vaguephilosophical significancy, implying whatever is beyond the Absolute or Brahman of any hierarchy. Justas Brahman is the summit of a kosmic hierarchy, so, following the same line of thought, the parabrahmanis "whatever is beyond Brahman."

Paramarthikasatta: The Absolute Reality; Transcendental Truth; Param Brahman.

Paramatman(Sanskrit) ::: The "primordial self" or the "self beyond," the permanent SELF, the Brahman or universalspirit-soul. A compound term meaning the highest or universal atman. Parama, "primordial," "supreme,"etc.; the root of atman is hardly known -- its origin is uncertain, but the general meaning is that of "self."Paramatman consequently means the "supreme self," or the summit or flower of a hierarchy, theroot-base or source of that kosmic self.Selflessness is the attribute of the paramatman, the universal self, where all personality vanishes.The universal self is the heart of the universe, for these two phrases are but two manners of expressingthe same thing; it is the source of our being; it is also the goal whither we are all marching, we and thehierarchies above us as well as the hierarchies and the entities which compose them inferior to us. Allcome from the same ineffable source, the heart of Being, the universal self, pass at one period of theirevolutionary journey through the stage of humanity, gaining thereby self-consciousness or the ego-self,the "I am I," and they find it, as they advance along this evolutionary path, expanding gradually intouniversal consciousness -- an expansion which never has an end, because the universal consciousness isendless, limitless, boundless.The paramatman is spiritually practically identical with what the theosophist has in mind when he speaksof the Absolute; and consequently paramatman, though possessing a wide range of meanings, is virtuallyidentical with Brahman. Of course when the human mind or consciousness ascends in meditation up therungs of the endless ladder of life and realizes that the paramatman of one hierarchy or kosmos is but oneof a multitude of other paramatmans of other kosmic hierarchies, the realization comes that even thevague term parabrahman may at certain moments of philosophical introspection be found to be thefrontierless paramatman of boundless space; but in this last usage of paramatman the word obviouslybecomes a sheer generalizing expression for boundless life, boundless consciousness, boundlesssubstance. This last use of the word, while correct enough, is hardly to be recommended because apt tointroduce confusion, especially in Occidental minds with our extraordinary tendency to takegeneralizations for concrete realities.

paramatman ::: the supreme Self or Spirit, the Absolute. ::: paramatma [nominative]

PARAMATMAN. ::: The supreme Sell ; the Absolute ; the supreme Divine Being.

paramatma&

Paranishpanna, Parinishpanna (Sanskrit) Paraniṣpanna, Pariniṣpanna [from para or pari + niṣpanna finished, completed from nis + the verbal root pad to come forth, ripen, accomplish] The state of having gone forwards beyond; philosophically, the absolute perfection to which all existences attain at the close of a great period of activity (mahamanvantara). It is identical in meaning with paranirvana, and corresponds to the Tibetan yond-grub.

Perfection, Perfectibility Absolute perfection is applicable, not to infinity, but to the Absolute of a universe, and theosophy teaches that all existences are tending through ever-growing evolutionary stages towards the relative perfection which all reach at the close of a manvantara; a state called paranishpanna in Sanskrit and yong-grub in Tibetan. Paranirvana is described as a state of perfect rest insofar as activity in the lower manifested realms of a universe is concerned, but not perfect spiritual inactivity — entirely to the contrary. In a larger view comprehending a galaxy of universes, or a super-galaxy of galaxies, any notion that human intelligence can entertain of perfection is relative, for we cannot assign ends to evolutionary progress, growth, or expansion.

phase-shift keying "communications" (PSK) A {digital modulation} scheme that conveys data by changing the {phase} of a {carrier} wave. The data can either determine the absolute phase relative to the unmodulated carrier or reference signal ("coherent phase-shift keying", CPSK) or the change in phase ("differential phase-shift keying", DPSK). The number of different phases used determines the amount of data that can be transmitted in each cycle. Each cycle can be considered to constitute one "symbol", e.g. with two possible phases, each cycle carries one {bit}. The more phases that are used, the less tollerant to noise the transmissions becomes. Alternatives to PSK are {amplitude-shift keying} (ASK) and {frequency-shift keying} (FSK). (2010-01-26)

Planetary spirits: In theosophical terminology, the seven rulers of the planets (“planetary gods”); they are regarded as emanations and agents of the Absolute.

Prakriti; prakrti: Sanskrit for Substance (as opposed to or contrasted with Spirit). The cosmic substance which is the primary source of all things, uncaused cause of phenomenal existence, eternal, all-pervasive, indestructible, emanated from the Absolute.

pramada. ::: swerving from abidance in the Absolute; the forgetfulness of one's Self

Prameya: Object of proof (Brahman or the Absolute Reality); subject of enquiry; object of right knowledge; measured or known object.

Pratisamvid (Sanskrit) Pratisaṃvid [from prati-sam-vid to recognize, attain knowledge by cognition or recognition] In Buddhism, “the four ‘unlimited forms of wisdom’ attained by an Arhat; the last of which is the absolute knowledge of and power over the twelve Nidanas,” the twelve causes of existence on earth (TG 260-1).

Purna: Sanskrit for filled, satisfied, used occasionally as a synonym for the Absolute, brahman.

Purna: (Skr.) The plenum, a synonym for the Absolute, brahman, used by Ajatasatru in Kausitaki Upanishad 4.8. See also Brhadaranyaka Up. 5.1. -- K.F.L.

Purnoham: I am full, the absolute, the infinite; I am Brahman.

quote :::In the Vedanta the soul is called by three names which denote its three aspects, Atma, Mahatma, Paramatma. Atma is the soul conscious of the life on the surface, Mahatma is the soul conscious as well of the life within, Paramatma is the consciousness that is the soul of souls, conscious of the Absolute within and without, the God of the knower, the Lord of the seer.

    


RaDHA. ::: Personification of the absolute love for the Divine, total and integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiri- tual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material nature the supreme Ananda.

Radha ::: “Radha is the personification of the absolute love for the Divine, total and integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material nature the supreme Ananda.” Letters on Yoga

Radha ::: the personification of the absolute love for the Divine (the word means adoration and also delight).

Rajas: One of the three aspects or component traits of cosmic energy; the principle of dynamism in nature bringing about all changes; through this is protected the relative appearance of the Absolute as the universe; this quality generates passion and restlessness.

rajas. ::: qualities of restlessness, passion, activity, excitability, aggressiveness and emotion; the principle of dynamism in nature bringing about all changes; through this is protected the relative appearance of the Absolute as the universe; second of the three qualities &

relative error: The error of a value compared to a reference value, as a proportion (when it exists) of the reference value. i.e. the absolute value of the ratio of the error to the reference value.

Renouvier, Charles: (1818-1903) a thinker strongly influenced by Leibniz and Kant. His philosophy has been called 'phenomenological neo-criticism', and its peculiar feature is that it denies the existence of all transcendental entities, such as thing-in-itself, the absolute, and the noumenon. -- R.B.W.

Romanticism: As a general philosophical movement, romanticism is best understood as the initial phase of German Idealism, serving as a transition from Kant to Hegel, and flourishing chiefly between 1775 and 1815. It is associated primarily with the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Fried, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, with Schelhng as its culmination and most typical figure. The philosophical point of departure for romanticism is the Kantian philosophy, and romanticism shares with all German Idealism both the fundamental purpose of extending knowledge to the realm of noumena, and the fundamental doctrine that all reality is ultimately spiritual, derivative from a living spirit and so knowable by the human spirit. The essence of philosophical romanticism as expressed by Schelhng, that which differentiates it from other types of Idealism, resides in its conception of Spirit; upon this depend its metaphysical account of nature and man, and its epistemological doctrine of the proper method for investigating and understanding reality. Romanticism holds that Spirit, or the Absolute, is essentially creative; the ultimate ground of all things is primarily an urge to self-expression, and all that it has brought into being is but a means to its fuller self-realization. If the Absolute of Fichte is a moralist, and that of Hegel a logician, then that of the romanticists is primarily an artist. From this basic view there springs a metaphysic that interprets the universe in terms of the concepts of evolution, process, life, and consciousness. The world of nature is one manifestation of Spirit, man is another and a higher such manifestation, for in man Spirit seeks to become conscious of its own work. The metaphysical process is the process by which the Absolute seeks to realize itself, and all particular things are but phases within it. Hence, the epistemology of romanticism is exclusively emotional and intuitive, stressing the necessity for fullness of experience and depth of feeling if reality is to be understood. Reason, being artificial and analytical, is inadequate to the task of comprehending the Absolute; knowing is living, and the philosopher must approach nature through inspiration, longing, and sympathy.

Sachchidananda (Sanskrit) Saccidānanda [from sat reality + cit pure consciousness + ānanda bliss] Abstract being, abstract consciousness, abstract bliss; the state of the cosmic spiritual hierarch, Brahman or the Second Logos, the Absolute of our cosmic hierarchy. Subba Row wrote that the Logos is described as sachchidananda because as sat it is the efflux of parabrahman, as chit it contains within itself the whole law of cosmic evolution, as ananda it is the abode of impersonal bliss and the highest happiness possible for a person who has become a jivanmukta — a freed monad, when union with the cosmic Logos is attained.

sadananda ::: "Ananda of pure existence apart from all objects and exsadananda periences", one of the seven forms of ananda, consisting of the delight of existence absorbed in unconditioned being (sat), where it is "at rest in peace of existence"; together with cidananda and suddhananda it comprises kaivalyananda, the bliss of the absolute, a term also applied to sadananda by itself. sadarsa sadarsa samadhi

saguna brahman. ::: the Absolute with qualities; manifest Brahman; the Absolute conceived as the creator, preserver and destroyer of the universe; the highest attainment which is eternal and undecaying

Saguna: Sanskrit for “possessed of qualities”; predicated of the Absolute from the exoteric point of view of the worshipper, in the philosophy of Sankara. (Cf. nirguna.)

Saguna: (Skr.) "possessed of qualities" (see guna), predicated of the Absolute from the exoteric point of view of the worshipper, according to Sankara (q.v.; see Nirguna). -- K.F.L.

sakshatakara. ::: Self-realisation; direct perception; direct experience; experience of the Absolute

Sakti: Power; energy; force; the Divine Power of becoming; the apparent dynamic aspect of Eternal Being; the Absolute Power or cosmic energy.

Samad/Samadiyyah ::: The Absolutely Self-Sufficient and Whole One.

Samvriti-Satya (Sanskrit) Saṃvṛti-satya [from saṃvṛti concealment, covering + satya truth] The congnizance of minor or relative truths. The student-initiate’s enlarging consciousness progressively demonstrates to itself the illusive character or mayavi emptiness of all mere things. Samvriti-satya is relative truth in contrast with Paramartha-satya, the Absolute Reality or Truth.

Sangbai Dag-po (Tibetan) [from sang ba to remove (impurity), cleanse, be freed from (or sang sbad hidden, concealed) + bdag po (dak-po) lord] The concealed lord; applied to one who has entered nirvana; a title of “those who have merged into, and identified themselves with, the Absolute” (TG 289). Equivalent to the Sanskrit jivanmukta and nirvani.

sarvasaundaryabodha ::: the sense of universal beauty, "a delightperception and taste of the absolute reality all-beautiful in everything". sarvasaundarya darsana

Sat is not Being, but Be-ness, since whatever is manifested is something phenomenal, not ever-lasting. Sat (pure being), chit (pure thought), and ananda (bliss) together signify the state of the Absolute.

Satya: Truth; Brahman or the Absolute.

sayujya ::: the absolute union of the divine with the human spirit.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775-1854) Founder of the philosophy of identity which holds that subject and object coincide in the Absolute, a state to be realized in intellectual intuition. Deeply involved in romanticism, Schelling's philosophy of nature culminates in a transcendental idealism where nature and spirit are linked in a series of developments by unfolding powers or potencies, together forming one great organism in which nature is dynamic visible spirit and spirit invisible nature. Freedom and necessity are different refractions of the same reality. Supplementing science -- which deals with matter as extinguished spirit and endeavors to rise from nature to intelligence -- philosophy investigates the development of spirit, theoretically practically, and artistically, converts the subjective into the objective, and shows how the world soul or living principle animates the whole. Schelling's monism recognizes nature and spirit as real and ideal poles respectively, the latter being the positive one. It is pantheistic and aesthetic in that it allows the world process to create with free necessity unconsciously at first in the manner of an artist. Art is perfect union of freedom and necessity, beauty reflects the infinite in the finite. History is the progressive revelation of the Absolute. The ultimate thinking of Schelling headed toward mysticism in which man, his personality expanded into the infinite, becomes absorbed into the absolute self, free from necessity, contingency, consciousness, and personality. Sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols. (1856, re-edited 1927). Cf. Kuno Fischer, Schellings Leben, Werke und Lehre; E. Brehier, Schelling, 1912; V. Jankelevitch, L'Odysee de la conscience dans la derniere philosophie de Schelling, 1933. -- K.F.L.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel (1768-1834): Religion, in which Schleiermacher substitutes for a theology (regarded impossible because of the unknowableness of God) the feeling of absolute dependence, is sharply delineated from science as the product of reason in which nature may ultimately attain its unity. Schleiermacher, a romanticist, exhibits Fichtean and Schellingean influence, and transcends Kant by proclaiming an ideal realism. Nature, the totality of existence, is an organism, just as knowledge is a system. Through the unity of the real and the ideal, wisdom, residing with the Absolute as the final unity, arises and is ever striven for by man. A determinism is evident in religion where sin and grace provide two poles and sin is regarded partly avoidable, partly unreal, and in ethics where freedom is admitted only soteriologically as spontaneous acknowledgment of identity with the divine in the person of Christ. However, the right to uniqueness and individuality in which each attains his real nature, is stressed. An elaborate ethics is based on four goods: State, Society, School, and Church, to which accrue virtues and duties. An absolute good is lacking, except insofar as it lies in the complete unity of reason and nature. -- K.F.L.

Second Logos A logos is the unitary or monadic head of a cosmic hierarchy, such as a universe, from which emanates the various rays or subordinate members of the hierarchy. Next in cosmic evolution after the Absolute of a universe comes the first manifestation called the First or Unmanifest Logos, the parent-precursor of the Manifest-unmanifest Logos, the Second Logos invested with feminine characteristics, and hence often called spirit-matter, life, the spirit of the universe, the combined Brahman-pradhana. It is likewise spoken of as Father-Mother or more commonly as the cosmic Mother. The First Logos does not create, but emanates the Second Logos, which in its turn gives birth to the Third Logos or Brahma-prakriti or Purusha-prakriti, which because of its generative and productive function in cosmogony is called the creative logos. Each higher logos emanates the one immediately below it. See LOGOS; SVABHAVAT

Self ::: The Self that becomes all these forms of things is the Virat or universal Soul; the Self that creates all these forms is Hiranyagarbha, the luminous or creatively perceptive Soul; the Self that contains all these things involved in it is Prajna, the conscious Cause or originally determining Soul; beyond all these is the Absolute.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 341


She lun zong. (J. Shoronshu; K. Sop non chong 攝論宗). In Chinese, "School of the MAHĀYĀNASAMGRAHA"; one of the early Chinese indigenous doctrinal schools, focusing on YOGĀCĀRA philosophy. The school has its origins in exegetical traditions that began with PARAMĀRTHA's (499-569) translation of ASAnGA's MahāyānasaMgraha (C. She Dasheng lun). The school played a central role in early Chinese doctrinal controversies concerning the interpretation of consciousness in two different Indian Buddhist systems of thought: Yogācāra and TATHĀGATAGARBHA. The controversies revolved around the issue of the nature of the eighth storehouse consciousness (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA), based on VASUBANDHU's ambiguous position in the SHIDIJING LUN (DAsABHuMIVYĀKHYĀNA), a commentary on the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA. In some passages, Vasubandhu implied that the ālayavijNāna was the tainted source from which SAMSĀRA arises; in others, he implied instead that the ālayavijNāna was coextensive with suchness (TATHATĀ) and thus fundamentally pure. The northern branch of the DI LUN ZONG argued that the storehouse consciousness was impure; it is a tainted source that produces only defiled dharmas. By contrast, the southern branch argued that the ālayavijNāna was fundamentally pure but came to be adventitiously associated with impure elements: it was the functioning of suchness and thus was pure, but it also was subject to the same laws of conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA) as the sensory consciousnesses and thus on that level was also impure. The She lun school sought to integrate these two interpretations by drawing on Paramārtha's concept of an immaculate consciousness (AMALAVIJNĀNA). Paramārtha in his personal writings condemned the ālayavijNāna as being fundamentally impure, positing instead that only a ninth mode of consciousness, which he termed the immaculate consciousness, was pure. Following Paramārtha, She lun exegetes treated the ālayavijNāna as impure, and instead established the amalavijNāna as the pure ninth consciousness. They identified this new consciousness with suchness (tathatā) by using it as a synonym for PARINIsPANNA, the perfected nature described in Yogācāra philosophy. In the She lun zong interpretation, amalavijNāna thus came to be regarded as the absolute basis for all previous eight types of consciousness; the eighth consciousness, the ālayavijNāna, was instead seen as the provisional basis of afflictions (KLEsA). Several She lun masters advocated this admixture between ālayavijNāna and tathāgatagarbha thought, including Huikai (518-568), Daoni (fl. 590), Huikuang (534-613), and Tanqian (542-607). Tanqian was especially influential and was even invited by the Sui emperor Wendi (r. 581-604) to the imperial capital of Chang'an in 587 to preach the She lun teachings. The emperor later built the monastery of Chandingsi in the capital and appointed Tanqian as its first abbot, which became the center of the She lun zong. Sengbian (568-642), a She lun master from Daoni's lineage, was one of the teachers of the renowned Korean Yogācāra master WoNCH'ŬK (613-696). Doctrinal positions held in the She lun zong were crucial in the evolution of the HUAYAN school of the mature Chinese tradition.

Shih fei: Right and wrong, with reference to both opinion and conduct, a distinction strongly stressed by the Confucians, Neo-Confucians, Mohists, Neo-Mohists, Sophists, and Legalists alike, except the Taoists who repudiated such distinction as superficial, relative, subjective, unreal in the eyes of Tao, and inconsistent with the Taoist idea of the absolute equality of things and opinions. To most of the ancient Chinese schools, correspondence of name to actuality, both in the social sense and the logical sense, served as the standard of right and wrong. The Sophists often employed the result of argumentation as the standard. The one who won was right and the one who lost was wrong. The Neo-Mohists emphasized logical consistency, whereas the Legalists insisted on law. The early Confucians emphasized conformity with the moral order. "Whiterer conforms with propriety is right and whatever does not conform with propriety is wrong " As Hsun Tzu (c 335-c 288 B.C.) put it, "Whatever conforms with the system of the sage-kings is right and whatever does not conform with the system of the sage-kings is wrong." To the Neo-Confucians, "Whatever is in accord with Reason (li) is right." "The right is the expression of justice and impartiality based on the Universal Reason, and the wrong is the expression of selfishness and partiality based on human desire." -- W.T.C.

Similarly, the Absolute is not the infinite, for absolute means “freed” or “liberated,” such as the cosmic hierarch of a universe; and this could not be infinite or boundless, but must have been of finite origin, grown into stature of divine grandeur. The ancients taught that the universe was filled with gods, and that the universes were as numerous in beginningless space and time, as number in itself is beginningless and endless and therefore incommensurable.

SPACE Space, not being space in the absolute sense of the word, is limitless primordial matter. In the cosmic sense, space is always a globe. K
1.8.1f

There are 49 kinds of matter in cosmos, its 49 dimensions. (K 1.8)


Spirit, the absolute impersonal Divine. Those who go through the heart (love, bhakd) do not accept taya. they believe in a state beyond of eternal companionship with the Divine or dwell- ing in the Divine without fayo.

spiritual ::: “‘Spiritual’ has not a necessary connection with the Absolute. Of course the experience of the Absolute is spiritual. All contacts with self, the higher consciousness, the Divine above are spiritual.” Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo: "By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature.” *The Upanishads

Sri Aurobindo: "It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind"s highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.” The Life Divine

:::   Sri Aurobindo: "Radha is the personification of the absolute love for the Divine, total and integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material nature the supreme Ananda.” *Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo: “Radha is the personification of the absolute love for the Divine, total and integral in all parts of the being from the highest spiritual to the physical, bringing the absolute self-giving and total consecration of all the being and calling down into the body and the most material nature the supreme Ananda.” Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo: "‘Spiritual" has not a necessary connection with the Absolute. Of course the experience of the Absolute is spiritual. All contacts with self, the higher consciousness, the Divine above are spiritual.” Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo: "The Absolute cannot indeed be bound in its nature to manifest a cosmos of relations, but neither can it be bound not to manifest any cosmos. It is not itself a sheer emptiness; for a vacant Absolute is no Absolute, — our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it: it bears in itself some ineffable essentiality of all that is and all that can be; and since it holds in itself this essentiality and this possibility, it must also hold in itself in some way of its absoluteness either the permanent truth or the inherent, even if latent, realisable actuality of all that is fundamental to our or the world"s existence.” *The Life Divine

Sri Aurobindo: "[There is] a Supernature behind all that is apparent, a supreme power of the Spirit in Time and beyond Time, in Space and beyond Space, a conscious Power of the Self who by her becomes all becomings, of the Absolute who by her manifests all relativities.” The Life Divine

Sri Aurobindo: "We mean by the Absolute something greater than ourselves, greater than the cosmos which we live in, the supreme reality of that transcendent Being which we call God, something without which all that we see or are conscious of as existing, could not have been, could not for a moment remain in existence. Indian thought calls it Brahman, European thought the Absolute because it is a self-existent which is absolved of all bondage to relativities . . . The Absolute is for us the Ineffable.” *The Life Divine

"Stability and movement, we must remember, are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, even as are oneness and multitude. The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity. But it takes its eternal poise in the one and the stable and whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably, securely in the moving and multitudinous.” The Life Divine

“Stability and movement, we must remember, are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, even as are oneness and multitude. The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity. But it takes its eternal poise in the one and the stable and whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably, securely in the moving and multitudinous.” The Life Divine

suddhananda (shuddhananda; suddhananda) ::: pure ananda, "the suddhananda pure delight of the Infinite"; the form of subjective ananda corresponding to the plane of transcendent bliss (anandaloka) or to the sub-planes created by the "repetition of the Ananda plane in each lower world of consciousness". It brings the "sense of Supreme Beauty in all things" (sarvasaundarya), differing from cidghanananda in that it "transcends or contains" the beauty of gun.a (quality) proper to vijñana, depending "not on knowledge-perception of the separate guna & yatharthya [truth] of things, but on being-perception in chit of the universal ananda of things"; its highest intensities are experienced when the soul "casts itself into the absolute existence of the spirit and is enlarged into its own entirely self-existent bliss infinitudes". suddha pravr suddha pravrtti

Sun God(s) Sometimes applied to the cosmic logoi, which collectively are not only symbolized, but actually are represented by and through the septenary sun. Deities of masculine character are often called sun gods. Like the sun, a sun god may be on various planes, from that of a Logos to that of the absolute in various subordinate hierarchies. Sun gods in mythology usually slay dragons, as Apollo slays Python, and often have serpents for their emblems, the serpent being dual in aspect — high and low, inner and outer, active and passive, positive and negative, spiritual and material. As in Egyptian mythology, Osiris the sun god manifests as Horus, his own son, who is also a sun god, in similar fashion sun gods are manifested in man and on the lower planes of nature; similar to the Egyptian Osiris we have Adonis, Bacchus, Krishna, Christ, etc., as the sun god or spiritual monad in man; and cosmically we find sun gods on various planes.

supernature ::: “[There is] a Supernature behind all that is apparent, a supreme power of the Spirit in Time and beyond Time, in Space and beyond Space, a conscious Power of the Self who by her becomes all becomings, of the Absolute who by her manifests all relativities.” The Life Divine

surya. ::: the name for the sun while it is above the horizon; the presiding deity of the sun, sometimes identified with Vishnu or the absolute Reality

Svarupavastha: State of being one with Brahman; resting in the Absolute Reality or Brahman.

Svayambhu-sunyata (Sanskrit) Svayambhū-śūnyatā [from svayambhū self-becoming + śūnyatā void] The self-becoming void of infinitude; in Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics, sunyata means that which is empty or void to human eye or understanding because of feebleness of penetrating vision, but otherwise the absolute fullness of spirit. “Spontaneous self-evolution; self-existence of the real in the unreal, i.e., of the Eternal Sat in the periodical Asat” (TG 315).

Synechism: (Gr. syn, with; and echein, to hold) A theory of philosophical explanation developed, and first named by C. S. Peirce (Monist, II, 534). He defined the theory as: "That tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of continuity as of prime importance in philosophy, and in particular, upon the necessity of hypothesis involving true continuity." (Baldwin, Dict. of Philos. and Psych., N. Y. 1902, II, 657). Continuity seems to have been the name chosen by Peirce for the complete interdependence and inter-relationship of all things. An explanation is not good which relies upon an inexplicable ultimate. In this he was reacting, possibly, to such contemporary principles of explanation as Spencer's Unknown, and the Absolute of German and English Hegelianism. Synechism was no doubt an important forerunner of the Pragmatic theory of explanation, but Peirce, in describing synechism, stressed the value of generalization, ("the form under which alone anything can be understood is the form of generality, which is the same thing as continuity"), much more than modern pragmatism does. -- V.J.B.

Tao: In Chinese philosophy, the Absolute—both the path and the goal. It denotes also the cosmic order, nature, and the Way in the cosmic sense, signifying that which is above the realm of corporeality.

tat ::: That (the Absolute) .

Tat (That) ::: Tat, That, indicates the Absolute
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 19, Page: 491


Ten One of the most sacred fundamental numbers in occultism, for ten — or more accurately perhaps twelve, as Plato pointed out — is the key of the numerical structure upon which the universe is laid and built. Where seven represents the manifested universe or brahmanda, ten or twelve includes the unmanifested aspects as well. Ten is the foundation of the decimal system and because of this is universal in its relations. With the Pythagoreans ten was the most sacred number, the mystical dekad involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire kosmos, “the absolute All manifesting itself in the Word or generative Power of Creation” (SD 2:553); and among certain other schools, as in the Orient, ten was symbolically synthesized by the vertical line traversing the circle.

"The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes.” The Synthesis of Yoga

“The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes.” The Synthesis of Yoga

"The Absolute is for us the Ineffable.” The Life Divine

“The Absolute is for us the Ineffable.” The Life Divine

"The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience.” The Life Divine*

“The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience.” The Life Divine

“The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being, a constantly persistent yet mutable form, process, outcome of its immutable formless essence.” The Life Divine

"The Absolute neither creates nor is created, — in the current sense of making or being made; we can speak of creation only in the sense of the Being becoming in form and movement what it already is in substance and status.” *The Life Divine

“The Absolute neither creates nor is created,—in the current sense of making or being made; we can speak of creation only in the sense of the Being becoming in form and movement what it already is in substance and status.” The Life Divine

The Absolute ::: See The Veils of Negative Existence.

The Absolute, the Spirit, the Self spaceless and timeless, the Self manifest in the cosmos and Lord of Nature,—all this is what we mean by God.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 725


  “The Boundless can have no relation to the bounded and the conditioned”; “the immutably Infinite and the absolutely Boundless can neither will, think, nor act. To do this it has to become finite, and it does so, by its ray penetrating into the mundane egg — infinite space — and emanating from it as a finite god” (SD 1:56, 354).

The general superiority of theology in this system over the admittedly distinct discipline of philosophy, makes it impossible for unaided reason to solve certain problems which Thomism claims are quite within the province of the latter, e.g., the omnipotence of God, the immortality of the soul. Indeed the Scotist position on this latter question has been thought by some critics to come quite close to the double standard of truth of Averroes, (q.v.) namely, that which is true in theology may be false in philosophy. The univocal assertion of being in God and creatures; the doctrine of universal prime matter (q.v.) in all created substances, even angels, though characteristically there are three kinds of prime matter); the plurality of forms in substances (e.g., two in man) giving successive generic and specific determinations of the substance; all indicate the opposition of Scotistic metaphysics to that of Thomism despite the large body of ideas the two systems have in common. The denial of real distinction between the soul and its faculties; the superiority of will over intellect, the attainment of perfect happiness through a will act of love; the denial of the absolute unchangeableness of the natural law in view of its dependence on the will of God, acts being good because God commanded them; indicate the further rejection of St. Thomas who holds the opposite on each of these questions. However the opposition is not merely for itself but that of a voluntarist against an intellectualist. This has caused many students to point out the affinity of Duns Scotus with Immanuel Kant. (q.v.) But unlike the great German philosopher who relies entirely upon the supremacy of moral consciousness, Duns Scotus makes a constant appeal to revelation and its order of truth as above all philosophy. In his own age, which followed immediately upon the great constructive synthesis of Saints Albert, Bonaventure, and Thomas, this lesser light was less a philosopher because he and his School were incapable of powerful synthesis and so gave themselves to analysis and controversy. The principal Scotists were Francis of Mayron (d. 1327) and Antonio Andrea (d. 1320); and later John of Basoles, John Dumbleton, Walter Burleigh, Alexander of Alexandria, Lychetus of Brescia and Nicholas de Orbellis. The complete works with a life of Duns Scotus were published in 1639 by Luke Wadding (Lyons) and reprinted by Vives in 1891. (Paris) -- C.A.H.

The Ineffable: *Sri Aurobindo: "It is this essential indeterminability of the Absolute that translates itself into our consciousness through the fundamental negating positives of our spiritual experience, the immobile immutable Self, the Nirguna Brahman, the Eternal without qualities, the pure featureless One Existence, the Impersonal, the Silence void of activities, the Non-being, the Ineffable and the Unknowable. On the other side it is the essence and source of all determinations, and this dynamic essentiality manifests to us through the fundamental affirming positives in which the Absolute equally meets us; for it is the Self that becomes all things, the Saguna Brahman, the Eternal with infinite qualities, the One who is the Many, the infinite Person who is the source and foundation of all persons and personalities, the Lord of creation, the Word, the Master of all works and action; it is that which being known all is known: these affirmatives correspond to those negatives. For it is not possible in a supramental cognition to split asunder the two sides of the One Existence, — even to speak of them as sides is excessive, for they are in each other, their co-existence or one-existence is eternal and their powers sustaining each other found the self-manifestation of the Infinite.” The Life Divine

the Infinite ::: **A designation of the Deity or the absolute Being; God. Infinite"s. ::: *

The_interest_rate_risk ::: is the risk that an investment's value will change due to a change in the absolute level of interest rates, in the spread between two rates, in the shape of the yield curve, or in any other interest rate relationship. Such changes usually affect securities inversely and can be reduced by diversifying (investing in fixed-income securities with different durations) or hedging (such as through an interest rate swap).

::: "The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; he is Space and all that is in Space; he is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe.” The Life Divine*

“The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; he is Space and all that is in Space; he is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe.” The Life Divine

"The Non-Manifestation is not a Non-Existence. Non-Existence is a term created by the mind and has no absolute significance; there is no such thing as an absolute Nihil or Zero. It is agreed even by the philosophies of the Nihil, Tao or Zero (Sunya) that the Non-Existence of which they speak is a Nought in which all is and from which all comes. Tao, Nihil or Zero is not different from the Absolute or the Supreme Brahman of Vedanta; it is only another way of describing or naming it. The Supreme is an Existence beyond what we know of our existence and therefore only it can seem to our mind as a Zero, a Nihil, a Non-Existence.” Essays Divine and Human*

“The Non-Manifestation is not a Non-Existence. Non-Existence is a term created by the mind and has no absolute significance; there is no such thing as an absolute Nihil or Zero. It is agreed even by the philosophies of the Nihil, Tao or Zero (Sunya) that the Non-Existence of which they speak is a Nought in which all is and from which all comes. Tao, Nihil or Zero is not different from the Absolute or the Supreme Brahman of Vedanta; it is only another way of describing or naming it. The Supreme is an Existence beyond what we know of our existence and therefore only it can seem to our mind as a Zero, a Nihil, a Non-Existence.” Essays Divine and Human

  "The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe.” The Mother

“The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine. Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe.” The Mother

  "The personal and the impersonal are themselves posited and experienced by mind as separate realities and one or other is declared and seen as supreme, so that the personal can have laya in the Impersonal or, on the contrary, the impersonal disappears into the absolute reality of the supreme and divine Person — the impersonal in that view is only an attribute or power of the personal Divine. But at the summit of spiritual experience passing beyond mind one begins to feel the fusion of all these things into one. Consciousness, Existence, Ananda return to their indivisible unity, Sachchidananda. The personal and the impersonal become irrevocably one, so that to posit one as against the other appears as an act of ignorance.” *Letters on Yoga

“The personal and the impersonal are themselves posited and experienced by mind as separate realities and one or other is declared and seen as supreme, so that the personal can have laya in the Impersonal or, on the contrary, the impersonal disappears into the absolute reality of the supreme and divine Person—the impersonal in that view is only an attribute or power of the personal Divine. But at the summit of spiritual experience passing beyond mind one begins to feel the fusion of all these things into one. Consciousness, Existence, Ananda return to their indivisible unity, Sachchidananda. The personal and the impersonal become irrevocably one, so that to posit one as against the other appears as an act of ignorance.” Letters on Yoga

There are two kinds of nirmanakayas: the natural is the condition of a high initiate who reaches a stage of bliss second only to nirvana; the assumed is the self-sacrifice of one who voluntarily gives up the absolute nirvana in order to help and guide humanity. The nirmanakaya, then,

There is yet a third kind of epohe that allegedly enables one to discriminate subjectivity qua transcendental -- by effecting yet another kind of reduction, which Husserl eventually called "transcendental-phenomenological." (In his Ideen he called it simply "phenomenological.") By refraining from participition in one's inveterate (and justifiable) natural attitude of presupposing the world and the status of one's subjectivity in the world, one can see the world (and whatever else one may intend) as fundamentally a noematic-intentional object for transcendental subjectivity -- for one's individual self, the subject whose life is one's own transcendental stream of consciousness, and for other transcendental subjects. As one can describe one's actual psychic subjectivity, so one can describe one's actual transcendental subjectivity and thus produce an empirical transcendental phenomenology. Again, as in the case of the purely psychic, so in the case of the purely transcendental, an eidetic reduction enables one to produce a purely eidetic science -- here an eidetic transcendental phenomenology, the theme of which is the absolutely universal domain of transcendental subjectivity in general, including the latter's noematic-objective sense: the entire world and all its possible variants. This eidetic transcendental phenomenology is what Husserl ordinarily meant when, in the Ideen or subsequent works, he spoke simply of "phenomenology. "

“The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga

The vital center of his doctrine is duration rather than intuition. Duration is the original thing in itself, the "substance" of philosophic tradition, except that to Bergson it is a specific experience, revealed to the individual in immediate experience. All things, consciousness, matter, time, evolution, motion and the absolute are so many specialized tensional forms of duration. The phrase elan vital sums up his vitalistic doctrine that there is an original life force, that it has passed from one generation of living beings to another by way of developed individual organisms, these being the connecting links between the generations. Bergson regards as pseudo-evolutionary the effort to arrange all living beings into a grand uni-linear series. True or creative evolution is pluri-dimensional, i.e., the life force is conserved in every line of evolution of living beings, causing all of the numerous varieties of living forms, creating all new species, and dividing itself more and more as it advances. As the vital impetus is not moving towards any fixed, predetermined and final end, an immanent teleology is within the life force itself.

The will, like the intellect, reaches after and finds its peace in the Absolute. The moral life lies in seeking the ever widening meaning of our individual lives and identifying ourselves with it. This self-identification with larger meaning is loyalty -- the basis and the essence of all human virtue. -- B.A.G.F.

Thinking was to Fichte a wholly practical affair, a form of action. Since experience is given in the form of consciousness, the origin and nature of consciousness is the key to all problems. The ego is the point at which the creative activity of the Absolute emerges in the individual consciousness. The world means nothing of itself. It has no independent self-existence. It exists for the sole purpose of affording man the occasion for realizing the ends of his existence. It is merely the material for his duty. Fichte sought to bring out the structural principles of the knowing act.

This first Sephirah contains involved within itself all the other nine Sephiroth, which it proceeds in regular serial order to emanate forth. It is considered in the Qabbalah as a sexless yet androgynous potency. Kether is original spiritual Light in comparison with divine Darkness or the absolute Light of ’eyn soph, this divine Darkness being beyond human conception and hence termed the Concealed of the Concealed — a title also applicable to Kether itself. Being the oldest or first of the Sephiroth it is termed the Most Holy Ancient One (‘Attiqa’ Qaddisha’), the Ancient of Days (‘Attiq Yomin), and the White Head (Reisha’ Hiwwara’) as containing within itself all colors. As head of the Sephirothal Tree, Kether is termed the Great Aspect, Macroprosopus, or Long Face (’Arich ’Anpin) as it contains all the attributes of the other nine Sephiroth. Its Divine Name is ’Ehyeh (I am), the first manifested existence or cosmic being. Applied to man, Kether is represented by the head. Its first emanation became the second Sephirah, Hochmah.

This is because our original being is the absolute in full possession of its infinite and illimitable self-consciousness and self-power; a self-possession whose other name is self-delight. And in proportion as the relative touches upon that self-possession, it moves towards satisfaction, touches delight.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 99


This something larger is the cosmic drama written, staged, and acted by the Absolute, who is artist and actor as well as a rational intelligence, intent no less upon dramatic than upon intelligible unity and self-expression. The world-process is tragic, witness the sin and suffering and imperfection with which it is fraught. But in the infinite tragedy, as well as in the tragedies composed by men, evil is contributory to the perfection of the whole, and, when seen and accepted as such by the finite individual, not only loses its sting but produces a "catharsis" of his attitude towards it, in which he cheerfully accepts it, battles with it, and finds his triumph over it in nobly enduring it. This "catharsis," identifying him as it does with the meaning of the life of the Absolute, is his peace and his salvation. Main works: Logic, 1888; The Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899; Value and Destiny of the Individual, 1913. -- B.A.G.F.

Though fragments of the absolute experience, our minds somehow remain separate selves and persons. Though infinite and all-comprehensive in extent, and reviewing ad infinitum its own infinity in knowing that it knows that it knows, the Absolute is nevertheless a finished and closed whole. Though shot through and through with error and evil and sin and suffering, the Absolute is nevertheless perfect, and perfect because of them, since struggle with them and triumph over them is of the essence of its perfection. Though a temporal process, it is nevertheless overarches that process in a single act of comprehension in which past, present, and future are grasped, even as the successive notes of a musical phrase are grasped, as an eternally present completed fact.

Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist.   Bibliography:   B. Geyer,   Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano,   Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody,   The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle,   Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter,   Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922).     --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B.   In logic, see Operationism.   In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations.   1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events.   2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance.   Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning).   Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class.   The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined.   In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations.   For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.)   For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation.   Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes.   Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion.   For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R.   The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .).   The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C.   G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M.   In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established.   Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset:     Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914;   El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935;   El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921;   España Invertebrada, 1922;   Kant, 1924;   La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925;   Espiritu de la Letra, 1927;   La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929;   Goethe desde Adentio, 1934;   Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939;   Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939;   El Libro de las Misiones, 1940;   Ideas y Creencias, 1940;     and others.   Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P

Thus the method is the delineation of systems which are real, and the doctrine of reality nothing other than a detailed statement of the result. Such a statement is the final category of dialectical analysis, the Absolute Idea, this is the "truth" of Being. What this category is in detail can be specified only by the method whereby it is warranted. In general it is the structure of fact, possibility and value as determined by dialectical negation. It is the all-comprehensive system, the "whole," which harmoniously includes every statement of fact, possibility and value by "sublating" (through dialectical negation) every such statement within its own structure. It is also of the nature of "subject" in contradistinction to "substance" as defined by Spinoza; Hegel sometimes speaks of it as Absolute Spirit. If this doctrine is to be called absolute idealism, as is customary, its distinguishing characteristic should not be submerged in the name: the system which is here identified with reality is structured precisely as disclosed in the process of dialectical negation which exhibits it.

T’ien Hsin (Chinese) The heaven of mind or that which is absolute, referring to the ideal or subjective heaven, and therefore to the state or condition of the Absolute of any hierarchy. “Universal Ideation and Mahat, when applied to the plane of differentiation” (TG 345).

Transcendentalism: Any doctrine giving emphasis to the transcendent or transcendental (q.v.). Originally, a convenient synonym for the "transcendental philosophy" (q.v.) of Kant and Schelling. By extension, post-Kantian idealism. Any idealistic philosophy positing the immanence of the ideal or spiritual in sensuous experience. The philosophy of the Absolute (q.v.), the doctrine of: a) the immanence of the Absolute in the finite; b) the transcendence of the Absolute above the finite conceived as illusion or "unreality". A name, onginally pejorative, given to and later adopted by an idealistic movement in New England centering around the informal and so-called "Transcendental Club," organized at Boston in 1836. An outgrowth of the romantic movement, its chief influences were Coleridge, Schelling and Orientalism. While it embodied a general attitude rather than a systematically worked out philosophy, in general it opposed Lockean empiricism, materialism, rationalism, Calvinism, Deism, Trinitarianism, and middle-class commercialism. Its metaphysics followed that of Kant and post-Kantian idealism posited the immanancc of the divine in finite existence, and tended towards pantheism (Emerson's "Nature", "Oversoul", "The Transcendentalist"). Its doctrine of knowledge was idealistic and intuitive. Its ethics embraced idealism, individualism, mysticism, reformism and optimism regarding human nature. Theologically it was autosoteric, unitarian, and broadly mystical (Theo. Parker's "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity"). Popularly, a pejorative term for any view that is "enthusiastic", "mystical", extravagant, impractical, ethereal, supernatural, vague, abstruse, lacking in common sense. --W.L. Transcendentals (Scholastic): The transcendentalia are notions which apply to any being whatsoever. They are Being, Thing, Something, One, True, Good. While thing (res) and being (ens) are synonymous, the other four name properties of being which, however, are only virtually distinct from the concept to which they apply. -- R.A.

Transcendent ::: “A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence—and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal—of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth—a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos.” The Synthesis of Yoga

Transcendent: (L. transcendere to climb over, surpass, go beyond) That which is beyond, in any of several senses. The opposite of the immanent (q.v.). In Scholasticism notions are transcendent which cannot be subsumed under the Aristotelian categories. The definitive list of transcendentia comprises ens, unum, bonum, verum, res, and aliquid. For Kant whatever is beyond possible experience is transcendent, and hence unknowable. Metaphysics and Theology: God (or the Absolute) is said to be transcendent in the following senses:   perfect, i e., beyond limitation or imperfection (Scholasticism);   incomprehensible (negative theology, mysticism);   remote from Nature (Deism);   alienated from natural man (Barthianism). Pluralism posits the essential mutual transcendence of substances or reals. Epistemology: Epistemological dualism (q.v.) holds that the real transcends apprehending consciousness, i.e., is directly inaccessible to it. Thought is said to be "self-transcendent" when held to involve essentially reference beyond itself (s. intentionahty). Ethics. Moral idealism posits the transcendence of the will over Nature (see Freedom). --W.L. Transcendent Reference: The reference of a mental state to something beyond itself. See Reference. -- L.W.

transcendent ::: Sri Aurobindo: "A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence — and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal — of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth — a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos.” *The Synthesis of Yoga

"The Transcendent, the Universal, the Individual are three powers overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole manifestation; this is the first of the Trinities. In the unfolding of consciousness also, these are the three fundamental terms and none of them can be neglected if we would have the experience of the whole Truth of existence. Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.” The Synthesis of Yoga

"We see then that there are three terms of the one existence, transcendent, universal and individual, and that each of these always contains secretly or overtly the two others. The Transcendent possesses itself always and controls the other two as the basis of its own temporal possibilities; that is the Divine, the eternal all-possessing God-consciousness, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, which informs, embraces, governs all existences. The human being is here on earth the highest power of the third term, the individual, for he alone can work out at its critical turning-point that movement of self-manifestation which appears to us as the involution and evolution of the divine consciousness between the two terms of the Ignorance and the Knowledge.” The Life Divine

The Transcendent
This is what is termed the Adya Shakti; she is the Supreme Consciousness and Power above the universe and it is by her that all the Gods are manifested, and even the supramental Ishwara comes into manifestation through her — the supramental Purushottama of whom the Gods are Powers and Personalities.” Letters on Yoga
**Transcendent"s.**


True and fair view – This accounting principle states that a firm should provide a true and fair view in regard to financial conditions and also its operating results. The concept of true and fair view does not necessarily mean the absolute and total truth about the firm. Financial statementss are after all the product of different management's judgments and various estimates. The principle of true and fair view requires that the comparative truth is given about the firms' position.

turiya ::: the fourth, the fourth plane of our consciousness; the superconscient; the Absolute.

Ultimate Value: See Value, ultimate. Ultramontanism: (Lat. ultra, beyond, and montanus, pertaining to mountains, i.e., the Alps) Extreme theory of the absolute supremacy of the Pope, not only in religious but in political matters -- V.J.B.

Unconsciousness The universe being a vast aggregation of conscious beings, only the one source of all is unconscious, paramartha is described as absolute being and consciousness which are absolute non-being and unconsciousness from the human standpoint. Theosophy rejects the idea of anything being unconscious in the absolute sense, save on this plane of illusion. The Vedantic idea of an Unconscious behind all manifestation has reappeared in Occidental philosophy, notably in that of Eduard van Hartmann. Unconsciousness and consciousness are used in theosophy with direct reference to human understanding, so that what we call unconsciousness is merely consciousness on a plane so high, and with a range so vast, that human understanding cannot contain it; or that what we call consciousness would be unconsciousness to less evolved beings because these cannot contain or understand our consciousness. We may look upon spirit as being both conscious and unconscious: active spirit we would call the consciousness of spirit; but those incomprehensibly vast ranges of spirit beyond our power of understanding we would call inactive spirit, merely because we cannot comprehend it and therefore say it is relatively non-existent, although actually being the basis of all being.

Union: The mystic union is the state in which the Self merges into the Absolute Life, and becomes one with it.

Universe: (a) Metaphysics (1) The complete natural world, (2) That whole composed of all particulars and of all universals. (3) The Absolute. (b) Logic: The universe of discourse in any given treatment is that class such that all other classes treated are subclasses of it and consequently such that all members of any class treated are members of it. See logic, formal, §§7, 8. -- C.A.B.

Unmanifest or Unmanifested Usually used of the First Logos in contradistinction to the manifest-unmanifest or Second Logos; though this unmanifested Logos is correctly said to be the first manifestation of the Absolute or the summit or primordial originant of a cosmic hierarchy, of which there are innumerable multitudes in boundless space. The unmanifest corresponds to primordial unity where the totality of the manifested universe is “all numbers.” Behind the ultimate which can be conceived, we have to postulate an unknown indefinable antecedent, which may therefore be called unmanifest.

Upadhi: A superimposed thing or attribute that veils and gives a coloured view of the substance beneath it; limiting adjunct; instrument; vehicle; body; a technical term used in Vedanta philosophy for any superimposition that gives a limited view of the Absolute and makes It appear as the relative. Jiva's Upadhi is Avidya; Isvara's Upadhi is Maya.

Upanishad: Sanskrit for secret teaching or Esoteric Doctrine. The Upanishads form the third section of the Vedas, recording the speculations of the Hindu sages and esoteric adepts on the nature of the world and ultimate reality and the way to spiritual union with The Absolute. The principal basis of Hindu philosophy. More than one hundred Upanishads are mentioned, but thirteen are generally listed as the oldest ones, viz. Chandogya, Brhadaranyaka, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Katha, Isa, Munda, Kausitaki, Kena, Prasna, Svetasvatara, Mandukya, and Maitri; they probably date from the 8th century B.C.

Vacuum Emptiness, the necessary correlative of plenum or fullness: the two being one of those pairs of opposites which the mind is bound to postulate as a basis of reasoning. It stands for the spiritual condition of a cosmic hierarchy before it emanates its streams of manifestation — “the symbol of the absolute Deity or Boundless Space, esoterically” (TG 357). Democritus taught that the first principles are atoms and a vacuum, which is equivalent to the manifest and the unmanifest, deity latent and deity patent, but the atoms of Democritus, being spiritual indivisibles, are not the atoms of science but what in theosophy are called monads, and likewise the vacuum of void of Democritus is the equivalent of the archaic Buddhist sunyata or the ancient Buddhist or Brahmanic arupa (formless) spheres.

vedanta ::: the "end or culmination of the Veda", the Upanisads (which occur at the end of the Veda) ; a system of philosophy based on the Upanisads teaching the culminating knowledge of the Absolute, considered (sometimes under the name uttara-mimamsa) to be one of the six darsanas].

Visistadvaita: (Skr.) "Qualified non-duality", the Vedantic (q.v.) doctrine of qualified monism advocated by Ramanuja (q.v.) which holds the Absolute to be personal, world and individuals to be real and distinct (visista), and salvation attainable only by grace of God earned through bhakti (q.v.). -- K.F.L.

Vivarta: Illusory appearance; a doctrine of the non-dualistic school of Vedanta philosophy explaining creation as an illusory appearance of the Absolute; apparent variation; illusory manifestation of Brahman; apparent or unreal or seeming change; superimposition; appearance.

vivarta. ::: illusory appearance; doctrine of creation as an illusory manifestation of the Absolute; seeming change; superimposition; dream appearance

void ::: “The Absolute cannot indeed be bound in its nature to manifest a cosmos of relations, but neither can it be bound not to manifest any cosmos. It is not itself a sheer emptiness; for a vacant Absolute is no Absolute,—our conception of a Void or Zero is only a conceptual sign of our mental inability to know or grasp it: it bears in itself some ineffable essentiality of all that is and all that can be; and since it holds in itself this essentiality and this possibility, it must also hold in itself in some way of its absoluteness either the permanent truth or the inherent, even if latent, realisable actuality of all that is fundamental to our or the world’s existence.” The Life Divine

Void, the: Capitalized, the deepest reaches of space; the principle of ultimate Oblivion; the utter absence of possibility; primal chaos; and the heart of the Underworld – all of which, in essence, may be the same thing. Sometimes called the Absolute, especially by Nephandi.

Wahdat al Wujud :::   Oneness of Being; the absolute non-duality of existence

Weber-Fechner Law: Basic law of psychophysics which expresses in quantitative terms the relation between the intensity of a stimulus and the intensity of the resultant sensation. E. H. Weber applying the method of "just noticeable difference" in experiments involving weight discrimination found that the ability to discriminate two stimuli depends not on the absolute difference between the two stimuli but on their relative intensities and suggested the hypothesis that for each sense there is a constant expressing the relative intensities of stimuli producing a just noticeable difference of sensation. Fechner, also employing the method of just perceptible difference, arrived at the formula that the sensation varies with the logarithm of the stimulus: S = C log R where S represents the intensity of the sensation, R that of the stimulus and C a constant which varies for the different senses and from individual to individual and even for the same individual at different times. -- L.W.

"We see that the Absolute, the Self, the Divine, the Spirit, the Being is One; the Transcendental is one, the Cosmic is one: but we see also that beings are many and each has a self, a spirit, a like yet different nature. And since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged to admit that all these many must be that One, and it follows that the One is or has become many; but how can the limited or relative be the Absolute and how can man or beast or bird be the Divine Being? But in erecting this apparent contradiction the mind makes a double error. It is thinking in the terms of the mathematical finite unit which is sole in limitation, the one which is less than two and can become two only by division and fragmentation or by addition and multiplication; but this is an infinite Oneness, it is the essential and infinite Oneness which can contain the hundred and the thousand and the million and billion and trillion. Whatever astronomic or more than astronomic figures you heap and multiply, they cannot overpass or exceed that Oneness; for, in the language of the Upanishad, it moves not, yet is always far in front when you would pursue and seize it. It can be said of it that it would not be the infinite Oneness if it were not capable of an infinite multiplicity; but that does not mean that the One is plural or can be limited or described as the sum of the Many: on the contrary, it can be the infinite Many because it exceeds all limitation or description by multiplicity and exceeds at the same time all limitation by finite conceptual oneness.” The Life Divine

“We see that the Absolute, the Self, the Divine, the Spirit, the Being is One; the Transcendental is one, the Cosmic is one: but we see also that beings are many and each has a self, a spirit, a like yet different nature. And since the spirit and essence of things is one, we are obliged to admit that all these many must be that One, and it follows that the One is or has become many; but how can the limited or relative be the Absolute and how can man or beast or bird be the Divine Being? But in erecting this apparent contradiction the mind makes a double error. It is thinking in the terms of the mathematical finite unit which is sole in limitation, the one which is less than two and can become two only by division and fragmentation or by addition and multiplication; but this is an infinite Oneness, it is the essential and infinite Oneness which can contain the hundred and the thousand and the million and billion and trillion. Whatever astronomic or more than astronomic figures you heap and multiply, they cannot overpass or exceed that Oneness; for, in the language of the Upanishad, it moves not, yet is always far in front when you would pursue and seize it. It can be said of it that it would not be the infinite Oneness if it were not capable of an infinite multiplicity; but that does not mean that the One is plural or can be limited or described as the sum of the Many: on the contrary, it can be the infinite Many because it exceeds all limitation or description by multiplicity and exceeds at the same time all limitation by finite conceptual oneness.” The Life Divine

Wissenschaftslehre: (Ger. doctrine of science) Since Fichte who understood by it critical philosophy in general and his idealistic system based on consciousness of the absolute ego apart from any definite content of knowledge in particular, a term characterizing philosophy as a scientific systcm of knowledge embracing the principles and methodology of all sciences under exclusion of their factual content or specific conclusions. -- K.F.L.

With reference to the approach to the central reality of religion, God, and man's relation to it, types of the Philosophy of Religion may be distinguished, leaving out of account negative (atheism), skeptical and cynical (Xenophanes, Socrates, Voltaire), and agnostic views, although insertions by them are not to be separated from the history of religious consciousness. Fundamentalism, mainly a theological and often a Church phenomenon of a revivalist nature, philosophizes on the basis of unquestioning faith, seeking to buttress it by logical argument, usually taking the form of proofs of the existence of God (see God). Here belong all historic religions, Christianity in its two principal forms, Catholicism with its Scholastic philosophy and Protestantism with its greatly diversified philosophies, the numerous religions of Hinduism, such as Brahmanism, Shivaism and Vishnuism, the religion of Judaism, and Mohammedanism. Mysticism, tolerated by Church and philosophy, is less concerned with proof than with description and personal experience, revealing much of the psychological factors involved in belief and speculation. Indian philosophy is saturated with mysticism since its inception, Sufism is the outstanding form of Arab mysticism, while the greatest mystics in the West are Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Thomas a Kempis, and Jacob Bohme. Metaphysics incorporates religious concepts as thought necessities. Few philosophers have been able to avoid the concept of God in their ontology, or any reference to the relation of God to man in their ethics. So, e.g., Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and especially Hegel who made the investigation of the process of the Absolute the essence of the Philosophy of Religion.

wuwei. (J. goi; K. owi 五位). In Chinese, lit., "five ranks"; a doctrinal formula generally attributed to the CHAN master DONGSHAN LIANGJIE (807-869), the putative cofounder of the CAODONG ZONG of the mature Chan tradition. The antecedents of these five ranks are traced to SHITOU XIQIAN's CANTONG QI, which discusses the mutual "turning back on one other" (huihu) of the terms brightness and darkness. This dichotomy is eventually generalized as "relative" (pian), lit., "askew" or "partial," referring to that which is bright, conceivable, effable, and phenomena (SHI); and absolute (zheng), lit., "upright," correlating with what is dark, inconceivable, ineffable, and principle (LI). Although these two valences of relative and absolute may be discrete, they are interconnected, interdependent, and mutually defining, thus constantly "turning back on one other." The five ranks are systematized by Dongshan in his "Verses on the Five Ranks" (Wuwei song) as follows. (1) The relative within the absolute (zhengzhong pian): this valence suggests that the ordinary person constantly abides in original enlightenment (BENJUE), but is unaware of it. (2) The absolute within the relative (pianzhong zheng): the practitioner may have become aware of the reality of original enlightenment, but still treats it as an object to be understood conceptually, rather than directly experienced. (3) [The relative] emerging from the absolute (zhengzhong lai): as the Chan practitioner experiences the pervasiveness of emptiness, that emptiness turns back on itself and transforms into a more dynamic and luxuriant way of experience of reality. (4) [The relative and the absolute] jointly accessible (jianzhong zhi): as the reality of each and every independent phenomenon (shi) is experienced, the reality of principle (li) is simultaneously accessed. (5) Integration of the absolute and the relative, or lit. "arriving within together" (jianzhong dao): the bifurcations between relative and absolute, the experiencing subject and the object experienced, the realizer and the realized, etc., all drop away, so that the practitioner continues to practice but now without practicing anything, and seeks buddhahood while understanding that there is no buddhahood to be sought. In some interpretations, the first two ranks evoke the famous passage in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA: "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" (see RuPAM suNYATĀ sUNYATAIVA RuPAM). The third rank implies the bodhisattva practice of returning to the world after his or her attainment of enlightenment (BODHI). Similarly, the fourth and fifth ranks imply the bodhisattva vow to save all living beings so that they may all access NIRVĀnA together. Despite the use of the term "rank," a systematic progression is not necessarily implied, and some commentators suggest that all five ranks may be experienced simultaneously in a moment of sudden awakening (DUNWU); thus, the five ranks may be an attempt to demonstrate how gradual and sequential outlines of Buddhist soteriology can be integrated with the more subitist soteriologies that become emblematic of the mature Chan tradition. The five ranks are also sometimes correlated with the five wisdoms (PANCAJNĀNA) of a buddha in the MAHĀYĀNA, and specifically in the YOGĀCĀRA school. Dongshan's "five ranks" were frequently used in East Asian GONG'AN collections as a means of checking a student's level of understanding. In one of the modern Japanese RINZAISHu systematizations of koan training, the final stage in the practice that follows initial sudden awakening (J. SATORI, C. dunwu) also involves mastery of the five ranks (J. goi).

Yajna: Sanskrit for sacrifice, a Vedic institution which became philosophically interpreted as the self-sacrifice of the Absolute One which, by an act of self-negation (nisedha-vyapara) became the Many.

Yajna: (Skr.) Sacrifice, a Vedic (q.v.) institution which became philosophically interpreted as the self-sacrifice of the Absolute One which, by an act of self-negation (nisedha-vyapara) became the Many. -- K.F.L.

Yet “in all such numerical divisions the One universal Principle, — although referred to as (the) one, because the Only One — never enters into the calculations. It stands, in its character of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the universal abstraction, entirely by Itself and independent of every other Power whether noumenal or phenomenal” (SD 2:598). Here the cosmic One is intimately intertwined with the universal zero, the last being equivalent to the universal All. Analogies in different systems of thought are numerous; for instance, the cosmic zero corresponds to parabrahman-mulaprakriti, whereas the cosmic One or monad corresponds to Brahman. See also UNITY

Yong Grub (Tibetan) yons-grub [from yongs wholly + grub anything accomplished or done by itself without any agent] That which is completed, equivalent to absolute or the Latin absolutum, and the Sanskrit paranishpanna: the absolute freedom from the limitations of manifestation to which all beings attain at the close of a great period of cosmic activity (mahamanvantara). It signifies attaining and identifying with the seventh principle of nature; when applied to monads, the state attained by the fully liberated jivanmuktas. Hence yong grub means nirvana, or in its largest sense the still more sublime condition of paranirvana.

Zero [from Arabic sifrom an empty thing cf cipher] As a mathematical idea, the absolute zero obtained by the subtraction of equal quantities (expressed by a - a), or the ideal zero denoting the imaginary limit of an infinite diminution (expressed by the quotient a/b, where a is indefinitely smaller than b). In physical measurement, a lower limit or point of origin, as in the zero of a scale or the absolute zero of temperature.



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   52 Sri Aurobindo
   15 Sri Ramakrishna
   8 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   3 The Mother
   2 Ken Wilber
   2 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
   1 Theodor W. Adorno
   1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   1 Sri Ramama Maharshi
   1 Sri Aurobindo?
   1 Saichō
   1 Richard P Feynman
   1 R Buckminster Fuller
   1 Raymond Frank Piper
   1 Ramesh Balsekar
   1 Ramakrishna
   1 Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite
   1 Plotnius
   1 Patanjali
   1 Nicholas of Cusa
   1 my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle
   1 Louis Bertrand Geiger
   1 Judith Simmer-Brown
   1 Joseph Campbell
   1 John F Kennedy
   1 Henri Bergson
   1 Erich Przywara
   1 Eliphas Levi
   1 Awaghosha
   1 Awaghesha
   1 Antoine the Healer
   1 Swami Vivekananda
   1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   1 Aleister Crowley
   1 Adyashanti

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   38 Sri Aurobindo
   23 Swami Vivekananda
   13 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   11 Simone de Beauvoir
   11 Anonymous
   10 Albert Camus
   9 Joseph Heller
   9 Henry Miller
   7 Rumi
   7 Ralph Waldo Emerson
   7 Emil M Cioran
   6 William James
   6 Pope Francis
   6 Ludwig Feuerbach
   6 Jamie McGuire
   6 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
   6 Alexis de Tocqueville
   5 Stephen King
   5 Rush Limbaugh
   5 Paulo Coelho

1:The absolute Brahman is realized in samadhi. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
2:The Absolute resides as the Self in the Heart. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
3:The Absolute Consciousness alone is our real nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
4:It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that liberation is discovered to be who and what you are. ~ Adyashanti,
5:In fact, wakefulness and dream are equally unreal from the standpoint of the Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
6:The mind of the Enlightened Sage (jnani) never exists apart from Brahman, the Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
7:The Jnana Yogi longs to realize Brahman, God the impersonal, the absolute, and the unconditioned. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
8:The Absolute Consciousness projects light, manifests as the ego and grows up as the universe. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
9:The goal always exists. It is not something new to be discovered. The Absolute is our nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
10:The absolute immunity can only come with the supramental change. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Illness and Health,
11:No one can say what formless samadhi is. It is the absolute transformation of one's own self into God's. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
12:By directly inquiring, "Who AM I?" ... 'I' reveals itself as the Perfect Being, the Absolute Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
13:No human law is the absolute expression of the divine justice, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Heraclitus - VI,
14:The Absolute is everywhere; it has to be seen and found everywhere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Nature,
15:The idea of the Self being the witness is only in the mind; it is not the absolute truth of the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
16:When the mind is one with the deeper spirit, there results the absolute knowledge of the self. ~ Patanjali, the Eternal Wisdom
17:Brahman, the Absolute, has never been defiled, for no one, as yet, has been able to express it by human speech. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
18:It is the Absolute who is all these relativities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature,
19:The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Pure Existent,
20:The knowledge of oneness makes me see that everything is but a manifestation of God, the absolute, on the plane of the senses. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
21:When the supreme being is inactive, he is styled as God the absolute. When creating, he is styled as Sakti or the personal God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
22:I actually see that whatever is, is God. It is He who has become all these things, the mind and Buddhi are lost in the absolute. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
23:As Ramanuja says, the Absolute is qualified by the finite soul and the phenomenal world. This is the doctrine of Vishishtadvaita. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
24:The knowledge of the absolute does away, in the end, with both knowledge and ignorance, since knowledge is free from all duality. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
25:The substance from which we derive our conception of the absolute is the identical substance from which we conceive of the finite. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
26:I see that it is the Absolute who has become all things about us; it is He who appears as the finite soul and the phenomenal world. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
27:How do you breathe and digest your food? Do you have the absolute certainty of remaining alive, for even the next five minutes, on the strength of your own volition? ~ Ramesh Balsekar,
28:Men want absolute and permanent happiness. This does not reside in objects, but in the Absolute. It is Peace free from pain and pleasure - it is a neutral state. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
29:Doctrine says the absolute must not be considered apart form the world and the soul. These three form a one -- three in one, one in three. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
30:Doctrine says the absolute must not be considered apart from the world and the soul. These three form a one -- three in one, one in three. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
31:The Absolute is not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: Brahman, Oneness of God and the World,
32:Shiva and Shakti, the absolute and power, are both necessary for creation. With dry clay no potter can make a vessel -- Water is necessary. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
33:You talk about heaven and hell, this Mahatma or that one, but how about you? Who are you? ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Consciousness and the Absolute,
34:The first gift of the absolute transcendent Goodness is the gift of being, and that Goodness is praised from those that first and principally have a share of being. ~ Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite,
35:The nearer we get to the absolute Ananda, the greater becomes our joy in man and the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty,
36:The way of knowledge tends easily towards the impersonal and the absolute, may very soon become exclusive. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Delight of the Divine,
37:Just discernment is of two kinds. The first conducts us towards the phenomenon, while the second knows how the Absolute appears in the universe. ~ Ramakrishna, the Eternal Wisdom
38:The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion,
39:It is only by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence,
40:It is only by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine: The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence,
41:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,
42:The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,
43:Felt its honey of felicity
Flow through his veins like the rivers of Paradise,
Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,
44:Intelligence is the first divine emanation. ... Creation is a fall, a progressivedegeneration of the divine. In the intelligence, the absolute unity of God splits up into intelligence proper . . . and theintelligible world. ~ Plotnius,
45:All the basic realities are a bringing out of something that is eternal and inherently true in the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence,
46:To seize the absolute in shapes that pass,
To fix the eternal's touch in time-made things,
This is the law of all perfection here. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter,
47:Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,
48:In place of the explosive unity of the absolute identity of the self and God or the absolute contradiction between the self and God a unity of tension enters, one of a relative similarity and a relative dissimilarity between God and self. ~ Erich Przywara,
49:Right discrimination is of two kinds analytical and synthetical. The first leads one from the phenomena to the Absolute Brahman, while by the second one knows how the Absolute Brahman appears as the universe. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
50:Mind cannot arrive at identity with the Absolute even when by a stretch of the intellect it conceives the idea, but can only disappear into it in a swoon or extinction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind,
51:Every question about God presupposes what is being asked about; and that which the question presupposes is that which is to be given as the answer… For God is the Absolute Presupposition of all things that are in anyway presupposed. ~ Nicholas of Cusa, De Sapientia II,
52:The absolute is not in itself a thing of magnitude; it is beyond measure, not in the sole sense of vastness, but in the freedom of its essential being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil,
53:Thus God, the Absolute, eludes finite beings. Where they desire to name him, because they must, they betray him. But if they keep silent about him, they acquiesce in their own impotence and sin against the other, no less binding, commandment to name him. ~ Theodor W. Adorno,
54:This evolution lasts until we reach the absolute purity of the Being. Then we arrive at divinity. We form a vast oneness. We enjoy an entirety of divine power; we are united in a single love; we are God. ~ Antoine the Healer, the Eternal Wisdom
55:Maya is a veil of the Absolute;
A Truth occult has made this mighty world:
The Eternal's wisdom and self-knowledge act
In ignorant Mind and in the body's steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Ideal,
56:As the Absolute He stands behind every relative, as the Eternal He supports every transient and assures the permanence of the sum of phenomena; as the Universal He manifests Himself in every particular. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Facts and Opinions,
57:Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
Love is man's lien on the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,
58:In the absolute retirement one lives a purely subjective life and the opportunity for extending the spiritual progress to the outer life and testing it thoroughly is not there. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga,
59:When a mirror is covered with dust it cannot reflect images; it can only do so when it is clear of stain. So is it with beings. If their minds are not pure of soil, the Absolute cannot reveal itself in them. But if they free themselves from soil, then of itself it will be revealed. ~ Awaghosha, the Eternal Wisdom
60:The birth of all the buddhas of the three times from this utterly pure realm [of] mind itself is this. The basis of the generation of all the sugata's power, fearless miracles and qualities is also this. The source of all the holy dharma is also this. Therefore, it is the absolute Great Mother. - Machik ~ Judith Simmer-Brown, Dakini's Warm Breath,
61:To the abiding and eternal is their climb,
To the pure existence everywhere the same,
To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force
And the unimaginable and formless bliss,
To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery
Of the triune being wh ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,
62:My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
   I guard the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
   Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
   For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven.
   Love is the far Transcendent's angel here
   Love is man's lien on the Absolute
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,
63:When a mirror is covered with dust, it cannot reflect the image cast upon it, it can only do that when it is without spot. It is so with beings. If their minds are not clear of stain, the Absolute cannot reveal himself in them; but if they free themselves from pollution, then shall he reveal himself within their being. ~ Awaghesha, the Eternal Wisdom
64:The essence of my work is; God, or the absolute Spirit, exists-and can be proven-and there is a ladder that reaches to that summit, a ladder that you can be shown how to climb, a ladder that leads from time to eternity, and from death to immortality. And all philosophy and psychology swings into a remarkable synthesis around that ladder. ~ Ken Wilber, The Great Chain of Being, 1987 (unpublished manuscript),
65:Bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us...No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream - it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race. ~ John F Kennedy,
66:Brahman: 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. God.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo?,
67:The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix-through identity-of the Divine Grace, with a perfect knowledge-through identity-of the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.
   ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,
68:I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain ... In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar. ~ Richard P Feynman,
69:In India the mother is the center of the family and our highest ideal. She is to us the representative of God, as God is the mother of the universe. It was a female sage who first found the unity of God, and laid down this doctrine in one of the first hy mns of the Vedas. Our God is both personal and absolute, the absolute is male, the personal, female. And thus it comes that we now say: 'The first manifestation of God is the hand that rocks the cradle'. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
70:All was found there the Unique has dreamed and made
   Tinging with ceaseless rapture and surprise
   And an opulent beauty of passionate difference
   The recurring beat that moments God in Time.
   Only was missing the sole timeless Word
   That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
   The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
   The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
   That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
   The single sign interpreting every sign,
   The absolute index to the Absolute.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,
71:This Magical Will is the wand in your hand by which the Great Work is accomplished, by which the Daughter is not merely set upon the throne of the Mother, but assumed into the Highest. : In one, the best, system of Magick, the Absolute is called the Crown, God is called the Father, the Pure Soul is called the Mother, the Holy Guardian Angel is called the Son, and the Natural Soul is called the Daughter. The Son purifies the Daughter by wedding her; she thus becomes the Mother, the uniting of whom with the Father absorbs all into the Crown. ~ Aleister Crowley, Book 4,
72:I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me ~ that I understand. And these two certainties ~ my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle ~ I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?,
73:During a period of nearly fifty years... [Sri Aurobindo] created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language… I venture the judgment that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth's darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man's mind towards the Absolute». ~ Raymond Frank Piper,
74:Imaginary Bondage ::: Once you realize that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realization you identify yourself with externals, like the body, the mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear. It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation, and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That, Talks with Sri Nisargadatta,
75:Saichō's Prayer

   So long as I have not attained the stage where my six faculties are pure, I will not venture out into the world.

   So long as I have not realized the absolute, I will not acquire any special skills or arts (e.g. medicine, divination, calligraphy, etc.)

   So long as I have not kept all the precepts purely, I will not participate in any lay donor's Buddhist meetings.

   So long as I have not attained wisdom (lit. hannya 般若), I will not participate in worldly affairs unless it be to benefit others.

   May any merit from my practice in the past, present and future be given not to me, but to all sentient beings so that they may attain supreme enlightenment. ~ Saichō,
76:The highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not to be gained by this self-blinded leap into the Absolute but by a patient transit beyond the mind into the Truth-consciousness where the Infinite can be known, felt, seen, experienced in all the fullness of its unending riches. And there we discover this Self that we are to be not only a static tenuous vacant Atman but a great dynamic Spirit individual, universal and transcendent. That Self and Spirit cannot be expressed by the mind's abstract generalisations; all the inspired descriptions of the seers and mystics cannot exhaust its contents and its splendours.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Integral Knowledge, The Object Of Knowledge [296],
77:Q:How shall I realise God?
M.: God is an unknown entity. Moreover He is external. Whereas, the Self is always with you and it is you. Why do you leave out what is intimate and go in for what is external?
D.: What is this Self again?
M.: The Self is known to everyone but not clearly. You always exist. The Be-ing is the Self. 'I am' is the name of God. Of all the definitions of God, none is indeed so well put as the Biblical statement "I AM THAT I AM" in EXODUS (Chap. 3). There are other statements, such as Brahmaivaham, Aham Brahmasmi and Soham. But none is so direct as the name JEHOVAH = I AM. The Absolute Being is what is - It is the Self. It is God. Knowing the Self, God is known. In fact God is none other than the Self. ~ Sri Ramama Maharshi, Collected Works,
78:three paths as one :::
   We can see also that in the integral view of things these three paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in the triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,
79:The thunderbolt (vajra) is one of the major symbols in Buddhist iconography, signifying the spiritual power of Buddhahood (indestructible enlightenment) which shatters the illusory realities of the world. The Absolute, or Adi Buddha, is represented in the images of Tibet as Vajra-Dhara (Tibetan: Dorje-Chang) "Holder of the Adamantine Bolt.
...
We know also that among primitive peoples warriors may speak of their weapons as thunderbolts. Sicut in coelo et in terra: the initiated warrior is an agent of the divine will; his training is not only in manual but also in spiritual skills. Magic (the supernatural power of the thunderbolt), as well as physical force and chemical poison, gives the lethal energy to his blows. A consummate master would require no physical weapon at all; the power of his magic word would suffice. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
80:Above her little finite steps she feels,
Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out
A strange perfection beyond law and rule,
A universe of self-found felicity,
An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,
The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,
Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,
Order of the freedom of the infinite,
The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.
There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.
But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,
Hers are but careless visits of the gods.
They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed
And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.
There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,
Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day,
81:This third and unknown, this tertium quid, he names God; and by the word he means somewhat or someone who is the Supreme, the Divine, the Cause, the All, one of these things or all of them at once, the perfection or the totality of all that here is partial or imperfect, the absolute of all these myriad relativities, the Unknown by learning of whom the real secret of the known can become to him more and more intelligible. Man has tried to deny all these categories, - he has tried to deny his own real existence, he has tried to deny the real existence of the cosmos, he has tried to deny the real existence of God. But behind all these denials we see the same constant necessity of his attempt at knowledge; for he feels the need of arriving at a unity of these three terms, even if it can only be done by suppressing two of them or merging them in the other that is left.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,
82:A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind has a certain fear, the small superficially active thinking or vital mind a shrinking from it or dislike, - for it confuses the silence with mental and vital incapacity and the void with cessation or non-existence: but this silence is the silence of the spirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge, power and bliss, and this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being, a liberation of it from its turbid contents so that it may be filled with the wine of God; it is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence. Even when the being turns towards cessation, it is a cessation not in non-existence but into some vast ineffable of spiritual being or the plunge into the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.28 - The Divine Life,
83:a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness: - it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,
84:A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence - and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal - of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth - a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
85:But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 302,
86:The key one and threefold, even as universal science. The division of the work is sevenfold, and through these sections are distributed the seven degrees of initiation into is transcendental philosophy.

The text is a mystical commentary on the oracles of Solomon, ^ and the work ends with a series of synoptic schedules which are the synthesis of Magic and the occult Kabalah so far as concerns that which can be made public in writing. The rest, being the esoteric and inexpressible part of the science, is formulated in magnificent pantacles carefully designed and engraved. These are nine in number, as follows

(1) The dogma of Hermes;
(2) Magical realisation;
(3) The path of wisdom and the initial procedure in the work
(4) The Gate of the Sanctuary enlightened by seven mystic rays;
(5) A Rose of Light, in the centre of which a human figure is extending its arms in the form of a cross;
(6) The magical laboratory of Khunrath, demonstrating the necessary union of prayer and work
(7) The absolute synthesis of science;
(8) Universal equilibrium ;
(9) A summary of Khunrath's personal embodying an energetic protest against all his detractors. ~ Eliphas Levi, The History Of Magic,
87:The pure existent is then a fact and no mere concept; it is the fundamental reality. But, let us hasten to add, the movement, the energy, the becoming are also a fact, also a reality. The supreme intuition and its corresponding experience may correct the other, may go beyond, may suspend, but do not abolish it. We have therefore two fundamental facts of pure existence and of worldexistence, a fact of Being, a fact of Becoming. To deny one or the other is easy; to recognise the facts of consciousness and find out their relation is the true and fruitful wisdom.

Stability and movement, we must remember, are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, even as are oneness and multitude. The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity. But it takes its eternal poise in the one and the stable and whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably, securely in the moving and multitudinous. World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Pure Existent, 85,
88:For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, - of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe. It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
   It is nothing less that is meant in the end when we speak of the absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant progression when the long and difficult process of transforming desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure. Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 85-86, [T1],
89:When, then, by the withdrawal of the centre of consciousness from identification with the mind, life and body, one has discovered ones true self, discovered the oneness of that self with the pure, silent, immutable Brahman, discovered in the immutable, in the Akshara Brahman, that by which the individual being escapes from his own personality into the impersonal, the first movement of the Path of Knowledge has been completed. It is the sole that is absolutely necessary for the traditional aim of the Yoga of Knowledge, for immergence, for escape from cosmic existence, for release into the absolute and ineffable Parabrahman who is beyond all cosmic being. The seeker of this ultimate release may take other realisations on his way, may realise the Lord of the universe, the Purusha who manifests Himself in all creatures, may arrive at the cosmic consciousness, may know and feel his unity with all beings; but these are only stages or circumstances of his journey, results of the unfolding of his soul as it approaches nearer the ineffable goal. To pass beyond them all is his supreme object. When on the other hand, having attained to the freedom and the silence and the peace, we resume possession by the cosmic consciousness of the active as well as the silent Brahman and can securely live in the divine freedom as well as rest in it, we have completed the second movement of the Path by which the integrality of self-knowledge becomes the station of the liberated soul.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
90:For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
91:Here lies the whole importance of the part of the Yoga of Knowledge which we are now considering, the knowledges of those essential principles of Being, those essential modes of self-existence on which the absolute Divine has based its self-manifestation. If the truth of our being is an infinite unity in which alone there is perfect wideness, light, knowledge, power, bliss, and if all our subjection to darkness, ignorance, weakness, sorrow, limitation comes of our viewing existence as a clash of infinitely multiple separate existences, then obviously it is the most practical and concrete and utilitarian as well as the most lofty and philosophical wisdom to find a means by which we can get away from the error and learn to live in the truth. So also, if that One is in its nature a freedom from bondage to this play of qualities which constitute our psychology and if from subjection to that play are born the struggle and discord in which we live, floundering eternally between the two poles of good and evil, virtue and sin, satisfaction and failure, joy and grief, pleasure and pain, then to get beyond the qualities and take our foundation in the settled peace of that which is always beyond them is the only practical wisdom. If attachment to mutable personality is the cause of our self-ignorance, of our discord and quarrel with ourself and with life and with others, and if there is an impersonal One in which no such discord and ignorance and vain and noisy effort exist because it is in eternal identity and harmony with itself, then to arrive in our souls at that impersonality and untroubled oneness of being is the one line and object of human effort to which our reason can consent to give the name of practicality.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
92:THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YOGA
Initial Definitions and Descriptions
Yoga has four powers and objects, purity, liberty, beatitude and perfection. Whosoever has consummated these four mightinesses in the being of the transcendental, universal, lilamaya and individual God is the complete and absolute Yogin.
All manifestations of God are manifestations of the absolute Parabrahman.
The Absolute Parabrahman is unknowable to us, not because It is the nothingness of all that we are, for rather whatever we are in truth or in seeming is nothing but Parabrahman, but because It is pre-existent & supra-existent to even the highest & purest methods and the most potent & illimitable instruments of which soul in the body is capable.
In Parabrahman knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes an inexpressible identity. Become Parabrahman, if thou wilt and if That will suffer thee, but strive not to know It; for thou shalt not succeed with these instruments and in this body.
In reality thou art Parabrahman already and ever wast and ever will be. To become Parabrahman in any other sense, thou must depart utterly out of world manifestation and out even of world transcendence.
Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee & in the world and art thou wiser & purer & better than the Absolute, O mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid on thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely & wailingly for departure. Therefore neither desire nor shun the world, but seek the bliss & purity & freedom & greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,
93:What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."

The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.

I have written all that only to explain what we mean whenwe speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else - so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to selfgiving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being - for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it is really that that has drawn from the beginning and is there behind - it is the categorical spiritual imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Seeking the Divine,
94:19 - When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellent, but I could no longer find them. - Sri Aurobindo

Is there really nothing ugly and repellent in the world? Is it our reason alone that sees things in that way?

To understand truly what Sri Aurobindo means here, you must yourself have had the experience of transcending reason and establishing your consciousness in a world higher than the mental intelligence. For from up there you can see, firstly, that everything that exists in the universe is an expression of Sachchidananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and therefore behind any appearance whatever, if you go deeply enough, you can perceive Sachchidananda, which is the principle of Supreme Beauty.

Secondly, you see that everything in the manifested universe is relative, so much so that there is no beauty which may not appear ugly in comparison with a greater beauty, no ugliness which may not appear beautiful in comparison with a yet uglier ugliness.

When you can see and feel in this way, you immediately become aware of the extreme relativity of these impressions and their unreality from the absolute point of view. However, so long as we dwell in the rational consciousness, it is, in a way, natural that everything that offends our aspiration for perfection, our will for progress, everything we seek to transcend and surmount, should seem ugly and repellent to us, since we are in search of a greater ideal and we want to rise higher.

And yet it is still only a half-wisdom which is very far from the true wisdom, a wisdom that appears wise only in the midst of ignorance and unconsciousness.

In the Truth everything is different, and the Divine shines in all things. 17 February 1960 ~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,
95:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],
96:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited by a qualityless void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the individual soul and all souls and more of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe. It is the cosmic and the supracosmic spirit, the supreme Lord, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha and supreme shakti, the Ever Unborn who is endlessly born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous One, the complex Simple, the many-sided Single, the Word of the Silence Ineffable, the impersonal omnipresent Person, the Mystery, translucent in highest consciousness to its own spirit, but to a lesser consciousness veiled in its own exceeding light and impenetrable for ever. These things are to the dimensional mind irreconcilable opposites, but to the constant vision and experience of the supramental Truth-Consciousness they are so simply and inevitably the intrinsic nature of each other that even to think of them as contraries is an unimaginable violence. The walls constructed by the measuring and separating Intellect have disappeared and the Truth in its simplicity and beauty appears and reduces all to terms of its harmony and unity and light. Dimensions and distinctions remain but as figures for use, not a separative prison for the self-forgetting Spirit.
2:In the ordinary Yoga of knowledge it is only necessary to recognise two planes of our consciousness, the spiritual and the materialised mental; the pure reason standing between these two views them both, cuts through the illusions of the phenomenal world, exceeds the materialised mental plane, sees the reality of the spiritual; and then the will of the individual Purusha unifying itself with this poise of knowledge rejects the lower and draws back to the supreme plane, dwells there, loses mind and body, sheds life from it and merges itself in the supreme Purusha, is delivered from individual existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 2.01 - The Object of Knowledge,
97:And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels, - for it is suprasensuous, - nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel, - for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, - but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 144,
98:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.

But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.

But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...

This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,
99:The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our individual being and its relations to the universe and it transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray.
   There the abstract terms of pure reason and the constructions .of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no significance, and to build separate significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, 293, 11457,
100:But even before that highest approach to identity is achieved, something of the supreme Will can manifest in us as an imperative impulsion, a God-driven action; we then act by a spontaneous self-determining Force but a fuller knowledge of meaning and aim arises only afterwards. Or the impulse to action may come as an inspiration or intuition, but rather in the heart and body than in the mind; here an effective sight enters in but the complete and exact knowledge is still deferred and comes, if at all, lateR But the divine Will may descend too as a luminous single command or a total perception or a continuous current of perception of what is to be done into the will or into the thought or as a direction from above spontaneously fulfilled by the lower members. When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can be done in this way, or else a general action may so proceed but only during periods of exaltation and illumination. When the Yoga is perfect, all action becomes of this character. We may indeed distinguish three stages of a growing progress by which, first, the personal will is occasionally or frequently enlightened or moved by a supreme Will or conscious Force beyond it, then constantly replaced and, last, identified and merged in that divine Power-action. The first is the stage when we are still governed by the intellect, heart and senses; these have to seek or wait for the divine inspiration and guidance and do not always find or receive it. The second is the stage when human intelligence is more and more replaced by a high illumined or intuitive spiritualised mind, the external human heart by the inner psychic heart, the senses by a purified and selfless vital force. The third is the stage when we rise even above spiritualised mind to the supramental levels. In all three stages the fundamental character of the liberated action is the same, a spontaneous working of Prakriti no longer through or for the ego but at the will and for the enjoyment of the supreme Purusha. At a higher level this becomes the Truth of the absolute and universal Supreme expressed through the individual soul and worked out consciously through the nature, - no longer through a half-perception and a diminished or distorted effectuation by the stumbling, ignorant and all-deforming energy of lower nature in us but by the all-wise transcendent and universal Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 218,
101:The fundamental nature of this supermind is that, all its knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and oneness and even when it makes numberless apparent divisions and discriminating modifications in itself, still all the knowledge that operates in its workings even in these divisions, is founded upon and sustained and lit and guided by this perfect knowledge by identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all things as itself and in itself, so sees them always and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance, in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and figure of their nature and their workings. When it sees anything as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself and in itself, and not as a thing other than or divided from it about which therefore it would at first be ignorant of the nature, constitution and workings and have to learn about them, as the mind is at first ignorant of its object and has to learn about it because the mind is separated from its object and regards and senses and meets it as something other than itself and external to its own being. ..... This is the second character of the supreme supermind that its knowledge is a real because a total knowledge. It has in the first place a transcendental vision and sees the universe not only in the universal terms, but in its right relation to the supreme and eternal reality from which it proceeds and of which it is an expression. It knows the spirit and truth and whole sense of the universal expression because it knows all the essentiality and all the infinite reality and all the consequent constant potentiality of that which in part it expresses. It knows rightly the relative because it knows the Absolute and all its absolutes to which the relatives refer back and of which they are the partial or modified or suppressed figures. It is in the second place universal and sees all that is individual in the terms of the universal as well as in its own individual terms and holds all these individual figures in their right and complete relation to the universe. It is in the third place, separately with regard to individual things, total in its view because it knows each in its inmost essence of which all else is the resultant, in its totality which is its complete figure and in its parts and their connections and dependences, -- as well as in its connections with and its dependences upon other things and its nexus with the total implications and the explicits of the universe.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
102:Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality. But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Integral Knowledge, 681,
103:O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world
Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,
Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,
And sayest God is not and all is vain.
How shall the child already be the man?
Because he is infant, shall he never grow?
Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn?
In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,
In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;
A little element in a little sperm,
It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.
Then wilt thou spew out, Death, God's mystic truth,
Deny the occult spiritual miracle?
Still wilt thou say there is no spirit, no God?
A mute material Nature wakes and sees;
She has invented speech, unveiled a will.
Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,
Something surrounds her into which she grows:
To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,
To exceed herself is her transcendent task.
In God concealed the world began to be,
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful's art.
All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal's harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.
His ways challenge our reason and our sense;
By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,
By means we slight as small, obscure or base,
A greatness founded upon little things,
He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;
His marvels are built from insignificant things.
If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama's needed steps;
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
Above her is the vigil of the stars;
Watched by a solitary Infinitude
She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,
In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,
104:The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience. It can be approached through an absolute negation of existence, as if it were itself a supreme Non-Existence, a mysterious infinite Nihil. It can be approached through an absolute affirmation of all the fundamentals of our own existence, through an absolute of Light and Knowledge, through an absolute of Love or Beauty, through an absolute of Force, through an absolute of peace or silence. It can be approached through an inexpressible absolute of being or of consciousness, or of power of being, or of delight of being, or through a supreme experience in which these things become inexpressibly one; for we can enter into such an ineffable state and, plunged into it as if into a luminous abyss of existence, we can reach a superconscience which may be described as the gate of the Absolute. It is supposed that it is only through a negation of individual and cosmos that we can enter into the Absolute. But in fact the individual need only deny his own small separate ego-existence; he can approach the Absolute through a sublimation of his spiritual individuality taking up the cosmos into himself and transcending it; or he may negate himself altogether, but even so it is still the individual who by self-exceeding enters into the Absolute. He may enter also by a sublimation of his being into a supreme existence or super-existence, by a sublimation of his consciousness into a supreme consciousness or superconscience, by a sublimation of his and all delight of being into a super-delight or supreme ecstasy. He can make the approach through an ascension in which he enters into cosmic consciousness, assumes it into himself and raises himself and it into a state of being in which oneness and multiplicity are in perfect harmony and unison in a supreme status of manifestation where all are in each and each in all and all in the one without any determining individuation - for the dynamic identity and mutuality have become complete; on the path of affirmation it is this status of the manifestation that is nearest to the Absolute. This paradox of an Absolute which can be realised through an absolute negation and through an absolute affirmation, in many ways, can only be accounted for to the reason if it is a supreme Existence which is so far above our notion and experience of existence that it can correspond to our negation of it, to our notion and experience of nonexistence; but also, since all that exists is That, whatever its degree of manifestation, it is itself the supreme of all things and can be approached through supreme affirmations as through supreme negations. The Absolute is the ineffable x overtopping and underlying and immanent and essential in all that we can call existence or non-existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion,
105:on purifying ego and desire :::
   The elimination of all egoistic activity and of its foundation, the egoistic consciousness, is clearly the key to the consummation we desire. And since in the path of works action is the knot we have first to loosen, we must endeavour to loosen it where it is centrally tied, in desire and in ego; for otherwise we shall cut only stray strands and not the heart of our bondage.These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives indeed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully self conscious. These are the twin obscure powers of the obsessing world-wide Ignorance that we have to enlighten and eliminate.
   In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most powerful of all is the vital selfs craving or seeking after the fruit of our works. The fruit we covet may be a reward of internal pleasure; it may be the accomplishment of some preferred idea or some cherished will or the satisfaction of the egoistic emotions, or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and ambitions. Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material, -wealth, position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other fulfilment of vital or physical desire. But all alike are lures by which egoism holds us. Always these satisfactions delude us with the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom, while really we are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that drives the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down by the Gita is to do the work that should be done without any desire for the fruit, niskama karma. ...
   The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [102],
106:Our culture, the laws of our culture, are predicated on the idea that people are conscious. People have experience; people make decisions, and can be held responsible for them. There's a free will element to it. You can debate all that philosophically, and fine, but the point is that that is how we act, and that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on. There's something deep about it, because you're subject to the law, but the law is also limited by you, which is to say that in a well-functioning, properly-grounded democratic system, you have intrinsic value. That's the source of your rights. Even if you're a murderer, we have to say the law can only go so far because there's something about you that's divine.

Well, what does that mean? Partly it means that there's something about you that's conscious and capable of communicating, like you're a whole world unto yourself. You have that to contribute to everyone else, and that's valuable. You can learn new things, transform the structure of society, and invent a new way of dealing with the world. You're capable of all that. It's an intrinsic part of you, and that's associated with the idea that there's something about the logos that is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality. That's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos. You can debate that, but you can't just bloody well brush it off. First of all, we are the most complicated things there are, that we know of, by a massive amount. We're so complicated that it's unbelievable. So there's a lot of cosmos out there, but there's a lot of cosmos in here, too, and which one is greater is by no means obvious, unless you use something trivial, like relative size, which really isn't a very sophisticated approach.

Whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it, which is a very strange thing. You can conceptualize the future in your imagination, and then you can work and make that manifest-participate in the process of creation. That's one way of thinking about it. That's why I think Genesis 1 relates the idea that human beings are made in the image of the divine-men and women, which is interesting, because feminists are always criticizing Christianity as being inexorably patriarchal. Of course, they criticize everything like that, so it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance. But I think it's an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document it says straightforwardly, with no hesitation whatsoever, that the divine spark which we're associating with the word, that brings forth Being, is manifest in men and women equally. That's a very cool thing. You got to think, like I said, do you actually take that seriously? Well, what you got to ask is what happens if you don't take it seriously, right? Read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. That's the best investigation into that tactic that's ever been produced. ~ Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series, 1,
107:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution, Part I, The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti [336-337],
108:We have now completed our view of the path of Knowledge and seen to what it leads. First, the end of Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of division. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality; in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him. It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all relations. Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge [511] [T1],
109:There is a true movement of the intellect and there is a wrong movement: one helps, the other hinders." Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (5 May 1929)

   What is the true movement of the intellect?


What exactly do you understand by intellect? Is it a function of the mind or is it a part of the human being? How do you understand it?

   A function of the mind.

A function of the mind? Then it is that part of the mind which deals with ideas; is that what you mean?

Not ideas, Mother.

Not ideas? What else, then?

Ideas, but...

There is a part of the mind which receives ideas, ideas that are formed in a higher mind. Still, I don't know, it is a question of definition and one must know what exactly you mean to say.

It is intellect that puts ideas in the form of thoughts, gathering and organising the thoughts at the same time. There are great ideas which lie beyond the ordinary human mentality, which can put on all possible forms. These great ideas tend to descend, they want to manifest themselves in precise forms. These precise forms are the thoughts; and generally it is this, I believe, that is meant by intellect: it is this that gives thought-form to the ideas.

And then, there is also the organisation of the thoughts among themselves. All that has to be put in a certain order, otherwise one becomes incoherent. And after that, there is the putting of these thoughts to use for action; that is still another movement.

To be able to say what the true movement is, one must know first of all which movement is being spoken about. You have a body, well, you don't expect your body to walk on its head or its hands nor to crawl flat on its belly nor indeed that the head should be down and the legs up in the air. You give to each limb a particular occupation which is its own. This appears to you quite natural because that is the habit; otherwise, the very little ones do not know what to do, neither with their legs nor with their hands nor with their heads; it is only little by little that they learn that. Well, it is the same thing with the mind's functions. You must know which part of the mind you are speaking about, what its own function is, and then only can you say what its true movement is and what is not its true movement. For example, for the part which has to receive the master ideas and change them into thought, its true movement is to be open to the master ideas, receive them and change them into as exact, as precise, as expressive a thought as possible. For the part of the mind which has the charge of organising all these thoughts among themselves so that they might form a coherent and classified whole, not a chaos, the true movement is just to make the classification according to a higher logic and in a thoroughly clear, precise and expressive order which may be serviceable each time a thought is referred to, so that one may know where to look for it and not put quite contradictory things together. There are people whose mind does not work like that; all the ideas that come into it, without their being even aware of what the idea is, are translated into confused thoughts which remain in a kind of inner chaos. I have known people who, from the philosophical point of view - although there is nothing philosophical in it - could put side by side the most contradictory things, like ideas of hierarchic order and at the same time ideas of the absolute independence of the individual and of anarchism, and both were accepted with equal sympathy, knocked against each other in the head in the midst of a wild disorder, and these people were not even aware of it!... You know the saying: "A question well put is three-fourths solved." So now, put your question. What do you want to speak about? I am stretching out a helping hand, you have only to catch it. What is it you are speaking about, what is it that you call intellect? Do you know the difference between an idea and a thought?
   ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, 107,
110:The recurring beat that moments God in Time.
Only was missing the sole timeless Word
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
The single sign interpreting every sign,
The absolute index to the Absolute.

There walled apart by its own innerness
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;
It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:
A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.
So it towered up to heights intangible
And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast
As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven
Built by the aspiring soul of man to live
Near to his dream of the Invisible.
Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;
Its spire touches the apex of the world;
Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses
It marries the earth to screened eternities.
Amid the many systems of the One
Made by an interpreting creative joy
Alone it points us to our journey back
Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps;
Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:
It is a brief compendium of the Vast.
This was the single stair to being's goal.
A summary of the stages of the spirit,
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies
Refashioned in our secret air of self
A subtle pattern of the universe.
It is within, below, without, above.
Acting upon this visible Nature's scheme
It wakens our earth-matter's heavy doze
To think and feel and to react to joy;
It models in us our diviner parts,
Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,
Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,
Links the body's death with immortality's call:
Out of the swoon of the Inconscience
It labours towards a superconscient Light.
If earth were all and this were not in her,
Thought could not be nor life-delight's response:
Only material forms could then be her guests
Driven by an inanimate world-force.
Earth by this golden superfluity
Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;
This higher scheme of being is our cause
And holds the key to our ascending fate;

It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in Matter's house.
The living symbol of these conscious planes,
Its influences and godheads of the unseen,
Its unthought logic of Reality's acts
Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,
Have fixed our inner life's slow-scaled degrees.
Its steps are paces of the soul's return
From the deep adventure of material birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall.
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
An idol of self is our mortality.
Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;
An atavism of higher births is hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;
They are partners of her greater growing fate
And her return to immortality;
They consent to share her doom of birth and death;
They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive
Her blind laborious spirit to compose
A meagre image of the mighty Whole.
The calm and luminous Intimacy within
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,
111:[the sevenfold ignorance and the integral knowledge:]

   We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,-that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, -that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,-that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,-that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,-that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,-that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,-that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.

   Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean [1] the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; [2] the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; [3] the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; [4] the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; [5] the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; [6] the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; [7] the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

   But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 680-683 [T1],

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:Eternity is the Absolute present. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove
2:The Absolute cannot be divided. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
3:The Absolute can never be thought of. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
4:God is the absolute truth... ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove
5:Om is the greatest, meaning the Absolute. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
6:The Absolute does not change, or re-evolve. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
7:The Absolute is the material of both God and man. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
8:The absolute is awareness unaware of itself. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
9:Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove
10:The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove
11:How could the Absolute be made a subject of illusion? ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
12:The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove
13:Changes in the universe are not in the Absolute; they are in nature. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
14:The sea calm is the Absolute; the same sea in waves is Divine Mother. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
15:The Absolute cannot be worshipped, so we must worship a manifestation. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
16:The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove
17:The Absolute and the Infinite can become this universe only by limitation. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
18:The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to. ~ quentin-crisp, @wisdomtrove
19:Until we realise ourselves as the Absolute, we cannot attain to deliverance. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
20:The person flickers, awareness contains all space and time, the absolute is. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
21:The Absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don't be half-hearted. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
22:The Universal Mind is not the Absolute, remember, but merely an emanation of it. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
23:All we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach. ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove
24:If the Absolute becomes limited by the mind, It is no more Absolute; It has become finite. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
25:The Universe has no existence at all, but is merely a &
26:Complaining is the absolute worst possible thing you could do for your health or your wealth. The worst! ~ t-harv-eker, @wisdomtrove
27:More often than not, when something looks like it's the absolute end, it is really the beginning. ~ charles-r-swindoll, @wisdomtrove
28:Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us? ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove
29:The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove
30:I would suffer all the humiliation, all the torture, the absolute ostracism and even death, to prevent violence ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove
31:When comprehending how different people truly are, you also comprehend the absolute necessity of some divine authority. ~ criss-jami, @wisdomtrove
32:The Absolute God of the universe, the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe, is impersonal principle. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
33:When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
34:Vulnerability is the absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity. There can be zero innovation without vulnerability. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove
35:I have the absolute confidence not to be number two, but then I have enough sense to realize that there can be no number one. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove
36:Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
37:No story is the absolute truth, but some stories are clearly better than others, because they give us a deeper understanding of things. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove
38:I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore also of humanity.  What though we have many bodies?  We have but one soul.   ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove
39:Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love. It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the Equator to the frigid cold of the North Pole. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove
40:Only when creation stops can we find the Absolute. The Absolute is in the soul, not in creation. So by stopping creation, we come to know the Absolute. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
41:The sum total of all the cells in an organism is one person; so each soul is like one cell and the sum of them is God, and beyond that is the Absolute. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
42:Don’t tolerate any form of average. Don’t accept Dis-excellence. Don’t stand for mediocre. If you’re going to settle, then please settle for the absolute best. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove
43:I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove
44:There is only one Soul in the Universe. There is no &
45:For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove
46:The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove
47:Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done’. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
48:All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove
49:Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and take them, without question, for the absolute truth. ~ rupert-spira, @wisdomtrove
50:Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
51:There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove
52:I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove
53:[Tibet] never sought any territory. All it wanted is the conquest of the soul, that people should attain a kind of inner sovereignty, inner independence, inner freedom. And inner strength to attain the absolute. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove
54:Do realise that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being - this is the absolute truth. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
55:Right discrimination is of two kinds analytical and synthetical. The first leads one from the phenomena to the Absolute Brahman, while by the second one knows how the Absolute Brahman appears as the universe. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove
56:We can never hope to know the real nature of the Absolute until we pass beyond the limits of even the highest manifestation of Mind, and pass into a consciousness and realization of our Real Self— Spirit. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
57:I often describe the Absolute as Pure Infinite Potential, prior to being or becoming anything. It is forever unborn, yet gives birth to all of existence. About our ultimate nature nothing can be said; it must be revealed. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove
58:To get the respect of people, I think you've got to roll up your sleeves and lead with your people. The absolute key is treating your people well. Looking for the best in your people. Lots and lots of praise, no criticism. ~ richard-branson, @wisdomtrove
59:The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knoweldge. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove
60:The Infinite Mind is Spirit— the Universal Mind Principle is "Mind-Stuff" of which all Finite Mind is a part. This Universal Mind Principle was the first conception of The Absolute, in the process of the creation of the Universe. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
61:Everything God tells us to do is for our good. Whether it's direction you get in His Word or something He's specifically put in your heart for your situation in life, the absolute best thing you can ever do is obey Him promptly and completely. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove
62:Ultimate REALITY— the Absolute— can never be divided, separated, or partitioned into parts or personalities. Neither can it change in shape, form, activity, or in any other way in any degree whatsoever and still remain the Absolute. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
63:In the Vedanta, the highest phase of Hindu philosophical thought, the teaching is that the Absolute, Brahman, or the Divine Mind is “an absolutely homogeneous, pure intelligence or thought, eternal, infinite, changeless, indivisible.” ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
64:For when we say that what is different is different, we affirm that what is different is the same as itself. For what is different can be different only through the Absolute Same, through which all that is is both the same as itself and other than another. ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove
65:Oninipresent means all— present— everywhere present at the same time, It means The Absolute is present in all space as we know it, and everywhere else without regard to our relative idea of space. It is Everywhere— space has no existence to it— it is Infinite. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
66:This consciousness of the reality of &
67:Once we know our own soul rising still higher, we sing the divinity of the Mind [which produced it], and above all these, the mighty King of that dominion (the Absolute), who, while remaining as He is, yet creates that multitude, all dependent on Him, existing by Him and from Him. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove
68:Knowledge of the Absolute depends upon no book, nor upon anything; it is absolute in itself. No amount of study will give this knowledge; is not theory, it is realization. Cleanse the dust from the mirror, purify your own mind, and in a flash you know that you are Brahman. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
69:Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history : the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal "honor" and court etiquette. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove
70:Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I . ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove
71:We cannot pry into the Infinite Mind of the Absolute, but we may form certain conclusions by observing and studying the Laws of the Universe, which seem to be moving in certain directions. From the manifested Will of the Divine One, we may at least hazard an idea as to its purposes. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
72:In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove
73:“This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.  This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove
74:G od is the Absolute and Eternal Brahman, as well as the Father of the Universe. The indivisible Brahman is like a vast shoreless ocean, without bounds and limits, in which I can only struggle and sink. But when I approach the always sportive personal Deity (Hari), I get peace, like the sinking man who nears the shore. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove
75:Q: If the shape of things is mere appearance, what are they in reality?  M: In reality, there is only perception. The perceiver and the perceived are conceptual, the fact of perceiving is actual.  Q: Where does the Absolute come in?  M: The Absolute is the birth place of Perceiving. It makes perception possible. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
76:Q:  Is there such a thing as absolute sin or absolute virtue?   M: Sin and virtue refer to a person only. Without a sinful or virtuous person what is sin or virtue? At the level of the absolute there are no persons; the ocean of pure awareness is neither virtuous nor sinful. Sin and virtue are invariably relative. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
77:Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove
78:Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove
79:If The Absolute is not possessed of all— knowledge, from whence do we gain knowledge? Surely not from outside of The Absolute. Is it not more likely that the knowledge is always there, and that our acquiring of know) edge is merely the unfolding of our minds sufficiently to absorb it, or to let the Divine Knowledge play upon our minds. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
80:To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true non-duality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove
81:The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove
82:The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove
83:Trying to maintain a pleasant state and avoid an unpleasant state is actually the cause of sorrow. When you stop resisting, you see that what seems frightening is actually the absolute beauty of reality. When you see that everything is a momentary display of reality, then you stop resisting it. Resistance hurts, only every single time. Love is the state of nonresistance. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove
84:Besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at once there is another Love – the eye with which this second Soul looks upwards – like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this Universe – not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove
85:Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove
86:Our friends should be our incentives to right, but not only our guiding, but our prophetic, stars. To love by right is much, to love by faith is more; both are the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. We love and ought to love one another, not merely for the absolute worth of each, but on account of a mutual fitness of temporary character. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove
87:One can attain the Knowledge of Brahman too by following the path of bhakti. God is all-powerful. He may give His devotee Brahmajnana [the knowledge of Brahman] also if He so wills. But the devotee generally doesn't seek the Knowledge of the Absolute. He would rather have the consciousness that God is the Master and he the servant, or that God is the Divine Mother and he the child. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove
88:Bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us... No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream - it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove
89:The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove
90:Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them. ~ jean-vanier, @wisdomtrove
91:The phenomenal world belongs to that very Reality to which the Absolute belongs; again, the Absolute belongs to that very Reality to which the phenomenal world belongs. He who is realized as God has also become the universe and its living beings. One who knows the Truth knows that it is He alone who has become father and mother, child and neighbor, man and animal, good and bad, holy and unholy, and so forth. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove
92:All religions are equal to me. And all castes and creeds are dear to me. But though I appreciate all `isms,' religions and political parties for the many good things they seek to achieve, I do not and cannot belong to any of these `isms,' religions or political parties, for the Absolute Truth, while equally including them, transcends all of them and leaves no room for separative divisions which are all equally false. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove
93:In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleeting aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove
94:I am not even six feet tall. Yet I am praying to the Absolute Supreme to reach His infinite Height, which is far beyond even my imagination's flight. For me to long to grow into that Height - is this not a miracle? I am mortal. My thoughts, my deeds, my experiences - everything that I have and everything that I am - represent mortality. Yet despite everything that I have and everything that I am, I am longing for Immortality. Is this not a miracle? ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove
95:Meditation is the only way to overcome fear. There is no other way. Why does meditation help us overcome fear? In meditation we identify ourselves with the vast, with the Absolute. When we are afraid of someone or something, it is because we do not feel that particular person or thing is a part of us. When we have established conscious oneness with the Absolute, with the Infinite Vast, the everything there is part of us. And how can we be afraid of ourselves? ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove
96:In India the mother is the center of the family and our highest ideal. She is to us the representative of God, as God is the mother of the universe. It was a female sage who first found the unity of God, and laid down this doctrine in one of the first hy mns of the Vedas. Our God is both personal and absolute, the absolute is male, the personal, female. And thus it comes that we now say: &
97:Freedom from self-identification with a set of memories and habits, the state of wonder at the infinite reaches of the being, its inexhaustible creativity and total transcendence, the absolute fearlessness born from the realisation of the illusoriness and transiency of every mode of consciousness - flow from a deep and inexhaustible source. To know the source as source and appearance as appearance, and oneself as the source only is self-realisation. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
98:Matter cannot be conceived to actually exist, as the only real substance is Universal Mind, and that the material and phenomenal universe is nothing but a series of mental appearances and impressions which appear and disappear in accordance with mental laws which are called "The Laws of Nature"; that the only reality of the phenomenal world consists in its being consciously "perceived" by God, Spirit, the Absolute, or whatever Ultimate reality may be termed. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
99:Omnipotent means all-mighty, all-powerful. Not that The Absolute is mightier than something else, or all the rest put together, but that it is allmighty— all— powerful. That it is possessed of all the power there is, and, consequently, that all the power of which we are conscious is a manifestation of The Absolute. There is no room for any other power, and all the power that is manifested, of all kinds and descriptions, must be manifestations of The Absolute. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
100:Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove
101:Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove
102:There can be no experience of the Absolute as it is beyond all experience. On the other hand, the self is the experiencing factor in every experience and thus, in a way, validates the multiplicity of experiences. The world may be full of things of great value, but if there is nobody to buy them, they have no price. The Absolute contains everything experienceable, but without the experience they are as nothing. That which makes the experience possible is the Absolute. That which makes it actual is the Self. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove
103:If The Absolute is Omnipresent (and we cannot conceive of it not being), it must pe present in all places at all times, in all persons, in all atoms, in matter, mind, and spirit. If it is absent from a single point of space, or without space, then it is not Omnipresent. and the whole statement is false. And if it is present everywhere, there is room for nothing else to be present at any place. And if this be so, everything must be a part of The Absolute, or an emanation of it. Everything must be a part of a Mighty Whole. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
104:The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove
105:Even if it be true that all these shapes, and forms, and appearances, and phenomena, and personalities, be but illusion as compared to the inner Reality— what of it? Are you not then assured that the Spirit within Yourself is the Spirit of the Absolute— that the Reality within You is the Reality of the Absolute— that you ARE, because the Absolute IS, and cannot be otherwise? Does not the Peace, and Calm, and Security, and Bliss that comes to you with this Realization, far more than counterbalance the petty nothings that you have discarded? ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
106:As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that Liberation is discovered to be who and what you are. Then the love and wisdom that flows out of you has a liberating effect on others. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove
107:He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove
108:To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought. ~ albert-schweitzer, @wisdomtrove
109:Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove
110:Omniscient means all— knowing, all wise. It means that The Absolute is possessed of all knowledge; that it knows everything; that there is nothing that it does not know; that it is the sum total of all the knowledge there is, ever has been or ever will be. If we admit that there is the slightest thing that is not known, or cannot be known, to The Absolute, then we admit that the word is meaningless. And if The Absolute is possessed of all the knowledge there is, then it can make no mistakes; does not find it necessary to change its mind; cannot think or act except wisely, and therefore, justly. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
111:Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove
112:while all the forms, shapes, and phenomena of the Universe are but parts of a great show-world, still the essence of all must be Reality, itself, else there would not be even the "appearance" of a Universe. Before a thing can be a Mental Image, there must be a Mind to hold that Mental Image, and a BEING to possess that Mind. And, the very essence of that BEING must pervade and be immanent in every Image in that Mind. Just as You are really in your Mental Images, as well as they in You, so must the Absolute be in Its Mental Images, or Creations, or Thought Forms, as truly as they are in the Mind of the Absolute. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove
113:Now I behold as in a mirror, in an icon, in a riddle, life eternal, for that is naught other than that blessed regard wherewith Thou never ceasest most lovingly to behold me, yea, even the secret places of my soul. With Thee, to behold is to give life; 'tis unceasingly to impart sweetest love of Thee; 'tis to inflame me to love of Thee by love's imparting, and to feed me by inflaming, and by feeding to kindle my yearning, and by kindling to make me drink of gladness, and by drinking to infuse in me a fountain of life, and by infusing to make it increase and endure. &
114:Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove
115:Why did the Absolute separate itself, or a portion of itself, into parts; or apparently so separate itself— what was the use— what does it all mean— what was the sense of it? There could have been no necessity for it, for the Absolute is beyond necessity— there could have been no object, for the Absolute possesses all there is, and is perfect— it could not have been the result of any desire, for the Absolute must be desireless. Therefore why did it emanate into the Universe at all; and why did it cause that which we call &
116:But see that none of the uninitiated hear these things. I mean those who cleave to created things, and suppose not that anything exists after a supernatural manner, above nature; but imagine that by their own natural understanding they know Him who has made darkness His secret place. But if the principles of the divine mysteries are above the understanding of these, what is to be said of those yet more untaught, who call the absolute First Cause of all after the lowest things in nature, and say that He is in no way above the images which they fashion after various designs; of whom they should declare and affirm that in Him as the cause of all, is all that may be predicated positively of created things; while yet they might with more propriety deny these predicates to Him, as being far above all; holding that here denial is not contrary to affirmation, since He is infinitely above all notion of deprivation, and above all affirmation and negation. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Damn the Absolute! ~ William James,
2:Eternity is the Absolute present. ~ D T Suzuki,
3:want to cut to the absolute bone. ~ David Shields,
4:The Absolute cannot be divided. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
5:The absolute value of being neutral is zero. ~ Toba Beta,
6:The Absolute can never be thought of. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
7:War should always be the absolute last resort. ~ Joe Biden,
8:God is the absolute truth... ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
9:I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love. ~ Iris Murdoch,
10:Om is the greatest, meaning the Absolute. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
11:The Absolute does not change, or re-evolve. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
12:Always ask: What is the absolute risk increase? ~ Gerd Gigerenzer,
13:Speed is the absolute essence of any form of combat ~ Jeff Cooper,
14:you dig and dig until you strike the absolute truth. ~ Max Brooks,
15:The Absolute resides as the Self in the Heart. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
16:The Absolute is the material of both God and man. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
17:The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd. ~ Mason Cooley,
18:The Captain was a peasant established in the Absolute. ~ Emil M Cioran,
19:When you're the absolute best, you get hated on the most. ~ Kanye West,
20:It is the absolute right of India to misgovern herself. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
21:Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things. ~ Novalis,
22:The Absolute Consciousness alone is our real nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
23:The absolute worst thing you can do in a scene is be apathetic. ~ Del Close,
24:Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. ~ Bruce Lee,
25:The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. ~ Frank Herbert,
26:"The absolute can only be comprehended through experience." ~ Mingyur Rinpoche,
27:Then HBO was the pie in the sky. HBO is the absolute ultimate. ~ Casey Neistat,
28:You have the absolute power to change someone's life with kindness. ~ Curt Mega,
29:If it’s true, I have the absolute right to terrify you with it. ~ Dorothy Allison,
30:In that little pocket-size world of his, he was the absolute master. ~ Eileen Chang,
31:The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero,
32:The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world. ~ Arthur Eddington,
33:Pursuit of the approximate can conclude. Not so pursuit of the absolute. ~ Mason Cooley,
34:Changes in the universe are not in the Absolute; they are in nature. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
35:The sea calm is the Absolute; the same sea in waves is Divine Mother. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
36:Your intention to love, no matter what, is the absolute key to happiness. ~ Robert Holden,
37:It doesn't pay to be good at something unless you are the absolute best at it. ~ Josh Lieb,
38:Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere. ~ Glenn Reynolds,
39:The Absolute cannot be worshipped, so we must worship a manifestation. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
40:The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more ~ D H Lawrence,
41:You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. ~ Dario Argento,
42:The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more. ~ D H Lawrence,
43:Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy. ~ Anthony Daniels,
44:The absolute bottom line in coaching is organization and preparing for practice. ~ Bill Walsh,
45:All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute. ~ Emile M Cioran,
46:I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me. ~ Colleen McCullough,
47:The Absolute and the Infinite can become this universe only by limitation. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
48:the absolute could be enclosed within the last moments of a dying person. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
49:The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to. ~ Quentin Crisp,
50:Books have always been the absolute, hands-down, best way for me to escape reality. ~ J C Cliff,
51:The coach should be the absolute boss, but he still should maintain an open mind. ~ Red Auerbach,
52:Until we realise ourselves as the Absolute, we cannot attain to deliverance. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
53:Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Creator who creates everything. ~ Miguel Ruiz,
54:You have to search the absolute demons of your soul to make a great record. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong,
55:As a spark proceeds from fire, individuality emanates from the Absolute Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
56:Effort is the key in the relative; effortlessness is the key to the Absolute. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar,
57:It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion. ~ Joseph Goebbels,
58:The mind of the Enlightened Sage never exists apart from Brahman, the Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
59:My business is not to remake myself, but to make the absolute best of what God made. ~ Robert Browning,
60:God changed Saul's heart. A changed heart is the absolute requirement for kingdom service. ~ Beth Moore,
61:The war of 1914–18 was the absolute negation of everything that Clausewitz had stood ~ Christopher Clark,
62:I'm human. The single most overused excuse on the planet for doing the absolute wrong thing. ~ Debra Webb,
63:Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. ~ Thomas Huxley,
64:is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity. ~ John Stuart Mill,
65:There is no conflict in the absolute universe, but there is conflict in the relative world. ~ Koichi Tohei,
66:When the mind is one with the deeper spirit, there results the absolute knowledge of the self. ~ Patanjali,
67:All we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach. ~ Nicholas of Cusa,
68:And they made me want to rip them off of her and fuck the absolute shit out of her. Twice. ~ Lani Lynn Vale,
69:Coffee is the absolute most dependably ordinary thing I could have every single day. ~ Billie Joe Armstrong,
70:I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. ~ Emma Cline,
71:Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice. ~ Woodrow Wilson,
72:God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,
73:In fact, wakefulness and dream are equally unreal from the standpoint of the Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
74:The mind of the Enlightened Sage (jnani) never exists apart from Brahman, the Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
75:...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art. ~ Charles Baudelaire,
76:If the Absolute becomes limited by the mind, It is no more Absolute; It has become finite. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
77:I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer. ~ Philip Pullman,
78:The absolute gut-level truth was that he had no desire for God to interrupt him in this way. ~ Elizabeth Musser,
79:The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
80:Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley,
81:I got to see my friend B. J. Novak daily, which, when we weren’t fighting, was the absolute best. ~ Mindy Kaling,
82:From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. ~ Lord Acton,
83:proportional to the absolute temperature, in quantitative agreement with theory (Curie’s law). ~ Erwin Schr dinger,
84:The absolute best, surefire way to make a good living is to help someone else make a good living. ~ James Altucher,
85:For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning. ~ Josiah Royce,
86:I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute. ~ Jon Krakauer,
87:The Absolute Consciousness projects light, manifests as the ego and grows up as the universe. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
88:The absolute quality of hate explains any human action even if it throws something inhuman around it. ~ Elie Wiesel,
89:The goal always exists. It is not something new to be discovered. The Absolute is our nature. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
90:A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest. ~ Martin Heidegger,
91:If anything can be gained, it can also be lost, whereas the Absolute is eternal, here and now. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
92:You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst. ~ Clive Barker,
93:She’d been so afraid of the absolute worst that she’d forgotten how she missed the absolute best. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
94:To demand the absolute and to be content with absolutely nothing else results in a skepticism. ~ Bernard J F Lonergan,
95:We and all our existences are non-entities. Thou art the absolute being whose appearance is transitory. ~ Idries Shah,
96:Complaining is the absolute worst possible thing you could do for your health or your wealth. The worst! ~ T Harv Eker,
97:I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science. ~ Max Planck,
98:I'm kind of ADD in that sense where if I start liking something, I'll just learn it to the absolute max. ~ Jason Momoa,
99:Somehow I feel that a person who thinks he has discovered the absolute truth will not be someone I know. ~ Manu Joseph,
100:That was the absolute worst catch phrase I've ever heard in the history of Monday Night Raw. ~ Stone Cold Steve Austin,
101:The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will. ~ Aleister Crowley,
102:You are the first person who has ever made me laugh when it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. ~ Marilyn Grey,
103:Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life. ~ Constantin Brancusi,
104:Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? ~ Annie Dillard,
105:By directly inquiring, "Who AM I?" ... 'I' reveals itself as the Perfect Being, the Absolute Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
106:The absolute worst thing a person can say about your pictures is, '"That's nice." It's the kiss of death. ~ Joe DiMaggio,
107:The greatest contribution you can make to women's rights, is to be the absolute ... best at what you do. ~ Oprah Winfrey,
108:The only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth. ~ Dalai Lama,
109:Children who were very truly pious in a Catholic childhood are apt to retain a nostalgia for the absolute. ~ Sonia Orwell,
110:Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history. ~ Emil M Cioran,
111:The absolute immunity can only come with the supramental change. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Illness and Health,
112:The absolute minimum for effective exercise is three times a week on alternate days for at least half an hour. ~ Jane Fonda,
113:The idea of the Self being the witness is only in the mind; it is not the absolute truth of the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
114:I will spark a generation of thinkers who will question traditional thought until they find the absolute truth. ~ Kanye West,
115:To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth. ~ Cal Newport,
116:Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us? ~ Malcolm Gladwell,
117:Alexander was and is the absolute embodiment of pure human ambition with all its good and evil consequences. ~ Philip Freeman,
118:Thank goodness I had made the right choice by picking the absolute wrong guy to love and perfect guy to hate. ~ Jay Crownover,
119:The apparent subjectivity of the Self exist only on the plane of relativity and vanish in the Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
120:We humans are explorers and pioneers, and we find our inner strength when the end state is the absolute unknown. ~ Zak Bagans,
121:Are we looking for the absolute truth or the absolute feeling? Or the answer that best suits our personal needs? ~ Noah Cicero,
122:When you go deep inside nothing is all there is. There is no 'I am'. The 'I am' merges in the Absolute. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj,
123:An art, which has an aim to achieve the beauty, is called a philosophy or in the absolute sense it is named wisdom. ~ Al Farabi,
124:Never, ever will the hotel accuse you of lying. That is the absolute last stance hotel management wants to take. ~ Jacob Tomsky,
125:No human law is the absolute expression of the divine justice, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Heraclitus - VI,
126:All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are. ~ Pema Chodron,
127:The absolute amount of money you have isn’t nearly as important as how you handle your money each and every day. ~ Laura D Adams,
128:The Absolute is everywhere; it has to be seen and found everywhere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Nature,
129:Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. ~ Rumi,
130:I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from. ~ Anne Enright,
131:The Sufi must be able to alternate his thought between the relative and the Absolute, the approximate and the Real. ~ Idries Shah,
132:"All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are." ~ Pema Chödrön,
133:The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. ~ D H Lawrence,
134:Ah, well,” I stammered, overcome by the absolute shocking effrontery and absurdity of it—were all human women crazy? ~ Jeff Lindsay,
135:It’s a struggle to achieve balance. It can be a futile search for the absolute truth or an endless certainty of lies. ~ Lisa Eugene,
136:In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense. ~ George Saunders,
137:It is the Absolute who is all these relativities. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Progress to Knowledge - God, Man and Nature,
138:When comprehending how different people truly are, you also comprehend the absolute necessity of some divine authority. ~ Criss Jami,
139:Do not ignore you gift. Your gift is the thing you do the absolute BEST with the LEAST amount of effort."~Steve Harvey ~ Steve Harvey,
140:It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively. ~ Peter Kreeft,
141:The Absolute God of the universe, the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe, is impersonal principle. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
142:When you talk and think of the Absolute, you have to do it in the relative; so all these logical arguments apply. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
143:And to the absolute fucking horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with her. ~ Jamie McGuire,
144:You never want to be the absolute leader in the game of life, the man out front, the one everyone sees and looks to, ~ Mark T Sullivan,
145:And to the absolute fucking horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with her.. ~ Jamie McGuire,
146:I would suffer all the humiliation, all the torture, the absolute ostracism and even death, to prevent violence ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
147:Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved. ~ Emil M Cioran,
148:Though he’d never know for sure what had happened to them, his mind was super talented at imagining the absolute worst. ~ James Dashner,
149:Vulnerability is the absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity. There can be zero innovation without vulnerability. ~ Brene Brown,
150:...and to the absolute fucking horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with he. ~ Jamie McGuire,
151:Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
-- Thomas H. Huxley ~ Thomas Henry Huxley,
152:One comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony. ~ George Leigh Mallory,
153:Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved. ~ Emile M Cioran,
154:The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals. ~ Alfred North Whitehead,
155:When you want the absolute best chance to succeed at anything you want, your approach should always be the same. Go small. ~ Gary Keller,
156:Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say. ~ David Nicholls,
157:I have the absolute confidence not to be number two, but then I have enough sense to realize that there can be no number one. ~ Bruce Lee,
158:The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Pure Existent,
159:Boiled down, isn't love just a form of vanity? You know, the wish to be adored. To be the absolute center for someone else. ~ Carol Shields,
160:He had a very young man's belief in the absolute rightness of his own cause and the absolute wrongness of everyone else's. ~ Susanna Clarke,
161:There are periods in life when you get caught up in the whole field of relativity and lose your moorings with the absolute. ~ Deepak Chopra,
162:God has become human. The absolute has become particular. The ideal has become real. The divine has taken up a human nature. ~ Timothy Keller,
163:If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon. ~ C S Lewis,
164:She was one of those shallow people who rewrote their own history and believed in the absolute truth of their own version. ~ Santa Montefiore,
165:As I watched the seagulls, I thought, That's the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis,
166:Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play. ~ Pat Metheny,
167:The level of collective courage in an organization is the absolute best predictor of that organization’s ability to be successful ~ Bren Brown,
168:Don’t forget this moment. Don’t forget the absolute truth in the way you feel right now. I love you and I’m not going to stop. ~ Cambria Hebert,
169:You don't always need the absolute latest gear. Find your piece(s) of equipment and let time evolve your ideas with that setup. ~ Richie Hawtin,
170:I want to tell you though, I'm having the absolute best birthday ever. Last night -- this was so sweet, it means a great deal ~ David Letterman,
171:Man can think of divine things only in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
172:No sex, age, or condition is above or below the absolute necessity of modesty; but without it one vastly beneath the rank of man. ~ Bruce Barton,
173:That was the absolute worst thing about love; no matter how hard you tried, you could never forget the person who had your heart. ~ Tarryn Fisher,
174:The source of tolerance is the recognition that none of us have the absolute truth. There can be no tolerance without humility. ~ Milton Friedman,
175:Do not ignore you gift. Your gift is the thing you do the absolute BEST with the LEAST amount of effort."~ Steve HarveySteve Harvey ~ Steve Harvey,
176:The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed. ~ Frederick C Beiser,
177:The only way I could work properly was by using the absolute maximum of observation and concentration that I could possible muster. ~ Lucian Freud,
178:I write really scathing, angry stuff when I'm in a better mood, and then uplifting and happy stuff when I'm at the absolute bottom. ~ Patrick Stump,
179:Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have. ~ David Bowie,
180:I think a man can have two, maybe three, affairs while he is married. But three is the absolute maximum. After that, you're cheating. ~ Yves Montand,
181:What comes out of our hearts through the words of our mouths determines what comes to pass in our lives. It’s the absolute truth. ~ Kenneth Copeland,
182:You never want to be the absolute leader in the game of life, the man out front, the one everyone sees and looks to,” Leyers said. ~ Mark T Sullivan,
183:Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruck by the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of ~ Eckhart Tolle,
184:Photography's central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation. ~ Martin Parr,
185:So perhaps the real secret to style is filling yourself to the absolute brim with engagement. Loving not wisely, but too well and all that. ~ Tim Gunn,
186:The past year has been the absolute hardest of all the years. I'm losing faith. Losing interest. Losing hope. Losing, losing, losing. ~ Colleen Hoover,
187:All he'd done was lose her underwear and practically get her blown up.
Hell. This had to be the absolute worst first date of her life. ~ Tara Janzen,
188:The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart. ~ Richard Wagner,
189:There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel,
190:Today's devices blurt out the absolute truth as they know it. A smart device in the future might know when NOT to blurt out the truth. ~ Genevieve Bell,
191:I love things that age well - things that don't date, that stand the test of time and that become living examples of the absolute best. ~ Giorgio Armani,
192:The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. ~ Iris Murdoch,
193:Those who escaped the noose settled here, at the very bottom, the absolute edge of peculiar society. Exiled from the outcasts of outcasts ~ Ransom Riggs,
194:It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe,
195:On average, 90 percent of the variability of returns and 100 percent of the absolute level of return is explained by asset allocation. ~ Roger G Ibbotson,
196:Perfection is the absolute right word. And you could never ruin it," she said in a low, calm voice. "Not when it was perfect because of you. ~ Laura Kaye,
197:But the absolute control over his facial muscles to which M. de Norpois had attained allowed him to listen without seeming to hear a word. ~ Marcel Proust,
198:Sufis deny the absolute reality of time, space and physical form. These things are both relative and local. They only appear to be absolute. ~ Idries Shah,
199:The absolute necessity to create a proper Earth government' - we should inscribe this as the priority item on the agenda of world affairs. ~ Robert Muller,
200:Democracy is the absolute value that makes for human dignity, as well as the only road to sustained economic development and social justice. ~ Kim Dae jung,
201:In passing we should note this curious mark of our age: The only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute ~ Francis A Schaeffer,
202:Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love. It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the Equator to the frigid cold of the North Pole. ~ Elbert Hubbard,
203:Both, in their own way, thinking, This is hell—the absolute loss borne from all those slivers of perfection that passed unnoticed, unrelished. ~ Blake Crouch,
204:My only worry about tweeting and modern technology is how it has crept into even the darkest corners of the absolute global village we live in. ~ Denis Leary,
205:Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay. ~ Eric Hoffer,
206:Oh, it won’t be as bad as I’m expecting,” he said. “That’s my trick. If I imagine the absolute worst, I can’t help but be pleasantly surprised. ~ Jodi Picoult,
207:Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. ~ Flannery O Connor,
208:The Absolute is not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond Time. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: Brahman, Oneness of God and the World,
209:The absolute truth cannot be realized within the domain of the ordinary mind, and the path beyond the ordinary mind is the path of the heart. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche,
210:The People's' historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals. ~ Charles Portis,
211:foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. ~ Jonathan Haidt,
212:Could you get off like that without it? Without the chains?"
Without the absolute surrender. "No. And not without you. You more than any of it. ~ Manna Francis,
213:In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute. ~ Francis A Schaeffer,
214:Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme. ~ Raymond Aron,
215:Just discernment is of two kinds. The first conducts us towards the phenomenon, while the second knows how the Absolute appears in the universe. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
216:... the damned had been given that insight which makes hardship so easy to bear — the absolute and certain knowledge that things could be worse. ~ Terry Pratchett,
217:Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
David Bowie ~ David Bowie,
218:I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of. ~ Tennessee Williams,
219:We believe profoundly in silence-the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman,
220:Gratitude is the proper response for the absolute astonishment of getting to be alive, and aware, and an essential part of this crazy, sprawling story. ~ John Green,
221:I believe that the silence of God, the absolute speechlessness of Him is a long, long, and awful thing that the whole world is lost because of. ~ Tennessee Williams,
222:Is a man who deals with the absolute not necessarily claiming to be the thinking organ with the capacity to do so, and thus the absolute himself? ~ Theodor W Adorno,
223:I've always loved animals and I always thought that they were, if not better, then the absolute equal of any two legged creature that God ever created. ~ Ali MacGraw,
224:The first was to expect crushing disappointment in life, the second was the absolute reliability of loss, and finally, the utter futility of faith ~ Domingo Martinez,
225:The light of day showed you the limits of possibility. But walk through the dark, the absolute, total darkness, and the possibilities were limitless. ~ Michael Grant,
226:Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging. ~ Paul Klee,
227:This is hell—the absolute loss borne from all those slivers of perfection that passed unnoticed, unrelished. In true dark, there is no gauging of time. ~ Blake Crouch,
228:My attitude is that when we put a youngster in harm's way, somebody who wears our nation's uniform in harm's way, he or she deserves the absolute best. ~ George W Bush,
229:Making the absolute best of ourselves is not an easy task. It is a pleasurable pursuit...but it requires patience, persistence, and perseverance. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach,
230:There is only one Soul in the Universe. There is no 'you' or 'me'; all variety is merged into the absolute unity, the one infinite existence - God. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
231:I'll tell the only thing I know in this business, I have had the absolute privilege of making movies that I loved when I was a kid and loved my whole life. ~ Thomas Tull,
232:The nearer we get to the absolute Ananda, the greater becomes our joy in man and the universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty,
233:In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
234:Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art. ~ Michel Foucault,
235:Moss should’ve realized the absolute worst way to make sure Sally stayed in the room was to vehemently object to her leaving.

- A Desperate Journey ~ Debra Parmley,
236:One of the absolute rules I learned in the war was, don't know anything you don't need to know, because if you ever get caught they will get it out of you. ~ Abraham Pais,
237:Only when creation stops can we find the Absolute. The Absolute is in the soul, not in creation. So by stopping creation, we come to know the Absolute. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
238:The sum total of all the cells in an organism is one person; so each soul is like one cell and the sum of them is God, and beyond that is the Absolute. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
239:They’ve worked the absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely truth since the beginning of time. They foment destruction and chaos. It puts them in their happy place. ~ Nina Bangs,
240:as Blessed John Henry Newman put it, “our duty as Christians lies in this, in making ventures for eternal life without the absolute certainty of success. ~ Charles J Chaput,
241:God too longs; and because the Absolute Life itself, which dwells in our life, and inspires these very longings, possesses the true world, and is that world. ~ Josiah Royce,
242:In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war. ~ Arthur Henderson,
243:Musical theatre goes through cycles. I came in when it was at the absolute height of musical theatre as I remember it. It was the age of the long-runners. ~ Ruthie Henshall,
244:The absolute best thing anyone can do is grab desperately at the throttle. But they don’t. Because it’s a speeding death kaleidoscope made out of tits.” Adam ~ Warren Ellis,
245:Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating one's self to the absolute, and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an idea. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
246:No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream. ~ Gustave Moreau,
247:There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
248:The way of knowledge tends easily towards the impersonal and the absolute, may very soon become exclusive. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Delight of the Divine,
249:We’re also going to have bad days and sad days and days that test our resolve. Those are the days I want you to feel the absolute weight of my love for you. ~ Colleen Hoover,
250:You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? ~ Italo Calvino,
251:Are there aspects of our lives - things we do, feel and think - that we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record. ~ William Boyd,
252:Don’t tolerate any form of average. Don’t accept Dis-excellence. Don’t stand for mediocre. If you’re going to settle, then please settle for the absolute best. ~ Robin Sharma,
253:Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. ~ Karl Jaspers,
254:It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are. ~ S J Watson,
255:It’s so difficult, isn’t it? To see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something? It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are. ~ S J Watson,
256:Will suspected Jem was in fact cleverer than he was himself - but he lacked Will's tendency to assume the absolute worst about people and proceed from there. ~ Cassandra Clare,
257:The goal of life is to gain an idea of what life is. In the absolute sense, of course, that changes nothing, according to the priests - but it helps our journey. ~ Ernst J nger,
258:But we’re also going to have bad days and sad days and days that test our resolve. Those are the days I want you to feel the absolute weight of my love for you. ~ Colleen Hoover,
259:I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth. ~ Henry Miller,
260:as Blessed Saint John Henry Newman put it, “our duty as Christians lies in this, in making ventures for eternal life without the absolute certainty of success. ~ Charles J Chaput,
261:If you order, with the absolute conviction that his wish will come, it will happen that way. But you mix the desire, fear and regret, and that is a contradiction. ~ Hermann Hesse,
262:he'd know that I think that . . . well, that bending an enemy's will through military force is the absolute last way a nation ought to go about solving their problems. ~ Meg Cabot,
263:In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy? ~ Esther Duflo,
264:In the absolute sense - kind of from the God's-eye view - God might feel like, "I made this thing that has all of that in it, all the horror and all the beauty." ~ George Saunders,
265:Every single fact I state in 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is the absolute and irrefutable truth...Do not let anyone say this or that isn't true. If they say that, they are lying. ~ Dave Kopel,
266:Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. ~ Rumi,
267:After all, there is nothing like a mother telling you that you're making a bad decision to convince you that what you are doing is the absolute best course of action. ~ Emily Giffin,
268:Felt its honey of felicity
Flow through his veins like the rivers of Paradise,
Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,
269:If this is a dream, the details are good. It's the absolute truth. They are a novelist's details... but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know? ~ Stephen King,
270:As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow. ~ Colette,
271:For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,
272:What is the meaning of Initiation? It is the Path to the realisation of your Self as the sole, the supreme, the absolute of all Truth, Beauty, Purity, Perfection! ~ Aleister Crowley,
273:If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people; but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh,
274:Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
275:The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
276:too often we react to our thoughts as if they are the absolute truth or as if we must give them all our attention. The psychological jargon for this reaction is “fusion. ~ Russ Harris,
277:When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us. ~ Robert Crumb,
278:Human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles, fear and hope, and that any one who can make these serve his ends may be sure of rapid fortune. ~ Lucian of Samosata,
279:The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion,
280:every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail. ~ Susan Wittig Albert,
281:I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it. ~ Joan Collins,
282:It is only by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence,
283:It is only by the touch of the Absolute that we can arrive at our own absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine: The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence,
284:An art, which has an aim to achieve the beauty, is called a philosophy or in the absolute sense it is named wisdom. ~ Alpharabius, “Philosophy” Alpharabius. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Nov. 2013.,
285:God, a born extremist, is the diplomat's worst enemy. Quite apart from the fact that His decrees are irrevocable, the Absolute will not allow anyone to relativize matters. ~ Regis Debray,
286:Complaining is the absolute worst possible thing you could do for your health or your wealth. The worst! ... For the next seven days, I challenge you not to complain at all. ~ T Harv Eker,
287:Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity. ~ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
288:Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic. ~ Alexis Carrel,
289:Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. ~ June Jordan,
290:Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ascent,
291:It's a tough world out there. You're going to prepare yourself for politics, bad bosses, hating employees - and usually when you're the absolute best, you get hated on the most. ~ Kanye West,
292:Anyone who has ever been in love, truly, magnificently in love, knows that it is torture. It is ugly and messy and brings out the absolute worst along with the best in you. ~ Jessica Gadziala,
293:But I guess you never really know some people. Sometimes they can be wonderful; sometimes they can be the absolute worst. You just have to decide how much of either you can accept. ~ Zoe Sugg,
294:People say I'm a nice girl saying terrible things. I tend to say the opposite of what I think. You hope that the absolute power of that transcends, and reaches the audience. ~ Sarah Silverman,
295:I don't know how to write jokes from the point of view of a six-foot-two guy. So, I'll always talk about it, but I just don't want it to be the absolute focus of all of my act. ~ Brad Williams,
296:To seize the absolute in shapes that pass,
To fix the eternal’s touch in time-made things,
This is the law of all perfection here. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdom of Subtle Matter,
297:A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war. ~ Louis Ferdinand C line,
298:A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war. ~ Louis Ferdinand C line,
299:I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. ~ Norman Mailer,
300:Parents name their child at a time when they have the absolute least amount of information they will ever have about the person they are naming. The whole practice is illogical. ~ Julie Buxbaum,
301:Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. ~ David Foster Wallace,
302:You have to give me something, Seafort. Politics is the art of the possible.” Father gazed at the Station. “Sir, I can give you nothing. Morality is ... the art of the absolute. ~ David Feintuch,
303:One's longing is not so much there for sense-gratification, profit and self-preservation, instead one's karma is there for no other purpose than inquiring after the Absolute Truth. ~ Ramesh Menon,
304:To believe that I could, at twenty-three, sacrifice history and culture for the Absolute was further proof that I had not understood India. My vocation was culture, not sainthood. ~ Mircea Eliade,
305:All science is methodolgy with regard to the Absolute. Therefore, there need be no fear of the unequivocally methodological. It isa husk, but not more than everything except the One. ~ Franz Kafka,
306:Because you are already sure everything is a lie. My only defence is the absolute truth. My only power over you is the truth. And if I keep telling it, eventually you'll believe. ~ Charlotte Stein,
307:We can be civil to each other, and we can try to express ourselves acknowledging that we're all patriots, we're all Americans, and not assume the absolute worst in people's motives. ~ Barack Obama,
308:I've had to learn that not everybody does things my way. But I do expect the absolute best of everyone around me, and I'm disappointed when people don't expect that of themselves. ~ Michael Johnson,
309:Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way. ~ Stephen King,
310:Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and take them, without question, for the absolute truth. ~ Rupert Spira,
311:let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future. ~ Edward O Wilson,
312:you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace.216 You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. ~ Jordan Peterson,
313:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,
314:The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,
315:Victory is possible, sisters, not by figuring out how to make this an easy process, but by choosing - over and over and over again - the absolute power available through God's truth. ~ Lysa TerKeurst,
316:Why should this be better Than the true way of the absolute, Directly penetrating the ground of Tathagata?

~ Hsuan Chueh of Yung Chia, 24 - Why should this be better (from The Shodoka)
,
317:As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette,
318:Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man. ~ Neal Stephenson,
319:I think The New York Times is one of the most dishonest media outlets I`ve ever seen in my life. The worst. The worst. The absolute worse. They have an agenda that you wouldn`t believe. ~ Donald Trump,
320:May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps. ~ Abigail Adams,
321:you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace.216 You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
322:Surviving and thriving in the wake of my mothers loss, I learned to believe in God. He has a plan, if you pay attention to the signs. I am inspired by the absolute proof of miracles. ~ Mariska Hargitay,
323:The absolute truth is that the 'I' is perfect and complete; the real 'I' is spiritual and can therefor never be less than perfect; it can never have any lack, limitation, or disease. ~ Charles F Haanel,
324:The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man's strange and difficult situation acceptable. Love cannot save life from death; but it can fulfill life's purpose. ~ Arnold J Toynbee,
325:He wrote very well in those days, as it happens, much better than he does now. He had absolute convictions, and style is nothing more than the absolute conviction of possessing a style. ~ Ricardo Piglia,
326:I believe in the absolute oneness of God and, therefore, also of humanity. I have always believed God to be without form. What I did hear was like a Voice from afar, and yet quite near. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
327:What does the absolute mean? Something that is, and of which (under pain of punishment) we dare not ask further whence and why it is. A precious rarity for professors of philosophy! ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
328:Let me tell you something about meditation. At the absolute center, is the vortex we are spun from like clay, there is a shaping hand which is neither Godlike nor peaceful as you imagine. ~ Forrest Gander,
329:No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself. ~ Jacques Ellul,
330:The good man is he for whom, because he is virtuous, the things that are absolutely good are good; it is also plain that his use of these goods must be virtuous and in the absolute sense good. ~ Aristotle,
331:A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely. ~ Viktor E Frankl,
332:Sometimes I feel an impingement of something I went through in another lifetime. But I like to concentrate on the absolute present. That's why I love my animals. They live in the present. ~ Shirley MacLaine,
333:cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one’s parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom. ~ Julie Lythcott Haims,
334:I think we are seeing the absolute and utter collapse of male politicians in this [U.S] country and we're seeing what the underpinnings of the power structure are, which are sexist underpinnings. ~ Eve Ensler,
335:Under whatever name or form we worship It, It leads us on to knowledge of the nameless, formless Absolute. Yet, to see one's true Self in the Absolute, to subside into It and be one with ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,
336:As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God. ~ Rodney Stark,
337:Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness. ~ Richard Rohr,
338:Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
339:I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial. ~ Greg Egan,
340:This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven. ~ Allen Ginsberg,
341:I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul. . . . I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
342:the absolute rulers of the states that arose from ‘Protestantism’ often did the equivalent of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Foreigners were simply excluded and driven out of the Scandinavian nation states. ~ Rodney Stark,
343:The idea of feeling old is much more the worry of a slightly younger person. When you are getting old, that becomes - psssh - completely secondary to the absolute understanding of how short your life is. ~ Moby,
344:And the greatest of the poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name. ~ G K Chesterton,
345:A Puritan believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick,
346:I have served one idea, marched under one banner - war against all imposed authority - against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. ~ Alexander Herzen,
347:No matter what God’s power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself. — ~ William Paul Young,
348:The cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one’s parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom. ~ Julie Lythcott Haims,
349:Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost ~ Thomas Merton,
350:If you ask any great player or great quarterback, there's a certain inner confidence that you're as good as anybody. But you can't say who is the absolute best. To be considered is special in itself. ~ Dan Marino,
351:The perfection of created life and the absolute beauty of nature is tarnished only by mortality and the cruel evils perpetrated by human kind. If humanity is the plague- only the divine is the cure... ~ Anonymous,
352:If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys. ~ Lucius Shepard,
353:We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
354:All the basic realities are a bringing out of something that is eternal and inherently true in the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence,
355:But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. ~ Catherynne M Valente,
356:Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that get in his way. ~ Stephen King,
357:The absolute truth is that the ‘I’ is perfect and complete; the real ‘I’ is spiritual and can therefore never be less than perfect; it can never have any lack, limitation, or disease.” Charles Haanel ~ Rhonda Byrne,
358:The very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be. ~ Edwin Land,
359:We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute. ~ Max Planck,
360:What more could there be, but the absolute beauty of our lives? Look around you, for heaven's sake and stop thinking. It is only in your thoughts and in analytical processes that you lose yourself. ~ Frederick Lenz,
361:Don’t go to college. It’s the absolute worst and it will ruin your life and you’ll never have good enough credit to own things, ever. Learn a trade or invent Facebook. College is for dummies. When ~ Brittany Gibbons,
362:I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour and drawing, as also of the whole of artistic life. And if we work with this strong faith, we may hope that it will not prove to be an illusion. ~ Anonymous,
363:It was being heard here and there that the benedictions being paid to Kṛṣṇa were neither befitting nor unbefitting because they were all for the Absolute, who was now playing the part of a human being.   ~ Anonymous,
364:There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence. ~ Henri Matisse,
365:The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ~ Isaiah Berlin,
366:When that which offers blessing predicates such on the absolute obeisance of the supplicant…demands, in fact, the soul’s willing enslavement – no, how could such a force stand tall in moral probity? ~ Steven Erikson,
367:God’s providence is His constant care for and His absolute rule over all His creation for His own glory and the good of His people. Note the absolute terms: constant care, absolute rule, all creation. ~ Jerry Bridges,
368:I just tend to think about everyday things for my onstage act. Actually you know what I like to talk about just the absolute most - the more mundane the subject matter, the more interesting it is to me. ~ Brian Regan,
369:... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart. ~ Marcel Proust,
370:I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. ~ Rick Moody,
371:I have recommended you the dignity of skepticism: yet here I am, prowling around the Absolute. Technique of contradiction? Remember, rather, what Flaubert said: "I am a mystic and I believe in nothing". ~ Emil M Cioran,
372:It is not by the absolute quantity of produce obtained by either class, that we can correctly judge of the rate of profit, rent, and wages, but by the quantity of labour required to obtain that produce. ~ David Ricardo,
373:The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth. ~ Brian Greene,
374:What I’ve learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously. ~ Tom Robbins,
375:Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness. ~ Lynne Truss,
376:Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn. ~ James Joyce,
377:"All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. ~ Emma Goldman,
378:Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute? ~ R Scott Bakker,
379:The goal of the machine,” David explained, “is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that’s at the absolute extent of their personal abilities.” It ~ Cal Newport,
380:Unwilling wholly to abandon the project for which his wife had died, unable to maintain any longer the absolute belief which the enterprise required, Muhammad Din entered the station wagon of scepticism. ~ Salman Rushdie,
381:What reality is is an emergent consequence of the interaction between something that is painfully limited-- like us-- and whatever the absolute is, which is something that is completely without borders. ~ Jordan Peterson,
382:German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
383:If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible. ~ Tony Robbins,
384:Life is endless reality. There is reality after reality, spinning on endlessly into the cosmos, billions and billions of manifest universes. Underlying all of this is the unmanifest, the absolute reality. ~ Frederick Lenz,
385:The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased. ~ Ida B Wells,
386:The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance. ~ Evelyn Underhill,
387:Alone, what did Bloom feel?
The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn. ~ James Joyce,
388:What reality is is an emergent consequence of the interaction between something that is painfully limited-- like us-- and whatever the absolute is, which is something that is completely without borders. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
389:why cannot you simply take what is good in Christianity, what you can define as valuable, what you can comprehend, and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible? ~ G K Chesterton,
390:I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable ~ Henry Miller,
391:The absolute deterioration of the wiki concept is just a matter of time. Once spam mechanisms are developed to eat into these systems, the caretakers will be too busy to stop the public-driven deterioration. ~ John C Dvorak,
392:…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
393:Honest to God, this is the absolute best kind of moment. The auditorium lights are off except for ones over the stage, and we're all bright eyed and giggle-drunk. I fall a little bit in love with everyone. ~ Becky Albertalli,
394:instead of those broad blind alleys which philosophy showed us, a certain type of mind has always discerned three strait and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute. In religion, in pain, and in beauty- ~ Evelyn Underhill,
395:Science cannot be “true” in the absolute sense, and that is why a society based on science alone cannot survive, for the people require absolute truths. Symbolic uncertainty is the downfall of civilization. ~ L E Modesitt Jr,
396:This evolution lasts until we reach the absolute purity of the Being. Then we arrive at divinity. We form a vast oneness. We enjoy an entirety of divine power; we are united in a single love; we are God. ~ Antoine the Healer,
397:[Tibet] never sought any territory. All it wanted is the conquest of the soul, that people should attain a kind of inner sovereignty, inner independence, inner freedom. And inner strength to attain the absolute. ~ Elie Wiesel,
398:Right discrimination is of two kinds analytical and synthetical. The first leads one from the phenomena to the Absolute Brahman, while by the second one knows how the Absolute Brahman appears as the universe. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
399:For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine,
400:Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It doesn't produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what is has to work with. ~ Jerry A Coyne,
401:Right discrimination is of two kinds analytical and synthetical. The first leads one from the phenomena to the Absolute Brahman, while by the second one knows how the Absolute Brahman appears as the universe. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
402:Maya is a veil of the Absolute;
A Truth occult has made this mighty world:
The Eternal’s wisdom and self-knowledge act
In ignorant Mind and in the body’s steps. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Ideal,
403:The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky,
404:There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
405:Why are you smiling?" she asked.
I kissed the inside of her wrists and answered what I felt at that moment was the absolute truth. "Because everything is perfect."
This is what I know that I am:
A fool. ~ Karin Slaughter,
406:Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity by this clause of Catch-22 and let a respectful whistle. 'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.
'It's the best there is,' agreed Doc Daneeka. ~ Joseph Heller,
407:But I love that feeling of utter depletion: It is an ecstatic sense of having committed myself to the absolute limit. But after recharging at night, I'm ready to go the next morning. Isn't that what life is all about? ~ George Lois,
408:Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute. ~ Emile M Cioran,
409:It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. ~ Galileo Galilei,
410:For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion. ~ Michael Pollan,
411:Hortense and Berthe nodded, as though profoundly impressed by the wisdom of their mother's pronouncements. She had long since convinced them of the absolute inferiority of men, whose sole function was to marry and to pay. ~ mile Zola,
412:I often describe the Absolute as Pure Infinite Potential, prior to being or becoming anything. It is forever unborn, yet gives birth to all of existence. About our ultimate nature nothing can be said; it must be revealed. ~ Adyashanti,
413:I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable. ~ Henry Miller,
414:TO FORM GROUPS, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups—these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence of culture. ~ Edward O Wilson,
415:Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and great affection under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad. ~ John Stuart Mill,
416:People have the absolute right to preach and to think and to say whatever they believe, and at the same time those beliefs can't be used as the basis for denying other people their equal rights and their equal freedom. ~ Chris Christie,
417:The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea. ~ Adolf Hitler,
418:you approach everything in your life with a certain degree of intention, you can affect the outcome. At the absolute minimum, you will affect how you feel about the outcome and that is ultimately what matters the most. ~ Sophia Amoruso,
419:The imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. ~ Pope Francis,
420:The men can go away, the executives can go away, but what is really though in this society are the players who has been handed down the feel of winning, of being the absolute best, which isn't equal to any other team. ~ Gianluigi Buffon,
421:There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'

There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
422:We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
423:Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women. ~ Emil M Cioran,
424:Mind cannot arrive at identity with the Absolute even when by a stretch of the intellect it conceives the idea, but can only disappear into it in a swoon or extinction. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind,
425:If you approach everything in your life with a certain degree of intention, you can affect the outcome. At the absolute minimum, you will affect how you feel about the outcome and that is ultimately what matters the most. ~ Sophia Amoruso,
426:The skillful are not obvious
They appear to be simple-minded
Those who know this know the patterns
of the Absolute
To know the patterns is the Subtle Power
The Subtle Power moves all things and has no name ~ David R Hawkins,
427:Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. ~ Joseph Heller,
428:In our development, as we grow throughout our lives, the structure of our beliefs becomes very complicated, and we make it even more complicated because we make the assumption that what we believe is the absolute truth. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz,
429:Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent’s angel here;
Love is man’s lien on the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,
430:Be really picky with your hiring, and hire the absolute best people you possibly can. People are the most important component of almost every business, and attracting the best talent possible is going to make a huge difference. ~ Peter Berg,
431:of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, ~ H G Wells,
432:The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. ~ William James,
433:To get the respect of people, I think you've got to roll up your sleeves and lead with your people. The absolute key is treating your people well. Looking for the best in your people. Lots and lots of praise, no criticism. ~ Richard Branson,
434:A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. ~ Mikhail Bakunin,
435:And yet having this man — who’d first attracted my attention by declaring his hatred for pancakes — spray my eggs with his sperm didn’t seem like the absolute most horrible idea. By which I mean, I didn’t upturn the table, smash ~ Mara Altman,
436:Inside each of us resides the truth, I began, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the real thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion. ~ Garth Stein,
437:The absolute worst part is watching your friends die," Carl spoke up from the sofa where he sat beside Allison. He glanced over at his frail friend, his eyes reflecting deep concern. "I've already watched my partner die. ~ Deanna Lynn Sletten,
438:The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised. ~ John C Calhoun,
439:The skillful are not obvious
They appear to be simple-minded
Those who know this know the patterns
of the Absolute
To know the patterns is the Subtle Power
The Subtle Power moves all things and
has no name. ~ David R Hawkins,
440:If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche. ~ Robertson Davies,
441:The absolute is not in itself a thing of magnitude; it is beyond measure, not in the sole sense of vastness, but in the freedom of its essential being. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil,
442:The other thing that's useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it's a beautiful morning, it's only a beautiful morning because we don't have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something. ~ George Saunders,
443:A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. ~ Mikhail Bakunin,
444:It is possible to be at the top of Christian service, respected and admired, and not have that indispensable ingredient by which God has chosen to work in His world today - the absolute sacrificial agape love of the Eternal God. ~ David Jeremiah,
445:Sinners live in a sort of hell, and saints imagine themselves in a sort of heaven. And the sage? - for him it is moksha, for him it is the absolute freedom. He is freed from all duality. The secret key, and the only key, is awareness. ~ Rajneesh,
446:We emphasize the transcendent worth of the human person. We insist that the human person must never be treated as an object; he must always be considered the subject. That is the basis for our teaching, the absolute standard. ~ Pope John Paul II,
447:Even in the dark I could see that [the tree] was dying, and doing it alone in the middle of these unconcerned pines. That was the absolute way of things. Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,
448:Surround yourself with people that push you to do and be better. No drama or negativity. Just higher goals and higher motivation. Good times and positive energy. No jealousy or hate. Simply bringing out the absolute best in each other. ~ Anonymous,
449:Australians were very practical, Emily had found. They did things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It was refreshing and guenuine but sometimes led to situations like building a town around a hole. ~ Max Barry,
450:Sometimes, the best endings are the ones that surprise you. Sometimes, the best are the ones that have everything happening exactly how you want it to happen. But the absolute perfect endings are when you get a little of both. ~ Sarah Addison Allen,
451:The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright. ~ Alain Badiou,
452:The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knoweldge. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
453:No matter what God’s power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself. —Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity ~ William Paul Young,
454:As the Absolute He stands behind every relative, as the Eternal He supports every transient and assures the permanence of the sum of phenomena; as the Universal He manifests Himself in every particular. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin, Facts and Opinions,
455:exclusivist, pluralist, and inclusivist. The exclusivist position concedes little if anything to the relativizing process: Christianity is reaffirmed in ringing tones as the absolute truth. As one would expect, this position is likely ~ Peter L Berger,
456:He has learned that silence means the absolute balance of the body, spirit and soul. The man who preserves his unity will never be dominated by the storms of existence; he has the strength to overcome the difficulties and move forwards. ~ Paulo Coelho,
457:It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
458:It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
459:But still he must have recourse to the paradox. For when the individual by his guilt has gone outside the universal he can return to it only by virtue of having come as the individual into an absolute relationship with the absolute. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
460:Kyndel continued. “By calling forth, I mean they can actually shift from man to dragon and back again. Now, I see you think I’ve been smoking something really good, or maybe I drank the Kool-aid, but I’m telling you the absolute truth. If ~ Julia Mills,
461:The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper problem of thought. ~ Josiah Royce,
462:More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,
463:They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus’s unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard. ~ Haruki Murakami,
464:Think of goodwill as your charisma safety net: as long as you can get into a state of goodwill, you will have the absolute best chances of getting your charisma right (you can refer back to chapter 5 for goodwill-boosting techniques). ~ Olivia Fox Cabane,
465:Francis [Ford Coppola] was on the cover of Time Magazine for One From The Heart and for owning a studio, and he was fresh off of Apocalypse [Now] and The Godfather films, so he was at the absolute top of his game and legend [in The Outsiders ]. ~ Rob Lowe,
466:I think we both like Crazy Anna a little more than regular Anna. It's like magic - while I was trying on the bathing suit last month, it rubbed against my butt and unleashed the Absolute Best Summer Ever Bikini Genie, granting all my wishes. ~ Sarah Ockler,
467:But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want. ~ Christopher Nolan,
468:Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole individual, to the absolute benefit of the community. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara,
469:No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. ~ Eugene Ionesco,
470:So when the ground is steady and the sky is clear, we should breathe deep until our lungs inflate against our ribs and hold in that one breath until we are light-headed with the privilege of being alive. The absolute privilege of being human. ~ Jacob Tomsky,
471:Every individual, however original he may be, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family and friends. Only thus is he truly himself. If in all this relativity he tries to be the absolute, then he becomes ridiculous. ~ S ren Kierkegaard,
472:When the disciples of Socrates questioned him concerning the Absolute, he also refused to discuss it, stating that it was beyond his wisdom and that it played no practical part in everyday life. ~ Manly P Hall, What the Ancient Wisdom Expects of Its Disciples,
473:It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances. ~ Charles Babbage,
474:The profile’s the key, the absolute key to modern dating. If you can get quality people to look at your profile, it becomes a numbers game. The more views, the more hits. The more hits, the more the odds climb that you’ll find a compatible mate. ~ Will McIntosh,
475:The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. ~ Lewis Thomas,
476:If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love. ~ James Finley,
477:The essence of things is not altered by their external relations, and that which, abstracting from these, alone constitutes the absolute worth of man is also that by which he must be judged, whoever the judge may be, and even by the Supreme Being. ~ Immanuel Kant,
478:To douchebags!" he said, gesturing to Brad. "And to girls that break your heart," he bowed his head to me. His eyes lost focus. "And to the absolute fucking horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with her. ~ Jamie McGuire,
479:In a world described by quantum physics, an insistence on causal closure of the physical world amounts to a quasi-religious faith in the absolute powers of matter, a belief that is no more than a commitment to brute, and outmoded, materialism. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
480:No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s. ~ Frederick C Beiser,
481:Perhaps humans have always had this ridiculous belief in the absolute excellence of the present, this conviction that the world into which they have had the marvelous good luck to be born is the best world that ever was, the best that ever will be. ~ Russell Baker,
482:Reality is, after all, too big for our frail understanding to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, we have to build our life on the theory which contains the maximum truth.We cannot sit still because we cannot, or do not , know the Absolute Truth. ~ Subhas Chandra Bose,
483:All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving what the Absolute has to nonfictively give. ~ David James Duncan,
484:[From p. 70 of the Midnight Ink paperback.]

"You have to have a corpse by page fifty-seven. Page seventy at the absolute outside."
"Says who?'
"Why, so says everyone. It's the industry standard."

[There has been, as yet, no corpse.] ~ G M Malliet,
485:In the absolute retirement one lives a purely subjective life and the opportunity for extending the spiritual progress to the outer life and testing it thoroughly is not there. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga,
486:Everyone had taken their places, when I excused myself to visit the bathroom, and there, in the toilet, was the absolute biggest turd I have ever seen in my life - no toilet paper or anything, just this long and coiled specimen, as thick as a burrito. ~ David Sedaris,
487:It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever… ~ William James,
488:One must not allow oneself to skid down to isolationism and unbridled economic egoism. ... The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country. And the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state. ~ Vladimir Putin,
489:I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life. ~ M Ageyev,
490:Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. ~ George MacDonald,
491:Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners. ~ Rowan Williams,
492:Anything I shouldn't laugh at makes me laugh. I mean, I'm bad at that, when somebody is singing something terribly and I'm thinking to myself, 'If I laugh now, this is the absolute worst thing I could ever do,' and then I start laughing and I can't stop. ~ Simon Cowell,
493:A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. ~ Mikhail Bakunin in "On God and the State",
494:Not that I’m crazy or anything, I just want some proof that death isn’t the end. Even if crazed zombies grabbed me in some dark hall one night, even if they tore me apart, at least that wouldn’t be the absolute end. There would be some comfort in that. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,
495:There is a brain mechanism that works to identify colour differences directly, without first identifying the absolute colour of each surface. So on my view there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million colour responses to surface viewed singly. ~ David Papineau,
496:Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate resposne to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure. ~ Tom Robbins,
497:The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of the" Great Breath," which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of the Absolute - Abstract Space and Duration being the other two. ~ H P Blavatsky,
498:we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth.” However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement. ~ Kai Bird,
499:I keep life filled and speeded up so that I can cheat myself into believing that I am happy and contented, but oh! When night comes and I go to bed and turn out the lights, I lie there in the dark, I realize the absolute futility of trying to kid myself. ~ Margaret Mitchell,
500:It's the vision of the composer that we have to determine, and not the absolute mathematical adherence of the score. In my experience, there have been occasions where I feel that a composer has not notated something as they meant to have it represented. ~ Marc Andre Hamelin,
501:So our definition of manliness, like that of the ancients, is simple: striving for virtue, honor, and excellence in all areas of your life, fulfilling your potential as a man, and being the absolute best brother, friend, husband, father and citizen you can be. ~ Brett McKay,
502:To discover the ultimate Reality of life—the Absolute, the eternal, God—you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. [These are] our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind and heart to reality. ~ Alan Watts,
503:For when we say that what is different is different, we affirm that what is different is the same as itself. For what is different can be different only through the Absolute Same, through which all that is is both the same as itself and other than another. ~ Nicholas of Cusa,
504:Give all your mental attention to recognizing the absolute sovereignty of the Spiritual Power, knowing that the God-Power has the answer and is now showing you the way. Trust It, believe in It, and walk the earth in the Light. Your prayer is already answered. ~ Joseph Murphy,
505:Wouldn't it be useful to explain the factors that actually allowed this to happen [Donald's Trump Presidency]. Like, for example, their frustration of the absolute shrinking of the middle class, the heroin epidemic, things like that. I don't see any of that. ~ Tucker Carlson,
506:Any scientist can testify that a dead ocean means a dead planet .... No national law, no national precautions can save the planet. The ocean, more than any other part of our planet, ... is a classic example of the absolute need for international global action. ~ Thor Heyerdahl,
507:For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,
508:When you step out onto the ineffable fabric of your own invention, it is key, essential to act just like that character in the cartoons who steps off the cliff onto the absolute air. Do not look down. You wrote it; you can stand on it to reach for the next thing. ~ Ron Carlson,
509:As the corruption of our nature shews the absolute necessity of regeneration, so the absolute necessity of regeneration plainly proves the corruption of our nature; for why should a man need a second birth, if his nature were not quite marred in the first birth? ~ Thomas Boston,
510:Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel. ~ Hubert Selby Jr,
511:What I want to do is to teach a lesson to all these people … I want [to prove] that the Devil exists, that the Devil reigns supreme, that the power he enjoyed in the Middle Ages has not been taken from him, for today he is the absolute master of the world. ~ Joris Karl Huysmans,
512:It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions. ~ Jack Finney,
513:I’m doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I’ll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I’m being selfish. It’s perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss. ~ Jessie Burton,
514:Peace comes from the absence of fear, from a consciousness of trust, from a deep, underlying faith in the absolute goodness and mercy, the final integrity of the universe in which we live, and of every cause to which we give our thought, our time and our attention. ~ Ernest Holmes,
515:The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul's quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment. ~ Rudy Rucker,
516:A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus. ~ Peter Thiel,
517:This time it was true death we heard - oblivion, void, the absolute - and the beauty of the experience was rooted in our sadness in acknowledging living within it. That's what True Death would say. Not I'm coming for you but You always dwell within me. ~ Eugene Lim,
518:It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
519:(...) all my life I had been looking forward for something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. ~ Henry Miller,
520:I never thought of punk rock as the absolute act of rebellion for the sake of rebellion. There's a lot of that in there, but for me I think punk rock was always about questioning things and making decisions for yourself, which is a great message to pass on to your kids. ~ Mark Hoppus,
521:Slavery in the modern world implies the absolute deprivation of the individual's liberty, while possession of weapons and mastery of their use are means to the individual's liberation. We do not perceive how a man may be armed and at the same time bereft of his freedom. ~ John Keegan,
522:In the midst of our lives, of our freedom and our struggles, we have to make a radical, absolute decision. And we never know when lightening will strike us out of the blue. It may be when we least expect to be asked whether we have the absolute faith and trust to say yes ~ Karl Rahner,
523:Some people say that true love is a myth, that soulmates don’t exist. I feel sadness for those cynical souls. They’ll never know the high that comes from being with the one you’re meant to be with. They’ll never experience the absolute rightness of finding their true mate. ~ E K Blair,
524:The absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright. ~ Alain Badiou,
525:We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need. ~ Thomas Mann,
526:He lifted his brows. "If I really thought it was the absolute best thing for our kids, you'd have had a battle on your hands. That was just a debate." "With chair-throwing." "Heated debate. Fights involve chair-breaking. Chair-throwing is just getting your attention. ~ Kelley Armstrong,
527:No one can do without some semblance of immortality, and even less will they deny themselves the right to seek it out in the form of this or that reputation, starting with the literary... Since death has come to be accepted by all as the absolute end, everyone writes. ~ Emile M Cioran,
528:There is nothing more lonely than eternity. And nothing is more cozy for us than to be a human being. This indeed is another contradiction-how can we keep the bonds of our humanness and still venture gladly and purposefully into the absolute loneliness of eternity? ~ Carlos Castaneda,
529:frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal “honor” and court etiquette. ~ Isaac Asimov,
530:Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.14 ~ Jonathan Haidt,
531:The political nonsense of network television and the culture of a set and all the problems that that can create, I can take. I can't take betraying the truth of what I'm doing. It cuts to the absolute core of everything that I do in the craft, in this world that I live in. ~ Richard Schiff,
532:It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind? ~ Czeslaw Milosz,
533:Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you. ~ Carol Channing,
534:As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. ~ Pope Francis,
535:Buddha himself taught different teachings to different people under different circumstances. For some people, there are beliefs based on a Creator. For others, no Creator. The only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth. ~ Dalai Lama,
536:He lifted his brows. "If I really thought it was the absolute best thing for our kids, you'd have had a battle on your hands. That was just a debate."
"With chair-throwing."
"Heated debate. Fights involve chair-breaking. Chair-throwing is just getting your attention. ~ Kelley Armstrong,
537:If you are very lucky, you're allowed to be in certain places during just the right season of your life: by the sea for the summer when you're seven or eight and full of the absolute need to swim until dark and exhaustion close their hands together, cupping you in between. ~ Jonathan Carroll,
538:Marlon Brando was the absolute opposite of everything they told me he was going to be, which is that he was a testy guy who wants to know that he's in control of everything. But, that's not who Marlon was. No matter what he did, the most important thing on his mind was justice. ~ Johnny Depp,
539:All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts, education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth; and ~ Victor Hugo,
540:Knowledge of the Absolute depends upon no book, nor upon anything; it is absolute in itself. No amount of study will give this knowledge; is not theory, it is realization. Cleanse the dust from the mirror, purify your own mind, and in a flash you know that you are Brahman. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
541:1267
You Constituted Time
765
You constituted Time—
I deemed Eternity
A Revelation of Yourself—
'Twas therefore Deity
The Absolute—removed
The Relative away—
That I unto Himself adjust
My slow idolatry—
~ Emily Dickinson,
542:I have to get to the point of the absolute and unquestionable relationship that takes everything exactly as it comes from Him. God never guides us at some time in the future, but always here and now. Realize that the Lord is here now, and the freedom you receive is immediate. ~ Oswald Chambers,
543:[P]rayer is the … certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of Nature, … Prayer is the absolute relation of the human heart to itself, to its own nature; in prayer, man forgets that there exists a limit to his wishes, and is happy in this forgetfulness. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
544:So that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely. ~ David Wallace Wells,
545:One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it. ~ Rajneesh,
546:The absolute requisites for the study of this work... are a knowledge of algebra to the binomial at least, plane and solid geometry, plane trigonometry, and the most simple part of the usual applications of algebra to geometry. ~ Augustus De Morgan, The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836),
547:When a mirror is covered with dust it cannot reflect images; it can only do so when it is clear of stain. So is it with beings. If their minds are not pure of soil, the Absolute cannot reveal itself in them. But if they free themselves from soil, then of itself it will be revealed. ~ Aҫwaghosha,
548:Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves. ~ Ryan Holiday,
549:Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not. ~ Tobias Wolff,
550:Now comes the really amazing part. What is offered to the world, to everyone who hears the gospel, is not a love or saving achievement designed for all and therefore especially for no one; but rather, what is offered is the absolute fullness of all that Christ achieved for his elect. ~ John Piper,
551:There’s a reason the phrase “the shit hits the fan” is such a popular way to express a complete and total mess. Because really, what other image could you conjure up that encapsulates the absolute, disgusting mess you’re dealing with when feces hits a dispersal machine like that? ~ Robert J Crane,
552:Matt felt like he surely had the absolute best friends in the whole world. “What the hell did you say to him, Petey?”

Petey said, “A simple seven-word statement of fact.”

Matt grinned. “What? My dick is smaller than a housefly’s?”

“I’ve got a rifle with a silencer. ~ J F Smith,
553:Retirement Is Worst-Case-Scenario Insurance. Retirement planning is like life insurance. It should be viewed as nothing more than a hedge against the absolute worst-case scenario: in this case, becoming physically incapable of working and needing a reservoir of capital to survive. ~ Timothy Ferriss,
554:Anyone who has ever been in love, truly, magnificently in love, knows that it is torture. It is ugly and messy and brings out the absolute worst along with the best in you. It hurts because it forces you to confront every aspect of yourself. It forces you out of your comfort zone. ~ Jessica Gadziala,
555:To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you—not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. ~ Christian Wiman,
556:It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.' ~ Albert Camus,
557:Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history. ~ Leonard Peikoff,
558:Until you recognize the need, the absolute requirement for taking responsibility, you will not succeed. Once you do accept the responsibility, however, the Egoscue Method never fails. Never. No drugs, no surgery, no machines, no miracles. Just You. A normal person, doing normal things. ~ Pete Egoscue,
559:Every activity of the human being is to be considered a failure unless he inquires about the nature of the Absolute. Therefore those who begin to question why they are suffering or where they came from and where they shall go after death are proper students for understanding Bhagavad-gītā. ~ Anonymous,
560:It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
561:To satisfy themselves with this, they gladly grasp at words, especially those which denote indefinite, very abstract, and unusual concepts difficult to explain, such, for example, as infinite and finite, sensuous and supersensuous, the Idea of being, Ideas of reason, the Absolute, ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
562:In place of the Absolute as determining history through the Zeitgeist, Marx offered mass movements and economic forces as the basic causes of every fundamental change, whether in the world of things or in the life of thought. Hegel, the imperial professor, had hatched the socialistic eggs. ~ Will Durant,
563:Korell is that frequent phenomenon in history : the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal "honor" and court etiquette. ~ Isaac Asimov,
564:If Democrats get another Elena Kagan, who has no business being there, if they get another Senorita Sonia Sotomayor, if they get another Stephen Breyer, who may be one of the absolute worst, Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg, if they get another one of these, then we don't have a Supreme Court, folks. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
565:Oh, just some crap about the essential paradox of man: How we refuse to juxtapose the absolute to the relative, and some other some-such about paradox as an ontological definition which expresses the relation between an existing cognitive spirit and eternal truth—You know, bullshit. ~ Stephen Adly Guirgis,
566:The absolute negative, the ultimate saying of no to the world, when it is just too late. And always the subtle conviction that if you had said No a moment earlier, it would none of it have happened. But the saying of no comes too late by a little. You are always a little too late in saying it. ~ Don Berry,
567:The absolute simplicity. That's what I love. When you're climbing your mind is clear and free from all confusions. You have focus. And suddenly the light becomes sharper, the sounds are richer and you're filled with the deep, powerful presence of life. I've only felt that one other time. ~ Heinrich Harrer,
568:Irony is the birth-pangs of the objective mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between existence and the idea of existence). Humor is the birth -pangs of the absolute mind (based upon the misrelationship, discovered by the I , between the I and the idea of the I . ~ Soren Kierkegaard,
569:Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research. ~ Jurgen Habermas,
570:May Peace reign in all hearts. Let us not forget that Peace is Light; let us not forget that Peace is an essence which emanates from the Absolute. It is Light which emanates from the Absolute. It is the Light of the Ancient of Days. Christ said: “MY PEACE I GIVE YOU, MY PEACE I LEAVE YOU”. ~ Samael Aun Weor,
571:The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us backout in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future. ~ Ellen Goodman,
572:17From now on let no one trouble me [by making it necessary for me to justify my authority as an apostle, and the absolute truth of the gospel], for I bear on my body the dbranding-marks of Jesus [the wounds, scars, and other outward evidence of persecutions—these testify to His ownership of me]. ~ Anonymous,
573:A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. ~ Albert Einstein,
574:Doing a route at the absolute limit of the possible demands and encourages a coordination of all peripheral factors. It is, at the same time, a sign of joy and contentment with that moment, perhaps even a mirror of the equlibrium in your inner spirit, a mirror of a liberated state of mind. ~ Wolfgang Gullich,
575:To the abiding and eternal is their climb,
To the pure existence everywhere the same,
To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force
And the unimaginable and formless bliss,
To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery
Of the triune being wh ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,
576:Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines. ~ Mindy Kaling,
577:Despair … is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves. ~ Stephen Adly Guirgis,
578:Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life. ~ Albert Camus,
579:She and Miu shared similar musical tastes, it turned out. They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven’s Sonata no. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus’s unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard. ~ Haruki Murakami,
580:What we're calling 'presencing' is possible because of this womb, where the absolute and the manifest interact. I think a buddhist would say that presencing can arise to the extent that we develop the capacity, individually and collectively, to extend our conscious awareness in both domains. ~ Betty Sue Flowers,
581:And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose. ~ Joseph Conrad,
582:Love is a lot of things. It's a hard place to fall and a soft place to land. It's give and take, push and pull. Love can bring out the absolute best or worst in us. But, when you find a love worth fightin' for, that's true love. And no matter the struggle or compromise, you can't walk away from that. ~ K Langston,
583:Love is a lot of things. It’s a hard place to fall and a soft place to land. It’s give and take, push and pull. Love can bring out the absolute best or worst in us. But, when you find a love worth fightin’ for, that’s true love. And no matter the struggle or compromise, you can’t walk away from that. ~ K Langston,
584:I love and respect all religions and philosophies. I see how they get formed, how they grow up, and how powerful they are. But for me to believe in a specific god - no. Because what I believe is that the infinite, the absolute, is a living being and the only one living being that really exists. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz,
585:Meet your obligations. But obligations never prevented anyone from following their dreams. Remember that you are a manifestation of the absolute, and do only those things in your life that are worth the effort. Only those who do that will understand the great transformations that are yet to be seen. ~ Paulo Coelho,
586:What dost thou believe is the most precious and beautiful thing in this world? What I believe is this. To me, "knowledge" is simply a "weapon" for living. 'Tis not my "goal" in life. That which is precious, which is beautiful...the absolute for which I would wager my entire life—'tis called...love! ~ Jun Mochizuki,
587:Even if death were to fall upon you today like lightning, you must be ready to die without sadness and regret, without any residue of clinging for what is left behind. Remaining in the recognition of the absolute view, you should leave this life like an eagle soaring up into the blue sky. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche,
588:The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years. ~ David Bowie,
589:Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,
590:If all men are brothers outside of any specifically human paradigm then no one can truly be a brother. The institution of a symbolically universal “paternity” annihilates the very possibility of true fraternity, in such a way that it proclaims itself in the absolute by the very thing that destroys it. ~ Alain de Benoist,
591:Investment banking may not be the absolute worst, but it’s up there, full of pride when they describe their requirement to work three weekends out of five. Client service, they say, just demands it. But I wonder how thrilled their clients would be if they knew how brain-dead the service they receive often is. ~ Anonymous,
592:The absolute bedrock of our independence is having control over our own bodies. You cannot be independent if the government or someone else says whether or not you can use birth control. Unless you're in charge of your body, you're not in charge of anything. I think that's really the bottom line of feminism. ~ Erica Jong,
593:How? she asks herself. How could they do it? How could they let it happen? But already she knows. She’s felt the rage, the hatred, the absolute and utter need to destroy. She’s partaken in it, drank the bitter draft of murder and did it unblinkingly. That is how all travesties occur. Because of people like her. ~ Joe Hart,
594:In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. ~ John Stuart Mill,
595:Metaphysical world.- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
596:I hate that there are so many sides of him that I don't understand, and I don't know if I even want to keep trying to understand them. There are parts of him that I love, parts of him that I hate. But there's a part of him that does nothing but disappoint me, and that's the absolute hardest part to accept. ~ Colleen Hoover,
597:It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. ~ Lord Acton,
598:In the reason that the contrast between the absolute and the relative is so terrible is because we believe so fully in ourselves as permanent, continuous, and central. I feel insane saying this, but if one weren't so deluded about the permanent reality of the self, a lot of this pain would actually lessen. ~ George Saunders,
599:It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak. ~ Guy Debord,
600:They made it seem so easy. Like giving their heart to someone else isn't the scariest thing in the world. I still don't understand that. Don't they know the power they're giving to that other person? The absolute future-forming dominion? Don't they understand how much it's going to hurt when it all goes wrong? ~ Leisa Rayven,
601:My love is stronger than the bonds of Fate:
   I guard the heavenly seal of the Supreme.
   Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
   For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven.
   Love is the far Transcendent's angel here
   Love is man's lien on the Absolute
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,
602:The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore. ~ Jack Gilbert,
603:This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. ~ William James,
604:Though the absolute sovereignty of God over our lives is consistently taught throughout Scripture, it is not the uncaring sovereignty of a despot but of a God who is just as loving and caring as He is sovereign. But we have to by faith believe that truth when His ways are different from that which we desire. My ~ Jerry Bridges,
605:Communion. I chewed and swallowed it. It was at the absolute center of my faith: wheat and water and yeast and heat; grape and sun and time; bread and wine, transformed into life. I ate it up. I kept coming back for more. And yet, even though church was where I found communion, church couldn't, finally, contain it. ~ Sara Miles,
606:The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past. ~ Lewis Thomas,
607:It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality—called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God—seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings. ~ Karen Armstrong,
608:The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is. ~ Aldous Huxley,
609:there’s a difference between when this happens in an artist’s studio or on the tennis court versus inside the barrel of a fifty-foot wave. When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that’s more than just an imaginative breakthrough—that’s bending reality to your will. ~ Steven Kotler,
610:When a mirror is covered with dust, it cannot reflect the image cast upon it, it can only do that when it is without spot. It is so with beings. If their minds are not clear of stain, the Absolute cannot reveal himself in them; but if they free themselves from pollution, then shall he reveal himself within their being. ~ Açwaghesha,
611:But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every last thing my parents had ever told me. ~ Michelle Obama,
612:If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about colour differences, and have 'thrown away' more fine-grained information about the absolute colours of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our colour experiences can't. ~ David Papineau,
613:The greatest hope, I say, is the one in which all the others are met, is that it is exists for everyone and that for everyone it lasts. That the absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity, be in the eyes of everyone the only natural and supernatural hanging bridge cast across life itself. ~ Andr Breton,
614:A lot of people want to have market share numbers, lots of users, because that's how they view their self worth. For me, one of the most important things for Linux is having a big community that is actively testing new kernels; it's the only way to support the absolute insane amount of different hardware we deal with. ~ Linus Torvalds,
615:once described fiction as a monumental lie that has to have the absolute ring of truth if it is to succeed. And that ring of truth invariably comes from research, which in turn gives a novel its authenticity. It is this kind of authenticity plus good storytelling that made Forever Amber a bestseller 56 years ago. Now ~ Kathleen Winsor,
616:It isn't the absolute truth about life and death, but the thing that helps us to live and confront the challenges of day-to-day life. It isn't what we learn from books, which serves only to fuel futile arguments about what happened or will happen; it is the knowledge that lives in the hearts of men and women of good will ~ Paulo Coelho,
617:It isn’t the absolute truth about life and death, but the thing that helps us to live and confront the challenges of day-to-day life. It isn’t what we learn from books, which serves only to fuel futile arguments about what happened or will happen; it is the knowledge that lives in the hearts of men and women of good will ~ Paulo Coelho,
618:It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects. ~ Nikola Tesla,
619:We are engaged in a form of intimacy that scares the absolute hell out of me. It’s as if there is a weight on my chest that I want to shove off, and I’ve never been this terrified before.
Or this whole and hopeful and connected.
My body starts to tremble. I want more of what I’m feeling, and I also want none of it. ~ Jessica Park,
620:Fascism was part of the absolute evil. (...) We have to denounce the ashaming pages in the history of our past. (...) There included all the pages related to the discrimination and the persecution of jews and, more in general, of minoritires. And therefore that one [The Italian Social Republic of Salò] is also included. ~ Gianfranco Fini,
621:I believe in the absolute oneness of God and, therefore, also of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul. The rays of the sun are many through refraction. But they have the same source. I cannot, therefore, detach myself from the wickedest soul (nor may I be denied identity with the most virtuous). ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
622:If our testimonies are strong onthis point and if we feel the absolute assurance that God loves us, we will change our questons. We won't ask, 'Why did this happen?' or 'Why doesn't God care about me?' Instead, our questions will become, 'What can I learn from this experience?' or 'How does the Lord want me to handle this? ~ John Bytheway,
623:But thinking is something different, altogether! Think always as if the hot hand of hell were grabbing for you. Think to the limit of your mind. Imagine, dream, hope, want things, drive yourself to goodness. Whatever you do...do it to the absolute best of your ability. Never take the easy way where thinking is concerned. ~ James A Michener,
624:It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved. ~ Thomas Keneally,
625:It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie’s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved. ~ Thomas Keneally,
626:The Absolute is not only the Absolute, but also the dialectical movement of finite and infinite. The Absolute is such that it only ever appears to an other. Just as our intuition is an ek-stasis, by which we try to situate ourselves in the Absolute, so too must the Absolute leave itself and make itself in the world. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty,
627:There exists an infinite, eternal Being, subsisting of himself, who is one without being alone; for he finds in his own essence relations whence, with the necessary movement of his life, results the absolute plenitude of his perfection and his happiness. A Being unique and complete, God suffices to himself. ~ Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire,
628:I don't want to take the women into the city until I know how things stand.' ' I'll tell you precisely how they stand,' Nicolo bitterly replied. 'The absolute ruler of this city is a Medici. The Pope is a Medici. People round here say that probably God is a Medici and as for the Devil, he's definitely one, beyond any doubt. ~ Salman Rushdie,
629:Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it. ~ Bruce Lee,
630:The absolute desire of 'having more' encourages the selfishness that destroys communal bonds among the children of God. It does so because the idolatry of riches prevents the majority from sharing the goods that the Creator has made for all, and in the all-possessing minority it produces an exaggerated pleasure in these goods. ~ Oscar Romero,
631:Global warming is a religion in the sense that it's a series of propositions that can't be refuted. It's very ironic that the global warming alarmists say, "We are the real defenders of science," and then they adopt the absolute reverse of the scientific attitude, which is openness to evidence. You cannot refute what they say. ~ George F Will,
632:in these few minutes one gets an overwhelming impression of the absolute identity of Body and Mind, and the fact that our highest functions—consciousness and self—are not entities, self-sufficient, “above” the body, but neuropsychological constructs—processes—dependent on the continuity of bodily experience and its integration. ~ Oliver Sacks,
633:Look at the catastrophic record Vishy Anand has against Garry Kasparov. Kasparov managed to beat him almost everywhere they played, even though Vishy Anand has belonged to the absolute top players in the world for fifteen years. This difference cannot be explained purely in chess terms, there must have been some psychology. ~ Vladimir Kramnik,
634:Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
635:He's not the absolute best at wearing a fake smile or pretending to be excited about taking people's orders, but one thing does give him staying power: he's really good at not caring. His managers have never exactly declared him their favorite employee, but they do praise his attitude, which is funny because no one else ever has. ~ Austin Chant,
636:Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man. ~ John Stuart Mill,
637:You asked about the Avengers. Y’wanna know the best part about being an Avenger? Having Captain America around you all the time. He just—the guy just brings out the absolute best in people. You want to be good when he’s around. You really do.

Ivan, look around you real quick. Because right now? Captain America ain’t here. ~ Matt Fraction,
638:It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies. ~ Rachel Cusk,
639:Set your standards high; namely, do the absolute best of which you are capable. Focus on running the race rather than winning it. Do those things necessary to bring forth your personal best and don’t lose sleep worrying about the competition. Let the competition lose sleep worrying about you. Teach your organization to do the same. ~ John Wooden,
640:If a man’s imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dream. ~ Edward Abbey,
641:The only time I got the absolute most insanely nervous in my life was at the Olympic trials, because archery is a horrible spectator sport. Nobody goes and watches an archery tournament. Because the targets are three-quarters of a football field away. Who can tell who's winning? You can't even see your own target from where you are. ~ Geena Davis,
642:We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not."

"Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives. ~ Alastair Reynolds,
643:Hereby Christ is made more precious to us when our insurmountable evils encompass us about like bees—when we see them more in number than the hairs of our head; then, and then only, we are properly apprized both of the exceeding value and the absolute necessity of that better righteousness than our own, whereon our hope is founded.37 ~ Tony Reinke,
644:The birth of all the buddhas of the three times from this utterly pure realm [of] mind itself is this. The basis of the generation of all the sugata's power, fearless miracles and qualities is also this. The source of all the holy dharma is also this. Therefore, it is the absolute Great Mother. - Machik ~ Judith Simmer-Brown, Dakini's Warm Breath,
645:To the physicist – but only to him – I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and ~ Erwin Schr dinger,
646:You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems. ~ Matthew Specktor,
647:Five, six weeks or two months into the diet and the absolute crazy training regimen is a brutal nightmare sometimes. But in the same breath, that's what is so wonderful about it because it's so structured and your body is changing and you're able to do things that you've never done before. You're stronger than you've ever been before. ~ Jessica Biel,
648:German writings attain popularity through a great name, or through personalities, or through good connections, or through effort,or through moderate immorality, or through accomplished incomprehensibility, or through harmonious platitude, or through versatile boredom, or through constant striving after the absolute. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
649:Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins. ~ Jeff Bezos,
650:The colors and views of this real paradise on Earth were unbelievable… you know, how can they be real?! Even harder to believe is how the vast majority of our planet’s inhabitants are spending their lives without ever having the opportunity to see all of the absolute beauty of nature that can be discovered in this part of the world. ~ Sahara Sanders,
651:The origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man or set of men have, to govern others, except their own consent? ~ Alexander Hamilton,
652:When you understand that there is nothing really good or bad in this world in the absolute sense, you focus your attention on balancing everything in the appropriate manner rather than craving for something and discarding the rest. A happy person, like a healthy person, takes a balanced diet of everything that nature presents to him. ~ Awdhesh Singh,
653:Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. ~ Emil M Cioran,
654:They fathomed principle; they attached themselves to right. They longed for the absolute, they caught glimpses of the infinite realisations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, pushes the mind towards the boundless, makes it float in the illimitable. There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. ~ Victor Hugo,
655:He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn’t. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place. ~ Lee Child,
656:Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. ~ Carl Jung,
657:Countless people have attempted to define the absolute power of the world of nature. Some praise it as god, some call it the Buddha, others call it truth. Still others convert nature into a philosophy by which they attempt to sound its deepest truth. Such attempts to define the power of nature are no more than striving to escape its effects. ~ Koichi Tohei,
658:Love is a lot of things. It’s a hard place to fall and a soft place to land. It’s give and take, push and pull. Love can bring out the absolute best or worst in us. But, when you find a love worth fightin’ for, that’s true love. And no matter the struggle or compromise, you can’t walk away from that. Now ask yourself, is he worth fightin’ for? ~ K Langston,
659:Rowing, particularly sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time. ~ David Halberstam,
660:My job doesn’t define me. The people I love define me. And if Nan’s aneurysm taught me one thing, it’s that those people are getting older, and their lives are getting shorter. I don’t want to be a full day’s journey away from them. I want to make the most of our time together and enjoy the absolute crap out of them while I have the chance. ~ Whitney Dineen,
661:When does a physical system – any kind of association of atoms – display ‘dynamical law’ (in Planck’s meaning) or ‘clock-work features’? Quantum theory has a very short answer to this question, viz. at the absolute zero of temperature. As zero temperature is approached the molecular disorder ceases to have any bearing on physical events. ~ Erwin Schr dinger,
662:We are the most illusioned society on the planet. We have to become adults. And it's hard; it's painful. I struggle with despair all the time. But I'm not going to let it win. It is incumbent upon all of us that at the same time we recognize how dark the future is, we also recognize the absolute imperative of resistance in every form possible. ~ Chris Hedges,
663:You're young, baby, but you think about kids? "he asked.
"My sister is the absolute best and no way in hell I'm gonna live a life where I don't have two girls who can share a room and have bunk beds and giggle every night so much me and my man have to shout threats at them to shut up," I declared, and watched in wonder as his face got soft. ~ Kristen Ashley,
664:Reader, what are you doing? Aren't you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating.... Ah, you fling yourself into it, too.... You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? Like this, without any preparation..? ~ Italo Calvino,
665:We celebrate the differences among us, even that which we cannot reconcile, not in denial of the absolute, but in the gift of humility that those differences require of us. Without denying our differences, we no longer allow them to categorize or divide us. It is in the diversity that the image of God is most fully reflected in and through us. ~ Jamie Arpin Ricci,
666:To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true non-duality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. ~ Adyashanti,
667:We all force our true selves into little hashes and show them like passwords. A smile is a hashing function, and a word, and a cry. The cry is not the grief, the word is not the meaning, and smile is not the joy: we cannot run the hash in reverse, we cannot get from the sign to the absolute truth. Maybe the smile is false. Maybe the grief is a lie. ~ Seth Dickinson,
668:You merely dream that you roam about. In a few years your stay in India will appear as a dream to you. You will dream some other dream at that time. Do realize that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being-that is the absolute truth. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,
669:The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
670:It is indeed the case that we philosophers work at night, after the day of the true becoming of a new truth. Yes, we hope, we believe that one day the ‘bright obvious’ will rise up motionless, in the stellar coldness of its ultimate form. It will be the last stage of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. But this does not come to pass. ~ Alain Badiou,
671:Man's delight in the Lord is the absolute peak of human triumph. He praises God when full of joy, and when not, he praises God to become full of joy. For to know and to live as though God is worthy of all praise, in all one's circumstances, whether seemingly good or seemingly bad, is the primary definition of joy and the richest triumph for man under God. ~ Criss Jami,
672:The great ideal of Mahayana Buddhism is to remain in this world, so tempting and full of snares, but at the same time attain this awareness of the Absolute which underlies it, thus remaining free while helping others to free themselves. Nagarjuna captures the essence of this state when he proclaims, There is no difference at all between samsara and nirvana; ~ Anonymous,
673:By raising Christ from death, God as the supreme Judge set his seal to the absolute perfection and completeness of his atoning work. The resurrection is a public announcement to the world that the penalty of death has been borne by Christ to its bitter end and that in consequence the dominion of guilt has been broken, the curse annihilated forever more. ~ Geerhardus Vos,
674:The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type. ~ Georg Cantor,
675:In the early morning hour, just before dawn, lover and beloved wake and take a drink of water. She asks, Do you love me or yourself more? Really, tell the absolute truth. He says, There is nothing left of me. I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one. ~ Rumi,
676:My life may be unknown, monotonous, commonplace, boring, hidden from all men’s eyes … but I shall carry out its duties in the consciousness that I am effectively collaborating in the absolute evolution of Being. Lowly atom though I am, I shall fulfil an imperceptible function as such with a heart as all-embracing as the universe. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life,
677:A toast” I yelled, climbing onto a chair. On my way to the top, I stole someone’s beer and held it out in front of me. “To douche bags!” I said gesturing to Brad. “And to girls that break your heart.” I bowed to Abby. My throat tightened. “And to the absolute fucking horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with her. ~ Jamie McGuire,
678:In people’s perceptions of money, as surely as in their perception of light and sound and the weather and everything else under the sun, what mattered was not the absolute levels but changes. People making choices, especially choices between gambles for small sums of money, made them in terms of gains and losses; they weren’t thinking about absolute levels. ~ Michael Lewis,
679:[Lost of the absolute] is in this sense that ''I no longer know what to do with my life" must be understood. Critics have been mistaken about the meaning of this phrase, seeing in it a cry of despair as in Simone de Beauvoir's "I have been cheated." When she uses this word it is to indicate that she claims from life an absolute which she cannot find there. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,
680:What is more ultimate, the absolute or the particular? The One or the Many? The ideal and eternal or the real and the concrete? Is Plato right or Aristotle? But the doctrine of the incarnation breaks through those binaries and categories. “Immanuel” means the ideal has become real, the absolute has become a particular, and the invisible has become visible! ~ Timothy J Keller,
681:The nature of the Absolute is neither perceptible nor imperceptible; and with phenomena it is just the same. But to one who has discovered his real nature, how can there be anywhere or anything separate from it?... ...Therefore it is said: 'The perception of a phenomenon IS the perception of the Universal Nature, since phenomena and Mind are one and the same.' ~ Huangbo Xiyun,
682:BELIEVE THAT YOU HAVE THE ABSOLUTE RIGHT TO THINK THINGS THAT I FIND OFFENSIVE, STUPID, PREPOSTEROUS OR DANGEROUS, AND THAT YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SPEAK, WRITE OR DISTRIBUTE THESE THINGS, AND THAT I DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL YOU, MAIM YOU, HURT YOU OR TAKE AWAY YOUR LIBERTY OR PROPERTY BECAUSE I FIND YOUR IDEAS THREATENING OR INSULTING OR DOWNRIGHT DISGUSTING. ~ Neil Gaiman,
683:Despite the large number of mergers, and the growth in the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of [the 20th] century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable...it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it. ~ Gabriel Kolko,
684:I think every leader has an obligation - the absolute obligation - to treat everyone fairly. But they also have the obligation to treat everyone differently. Because people aren't all the same, and the last thing you ever want to do, in my opinion, is let the best in your organization be treated like the worst in your organization. It does nothing for your future. ~ Jack Welch,
685:It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects: as the spirit's particular creative mood that had given rise to me, the cosmos; and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit. Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience. ~ Olaf Stapledon,
686:More and more, I have come to realize how thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being . . . in the absolute. . . . When the view is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are: fleeting and transparent, and only relative. . . . You do not cling to thoughts and emotions or reject them, but welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche,
687:Let’s just say when I was little and my mom was out, I’d go to bed with a ketchup bottle.”

“I already love this story so much...”

“It was a foolproof plan. If the bad guys came in I could douse myself and they wouldn’t kill me because I was already dead.”

“Jesus, I can’t tell if that’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard or the absolute most sad. ~ Mary H K Choi,
688:Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
689:Of the many causes that shaped St. Francis’s actions, a primary one was the belief that his actions mattered, and that he had a responsibility to change the world around him. This belief, in itself, is a “cause.” The idea of free will is a self-fulfilling prophecy; those who abide by it are liberated from the absolute determinism of external forces. Chance ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
690:To the physicist – but only to him – I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed. ~ Erwin Schr dinger,
691:Am I scared of the horrible things I know will happen to my kid to hurt him? Absolutely. But would I stop those things at the risk of taking away joy and growth and the absolute embracing of life? Never. Because I love this child for being mine,but I also love him for the being he will be, and I can't tell you how excited I am to watch him discover that for himself. ~ Kiersten White,
692:In the end, it was such a simple, small thing. He had felt flashes of it before in his life, the absolute certainty. But the truth was that he’d kept walking away from it. It was a far more terrifying idea to imagine how much control he really had over how his life turned out. Easier to believe that he was a gallant ship tossed by fate than to captain it himself. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
693:...Freedom of the will is of a wholly unique nature in that an incentive can determine the will to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it the general rule in accordance with which he will conduct himself); only thus can an incentive, whatever it may be, co-exist with the absolute spontaneity of the will (i.e., freedom). ~ Immanuel Kant,
694:It seems to me an utterly futile task to prescribe rules and limitations for the conduct of war. War is not a game; hence one cannot wage war by rules as one would in playing games. Our fight must be against war itself. The masses of people can most effectively fight the institution of war by establishing an organization for the absolute refusal of military service. ~ Albert Einstein,
695:One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush's Iraq War. ~ Adam Hochschild,
696:Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest. ~ Iceberg Slim,
697:The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
698:Trying to maintain a pleasant state and avoid an unpleasant state is actually the cause of sorrow. When you stop resisting, you see that what seems frightening is actually the absolute beauty of reality. When you see that everything is a momentary display of reality, then you stop resisting it. Resistance hurts, only every single time. Love is the state of nonresistance. ~ Adyashanti,
699:He had no secrets left. No defenses. He had nothing, except that same vast, dark, empty, infinite ache that had resided in him for as long as he could remember. An endless flight of stairs, leading down and down into the cold, dark pit of his soul. Now, at long last, he'd reached the absolute rock bottom. And there she was, just standing there. She'd been there all along. ~ Tessa Dare,
700:Maths was "the one true thing," according to Nancy.
"Not love?" Teddy said.
"Oh, love, of course," Nancy said, in an offhanded way. "Love is crucial, but it's an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can't be manipulated." An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him? ~ Kate Atkinson,
701:Everybody’s too stupid for Shifting Winds!” she growls. “You honestly think all those people who claim to love the series actually read the damn books? They haven’t! Because they’re fucking five thousand pages long! I tried to read the first book one time, and the dickwad author spent nine pages describing a tree. Nine pages! Those books are the worst. The absolute worst. ~ Elle Kennedy,
702:The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. ~ Angela Nagle,
703:It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything,. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size....I figured on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt,
704:Magnus remembered lying in the silver sand of the night desert and thinking of quiet places where he did not belong, and how sometimes he believed, as he believed in the passage of time and the joy of living and the absolute merciless unfairness of fate, that there was no quiet place in the world for him, and never would be. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. ~ Cassandra Clare,
705:You are the absolute creator of what happens to you. This means now. [...] There is awesome power in knowing this fact. As long as there is even one tiny part of you that thinks the world is doing it to you, the world is going to do it to you. When you know 100% that you create it, you will start influencing the world around you in a much bigger and more positive way. ~ Gay Hendricks,
706:Biblical inerrancy and the absolute authority of the Bible are thus a post-Reformation Protestant development. The first time the Bible was described as “inerrant” and “infallible” was in a book of Protestant theology written in the second half of the 1600s. Widespread affirmation of biblical inerrancy is even more recent, largely the product of the past one hundred years. ~ Marcus J Borg,
707:Except then I wonder what it's like to feel normal because if you take away the things I've felt all my life--the insecurity, the pain, the loneliness, the absolute dissolution of any sane or rational thought during one of my more manic moods and the helplessness when I realize one of said manic moods is creeping up on me (like right now)--what's left after the fact? Emptiness? ~ Kelley York,
708:Arjuna said: You are the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the ultimate abode, the purest, the Absolute Truth. You are the eternal, transcendental, original person, the unborn, the greatest. All the great sages such as Nārada, Asita, Devala and Vyāsa confirm this truth about You, and now You Yourself are declaring it to me. O Kṛṣṇa, I totally accept as truth all that You have told me. ~ Anonymous,
709:Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth ~ Ayn Rand,
710:Our friends should be our incentives to right, but not only our guiding, but our prophetic, stars. To love by right is much, to love by faith is more; both are the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. We love and ought to love one another, not merely for the absolute worth of each, but on account of a mutual fitness of temporary character. ~ Margaret Fuller,
711:The absolute worst place to begin constructing an identity is you, which is precisely where most counseling begins. The absolute best place to begin constructing an identity is Jesus Christ, which is precisely where Scripture begins. Knowing Jesus and being saved by him in faith is the key to your identity and the defeat of your idolatry. It’s not about you. It’s all about Jesus. ~ Mark Driscoll,
712:How my eyes see, perspective, is my key to enter into His gates. I can only do so with thanksgiving. If my inner eye has God seeping up through all things, then can't I give thanks for anything? And if I can give thanks for the good things, the hard things, the absolute everything, I can enter the gates to glory. Living in His presence is fullness of joy- and seeing shows the way in. ~ Ann Voskamp,
713:Some scientists hate religion, fear it, and rail against it. And some priests and preachers...claim the absolute primacy of biblical revelation over material fact.
Thus they both set a fatal trap for the believer: if you believe in God you can't believe in evolution, and vice versa.
But this is rather like saying if you believe in Tuesday you can't believe in artichokes. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
714:This Bhāgavatam is the essence of all Vedanta philosophy because its subject matter is the Absolute Truth, which, while nondifferent from the spirit soul, is the ultimate reality, one without a second. The goal of this literature is exclusive devotional service unto that Supreme Truth.(BP 12.13.12) ~ Bhaktivedanatha Data Base, in SB 12.13: The Glories of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam Bhaktivedanatha Data Base,
715:You can't stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they'll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they'll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason. ~ Catherynne M Valente,
716:[Mankind's future] was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand—at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society,—having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy. ~ Isaac Asimov,
717:Marriage is a really scary thing. I'm excited about it. I know it's not a mistake, it's the absolute right thing to do. I'm really happy about it. I really, really love my fiancee. We're good friends and I think it's going to work. But that's just the point - it's going to take work. It does make me feel vulnerable to be like, wow, I'm committed to this person for the rest of my life. ~ John Rzeznik,
718:She was the most beautiful thing in my life and my mind had settled long ago that she always would be. I loved her so much I could barely wrap my mind around it. It was like the sun being the center of the universe, the planets all held captive around it, unable to break free of the pull and unable to sustain without its magnificence. She was my sun, the absolute center of my universe. ~ Kahlen Aymes,
719:The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols — so many pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
720:This was the absolute last woman on earth he should want—she was trouble, in so many ways. She was troubled, and that was just one of the reasons he didn’t need this.
This was the absolute last woman on earth he wanted to want—she just plain and simple was trouble—he could feel that in his bones.
And yet, as he stared into those big, green eyes, he did want.
Hell, did he want. ~ Shiloh Walker,
721:While it is certainly true that God’s love for us does not protect us from pain and sorrow, it is also true that all occasions of pain and sorrow are under the absolute control of God. If God controls the circumstances of the sparrow, how much more does He control the circumstances that affect us? God does not walk away and leave us to the mercy of uncontrolled random or chance events. ~ Jerry Bridges,
722:Eternal life is not a gift from God; eternal life is the gift of God. The energy and the power which was so very evident in Jesus will be exhibited in us by an act of the absolute sovereign grace of God, once we have made that complete and effective decision about sin. We have to keep letting go, and slowly, but surely, the great full life of God will invade us, penetrating every part. ~ Oswald Chambers,
723:There is a superior unity of all those who despite all, fight in different parts of the world the same battle, lead the same revolt, and are the bearers of the same intangible Tradition. These forces appear to be scattered and isolated in the world, and yet are inexorably connected by a common essence that is meant to preserve the absolute ideal of the Imperium and to work for its return. ~ Julius Evola,
724:Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. ~ Henry Miller,
725:Esoteric Philosophy...denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ens. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever-Unknowable. ~ H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 (1888),
726:In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none. ~ Woodrow Wilson,
727:Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace. ~ Philip Yancey,
728:It is true that the American colonials have "free elections," in which they have the absolute right to vote for one of two opposing candidates, both of whom have been handpicked and financed by the Rockefeller syndicate. This touching evidence of "democracy" serves to convince most Americana that we are indeed a free people. We even have a cracked Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to prove it. ~ Eustace Mullins,
729:The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears—because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared. ~ Erich Fromm,
730:Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains.[...] It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain? ~ Henri Barbusse,
731:New Orleans, the storm, Perry, the river: they all reminded me not to take anything for granted. It all washes away, and we are all washed away with it. So when then ground is steady and the sky is clear, we should breathe deep until our lungs inflate against our ribs and hold in that one breath until we are lightheaded with the privilege of being human. The absolute privilege of being human. ~ Jacob Tomsky,
732:Bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us...No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream - it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race. ~ John F Kennedy,
733:The essence of my work is; God, or the absolute Spirit, exists-and can be proven-and there is a ladder that reaches to that summit, a ladder that you can be shown how to climb, a ladder that leads from time to eternity, and from death to immortality. And all philosophy and psychology swings into a remarkable synthesis around that ladder. ~ Ken Wilber, The Great Chain of Being, 1987 (unpublished manuscript),
734:The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,
735:Bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us...No longer is the quest for disarmament a sign of weakness, (nor) the destruction of arms a dream - it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race. ~ John F Kennedy,
736:Calvin sets the absolute sovereignty of God and the infallibility of the Bible over against the pretended sovereignty and infallibility of the pope. Fearing God, he was fearless of man. The sense of God’s sovereignty fortified his followers against the tyranny of temporal sovereigns, and made them champions and promoters of civil and political liberty in France, Holland, England, and Scotland. ~ Philip Schaff,
737:Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. ~ Eckhart Tolle,
738:While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. ~ Pope Francis,
739:The risks in antiques fraud are relative. Other criminals risk the absolute. You've never heard of a fraudster involved in a shoot-out, of the "Come and get me, copper!" sort. Or of some con artist needing helicopter gunships to bring him. No, we subtle-mongers do it with the smile, the promise, the hint. And we have one great ally: greed. And make no mistake. Greed is everywhere, like weather. ~ Jonathan Gash,
740:I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely nowhere-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. ~ Cheryl Strayed,
741:The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother?
The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,
742:Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: ~ David Brooks,
743:When he was about a foot away from my face, I thrust the dick in the air like a goddamn sword, and brought it down across his face, smacking him so hard in the face that he literally fell backwards, back hitting the ground like a ton of bricks. I didn’t waste time in staring at him though. I wielded my two-foot dick like The Rock in Walking Tall, and started beating the absolute shit out of him. ~ Lani Lynn Vale,
744:Call me crazy, but I think sex is the absolute most intimate thing you can share with someone. You're making yourself naked and vulnerable to another human being. It should be an act of sharing with someone you know and have feelings for. You're giving a part of yourself to them, and they're giving a part of themselves to you. It doesn't get any more intimate than that. It's not just an act." (Ryan) ~ Dan Skinner,
745:Inspiring all Holmes's championship of free expression was his seeking spirit, his doubt that he or anyone had an avenue to the absolute. "The great act of faith," he wrote to his friend William James (who hardly needed the advice), "is when man decides that he is not God." On his ninetieth birthday he was still reminding young men that his "discovery I was not God" was his "secret of success. ~ Daniel J Boorstin,
746:The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. ~ H L Mencken,
747:Then Krishna says, "O Arjuna, you and I have run the cycle of births and deaths many times, but you are not conscious of them all. I am without beginning, birthless, the absolute Lord of all creation. I through my own nature take form. Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I come to help mankind. For the salvation of the good, for the destruction of wickedness, for the establishment ~ Swami Vivekananda,
748:If at some point in your life you adopt an idea or a perception as the absolute truth, you close the door of your mind. This is the end of seeking the truth. And not only do you no longer seek the truth, but even if the truth comes in person and knocks on your door, you refuse to open it.
Attachment to views, attachment to ideas, attachment to perceptions are the biggest obstacle to the truth. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh,
749:Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them. ~ Jean Vanier,
750:Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man’s needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. “All government in essence,” says Emerson, “is tyranny.” It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. ~ Emma Goldman,
751:In order to banish from the mind the identity of the divine … recourse is had to the idea that God, as the absolute, real Being, has an infinite fulness of various predicates, of which we here know only a part, … those such as are analogous to our own; while the rest, by virtue of which God must have quite a different nature from the human … , we shall only know in the future – that is, after death. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
752:the solution to racism lies in our ability to see its ubiquity but not to concede its inevitability. It lies in the collective and institutional power to make change, at least as much as with the individual will to change. It also lies in the absolute moral imperative to break the childish, deadly circularity of centuries of blindness to the shimmering brilliance of our common, ordinary humanity. ~ Patricia J Williams,
753:[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
754:It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything. ~ Fernando Pessoa,
755:But—for good reasons rooted deeply in the nature of the person and of personal relationships—his preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. And this, among other things, is the reason why an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.1 ~ Dallas Willard,
756:FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It’s the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It’s a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it’s one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong. ~ PZ Myers,
757:In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'. ~ Luc Ferry,
758:The key to the missionary's work is the authority of Jesus Christ, not the needs of the lost. We are inclined to look on our Lord as one who assists us in our endeavors for God. Yet our Lord places Himself as the absolute sovereign and supreme Lord over His disciples. He does not say that the lost will never be saved if we don't go- He simply says, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations...." ~ Oswald Chambers,
759:I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing. ~ Jon Krakauer,
760:Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are ... bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both ... at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. ~ George Perkins Marsh,
761:Nightmares did come true. Because, after her second night of major loving with the man of her dreams, the absolute last person she ever wanted to see was her mother. Yet there she was, her small, hefty frame trundling up the stairs to Maira’s front door.
She was so frozen with horror, she couldn’t move until she heard the doorbell ring.
Don’t answer it. Maybe she’ll go away.
Well, that was just stupid. ~ Alisha Rai,
762:And there I sat, eating Tack’s fabulous (really, they were amazing, he was a scary biker but it couldn’t be denied the man could cook) fajitas and watching a movie that scared the absolute crap out of me while sipping wine and wondering how in the hell I was sitting in my very own living room with Tack and his kids eating his fajitas, sipping wine and watching a movie that scared the absolute crap out of me. ~ Kristen Ashley,
763:For, as the German diplomat and philosopher Max Scheler wrote, “He who has not, as it were, looked into the abyss of the absolute Nothing will completely overlook the eminently positive content of the realization that there is something rather than nothing.” Let us, then, dip briefly into that abyss, with full assurance that we will not come up empty-handed. For, as the old saying goes: Nothing seek, nothing find. ~ Jim Holt,
764:The truth I've discovered is that you don't have to lift enormous weights to grow muscle. By using stricter form, slower negatives, and stretching between sets you can get an incredible pump in all your workouts. Numbers are an abstraction, especially to muscles. Your body doesn't know the absolute weight of what you lift, it only recognizes how heavy it feels. The secret is to make lighter weights feel heavier. ~ Frank Zane,
765:The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain. ~ Shoshana Zuboff,
766:For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to “understand” what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say. ~ Richard Rohr,
767:God wants a love partner, centering on the place where husband and wife become one through their sexual organs, God wants to appear and meet us...I wish you would center on the absolute sexual organ, unique sexual organ, unchanging sexual organ and eternal sexual organ and use this as your foundation to pursue God...We have to realize that the Kingdom of God on earth and in heaven will begin on this foundation. ~ Sun Myung Moon,
768:If, instead of all the diverse powers which excessively hindered or slowed down the flight of reason of the individual, democratic nations substituted the absolute power of a majority, only the character of this social ill would have been changed. Men would not have achieved the means of living independently; they would simply have lighted upon—a difficult enough task in itself—a new face of enslavement. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
769:A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. ~ Jordan Peterson,
770:Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co-religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep. ~ Benjamin H Freedman,
771:When we both experienced the love that consumes, we shared in the Absolute. The Absolute shows each of us who we really are; it is an enormous web of cause and effect, where every small gesture made by one person affects the life of someone else. This morning, that slice of the Absolute was still very much alive in my soul. I was seeing not only you but everything there is in the world, unlimited by space or time. ~ Paulo Coelho,
772:All religions are equal to me. And all castes and creeds are dear to me. But though I appreciate all `isms,' religions and political parties for the many good things they seek to achieve, I do not and cannot belong to any of these `isms,' religions or political parties, for the Absolute Truth, while equally including them, transcends all of them and leaves no room for separative divisions which are all equally false. ~ Meher Baba,
773:You know who Nicolaus Copernicus is?” “Was,” Walker said. “Some old astronomer. Polish, I think. Proved the earth goes around the sun.” Reacher nodded. “And much more than that, by implication. He asked us all to consider how likely is it that we’re at the absolute center of things? What are the odds? That what we’re seeing is somehow exceptional? The very best or the very worst? It’s an important philosophical point. ~ Lee Child,
774:A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
775:Brahman: 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. God.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo?,
776:Wes Clark is a man of whom you can ask a question, and he will look you directly in the eye, and give you the most truthful and complete answer you can imagine. You will know the absolute truth of the statement as well as the thought process behind the answer. You will have no doubt as to the intellect of the speaker and meaning of the answer to this question....So you can see, as a politician, he has a lot to learn. ~ Mario Cuomo,
777:Admit is a beautiful word—it means both “tell the truth” and “allow in.” To admit present experience—to tell the truth about what is actually present—is to recognize that what’s present has already been admitted into life. The waves appearing at present have already been admitted into the ocean, and admitting that they exist is at the absolute core of this teaching. Waking up is all about admitting who you really are! ~ Jeff Foster,
778:It is easy to leave, once you are used to leaving. Easy to feel the moment of it approaching, to sense the loosening of the ropes that bound you to the earth. One becomes adept in noticing the absolute apex of love or belief from which it will inevitably decline. There comes a point when one can even begin to love leaving, the only constant we carry with us. The man who wanders forever is not cursed, he is blessed. ~ Naomi Alderman,
779:have no interest in handing down an indictment of mankind. If I did, I’d point out that for every Michelangelo there’s a Marquis de Sade, for every Gandhi an Eichmann, for every Martin Luther King an Osama bin Laden. Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.” He ~ Stephen King,
780:He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. ~ Cormac McCarthy,
781:That is what is meant by the proposition omne ens est verum (everything that is, is true)—though we have almost ceased to understand it—and by the complementary proposition that being and truth are interchangeable concepts. (What does truth mean, where things are concerned, the truth of things? “A thing is true” means: it is known and knowable, known to the absolute spirit, knowable to the spirit that is not absolute. ~ Josef Pieper,
782:thousands of lungs will swell as one across the way, thousands of livers will be soaked with beer, thousands of kidneys will, simultaneously, filter bodily substances, and thousands of hearts will pump blood, and suddenly she is struck by the fragmentation of the world, by the absolute discontinuity of reality in this small area, by the thought of humanity being sprayed in an infinite divergence of trajectories— ~ Maylis de Kerangal,
783:Baby, I have no idea how this will end. Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth’s hips and our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary or maybe tomorrow my absolute insanity combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills will leave us like a love letter in a landfill. But whatever, however, whenever this ends I want you to know that right now, I love you forever. ~ Andrea Gibson,
784:It was the end for me. And yet not an end. In all the years which have since elapsed she remains the woman I loved and lost, the unattainable one [...] I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.

—Henry Miller, Stand Still like the Hummingbird (1962) ~ Henry Miller,
785:So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute. ~ Theodor Adorno,
786:The Church encourages those in power to be truly at the service of the common good of their peoples. She urges financial leaders to take account of ethics and solidarity. And why should they not turn to God to draw inspiration from his designs? In this way, a new political and economic mindset would arise that would help to transform the absolute dichotomy between the economic and social spheres into a healthy symbiosis. ~ Pope Francis,
787:I believe that you have the absolute right to think things that I find offensive, stupid, preposterous or dangerous, and that you have the right to speak, write, or distribute these things, and that I do not have the right to kill you, maim you, hurt you, or take away your liberty or property because I find your ideas threatening or insulting or downright disgusting. You probably think some of my ideas are pretty vile too. I ~ Neil Gaiman,
788:The Cuban people along with international solidarity defeated this imperial position [America] in the middle of the 21st century and have demonstrated the potential of a nation that has lived under an iron handed blockade and permanent aggression including state sponsored terrorism and yet has survived. In the new circumstances we have the absolute conviction that we will move forward even more than we already have. ~ Alejandro Castro Espin,
789:The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. ~ Pope Francis,
790:In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency ...and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe. ~ Eugen Drewermann,
791:It wasn’t fair. Mollie had spent her entire life trying to do the right thing—going out of her way to do what she was supposed to, even when she wanted to do the exact opposite. But tonight her heart had betrayed her. Tonight her heart had done the wrong thing. No, the absolute worst thing.

Tonight, at her sister’s wedding, Mollie Carrington had gone and fallen head over heels in love.

With the groom. ~ Lauren Layne,
792:Humanity is no longer the same. Its needs are no longer the same, and the needs of all around the world are recognizable. We need jobs. We need food. We need shelter. We need health care. We need education. These few things are the absolute necessities of all people everywhere, and yet even in the most-developed world, like America and Europe, no one has all of these things by right, unless they have money - and this is the rub. ~ Benjamin Creme,
793:One of the characteristic aspects of our time is that we fear the future. We fear the unholy powers unleashed by science. We fear the absolute power of states more tyrannical than the tyrannies of the past because they strive to rule men’s minds as well as their bodies. And writers, who can imagine the dreadful details of such a future more vividly than the rest of us, write books capable of troubling our sleep indefinitely. . . . ~ Ray Bradbury,
794:There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to [all others]...We have to ask: 'What is the [absolute] vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims these different scriptures make? ~ Lesslie Newbigin,
795:Lately... Americans have begun to understand that trouble does not start somewhere on the other side of town. It seems to originate inside the absolute middle of the homemade cherry pie. In our history, the state has failed to respond to the weak. You could be white, male, Presbyterian and heterosexual besides, but if you get fired or if you get sick tomorrow, you might as well be Black, for all the state will want to hear from you. ~ June Jordan,
796:The Divine Grace alone has the power to intervene and change the course of Universal Justice. The great work of the Avatar is to manifest the Divine Grace upon earth. To be a disciple of the Avatar is to become an instrument of the Divine Grace. The Mother is the great dispensatrix-through identity-of the Divine Grace, with a perfect knowledge-through identity-of the absolute mechanism of Universal Justice.
   ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,
797:Of all the attributes which the understanding assigns to God, that which … especially in the Christian religion … has … pre-eminence … is moral perfection. But God as a morally perfect being is nothing else than the realised idea, … the moral nature of man posited as the absolute being; … how could he otherwise tremble before the Divine Being, accuse himself before him, and make him the judge of his inmost thoughts and feelings? ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
798:The mind that doesn’t need any outer conditions for happiness is the mind that can say, “This is the release from all suffering. This is true happiness.” Such a mind sees with clarity the absolute reality of what’s happening in this universe and doesn’t have to hang on to anything, attach to anything, doesn’t have to become anything, doesn’t have to be anything. It just does what is necessary at each particular moment and then lets go. ~ Ayya Khema,
799:To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself. ~ George Santayana,
800:It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people the love they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price. ~ Nick Cutter,
801:For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate. ~ Emil M Cioran,
802:The challenge that faced the English in the seventeenth century was how to curb the absolute power of the monarch. In the twenty-first century, it is the markets that have taken on the mantle of absolutism, placing themselves above the jurisdiction of national governments. Holding the king to account was unprecedented and went against custom and tradition - holding the global markets to account is just as audacious and just as necessary. ~ Billy Bragg,
803:There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to [all others] . . . We have to ask: ‘What is the [absolute] vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims these different scriptures make?’8 ~ Timothy J Keller,
804:There is a scripture in the Buddhist tradition called the Heart Sutra, which says that there is no birth, no old age, and no death, and no end to birth, old age, or death. This is a very important part of the sutra. There is no birth, no old age, and no death. This is true from the absolute point of view. But unless we’ve also realized, simultaneously, that there is no end to birth, old age, and death, then our realization is not complete. ~ Adyashanti,
805:I've noticed that there can be a visceral reaction to strong statements about poetry, as if anyone who has an opinion and expresses it is shutting people down. It's funny to see that expressed, and then to go back and read poetic statements by the great poets of the past: they are full of a passionate conviction! It is clearly possible to express strong feelings about poetry while also defending the absolute right of myriad approaches. ~ Matthew Zapruder,
806:The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system. ~ Hermann Broch,
807:You know the best example of sincerity? The absolute gold standard?

Who?

Angus pointed to the door, outside which Cyril was waiting patiently. A dog. Have you ever met an insincere dog - a dog who hides his true feelings?
Domenica looked thoughtful.

And cats?

Dreadfully insincere, said Angus. Psychopaths- every one of them. Show me a cat, Domenica, and I'll show you a psychopath. Textbook examples. ~ Alexander McCall Smith,
808:All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty. ~ Charles Baudelaire,
809:It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time. ~ Lewis Thomas,
810:The absolute equality of races—physical, political and social—is the founding stone of world peace and human advancement. No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment among individuals of all races, but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior.” For Du Bois, “To deny this fact is to throw ~ Jon Meacham,
811:I have a rule of thumb now and that's that somebody [she dates] has to have been married and they have to have had kids. Everything boils down to perspective. If your potential mate does not have the same perspective that you do then you're going to be lost.... If somebody has never been married, they don't know compromise ... [and] if they don't have children, they don't know the absolute self-sacrifice it takes and what it means to be a parent. ~ Eva LaRue,
812:What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly ~ Slavoj i ek,
813:In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleeting aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary. ~ Frank Herbert,
814:Kingsley wrote to Maurice, ‘They find that now they have got rid of an interfering God – a master-magician, as I call it – they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God.’21 To another correspondent, an atheist, he wrote, ‘Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral atheism. Don’t forget the Eternal Goodness, whatever you call it. I call it God.’22 ~ A N Wilson,
815:What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly ~ Slavoj Zizek,
816:I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. ~ Jack Kerouac,
817:In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are somtimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary. ~ Frank Herbert,
818:I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible - determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders. ~ Susan Vreeland,
819:Straight away, remove yourself from the field of spiritual progression , stay away from contemplation and skillful discourse, do not do research or meditate on the divinities, and stop concentrating and reciting textbooks! Tell me, what is the absolute nature of reality which allows no room for doubt? Listen carefully! Stop holding on to this or that, inhabit your true absolute nature, and peacefully enjoy the essence of what it is to be alive! ~ Abhinavagupta,
820:There is one person who will never let you down, will never fail you. Jesus Christ. He is perfect. Sinless. Faultless. He loves you more than you love yourself. He is always there. Always watching you. Never turning an eye from you. He loves you as though there were no other person to love. He will never, never, never fail you. Ever. Count on it. My whole life and ministry are based upon this premise: the absolute, unwavering perfection of Jesus. ~ R T Kendall,
821:As the Hindu sages who fashioned the Akashic concept realized, there are aspects of the human mind that are unlimited in space, therefore omnipresent, and that are also boundless in time, therefore eternal and immortal. Omnipresence and eternality are qualities that have always been attributed to the Divine—thus the Hindu aphorism Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which affirms that we share qualities with the Godhead or the Absolute, however named. ~ Ervin Laszlo,
822:The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system. ~ Hermann Broch,
823:What good is it to me to have an authority always ready to see to the tranquil enjoyment of my pleasures, to brush away all dangers from my path without my having to think about them, if such an authority, as well as removing thorns from under my feet, is also the absolute master of my freedom or if it so takes over all activity and life that around it all must languish when it languishes, sleep when it sleeps and perish when it perishes. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
824:I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders... ~ Susan Vreeland,
825:So long, therefore, as the object of the mystic's contemplation is amenable to thought, is something which he can "know," he may be quite sure that it is not the Absolute; but only a partial image or symbol of the Absolute. To find that final Reality, he must enter into the "cloud of unknowing"--must pass beyond the plane on which the intellect can work. "When I say darkness," says the same great mystic, "I mean thereby a lack of knowing. . . . ~ Evelyn Underhill,
826:I would like to quote a very prejudicial doctrine that was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1823. It said that the Indian Nations do not have title to their lands because they weren't Christians. That the first Christian Nations to discover an area of heathen lands has the absolute title. This doctrine should be withdrawn and renounced to establish a new basis for relationship between indigenous peoples and other peoples of the world. ~ Floyd Red Crow Westerman,
827:/Farsi & Turkish The Absolute works with nothing. The workshop, the materials are what does not exist. Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. [2652.jpg] -- from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (A Poetry Chaikhana Anthology), Edited by Ivan M. Granger

~ Jalaluddin Rumi, The Absolute works with nothing
,
828:He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing. ~ Jon Krakauer,
829:I am not even six feet tall. Yet I am praying to the Absolute Supreme to reach His infinite Height, which is far beyond even my imagination's flight. For me to long to grow into that Height - is this not a miracle?  I am mortal. My thoughts, my deeds, my experiences - everything that I have and everything that I am - represent mortality. Yet despite everything that I have and everything that I am, I am longing for Immortality. Is this not a miracle? ~ Sri Chinmoy,
830:...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious. ~ Julian Huxley,
831:The Buddhas and the Christs are born complete. They neither seek love nor give love, because they are love itself. But we who are born again and again must discover the meaning of love, must learn to live love as the flower lives beauty.
How wonderful, if only you can believe it, act on it! Only the fool, the absolute fool, is capable of it. He alone is free to plumb the depths and scour the heavens. His innocence preserves him. He asks no protection. ~ Henry Miller,
832:I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar. ~ Richard P Feynman,
833:A spouse was the absolute best thing a supervillain could have. It was the superheroes who struck me as the perpetual bachelors. I mean, come on, the whole ‘it’s not you, it’s my enemies’ thing is so they can stay single and get sex from the people they rescue. I have it on good authority the Silver Lightning uses it all the time to pick up guys. Admittedly, the good authority was my brother’s old gang but if you couldn’t trust them then who could you trust? ~ C T Phipps,
834:The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences* which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God’s universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous,
835:Two different primaries," she continued, striding around the office. "Two different cops, and both of them fucked up the case. What are they using to train them in Chicago -- old videos of the Three Boobs?"
"I think that's Stooges," Roarke remarked.
"What?"
He glanced up, focused fully on her, and smiled at the absolute baffled fury on her face. "Stooges, darling. The Three Stooges."
"What's the difference, they're still incompetent knot-heads. ~ J D Robb,
836:The intellect searches out the Absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
837:Errors and exaggerations do not matter. What matters is boldness in thinking with a strong-pitched voice, in speaking out about things as one feels them in the moment of speaking; in having the temerity to proclaim what one believes to be true without fear of the consequences. If one were to await the possession of the absolute truth, one must be either a fool or a mute. If the creative impulse were muted, the world would then be stayed on its march. ~ Jose Clemente Orozco,
838:I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain ... In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar. ~ Richard P Feynman,
839:Locke said that there is a circle of freedom surrounding each person and all people at birth. And within that circle is the absolute human right to live and live freely. This is a natural right born of natural law or the law of nature. It is divine and eternal, unalterable by mankind. Moreover, man also has the ability to reason. And it is through reason that he discovers and discerns natural law, his natural rights, and their application to all of humanity. ~ Mark R Levin,
840:Meditation is the only way to overcome fear. There is no other way. Why does meditation help us overcome fear? In meditation we identify ourselves with the vast, with the Absolute. When we are afraid of someone or something, it is because we do not feel that particular person or thing is a part of us. When we have established conscious oneness with the Absolute, with the Infinite Vast, the everything there is part of us. And how can we be afraid of ourselves? ~ Sri Chinmoy,
841:In India the mother is the center of the family and our highest ideal. She is to us the representative of God, as God is the mother of the universe. It was a female sage who first found the unity of God, and laid down this doctrine in one of the first hy mns of the Vedas. Our God is both personal and absolute, the absolute is male, the personal, female. And thus it comes that we now say: 'The first manifestation of God is the hand that rocks the cradle'. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
842:In India the mother is the center of the family and our highest ideal. She is to us the representative of God, as God is the mother of the universe. It was a female sage who first found the unity of God, and laid down this doctrine in one of the first hy mns of the Vedas. Our God is both personal and absolute, the absolute is male, the personal, female. And thus it comes that we now say: 'The first manifestation of God is the hand that rocks the cradle'. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
843:All work is noble, if it is legal and ethical, so do your best, whether you are first, second, or last. Never lose an opportunity, a job, an election, a competition, or anything else because you were too lazy to give it your best effort. Certainly, you need rest and recreation, but keep those in balance with hard work. Remember, while you are partying, someone else is working hard to succeed. It’s okay to be second, as long as you do the absolute best you can do. ~ Buzz Aldrin,
844:As science attained unprecedented power through its ability to predict and control certain limited aspects of nature, it also began to overshadow our understanding of ethics and values. History has shown that decisions affecting millions were made on the basis of industrial expediency, technological imperatives, and economic pressures. Just as the absolute power held by the church for centuries had been seductive, the growing power of science had seduced as well.6 ~ Dean Radin,
845:Locke said that there is a circle of freedom surrounding each person and all people at birth. And within that circle is the absolute human right to live and live freely. This is a natural right born of natural law or the law of nature. It is divine and eternal, unalterable by mankind. Moreover, man also has the ability to reason. And it is through reason that he discovers and discerns natural law, his natural rights, and their application to all of humanity. Let ~ Mark R Levin,
846:The key to affording higher wages (we’re talking frontline employees, not senior leadership) is a lower total wage cost as a percent of revenue. You have to remain competitive, and the best companies know that one great person can replace three good ones. Through rigorous selection (i.e., Topgrading), they get the absolute best talent in the door, pay employees above-market rates, and then invest heavily in training and development to make them more productive. ~ Verne Harnish,
847:[Georg Cantor was the first to prove that there could be a series of infinities; that infinities come in an infinite number of sizes.] Thus Cantor's Absolute is a perfect image for what we experience of God. When I speak of a Big Enough God I am not merely thinking of an Infinite God, but the God of infinities, the Absolute, which either chooses to reveal itself or remains veiled in mystery. Modern mathematics does begin to feel like the language that God talks. ~ Sara Maitland,
848:I have a strange situation as far as my name is concerned, because of course, what should my name really be? Is it my traditional Jewish name? Or this curious name my parents put together, partially to honor departed family members, and partially to keep me away from the absolute craziness of my grandparents' fame and the intrusiveness of their fans? So many people call me "MTT," and some do say, "Oh Maestro," and some are comfortable calling me Michael. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas,
849:The Wise Man believes profoundly in silence - the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astire on the tree, not a ripple upon the surface of the shinning pool-his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman,
850:As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as under the dominance of these wants he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world. [T]hat is, indeed, only of man considered as Christian; for Christianity, in contradiction with the genuine universal human heart, recognised man only under the condition, the limitation, of belief in Christ. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
851:It would convert the Treasury of the United States into a manufactory of paper money. It makes the House of Representatives and the Senate, or the caucus of the party which happens to be in the majority, the absolute dictator of the financial and business affairs of this country. This scheme surpasses all the centralism and all the Caesarism that were ever charged upon the Republican party in the wildest days of the war or in the events growing out of the war. ~ James A Garfield,
852:Primitive man's life in Hobbes' famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes' ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king's will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves. ~ Lewis Mumford,
853:The wise man believes profoundly in silence, the sign of a perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence - not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree, not a ripple upon the surface of the shinning pool - his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life. Silence is the cornerstone of character. ~ Charles Alexander Eastman,
854:When you come face to face with absolute reliability, you tend, first of all, to burst into silly laughter. You just come all undone. It's like-this is a funny way to put it, I know, but it's like chuckling with relief after loosening your belt. Young men, if ever the one you love bursts out laughing the moment she sees you, you are to be congratulated. By no means must you reproach her. She has merely been overwhelmed by the absolute reliability she senses in you. ~ Osamu Dazai,
855:Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth; in visible nature, it is the sun: in the subterranean and mineral world, it is the purest and most perfect gold. Hence the search after the Great Work is called the Search for the Absolute, and this work itself is termed the operation of the sun. ~ liphas L vi,
856:The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ~ Milan Kundera,
857:Is not our body in itself nothing but a common central effect of our senses—if we have mastery over our senses—if we are able to transform them into activity at will—to center them at a common point, then it only depends on us—to give ourselves the body we want.

Indeed, in our senses are nothing other than modifications of the mental organ—of the absolute element—then with mastery over this element we shall also be able to modify and direct our senses as we please. ~ Novalis,
858:I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. ~ Stephen Fry,
859:Scripture teaches us that there is not one truth on which Christ insisted more frequently, both with His disciples and with those who came seeking His help, than the absolute necessity of faith and its unlimited possibilities. Experience has taught us that there is nothing in which we come so short as the simple and absolute trust in God to fulfill literally in us all that He has promised. A life in the abiding presence must of necessity be a life of unceasing faith. ~ Andrew Murray,
860:I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman. ~ Georges Braque,
861:You never want to be the absolute leader in the game of life, the man out front, the one everyone sees and looks to,” Leyers said. “That’s where my poor Willy made his mistake. He got out front, right there in the light. You see, Vorarbeiter, in the game of life, it is always preferable to be a man of the shadows, and even the darkness, if necessary. In this way, you run things, but you are never, ever seen. You are like a . . . phantom of the opera. You are like . . ~ Mark T Sullivan,
862:I know a lot of people don't like the big phone [ iPhone] because they can't use it one-handed. But I'm telling you, it is a marvel. Aside from a couple of things, it's my favorite thing that I have. It's just the absolute best. The thinking, the inventiveness, the innovation that's in these devices blows me away. It's the first thing to come along in a long time that actually makes me regret getting older. I'm now realizing the tech that I'm going to miss at some point. ~ Donald Trump,
863:Equipped as he is by his very nature for worship, man cannot not worship ; and if his outlook is cut off from the spiritual plane, he will find a “god” to worship at some lower level, thus endowing something relative with what belongs only to the Absolute. Hence the existence today of so many “words to conjure with” like “freedom”, “equality”, “literacy”, “science”, “civilization”, words at the utterance of which a multitude of souls fall prostrate in sub-mental adoration. ~ Martin Lings,
864:I AM A CONSISTENT WINNER BECAUSE: 1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors. 7. I understand the absolute necessity of these principles of consistent success and, therefore, I never violate them. ~ Mark Douglas,
865:It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity, even the processes of mere thought, must culminate in the absolute quiet of contemplation.11 Every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in complete human stillness.12 Traditionally ~ Hannah Arendt,
866:Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free, he'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species.
An animal carries out its slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand, claims to aspire to the absolute. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky,
867:What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions? ~ Albert Camus,
868:Ethics involves the question of authority. The Christian lives under the sovereignty of God, who alone may claim lordship over us. Christian ethics is theocentric as opposed to secular or philosophical ethics, which tend to be anthropocentric. For the humanist, man is the norm, the ultimate standard of behavior. Christians, however, assert that God is the center of all things and that His character is the absolute standard by which questions of right and wrong are determined. ~ R C Sproul,
869:Off course, life has no point. If it had, man would not be free. He'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species.
An animal carries out his slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand claims to aspire to the absolute. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky,
870:The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. ~ Aldous Huxley,
871:When you are raised in a place like Cadiz, in a time like ours, you learned the signs. The absolute silence, followed by the soft, near imperceptible click of metal against stone. The soft whir of gears just loud enough to announce itself. The Vath rarely sent men to our homes. When they did—well. The cruelty of men knew few bounds. So there was some relief when the first body through the door was an Imperial droid, chrome and silver, its body etched in cruel, sharp designs. ~ Somaiya Daud,
872:The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right. ~ Angela Nagle,
873:Love makes the world go 'round, it's true, but lust stops the world in its tracks; love renders bearable the passage of time, lust causes time to stand still, lust kills time, which is not to say that it wastes it or whiles it aimlessly away but rather that it annihilates it, cancels it, extirpates it from continuum; preventing, while lasts, any lapse into the tense and shabby woes of temporal society, lust is the thousand-pound odometer needle on the dashboard of the absolute. ~ Tom Robbins,
874:According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance—that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore human, and may be called māyā or illusion. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man,
875:Mankind occurs as male or female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in ontological reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the genius, has such a relation, and for him the absolute is either the conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of absolute beauty, and then he is an artist. ~ Otto Weininger,
876:I have been aware for many years that most people do not think about aging in the same way that they think about cancer, or diabetes, or heart disease. They are strongly in favor of the absolute elimination of such diseases as soon as possible, but the idea of eliminating aging—maintaining truly youthful physical and mental function indefinitely—evokes an avalanche of fears and reservations. Yet, in the sense that matters most, aging is just like smoking: It’s really bad for you. ~ Aubrey de Grey,
877:What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition? ~ Albert Camus,
878:Pulitzer's Gold is a goldmine of inspiration for both journalists and non-journalists. Those in the newspaper business, who now find themselves obsessing about staff cutbacks and circulation declines, should embrace this book as a reminder of the highest ideals, and the absolute thrills, to be found in their profession. As for regular readers, Pulitzer's Gold offers marvelous storytelling, real-life adventures, and absolute proof that journalism can change our world for the better. ~ Jeffrey Zaslow,
879:Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do. He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks of what might called the absolute beginning of the personal life. He lacks what at moments is indispensable for the personal life, lacks both the regeneration and rejuvenation, the cleaning baptism of irony that redeems the soul from having its life in finitude though living boldly and energetically in finitude. ~ Soren Kierkegaard,
880:Many in the White House expressed a shocked appreciation of Putin’s chutzpah: Had he really made such fantastical propositions, much less gotten the president to agree to them? In some surreal sense, this was a moment when effectively the entire U.S. government realized that its leader was not only tragically—or comically—out of his depth, but a pitiable mark. It was almost impossible to overstate the absolute bewilderment in the government or the rising panic in the Republican Party. ~ Michael Wolff,
881:Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream––grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. ~ Jack Kerouac,
882:We've got Donald Trump who doesn't want to go single payer, and this the Democrats and the establishment know. So there are two options here, and it's interesting to note that if you listen to the media and you listen to the Democrats, repealing Obamacare is the worst thing that could be done, but it isn't. Staying with Obamacare and letting it implode is the absolute worst outcome here. Repealing it means you repeal it. You get rid of every Obamacare law, and that means you start over. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
883:There is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits. ~ Kenny Smith,
884:Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,
885:It has often been argued that absolute scepticism is self-contradictory; but this is a mistake: and even if it were not so, it would be no argument against the absolute sceptic, inasmuch as he does not admit that no contradictory propositions are true. Indeed, it would be impossible to move such a man, for his scepticism consists in considering every argument and never deciding upon its validity; he would, therefore, act in this way in reference to the arguments brought against him. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce,
886:And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity here. A movement, an event in the tiny coloured world of men is only relatively absurd: by relation to the accompanying circumstances. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,
887:If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. ~ Jordan Peterson,
888:Obamacare is an absolute disaster! And half the country knows it's a disaster because the alternative media read the bill and told you what's in it and gave you the absolute anti-American contents to this piece-of-garbage bill. Half of the country doesn't know what's in it. They think it's free health care because that's what Obama's been out lying to people, you keep your doctor, keep your plan and your premium's coming down $2,500. People were lied to through his teeth. And they believed him. ~ Rush Limbaugh,
889:What happened was that I caught a glimpse of something I desperately needed to believe in at that point in my life. I wanted to believe there could be something within you that was so essential and so courageous that nothing - no boyfriend, no employer, no trauma - could tarnish or rob you of it. And if you had that kind of unbreakable core, not only would it always be yours, but even in your darkest moments others would see it in you, and help you out before the worse came to the absolute worst. ~ Gwen Cooper,
890:If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
891:The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of the heathenism of his day, is fully sustained by Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of that age, and shows the absolute need of redemption. "The world," says Seneca, in a famous passage, "is full of crimes and vices. More are committed than can be cured by force. There is an immense struggle for iniquity. Crimes are no longer bidden, but open before the eyes. Innocence is not only rare, but nowhere."83  ~ Philip Schaff,
892:The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination. ~ Pope John Paul II,
893:He came back into the room and frowned at the calendar. He didn’t want to know what today’s message said, because yesterday’s was the absolute worst. He’d said hello and everything had turned upside down.
Gus frowned, because he was good at it.
“Ugh,” he said. “Fine.”
We don’t meet people by accident. They are meant to cross our path for a reason.
Gus stared at the inspirational calendar.
“Are you spying on me?” he eventually whispered.
The inspirational calendar did not reply. ~ T J Klune,
894:So what does the color blue say about you?” He studies all the parts of my face—mouth, nose, ears, chin—as if he’s memorizing it for an exam. Then his eyes return to mine. “It says I never had a favorite color until I met this girl in a coffee shop with eyes so blue, they’re almost purple, like the absolute final moments before sunrise. This girl stayed on my mind. When I saw things like a cluster of irises or a peacock at the zoo, I would think of her and say to myself, that is my favorite color. ~ Jessica Hawkins,
895:This experience which we call things, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, forms, and weights is, in itself, no thing, no form, no number, no nothing—but at this moment we behold it. We are, then, beholding the God which traditional doctrines call the boundless, formless, infinite, eternal, undivided, unmoved, and unchanging Reality—the Absolute behind the relative, the Meaning behind thoughts and words.1 Naturally the Meaning is meaning-less because, unlike words, it does not have meaning but is meaning. ~ Alan W Watts,
896:It was true that Swann had often reflected that Odette was in no way a remarkable woman, and there was nothing especially flattering in seeing the supremacy he wielded over someone so inferior to himself proclaimed to all the “faithful”; but since he had observed that to many other men besides himself Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for them had aroused in him a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart. ~ Marcel Proust,
897:Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary ~ Salman Rushdie,
898:Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary. ~ Salman Rushdie,
899:Love is about a state of grace. You experience it when you accept the absolute truth of the other person, both the cruel and the divine, and they accept these things in you, and you find that you still long to share a life with them. To know the worst in another and still want them with all your soul. To know that they feel the same. It is a sense of security and power. And once you have arrived at this, the richness of romance and passion that appears is not blinding. Instead, it is invulnerable and forever. ~ Cody McFadyen,
900:And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods. ~ Julian Jaynes,
901:Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
902:It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything. If only I knew how to think! If only I knew how to feel! My mother died too soon for me to ever know her … ~ Fernando Pessoa,
903:Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. ~ Soren Kierkegaard,
904:In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive. ~ Evelyn Underhill,
905:It has been stated that Ferrer prepared the children to destroy the rich. Ghost stories of old maids. Is it not more likely that he prepared them to succor the poor? That he taught them the humiliation, the degradation, the awfulness of poverty, which is a vice and not a virtue; that he taught the dignity and importance of all creative efforts, which alone sustain life and build character. Is it not the best and most effective way of bringing into the proper light the absolute uselessness and injury of parasitism? ~ Emma Goldman,
906:Since death, as the existential horizon of Dasein, is considered absolute, it becomes the absolute in the form of an icon. There is here a regression to the cult of death; thus the jargon has from the beginning gotten along well with military manners. Now, as earlier, that answer is valid which Horkheimer gave to an enthusiastic female devotee of Heidegger's. She said that Heidegger had finally, at least, once again placed men before death; Horkheimer replied that Ludendorff had taken care of that much better. ~ Theodor W Adorno,
907:These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault, however. The blame lay with a certain ubiquitous spirit of the times, transmitted to them by their respective mothers. And perhaps it goes without saying that this "spirit of the times" was in fact an oppressive value system based primarily upon the absolute certainty that nothing in this world was ever going to change. ~ Ry Murakami,
908:The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. ~ Flannery O Connor,
909:Your Honor,” he said with a small smile, “the defense in this matter will reserve the right to make its opening statement until the completion of the prosecution’s case.” MacNamara stared at Tommy. “That is unusual,” he said. “I’m not sure—” “We have the absolute right, under military law, to postpone our opening,” Tommy said swiftly, not having any idea at all whether he was right or wrong. “We are under no obligation to display our defense to the prosecution until such time that it becomes our turn to present it. ~ John Katzenbach,
910:Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable. ~ Bela Bartok,
911:The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves. As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL. William James,
The Principles of Psychology ~ Caleb Carr,
912:Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time. . . Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality. ~ Barbara Kingsolver,
913:All was found there the Unique has dreamed and made
   Tinging with ceaseless rapture and surprise
   And an opulent beauty of passionate difference
   The recurring beat that moments God in Time.
   Only was missing the sole timeless Word
   That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
   The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
   The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
   That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
   The single sign interpreting every sign,
   The absolute index to the Absolute.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,
914:Because of … this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; … God is … a subject; … the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians … deify the human individual, make him the absolute being. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach,
915:Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me. ~ Stephen Fry,
916:Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty,
917:Questioner: We were told about karma and reincarnation, evolution and Yoga, masters and disciples. What are we to do with all this knowledge?

Maharaj: Leave it all behind you. Forget it. Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The Absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don't be half-hearted.

Q: I must begin with some absolute truth. Is there any?

M: Yes, there is, the feeling: 'I am'. Begin with that. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj,
918:It is said that one can understand the Supreme Personality of Godhead when one is even slightly favored by Him; otherwise, without His mercy, a man may speculate for thousands of years and not understand what is actually the Absolute Truth. This mercy can be perceived by the devotee when he is completely freed from contamination. It is stated, therefore, that only when all contamination is rooted out and the devotee is completely detached from material attractions can he receive this mercy of the Lord. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhup da,
919:The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case may be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, thought not to the theory, of toleration. ~ Bertrand Russell,
920:What most of us need, almost more than anything, is the courage and humility really to ask for help, from the depths of our hearts: to ask for the compassion of the enlightened beings, to ask for purification and healing, to ask for the power to understand the meaning of our suffering and transform it; at a relative level to ask for the growth in our lives of clarity, peace, and discernment, and to ask for the realization of the absolute nature of mind that comes from merging with the deathless wisdom mind of the master. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche,
921:The absolute monarch was supposed to serve the interests of the nation as a whole, to be the visible exponent and proof of the existence of such a common interest. The enlightened despotism was based on [Duc de] Rohan's "kings command the peoples and interest commands the king"; with the abolition of the king and sovereignty of the people, this common interest was in constant danger of being replaced by a permanent conflict among class interests and struggle for control of state machinery, that is, by a permanent civil war. ~ Hannah Arendt,
922:Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government, and earthly despotism would be the absolute perfect earthly government if the conditions were the same; namely the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual; but as a perishable, perfect man must die and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible. ~ Mark Twain,
923:One more thing is absolutely forbidden in the capital of the Islamic State: mocking Muslims or Islam. And on May 3, 2015, jihadis loyal to ISIS attempted to impose the death penalty on offenders against that rule—including some Christians, a Jewish woman, and an atheist—who had dared to mock Islam and its Prophet. But the criminals who were guilty of flouting the absolute respect that the Islamic State demands for their religion on pain of death were not in Raqqa. We were in Garland, Texas—as were our would-be executioners. ~ Robert Spencer,
924:Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.
Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute. ~ T S Eliot,
925:A ridiculous fear pursued me, in fact: one could not die without having confessed all one's lies. Not to God or to one of his representatives; I was above that, as you well imagine. No, it was a matter of confessing to men, to a friend, to a beloved woman, for example. Otherwise, were there but one lie hidden in life, death made it definitive. No one, ever again, would know the truth at this point, since the only one to know it was precisely the dead man sleeping on his secret. The absolute murder of truth used to make me dizzy. ~ Albert Camus,
926:When sin is characterized as a crime, we see that Christ is the One Who actually comes under judgment in the drama of the atonement. He functions as the Substitute, the One Who stands in the place of the true criminals-you and me.
Christ, then, is the One Who made satisfaction. By His work on the cross, He satisfied the demands of God's justice with regard to our debt, our state of enmity, and our crime. In light of the facts of God's justice and our sinfulness, it is not difficult to see the absolute necessity of the atonement. ~ R C Sproul,
927:Kali's nakedness shows that she has cast away illusion; in her, the entire truth about life and death is revealed. Even her color is esoteric; Kali's dark colors stand for the ultimate void state, where as differences dissolve into the absolute beyond all form. Her sword is the force that slices delusion, ignorance, false hope, and lies. Her position on top of Shiva reveals that she is the dynamic force in the universe, the power that churns the stillness of the void, so worlds can be created inside that transcendent nothingness. ~ Sally Kempton,
928:Travis staggered backward, the hurt plainly displayed in his eyes. "A toast!" he yelled.
I flinched, turning just in time to see him climbing onto a chair, stealing a beer from the shocked Sig Tau brother closest to him. I glanced to America, who watched Travis with a pained expression.
"To douchebags!" he said, gesturing to Brad. "And to girls that break your heart, he bowed his head to me. His eyes lost focus. "And to the absolute horror of losing your best friend because you were stupid enough to fall in love with her. ~ Jamie McGuire,
929:Didn’t Gran make a beautiful bride, Jackson?” Celia asked.
“Hmm? Yes. Beautiful.” He covered her gloved hand with his. “Though not nearly as beautiful a bride as you were.”
She smiled. “Flatterer.”
“Not a bit. It’s the absolute truth.”
“You were a gorgeous bride,” Aunt Ada agreed. “That veil with the rosettes…”
And they were off again, discussing gauze and ribbons and something called a furbelow. That last one sounded dirty, but he figured it probably wasn’t, it they were discussing it with such enthusiasm. ~ Sabrina Jeffries,
930:Now I remember the story. A True Man stares at his old shoes and sheepskin jacket. Every day he goes up to his attic to look at his work-shoes and worn-out coat. This is his wisdom, to remember the original clay and not get drunk with ego and arrogance. To visit those shoes and jacket is praise. The Absolute works with nothing. The workshop, the materials are what does not exist. Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. ~ Rumi,
931:By the end of the eighteenth century it had become clear that none of the estates or classes in the various countries was willing or able to become the new ruling class, that is to identify itself with the government as the nobility had done for centuries.8 The failure of the absolute monarchy to find a substitute within society led to the full development of the nation-state and its claim to be above all classes, completely independent of society and its particular interests, the true and only representative of the nation as a whole. ~ Hannah Arendt,
932:If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing. ~ Herman Melville,
933:There should be some drug for fathers of teenage girls. Something that calmed your heart so it didn't practically rip through your chest. Something that could soothe the fury your daughter could inspire, the absolute terror that something unspeakable would happen to her, the almost murderous sense of protection. Something that would give you the words to tell her that no one would ever love her as much as dear old dad, and if she just listened to him, she'd have a much easier time of things and be safe from boys who ruined her life. ~ Kristan Higgins,
934:In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute? ~ Sue Monk Kidd,
935:The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. ~ Hannah Arendt,
936:The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window. ~ Jean Baudrillard,
937:What makes it possible to imagine ourselves as other beings? What does our capacity to exchange ourselves with others tell us about ourselves? If the beliefs we have about the world and ourselves are nothing more than ideas, then who and what are we? These are the very questions that hint at the absolute truth of emptiness, the ultimate reality that allows us to liberate ourselves from fixed and fabricated identities. Many opportunities to discuss this lie ahead, but for now just hold these questions in a creative and playful way. ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche,
938:I try unsuccessfully to suppress a smile. “So what does the color blue say about you?” He studies all the parts of my face—mouth, nose, ears, chin—as if he’s memorizing it for an exam. Then his eyes return to mine. “It says I never had a favorite color until I met this girl in a coffee shop with eyes so blue, they’re almost purple, like the absolute final moments before sunrise. This girl stayed on my mind. When I saw things like a cluster of irises or a peacock at the zoo, I would think of her and say to myself, that is my favorite color. ~ Jessica Hawkins,
939:Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward off attacks. You see the absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become dangerous frontier districts—new planets, new economic areas to exploit, new ideas or new devices, visitors—everything suspect. Feudalism takes firm hold, sometimes disguised as a politbureau or similar structure, but always present. Hereditary succession follows the lines of power. The blood of the powerful dominates. ~ Frank Herbert,
940:You never were the body and you will never be a body. You are pure awareness, the absolute reality. As you think about these things you become them. The worst thing you can do is think about troubles and worries. Always think about the heart. Always think about the Self, which is forever. If you think about anything else it is only temporary, it comes and goes. The good things, the bad things of this world, they come and go. Think only of the Self, the heart. This is your reality, beauty, joy. This is being-ness. This is the 'I am that I am'. ~ Robert Adams,
941:Americans don't like to waste time on stupid things, for example, on the torturous process of coming up with names for their towns. And really, why strain yourself when so many wonderful names already exist in the world?The entrance to the town of Moscow is shown in the photograph. That's right, an absolutely authentic Moscow, just in the state of Ohio, not in the USSR in Moscow province.There's another Moscow in some other state, and yet another Moscow in a third state. On the whole, every state has the absolute right to have its very own Moscow. ~ Ilya Ilf,
942:In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face. ~ Karl Mannheim,
943:There is another class of people who go about discussing the Infinite with ease and fluency who as yet have never acquainted themselves with the finite. A most interesting rule of the Ancient Wisdom is that none of its initiates discuss the Absolute. They explain the hypothesis of First Cause, but state finally that no human being, themselves included, know sufficient concerning it to give an intelligent opinion or definition; and no wise man presumes to discuss that bout which he knows nothing. ~ Manly P Hall, What the Ancient Wisdom Expects of Its Disciples,
944:An LSD experience without the LSD" -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice. ~ Tom Wolfe,
945:Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers. ~ Lionel Trilling,
946:You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent," Westerberg reflects, draining his third drink. "He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing. ~ Jon Krakauer,
947:He hates that the poor, who have infinite value as image bearers in their own right, become devalued and commoditized, pawns in the self-inflating schemes of the god players. And he hates that all that remains is a world of broken images, a world where you could readily believe that the final truth is domination, demanding more and more while offering less and less until eventually the absolute winner and wielder of power has everything and needs to give nothing. This is idolatry, this is injustice, and God hates them because they are the same thing. ~ Andy Crouch,
948:The abiding American myth of the self-made man comes attached to another article of faith--an insistence, even--that every self-made man can sustain whatever self he has managed o make. A man divided--thwarting or interrupting his own mechanisms of survival--fails to sustain this myth, disrupts our belief in the absolute efficacy of willpower, and in these failures also forfeits his right to our sympathy. or so the logic goes. But I wonder why this fractures elf shouldn't warrant our compassion just as much as the self besieged? Or maybe even more? ~ Leslie Jamison,
949:Love is not about romance or passion. Love is about a state of grace. You experience it when you accept the absolute truth of the other person, both the cruel and the divine, and they accept these things in you, and you find that you still long to share a life with them. To know the worst in another and still want them with all your soul. To know that they feel the same way. It is a sense of security and power. And once you have arrived at this, the richness of romance and passion that appears is not blinding. Instead, it is invulnerable and forever. ~ Cody McFadyen,
950:Nothing can be more consoling to the man of God, than the conviction that the Lord who made the world governs the world; and that every event, great and small, prosperous and adverse, is under the absolute disposal of him who doth all things well, and who regulates all things for the good of his people…. The Christian will be confident and courageous in duty, in proportion as he views God in his Providence as ruling in the midst of his enemies; and acting for the good of his people, as well as for his own glory, even in the persecution of the Gospel. ~ Jerry Bridges,
951:Between 1929 and 1933, the public succeeded in increasing its cash holdings by 31 per cent; commercial bank reserves were scarcely altered (indeed, surviving banks built up excess reserves); but commercial bank deposits decreased by 37 per cent and loans by 47 per cent. The absolute numbers reveal the lethal dynamic of the ‘great contraction’. An increase of cash in public hands of $1.2 billion was achieved at the cost of a decline in bank deposits of $15.6 billion and a decline in bank loans of $19.6 billion, equivalent to 19 per cent of 1929 GDP.91 ~ Niall Ferguson,
952:The absolute worst part of being depressed is the food. A person's relationship with food is one of their most important relationships. I don't think your relationship with your parents is that important. Some people never know their parents. I don't think your relationship with your friends are important. But your relationship with air-that's key. You can't break up with air. You're kind of stuck together. Only slightly less crucial is water. And then food. You can't be dropping food to hang with someone else. You need to strike up an agreement with it. ~ Ned Vizzini,
953:No, by no means, by no means all of it. But you are so hard on one, my dear, with your running after honesty, that one is not able to tell the real facts as they are. You make one speak in such a bald, naked way.” “Ah, you think that anything naked must be indecent; even truth.” “I think it is more proper-looking, and better suited, too, for the world’s work, when it goes about with some sort of a garment on it. We are so used to a leaven of falsehood in all we hear and say, nowadays, that nothing is more likely to deceive us than the absolute truth. ~ Anthony Trollope,
954:Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government. ~ St George Tucker,
955:Large, pleasant signs provided directions, accompanied by helpfully animated arrows that drew lines down the wall, just in case the addled, time-shifted tourists had lost the ability to read. I staggered in the indicated direction, followed by most of the population of my flight. I am quite sure that, in that moment, there was very little to differentiate us from your average zombie mob. No one was moaning, but all the rest of the characteristic signs were there: the slack-jawed expressions, the shambling gaits, and the absolute lack of apparent intelligence. ~ Mira Grant,
956:She had watched other women with infants and eventually understood what she craved: the boundless permission-no, the absolute necessity- to hold and kiss and stroke this tiny person. Cradling a swaddled infant in their arms, mothers would distractedly touch their lips to their babies' foreheads. Passing their toddlers in a hall, mothers would tousle their hair even sweep them up in their arms and kiss them hard along their chins and necks until the children squealed with glee. Where else in life, Mabel wondered, could a woman love so openly and with such abandon? ~ Eowyn Ivey,
957:This Magical Will is the wand in your hand by which the Great Work is accomplished, by which the Daughter is not merely set upon the throne of the Mother, but assumed into the Highest.<the Absolute is called the Crown, God is called the Father, the Pure Soul is called the Mother, the Holy Guardian Angel is called the Son, and the Natural Soul is called the Daughter. The Son purifies the Daughter by wedding her; she thus becomes the Mother, the uniting of whom with the Father absorbs all into the Crown. ~ Aleister Crowley, Book 4,
958:Say something,” he whispered. “Please…say you despise me for withholding the truth, that you’ll never forgive me…say anything, just don’t hide your thoughts from me.”

“I will,” she said evenly, eyeing him past a loose strand of hair that had fallen across her face. “Once I figure out the best way to cut out your heart and eat it.”

The laugh that burst from his chest was little more than a weak chuckle. “I wish you would. At least then you might see the whole of the sorry thing, the absolute mastery you have held over it from the moment I saw you. ~ Alexandra Bracken,
959:When you’ve tired of me,” she said softly, precisely, “Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me.”

“I’ll never tire of you,” he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth.

“Then prove it.”

He knew what she asked with such an open and vulnerable face. Something within him shriveled and died... he’d been on the rack too long for a penance he wasn’t sure he could ever entirely pay.

“You know…” His voice was hoarse, the croaking of a dying man. He licked his lips. “You know why I cannot. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,
960:I'm willing to go through a full body scan or anything else you need to. What I am offended by is the absolute unwillingness of Obama's administration. Callista and I did a movie called "America at Risk: The War with No Name," where we outlined - who are the people who've been terrorists in the last three or four years? They're all males. They're all young. They're all fairly identifiable in other ways. So we're going to a point - we're going to have a full body scan of an 83-year-old nun from Des Moines because we don't want to be honest about who our enemies are? ~ Newt Gingrich,
961:When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] ~ Philip Pullman,
962:In examining the division of powers, as established by the Federal Constitution, remarking on the one hand the portion of sovereignty which has been reserved to the several States, and on the other, the share of power which has been given to the Union, it is evident that the Federal legislators entertained very clear and accurate notions respecting the centralization of government. The United States form not only a republic, but a confederation; yet the national authority is more centralized there than it was in several of the absolute monarchies of Europe.... ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
963:As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but Freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that Liberation is discovered to be who and what you are. Then the love and wisdom that flows out of you has a liberating effect on others. ~ Adyashanti,
964:In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 150,000 children were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. They worked in harsh conditions, but the work was only part of their suffering. From the 1940s until 1967, about 10,000 children were shipped to Western Australia to work in the fields and live in orphanages. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant and only discovered in later years. In 2009, Australia’s prime minister formally apologized to those children who had suffered under the program, for what he called “the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost. ~ A G Riddle,
965:For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies. We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way. ~ Terry Tempest Williams,
966:He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him. ~ E M Forster,
967:What, then, are we to say about the suggestion that a hearty faith in the absolute sovereignty of God is inimical to evangelism? We are bound to say that anyone who makes this suggestion thereby shows that he has simply failed to understand what the doctrine of divine sovereignty means. Not only does it undergird evangelism, and uphold the evangelist, by creating a hope of success that could not otherwise be entertained; it also teaches us to bind together preaching and prayer; and as it makes us bold and confident before men, so it makes us humble and importunate before God. ~ J I Packer,
968:As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments. ~ Richard Rorty,
969:What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. ~ William James,
970:that is sacred which in the first place is attached to the transcendent order, secondly, possesses the character of absolute certainty and, thirdly, eludes the comprehension and power of investigation of the ordinary human mind...The sacred is the presence of the centre in the periphery, of the motionless in the moving; dignity is essentially an expression of it, for in dignity too the centre manifests at the exterior; the heart is revealed in gestures. The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
971:IGNORANCE I didn’t know love would make me this crazy, with my eyes like the river Ceyhun carrying me in its rapids out to sea,where every bit of shattered boat sinks to the bottom. An alligator lifts its head and swallows the ocean, then the ocean floor becomes a desert covering the alligator in sand drifts. Changes do happen. I do not know how, or what remains of what has disappeared into the absolute. I hear so many stories and explanations, but I keep quiet, because I don’t know anything, and because something I swallowed in the ocean has made me completely content with ignorance. ~ Rumi,
972:every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail. The question each person must answer is whether that freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden, the price of individual self-reliance and insecurity. Yes, insecurity. Because if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves. ~ Susan Wittig Albert,
973:I am the center of the culture. I am genesis, herald, harbinger. The absolute germinal zero point--that's me. I am the sun around which all the American else orbits. In fact, I am America, I exist more than other Americans. America is the center of the world, and I am the center of America. I am fifteen, while, middle class and male. Middle-aged men and women scurry for my attention. What Internet sites I visit. What I buy. What my desires are. What movies I watch. What and who I want; when and how I want it. People get paid a lot of money to think of how to get to me and mine. ~ Dana Spiotta,
974:Though we live under the form of a republic,” Justice Joseph Story said, “we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man.” Jackson vetoed laws passed by Congress (becoming the first president to assume this power). At one point, he dismissed his entire cabinet. “The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet,” declared a senator from Rhode Island, “When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it.”61 ~ Jill Lepore,
975:Devotion is the essence of the path, and if we have in mind nothing but the guru and feel nothing but fervent devotion, whatever occurs is perceived as his blessing. If we simply practice with this constantly present devotion, this is prayer itself. When all thoughts are imbued with devotion to the guru, there is a natural confidence that this will take care of whatever may happen. All forms are the guru, all sounds are prayer, and all gross and subtle thoughts arise as devotion. Everything is spontaneously liberated in the absolute nature, like knots untied in the sky. ~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche,
976:There is no real separation or gap in consciousness. ‘I AM’ cannot be divided. I may conceive myself to be a rich man, a poor man, a beggar man or a thief, but the center of my being remains the same regardless of the concept I hold of myself. At the center of manifestation there is only one ‘I AM’ manifesting in legions of forms or concepts of itself and ‘I am that I am.’ ‘I AM’ is the self definition of the absolute, the foundation on which everything rests. ‘I AM’ is the first cause-substance. ‘I AM’ is the self definition of God. “I AM hath sent me unto you” “I AM THAT I AM ~ Neville Goddard,
977:Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers. ~ Emile Zola,
978:Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers. ~ mile Zola,
979:To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought. ~ Albert Schweitzer,
980:Woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath forever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky,
981:wrote that every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail. The question each person must answer is whether that freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden, the price of individual self-reliance and insecurity. Yes, insecurity. Because if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves. ~ Susan Wittig Albert,
982:For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
Touch the cloth of the robe,
but do not pull it toward you,
or like an arrow it will leave the bow.

Images. Presence plays with form,
fleeing and hiding as the sky does in water,
now one place, now nowhere.

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

I love the rose that is not a rose,
but the second I try to speak it, any name
for God becomes so-and-so, and vanishes.

What you thought to draw lifts off the paper,
as what you love slips from your heart. ~ Rumi,
983:This ‘shining forth’ as the universe of forms is not He, yet it is He. His “glory” stands in relation to the Absolute as the Sun’s radiating light stands to the Sun. They are different, yet they are one. The rays of the Sun have no independent existence, and exist only because of the Sun; the glory of God, which appears as the phenomenal universe, also has no independent reality, but exists only as a radiation or emanation from that pure Sun of Consciousness. “He transcends His own glory,” says the seer; remaining forever One, unchanging and pure, He appears as the multiform universe. ~ Swami Abhayananda,
984:Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached "reality"; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya [illusion]. ~ H P Blavatsky,
985:The Church is likewise conscious of the responsibility which all of us have for our world, for the whole of creation, which we must love and protect. There is much that we can do to benefit the poor, the needy and those who suffer, and to favour justice, promote reconciliation and build peace. But before all else we need to keep alive in our world the thirst for the absolute, and to counter the dominance of a one-dimensional vision of the human person, a vision which reduces human beings to what they produce and to what they consume: this is one of the most insidious temptations of our time. ~ Pope Francis,
986:As for reading, I doubt whether she did much better by the sea-side than she had done in the town. Men and women say that they will read, and think so—those, I mean, who have acquired no habit of reading—believing the work to be, of all works, the easiest. It may be work, they think, but of all works it must be the easiest of achievement. Given the absolute faculty of reading, the task of going through the pages of a book must be, of all tasks, the most certainly within the grasp of the man or woman who attempts it. Alas! no; if the habit be not there, of all tasks it is the most difficult. ~ Anthony Trollope,
987:Imaginary Bondage ::: Once you realize that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realization you identify yourself with externals, like the body, the mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear. It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation, and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage. ~ Nisargadatta, I Am That, Talks with Sri Nisargadatta,
988:The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
989:these people should remember that Marxism is fire and danger: the theoretical approach that not only manages to comprehend capitalist relations, but proposes the abolition of those relations. In other words, it’s the only joke that’s actually funny. Marxism sees the finely tuned logic of all currently existing societies, recognizes the absolute necessity of every element, and then pronounces the whole thing to be mad and stupid. It finally reveals that the rational world we’re living in now is in fact a fantasy world, full of snarks and grumpkins, as absurd as anything in the most overblown fictions. ~ Anonymous,
990:When the habit of inwardly gazing Godward becomes fixed within us we shall be ushered onto a new level of spiritual life more in keeping with the promises of God and the mood of the New Testament. The Triune God will be our dwelling place even while our feet walk the low road of simple duty here among men. We will have found life's summum bonum indeed. "There is the source of all delights that can be desired; not only can nought better be thought out by men and angels, but nought better can exist in mode of being! For it is the absolute maximum of every rational desire, than which a greater cannot be. ~ Anonymous,
991:I Creation and Union Imagine yourself sitting in a quiet place in nature, being still and silent inside yourself. Breathe in the power of the universe. Breathe out the power of universe. Breathe in the love of the divine. Breathe out the love of the divine. Breathe in the light of the Absolute. Breathe out the light of the Absolute. As you inspire the power, love, and light of the universe, you exhale sharing love and light with all living beings. As you breathe, experience yourself expanding into the eternal light of all life. You are not a separate entity, you are one with all that is. Imagine. ~ Sandra Ingerman,
992:If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. ~ Jordan Peterson,
993:The problem is, we have been trained to process life based on the way we feel. We think we must feel love for love to exist. We think we must feel wanted to truly be chosen. We think we must feel God’s presence for Him to really be close. But God never meant for us to feel our way to Him. God wants us to stand on the absolute truth that He is with us no matter how our feelings may betray that reality. When I process life through my feelings, I am left deceived and disillusioned. When I process life through God’s truth, I am divinely comforted by His love and made confident in His calling on my life. ~ Lysa TerKeurst,
994:If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve. ~ Jordan B Peterson,
995:Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached "reality"; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya [illusion]. ~ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky,
996:Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?

Edgerton asks me with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price. ~ Nick Cutter,
997:But the greatest danger could spring from the chaos of a dysfunctional democracy, compounded by relentless party warfare, which, Washington warned, would erode faith in the effectiveness of self-governance and open the door to a demagogue with authoritarian ambitions. 'The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty. ~ John P Avlon,
998:Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, ‘What does God want to tell us?’ If we hang our faith on the absolute historical accuracy of Scripture in every detail, we risk making Scripture a sort of ‘magic’ book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions, instead of being a book that gives us, in the wonderful words of the Coronation service, ‘the lively oracles of God’. The Bible is not intended to be a mere chronicle of past events, but a living communication from God, telling us now what we need to know for our salvation. ~ Rowan Williams,
999:It is only through the mystery of the redeeming Incarnation that a Christian sees the proper dignity of human personality, and what it costs. The idea which he has of it stretches out indefinitely, and only attains the absolute fullness of its significance in Christ. But by the very fact that it is secular and not sacred, this common task does not in the least demand in its beginning a profession of faith in the whole of Christianity from each man. On the contrary, it includes in its characteristic features a pluralism which makes possible the convivium of Christians and non-Christians in one temporal city. ~ Jacques Maritain,
1000:And yet even as she heard this old voice in her head, she could still feel the shift that had just occurred inside her. The old voice was no longer strong enough to hold her back—Deya knew this now. She knew this voice that she had always taken as the absolute truth was actually the very thing preventing her from achieving everything she wanted. The voice was the lie, and all the things she wanted for herself were the truth, perhaps the most important truth in the world. And because of this she had to stand up for herself. She had to fight. She had to. The fight was worth everything if it meant finally having a voice. ~ Etaf Rum,
1001:If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth. ~ Cal Newport,
1002:The body,” Rinzai (d. 876) tells us, “does not know how to discourse or to listen to a discourse ... This which is unmistakably perceivable right where you are, absolutely identifiable yet without form - this is what listens to the discourse.” Here the Chinese master, along with Kabir and the rest, is echoing the Surangama Sutra (a pre-Zen Indian scripture) which teaches that it’s absurd to suppose that we see with our eyes, or hear with our ears: it’s because these have melted together, and vanished into the absolute Emptiness of our “original bright and charming Face,” that experience of any sort is possible. ~ Douglas E Harding,
1003:perceptions, our ways of thinking, and our behavior. It is a question of bringing about a complete reversal of mental habits by reducing emotions in a gradual process of study, reflection, and meditation—in other words, familiarization. That is how we refine the mind and purify it through a training that actualizes its potential. We learn to master the stream of our consciousness, to control the emotional obscurations, without letting ourselves be dominated by them. That is the path toward realization of the absolute nature. Our practice integrates all the aspects and all the various levels of the Buddha’s teaching. ~ Dalai Lama XIV,
1004:We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. ~ C S Lewis,
1005:We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa,
1006:Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.

'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.

Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes. ~ Joseph Heller,
1007:But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root—there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. Oh, how can I put it in words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not even a profound, secret upheaval of nature—could
explain it. Evidently I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But
faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,
1008:Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right.
The “honesty” often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one’s self; only “letting it all hang out,” not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes “honesty” is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth. ~ Peter Kreeft,
1009:The most tragic strain in human existence lies in the fact that the pleasure which we find in the things of this life, however good that pleasure may be in itself, is always taken away from us. The things for which men strive hardly ever turn out to be as satisfying as they expected, and in the rare cases in which they do, sooner or later they are snatched away.... For the Christians, all those partial, broken and fleeting perfections which he glimpses in the world around him, which wither in his grasp and he snatches away from him even while the wither, are found again, perfect, complete and lasting in the absolute beauty of God. ~ Randy Alcorn,
1010:There was never a doubt in my mind that I was going to keep this baby and be the absolute best mom that I could be. From day one, nothing else was an option.

This was a sign that it was time to change my life. This was my chance to turn everything around. I knew it was time for me to move on from the partying and to grow up, to be a woman who had responsibilities and priorities.

I was going to make this happen no matter what it took. There were no other options for me. I’m a strong believer that there are no accidents and that nothing in life is a mistake. This happened for a reason, and I believe it saved my life. ~ Jodie Sweetin,
1011:The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ~ Milan Kundera,
1012:Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heartbeats & these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness. ~ R my de Gourmont,
1013:Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeled away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropic stasis, the absolute and literal end of time itself. No action, no memory of an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artistic achievement, was ultimately pointless. But it wasn’t as if people went around thinking ~ Alastair Reynolds,
1014:During a period of nearly fifty years... [Sri Aurobindo] created what is probably the greatest epic in the English language… I venture the judgment that it is the most comprehensive, integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earth’s darkness and struggles, to the highest realms of supramental spiritual existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s mind towards the Absolute». ~ Raymond Frank Piper,
1015:It's pretty generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. Now, when any one speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can't get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it,—this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it; and, if we may judge by their practice, the majority of the world will bear us out in it. But when he begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture, I incline to think he isn't much better than he should be. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe,
1016:The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. ~ George Washington,
1017:For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected—not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. ~ George MacDonald,
1018:Mussolini never conceded the absolute authority of the state to dictate the course of the economy. By the early 1930s he had found it necessary to start putting Fascist ideology down on paper. Before then, it was much more ad hoc. But when he did get around to writing it out, doctrinal Fascist economics looked fairly recognizable as just another left-wing campaign to nationalize industry, or regulate it to the point where the distinction was hardly a difference. These policies fell under the rubric of what was called corporatism, and not only were they admired in America at the time, but they are unknowingly emulated to a staggering degree today. ~ Jonah Goldberg,
1019:And cruelly, surely, I said to her, "Did you love this child?" I will never forget her face then, the violence in her, the absolute hatred. "Yes." She reached for the locket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was consuming her, not love. It was guilt -that shop of dolls Claudia had described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death. There was something as hard in her as the evil in myself, something as powerful. She touched my waistcoat and opened her fingers there, pressing them against my chest. And I was on my knees, drawing closer to her, her hair brushing my face. ~ Anne Rice,
1020:In my entire scientific life, extending over forty-five years, the most shattering experience has been the realization that an exact solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, discovered by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, provides the absolute exact representation of untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the universe. This "shuddering before the beautiful," this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound level. ~ Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar,
1021:I was profoundly impressed by my contact with these places which are and have always been, the wellsprings of your history. It makes one think that the men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of "good" and "evil." Their practical policies were checked against their moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most farsighted and the most salutary. This is true even though in the short term one may wonder: Why all this morality? Let's just get on with the immediate job. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
1022:There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. ~ Joseph Heller,
1023:Meditation,” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ‘cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. Yes, Lord, but when you get down to nothing, you get down to ultimate reality. It’s then and exactly then that you’re sensing the true nature of the universe, you’re linked up with the absolute Absolute, son, and unless you’re content with blowing smoke up your butt all your life, that there’s the only place to be. ~ Tom Robbins,
1024:People want black-and-white answers, but Scripture is rainbow arch across a stormy sky. Our sacred book is not an indexed answer book or life manual; it is also a grand story, mystery, invitation, truth and wisdom, and a passionate love letter. I’ve abandoned the idea that my job is to get the absolute, 100 percent right answers on everything. And my task here, in this book, isn’t to silence all discussion or find the magic key that unlocks a “This is the answer! Case closed! Court dismissed!” answer for you. I want you to wrestle with the Bible. Do it. Wrestle until, Jacob-like, you walk with a limp ever after, and you receive the blessing of the Lord. ~ Sarah Bessey,
1025:There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and he could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. ~ Joseph Heller,
1026:The idea so commonly found that scepticism leads to toleration arises from considering the effects of scepticism in the intellectual who takes no active part - not its effects in the man of action. In the man of action, moral relativism and scepticism as to the absolute and universal value of his priunciples are no obstacle to a fanatical belief in their immediate value as his own clan at the actual moment; they do not weaken in the least his will to impose his principles. How should he glimpse a soul of truth in the principles of others, entitling them to respect, when he does not believe in noble origins of this kind even for his own principles? ~ Bertrand De Jouvenel,
1027:Grief
I TELL you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death-Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
1028:The most viable method of elaborating the natural-rights statement of the libertarian position is to divide it into parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the “right to self-ownership.” The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to “own” his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. ~ Murray N Rothbard,
1029:We have of late come to understand that sunrise and sunset are to her times of peculiar freedom. When her old self can be manifest without any controlling force subduing or restraining her, or inciting her to action. This mood or condition begins some half hour or more before actual sunrise or sunset, and lasts till either the sun is high, or whilst the clouds are still aglow with the rays streaming above the horizon. At first there is a sort of negative condition, as if some tie were loosened, and then the absolute freedom quickly follows. When, however, the freedom ceases the change back or relapse comes quickly, preceded only by a spell of warning silence. ~ Bram Stoker,
1030:Greatness
That man is truly great, and he alone
Who venerates, of present things or past
The absolute only,—is the liege of none
Save God and truth; who, awed not by this vast
And shadowy scheme of life, but anchored fast
In love, and sitting central like the sun,
So gives his mental beams to pierce and run
Through all its secrets while his days may last.
While thus progressive, little faith has he
For mysteries, till, sounding them, he hear
The gathered tones of their stirred depths agree
With that religious harmony severe,
Which ever anthems to his spirit’s ear
The hallowing presence of the Deity.
~ Charles Harpur,
1031:Napoleon pronounced, “the husband must possess the absolute power and right to say to his wife, ‘Madam, you shall not go to the theater, you shall not receive such and such a person; for the children you will bear shall be mine.’ ” Equally, every woman “must be made to realize that on leaving the tutelage of her family, she passes under that of her husband.”13 To this end, the Code Napoléon equipped every husband with extraordinary, unprecedented, indeed despotic powers. He could compel his wife either to reside in or to move to any place he decreed; everything she ever owned or earned became his; in divorce, he kept the children, the house and all the goods, ~ Rosalind Miles,
1032:Common sense was exactly what kingship, almost by definition, lacked: when the king's orders were executed no one dared to tell him honestly how they had turned out. With the absolute powers bestowed by kingship came an arrogance, a ruthlessness, an inflexibility, a habit of compulsion, an unwillingness to listen to reason, that no small community would have endured from any of its members-though the aggressive and humanly disagreeable qualities that make for such ambitious leadership might be found anywhere-as Margaret Mead discovered among the Mundugumor, whose leaders were known to the community as "really bad men," aggressive, gluttonous for power and prestige. ~ Lewis Mumford,
1033:IGNORANCE

I didn’t know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea,where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.

An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.

Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
has disappeared
into the absolute.

I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don’t know anything,
and because something I swallowed
in the ocean
has made me completely content
with ignorance. ~ Rumi,
1034:When you understand that form is the form of the formless, Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are. When you understand that thought is the thought of the thought-less. Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma. How boundless is the sky of Samadhi! How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom! Being so is there anything you lack? As the Absolute presents itself before you The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus, And your person -- the body of the Buddha. [2139.jpg] -- from Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

~ Hakuin, The Form of the Formless (from Hakuins Song of Zazen)
,
1035:The oft repeated slogan of our time is, among all politicians, the Socialists included, that ours is an era of individualism, of the minority. Only those who do not probe beneath the surface might be led to entertain this view. Have not the few accumulated the wealth of the world? Are they not the masters, the absolute kings of the situation? Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass. The latter wants but to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced. As to individualism, at no time in human history did it have less chance of expression, less opportunity to assert itself in a normal, healthy manner. ~ Emma Goldman,
1036:Lift up your eys and see. How does a man lift up his eyes to see a little higher than himself? The grand premise of religion is that man is able to surpass himself; that man who is part of this world may enter into a relationship with Him who is greater than the world; that man may lift up his mind and be attached to the absolute; that man who is conditioned by a multiplicity of factors is capable of living with demands that are unconditioned. How does one rise above the horizon of the mind? How does one free oneself from the perspectives of ego, group, earth, and age? How does one find a way in this world that would lead to an awareness of Him who is beyond this world? ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel,
1037:This is my brother we’re talking about, Maximus.” “You’ll take his part before mine?” Oh, he knew it was a mistake even before the words left his lips. Her shoulders squared. “If I must. We shared a womb. We’re flesh and blood, tied together forever, both physically and spiritually. I love my brother.” “As you don’t me?” She stopped, her chemise in her hands before her. For a moment her shoulders slumped and then she raised her head. His goddess. His Diana. “When you’ve tired of me,” she said softly, precisely, “Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me.” “I’ll never tire of you,” he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,
1038:But, alas, I have such a limited spirit, so feeble a memory, that I can’t make any progress. This long illness has parched my poor head. How painful it is to me to open these big books! The odor of damp parchment makes me faint, and all the letters aligned and printed with discouraging symmetry make me dizzy. [...] Just yesterday I confused “objectivity” with “subjectivity” and last night I dreamed about the definition of the absolute. I dreamed I was in a beautiful meadow and watched the flow of a stream of living water. It seemed to me that there were some words written in the depths of its
transparent bed, and I read there all sorts of beautiful things, as though in a book. ~ George Sand,
1039:I think Attica brings to mind several things. The first is the basic inhumanity of man to man, the veneer of civilization as we sit here today in a well-lit, reasonably well appointed room with suits and ties on objectively performing an autopsy on this day, yet cannot get at the absolute horror of the situation, to people, be they black, yellow, orange, spotted, whatever, whatever uniform they wore, that day tore from them the shreds of their humanity. The veneer was penetrated. After seeing that day I went home and sat down and spoke with my wife and I said for the first time being a somewhat dedicated amateur army type, I could understand what may have happened at My Lai. ~ Heather Ann Thompson,
1040:Saichō's Prayer

   So long as I have not attained the stage where my six faculties are pure, I will not venture out into the world.

   So long as I have not realized the absolute, I will not acquire any special skills or arts (e.g. medicine, divination, calligraphy, etc.)

   So long as I have not kept all the precepts purely, I will not participate in any lay donor's Buddhist meetings.

   So long as I have not attained wisdom (lit. hannya 般若), I will not participate in worldly affairs unless it be to benefit others.

   May any merit from my practice in the past, present and future be given not to me, but to all sentient beings so that they may attain supreme enlightenment. ~ Saichō,
1041:If Daddy could see me now. I spent the morning with Rebecca at the Indianapolis Speedway, at an auto museum filled with Nascars and racing paraphernalia. Do you remember when we used to watch all five hundred laps with him, every year? I never understood what it was that made auto racing such a biggie for him—it's not like he ever tried the sport himself. He told me once when I was older that it was the absolute speed of it all. I liked to watch for crashes, like you. I liked the way there'd be a huge explosion on the track and billows of ebony smoke, and the other cars would just keep a straight course and head right for the spin, into this sort of black box, and they'd come out okay. I ~ Jodi Picoult,
1042:About novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.

Q: What does the title "Imperfect Birds" mean?

It's a line from a poem by Rumi. The line is "Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds", and it's really about how these kind of scraggly, raggedy nests that are our lives are the sanctuary for other people to step into, and that if you want to see the divine, you really step into the absolute ordinary. When you're at your absolutely most lost and dejected ... where do you go? You go to the nests left by other imperfect birds, you find other people who've gone through it. You find the few people you can talk to about it.

from Writer's Digest May/June 2010 ~ Anne Lamott,
1043:Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu: “All your teaching is centered on what has no use.” Chuang replied: “If you have no appreciation for what has no use You cannot begin to talk about what can be used. The earth, for example, is broad and vast But of all this expanse a man uses only a few inches Upon which he happens to be standing. Now suppose you suddenly take away All that he is not actually using So that, all around his feet a gulf Yawns, and he stands in the Void, With nowhere solid except right under each foot: How long will he be able to use what he is using?” Hui Tzu said: “It would cease to serve any purpose.” Chuang Tzu concluded: “This shows The absolute necessity Of what has ‘no use. ~ Thomas Merton,
1044:Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party — all these may also impose a simple structure on life. ~ Alvin Toffler,
1045:All of us are meaning-seekers. We approach every painting, novel, film, symphony, or ballet unconsciously hoping it will move us one step further on the journey toward answering the question ‘Why am I here?’ People living in the postmodern world, however, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning, while at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick, but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the Absolute. But if we want to find our true meaning in life, our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination; it is a signpost pointing toward our desired destination. ~ Ian Morgan Cron,
1046:The highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not to be gained by this self-blinded leap into the Absolute but by a patient transit beyond the mind into the Truth-consciousness where the Infinite can be known, felt, seen, experienced in all the fullness of its unending riches. And there we discover this Self that we are to be not only a static tenuous vacant Atman but a great dynamic Spirit individual, universal and transcendent. That Self and Spirit cannot be expressed by the mind's abstract generalisations; all the inspired descriptions of the seers and mystics cannot exhaust its contents and its splendours.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Integral Knowledge, The Object Of Knowledge [296],
1047:If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers. For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer,
1048:Today was the absolute worst day ever
And don't try to convince me that
There's something good in every day
Because, when you take a closer look,
This world is a pretty evil place.
Even if
Some goodness does shine through once in a while
Satisfaction and happiness don't last.
And it's not true that
It's all in the mind and heart
Because
True happiness can be obtaind
Only if one's surroundings are good
It's not true that good exists
I'm sure you can agree that
The reality
Creates
My attitude
It's all beyond my control
And you'll never in a million years hear me say that
Today was a good day

(read from bottom up for a different perspective) ~ Unknown,
1049:[T]raveling, a local is shocked to realize that in neighboring countries locals view him as a foreigner; between villages, clans, nations, and classes there are wars, potlatches, agreements, treaties, and struggles that remove the absolute meaning from the idea of the 'other' and bring out its relativity; whether one likes it or not, individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relation. How is it, then, that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been put forward, that one of the terms has been asserted as the only essential one, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative, defining the latter as pure alterity? Why do women not contest male sovereignty? ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
1050:The Torah is the world’s great protest against empires and imperialism. There are many dimensions to this protest. One dimension is the protest against the attempt to justify social hierarchy and the absolute power of rulers in the name of religion. Another is the subordination of the masses to the state – epitomized by the vast building projects, first of Babel, then of Egypt, and the enslavement they entailed. A third is the brutality of nations in the course of war (the subject of Amos’ oracles against the nations). Undoubtedly, though, the most serious offence – for the prophets as well as the Mosaic books – was the use of power against the powerless: the widow, the orphan and, above all, the stranger. ~ Jonathan Sacks,
1051:What you call your life is not yours at all--not yours to plan, manipulate, or control, at least not very often. . . . In fleeting moments of deep satisfaction and insight, I saw the absolute truth of life: the unbroken line of love that had led to my existence and would lead on through my daughter. My mother's love, her mother's love, her mother's love, and back and back forever ago. Love that is no mere word, love that goes beyond feeling, love that is life itself. . . . What miracles, what sacrifice, what love! . . . Can you imagine this love? Can you anticipate it, fabricate it, measure and evaluate it? No you can't, you can only be love, and your child will release its magnitude within you. ~ Karen Maezen Miller,
1052:I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly. The numinous authority of form enjoys the prerogative of being able to tell me 'You must'.
It is the authority of a different life in this life. This authority touches on a subtle insufficiency within me that is older and freer than sin; it is my innermost not-yet. In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary. If you do indeed subsequently change your life, what you are doing is no different from what you desire with your whole will as soon as you feel how a vertical tension that is valid for you unhinges your life. ~ Peter Sloterdijk,
1053:I am not wise enough to say how much of all this squalor and wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I only know that children should never be hungry, that there are ignorant human creatures to be taught how to live; and if it is a hard task, the sooner it is begun the better, both for teachers and pupils. It is comparatively easy to form opinions and devise remedies, when one knows the absolute truth of things; but it is so difficult to find the truth here, or at least there are so many and such different truths to weigh in the balance.... ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin,
1054:Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant. ~ Michel Houellebecq,
1055:It is a strange misunderstanding to make Paul either a fatalist or a particularist; he is the strongest opponent of blind necessity and of Jewish particularism, even in the ninth chapter of Romans. But he aims at no philosophical solution of a problem which the finite understanding of man cannot settle; he contents himself with asserting its divine and human aspects, the religious and ethical view, the absolute sovereignty of God and the relative freedom of man, the free gift of salvation and the just punishment for neglecting it. Christian experience includes both truths, and we find no contradiction in praying as if all depended on God, and in working as if all depended on man. This is Pauline theology and practice. ~ Philip Schaff,
1056:On the ship, I saw something in you.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “And that was?” “The absolute need to fight. To be free. That’s something I can understand.” I wasn’t so sure he could. “Some years ago,” he continued, “there was a revolt. A gang of slaves—gladiators, in fact—rose up and challenged the might of the Republic. They fought the legions for a very long time, and they very nearly won. But it took one man—a man named Spartacus—to ignite the spark that turned to flame. I’ve always admired him, even though he went against everything I’m supposed to fight for as a soldier of Rome. I thought, on the ship, that I saw that same kind of ember glowing in your eyes. I suppose I wanted to see if it was still there. ~ Lesley Livingston,
1057:Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for
the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic
end. I’ve finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must
screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We [255] shall be all of us
shot at dawn. One hundred cc’s apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we,,,
face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines!
Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword, blooie! Tranquilize all of us completely out of
existence. ~ Ken Kesey,
1058:Uh-huh,” she said. “Very logical, Dex. So what kind of psycho asshole would kill Camilla just to drop you in the shit?” It was an awkward question. I knew what psycho asshole had done it. My Witness had said he was moving closer, and he had; that had been him watching me at the crime scene and taking pictures. And he had killed Camilla Figg, purely as a way to get at me. It really was remarkably wicked, killing an innocent person merely to cause me inconvenience, and it would have been very tempting to pause and ponder the absolute depths of callous perfidy that this act revealed. But there really wasn’t a lot of time to ponder at present, and in any case worrying about moral turpitude is best left to those with morals. The ~ Jeff Lindsay,
1059:For six years, I’d assumed this was an inevitable transformation, an inherent part of parenthood. It seemed to be what most parents (but especially women) did, moving their children to the absolute center of their lives and pushing everything else—marriage, friendship, civic engagement, creative work—out to the distant edges where maybe, possibly, it could be revisited in fifteen or twenty years. Or at least, I thought it was parenthood we were moving to the center, but what if that was only part of it? What if the thing taking up so much space was not the fact of parenthood itself, the actual relationship with our children, but the feeling surrounding that relationship, the fearful feeling that we could never quite do enough? ~ Kim Brooks,
1060:The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. ...The conic sections, invented in an attempt to solve the problem of doubling the altar of an oracle, ended by becoming the orbits followed by the planets... The imaginary magnitudes invented by Cardan and Bombelli describe... the characteristic features of alternating currents. The absolute differential calculus, which originated as a fantasy of Reimann, became the mathematical model for the theory of Relativity. And the matrices which were a complete abstraction in the days of Cayley and Sylvester appear admirably adapted to the... quantum of the atom. ~ Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).,
1061:Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. 122. The idea of travelling nauseates me. I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen. I’ve already seen what I have yet to see. The tedium of the forever new, the tedium of discovering – behind the specious differences we see in things and ideas – the unrelenting sameness of everything, the absolute similarity of a mosque and a temple and a church, the exact equivalence of a cabin and a castle, the same structural body for a king in robes and for a naked savage, the eternal concordance of life with itself, the stagnation of everything that lives just because it moves* … Landscapes ~ Fernando Pessoa,
1062:The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way - is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards an unknown goal! To act and think are opposites which identify one only in the Absolute. To accomplish all one's movements – of the head, the arms, the legs – without ever quite attaining the status of a puppet, but with a certainty that gives one a feeling of rightness: that is what is nowadays held up as the ideal. Be citizens of Universal activity! Forget to be conscious of ourselves! The blind horse gallops without hesitation, not knowing where it is going, not caring where it has been: so let up put out our eyes! ~ R my de Gourmont,
1063:The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth. ~ Cal Newport,
1064:Earlier, I was sitting on a bench on the banks of the Tiber, and there were all these people there
holding hands and kissing. Happy and in love.
They made it seem so easy. Like giving their heart to someone else isn't the scariest thing in the
world.
I still don't understand that.
Don't they know the power they're giving to that other person? The absolute future-forming
dominion?
Don't they understand how much it's going to hurt when it all goes wrong? And let's face it, ninety
percent of those couples won't still be together a year from now. Even six months from now.
And yet, there they are, hugging and lip-locking, completely oblivious to the pain that's coming for
them.
Unconcerned and trusting. ~ Leisa Rayven,
1065:The absolute success of these two movements is such that at this stage, "indie" and "yuppie" are meaningless designators. The yuppie aesthetic of connoisseurship has infiltrated everywhere and now there is only--for many of us--either luxury gelato or food made of chemical waste. Ikea, Martha Stewart, and Whole Foods make yuppiedom no longer a chic and extravagant choice but an enforced mode. It's either that or eat at a toxic toilet such as McDonald's. The indie aesthetic is likewise de rigueur. H&M, Urban Outfitters, and American Apparel sell the floppy "Brit on a holiday" look to all Americans. Radiohead and Arcade Fire music is blasted from speakers at stadiums. For many poor souls, there is no alternative to the alternative. ~ Ian F Svenonius,
1066:No matter what life throws at us, we're going to make great memories together, Quinn. That's a given. But there's also going to be bad days and sad days and days that test our resolve.
Those are the days I want you to feel the absolute weight of my love for you.
I promise I will love you more during the storms than I will love you during the perfect days.
I promise to love you more when you're hurting then when you're happy.
I promise to love you more when we're poor than when we're swimming in riches.
I promise to love you more when you're crying than when you're laughing.
I promise to love you more when you're sick than when you're healthy.
I promise to love you more when you hate me than when you love me. ~ Colleen Hoover,
1067:she would indeed like to tell that kind of story, except that it requires a plot, “the absolute line between two points which [she’s] always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” What’s despicable about the absolute line between two points is its danger of becoming a single story. For Paley, there was no “defining” experience of women or Jews or New York or activists or the 1960s, or of one female Russian Jewish activist-writer in New York in 1965. There were stops and starts, inconsistencies, loyalties forged and broken, discordant voices. People made themselves up as they went along. In the meantime, there was daily life to endure. ~ Christopher Castellani,
1068:The following morning dawned clear and cool, and the chef decided to send me to the Rialto to buy pears and Gorgonzola. It was a culinary test, and I was ready. I'd accompanied him on other shopping trips when he instructed me on how to judge pears by scent and color and touch. They must be bought at the absolute peak of ripeness, with no hint of green or bruising. They must be firm, though not hard, and well perfumed, ready to be eaten the same day but overripe the next. The cheese must be dolce, not picante, because it would be served with the pears for dessert. The ripeness of Gorgonzola is more forgiving than pears. Already veined with a pungent mold, it will last a good while, although even molded cheeses have their limits. ~ Elle Newmark,
1069:There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed. ~ Joseph Heller,
1070:You took them home in a plain brown wrapper. You really didn’t want your mother, children, or respectable wife to find you reading them. The ladies in such stories lost their clothes with surprising frequency. Covers and story situations involved lots of bondage, torture, and violence, much of it a tease. Close analysis of the texts will reveal what parts of the female anatomy had to be described in each story with prescribed euphemisms and what parts could not be described at all. The illustrations, even in a medium noted for luridness, are astonishingly explicit, pushing the boundaries of what could be sent through the mails or displayed in public to the absolute limit at the time—and indeed these magazines were often sold under the counter. ~ E Hoffmann Price,
1071:For A Virgin And Child By Hans Memmelinck
(In the Academy of Bruges)
MYSTERY: God, man's life, born into man
Of woman. There abideth on her brow
The ended pang of knowledge, the which now
Is calm assured. Since first her task began
She hath known all. What more of anguish than
Endurance oft hath lived through, the whole space
Through night till day, passed weak upon her face
While the heard lapse of darkness slowly ran?
All hath been told her touching her dear Son,
And all shall be accomplished. Where He sits
Even now, a babe, He holds the symbol fruit
Perfect and chosen. Until God permits,
His soul's elect still have the absolute
Harsh nether darkness, and make painful moan.
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
1072:Quirky, Airbnb, and Uber are great examples of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the expanding scale of exponential impact. They have created billion-dollar companies in record time. They are the absolute inverse of everything we believed was true about scaling up a capital-intensive businesses. For most of the twentieth century, scaling up such businesses required massive investments and time. Adding workforce, constructing buildings, developing vastly new product suites—no wonder implementation strategies stretched years into decades. It wasn’t unusual for a board of directors to “bet the company” on a new and extremely expensive direction whose outcome would remain unknown until long after most of those board members retired. That was then. ~ Peter H Diamandis,
1073:It’s strange,” Rick said. “I had the absolute, utter, completely real illusion that I had become Mercer and people were lobbing rocks at me. But not the way you experience it when you hold the handles of an empathy box. When you use an empathy box you feel you’re with Mercer. The difference is I wasn’t with anyone; I was alone.”

“They’re saying now that Mercer is a fake.”

“Mercer isn’t a fake,” he said. “Unless reality is a fake.” This hill, he thought. This dust and these many stones, each one different from all the others. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I can’t stop being Mercer. Once you start it’s too late to back off.” Will I have to climb the hill again? he wondered. Forever, as Mercer does…trapped by eternity. “Good-bye,” he said. ~ Philip K Dick,
1074:There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. ~ Joseph Heller,
1075:You just never know when you’ll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who’s got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laundromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor’s office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library ~ Stephen King,
1076:Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts. ~ Stephen Fry,
1077:Q:How shall I realise God?
M.: God is an unknown entity. Moreover He is external. Whereas, the Self is always with you and it is you. Why do you leave out what is intimate and go in for what is external?
D.: What is this Self again?
M.: The Self is known to everyone but not clearly. You always exist. The Be-ing is the Self. 'I am' is the name of God. Of all the definitions of God, none is indeed so well put as the Biblical statement "I AM THAT I AM" in EXODUS (Chap. 3). There are other statements, such as Brahmaivaham, Aham Brahmasmi and Soham. But none is so direct as the name JEHOVAH = I AM. The Absolute Being is what is - It is the Self. It is God. Knowing the Self, God is known. In fact God is none other than the Self. ~ Sri Ramama Maharshi, Collected Works,
1078:A sutra is, so to speak, the bare thread of an exposition, the absolute minimum that is necessary to hold it together, unadorned by a single "bead" of elaboration. Only essential words are used. Often, there is no complete sentence-structure. There was a good reason for this method. Sutras were composed at a period when there were no books. The entire work had to be memorized, and so it had to be expressed as tersely as possible. Patanjali's Sutras, like all others, were intended to be expanded and explained. The ancient teachers would repeat an aphorism by heart and then proceed to amplify it with their own comments, for the benefit of their pupils. In some instances these comments, also, were memorized, transcribed at a later date, and thus preserved for us. ~ Prabhavananda,
1079:It is as if Protestantism by clinging to the Scripture wished to preserve the last faint echoes of God’s Word in a world that has fallen silent, a world where only things speak dumbly, a world delivered over to the silence and ruthlessness of the Absolute, - and in his fear of God the Protestant has realized that it is his own goal before which he cowers. For in excluding all other values, in casting himself in the last resort on an autonomous religious experience, he has assumed a final abstraction of a logical rigour that urges him unambiguously to strip all sensory trappings from his faith, to empty it of all content but the naked Absolute, retaining nothing but the pure form, the pure, empty and neutral form of a 'religion in itself', a 'mysticism in itself'. ~ Hermann Broch,
1080:Now I am experiencing the Clear Light of objective reality. Nothing is happening, nothing ever has happened or ever will happen. My present sense of self, the voyager, is in reality the void itself, having no qualities or characteristics. I remember myself as the voyager, whose deepest nature is the Clear Light itself; I am one; there is no other. I am the voidness of the void, the eternal unborn, the uncreated, neither real nor unreal. All that I have been conscious of is my own play of consciousness, a dance of light, the swirling patterns of light in infinite extension, endless endlessness, the Absolute beyond change, existence, reality. I, the voyager, am inseparable from the Clear Light; I cannot be born, die, exist or change. I know now that this is my true nature. ~ E J Gold,
1081:Men and women say that they will read, and think so,—those, I mean, who have acquired no habit of reading,—believing the work to be, of all works, the easiest. It may be work, they think, but of all works it must be the easiest of achievement. Given the absolute faculty of reading, the task of going through the pages of a book must be, of all tasks, the most certainly within the grasp of the man or woman who attempts it! Alas, no;—if the habit be not there, of all tasks it is the most difficult. If a man have not acquired the habit of reading till he be old, he shall sooner in his old age learn to make shoes than learn the adequate use of a book. And worse again;—under such circumstances the making of shoes shall be more pleasant to him than the reading of a book. ~ Anthony Trollope,
1082:Sure there’s a catch,’ Doc Daneeka replied. ‘Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’ There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. ~ Joseph Heller,
1083:Sometimes, too, we went out in the rubber boat to look at ourselves at night. Coal-black seas towered up on all sides, and a glittering myriad of tropical stars drew a faint reflection from plankton in the water. The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars. ~ Thor Heyerdahl,
1084:three paths as one :::
   We can see also that in the integral view of things these three paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in the triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,
1085:Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquillity; evasions will merely encourage turmoil. Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community. ~ Martin Luther King Jr,
1086:Together they repeat, ''we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.'' Thus do they stupefy one another.
Having nothing and able to give nothing, they let themselves sink into words that feign communication, because none of them can make his world be the world of the others; they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it. Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: 'ornaments of the darkness'. ~ Carlo Michelstaedter,
1087:Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth. It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. […] The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. […] If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. ~ Eric Hoffer,
1088:Together they repeat, ''we are, we are, because we know, because we can tell each other the words of knowledge, of free and absolute consciousness.'' Thus do they stupefy one another.

Having nothing and able to give nothing, they let themselves sink into words that feign communication, because none of them can make his world be the world of the others; they feign words containing the absolute world, and with words they nourish their boredom, making themselves a poultice for the pain; with words they show what they do not know and what they need in order to soothe the pain or make themselves numb to it. Each word contains mystery, and they entrust themselves to words, weaving with them thereby a new, tacitly agreed-upon veil over the obscurity: 'ornaments of the darkness'. ~ Carlo Michelstaedter,
1089:Victoria
victoria beautiful yes sweet of course
smart no doubt friend you bet
like her you know it will i ever
be hers dont think so is that
a bad thing not at all
why because she deserves
the absolute best and me
no where near it huggable
loveable and fun right on
got attuide who dosent
will she ever be ok or
appear like it i dont know
but when it all boils down
who is victoria well thats
something you have to ask
her yourself but in my opinion
she is cool nice to talk to
but be easy what you say
because you may never
say another word it sounds
brutal but ahe wouldnt do
that unless it built up to that
point but she is very
sweet and that i can
promise so like i said
victoria your cool
~ david bailey,
1090:The sun was reaching the meridian and Bhishma knew his departure was near. He controlled his mind, absorbing it in thoughts of Krishna alone. Thinking of Krishna’s many divine pastimes during his presence on earth, he spoke one final time. “I can now meditate with full concentration upon that one Lord, Krishna, visible before me, because I have transcended the misconception of duality. It is this Krishna who is present in everyone’s heart and who is the ultimate destination for all transcendentalists, including those who accept the absolute truth as being simply the Brahman. Even though different people in different parts of the world may perceive the sun differently, the sun is one. I therefore surrender myself fully to that allpowerful, omnipresent Krishna. May all be well with the worlds. ~ Krishna Dharma,
1091:A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1092:All theology is a doomed but necessary attempt to express the inexpressible. God is the elusive mystery we try to capture and convey in language, but how can that ever be done? If the word water is not itself drinkable, how can the words we use to express the mystery of God be themselves absolute? They are metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, yet religious people have slaughtered and condemned each other over these experimental uncertainties. Our glory and agony as humans is that we long to find words that will no longer be words, mere signifiers, but the very experience they are trying to signify; and our tragedy is that we never succeed. This is the anguish that lies at the heart of all religion, because, though our words can describe our thirst for the absolute, they can never satisfy it. ~ Richard Holloway,
1093:GGibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam -- the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. ~ George MacDonald,
1094:The guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done. People who await guidance or detailed instructions languish. The same goes for workers who crave feedback. And the absolute worst thing that someone can do is inform Musk that what he’s asking is impossible. An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was. ~ Ashlee Vance,
1095:army of people. First, a massive thank you to all of my readers. I wouldn’t be writing this right now if it wasn’t for your support. I say it every time, but you guys are seriously the absolute best. Thank you for sticking with me and just being awesome in general. To the greatest reading group in the history of the Internet, my Slow Burners, thank you for your patience and love. To my pre-readers/ friends for putting up with me and the horrible drafts I send you. Ryn, I can’t thank you enough for not just being a good friend but for also helping me out with this freaking blurb. To my new friend Amy who kept me company so many nights doing writing sprints and for letting me vent randomly, this book would have taken me way longer to finish (and it would have been less fun). Eva, Eva, Eva. The list of ~ Mariana Zapata,
1096:I’ll never know anyone’s true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfness of someone, the me-ness of me: that’s like a true name, a person in all their formless awesome grandeur. But we do not see that grandeur. We see each other only in the shapes we are forced to assume. Words constrain us, and also our laws, and our fears and hopes, and the wind, and the rain, and the dog that barks while we’re trying to speak, all these things constrain us. We all force our true selves into little hashes and show them like passwords. A smile is a hashing function, and a word, and a cry. The cry is not the grief, the word is not the meaning, the smile is not the joy: we cannot run the hash in reverse, we cannot get from the sign to the absolute truth. Maybe the smile is false. Maybe the grief is a lie. ~ Seth Dickinson,
1097:We all have that one girl. We can have a handful of relationships, and they might be good, we might even fall in love with those people, but there is always going to be that one girl. The thing is, you don’t know it until you meet her, but when you do, it is like nothing else could ever compare. She has the power to change everything. She makes you a better person. She brings out the good in you. She knocks back all the bad. You honestly don’t know yourself when you’re with her. But you just know, she’s the one to bring out the absolute best in you. It's a connection unlike anything you've ever felt, almost like you've known her forever. It's more real than anything you've ever experienced. You don't feel a single bad vibe. And for the first time, you honestly wonder how you ever managed before you met her. ~ Bella Jewel,
1098:When it came down to it, she decided, she believed in a few important things.
In humanity before Dogma.
In religion of human kindness.
In Poetry. In Sex.
In being clear enough to ask for what she wanted,
and detaching from ego enough to hear the answer.
In the power of yoga.
In being embodied.
In owning her reality without apology.
In embracing it all, the fuck-ups and the bliss.
In the absolute necessity of dark chocolate to her continued existence.
In the power of a hard swallow of whiskey to make everything clear.
That most of the time we all do the very best we can.
But most of all, she believed that nothing is fixed and unchanging,
Not even the things she believed the most.
That belief, it turns out, is the one that felt the most like freedom. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc,
1099:Being a better dialectician meant not only being skillful at invention or at denouncing tricks in reasoning. Before anything else, it meant knowing how to dialogue, together with all the demands that this entails: recognizing the presence and the rights of one's interlocutor, basing one's replies on what the interlocutor admits he knows, and therefore agreeing with him at each stage of the discussion. Above all, it meant submitting oneself to the demands and norms of reason and the search for truth; finally, it meant recognizing the absolute value of the Good. It therefore meant leaving behind one's individual point of view, in order to rise to a universal viewpoint; and it meant trying to see things within the perspective of the All and the deity, thereby transforming one's vision of the world and one's own inner attitude. ~ Pierre Hadot,
1100:Speed showering. Speed shaving. Speed dressing. Then it hit me. What a waste of energy. It was all for nothing. I was going to miss that meeting no matter what I did. I could be on the platform right now, waiting for the PATH train, and it would still be a no-go. I could be on the train, heading out of the station, and it still wouldn’t work. So I took a minute for four or five gulps of too-hot coffee, which had already brewed on a timer. I wanted to call Sturgis and tell him I’d be late and I was sorry. But by then it was almost 8:35 a.m., and I thought it would be worse to interrupt his meeting. Crap. Crap. Crap. This was the worst. The absolute worst. The worst possible thing that could have happened to me. The job meant more to me than anything, than my own life, than the world. Why did I keep screwing up like this? ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde,
1101:As we saw concerning Chronicles in chapter 2, the Old Testament already does in principle what Paul is doing here: reworking the past to speak to the present. That interpretive conviction is seen time and time again throughout Second Temple Jewish literature where the past needs to be rethought in view of the present. This can be counterintuitive for modern readers: it is the very act of altering the past to address present circumstances that ensures its continuation as the active and abiding Word of God, not a relic of a bygone era. That is why the Chronicler does what he does with Samuel–Kings, and it is why Paul does what he does with the Abraham story. The text is not the master: it serves a goal. For Paul, that goal is the absolute and uncompromised centrality of what God has done here and now in the crucified and risen Christ. ~ Peter Enns,
1102:I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. ~ Eug ne Ionesco,
1103:On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured―disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui―in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. ~ Henry Miller,
1104:At least we must know how to recognize the ignoble ends it achieves. Each time that it deifies the total rejection, the absolute negation, of what exists, it destroys. Each time that it blindly accepts what exists and gives voice to absolute assent, it destroys again. Hatred of the creator can turn to hatred of creation or to exclusive and defiant love of what exists. But in both cases it ends in murder and loses the right to be called rebellion. One can be nihilist in two ways, in both by having an intemperate recourse to absolutes. Apparently there are rebels who want to die and those who want to cause death. But they are identical, consumed with desire for the true life, frustrated by their desire for existence and therefore preferring generalized injustice to mutilated justice. At this pitch of indignation, reason becomes madness. ~ Albert Camus,
1105:Tristan Mack Wilds: One of the conversations from Ed that I remember the absolute most, it was during my audition. We've had deep, intellectual conversations and we've had ones where he'll say a few words that will stick with you for the rest of your life. This is one of the joints that stick with you for the rest of your life. I was in the middle of auditions, and i twas kind of the last audition for the character of Michael ... Ed pulled me out. He's kind of sitting there, kind of just thinking. He said, 'Less is more. Remember that for the rest of your life. ... The less you do, the more everybody will feel it. Because we're so prone to seeing so much. With acting, with life, whatever. W'ere so prone to seeing so much more more. But when there's less, the mystery behind it, it leaves people guessing. It feels so much more. (227) ~ Jonathan Abrams,
1106:Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1107:The cats are asleep at the end of my bed and all around me, the thundery silence of L'Escarènere, caught at last in the rising flood of warm air, carrying the sand from the south. The Alps are folded above in the flickering light. And on the desk in the room beneath lies the writing which insists that the only escape is through the absolute destruction of everything you have ever known, loved, cared for, believed in, even the shell of yourself must be discarded with contempt; for freedom costs no less than everything, including your generosity, self-respect, integrity, tenderness - is that really what i wanted to say? It's what I have said. Worse still, I have pointed out the sheer creative joy of this ferocious destructiveness and the liberating wonder of violence. And these are dangerous messages for which I am no longer responsible. ~ Patricia Duncker,
1108:I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A space-voyage through somebody else's psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination. Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination - to me - is the next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy.
All the rest is either Politics or Pedantry, or Mainstream Fiction, may it rest in peace. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
1109:Above her little finite steps she feels,
Careless of knot or pause, worlds which weave out
A strange perfection beyond law and rule,
A universe of self-found felicity,
An inexpressible rhythm of timeless beats,
The many-movemented heart-beats of the One,
Magic of the boundless harmonies of self,
Order of the freedom of the infinite,
The wonder-plastics of the Absolute.
There is the All-Truth and there the timeless bliss.
But hers are fragments of a star-lost gleam,
Hers are but careless visits of the gods.
They are a Light that fails, a Word soon hushed
And nothing they mean can stay for long on earth.
There are high glimpses, not the lasting sight.
A few can climb to an unperishing sun,
Or live on the edges of the mystic moon
And channel to earth-mind the wizard ray. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day,
1110:A theory of "social rights," the like of which probably never before found its way into distinct language—being nothing short of this—that it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought; that whosoever fails thereof in the smallest particular, violates my social right, and entitles me to demand from the legislature the removal of the grievance. So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious, passes any one's lips, it invades all the "social rights" attributed to me by the Alliance. ~ John Stuart Mill,
1111:This illustration might also be used to illustrate the dialectic, which consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. First we say: ‘Reality is an uncle.’ This is the thesis. But the existence of an uncle implies that of a nephew. Since nothing really exists except the Absolute, and we are now committed to the existence of a nephew, we must conclude: ‘The Absolute is a nephew.’ This is the antithesis. But there is the same objection to this as to the view that the Absolute is an uncle; therefore we are driven to the view that the Absolute is the whole composed of uncle and nephew. This is the synthesis. But this synthesis is still unsatisfactory, because a man can be an uncle only if he has a brother or sister who is a parent of the nephew. Hence we are driven to enlarge our universe to include the brother or sister, with his wife or her husband. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1112:Love is one, and love is changeless.

For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected–not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire. ~ George MacDonald,
1113:When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature"? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution — i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick — an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? ~ Karl Marx,
1114:It all seems ‘real,’ but as it is constantly changing, it is not Real. Due to this maya mentality (the illusion that the world is Real),
people do not look beyond the veil of illusion to Me, the unchanging consciousness, the Absolute Reality beyond all the worldly; they do not see beyond to Me, the very basis of it all.
“This curtain of illusion (maya) is hard to see through, Arjuna. Only those who love and depend completely on Divinity are eventually able to see through it.
“Those who are unable to see beyond the veil cannot, in effect, discriminate between Real and not-Real. Oblivious to the Reality of their own higher nature (the True Self Within), they sink to their lower nature and do evil deeds, committing acts that turn them away from Divinity. Not knowing the holy from the unholy, they are of course not devoted to Me, Divinity. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa,
1115:In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of adults. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plow. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities, and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
1116:The thunderbolt (vajra) is one of the major symbols in Buddhist iconography, signifying the spiritual power of Buddhahood (indestructible enlightenment) which shatters the illusory realities of the world. The Absolute, or Adi Buddha, is represented in the images of Tibet as Vajra-Dhara (Tibetan: Dorje-Chang) "Holder of the Adamantine Bolt.
...
We know also that among primitive peoples warriors may speak of their weapons as thunderbolts. Sicut in coelo et in terra: the initiated warrior is an agent of the divine will; his training is not only in manual but also in spiritual skills. Magic (the supernatural power of the thunderbolt), as well as physical force and chemical poison, gives the lethal energy to his blows. A consummate master would require no physical weapon at all; the power of his magic word would suffice. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
1117:A Frenchman is self-assured because he considers himself personally, in mind as well as body, irresistibly enchanting for men as well as women. An Englishman is self-assured on the grounds that he is a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore, as an Englishman, he always knows what he must do, and knows that everything he does as an Englishman is unquestionably good. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others. A Russian is self-assured precisely because he does not know anything and does not want to know anything, because he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. A German is self-assured worst of all, and most firmly of all, and most disgustingly of all, because he imagines that he knows the truth, science, which he has invented himself, but which for him is the absolute truth. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1118:In other words, our constitution was designed by people who were idealistic but not ideological. There's a big difference. You can have a philosophy that tends to be liberal or conservative but still be open to evidence, experience, and argument. That enables people with honest differences to find practical, principled compromise. On the other hand, fervent insistence on an ideology makes evidence, experience, and arguments irrelevant: If you possess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant. There is nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. Compromise is weakness. And if your policies fail, you don't abandon them; instead, you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried to their logical extreme. ~ Bill Clinton,
1119:Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system—a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth—does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many “religious” people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don’t realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now. ~ Eckhart Tolle,
1120:[T]he whole talk about the absolute, is nothing but the cosmological proof incognito. This proof, in consequence of the case brought against it by Kant, deprived of all right and declared outlawed, dare no longer show itself in its true form, and therefore appears in all kinds of disguises - now in distinguished form, concealed under intellectual intuition or pure thought now as a suspicious vagabond, half begging, half demanding what it wants in more unpretending philosophemes. If an absolute must absolutely be had, then I will give one which is far better fitted to meet all the demands which are made on such a thing than these visionary phantoms: it is matter. It has no beginning, and it is imperishable; thus it is really independent, and quod per se est et per se concipitur; from its womb all proceeds, and to it all returns; what more can be desired of an absolute? ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
1121:Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless—and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performed—unaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unaware—and yet, look what it has done in all its unthinking, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything. Lily ~ Jeff Lindsay,
1122:Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.
Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope. ~ Dennis Lehane,
1123:An existence devoted to reading would have been his ultimate fulfillment, but it had not been given to him. He would have had to choose that path much earlier, to have known what he wanted to do...To have had a life plan. At first it had been interested to be recognized as a promising young banker, to climb the hierarchy, to have responsibilities and to earn a lot of money. Up until the day he had started to feel, dimly at first, then more and more clearly, that the man he had become was the absolute opposite of what he really was. Although the dichotomy weighed heavily on him, for a while the money he was earning was compensation enough, but then it could no longer make up for it. The gap between his ideal and his reality was too great. The weight turned into an anguish that was succeeded by the intolerable idea that he was wasting his life --or even that he had already wasted it. ~ Antoine Laurain,
1124:This third and unknown, this tertium quid, he names God; and by the word he means somewhat or someone who is the Supreme, the Divine, the Cause, the All, one of these things or all of them at once, the perfection or the totality of all that here is partial or imperfect, the absolute of all these myriad relativities, the Unknown by learning of whom the real secret of the known can become to him more and more intelligible. Man has tried to deny all these categories, - he has tried to deny his own real existence, he has tried to deny the real existence of the cosmos, he has tried to deny the real existence of God. But behind all these denials we see the same constant necessity of his attempt at knowledge; for he feels the need of arriving at a unity of these three terms, even if it can only be done by suppressing two of them or merging them in the other that is left.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,
1125:The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when...you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out".'

There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are only the three positions. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1126:And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility. Here, the grass is not singing. The wind cannot blow through it. Dumb expression, greenery made stupid, it hums a bland monotone in the key of the mono-minded. No word is emptier than a golf tee. No roots, it has no known etymology, it is verbal nail polish. Worldwide, golf is an arch act of enclosure, a commons fenced and subdued for the wealthy, trampling serf and seedling. The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature. ~ Jay Griffiths,
1127:From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1128:German philosophy was almost at the very root of the problem. The sense of neurasthenia felt in the late 19th century was in part created by a weariness of philosophy and not only because there was an awareness that there was so much to think about, but because german thought was already characterized by a weightiness that too easily transferred in weariness, and even fatalism. There are of course many reasons for this, but among them is the peculiarly german pursuit of continuously, relentlessly, pursuing ideas to their endpoint; wherever that might lead. This tendency also has an expression in german: Drang nach dem absoluten ('the drive towards the absolute'). Again it is not a phrase that the English or English philosophy would use, but it aptly sums up that habit of pushing and pushing ideas until they can then reach what can then seem to be an unavoidable and even predetermined endpoint. ~ Douglas Murray,
1129:Darling Downs Earless Dragon
Darling Downs Earless Dragon
Tympanocryptis cf. tetraporophora
The arms of his spiral galaxy were not punctured
With bright stars, but with buckets of bore water
For his mother’s native shrub garden. The immense
Pull of drought confined the scraggily callistemons
To a dense cluster in the house paddock, just beyond
Where the hose’s far-flung wavelets could penetrate.
Here, the dark soil yawned like a grain sack spilt open
As he poured the rusty swill into a black hole’s thirsty
Maw. It was here, one late afternoon at the absolute
Horizon of the day, that he noticed a pale white glow
Skulk into a crack’s dim singularity, as if the icy tail
Of a comet had been swallowed whole. The patterns
Of the lizard’s scales soaked into the gloom like water
Into the earth; no light escaping extinction’s pressure.
~ B. R. Dionysius,
1130:In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and [[God] is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929),
1131:In Christ, the absolute Other of God is said to enter into the mundane world and set up a home among us. Here God is neither reduced to the world of objects nor remains in some space utterly beyond the world, but rather ruptures the present with the future, fractures the finite with the infinite, and tears through the temporal with the eternal, inhabiting the now in the guise of the not-yet. Here God’s Otherness is no longer located in some eschatological realm beyond the present order of the world but rather in an eschatological realm that infuses the present world, rupturing it and placing it into question. Here the razor-sharp cut of God’s kingdom does not presuppose a hairline gap between the present world and the world to come, but rather is that which slices through the present world with the world to come, inhabiting our world with a divine realm that is not reducible to our time and space. ~ Peter Rollins,
1132:Skipping the intermediary stages, it suffices to say that this synthesis, after being incarnated in the Church
and in Reason, culminates in the absolute State, founded by the soldier workers, where the spirit of the world will be finally reflected in the mutual recognition of each by all and in the universal reconciliation of everything that has ever existed under the sun. At this moment, "when the eyes of the spirit coincide with the eyes of the body," each individual consciousness will be nothing more than a mirror reflecting another mirror, itself reflected to infinity in infinitely recurring images. The City of God will coincide with the city of humanity; and universal history, sitting in judgment on the world, will pass its sentence by which good and evil will be justified. The State will play the part of Destiny and will proclaim its approval of every aspect of reality on
"the sacred day of the Presence. ~ Albert Camus,
1133:You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy." There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane then he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. ~ Joseph Heller,
1134:With more and more decision making and work done by robots, what will be left for humans to do? Do we really want to compete biologically with robot technology by using brain implants and genetically improved intelligence and social behavior? This choice would mean a sharp departure away from the human nature we have inherited, and a fundamental change in the human condition. Now we are talking about a problem best solved within the humanities, and one more reason the humanities are all-important. While I’m at it, I hereby cast a vote for existential conservatism, the preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust. We are doing very well in science and technology. Let’s agree to keep it up, and move both along even faster. But let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future. ~ Edward O Wilson,
1135:Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion. A poet meditating upon the life of a great poet, that is Victor-Emile Michelet meditating upon the life of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, wrote: "Alas! we have to grow old to conquer youth, to free it from its fetters and live according to its original impulse. ~ Gaston Bachelard,
1136:To The Seasons
Having overcome the accidents of Winter, Summer, Spring, and the Rains,
I welcome at my heart’s evening the void, the null, the absolute zero
No longer prey to the whimsy of the seasons, I rejoice
In freedom from function,
liberty from thought, lightness of death
No longer wronged by the contingent, the wails of the grieving,
Laughter and shrieks of the whirling months, I yield at most
To the malaise of old age, to the body’s loss of humors
Markings in a dead script on a calendar no longer in use
In a ruined palace my moving finger points to rusty locks hanging
From rows of the chained doors of long deserted chambers
Dimmed is the former chiaroscuro, my heart is monochrome
A late autumn landscape with gray fog shading into a pallid moon
In my ears the ageless sea confirms what I already know
I have for company only the void, the vacuum, the zero
~ Buddhadeb Bosu,
1137:IV.The wounded surgeon plies the steelThat questions the distempered part;Beneath the bleeding hands we feelThe sharp compassion of the healer's artResolving the enigma of the fever chart.Our only health is the diseaseIf we obey the dying nurseWhose constant care is not to pleaseBut to remind of our, and Adam's curse,And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.The whole earth is our hospitalEndowed by the ruined millionaire,Wherein, if we do well, we shallDie of the absolute paternal careThat will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.The chill ascends from feet to knees,The fever sings in mental wires.If to be warmed, then I must freezeAnd quake in frigid purgatorial firesOf which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and bloodAgain, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. ~ T S Eliot,
1138:If you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. Write down your answers to these questions, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit - aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.

1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.
2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?
3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?
4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?
5. What are you putting off out of fear?
6. What is it costing you - financially, emotionally, and physically - to postpone action?
7. What are you waiting for? ~ Timothy Ferriss,
1139:Londoners have intense loyalties to the areas from which they come. Those born in Croydon will argue that theirs is a borough with access to the green belt, excellent shopping and wide, pleasant streets, while the rest of the city flatly knows that Croydon is a soulless hole whose only redeeming feature is the novelty of the electric tram and a large DIY store with reasonable parking. Likewise, those from Hackney would contend that their borough is vibrant and exciting, instead of crime-ridden and depressed; those from Acton would argue that their suburb is peaceful and gentle instead of soul-destroyingly dull, samey and bleak; and the people of Amersham would proclaim that their town is the ideal combination of leafy politeness and speedy transport links instead of, clearly, the absolute end of the earth. However, no one, not one mind worthy of respect, could defend Willesden Junction as anything but an utter and irredeemable dump. ~ Kate Griffin,
1140:Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called “a mystery ashtray,” which got hurled back into the clay bucket.

So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray. ~ Neal Shusterman,
1141:A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or infinite emptiness is part of the inner spiritual experience; of this silence and void the physical mind has a certain fear, the small superficially active thinking or vital mind a shrinking from it or dislike, - for it confuses the silence with mental and vital incapacity and the void with cessation or non-existence: but this silence is the silence of the spirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge, power and bliss, and this emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being, a liberation of it from its turbid contents so that it may be filled with the wine of God; it is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence. Even when the being turns towards cessation, it is a cessation not in non-existence but into some vast ineffable of spiritual being or the plunge into the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.28 - The Divine Life,
1142:How many times do I have to say I’m sorry before you believe it? That I acknowledge I made a terrible mistake and have done everything I know how to fix it? How can you just freeze me out after that and walk away from everything we had?”
Hurt and resentment swelled inside him, mixing with the anger in a toxic, chaotic mess. “You walked away first,” he shot back. “That was your choice.” Then I made mine. It was a low blow, even if it was true. But he refused to feel guilty about it, even under the circumstances. He hadn’t wanted to have this conversation, but she’d insisted, and he wouldn’t lie to her about the way things stood.
Honor’s chin came up, her tears evaporating as her eyes sparked with fresh anger. “I did,” she admitted quietly, her control merely emphasizing the loss of his own. “I did walk away and it was the absolute worst mistake of my life. I’m sorry, Liam. See? I’m a big enough person to admit it to your face. Are you? ~ Kaylea Cross,
1143:4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,
1144:According to the Tiqqun collective, we have become the innocuous, pliable inhabitants of global urban societies.7 Even in the absence of any direct compulsion, we choose to do what we are told to do; we allow the management of our bodies, our ideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to be externally imposed. We buy products that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then we voluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject who submits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water and lives near nuclear reactors without complaint. The absolute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by the titles of the many bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies to see before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before we die. ~ Jonathan Crary,
1145:Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defence, the German Government has re-established, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone!” Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream Heils, the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: “Men of the German Reichstag!” The silence is utter. ~ William L Shirer,
1146:Nevertheless, if we do accept this evidence, from the pre-Aryan (Dravidian) civilization, of a full-blown Shiva-Shakti mythology, we may trace the manifestation of the Shaivite tradition to these pre-Aryan peoples, and account for the appearance of two separately developing traditions among the early Indian peoples: one, the long-established tradition of the aboriginal races, and the other, the imported Vedic pantheon of the invading Aryans. For the Dravidian population, the Absolute Being came eventually to be known as Shiva, and His world-manifesting Power was called Shakti; while the Aryan tradition eventually adopted the name, Brahman for the Absolute principle, and Maya for Its world-manifesting Energy. And, while these two traditions eventually intermingled and became recognized by the wise as representative of a common and identical worldview, for many centuries each retained a semblance of independence while coexisting alongside one another. ~ Swami Abhayananda,
1147:For if the Absolute has predicates, then there are predicates; but the proposition “there are predicates” is not one which the present theory can admit. We cannot escape by saying that the predicates merely qualify the Absolute; for the Absolute cannot be qualified by nothing, so that the proposition “there are predicates” is logically prior to the proposition “the Absolute has predicates”. Thus the theory itself demands, as its logical prius, a proposition without a subject and a predicate; moreover this proposition involves diversity, for even if there be only one predicate, this must be different from the one subject. Again, since there is a predicate, the predicate is an entity, and its predicability of the Absolute is a relation between it and the Absolute. Thus the very proposition which was to be non-relational turns out to be, after all, relational, and to express a relation which current philosophical language would describe as purely external. ~ Bertrand Russell,
1148:The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. ~ Jean Baudrillard,
1149:Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders - but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarm, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given? ~ Catherynne M Valente,
1150:When a movie begins with the words “Based on a True Story,” what crosses your mind? Do you assume every line of dialogue, every bit of clothing and song in the background is the same as it was in the true event on which the film was based? Of course you don’t. You know movies like Pearl Harbor or Erin Brockovich take artistic license with facts, shaping them so a coherent story will unfold with a beginning, middle, and end. Even biopics about the lives of musicians or politicians who are still alive are rarely the absolute truth. Some things are left out, or some people are fused into single characters. The details, you think when watching, are less important than the big picture, the general idea. If only you were so savvy when it came to looking back on the biopic in your head, but you are not so smart. You see, the movie up there is just as dramatized, and scientists have known this for quite a while. It all starts with your brain’s desire to fill in the gaps. Take ~ David McRaney,
1151:So in the midst of our struggle with indwelling sin, we must continually keep our focus on the gospel. We must always go back to the truth that even in the face of the fact that so often "I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing" (Rom 7:19), there is no condemnation. God no longer counts our sins against us (Rom 4:8). Or, to say it another way, God wants us to find our primary joy in our objectively declared justification, not in our subjectively perceived sanctification. Regardless of how much progress we make in our pursuit of holiness, it will never come close to the absolute perfect righteousness of Christ that is ours through our union with him in his life and death. So we should learn to live with the discomfort of the justified life. We should accept the fact that as still-growing Christians we will always be dissatisfied with our sanctification. But at the same time, we should remember that in Christ we are justified. ~ Jerry Bridges,
1152:Germans can be self-assured on the basis of an abstract idea—science, that is, an imaginary knowledge of the perfect truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he considers himself personally, in mind as well as body, irresistibly enchanting for men as well as women. An Englishman is self-assured on the grounds that he is a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore, as an Englishman, he always knows what he must do, and knows that everything he does as an Englishman is unquestionably good. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others. A Russian is self-assured precisely because he does not know anything and does not want to know anything, because he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. A German is self-assured worst of all, and most firmly of all, and most disgustingly of all, because he imagines that he knows the truth, science, which he has invented himself, but which for him is the absolute truth. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1153:He was an old Drag man with his bit getting short. He was the first to attempt to teach me to control my emotions. He would say, “Always remember whether you be sucker or hustler in the world out there, you’ve got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings. I picture the human mind as a movie screen. If you’re a dopey sucker, you’ll just sit and watch all kinds of mindwrecking, damn fool movies on that screen.” He said. “Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest.” His rundown of his screen theory saved my sanity many years later. He was a twisted wise man and one day when he wasn’t looking, a movie flashed on the screen. The title was “Death For an Old Con. ~ Iceberg Slim,
1154:I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt,
1155:God has created nothing more noble than intelligence,' he said, 'and His wrath is on him who despises it'; and here intelligence might be defined as the capacity to perceive and assimilate the truth on every level, on one hand distinguishing between the Absolute and the relative, and on the other, perceiving that two and two make four. He said also: 'God is beautiful and He loves beauty.' This relates closely to the concept of fitrah, for the human norm is one of beauty of spirit, beauty of soul, beauty of comportment and, finally, the beauty of those things with which we choose to surround ourselves - home, dress, utensils and so on. Anger, condemned in the Qur'an and hadith on moral grounds, is condemned also because it disfigures the human countenance. An ugly building is un-Islamic, however functional it may be, as is everything cheap and tawdry. The true and the beautiful, therefore, belong to this final faith in a very special way. Stupidity and ugliness have no place in it. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton,
1156:There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another. ~ Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov,
1157:when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into the property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life. ~ Hermann Broch,
1158:a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness: - it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,
1159:The spectacle's instruction and the spectators' ignorance are wrongly seen as antagonistic factors when in fact they give birth to each other. In the same way, the computer's binary language is an irresistible inducement to the continual and unreserved acceptance of what has been programmed according to the wishes of someone else and passes for the timeless source of a superior, impartial and total logic. Such progress, such speed, such breadth of vocabulary! Political? Social? Make your choice. You cannot have both. My own choice is inescapable. They are jeering at us, and we know whom these programs are for. Thus it is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are still unable to read, for reading demands making judgements at every line; and is the only access to the wealth of pre-spectacular human experience. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak. ~ Guy Debord,
1160:A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence - and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal - of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth - a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a Supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
1161:The best sex and the most satisfying sex are not the same. I have had great sex with men who were intimate terrorists, men who seduce and attract by giving you just what you feel your heart needs then gradually or abruptly withholding it once they have gained your trust. And I have been deeply sexually fulfilled in bonds with loving partners who have had less skill and know-how. Because of sexist socialization, women tend to put sexual satisfaction in its appropriate perspective. We acknowledge its value without allowing it to become the absolute measure of intimate connection. Enlightened women want fulfilling erotic encounters as much as men, but we ultimately prefer erotic satisfaction within a context where there is loving, intimate connection. If men were socialized to desire love as much as they are taught to desire sex, we would see a cultural revolution. As it stands, most men tend to be more concerned about sexual performance and sexual satisfaction than whether they are capable of giving and receiving love. ~ bell hooks,
1162:I once had occasion to conduct an interview with a Soviet writer (Anatoli Kusnyetsov). (...) He made a remark which is one of the most extraordinary remarks anyone has ever made to me and has echoed in my mind more often than I can say. He said to me this: that if in this world you are confronted with absolute power, power unmitigated, unrestrained, extending to every area of human life - if you are confronted with power in those terms, you are driven to realise that the only possible response to it is not some alternative power arrangement, more humane, more enlightened. The only possible response to absolute power is the absolute love which our Lord brought into the world. (...) I can see, though we in the West have not experienced this absolute power, that there would be something futile and ridiculous even in the attempt to meet such tyranny with some alternative propaganda or ideology. As between Caesar at his most absolute and God at his most remote, there is only Christ. And that was what this man said. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge,
1163:We may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well the totalitarian rulers know it. (…) To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms. ~ Robert A Nisbet,
1164:Yes, Joseph Smith did see angels and visions—because he was the instrument in God’s hands to restore the same Church of Jesus Christ as existed in primitive times—all of its powers as well as all of its doctrines. Yet sorrowfully, on occasion, some are willing to set aside the precious gospel truths restored by Joseph Smith because they get diverted on some historical issue or some scientific hypothesis not central to their exaltation, and in so doing they trade their spiritual birthright for a mess of pottage. They exchange the absolute certainty of the Restoration for a doubt, and in that process they fall into the trap of losing faith in the many things they do know because of a few things they do not know. There will always be some seemingly intellectual crisis looming on the horizon as long as faith is required and our minds are finite, but likewise there will always be the sure and solid doctrines of the Restoration to cling to, which will provide the rock foundation upon which our testimonies may be built. ~ Tad R Callister,
1165:Out comes a gorgeous, fleshy wheel of foie gras, perched on its side like a monument grander than its actual two-inch height. Around it are its minions, smears of savory-sweet onion confit paste and garlic tendrils puffed like Rice Krispies. You slide your knife down, slowly at first. The wheel is murky, muddy, and before you know it, the knife is being sucked to the bottom of the plate as you watch the wheel unpeel from itself.
Out spills a green liquid, as mesmerizing as lava. Go on, take a forkful. Drag the finest, smoothest foie into the absolute essence of pea. Pick up a few pieces from the pool of accents. And taste. Put your fork down and wonder: how could this dish seem so pure and elemental, and yet have a flavor so electric, so challenging?
Bakushan, from the Japanese word bakku-shan. A girl who looks pretty from behind, but is ugly in the front.
This dish is not ugly by any means, but it offers that bit of shock, that moment of fear and excitement when the girl turns around and shows you the truth. ~ Jessica Tom,
1166:Actually, the substitution of the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle denotes no dethronement of the pleasure-principle, but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in the new way an assured pleasure coming later. But the end psychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is mirrored in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in a future life for the—voluntary or enforced—renunciation of earthly lusts is nothing but a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. In logical pursuit of this prototype, religions have been able to effect the absolute renunciation of pleasure in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future life; they have not, however, achieved a conquest of the pleasure-principle this way. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in this conquest; science, however, also offers intellectual pleasure during its work and promises practical gain at the end. ~ Sigmund Freud,
1167:If you asked me to boil down everything I’ve learned from this research, I would tell you these three things: The level of collective courage in an organization is the absolute best predictor of that organization’s ability to be successful in terms of its culture, to develop leaders, and to meet its mission. The greatest challenge in developing brave leaders is helping them acknowledge and answer their personal call to courage. Courage can be learned if we’re willing to put down our armor and pick up the shared language, tools, and skills we need for rumbling with vulnerability, living into our values, braving trust, and learning to rise. We fail the minute we let someone else define success for us. Like many of you, I spent too many years taking on projects and even positions, just to prove I could do it. I was driven by a definition of success that didn’t reflect who I am, what I want, or what brings me joy. It was simply accomplish-acquire-collapse-repeat. There was very little joy, very little meaning, and tons of exhaustion and resentment. ~ Bren Brown,
1168:Now the leaders of the Nazi Third Reich regarded war as the natural state of human society and extermination as a desirable way of establishing the dominance of their national organization and their ideology over rival systems. The enslavement or extermination of inferior groups or nations thus became the appointed duty of those who accepted their doctrine of 'Aryan' superiority. Only in the atmosphere of constant war could totalitarian leaders command the absolute obedience and unqualified loyalty necessary for the smooth operation of such a megamachine.

In conformity with these aberrations, systematic violence, brutality, torture, and sexual corruption were treated as normal, even desirable accompaniments of the 'new order.' And though all these features were openly present from the beginning, many otherwise decent people, in other countries besides Germany, openly hailed this regime as 'The Wave of the Future,' though when one examines either its doctrines or its acts, one can find in Nazism only the sewage-laden backwash of the past. ~ Lewis Mumford,
1169:Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth. ~ Leo Tolstoy,
1170:A conception of the law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: "Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things. ~ Hannah Arendt,
1171:Aa-Zaa-Dee
How can I define this Real
of language in words? Signs
betray its unsayable being
like a hoax. Has no authenticity
cheated by fakeness; condemns
all things to fantasy. How can I
praise this enemy
of appreciation? When it’s around
I’m disoriented, terrified
like a newborn. Has no quantity
beyond its lack; know it
by its non-being, risk its abdication
from your ideals by naming it
as a visible thing. Look and see
the home to the Statue of Liberty
is the empire of prisons, correctional
hellholes. How can you crave this
termination of desire? Beautiful
lover is a tundra if it’s the eternal
-ly absent flame. It’s understandable
as an ineffable terror, State
of Nature that deracinates words
like ‘nature’, ‘chaos’, ‘annihilation’.
It’s like nothing else. It’s the absolute nothing
at the core of our stifling things
’ composition. Equality, fraternity
need their triplet. I need it
to tease, evade me; like death
to define life, give it meaning.
~ Ali Alizadeh,
1172:Offer me?" A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. "Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports."
How does that make Britain great?"
"Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!"
I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing.
"The second," she went on, "is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptions, the Today Program and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!"
"Oh," I said, feeling that something was expected. "Oh" was enough.
"And lastly, we have the NHS!"
"This is an NHS service?" I asked incredulously.
"I didn't say that, I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still. ~ Kate Griffin,
1173:Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing. ~ Ernest Hemingway,
1174:The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float, as the other evening at the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous": here is Nausea; here there is what those bastards—the ones on the Coteau Vert and others—try to hide from themselves with their idea of their rights. But what a poor lie: no one has any rights; they are entirely free, like other men, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they are superfluous, that is to say, amorphous, vague, and sad. ~ Jean Paul Sartre,
1175:We, that is, the traditionalists like myself, use the term ‘‘modernism’’ not in a vague way as characterizing just things that happen to be around today, but as a particular way of looking at the world, a worldview that began in the Renaissance in the West with such components as Renaissance humanism, rationalism, et cetera. As I have mentioned already, modernism rejects the primacy of absolute and ultimate truth transcending the human order and descend- ing upon the human realm from the Divine Order. It places man himself at the center of the stage as ‘‘the absolute.’’ In a sense it absolutizes the human being in his or her earthly reality. Usually it does not come out and say so explicitly, but that is what it really means; that is, it takes the absolute away from God and puts it on the human plane, and therefore makes human reason, human perceptions, human interests the criteria of reality, of knowledge, of the truth, of the goal of human life. Therefore, as a consequence it substitutes the significance of the temporal and the transient for the abiding and the eternal. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
1176:In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It is a movement that
describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition.
A change of regulations concerning property without a corresponding change of government is not a
revolution, but a reform. There is no kind of economic revolution, whether its methods are violent or
pacific, which is not, at the same time, manifestly political. Revolution can already be distinguished, in
this way, from rebellion. The warning given to Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a
revolution," accents the essential difference. It means precisely that "it is the absolute certainty of a new
form of government." Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent
pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the
injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from
individual experience into the realm of ideas. ~ Albert Camus,
1177:Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and looked in vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. The certainty of meeting him had not been checked by any of those recollections that might not unreasonably have alarmed her. She had dressed with more than usual care, and prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all that remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more than might be won in the course of the evening. But in an instant arose the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted for Mr. Darcy's pleasure in the Bingleys' invitation to the officers; and though this was not exactly the case, the absolute fact of his absence was pronounced by his friend Denny, to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and who told them that Wickham had been obliged to go to town on business the day before, and was not yet returned; adding, with a significant smile, "I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if he had not wanted to avoid a certain gentleman here. ~ Jane Austen,
1178:People reject the cross because it contradicts historical values and expectations—just as Peter challenged Jesus for saying, “The Son of Man must suffer”: “Far be it from You; this shall not happen to You.” But Jesus rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31, 33). “In the course of a few moments,” Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation. Suffering and death were not supposed to happen to the Messiah. He was expected to triumph over evil and not be defeated by it. How could God’s revelation be found connected with the “the worst of deaths,” the “vilest death,” “a criminal’s death on the tree of shame”?[15] Like the lynching tree in America, the cross in the time of Jesus was the most “barbaric form of execution of the utmost cruelty,” the absolute opposite of human value systems. It turned reason upside down. In his sermon-lecture “The Transvaluation of Values” in Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr turns to Paul to express what it meant to see the world from a transcendent, divine point of view. ~ James H Cone,
1179:Tell me what you are looking at right now.” Malory smacked his lips — he was really the absolute worst human to speak to on the telephone — and considered. “I’m looking at, what does this seem to be? West of England Tumbler, I should think. Yes. Lovely example. You should see his muffs. Right next to him is a dreadful little Thuringen Field Pigeon. I’ve never had them but I’m quite certain they aren’t meant to have that hideous stallion neck. I have no idea what this one is. Let’s read the card. Anatolian Ringbeater. Of course. Oh, and here’s a German Beauty Homer.” “Oh, those are my favorite,” Gansey said. “I am a fan of a good German Beauty Homer.” “Gansey, don’t make light,” Malory said sternly. “Those things look like bloody puffins.” Adam’s body shook in silent convulsions of laughter. Gansey took a moment to catch his breath before asking, “And what’s that sound in the background?” “Let me take a gander,” Malory replied. There was a crackling sound, and then his voice, rather louder than before, said, “They’re auctioning off some birds.” “What sort? Please tell me German Beauty Homers. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,
1180:In the flood of the loss of humanness in our age—including the flow from abortion-on-demand to infanticide and on to euthanasia—the only thing that can stem this tide is the certainty of the absolute uniqueness and value of people. And the only thing which gives us that is the knowledge that people are made in the image of God. We have no other final protection. And the only way we know that people are made in the image of God is through the Bible and the incarnation of Christ, which we know from the Bible. If people are not made in the image of God, the pessimistic, realistic humanist is right: the human race is an abnormal wart on the smooth face of a silent and meaningless universe. In this setting, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia (including the killing of mentally deranged criminals, the severely handicapped, or the elderly who are an economic burden) are completely logical.... Without the Bible and without the revelation in Christ (which is only told to us in the Bible) there is nothing to stand between us and our children and the eventual acceptance of the monstrous inhumanities of theage. ~ John Piper,
1181:When they were about a hundred meters from the death lines, Yifan waved Cheng Xin to a stop. Each death line was about twenty or thirty meters in diameter, and from here, they resembled death columns. “These are probably the darkest things in the universe,” Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space. “These are the deadest things in the universe as well,” said Guan Yifan. “Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge.” Yifan picked up a rock and tossed it toward one of the death lines. The rock disappeared inside the absolute darkness. “Can your lightspeed ships produce death lines?” Cheng Xin asked. “Far from it.” “So you’ve seen these before, then?” “Yes, but only rarely.” Cheng ~ Liu Cixin,
1182:What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny,
what I cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything
of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire
for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I
can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or
enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this
divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know
whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know
that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me
just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition
mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch,
what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two
certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the
impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable
principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other
truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack
and which means nothing within the limits of my condition? ~ Albert Camus,
1183:Now we see what we might call the ontological or creature tragedy that is so peculiar to man: If he gives in to Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation; he pulls away from the healing power of gratitude and humility that he must naturally feel for having been created, for having been given the opportunity of life experience.

Man thus has the absolute tension of the dualism. Individuation means that the human creature has to oppose itself to the rest of nature. It creates precisely the isolation that one can't stand-and yet needs in order to develop distinctively. It creates the difference that becomes such a burden; it accents the smallness of oneself and the sticking-outness at the same time. This is natural guilt. The person experiences this as "unworthiness" or "badness" and dumb inner dissatisfaction. And the reason is realistic. Compared to the rest of nature man is not a very satisfactory creation. He is riddled with fear and powerlessness. ~ Ernest Becker,
1184:Is there an infinite outside of us? Is this infinite, one, immanent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite, and because, if matter were lacking in it, it would in that respect be limited; necessarily intelligent, because it is infinite, and since if it lacked intelligence it would be to that extent, finite? Does this finite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we are able to attribute to ourselves the idea of existence only? In other words, it is not the absolute of which we are the relative? At the same time, while there is an infinite outside of us, is there not an infinite within us? These two infinities, do they not rest superimposed on one another? Does the second infinite not underlie the first, so to speak? It is not the mirror, the reflection, the echo of the first, an abyss concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinite intelligent, also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If the two infinities are intelligent, each one of them has a principle of will, and there is a "me" in the infinite above, as there is a "me" in the infinite below. The "me" below is the soul; the "me" above is God. ~ Victor Hugo,
1185:Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn’t it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment He had come down in power and glory? Why didn’t He do it? Why hasn’t He done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?
I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn’t, He hasn’t, because from the moment He did, He would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves. Even those who hated Him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in Him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to Him and He to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.
And so, I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world. ~ Wendell Berry,
1186:Of course I'd been long enough on land to know earthly love, and it had always ended in a battle, in each wanting to be the stronger, the superior in the relation. It is commonly called 'the battle of the sexes,' but I don't know if that is the right term. In truth it's a question of a power struggle, of a battle not to lose oneself, to maintain one's sovereignty — one's property rights. Only the very strong can live with no fear of losing their autonomy. Still, this is the precondition for loving: not to want power — not to want to own someone.
There can be talk of love only when one gives up one's self-assertion, when one lays down arms and capitulates fully. When one no longer defends oneself. Love is the absolute yielding, the total surrender – unconditionally. It knows no reservations, no defense. Love creates no need to be the strongest; it knows no lust for power, no personality struggle. Love is pure devotion, absolute self-surrender. Only one who is strong enough not to fear losing his personality can love. To love, one must be able to forsake oneself, to make the other free. And it is this which we're not strong enough to do. ~ Jens Bj rneboe,
1187:Brought From Beyond
The magpie and the bowerbird, its odd
predilection unheard of by Marco Polo
when he came upon, high in Badakhshan,
that blue stone’s
embedded glint of pyrites, like the dance
of light on water, or of angels
(the surface tension of the Absolute)
on nothing,
turned, by processes already ancient,
into pigment: ultramarine, brought from
beyond the water it’s the seeming
color of,
and of the berries, blooms and pebbles
finickingly garnishing an avian
shrine or bower with the rarest hue
in nature,
whatever nature is: the magpie’s eye for
glitter from the clenched fist of
the Mesozoic folding: the creek sands,
the mine shaft,
the siftings and burnishings, the ingot,
the pagan artifact: to propagate
the faith, to find the metal, unearth it,
hoard it up,
to, by the gilding of basilicas,
transmute it: O magpie, O bowerbird,
O Marco Polo and Coronado, where do
15
these things, these
fabrications, come from—the holy places,
ark and altarpiece, the aureoles,
the seraphim—and underneath it all
the howling?
~ Amy Clampitt,
1188:But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 302,
1189:In order to become, to be, to move,
Imagine leaving here, going to a cliff above the sea.
Watch the sea
Dive into the air, down into the sea.
Dive deep toward the bottom.
Feel the entities in the sea, in the cool darkness, the pressure.
Listen and communicate with them.
They know the secret way of escape from here.
Escape into other places far from this planet.
Move up from the sea's depths.
Slant up through the dark clod, up to the warmth.
Move out of the sea's surface, into light.
Travel through the earth's air space, out.
Accelerate toward our star, the sun.
Feel its radiance increase, its energy.
This energy started, maintains us, is us.
Enter the sun's flaming self, be its light,
Be its energy, share the star as you.
Be the sun, shining into space.
Move away on its energy, become greater that this star.
Spread as its light in all directions.
Fill the universe with thee, be the universe.
Be all the stars, the galaxies are your body.
Be empty space spread self to infinity.
Be the creative potential in the empty spaces.
BE the potential, infinite in the absolute zero of nothing. ~ John C Lilly,
1190:In today’s safety culture we seem to swing from strictly monitoring and guiding our children from infancy through high school, and then releasing them to the absolute freedom of college (though some parents are trying to encroach there as well). We have to remember that for most of human history adolescents took on adult roles earlier and rose admirably to the challenge. Many of the problems we have with teenagers result from failing to adequately challenge their growing brains. While we now know that the brain’s decision-making areas aren’t completely wired until at least their early twenties, it is experience-making decisions that wires them, and it can’t be done without taking some risks. We need to allow children to try and fail. And when they do make the stupid, shortsighted decisions that come from inexperience, we need to let them suffer the results. At the same time we also need to provide balance by not setting policies that will magnify one mistake, like drug use or fighting, into a life-derailing catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is exactly what our current “zero tolerance” policies—that expel children from school for just one rule violation—do. ~ Bruce D Perry,
1191:It is a common misconception, in the spirit of the sentiments expressed in Q16, that Godel's theorem shows that there are many different kinds of arithmetic, each of which is equally valid. The particular arithmetic that we may happen to choose to work with would, accordingly, be defined merely by some arbitrarily chosen formal system. Godel's theorem shows that none of these formal systems, if consistent, can be complete; so-it is argued-we can keep adjoining new axioms, according to our whim, and obtain all kinds of alternative consistent systems within which we may choose to work. The comparison is sometimes made with the situation that occurred with Euclidean geometry. For some 21 centuries it was believed that Euclidean geometry was the only geometry possible. But when, in the eighteenth century, mathematicians such as Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai showed that indeed there are alternatives that are equally possible, the matter of geometry was seemingly removed from the absolute to the arbitrary. Likewise, it is often argued, Godel showed that arithmetic, also, is a matter of arbitrary choice, any one set of consistent axioms being as good as any other. ~ Roger Penrose,
1192:Nothing is easier than to be original thanks to a false absolute, all the more so when this absolute is negative, for to destroy is easier than to construct. Humanism is the reign of horizontality, either naive or perfidious; and since it is also — and by that very fact — the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. It is not too difficult to be original with such intentions and such means; all one needs is a little imagination. It should be noted that subversion includes not only philosophical and moral schemes designed to undermine the normal order of things, but also — in literature and on a seemingly harmless plane — all that can satisfy an unhealthy curiosity: namely all the narrations that are fantastic, grotesque, lugubrious, "dark," thus satanic in their way, and well-fitted to predispose men to all excesses and all perversions; this is the sinister side of romanticism. Without fearing in the least to be "childlike" or caring in the least to be "adult," we readily dispense with these somber lunacies, and are fully satisfied with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1193:For primordial man Revelation and intellection coincided: contingency was still transparent so that there were as yet neither “points of view” nor "perspectives”; whereas in later times Revelation is multiple because geometrically speaking the circumference implies many radii, the “point of view” of primordial man corresponded to the entire circle; the center was everywhere. In the same way the unavoidably limiting aspect of expressions, forms, or symbols did not yet imprison minds; there was therefore no place for a diversity of forms, each expressing the same Truth in the name of the impersonal Self while excluding each other in the name of this or that particular manifestation of the personal God. Now that these diverse manifestations exist, what matters is knowing that intrinsically they speak in an absolute mode since it is the Absolute which is speaking, but that extrinsically they are clothed in the language of a particular mental coloring and a particular system of contingencies since they are addressed to man; now the man to whom they are addressed in this manner is already cut off from the inward Revelation that is direct and “supernaturally natural” intellection. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1194:But those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun." Suddenly his voice sounded to Will very strong, and very Welsh. "At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders -- oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe."
His warm, deep voice ended, and there was only the roar of the engine. Will looked out over the grey-misted fields, silent.
"There was a great long speech, now," John Rowlands said awkwardly. "But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends. ~ Susan Cooper,
1195:The key one and threefold, even as universal science. The division of the work is sevenfold, and through these sections are distributed the seven degrees of initiation into is transcendental philosophy.

The text is a mystical commentary on the oracles of Solomon, ^ and the work ends with a series of synoptic schedules which are the synthesis of Magic and the occult Kabalah so far as concerns that which can be made public in writing. The rest, being the esoteric and inexpressible part of the science, is formulated in magnificent pantacles carefully designed and engraved. These are nine in number, as follows

(1) The dogma of Hermes;
(2) Magical realisation;
(3) The path of wisdom and the initial procedure in the work
(4) The Gate of the Sanctuary enlightened by seven mystic rays;
(5) A Rose of Light, in the centre of which a human figure is extending its arms in the form of a cross;
(6) The magical laboratory of Khunrath, demonstrating the necessary union of prayer and work
(7) The absolute synthesis of science;
(8) Universal equilibrium ;
(9) A summary of Khunrath's personal embodying an energetic protest against all his detractors. ~ Eliphas Levi, The History Of Magic,
1196:Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One must keep winning elections to defend the gains that social movements have contributed to. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today. Given the Republicans’ rage for destruction, it is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women, and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up, and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress . . ~ Mark Lilla,
1197:In the end, Buchanan was one of the paleocons to back Trump and many of those who formerly loathed most of what Yiannopoulos and what he represented decided to change their minds and back the winning horse, not only of Trump, but also of the new libertines of the online irreverent ‘punk’ right. Having lost Buchannan’s conservative culture war, they were perhaps strategically right to calculate that the only way they can ever have at least some of their ideas heard again would be to back a groping, lecherous, godless presidential candidate and a libertine figure such as Yiannopoulos and his army of online racist, foul-mouthed, porn-loving nihilists, who in many ways represent everything people like Buchannan are supposed to stand against. The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right. ~ Angela Nagle,
1198:Writer In Prison
Your cell is a cavern; the guards
grinding teeth outside your grotto
marginally refined ape-men; you
the last human in the world
of triumphant beasts. Is your pen
the key to emancipation?
No. The lock has no keyhole
and welded beyond breakage,
bolstered by all the energy
invested in orchestrating
your captivity. Such formality
staged for the incarceration
of one soul. The vilification,
the public outrage, the trial
and the theatrical castigation
all to ensure that the curtain
forever falls over your life. What
could a pen possibly do
to alter the absolute plot
of the script of so-called justice?
Zilch. Your freedom is untenable.
Barbarity always possesses
the upper hand. Don't waste
your vital ink doodling tears.
In your pre- or post-historic cave
you are the insider archaeologist.
103
Your pen is a shovel, chisel
and brush only for exhuming
the bruised icons, recovering the abject
tales and treasures from beneath
the stone, lava, rubble and sand
of the storms of tyranny. Please
don't get sentimental now.
You, writer in prison,
may yet be our saviour.
~ Ali Alizadeh,
1199:The pure existent is then a fact and no mere concept; it is the fundamental reality. But, let us hasten to add, the movement, the energy, the becoming are also a fact, also a reality. The supreme intuition and its corresponding experience may correct the other, may go beyond, may suspend, but do not abolish it. We have therefore two fundamental facts of pure existence and of worldexistence, a fact of Being, a fact of Becoming. To deny one or the other is easy; to recognise the facts of consciousness and find out their relation is the true and fruitful wisdom.

Stability and movement, we must remember, are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, even as are oneness and multitude. The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity. But it takes its eternal poise in the one and the stable and whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably, securely in the moving and multitudinous. World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Pure Existent, 85,
1200:It will be easy for us to understand at this point that menopause simply reawakens the horror of the body, the utter bankruptcy of the body as a viable causa-sui project — the exact experience that brings on the early Oedipal castration anxiety. The woman is reminded in the most forceful way that she is an animal thing; menopause is a sort of "animal birthday" that specifically marks the physical career of degeneration. It is like nature imposing a definite physical milestone on the person, putting up a wall and saying "You are not going any further into life now, you are going toward the end, to the absolute determinism of death." As men don't have such animal birthdays, such specific markers of a physical kind, they don't usually experience another stark discrediting of the body as a causa-sui project. Once has been enough, and they bury the problem with the symbolic powers of the cultural world-view. But the woman is less fortunate; she is put in the position of having all at once to catch up psychologically with the physical facts of life. To paraphrase Goethe's aphorism, death doesn't keep knocking on her door only to be ignored (as men ignore their aging), but kicks it in to show himself full in the face. ~ Ernest Becker,
1201:The answer to all questions of life and death, "the absolute solution" was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language... Thus the traveller spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters. And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality - one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding. ~ Vladimir Nabokov,
1202:There's a good general reason to expect that physical theories consistent with special relativity will have to be field theories. Here it comes:

A major result of the special theory of relativity is that there is a limiting velocity: the speed of light, usually denoted c. The influence of one particle on another cannot be transmitted faster than that. Newton's law for the gravitational force, according to which the force due to a distant body is proportional to the inverse square of its distance right now, does not obey that rule, so it is not consistent with special relativity. Indeed the concept "right now" itself is problematic. Events that appear simultaneous to a stationary observer will not appear simultaneous to an observer moving at constant velocity. Overthrowing the concept of a universal "now" was, according to Einstein himself, by far the most difficult step in arriving at special relativity:

[A]ll attempts to clarify this paradox satisfactorily were condemned to failure as long as the axiom of the absolute character of times, viz., of simultaneity, unrecognizedly was anchored in the unconscious. Clearly to recognize this axiom and its arbitrary character really implies already the solution of the problem. ~ Frank Wilczek,
1203:Princes had, so to speak, turned violence into a physical thing but our democratic republics have made it into something as intellectual as the human will it intends to restrict. Under the absolute government of one man, despotism, in order to attack the spirit, crudely struck the body and the spirit escaped free of its blows, rising gloriously above it. But in democratic republics, tyranny does not behave in that manner; it leaves the body alone and goes straight to the spirit. No longer does the master say: “You will think as I do or you will die”; he says: “You are free not to think like me, your life, your property, everything will be untouched but from today you are a pariah among us. You will retain your civic privileges but they will be useless to you, for if you seek the votes of your fellow citizen, they will not grant you them and if you simply seek their esteem, they will pretend to refuse you that too. You will retain your place amongst men but you will lose the rights of mankind. When you approach your fellows, they will shun you like an impure creature; and those who believe in your innocence will be the very people to abandon you lest they be shunned in their turn. Go in peace; I grant you your life but it is a life worse than death. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
1204:An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal abortions were married. This means that up to two thirds of the botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors are married women. This means that most of the women who risked death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married—perhaps one million married women each year. They were not shameless sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in traditional terms—though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were, quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre distortion of the real history of women and abortion—too distorted to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory reaches back one decade. Abortion has been legalized just under one decade. The facts should not be obliterated yet. Millions of respectable, God-fearing, married women have had illegal abortions. They thank their God that they survived; and they keep quiet. ~ Andrea Dworkin,
1205:For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, - of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe. It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
   It is nothing less that is meant in the end when we speak of the absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant progression when the long and difficult process of transforming desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure. Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 85-86, [T1],
1206:But there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality that are imposed even by the most liberal version of natural right, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation of individuality. They chose the latter. Once this step was taken, tolerance appeared as one value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite. In other words, intolerance appeared as a value equal in dignity to tolerance. But it is practically impossible to leave it at the equality of all preferences or choices. If the unequal rank of choices cannot be traced to the unequal rank of their objectives, it must be traced to the unequal rank of the acts of choosing; and this means eventually that genuine choice, as distinguished from spurious or despicable choice, is nothing but resolute or deadly serious decision. Such a decision, however, is akin to intolerance rather than to tolerance. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance. ~ Leo Strauss,
1207:What had they done to Bogrov? What had they done to this sturdy sailor, to draw this childish whimpering from his throat? Had Arlova whimpered in the same way when she was dragged along the corridor? Rubashov sat up and leant his forehead against the wall behind which No. 402 slept; he was afraid he was going to be sick again. Up till now, he had never imagined Arlova’s death in such detail. It had always been for him an abstract occurrence; it had left him with a feeling of strong uneasiness, but he had never doubted the logical rightness of his behaviour. Now, in the nausea which turned his stomach and drove the wet perspiration from his forehead, his past mode of thought seemed lunacy. The whimpering of Bogrov unbalanced the logical equation. Up till now Arlova had been a factor in this equation, a small factor compared to what was at stake. But the equation no longer stood. The vision of Arlova’s legs in their high-heeled shoes trailing along the corridor upset the mathematical equilibrium. The unimportant factor had grown to the immeasurable, the absolute; Bogrov’s whining, the inhuman sound of the voice which had called out his name, the hollow beat of the drumming, filled his ears; they smothered the thin voice of reason, covered it as the surf covers the gurgling of the drowning. ~ Arthur Koestler,
1208:The day you were born was the happiest day of my life, but I was so nervous that I don’t know if happiness is really the best word to describe what I felt. I think it is my obligation to tell you, in spite of the absolute love I have always felt for you, in spite of how much you have brightened my life, and I assume your mother’s as well—I haven’t seen her in around ten years now, but I’m sure that for her as well you have been a constant source of happiness—in spite of all that, I have to tell you that during the eighteen years you’ve now been alive, I’ve never stopped wondering what my life would have been like if you had never been born.

It’s an overwhelming thought, an exit that leads to the darkest of nights, to the most complete blackness, but also to shadow and sometimes, slowly, toward something like a clearing in the woods. These fantasies are normal, but it’s not so common for parents to confess them. For example, over the years I have thought thousands of times that if you hadn’t been born I would have needed less money, or could have disappeared for weeks on end without worrying about anyone. I could have prolonged my youth for several more years. I could have even killed myself. I mean, the first consequence of your birth was that from then on, I could never kill myself. ~ Alejandro Zambra,
1209:In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Guatama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured -- disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui -- in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. ~ Henry Miller,
1210:Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by travelling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things. 'Why this?' I answer, 'because that," and from one explanation to the next I reach the point where no explanation is satisfying, from one explanation to the next I reach zero, the absolute, where truth and falsehood are equivalent, become equal to one another, are identified with one another, cancel each other out in face of the absolute nothing. And so we can understand how all action, all choice, all history is justified, at the end of time, by a final cancelling-out. The why goes beyond everything. Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate why, that great why is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out, there is nothing more to make out. ~ Eug ne Ionesco,
1211:I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. [...] The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities. ~ H G Wells,
1212:For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be
obeyed in order to subjugate history. It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek. Nietzsche,
at least, foresaw what was going to happen: "Modern socialism tends to create a form of secular
Jesuitism, to make instruments of all men"; and again: "What we desire is well-being. ... As a result we
march toward a spiritual slavery such as has never been seen. . . . Intellectual Caesarism hovers over
every activity of the businessman and the philosopher." Placed in the crucible of Nietzschean philosophy,
rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical Caesarism. The absolute negative had driven Stirner to deify crime simultaneously with the individual. But the absolute affirmative leads to
universalizing murder and mankind simultaneously. Marxism-Leninism has really accepted the burden
of Nietzsche's freewill by means of ignoring several Nietzschean virtues. The great rebel thus creates with
his own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity. Once he had escaped
from God's prison, his first care was to construct the prison of history and of reason, thus putting the
finishing touch to the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism whose conquest he claimed. ~ Albert Camus,
1213:The lack of traces is the trace of his Perfect One. In the immensity of the strength of his spirit, compared to the limited consciousness of human beings, he appears to hardly know he exists. In the guise of weakness, he has true strength; he knows he is powerful and yet appears weak. He knows he is enlightened and yet appears small and mediocre. He dulls what is sharp, clarifies what is confused, tones down his shining nature, and is outwardly identical with what is ordinary. He progresses without advancing; he absorbs without conquering; he has without owning. Becoming like everybody else, he becomes different from everybody. As he goes on, he is as prudent as one who crosses a winter stream; vigilant as one who knows he is surrounded by enemies; cold as a stranger; ephemeral as a melting snowflake; rough as a tree trunk; wide as the great valleys; impenetrable as deep water; inaccessible as solitary peaks. He arrives without walking; he penetrates without looking; achieves without willing; acts without doing; he just vanishes. He is obeyed without commanding; he wins without struggling; he draws people to himself without calling for them. How disheartening to those who uphold the myth of manhood based on muscles and metallic strength: this alone is the true man, the absolute man! He absorbs within himself the ambiguous virtue of the female. ~ Julius Evola,
1214:Your pain, your sorrow, your desperate seeking, it is energy, only energy. Sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, sometimes even volcanic, but energy nonetheless. Strip away the secondhand words and concepts—fear, anger, depression, loneliness—and contact what is wordlessly alive in your body, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but now. Feel “sadness” before it is named. Feel the tightness in the chest, the tension in the throat. Feel “anger” before it is defined. Feel the burning in the belly, the pounding of the passionate heart. Feel the throb and pull of life, the vibration of it. Make space for all bodily sensations, the raw energy, the power, the electricity, the sound and the fury. It is life, only life, always life. Don’t judge the energy, or try to push it away, or ignore it, because then you split yourself into “good me” and “bad me,” “sick me” and “healthy me,” “spiritual me” and “ignorant me,” and the war begins. Go beyond the entire “me” story, and honor what is alive in your body, here and now, even if what is alive is intense, uncomfortable, or simply too unfamiliar to be named. Let the intensity of bodily sensation focus you. Let attention drop into the moment. Non-resistance to life, the absolute surrender to the living moment, no matter how much the moment deviates from our “perfect” image—this is the beginning of true healing. Divorce the dream and marry reality. ~ Jeff Foster,
1215:War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”

Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us. ~ Iain M Banks,
1216:There is a growing intolerance of inadequate images of the Absolute. This is a healthy iconoclasm, since the idea of God has been used in the past to disastrous effect. One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we usually call “fundamentalism” in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God. A highly political spirituality, it is literal and intolerant in its vision. In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right. Fundamentalists campaign for the abolition of legal abortion and for a hard line on moral and social decency. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority achieved astonishing political power during the Reagan years. Other evangelists such as Maurice Cerullo, taking Jesus’ remarks literally, believe that miracles are an essential hallmark of true faith. God will give the believer anything that he asks for in prayer. In Britain, fundamentalists such as Colin Urquhart have made the same claim. Christian fundamentalists seem to have little regard for the loving compassion of Christ. They are swift to condemn the people they see as the “enemies of God.” Most would consider Jews and Muslims destined for hellfire, and Urquhart has argued that all oriental religions are inspired by the devil. ~ Karen Armstrong,
1217:In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth. ~ Max Brooks,
1218:The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power’s greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman. ~ Philip Gourevitch,
1219:Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. It has long been reported that Westerners have a more independent and autonomous concept of the self than do East Asians.3 For example, when asked to write twenty statements beginning with the words “I am …,” Americans are likely to list their own internal psychological characteristics (happy, outgoing, interested in jazz), whereas East Asians are more likely to list their roles and relationships (a son, a husband, an employee of Fujitsu). The differences run deep; even visual perception is affected. In what’s known as the framed-line task, you are shown a square with a line drawn inside it. You then turn the page and see an empty square that is larger or smaller than the original square. Your task is to draw a line that is the same as the line you saw on the previous page, either in absolute terms (same number of centimeters; ignore the new frame) or in relative terms (same proportion relative to the frame). Westerners, and particularly Americans, excel at the absolute task, because they saw the line as an independent object in the first place and stored it separately in memory. East Asians, in contrast, outperform Americans at the relative task, because they automatically perceived and remembered the relationship among the parts.4 ~ Jonathan Haidt,
1220:What remains of the labours of the ‘new philosophers’ who have been enlightening us – or, in other words, deadening our minds – for 30 years now? What really remains of the great ideological machinery of freedom, human rights, the West and its values? It all comes down to a simple negative statement that is as bald as it is flat and as naked as the day it was born: socialisms, which were the communist Idea’s only concrete forms, failed completely in the twentieth century. Even they have had to revert to capitalism and non-egalitarian dogma. That failure of the Idea leaves us with no choice, given the complex of the capitalist organization of production and the state parliamentary system. Like it or not, we have to consent to it for lack of choice. And that is why we now have to save the banks rather than confiscate them, hand out billions to the rich and give nothing to the poor, set nationals against workers of foreign origin whenever possible, and, in a word, keep tight controls on all forms of poverty in order to ensure the survival of the powerful. No choice, I tell you! As our ideologues admit, it is not as though relying on the greed of a few crooks and unbridled private property to run the state and the economy was the absolute Good. But it is the only possible way forward. In his anarchist vision, Stirner described man, or the personal agent of History, as ‘the Ego and his own’. Nowadays, it is ‘Property as ego’. Which ~ Alain Badiou,
1221:Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate — so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears. ~ Terry Eagleton,
1222:If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power--something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death. ~ Quentin Meillassoux,
1223:In contrast to classical physics, with its exclusive focus on material causation, quantum physics offers a mechanism that validates the intuitive sense that our conscious thoughts have the power to affect our actions. Quantum theory, in the von Neumann-Wigner formulation as developed by Henry Stapp, offers a mathematically rigorous alternative to the impotence of conscious states: it allows conscious experience to act back on the physical brain by influencing its activities. It describes a way in which our conscious thoughts and volitions enter into the causal structure of nature and focus our thoughts, choose from among competing possible courses of action, and even override the mechanical aspects of cerebral processes. The quantum laws allow mental effort to influence the course of cerebral processes in just the way our subjective feeling tells us it does. How? By keeping in focus a stream of consciousness that would otherwise diffuse like mist at daybreak. Quantum theory demonstrates how mental effort can have, through the process of willfully focusing attention, dynamical consequences that cannot be deduced or predicted from, and that are not the automatic results of, cerebral mechanisms acting alone. In a world described by quantum physics, an insistence on causal closure of the physical world amounts to a quasi-religious faith in the absolute powers of matter, a belief that is no more than a commitment to brute, and outmoded, materialism. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz,
1224:The whole thing boils down to this paradox: if you are going to be a hero then you must give a gift. If you are the average man you give your heroic gift to the society in which you live, and you give the gift that society specifies in advance. If you are an artist you fashion a peculiarly personal gift, the justification for your own heroic identity, which means that it is always aimed at least partly over the heads of your fellow men. After all, they can't grant the immortality of your personal soul. As Rank argued in the breathtaking closing chapters of Art and Artist, there is no way for the artist to be at peace with his work or with the society that accepts it. The artist's gift is always to creation itself, to the ultimate meaning of life, to God. We should not be surprised that Rank was brought to exactly the same conclusion as Kierkegaard: that the only way out of human conflict is full renunciation, to give one's life as a gift to the highest powers. Absolution has to come from the absolute beyond. As Kierkegaard, Rank showed that this rule applied to the strongest, most heroic types-not to trembling and empty weaklings. To renounce the world and oneself, to lay the meaning of it to the powers of creation, is the hardest thing for man to achieve-and so it is fitting that this task should fall to the strongest personality type, the one with the largest ego. The great scientific world-shaker Newton was the same man who always carried the Bible under his arm. ~ Ernest Becker,
1225:At times I wondered whether writing was not a solipsistic luxury in countries like mine, where there were scant readers, so many people who were poor and illiterate, so much injustice, and where culture was a privilege of the few. These doubts, however, never stifled my calling, and I always kept writing even during those periods when
earning a living absorbed most of my time. I believe I did the right thing, since if, for literature to flourish, it was first necessary for a society to achieve high culture, freedom, prosperity, and justice, it never would have existed. But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be
worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as
restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look
in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow
the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa,
1226:A moment ago, when he entered this human aviary, the pictures, modestly enclosed in four wooden mouldings, remained flat and silent before him; in order to wrest their secret from them, he must believe in them. He wanted to believe in them. He stood in front of one of the canvases. Between the two walls, drenched in sunlight, a single hoop rolled towards that point where the parallels meet in infinity. Little by little, as he looked at it, the picture came alive. What it was saying he could not be translated into words; it was said in painting and no other language could have expressed its meaning; but it spoke. He advanced a few paces. Under his attentive gaze, all the pictures came alive; they awoke memories more ancient than the beginning of the world; they evoked the unpredictable face of the earth far beyond the revolutions to come; they exposed the secrets of a jagged coastline, of a dessert sprinkled with shells, as they remained solitary within themselves, protected from any conscience. Statues without faces, men turned to pillars of salt, landscapes scorched by the flames of death, oceans frozen into immobility of the absolute instant: these were the thousand shapes of absence. And while he looked at this universe devoid of onlookers, it seemed as if he were absent from himself, and that he remained, outside his own personal history, in an empty white eternity. And yet that dream of purity and absence only existed because I was there to lend it the strength of my life. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
1227:When, then, by the withdrawal of the centre of consciousness from identification with the mind, life and body, one has discovered ones true self, discovered the oneness of that self with the pure, silent, immutable Brahman, discovered in the immutable, in the Akshara Brahman, that by which the individual being escapes from his own personality into the impersonal, the first movement of the Path of Knowledge has been completed. It is the sole that is absolutely necessary for the traditional aim of the Yoga of Knowledge, for immergence, for escape from cosmic existence, for release into the absolute and ineffable Parabrahman who is beyond all cosmic being. The seeker of this ultimate release may take other realisations on his way, may realise the Lord of the universe, the Purusha who manifests Himself in all creatures, may arrive at the cosmic consciousness, may know and feel his unity with all beings; but these are only stages or circumstances of his journey, results of the unfolding of his soul as it approaches nearer the ineffable goal. To pass beyond them all is his supreme object. When on the other hand, having attained to the freedom and the silence and the peace, we resume possession by the cosmic consciousness of the active as well as the silent Brahman and can securely live in the divine freedom as well as rest in it, we have completed the second movement of the Path by which the integrality of self-knowledge becomes the station of the liberated soul.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
1228:Emphatically rejecting ali traditional religions and claiming for their teachings the epithet "scientific," various writers tried to substitute a new faith for the old ones. They claimed to know precisely what the mysterious power that directs ali cosmic becoming has in store for mankind. They proclaimed an absolute standard of values. Good is what works along the lines that this power wants mankind to follow; everything else is bad. In their vocabulary "progressive" is a synonym of good and "reactionary" a synonym of bad. Inevitably progress will triumph over reaction because it is impossible for men to divert the course of history from the direction prescribed by the plan of the mysterious prime mover. Such is the metaphysics of Karl Marx, the faith of contemporary selfstyled progressivism.
Marxism is a revolutionary doctrine. It expressly declares that the design of the prime mover will be accomplished by civil war. It implies that ultimately in the battles of these campaigns the just cause, that is, the cause of progress, must conquer. Then ali conflicts concerning judgments of value will disappear. The liquidation of ali dissenters will establish the undisputed supremacy of the absolute eternal values.
This formula for the solution of conflicts of value judgments is certainly not new. It is a device known and practiced from time immemorial. Kill the infidels! Burn the heretics! What is new is merely the fact that today it is sold to the public under the label of "science. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
1229:Say five years, I replied; at the end of the time they must be sent down again into the den and compelled to hold any military or other office which young men are qualified to hold: in this way they will get their experience of life, and there will be an opportunity of trying whether, when they are drawn all manner of ways by temptation, they will stand firm or flinch. And how long is this stage of their lives to last? Fifteen years, I answered; and when they have reached fifty years of age, then let those who still survive and have distinguished themselves in every action of their lives and in every branch of knowledge come at last to their consummation: the time has now arrived at which they must raise the eye of the soul to the universal light which lightens all things, and behold the absolute good; for that is the pattern according to which they are to order the State and the lives of individuals, and the remainder of their own lives also; making philosophy their chief pursuit, but, when their turn comes, toiling also at politics and ruling for the public good, not as though they were performing some heroic action, but simply as a matter of duty; and when they have brought up in each generation others like themselves and left them in their place to be governors of the State, then they will depart to the Islands of the Blest and dwell there; and the city will give them public memorials and sacrifices and honour them, if the Pythian oracle consent, as demigods, but if not, as in any case blessed and divine. You ~ Plato,
1230:Weininger observed that nothing is more baffling for a man than a woman’s response when caught in a lie. When asked why she is lying, she is unable to understand the question, acts astonished, bursts out crying, or seeks to pacify him by smiling . She cannot understand the ethical and transcendental side of lying or the fact that a lie represents damage to being and, as was acknowledged in ancient Iran, constitutes a crime even worse than killing. It is nonsense to deduce this trait in women from sociological factors; some people say that a lie is the “natural weapon” of the woman and therefore used in her defense for hundreds of years. The truth, pure and simple, is that woman is prone to lie and to disguise her true self even when she has no need to do so; this is not a social trait acquired in the struggle for existence, but something linked to her deepest and most genuine nature. Just as the absolute woman does not truly feel that lying is wrong, so in her, contrary to man, lying is not wrong, nor is it an inner yielding or a breaking of her own existential law. It is a possible counterpart of her plastic and fluid
nature. A type such as D’Aurevilly described is perfectly understandable: “She made a habit of lying to the point where it became truth; it was so simple and natural, without any effort or alleviation." Ii is foolish to judge woman with the values of the absolute man even in cases where, by doing violence to her own self, she makes a show of following those values and even sincerely believes that she is following them. ~ Julius Evola,
1231:Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute's eternal way of thinking.
These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation. When you've got your true idea of anything, there's an end of the matter. You're in possession; you KNOW; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as. ~ William James,
1232:Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom, The void was conscious and intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way - not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God's thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe. ("All know that the drop merges into ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop," wrote the sage Kabir - and I can personally attest now that this is true.)
It wasn't hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It was heaven, yes. It was the deepest love I'd ever experienced, beyond anything I could previously imagined, but it wasn't euphoric. It wasn't exciting. There wasn't enough ego or passion left in me to create euphoria and excitement. It was just obvious. Like when you've been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there - now you can clearly see it! - the two vases are actually two faces. And once you've seen through the optical illusion, you can never not see it again.
"So this is God," I thought. "Congratulations to meet you." - ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,
1233:What is knowledge? it is primarily and essentially idea. What is idea? A very complicated physiological process in the brain of an animal, the result of which is the consciousness of a picture there. Clearly the relation between such a picture and something entirely different from the animal in whose brain it exists can only be a very indirect one. This is perhaps the simplest and most comprehensible way of disclosing the deep gulf between the ideal and the real. This belongs to the things of which, like the motion of the earth, we are not directly conscious; therefore the ancients did not observe it, just as they did not observe the motion of the earth. Once pointed out, on the other hand, first by Descartes, it has ever since given philosophers no rest. But after Kant had at last proved in the most thorough manner the complete diversity of the ideal and the real, it was an attempt, as bold as it was absurd, yet perfectly correctly calculated with reference to the philosophical public in Germany, and consequently crowned with brilliant results, to try to assert the absolute identity of the two by dogmatic utterances, on the strength of a pretended intellectual intuition. In truth, on the contrary, a subjective and an objective existence, a being for self and a being for others, a consciousness of one's own self, and a consciousness of other things, is given us directly, and the two are given in such a fundamentally different manner that no other difference can compare with this. About himself every one knows directly, about all others only very indirectly. This is the fact and the problem. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
1234:Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless—and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performed—unaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unaware—and yet, look what it has done in all its unthinking, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything. Lily Anne. Three small and very ordinary syllables. Sounds with no real meaning—and yet strung together and attached to the tiny lump of flesh that squirms there on its pedestal, it has performed the mightiest of magical feats. It has turned Dexter Dead for Decades into something with a heart that beats and pumps true life, something that almost feels, that so very nearly resembles a human being— There: It waves one small and mighty hand and that New Thing inside Dexter waves back. Something turns over and surges upward into the chest cavity, bounces off the ribs and attacks the facial muscles, which now spread into a spontaneous and unpracticed smile. Heavens above, was that really an emotion? Have I fallen so far, so fast? Yes, ~ Jeff Lindsay,
1235:Wisdom Of Hafiz: The Philosopher Takes To Racing
My son, if you go to the races to battle with Ikey and Mo,
Remember, it's seldom the pigeon can pick out the eye of the crow;
Remember, they live by the business; remember, my son, and go slow.
If ever an owner should tell you, "Back mine" -- don't you be such a flat.
He knows his own cunning no doubt -- does he know what the others are at?
Find out what he's frightened of most, and invest a few dollars on that.
Walk not in the track of the trainer, nor hang round the rails at his stall.
His wisdom belongs to his patron -- shall he give it to one and to all?
When the stable is served he may tell you -- and his words are like jewels let fall.
Run wide of the tipster, who whispers that Borak is sure to be first,
He tells the next mug that he meets with a tale with the placings reversed;
And, remember, of judges of racing, the jockey's the absolute worst.
When they lay three to one on the field, and the runners are twenty-and-two,
Take a pull at yourself; take a pull -- it's a mighty big field to get through.
Is the club handicapper a fool? If a fool is about, p'raps it's you!
Beware of the critic who tells you the handicap's absolute rot,
For this is chucked in, and that's hopeless, and somebody ought to be shot.
How is it he can't make a fortune himself when he knows such a lot?
From tipsters, and jockeys, and trials, and gallops, the glory has gone,
For this is the wisdom of Hafiz that sages have pondered upon,
"The very best tip in the world is to see the commission go on!"
~ Banjo Paterson,
1236:For invincible reasons of homogeneity and coherence, the fibers of cosmogenesis require to be prolonged in ourselves far more deeply than flesh and bone. We are not being tossed about and drawn along in the vital current merely by the material surface of our being. But like a subtle fluid, space-time, having drowned our bodies, penetrates our soul. It fills it and impregnates it. It mingles with its powers, until the soul soon no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts. Nothing can escape this flux any longer, for those who know how to see, even though it were the summit of our being, because it can only be defined in terms of increases of consciousness. For is not the very act by which the fine point of our mind penetrates the absolute a phenomenon of emergence? In short, recognized at first in a single point of things, then inevitably having spread to the whole of the inorganic and organic volume of matter, whether we like it or not evolution is now starting to invade the psychic zones of the world.... The human discovers that, in the striking words of Julian Huxley, we are nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. It seems to me that until it is established in this perspective, the modern mind...will always be restless. For it is on this summit and this summit alone that a resting place and illumination await us.... All evolution becomes conscious of itself deep within us.... Not only do we read the secret of its movements in our slightest acts, but to a fundamental extent we hold it in our own hands: responsible for its past and its future. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,
1237:I remember a vivid talk by the Japanese Zen philosopher Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki that opened with an unforgettable contrast of the Occidental and Oriental understandings of the God-man-nature mystery. Commenting first on the Biblical view of the state of man following the Fall in Eden, “Man,” he observed, “is against God, Nature is against God, and Man and Nature are against each other. God’s own likeness (Man), God’s own creation (Nature) and God himself - all three are at war.” Then, expounding the Oriental view, “Nature,” he said, “is the bosom whence we come and whither we go.” “Nature produces Man out of itself; Man cannot be outside of Nature.” “I am in Nature and Nature is in me.” The Godhead as highest Being is to be comprehended, he continued, as prior to creation, “in whom there was yet neither Man nor Nature.” “As soon as a name is given, the Godhead ceases to be Godhead. Man and Nature spring up and we get caught in the maze of abstract conceptual vocabulary.”

We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences - ever deeper, ever greater - of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1238:I press the blue glass triangle to my lips and smile for Matt, my best-friend-that’s-a-boy, my last goodbye to the brokenhearted promise I carried like my journal for so long. Somewhere below the black frothy ocean, a banished mermaid reads my letters and weeps endlessly for a love she’ll never know – not for a single moment.
Before the trip, Frankie and I set out to have the Absolute Best Summer Ever, the summer of twenty boys. We’ll never agree on the final count – whether the boys from Caroline’s should be included in the tally, whether the milk-shake man was too old to be considered a “boy,” whether her tattooed rock star interlude was anything other than a rebound. But in the end, there were only two boys who really mattered.
Matt and Sam.
When I close my eyes, I see Sam lying next to me on the blanket that first night we watched the stars – the night he made me look at everything in a different way; the breeze on my skin and the music and the ocean at night. But I also see Matt; his marzipan frosting kiss. All the books he read to me. His postcard fairy tales of California, finally coming to life in Zanzibar Bay.
When I kissed Sam, I was so scared of erasing Matt. But now I know that I could never erase him.
He’ll always be part of me – just in a different way. Like Sam, making smoothies on the beach two thousand miles away. Like Frankie, my voodoo magic butterfly finding her way back home in the dark.
Like the stars, fading with the halo of the vanishing moon. Like the ocean, falling and whispering against the shore. Nothing ever really goes away – it just changes into something else. Something beautiful. ~ Sarah Ockler,
1239:The desire for possession is only another form of the desire to endure; it is this that comprises the impotent delirium of love. No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession. On the pitiless earth where lovers are often separated in death and are always born divided, the total possession of another human being and absolute communion throughout an entire lifetime are impossible dreams. The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves. The shamefaced suffering of the abandoned lover is not so much due to being no longer loved as to knowing that the other partner can and must love again. In the final analysis, every man devoured by the overpowering desire to endure and possess wishes that those whom he has loved were either sterile or dead. This is real rebellion. Those who have not insisted, at least once, on the absolute virginity of human beings and of the world, who have not trembled with longing and impotence at the fact that it is impossible, and have then not been destroyed by trying to love halfheartedly, perpetually forced back upon their longing for the absolute, cannot understand the realities of rebellion and its ravening desire for destruction. But the lives of others always escape us, and we escape them too; they have no firm outline. Life from this point of view is without style. It is only an impulse that endlessly pursues its form without ever finding it. Man, tortured by this, tries in vain to find the form that will impose certain limits between which he can be king. ~ Albert Camus,
1240:In this moment, however you are searching, stop. Whether you are searching for peace and happiness in a relationship, in a better job, or even in world peace, just for one moment stop absolutely. There is nothing wrong with these pursuits, but if you are engaging in them to get peace or to get happiness, you are overlooking the ground of peace that is already here. Once you discover this ground of peace, then whatever pursuits you engage in will be informed by your discovery. Then you will naturally bring what you have discovered to the world, to politics, to all your relationships. This discovery has infinite, complex ramifications, but the essence of it is very simple. If you will stop all activity, just for one instant, even for one-tenth of a second, and simply be utterly still, you will recognize the inherent spaciousness of your being that is already happy and at peace with itself. Because of our conditioning, we normally dismiss this ground of peace with an immediate, “Yes, but what about my life? I have responsibilities. I need to keep busy. The absolute doesn’t relate to my world, my existence.” These conditioned thoughts just reinforce further conditioning. But if you will take a moment to recognize the peace that is already alive within you, you then actually have the choice to trust it in all your endeavors, in all your relationships, in every circumstance of your life. It doesn’t mean that your life will be swept clean of conflicts, challenges, pain, or suffering. It means that you will have recognized a sanctuary where the truth of yourself is present, where the truth of God is present, regardless of the physical, mental, or emotional circumstances of your life. ~ Gangaji,
1241:What happened was, I got the idea in my head-and I could not get it out ㅡ that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping ㅡ and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge ㅡ when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway ㅡ is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly. [...] I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while ㅡ just once in a while ㅡ there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? Do you want to hear something really funny? In almost four years of college ㅡ and this is the absolute truth ㅡ in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression 'wise man' being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who'd made a fortune in the stock market and then gone to Washington to be an adviser to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I'm not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die. ~ J D Salinger,
1242:Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world. ~ Nancy R Pearcey,
1243:This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill. The truism “All thought is anthropomorphic” has no other meaning. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia’s existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied. For if, bridging the gulf that separates desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One (whatever it may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other vicious circle is enough to stifle our hopes ~ Anonymous,
1244:Here lies the whole importance of the part of the Yoga of Knowledge which we are now considering, the knowledges of those essential principles of Being, those essential modes of self-existence on which the absolute Divine has based its self-manifestation. If the truth of our being is an infinite unity in which alone there is perfect wideness, light, knowledge, power, bliss, and if all our subjection to darkness, ignorance, weakness, sorrow, limitation comes of our viewing existence as a clash of infinitely multiple separate existences, then obviously it is the most practical and concrete and utilitarian as well as the most lofty and philosophical wisdom to find a means by which we can get away from the error and learn to live in the truth. So also, if that One is in its nature a freedom from bondage to this play of qualities which constitute our psychology and if from subjection to that play are born the struggle and discord in which we live, floundering eternally between the two poles of good and evil, virtue and sin, satisfaction and failure, joy and grief, pleasure and pain, then to get beyond the qualities and take our foundation in the settled peace of that which is always beyond them is the only practical wisdom. If attachment to mutable personality is the cause of our self-ignorance, of our discord and quarrel with ourself and with life and with others, and if there is an impersonal One in which no such discord and ignorance and vain and noisy effort exist because it is in eternal identity and harmony with itself, then to arrive in our souls at that impersonality and untroubled oneness of being is the one line and object of human effort to which our reason can consent to give the name of practicality.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
1245:Had I been downstairs among the glittering throng, I would have loved it, but I now had Shevraeth standing right beside me, holding out his arm. I just knew I would manage to do something embarrassing.
I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and tried my best to smooth my face into a polite smile as I put my hand on his sleeve.
Just before we started down, he murmured, “Think of this as a battle.”
“A battle?” I repeated, so surprised I actually looked up at his face. He didn’t look angry, or disgusted, or sarcastic. But there was suppressed laughter in the way his gray eyes were narrowed.
He replied so softly I could just barely hear it. “You’ve a sword in your hand, and vast numbers of ravening minions of some dreaded evil sorcerer await below. The moment you step among them, you’ll leap into battle, mowing them down in droves…”
The absolute unlikelihood of it made me grin, on the verge of laughter. And I realized that while he’d spoken we had come safely down the stairs and were halfway along the huge room to the Duke of Savona, who waited alone. On either side people bowed and curtsied, as graceful as flowers in the wind.
I’d almost made it, and my smile was real--until I lost the image and remembered where I was, and who I was with, and I muttered defensively, “I don’t really like battles, you know.”
“Of course I know,” he returned, still in that soft voice. “But you’re used to them.” And then we were before Savona, who was resplendent in black and crimson and gold; and as the Duke bowed, fanfare after fanfare washed over me like waves of brilliant light.
Because Shevraeth was also a guest of honor, and had the highest rank, it was his choice for the first dance, and he held out his hand to me. ~ Sherwood Smith,
1246:Morning, September 30 "Sing forth the honour of his name, make his praise glorious." Psalm 66:2 It is not left to our own option whether we shall praise God or not. Praise is God's most righteous due, and every Christian, as the recipient of his grace, is bound to praise God from day to day. It is true we have no authoritative rubric for daily praise; we have no commandment prescribing certain hours of song and thanksgiving: but the law written upon the heart teaches us that it is right to praise God; and the unwritten mandate comes to us with as much force as if it had been recorded on the tables of stone, or handed to us from the top of thundering Sinai. Yes, it is the Christian's duty to praise God. It is not only a pleasurable exercise, but it is the absolute obligation of his life. Think not ye who are always mourning, that ye are guiltless in this respect, or imagine that ye can discharge your duty to your God without songs of praise. You are bound by the bonds of his love to bless his name so long as you live, and his praise should continually be in your mouth, for you are blessed, in order that you may bless him; "this people have I formed for myself, they shall show forth my praise"; and if you do not praise God, you are not bringing forth the fruit which he, as the Divine Husbandman, has a right to expect at your hands. Let not your harp then hang upon the willows, but take it down, and strive, with a grateful heart, to bring forth its loudest music. Arise and chant his praise. With every morning's dawn, lift up your notes of thanksgiving, and let every setting sun be followed with your song. Girdle the earth with your praises; surround it with an atmosphere of melody, and God himself will hearken from heaven and accept your music. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon,
1247:THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YOGA
Initial Definitions and Descriptions
Yoga has four powers and objects, purity, liberty, beatitude and perfection. Whosoever has consummated these four mightinesses in the being of the transcendental, universal, lilamaya and individual God is the complete and absolute Yogin.
All manifestations of God are manifestations of the absolute Parabrahman.
The Absolute Parabrahman is unknowable to us, not because It is the nothingness of all that we are, for rather whatever we are in truth or in seeming is nothing but Parabrahman, but because It is pre-existent & supra-existent to even the highest & purest methods and the most potent & illimitable instruments of which soul in the body is capable.
In Parabrahman knowledge ceases to be knowledge and becomes an inexpressible identity. Become Parabrahman, if thou wilt and if That will suffer thee, but strive not to know It; for thou shalt not succeed with these instruments and in this body.
In reality thou art Parabrahman already and ever wast and ever will be. To become Parabrahman in any other sense, thou must depart utterly out of world manifestation and out even of world transcendence.
Why shouldst thou hunger after departure from manifestation as if the world were an evil? Has not That manifested itself in thee & in the world and art thou wiser & purer & better than the Absolute, O mind-deceived soul in the mortal? When That withdraws thee, then thy going hence is inevitable; until Its force is laid on thee, thy going is impossible, cry thy mind never so fiercely & wailingly for departure. Therefore neither desire nor shun the world, but seek the bliss & purity & freedom & greatness of God in whatsoever state or experience or environment.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,
1248:Plenty of tolerant people out there say, “Okay, you’re into this cross thing, and Jesus being crucified, and that’s your truth. Good for you—we are an inclusive people. You’re welcome to your foolish view of religion, your foolish perspective, your simple, silly story of a crucified Jew, and that’s fine if that’s your truth. But that’s not our truth.” Well, here’s the rub: It is your truth. It’s everybody’s truth. It’s the only truth. The power of the crucified Christ is the only power of God by which He saves. Salvation comes only through a belief in that gospel, the gospel of Jesus. No gospel, no salvation. The absolute exclusivity of it has always been a shameful, embarrassing, inconvenient message to worldly-wise sinners, but the truth is nonnegotiable. Other religions are not truth and lead only to eternal damnation. Islam is a damning system. Buddhism is a damning system. Hinduism is a damning system. Simply not believing the gospel is itself enough to damn a person. People in false religions do not worship the true God by another name, as some suggest. They unwittingly worship Satan’s demons. Here is what the Bible says: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20). Even so, a book called The Christ of Hinduism actually exists, and it argues that Hinduism’s symbols and doctrines contain the Christian message. But there is no Christ of Hinduism, nor has the true God any part in Hinduism. Christ is the only way to the one true God, and biblical Christianity is the only way to the one true Christ. Misguided people who recognize any other god and engage in any other religion are not worshipping and sacrificing to God, but to demons. I didn’t make this up. This isn’t my theology. This is Christianity 101. ~ John F MacArthur Jr,
1249:[Asked by an audience member at a public Q&A session] Considering that atheism cannot possibly have any sense of 'absolute morality', would it not then be an irrational leap of faith – which atheists themselves so harshly condemn – for an atheist to decide between right and wrong?
[Dawkins] Absolute morality...the absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include, what, stoning people for adultery? Death for apostasy? [...] These are all things which are religiously-based absolute moralities. I don't think I want an absolute morality; I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed, and based on – you could almost say intelligent design. [...]
If you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people – among 21st century people – we don't believe in slavery anymore; we believe in equality of women; we believe in being gentle; we believe in being kind to animals...these are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Koranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time; through a consensus of reasoning, sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the 'good bits' in religious scriptures, you have to cherry-pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Koran, and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality – and you say, look at that! That's religion!...and you leave out all the horrible bits. And you say, 'Oh, we don't believe that anymore, we've grown out of that.' Well, of course we've grown out of it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion. ~ Richard Dawkins,
1250:They pray.

To whom?

To God.

To pray to God, - what is the meaning of these words?

Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because, if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms, is it not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of them has a will principle, and there is an "I" in the upper infinity as there is an "I" in the lower infinity. The "I" below is the soul; the "I" on high is God.

To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought, with the infinity on high, is called praying.

Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards the Unknown; thought, revery, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, revery, prayer, - these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them. Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow; that is to say, to the light. ~ Victor Hugo,
1251:And what does the text inform us about the content of discipleship? Follow me, run along behind me! That is all. To follow in his steps is something which is void of all content. It gives us no intelligible programme for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after. It is not a cause which human calculation might deem worthy of our devotion, even the devotion of ourselves. What happens? At the call, Levi leaves all that he has--but not because he thinks that he might be doing something worth while, but simply for the sake of the call. Otherwise he cannot follow in the steps of Jesus. This act on Levi's part has not the slightest value in itself, it is quite devoid of significance and unworthy of consideration. This disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out, and has to forsake his old life in order that he may "exist" in the strictest sense of the word. The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus), from a life which is observable and calculable (it is, in fact, quite incalculable) into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous (that is, into one which is necessary and calculable), out of the realm of finite (which is in truth the infinite) into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality). Again it is no universal law. Rather is it the exact opposite of all legality. It is nothing else than bondage to Jesus Christ alone, completely breaking through every programme, every ideal, every set of laws. No other significance is possible, since Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
1252:What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."

The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.

I have written all that only to explain what we mean whenwe speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else - so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to selfgiving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being - for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it is really that that has drawn from the beginning and is there behind - it is the categorical spiritual imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Seeking the Divine,
1253:Judgment Hour
“SPIRIT,” said God, “come up for Judgment now.”
The words seemed spoke in such familiar tone
As if the accents of a natural voice
Close to the heart as its own beating pulse.
“Come up,” it said, “for final judgment now
Before the absolute court of Me in Thee,
The court which hears no plea, allows no charge,
Abates no jot in estimating wrong,
Awards no punishment and grants no boon,
But weighs precise the actual quality
Of Spirit proven by the appointed tests,
And true decides if it recruit in Me
The Immortal Strength, or if the tempted one,
Too weak for toils eternal, sanely pass
To that which I am not, Oblivion.”
Then Thee reviewed with Me, O God, the course,—
What bodily appetites indulged or quelled;
What hates and harms repaid with hurts and scorns,
Or with forgetfulness or benefits;
The proper rest that merged to slothful ease,
Or was in pain enduringly ignored;
That laughing, wholesome impulse which, unchecked,
Became derision’s cruelty of glee;
The righteous anger rushing headlong on,
What did, when calmly visioned, piteous seem;
That pity for the Weak, which blamed alike
The unjust heedless and the heedful Strong;
The passionate heart’s excess in everything,
Its wild unsteadiness unto the Soul
Which yet persisted, sternly right, to chide
The insensate rebel part averse from Thee.
47
The Thee and Me, O God, revised it all
Clearly, relentlessly, and grave declared,—
“Thou didst not ever fail the Heart, O Soul,
Nor doth it fail thee now. Nay, We elect
No Lethe, no Oblivion, but the strife
Eternal, toward we know not what, save Good.”
Then some calm happiness known not before
Came to the Life whose Judgement hour was o’er.
~ Edward William Thomson,
1254:Woman thus emerged as the inessential who never returned to the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. All the creation myths express this conviction that is precious to the male, for example, the Genesis legend, which, through Christianity, has spanned Western civilization. Eve was not formed at the same time as man; she was not made either from a different substance or from the same clay that Adam was modeled from: she was drawn from the first male’s flank. Even her birth was not autonomous; God did not spontaneously choose to create her for herself and to be directly worshiped in turn: he destined her for man; he gave her to Adam to save him from loneliness, her spouse is her origin and her finality; she is his complement in the inessential mode. Thus, she appears a privileged prey. She is nature raised to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing a being while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom. No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women. “Thank God for creating woman.” “Nature is good because it gave men woman.” In these and other similar phrases, man once more asserts arrogantly and naively that his presence in this world is an inevitable fact and a right, that of woman is a simple accident—but a fortunate one. Appearing as the Other, woman appears at the same time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the nothingness of existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as object in the subject’s eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
1255:19 - When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellent, but I could no longer find them. - Sri Aurobindo

Is there really nothing ugly and repellent in the world? Is it our reason alone that sees things in that way?

To understand truly what Sri Aurobindo means here, you must yourself have had the experience of transcending reason and establishing your consciousness in a world higher than the mental intelligence. For from up there you can see, firstly, that everything that exists in the universe is an expression of Sachchidananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and therefore behind any appearance whatever, if you go deeply enough, you can perceive Sachchidananda, which is the principle of Supreme Beauty.

Secondly, you see that everything in the manifested universe is relative, so much so that there is no beauty which may not appear ugly in comparison with a greater beauty, no ugliness which may not appear beautiful in comparison with a yet uglier ugliness.

When you can see and feel in this way, you immediately become aware of the extreme relativity of these impressions and their unreality from the absolute point of view. However, so long as we dwell in the rational consciousness, it is, in a way, natural that everything that offends our aspiration for perfection, our will for progress, everything we seek to transcend and surmount, should seem ugly and repellent to us, since we are in search of a greater ideal and we want to rise higher.

And yet it is still only a half-wisdom which is very far from the true wisdom, a wisdom that appears wise only in the midst of ignorance and unconsciousness.

In the Truth everything is different, and the Divine shines in all things. 17 February 1960 ~ The Mother, On Thoughts And Aphorisms,
1256:If you’re going to make an error in life, err on the side of overestimating your capabilities (obviously, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize your life). By the way, this is something that’s hard to do, since the human capacity is so much greater than most of us would ever dream. In fact, many studies have focused on the differences between people who are depressed and people who are extremely optimistic. After attempting to learn a new skill, the pessimists are always more accurate about how they did, while the optimists see their behavior as being more effective than it actually was. Yet this unrealistic evaluation of their own performance is the secret of their future success. Invariably the optimists eventually end up mastering the skill while the pessimists fail. Why? Optimists are those who, despite having no references for success, or even references of failure, manage to ignore those references, leaving unassembled such cognitive tabletops as “I failed” or “I can’t succeed.” Instead, optimists produce faith references, summoning forth their imagination to picture themselves doing something different next time and succeeding. It is this special ability, this unique focus, which allows them to persist until eventually they gain the distinctions that put them over the top. The reason success eludes most people is that they have insufficient references of succeeding in the past. But an optimist operates with beliefs such as, “The past doesn’t equal the future.” All great leaders, all people who have achieved success in any area of life, know the power of continuously pursuing their vision, even if all the details of how to achieve it aren’t yet available. If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible. ~ Anthony Robbins,
1257:Christmas
WITH garlands to grace it, with laughter to greet it,
Christmas is here, holly-red and snow-white,
Hung round with quaint legends, and old-as-life stories
Of mystical beauty and lifelong delight;
With dreams of the Christ-child, with Santa Claus fables,
Without doubts to trouble or questions to break
The absolute faith in the triumph of goodness,
In God and in nature on guard for its sake;
Without fear of death, with no memories of grief,
Believing life clear as our cloudless belief;
What wonder if rose-coloured Christmas appear
As the happiest day of our happy child year?
With the swiftness of thought, with the spring's incompleteness,
Childhood has passed, and its place is filled up;
Hope suns our youth into midsummer sweetness,
And the roses of love wreathe our life's golden cup.
We shall do--we shall dare--and our faith has no limit,
Wrong must go down 'neath the sword of the right
And life is so joyous, and may be so glorious,
And day looks so long, and so distant the night.
We love--there are chances--and if we should meet
The woman who holds all our heart at her feet
At Christmas--would that not make Christmas more dear
Than all other days of our love-lightened year?
With the sadness of tears, with the speed of the swallow,
Youth has gone by, and its hope and its faith;
Love has grown into grief, and remembrance is anguish,
And down the dim years sound the footsteps of death.
There sit at our feast (for we still hold our revels)
The phantom of hope and the spectre of truth.
This life we believed in--how has it rewarded
The passionate faith of our long-ago youth?
Our hearth is deserted--our Christmas Day seems
But the ghost of a day from a lifetime of dreams.
Oh, lost voices that call us--we hear you--we hear!
92
Oh, most desolate day of our desolate year!
~ Edith Nesbit,
1258:... [T]hose who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that they don't even recognise that being in earnest -is the act-. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.
I realise that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterise mental illness and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious -separation- of those two things. If there even -is- a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation -- the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate. I'm talking about recognising that one is acutely a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness and pretending that it isn't a performance but you. . . . All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about -my- self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself -- a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater. ~ Philip Roth,
1259:To summarize, the human mind is capable of making an essential distinction between the material or visible and the Immaterial or Invisible; or between the formal—matter, soul, spirits—and the angelic Non-formal, rooted in the Divine; or between the peripheral—extending from the physical cosmos to the angelic cosmos—and the Central, the manifested Spirit of God with its archangelic functions and metacosmic root; or between existence and Being, the created and the Creator, together with its Essence, which is Beyond-Being; or finally between Relativity—metacosmic as well as cosmic—and the Absolute as such. But there are also two non-distinctions, one from below and the other from above. For the first, everything is God, and we are therefore parts of God; this amounts to pantheism unless one compensates for this perspective by emphasizing its transcendent complement, as does shamanism but not philosophical pantheism. According to the second non-distinction, nothing is except Ātmā; this is the Vedantic thesis, which never excludes distinctions wherever these can and should apply; it is also the Sufic thesis, according to which the world is Allah as al-Zāhir, the Outward. The same teaching is likewise found in Mahāyāna Buddhism: Samsāra is Nirvāna, and Nirvāna is Samsāra; Existence is an aspect of Beyond-Existence, the supreme "Void”, and it is for this reason that every consciousness contains in its substance a point of access to the “Void” or the Infinite, which is pure Beatitude. The interpenetration of the two Realities is depicted by the movement of the sand in the hourglass; but Reality is one just as the grains of sand are identical, and it is only differences of situation, if one may express it this way, that give rise to a disparity whose terms are incomparable, a disparity that is unilateral since one of the terms, even though it appears as “inward” in relation to the outwardness of the related term, is simply What is. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1260:Broadway lit up just as crazy as ever, and the crowd thick as molasses. Just fling yourself into it like an ant and let yourself get pushed along. Everybody doing it, some for a good reason, and some for no reason at all. All this push and movement
representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes, or fancy shirts. The new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every other joint a food emporium. Everytime I hit that runway toward dinner hour, a fever of expectancy seized me. It's only a stretch of a few blocks from Time Square to 50th street, and when one says 'Broadway', that's all that's really meant. And it's really nothing, just a chicken run, and a lousy one at that. But at 7 in the evening, when everybody's rushing for a table, there is a sort of electrical crackle in the air. And your hair stands on end like antennae, and if you're receptive, you not only get every flash and flicker, but you get the statistical itch. The quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial, ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which compose the Milky Way. Only, this is the gay white way. The top of the world with no roof above and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through and say it's a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch of warm human delirium, which makes you run forward like a blind nag, and wag your delirious ears. Everyone is so utterly, confoundedly not himself, that you become automatically the personification of the whole human race. Shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up until Moses, and beyond that, you are a woman buying a bird cage, or just a mouse trap. ~ Henry Miller,
1261:On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.

The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest—hence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.

However, some of the lamps are “turned down” and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will)—hence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.

The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.

As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to “feel” a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).

The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.

The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.

The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe—and this includes its sense of connection to other beings, its sense of dual presence in the material world and the metaphysical world, and the thin connection line to the wick of fuel or the flow of electricity that resides beyond the material plane and is the universal energy.

To remain “lit” each lantern lamp must tap into the universal Source of energy.

If the link is weak, depression and-or illness sets in.

If the link is strong, life persists.

This metaphor to me best illustrates the universe. ~ Vera Nazarian,
1262:I come to call you Home.
Those who resonate with my words and follow them internally, will find that place and know It's completeness, its joy and fullness.
I have come to call you away from suffering, from fear and from a life of sorrow and into your own, divine Being.
I did not come here to give you decorative stories, to excite your imagination, or sign you up for some long program but to show you how available Truth is, and to remind you that you are never separate from It.
No person on this planet is apart from the Truth in the Heart and yet the world is so vast and varied in expression.
The greatest good and greatest evil is here.
In this forest of duality and complexity you must find your way Home.
You must win your Self back. Wisdom and trust will be your compass.
Many voices came to call us but we are here today because we are freshly called by the voice of God, Love, Truth.
Do not come half way home, but fully home.
I know the voice that called you is true and Truth and that where you are being called to is also Real.
It is inside your own Heart.
It is what gives me the strength to be here.
I love to see the beings being set free from the hypnosis of conditioning; from fears, false projection and the grip of ego.
And I know that to be liberated is not difficult.
It requires only openness and the sincere desire to be free.
I don't need to hear anything about your past.
Your stories are of no interest to me.
That is not how I know you.
I know you only through your Heart.
That is my true connection with you -
the living power of God.
It is That which I respond to in you
and it is only This that I know.
I can only keep reminding you of It by pointing you again and again to the obvious in yourself.
Now you must respond to my pointing.
This will complete this yoga of seeing.
Find and be one with That which is imperishable.
Be merged in the Absolute.
Don't go to sleep. ~ Mooji,
1263:What I am fighting is the slick "Marxist" or "anarchist" opportunism, which sees aligning with the white settler majority and reform politics as the absolute necessity.
Malcolm X and Women's Liberation, ACT-UP and Wounded Knee II, Anti-Vietnam War draft card burning and radical ecology, were all shocking to the majority of North Americans. Radical threats to "the American Way of Life" – and loudly condemned not only by the majority but more specifically by the white working class – these political offensives by the few turned everything upside down. Because in the metropolis, radical and democratic change can only come against the wishes of the bribed majority. That may be tough to swallow for white folks, but reality is just reality.
This obsession with needing a social majority has nothing to do with being "practical". What it has to do with is bourgeois and defeatist thinking. This is like the left thinking that could not build a practical anti-fascist movement in Weimar Republic Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, although millions hated Nazism and wanted to do something, because that German left was too preoccupied with fantasies of either seizing or getting elected into state power for itself.
That left was too lost in delusions of success almost within their hands, delusions of maneuvering together a majority, to bother even really understanding fascism coming up fast in their rear view mirror. The urgent need was to organize a working minority to counter fascism in a much more radical way. Not by trying to defend liberal bourgeois rule. All the real things that had to be done by scattered German anti-fascists later after the Nazis were put into power – such as to survive politically, to significantly sabotage the war effort, to rescue Jews and Romany and gays, to build an underground against the madness of the Third Reich – all these things were attempted bravely but largely unsuccessfully, because they had to be done too late from scratch. ~ J Sakai,
1264:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],
1265:Yes, but … the waking and the sleeping, the sludge of e-mails and appointments, the low-temperature life that is, for the most part, life: even if there are moments of intensity that seem to release us from this, surely any spiritual maturity demands an acknowledgment that there is not going to be some miraculous, transfiguring intrusion into reality. The sky will not darken and the dead will not speak; no voice from heaven is going to boom you back to a pre-reflective faith, nor will you feel, unless in death, a purifying fire that scalds all of consciousness like fog from the raw face of God. Is faith, then - assuming it isn’t merely a form of resignation or denial - some sort of reconciliation with the implacable fact of matter, or is it a deep, ultimate resistance to it? Both. Neither. To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you - not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. Heading home from work, irritated by my busyness and the sense of wasted days, shouldering through the strangers who merge and flow together on Michigan Avenue, merge and flow in the mirrored facades, I flash past the rapt and undecided face of my grandmother, lit and lost at once. In a board meeting, bored to oblivion, I hear a pen scrape like a fingernail on a cell wall, watch the glasses sweat as if even water wanted out, when suddenly, at the center of the long table, light makes of a bell-shaped pitcher a bell that rings in no place on this earth. Moments, only, and I am aware even within them, and thus am outside of them, yet something in the very act of such attention has troubled the tyranny of the ordinary, as if the world at which I gazed, gazed at me, as if the lost face and the living crowd, the soundless bell and the mind in which it rings, all hankered toward - expressed some undeniable hope for - one end. ~ Christian Wiman,
1266:As for the negation of the Christian Trinity in the Quran - and this negation is extrinsic and conditional - we must take account of certain shades of meaning. The Trinity can be envisaged according to a "vertical" perspective or according to either of two "horizontal" perspectives, one of them being supreme and the other not. The vertical perspective- Beyond-Being, Being and Existence - envisages the hypostases as "descending" from Unity or from the Absolute - or from the Essence it could be said - which means that it envisages the degrees of Reality. The supreme horizontal perspective corresponds to the Vedantic triad Sat (supraontological Reality), Chit (Absolute Consciousness) and Ananda (Infinite Beatitude), which means that it envisages the Trinity inasmuch as It is hidden in Unity(1). The non-supreme horizontal perspective on the contrary situates Unity as an essence hidden within the Trinity, which is then ontological and represents the three fundamental aspects or modes of Pure Being, whence the triad : Being, Wisdom, Will (Father, Son, Spirit).

Now the concept of a Trinity seen as a deployment (tajalli) of Unity or of the Absolute is in no way opposed to the unitary doctrine of Islam ; what is opposed to it is solely the attribution of absoluteness to the Trinity alone, or even to the ontological Trinity alone, as it is envisaged exoterically. This last point of view does not, strictly speaking, attain to the Absolute and this is as much as to say that it attributes an absolute character to what is relative and is ignorant of Maya and the degrees of reality or of illusion ; it does not conceive of the metaphysical - but not pantheistic - identity between manifestation and the Principle; still less, therefore, does it conceive of the consequence this identity implies from the point of view of the intellect and the knowledge which delivers.

(1) The Absolute is not the Absolute inasmuch as it contains aspects, but inasmuch as It transcends them; inasmuch as It is Trinity It is therefore not Absolute. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
1267:Captain Phelan,” Amelia asked, noticing the direction of his gaze, “what do you think of the change in Albert?”
“Nearly inconceivable,” Christopher replied. “I had wondered if it would be possible to bring him from the battlefield to a peaceful life here.” He looked at Beatrix, adding gravely, “I am in your debt.”
Beatrix colored and smiled down at her plate. “Not at all.”
“My sister has always had a remarkable ability with animals,” Amelia said. “I’ve always wondered what would happen if Beatrix took it in her head to reform a man.”
Leo grinned. “I propose we find a really revolting, amoral wastrel, and give him to Beatrix. She would set him to rights within a fortnight.”
“I have no wish to reform bipeds,” Beatrix said. “Four legs are the absolute minimum. Besides, Cam has forbidden me to put any more creatures in the barn.”
“With the size of that barn?” Leo asked. “Don’t say we’ve run out of room?”
“One has to draw the line somewhere,” Cam said. “And I had to after the mule.”
Christopher looked at Beatrix alertly. “You have a mule?”
“No,” she said at once. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the light, but the color seemed to leave her face. “It’s nothing. That is, yes, I have a mule. But I don’t like to discuss him.”
“I like to discuss him,” Rye volunteered innocently. “Hector is a very nice mule, but he has a weak back and he’s sickle-hocked. No one wanted him after he was born, so Aunt Beatrix went to Mr. Caird and said--”
“His name is Hector?” Christopher asked, his gaze locked on Beatrix.
She didn’t answer.
A strange, severe sensation took over Christopher’s body. He felt every hair lift, felt every distinct pulse of blood in his veins. “Did his sire belong to Mr. Mawdsley?” he asked.
“How did you know?” came Rye’s voice.
Christopher’s reply was very soft. “Someone wrote to me about it.”
Lifting a glass of wine to his lips, Christopher tore his gaze from Beatrix’s carefully blank face.
He did not look at her for the rest of the meal.
He couldn’t, or he would lose all self-control. ~ Lisa Kleypas,
1268:English version by Garma C. C. Chang
Obeisance to the perfect Marpa.

I am the Yogi who perceives the Ultimate Truth.
In the Origin of the Unborn, I first gain assurance;
On the Path of Non-extinction, slowly
   I perfect my power;
With meaningful symbols and words
Flowing from my great compassion,
I now sing this song
From the absolute realm of Dharma Essence.

Because your sinful Karma has created
Dense blindness and impenetrable obstruction,
You cannot understand the meaning
Of Ultimate Truth.
Listen, therefore, to the Expedient Truth.

In their spotless, ancient Sutras,
All the Buddhas in the past, repeatedly
Admonished with the eternal Truth of Karma --
That every sentient being is one's kinsman.
This is eternal Truth which never fails.
Listen closely to the teaching of Compassion.

I, the Yogi who developed by his practices,
Know that outer hindrances are but a shadow-show,
And the phantasmal world
A magic play of mind unborn.

By looking inward into the mind is seen
Mind-nature -- without substance, intrinsically void.
Through meditation in solitude, the grace
Of the Succession Gurus and the teaching
Of the great Naropa are attained.
The inner truth of the Buddha
Should be the object of meditation.

By the gracious instruction of my Guru,
Is the abstruse inner meaning of Tantra understood.
Through the practice of Arising and
   Perfecting Yoga,
Is the Vital Power engendered
And the inner reason for the microcosm realized.
Thus in the outer world I do not fear
The illusory obstacles.

To the Great Divine Lineage I belong,
With innumerable yogis great as all Space.

When in one's own mind one ponders
On the original state of Mind,
Illusory thoughts of themselves dissolve
Into the Realm of Dharmadhatu.
Neither afflicter nor afflicted can be seen.
Exhaustive study of the Sutras
Teaches us no more than this.

~ Jetsun Milarepa, The Song of Perfect Assurance (to the Demons)
,
1269:Just as, in the eyes of the liberal, the state is not the highest ideal, so it is also not the best apparatus of compulsion. The metaphysical theory of the state declares—
approaching, in this respect, the vanity and presumption of the absolute monarchs—
that each individual state is sovereign, i.e., that it represents the last and highest court of appeals. But, for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national. He realizes from the very first that it is not sufficient to establish peace within each country, that it is much more important that all nations live at peace with one another. The liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory.
For a long time the demand for the establishment of such a supranational world organization was confined to a few thinkers who were considered utopians and went unheeded. To be sure, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the world repeatedly witnessed the spectacle of the statesmen of the leading powers gathered around the conference table to arrive at a common accord, and after the middle of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of supranational institutions were established, the most widely noted of which are the Red Cross and the International Postal Union. Yet all of this was still a very far cry from the creation of a genuine supranational organization. ~ Ludwig von Mises,
1270:In the very midst of this panic came the news that the steamer Central America, formerly the George Law, with six hundred passengers and about sixteen hundred thousand dollars of treasure, coming from Aspinwall, had foundered at sea, off the coast of Georgia, and that about sixty of the passengers had been providentially picked up by a Swedish bark, and brought into Savannah. The absolute loss of this treasure went to swell the confusion and panic of the day. A few days after, I was standing in the vestibule of the Metropolitan Hotel, and heard the captain of the Swedish bark tell his singular story of the rescue of these passengers. He was a short, sailor-like-looking man, with a strong German or Swedish accent. He said that he was sailing from some port in Honduras for Sweden, running down the Gulf Stream off Savannah. The weather had been heavy for some days, and, about nightfall, as he paced his deck, he observed a man-of-war hawk circle about his vessel, gradually lowering, until the bird was as it were aiming at him. He jerked out a belaying pin, struck at the bird, missed it, when the hawk again rose high in the air, and a second time began to descend, contract his circle, and make at him again. The second time he hit the bird, and struck it to the deck. . . . This strange fact made him uneasy, and he thought it betokened danger; he went to the binnacle, saw the course he was steering, and without any particular reason he ordered the steersman to alter the course one point to the east. After this it became quite dark, and he continued to promenade the deck, and had settled into a drowsy state, when as in a dream he thought he heard voices all round his ship. Waking up, he ran to the side of the ship, saw something struggling in the water, and heard clearly cries for help. Instantly heaving his ship to, and lowering all his boats, he managed to pick up sixty or more persons who were floating about on skylights, doors, spare, and whatever fragments remained of the Central America. Had he not changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night. ~ William T Sherman,
1271:against the velvet rope force fields that kept everyone without an invitation at bay. As I walked toward the entrance, the crowd bombarded me with a mix of insults, autograph requests, death threats, and tearful declarations of undying love. I had my body shield activated, but surprisingly, no one took a shot at me. I flashed the cyborg doorman my invitation, then mounted the long crystal staircase leading up into the club. Entering the Distracted Globe was more than a little disorienting. The inside of the giant sphere was completely hollow, and its curved interior surface served as the club’s bar and lounge area. The moment you passed through the entrance, the laws of gravity changed. No matter where you walked, your avatar’s feet always adhered to the interior of the sphere, so you could walk in a straight line, up to the “top” of the club, then back down the other side, ending up right back where you started. The huge open space in the center of the sphere served as the club’s zero-gravity “dance floor.” You reached it simply by jumping off the ground, like Superman taking flight, and then swimming through the air, into the spherical zero-g “groove zone.” As I stepped through the entrance, I glanced up—or in the direction that was currently “up” to me at the moment—and took a long look around. The place was packed. Hundreds of avatars milled around like ants crawling around the inside of a giant balloon. Others were already out on the dance floor—spinning, flying, twisting, and tumbling in time with the music, which thumped out of floating spherical speakers that drifted throughout the club. In the middle of all the dancers, a large clear bubble was suspended in space, at the absolute center of the club. This was the “booth” where the DJ stood, surrounded by turntables, mixers, decks, and dials. At the center of all that gear was the opening DJ, R2-D2, hard at work, using his various robotic arms to work the turntables. I recognized the tune he was playing: the ’88 remix of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” with a lot of Star Wars droid sound samples mixed in. As I made my way to the nearest bar, the avatars I passed all stopped to stare and point in ~ Ernest Cline,
1272:The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning “contemplation, meditation.” Contemplation, however, of what?

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall where I originally presented the material for this chapter. Above, we see the many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other. Regarded that way, they are so many empirical facts; and the whole universe seen that way is called in Japanese ji hokkai, “the universe of things.”

But now, let us consider further. Each of those separate bulbs is a vehicle of light, and the light is not many but one. The one light, that is to say, is being displayed through all those bulbs; and we may think, therefore, either of the many bulbs or of the one light. Moreover, if this or that bulb went out, it would be replaced by another and we should again have the same light. The light, which is one, appears thus through many bulbs.

Analogously, I would be looking out from the lecture platform, seeing before me all the people of my audience, and just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his consciousness. And although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all. These are but two ways of interpreting and experiencing the same set of present facts. One way is not truer than the other. They are just two ways of interpreting and experiencing: the first, in terms of the manifold of separate things; the second, in terms of the one thing that is made manifest through this manifold. And as, in Japanese, the first is known as ji hokkai, so the second is ri hokkai, the absolute universe. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1273:All beings are primarily Buddhas. It is like water and ice: There is no ice apart from water; There are no Buddhas apart from beings. Not knowing how close the truth is to them, Beings seek for it afar -- what a pity! They are like those who, being in the midst of water, Cry out for water, feeling thirst. They are like the son of the rich man, Who, wandering away from his father, Goes astray amongst the poor. It is all due to their ignorance That beings transmigrate in the darkness Of the Six Paths of existence. When they wander from darkness to darkness, How can they ever be free from birth-and-death? As for the Dhyana practice as taught in the Mahayana, No amount of praise can exhaust its merits. The Six Paramitas--beginning with the Giving, Observing the Precepts, And other good deeds, variously enumerated, Such as Nembutsu, Repentance, Moral Training, and so on -- All are finally reducible to the practice of Dhyana. The merit of Dhyana practice, even during a single sitting, Erases the countless sins accumulated in the past. Where then are the Evil Paths to misguide us? The Pure Land cannot be far away. Those who, for once, listening to the Dharma In all humility, Praise it and faithfully follow it, Will be endowed with innumerable merits. But how much more so when you turn your eyes within yourselves And have a glimpse into your self-nature! You find that the self-nature is no-nature - The truth permitting no idle sophistry. For you, then, open the gate leading to the oneness of cause and effect; Before you, then, lies a straight road of non-duality and non-trinity. When you understand that form is the form of the formless, Your coming-and-going takes place nowhere else but where you are. When you understand that thought is the thought of the thought-less. Your singing-and-dancing is no other than the voice of the Dharma. How boundless is the sky of Samadhi! How refreshingly bright is the moon of the Fourfold Wisdom! Being so is there anything you lack? As the Absolute presents itself before you The place where you stand is the Land of the Lotus, And your person -- the body of the Buddha. [2139.jpg] -- from Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

~ Hakuin, Hakuins Song of Zazen
,
1274:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. It is beyond all limitation by quality and yet it is not limited by a qualityless void but is too all infinite qualities. It is the individual soul and all souls and more of them; it is the formless Brahman and the universe. It is the cosmic and the supracosmic spirit, the supreme Lord, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha and supreme shakti, the Ever Unborn who is endlessly born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous One, the complex Simple, the many-sided Single, the Word of the Silence Ineffable, the impersonal omnipresent Person, the Mystery, translucent in highest consciousness to its own spirit, but to a lesser consciousness veiled in its own exceeding light and impenetrable for ever. These things are to the dimensional mind irreconcilable opposites, but to the constant vision and experience of the supramental Truth-Consciousness they are so simply and inevitably the intrinsic nature of each other that even to think of them as contraries is an unimaginable violence. The walls constructed by the measuring and separating Intellect have disappeared and the Truth in its simplicity and beauty appears and reduces all to terms of its harmony and unity and light. Dimensions and distinctions remain but as figures for use, not a separative prison for the self-forgetting Spirit.
2:In the ordinary Yoga of knowledge it is only necessary to recognise two planes of our consciousness, the spiritual and the materialised mental; the pure reason standing between these two views them both, cuts through the illusions of the phenomenal world, exceeds the materialised mental plane, sees the reality of the spiritual; and then the will of the individual Purusha unifying itself with this poise of knowledge rejects the lower and draws back to the supreme plane, dwells there, loses mind and body, sheds life from it and merges itself in the supreme Purusha, is delivered from individual existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, 2.01 - The Object of Knowledge,
1275:Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows: There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female — sexual transitional forms. In physical inquiries an ideal gas is assumed, that is to say, a gas, the behaviour of which follows the law of Boyle-Guy-Lussac exactly, although, in fact, no such gas exists, and laws are deduced from this so that the deviations from the ideal laws may be established in the case of actually existing gases. In the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types although these types do not actually exist. Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic Idea. The science of physics investigates the behaviour of bodies that are absolutely rigid or absolutely elastic, in the full knowledge that neither the one nor the other actually exists. The intermediate conditions actually existing between the two absolute states of matter serve merely as a starting-point for investigation of the types and in the practical application of the theory are treated as mixtures and exhaustively analysed. So also there exist only the intermediate stages between absolute males and females, the absolute conditions never presenting themselves.

Let it be noted clearly that I am discussing the existence not merely of embryonic sexual neutrality, but of a permanent bisexual condition. Nor am I taking into consideration merely those intermediate sexual conditions, those bodily or psychical hermaphrodites upon which, up to the present, attention has been concentrated. In another respect my conception is new. Until now, in dealing with sexual intermediates, only hermaphrodites were considered; as if, to use a physical analogy, there were in between the two extremes a single group of intermediate forms, and not an intervening tract equally beset with stages in different degrees of transition.

The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and the female condition. ~ Otto Weininger,
1276:Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call 'le bapteme de solitude.' It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears...A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintergration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
...Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price. ~ Paul Bowles,
1277:After that, Lily was recuperating and then
dealing with significant financial hardships. The
birth was described to me by Lily and also by
her obstetrician, who I spoke to myself yesterday.
The doctor, in his own words, remembers what
he describes as that ‘hideous day’ like it was yesterday.
The labour, intense and excruciating, lasted
for days. In the end, in extreme distress at
the length of the labour, the baby nearly died.
Lily did die. She was flatline for two minutes and
thirty-eight –”
Alistair didn’t get the opportunity to finish his
grand statement because Nate surged out of his
chair so fast, it flew on its wheels and shot across
the room, slamming into the wall.
“Mr. McAllister…” Alistair said warningly
but Nate was coming swiftly around the table,
coming at her.
At this sight, Lily, too, jumped out of her chair
in a panic, her numbness not that complete, and
backed away in self-defence as Nate came at her,
came at her with purposeful, long strides. She
backed up jerkily, one hand behind her, one hand
in front, retreating until she hit the wall. Before
she knew what he was about, his hard chest came
up against her hand, pushing it back and his body
pressed against hers.
Terrified and confused at this sudden change,
she looked to the right and to the left, anywhere
for escape, anywhere but at Nate.
And to her shock, his hands caught her face,
resting one on either side, gently trying to force
her to look into his impossibly dark eyes.
“I didn’t know,” he whispered and the absolute
ache dripping from his first words said to her
since she found out he was alive cut through her
thin shield of numbness like a razor.
She attempted to pull her face free but his
hands tightened.
“Lily, I didn’t know,” he repeated, and she
caught his eyes and they were glittering dark with
something that she couldn’t read, something
hideously painful and she had to get away from
it. Was desperate to get away from it. She needed
to flee.
She tried to look over his shoulder but he was
too tall, too close. Things were happening in the
room, there was urgent talk, maybe even a tussle.
But all she could see was Nate. ~ Kristen Ashley,
1278:After having denounced the absurdities of utopia, let us deal with its merits, and, since men accommodate
social arrangements so well and scarcely distinguish from them the evils immanent within them, let us do
as they do, let us unite ourselves with their unconsciousness.
We shall never praise the utopias sufficiently for having denounced the crimes of ownership, the
horror property represents, the calamities it causes. Great or small, the owner is corrupted, sullied in his essence: his corruption is projected onto the merest object he touches or appropriates. Whether his
“fortune” is threatened or stripped from him, he will be compelled to a consciousness of which he is
normally incapable. In order to reassume a human appearance, in order to regain his “soul,” he must be
ruined and must consent to his ruin. In this, the revolution will help him. By restoring him to his primal
nakedness, it annihilates him in the immediate future and saves him in the absolute, for it liberates—
inwardly, it is understood—those whom it strikes first: the haves; it reclassifies them, it restores to them
their former dimension and leads them back to the values they have betrayed. But even before having the
means or the occasion to strike them, the revolution sustains in them a salutary fear: it troubles their sleep,
nourishes their nightmares, and nightmare is the beginning of a metaphysical awakening. Hence it is as an
agent of destruction that the revolution is seen to be useful; however deadly, one thing always redeems it:
it alone knows what kind of terror to use in order to shake up this world of owners, the crudest of all
possible worlds. Every form of possession, let us not hesitate to insist, degrades, debases, flatters the
monster sleeping deep within each of us. To own even a broom, to count anything at all as our property, is
to participate in the general infamy. What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you—what a
revelation! You took yourself for the last of men, and now, suddenly, astonished and virtually enlightened
by your destitution, you no longer suffer from it; quite the contrary, you pride yourself in it. And all you
still desire is to be as indigent as a saint or a madman. ~ Emil M Cioran,
1279:And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels, - for it is suprasensuous, - nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel, - for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, - but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive. When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 144,
1280:Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human
life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the
countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these
coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is
open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to
the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The
one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path
leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is
between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never
surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own
destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He
strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1281:This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nation does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain effectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitutions prevent this.) A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. ~ Hannah Arendt,
1282:Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human
life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the
countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these
coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is
open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to
the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The
one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path
leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is
between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never
surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own
destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He
strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to
serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and
comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two
extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds
though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man
cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more
highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his
own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed
by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that
deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak
impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted
majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1283:Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human
life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the
countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these
coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is
open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of
saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to
the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The
one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path
leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is
between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never
surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own
destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He
strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to
serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and
comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two
extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds
though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man
cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more
highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his
own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed
by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that
deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak
impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted
majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility. ~ Hermann Hesse,
1284:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.

  But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.

  But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...

  This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,
1285:The many ... whom one chooses to call the people, are indeed a collection, but only as a multitude, a formless mass, whose movement and action would be elemental, irrational, savage, and terrible."

"Public opinion deserves ... to be esteemed as much as to be despised; to be despised for its concrete consciousness and expression, to be esteemed for its essential fundamental principle, which only shines, more or less dimly, through its concrete expression."

"The definition of the freedom of the press as freedom to say and write what one pleases, is parallel to the one of freedom in general, viz., as freedom to do what one pleases. Such a view belongs to the uneducated crudity and superficiality of naïve thinking."

"In public opinion all is false and true, but to discover the truth in it is the business of the great man. The great man of his time is he who expresses the will and the meaning of that time, and then brings it to completion; he acts according to the inner spirit and essence of his time, which he realizes. And he who does not understand how to despise public opinion, as it makes itself heard here and there, will never accomplish anything great."

"The laws of morality are not accidental, but are essentially Rational. It is the very object of the State that what is essential in the practical activity of men, and in their dispositions, should be duly recognized; that it should have a manifest existence, and maintain its position. It is the absolute interest of Reason that this moral Whole should exist; and herein lies the justification and merit of heroes who have founded states - however rude these may have been."

"Such are all great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit. ... World historical men - the Heroes of an epoch - must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time. Great men have formed purposes to satisfy themselves, not others."

"A World-Historical individual is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower or crush to pieces many an object in its path. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
1286:The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. It must be the one word from which all things are and all things speak. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.

It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self. The fact that they understand a thing fully impairs its validity and certitude in their eyes.

The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. "It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason." Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: "Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts." When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrine and make it intelligible, it is a sign that its dynamic span is over; that it is primarily interested in stability. For, as will be shown later (Section 106), the stability of a regime requires the allegiance of the intellectuals, and it is to win them rather than to foster self-sacrifice in the masses that a doctrine is made intelligible.

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting and scholastic tortuousness. ~ Eric Hoffer,
1287:If we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual uity out of which asll the separate activities of our civilization have arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at Western civilization as a whole and to treat it wit the same objective appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted to the civilization of antiquity.
This does not seem much to ask; yet there have always been a number of reasons which stood in the way of its fulfillment.
In the first place, there has been the influence of modern nationalism, which has led every European people to insist on what distinguished it from the rest, instead of what united it with them. It is not necessary to seek for examples in the extremism of German racial nationalists and their crazy theories, proving that everything good in the world comes from men with Germanic blood. Leaving all these extravagances out of account, we still have the basic fact that modern education in general teaches men the history of their country and the literature of their own tongue, as though these were complete wholes and not part of a greater unity.
In the second place, there has been the separation between religion and culture, which arose partly from the bitterness of the internal divisions of Christendom and partly from a fear lest the transcendent divine values of Christianity should be endangered by any identification or association of them with the relative human values of culture. Both these factors have been at work, long before our civilization was actually secularized. They had their origins in the Reformation period, and it was Martin Luther in particular who stated the theological dualism of faith and works in such a drastic form as to leave no room for any positive conception of a Christian culture, such as had hitherto been taken for granted.
And in the third place, the vast expansion of Western civilization in modern times has led to a loss of any standard of comparison or any recognition of its limits in time and space. Western civilization has ceased to be one civilization amongst others: it became civilization in the absolute sense.
It is the disappearance or decline of this naive absolutism and the reappearance of a sense of the relative and limited character of Western civilization as a particular historic culture, which are the characteristic features of the present epoch. ~ Christopher Henry Dawson,
1288:OUR ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR THINGS
At first glance our ability to recognize familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have long realized it is quite a complex ability. For example, the absolute certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing in our brain. In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature, physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability. * In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to strike the unexposed film. If a second object, similar but not identical
* Van Heerden, a researcher at the Polaroid Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually proposed his own version of a holographic theory of memory in 1963, but his work went relatively unnoticed.
to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is bounced off the mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of light will appear on the film. The brighter and sharper the point of light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of light will appear. By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical recognition system.7 A similar technique known as interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years. In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect light differently. An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same. The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing industry. ~ Michael Talbot,
1289:The object of spiritual knowledge is the Supreme, the Divine, the Infinite and the Absolute. This Supreme has its relations to our individual being and its relations to the universe and it transcends both the soul and the universe. Neither the universe nor the individual are what they seem to be, for the report of them which our mind and our senses give us, is, so long as they are unenlightened by a faculty of higher supramental and suprasensuous knowledge, a false report, an imperfect construction, an attenuated and erroneous figure. And yet that which the universe and the individual seem to be is still a figure of what they really are, a figure that points beyond itself to the reality behind it. Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclusions of the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science. But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-Consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true light of which it is a refracted ray.
   There the abstract terms of pure reason and the constructions .of the mind disappear or are converted into concrete soul-vision and the tremendous actuality of spiritual experience. This knowledge can turn away to the absolute Eternal and lose vision of the soul and the universe; but it can too see that existence from that Eternal. When that is done, we find that the ignorance of the mind and the senses and all the apparent futilities of human life were not an useless excursion of the conscious being, an otiose blunder. Here they were planned as a rough ground for the self-expression of the Soul that comes from the Infinite, a material foundation for its self-unfolding and self-possessing in the terms of the universe. It is true that in themselves they and all that is here have no significance, and to build separate significances for them is to live in an illusion, Maya; but they have a supreme significance in the Supreme, an absolute Power in the Absolute and it is that that assigns to them and refers to that Truth their present relative values. This is the all-uniting experience that is the foundation of the deepest integral and most intimate self-knowledge and world-knowledge
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, 293, 11457,
1290:But even before that highest approach to identity is achieved, something of the supreme Will can manifest in us as an imperative impulsion, a God-driven action; we then act by a spontaneous self-determining Force but a fuller knowledge of meaning and aim arises only afterwards. Or the impulse to action may come as an inspiration or intuition, but rather in the heart and body than in the mind; here an effective sight enters in but the complete and exact knowledge is still deferred and comes, if at all, lateR But the divine Will may descend too as a luminous single command or a total perception or a continuous current of perception of what is to be done into the will or into the thought or as a direction from above spontaneously fulfilled by the lower members. When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can be done in this way, or else a general action may so proceed but only during periods of exaltation and illumination. When the Yoga is perfect, all action becomes of this character. We may indeed distinguish three stages of a growing progress by which, first, the personal will is occasionally or frequently enlightened or moved by a supreme Will or conscious Force beyond it, then constantly replaced and, last, identified and merged in that divine Power-action. The first is the stage when we are still governed by the intellect, heart and senses; these have to seek or wait for the divine inspiration and guidance and do not always find or receive it. The second is the stage when human intelligence is more and more replaced by a high illumined or intuitive spiritualised mind, the external human heart by the inner psychic heart, the senses by a purified and selfless vital force. The third is the stage when we rise even above spiritualised mind to the supramental levels. In all three stages the fundamental character of the liberated action is the same, a spontaneous working of Prakriti no longer through or for the ego but at the will and for the enjoyment of the supreme Purusha. At a higher level this becomes the Truth of the absolute and universal Supreme expressed through the individual soul and worked out consciously through the nature, - no longer through a half-perception and a diminished or distorted effectuation by the stumbling, ignorant and all-deforming energy of lower nature in us but by the all-wise transcendent and universal Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will, 218,
1291:Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices, Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government. There must be a state religion just as there is a state policy; or, rather, religious and political dogmas must be merged and mingled together to form a complete common or national reason strong enough to repress the aberrations of individual reason, which of its nature is the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it produces only divergent opinions.

All known nations have been happy and powerful to the extent that they have more faithfully obeyed this national reason, which is nothing other than the annihilation of individual dogmas and the absolute and general reign of national dogmas, that is to say, of useful prejudices. Let each man call upon his individual reason in the matter of religion, and immediately you will see the birth of an anarchy of belief or the annihilation of religious sovereignty. Likewise, if each man makes himself judge of the principles of government, you will at once see the birth of civil anarchy or the annihilation of political sovereignty. Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith, which is a creed. Man’s first need is that his nascent reason be curbed under this double yoke, that it be abased and lose itself in the national reason, so that it changes its individual existence into another common existence, just as a river that flows into the ocean always continues to exist in the mass of water, but without a name and without a distinct reality. ~ Joseph de Maistre,
1292:With his five senses he engages this real world. All things necessary to his physical existence he apprehends by the faculties with which he has been equipped by the God who created him and placed him in such a world as this. Now, by our definition also God is real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His. The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration. Another word that must be cleared up is the word reckon. This does not mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other. Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there. God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us. Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say here) inviting our attention and challenging our trust. Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word. The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here, assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final. But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's tragic race. At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality. Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a contrast between the ~ A W Tozer,
1293: Ascent
(1)
The Silence
Into the Silence, into the Silence,
Arise, O Spirit immortal,
Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle.

Ascend, single and deathless:
Care no more for the whispers and the shoutings in the darkness,
Pass from the sphere of the grey and the little,
Leaving the cry and the struggle,
Into the Silence for ever.

Vast and immobile, formless and marvellous,
Higher than Heaven, wider than the universe,
In a pure glory of being,
In a bright stillness of self-seeing,
Communing with a boundlessness voiceless and intimate,
Make thy knowledge too high for thought, thy joy too deep for emotion;
At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision,
Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.

All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness.

Turn to the Alone and the Absolute, turn to the Eternal:
Be only eternity, peace and silence,
O world-transcending nameless Oneness,
Spirit immortal.
(2)
Beyond the Silence
Out from the Silence, out from the Silence,
Carrying with thee the ineffable Substance,
Carrying with thee the splendour and wideness,

582

Pondicherry, c. 1927 - 1947

Ascend, O Spirit immortal.

Assigning to Time its endless meaning,
Blissful enter into the clasp of the Timeless.

Awake in the living Eternal, taken to the bosom of love of the Infinite,
Live self-found in his endless completeness,
Drowned in his joy and his sweetness,
Thy heart close to the heart of the Godhead for ever.

Vast, God-possessing, embraced by the Wonderful,
Lifted by the All-Beautiful into his infinite beauty,
Love shall envelop thee endless and fathomless,
Joy unimaginable, ecstasy illimitable,
Knowledge omnipotent, Might omniscient,
Light without darkness, Truth that is dateless.

One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,
Single and free, yet innumerably living,
All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it.

Soul, exceed life's boundaries; Spirit, surpass the universe.

Outclimbing the summits of Nature,
Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,
Rise with the world in thy bosom,
O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.

One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Ascent
,
1294:The fundamental nature of this supermind is that, all its knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and oneness and even when it makes numberless apparent divisions and discriminating modifications in itself, still all the knowledge that operates in its workings even in these divisions, is founded upon and sustained and lit and guided by this perfect knowledge by identity and oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all things as itself and in itself, so sees them always and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in their reality as well as their appearance, in their truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and figure of their nature and their workings. When it sees anything as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself and in itself, and not as a thing other than or divided from it about which therefore it would at first be ignorant of the nature, constitution and workings and have to learn about them, as the mind is at first ignorant of its object and has to learn about it because the mind is separated from its object and regards and senses and meets it as something other than itself and external to its own being. ..... This is the second character of the supreme supermind that its knowledge is a real because a total knowledge. It has in the first place a transcendental vision and sees the universe not only in the universal terms, but in its right relation to the supreme and eternal reality from which it proceeds and of which it is an expression. It knows the spirit and truth and whole sense of the universal expression because it knows all the essentiality and all the infinite reality and all the consequent constant potentiality of that which in part it expresses. It knows rightly the relative because it knows the Absolute and all its absolutes to which the relatives refer back and of which they are the partial or modified or suppressed figures. It is in the second place universal and sees all that is individual in the terms of the universal as well as in its own individual terms and holds all these individual figures in their right and complete relation to the universe. It is in the third place, separately with regard to individual things, total in its view because it knows each in its inmost essence of which all else is the resultant, in its totality which is its complete figure and in its parts and their connections and dependences, -- as well as in its connections with and its dependences upon other things and its nexus with the total implications and the explicits of the universe.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,
1295:Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality. But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Integral Knowledge, 681,
1296:On many occasions in our nearly thirty years of marriage my wife and I have had a disagreement—sometimes a deep disagreement. Our unity appeared to be broken, at some unknowably profound level, and we were not able to easily resolve the rupture by talking. We became trapped, instead, in emotional, angry and anxious argument. We agreed that when such circumstances arose we would separate, briefly: she to one room, me to another. This was often quite difficult, because it is hard to disengage in the heat of an argument, when anger generates the desire to defeat and win. But it seemed better than risking the consequences of a dispute that threatened to spiral out of control. Alone, trying to calm down, we would each ask ourselves the same single question: What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about? However small, however distant…we had each made some error. Then we would reunite, and share the results of our questioning: Here’s how I was wrong…. The problem with asking yourself such a question is that you must truly want the answer. And the problem with doing that is that you won’t like the answer. When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right, and you want the other person to be wrong. Then it’s them that has to sacrifice something and change, not you, and that’s much preferable. If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change, then you have to reconsider yourself—your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present, and your plans for the future. Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that. Then you actually have to do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice, to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual. It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain wilfully blind. But it’s at such a point that you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace.216 You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong—defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was). To choose the alternative—to seek peace—you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right. That’s the way out of the prison of your stubborn preconceptions. That’s the prerequisite for negotiation. That’s to truly abide by the principle of Rule 2 (Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping). ~ Jordan Peterson,
1297:On many occasions in our nearly thirty years of marriage my wife and I have had a disagreement—sometimes a deep disagreement. Our unity appeared to be broken, at some unknowably profound level, and we were not able to easily resolve the rupture by talking. We became trapped, instead, in emotional, angry and anxious argument. We agreed that when such circumstances arose we would separate, briefly: she to one room, me to another. This was often quite difficult, because it is hard to disengage in the heat of an argument, when anger generates the desire to defeat and win. But it seemed better than risking the consequences of a dispute that threatened to spiral out of control. Alone, trying to calm down, we would each ask ourselves the same single question: What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about? However small, however distant…we had each made some error. Then we would reunite, and share the results of our questioning: Here’s how I was wrong…. The problem with asking yourself such a question is that you must truly want the answer. And the problem with doing that is that you won’t like the answer. When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right, and you want the other person to be wrong. Then it’s them that has to sacrifice something and change, not you, and that’s much preferable. If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change, then you have to reconsider yourself—your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present, and your plans for the future. Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that. Then you actually have to do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice, to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual. It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain wilfully blind. But it’s at such a point that you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace.216 You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong—defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was). To choose the alternative—to seek peace—you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right. That’s the way out of the prison of your stubborn preconceptions. That’s the prerequisite for negotiation. That’s to truly abide by the principle of Rule 2 (Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping). ~ Jordan B Peterson,
1298:Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck… I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47 ~ William L Shirer,
1299:Legal and political theory have committed much mischief by failing to pinpoint physical invasion as the only human action that should be illegal and that justifies the use of physical violence to combat it."

In the law of torts, "harm" is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property. The outlawing of defamation (libel and slander) has always been a glaring anomaly in tort law. Words and opinions are not physical invasions. Analogous to the loss of property value from a better product or a shift in consumer demand, no one has a property right in his "reputation." Reputation is strictly a function of the subjective opinions of other minds, and they have the absolute right to their own opinions whatever they may be. Hence, outlawing defamation is itself a gross invasion of the defamer's right of freedom of speech, which is a subset of his property right in his own person.

An even broader assault on freedom of speech is the modern Warren-Brandeis-inspired tort of invasion of the alleged right of "privacy," which outlaws free speech and acts using one's own property that are not even false or "malicious."

In the law of torts, "harm" is generally treated as physical invasion of person or property and usually requires payment of damages for "emotional" harm if and only if that harm is a consequence of physical invasion. Thus, within the standard law of trespass — an invasion of person or property — "battery" is the actual invasion of someone else's body, while "assault" is the creation by one person in another of a fear, or apprehension, of battery.

To be a tortious assault and therefore subject to legal action, tort law wisely requires the threat to be near and imminent. Mere insults and violent words, vague future threats, or simple possession of a weapon cannot constitute an assault18; there must be accompanying overt action to give rise to the apprehension of an imminent physical battery. Or, to put it another way, there must be a concrete threat of an imminent battery before the prospective victim may legitimately use force and violence to defend himself.

Physical invasion or molestation need not be actually "harmful" or inflict severe damage in order to constitute a tort. The courts properly have held that such acts as spitting in someone's face or ripping off someone's hat are batteries. Chief Justice Holt's words in 1704 still seem to apply: "The least touching of another in anger is a battery." While the actual damage may not be substantial, in a profound sense we may conclude that the victim's person was molested, was interfered with, by the physical aggression against him, and that hence these seemingly minor actions have become legal wrongs. (2/2) ~ Murray N Rothbard,
1300:His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge — movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition.

His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the calves. Where later? Where now?

I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?

The fusion of the two strong egotisms, Eliza’s inbrooding and Gant’s expanding outward, made of him a fanatical zealot in the religion of Chance. Beyond all misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, confusion, unswerving necessity was on the rails; not a sparrow fell through the air but that its repercussion acted on his life, and the lonely light that fell upon the viscous and interminable seas at dawn awoke sea-changes washing life to him. The fish swam upward from the depth. ~ Thomas Wolfe,
1301:"O Death, thou lookst on an unfinished world
Assailed by thee and of its road unsure,
Peopled by imperfect minds and ignorant lives,
And sayest God is not and all is vain.
How shall the child already be the man?
Because he is infant, shall he never grow?
Because he is ignorant, shall he never learn?
In a small fragile seed a great tree lurks,
In a tiny gene a thinking being is shut;
A little element in a little sperm,
It grows and is a conqueror and a sage.
Then wilt thou spew out, Death, God's mystic truth,
Deny the occult spiritual miracle?
Still wilt thou say there is no spirit, no God?
A mute material Nature wakes and sees;
She has invented speech, unveiled a will.
Something there waits beyond towards which she strives,
Something surrounds her into which she grows:
To uncover the spirit, to change back into God,
To exceed herself is her transcendent task.
In God concealed the world began to be,
Tardily it travels towards manifest God:
Our imperfection towards perfection toils,
The body is the chrysalis of a soul:
The infinite holds the finite in its arms,
Time travels towards revealed eternity.
A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes,
A scripture written out in cryptic signs,
An occult document of the All-Wonderful's art.
All here bears witness to his secret might,
In all we feel his presence and his power.
A blaze of his sovereign glory is the sun,
A glory is the gold and glimmering moon,
A glory is his dream of purple sky.
A march of his greatness are the wheeling stars.
His laughter of beauty breaks out in green trees,
His moments of beauty triumph in a flower;
The blue sea's chant, the rivulet's wandering voice
Are murmurs falling from the Eternal's harp.
This world is God fulfilled in outwardness.
His ways challenge our reason and our sense;
By blind brute movements of an ignorant Force,
By means we slight as small, obscure or base,
A greatness founded upon little things,
He has built a world in the unknowing Void.
His forms he has massed from infinitesimal dust;
His marvels are built from insignificant things.
If mind is crippled, life untaught and crude,
If brutal masks are there and evil acts,
They are incidents of his vast and varied plot,
His great and dangerous drama's needed steps;
He makes with these and all his passion-play,
A play and yet no play but the deep scheme
Of a transcendent Wisdom finding ways
To meet her Lord in the shadow and the Night:
Above her is the vigil of the stars;
Watched by a solitary Infinitude
She embodies in dumb Matter the Divine,
In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Debate of Love and Death,
1302:Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment.

I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to
the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history?

By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb
my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself. ~ Henry Miller,
1303:Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part, in magic, WORDS have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's PRINCIPLE, and to possess it is, after a fashion, to possess the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be CHANGED.
THEORIES THUS BECOME INSTRUMENTS, NOT ANSWERS TO ENIGMAS, IN WHICH WE CAN REST. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions.
All these, you see, are ANTI-INTELLECTUALIST tendencies. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS. ~ William James,
1304:on purifying ego and desire :::
   The elimination of all egoistic activity and of its foundation, the egoistic consciousness, is clearly the key to the consummation we desire. And since in the path of works action is the knot we have first to loosen, we must endeavour to loosen it where it is centrally tied, in desire and in ego; for otherwise we shall cut only stray strands and not the heart of our bondage.These are the two knots of our subjection to this ignorant and divided Nature, desire and ego-sense. And of these two desire has its native home in the emotions and sensations and instincts and from there affects thought and volition; ego-sense lives indeed in these movements, but it casts its deep roots also in the thinking mind and its will and it is there that it becomes fully self conscious. These are the twin obscure powers of the obsessing world-wide Ignorance that we have to enlighten and eliminate.
   In the field of action desire takes many forms, but the most powerful of all is the vital selfs craving or seeking after the fruit of our works. The fruit we covet may be a reward of internal pleasure; it may be the accomplishment of some preferred idea or some cherished will or the satisfaction of the egoistic emotions, or else the pride of success of our highest hopes and ambitions. Or it may be an external reward, a recompense entirely material, -wealth, position, honour, victory, good fortune or any other fulfilment of vital or physical desire. But all alike are lures by which egoism holds us. Always these satisfactions delude us with the sense of mastery and the idea of freedom, while really we are harnessed and guided or ridden and whipped by some gross or subtle, some noble or ignoble, figure of the blind Desire that drives the world. Therefore the first rule of action laid down by the Gita is to do the work that should be done without any desire for the fruit, niskama karma. ...
   The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita, [102],
1305:Religion, with its metaphysical error of absolute guilt, dominated the broadest, the cosmic realm. From there, it infiltrated the subordinate realms of biological, social and moral existence with its errors of the absolute and inherited guilt. Humanity, split up into millions of factions, groups, nations and states, lacerated itself with mutual accusations. "The Greeks are to blame," the Romans said, and "The Romans are to blame," the Greeks said. So they warred against one another. "The ancient Jewish priests are to blame," the early Christians shouted. "The Christians have preached the wrong Messiah," the Jews shouted and crucified the harmless Jesus. "The Muslims and Turks and Huns are guilty," the crusaders screamed. "The witches and heretics are to blame," the later Christians howled for centuries, murdering, hanging, torturing and burning heretics. It remains to investigate the sources from which the Jesus legend derives its grandeur, emotional power and perseverance.

Let us continue to stay outside this St. Vitus dance. The longer we look around, the crazier it seems. Hundreds of minor patriarchs, self-proclaimed kings and princes, accused one another of this or that sin and made war, scorched the land, brought famine and epidemics to the populations. Later, this became known as "history." And the historians did not doubt the rationality of this history.

Gradually the common people appeared on the scene. "The Queen is to blame," the people's representatives shouted, and beheaded the Queen. Howling, the populace danced around the guillotine. From the ranks of the people arose Napoleon. "The Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians are to blame," it was now said. "Napoleon is to blame," came the reply. "The machines are to blame!" the weavers screamed, and "The lumpenproletariat is to blame," sounded back. "The Monarchy is to blame, long live the Constitution!" the burgers shouted. "The middle classes and the Constitution are to blame; wipe them out; long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the proletarian dictators shout, and "The Russians are to blame," is hurled back. "Germany is to blame," the Japanese and the Italians shouted in 1915. "England is to blame," the fathers of the proletarians shouted in 1939. And "Germany is to blame," the self-same fathers shouted in 1942. "Italy, Germany and Japan are to blame," it was said in 1940.

It is only by keeping strictly outside this inferno that one can be amazed that the human animal continues to shriek "Guilty!" without doubting its own sanity, without even once asking about the origin of this guilt. Such mass psychoses have an origin and a function. Only human beings who are forced to hide something catastrophic are capable of erring so consistently and punishing so relentlessly any attempt at clarifying such errors. ~ Wilhelm Reich,
1306:I've thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you'd use in a novel. I'd be careful not to use them.
Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I'd bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night, would instantly agree with this classification-would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant.
And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality.' Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory,suddenly I know it's nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later,she'd make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she'd be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she 'broke down,' or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this antihumanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I've known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George's over-grateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifyingly patient smile... I've written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I'm clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing I so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I'd never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin.
And so I'll write again that George was a good man. ~ Doris Lessing,
1307:Our culture, the laws of our culture, are predicated on the idea that people are conscious. People have experience; people make decisions, and can be held responsible for them. There's a free will element to it. You can debate all that philosophically, and fine, but the point is that that is how we act, and that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on. There's something deep about it, because you're subject to the law, but the law is also limited by you, which is to say that in a well-functioning, properly-grounded democratic system, you have intrinsic value. That's the source of your rights. Even if you're a murderer, we have to say the law can only go so far because there's something about you that's divine.

Well, what does that mean? Partly it means that there's something about you that's conscious and capable of communicating, like you're a whole world unto yourself. You have that to contribute to everyone else, and that's valuable. You can learn new things, transform the structure of society, and invent a new way of dealing with the world. You're capable of all that. It's an intrinsic part of you, and that's associated with the idea that there's something about the logos that is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality. That's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos. You can debate that, but you can't just bloody well brush it off. First of all, we are the most complicated things there are, that we know of, by a massive amount. We're so complicated that it's unbelievable. So there's a lot of cosmos out there, but there's a lot of cosmos in here, too, and which one is greater is by no means obvious, unless you use something trivial, like relative size, which really isn't a very sophisticated approach.

Whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it, which is a very strange thing. You can conceptualize the future in your imagination, and then you can work and make that manifest-participate in the process of creation. That's one way of thinking about it. That's why I think Genesis 1 relates the idea that human beings are made in the image of the divine-men and women, which is interesting, because feminists are always criticizing Christianity as being inexorably patriarchal. Of course, they criticize everything like that, so it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance. But I think it's an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document it says straightforwardly, with no hesitation whatsoever, that the divine spark which we're associating with the word, that brings forth Being, is manifest in men and women equally. That's a very cool thing. You got to think, like I said, do you actually take that seriously? Well, what you got to ask is what happens if you don't take it seriously, right? Read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. That's the best investigation into that tactic that's ever been produced. ~ Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series, 1,
1308:The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly,
and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of.
It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of
everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let
myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself
was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone
than at this very moment. ~ Henry Miller,
1309:I have shown small respect indeed for the Absolute, and I have until this moment spoken of no other superhuman hypothesis but that. But I trust that you see sufficiently that the Absolute has nothing but its superhumanness in common with the theistic God. On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. Now whatever its residual difficulties may be, experience shows that it certainly does work, and that the problem is to build it out and determine it, so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths. I cannot start upon a whole theology at the end of this last lecture; but when I tell you that I have written a book on men's religious experience, which on the whole has been regarded as making for the reality of God, you will perhaps exempt my own pragmatism from the charge of being an atheistic system. I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog's and cat's ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.
You see that pragmatism can be called religious, if you allow that religion can be pluralistic or merely melioristic in type. But whether you will finally put up with that type of religion or not is a question that only you yourself can decide. Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run. The various overbeliefs of men, their several faith-ventures, are in fact what are needed to bring the evidence in. You will probably make your own ventures severally. If radically tough, the hurly-burly of the sensible facts of nature will be enough for you, and you will need no religion at all. If radically tender, you will take up with the more monistic form of religion: the pluralistic form, with its reliance on possibilities that are not necessities, will not seem to afford you security enough.
But if you are neither tough nor tender in an extreme and radical sense, but mixed as most of us are, it may seem to you that the type of pluralistic and moralistic religion that I have offered is as good a religious synthesis as you are likely to find. Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require.
The End ~ William James,
1310:Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders.
But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices.
Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.
Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. IF THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE, THEY WILL BE TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED. ~ William James,
1311:It is a common misconception, in the spirit of the sentiments expressed in Q16, that Godel's theorem shows that there are many different kinds of arithmetic, each of which is equally valid. The particular arithmetic that we may happen to choose to work with would, accordingly, be defined merely by some arbitrarily chosen formal system. Godel's theorem shows that none of these formal systems, if consistent, can be complete; so-it is argued-we can keep adjoining new axioms, according to our whim, and obtain all kinds of alternative consistent systems within which we may choose to work. The comparison is sometimes made with the situation that occurred with Euclidean geometry. For some 21 centuries it was believed that Euclidean geometry was the only geometry possible. But when, in the eighteenth century, mathematicians such as Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Bolyai showed that indeed there are alternatives that are equally possible, the matter of geometry was seemingly removed from the absolute to the arbitrary. Likewise, it is often argued, Godel showed that arithmetic, also, is a matter of arbitrary choice, any one set of consistent axioms being as good as any other.

This, however, is a completely misleading interpretation of what Godel has demonstrated for us. He has taught us that the very notion of a formal axiomatic system is inadequate for capturing even the most basic of mathematical concepts. When we use the term 'arithmetic' without further qualification, we indeed mean the ordinary arithmetic which operates with the ordinary natural numbers 0,1,2,3,4,...(and perhaps their negatives) and not with some kind of 'supernatural' numbers. We may choose, if we wish, to explore the properties of formal systems, and this is certainly a valuable part of mathematical endeavour. But it is something different from exploring the ordinary properties of the ordinary natural numbers. The situation is, in some ways, perhaps not so very unlike that which occurs with geometry. The study of non-Euclidean geometries is something mathematically interesting, with important applications (such as in physics, see ENM Chapter 5 especially Figs 5.1 and 5.2, and also 4.4), but when the term 'geometry' is used in ordinary language (as distinct from when a mathematician or theoretical physicist might use that term), we do indeed mean the ordinary geometry of Euclid. There is a difference, however, in that what a logician might refer to as 'Euclidean geometry' can indeed be specified (with some reservations) in terms of a particular formal system, whereas, as Godel has shown, ordinary 'arithmetic' cannot be so specified.

Rather than showing that mathematics (most particularly arithmetic) is an arbitrary pursuit, whose direction is governed by the whim of Man, Godel demonstrated that it is something absolute, there to be discovered rather than invented (cf. 1.17). We discover for ourselves what the natural numbers are, and we do not have trouble in distinguishing them from any sort of supernatural numbers. Godel showed that no system of 'man-made' rules can, by themselves, achieve this for us. Such a Platonic viewpoint was important to Godel, and it will be important also for us in the later considerations of this book (8.7). ~ Roger Penrose,
1312:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution, Part I, The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti [336-337],
1313:Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre.

„Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable.

In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra!

Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world. ~ Emil M Cioran,
1314:Richborough Castle
THESE three grey walls are still stout and strong,
Though the fourth wide wall has crumbled away
Where the sea swept by when the land was young,
And the great waves thundered along the bay,
Under the sailing seagull's feather,
Wildly white in the stormy weather,
And, murmuring ever a restless song,
Shone, crumpled green, on a sunny day.
Through eighteen hundred years of our time,
With their storms and sieges, these walls have stood,
Till the cliff that the waves once strove to climb
Is left in a meadow solitude;
And now no sea-gulls' nests are there,
But ash-trees and thorns make the cliff-side fair,
And the green of the leaves, and the white of the lime,
And the red of the berries is sweet and good.
Over the walls, whence eagle-eyed
The Romans looked for the coming foes,
Swift keen-tongued snakes now curl and glide
Where the heavy weight of the ivy grows.
Oh, hand that builded, oh, scheming brain,
So long made one with the dust again,
Your old cement and your walls abide,
But stronger than they are the ivy and rose!
How the whole dear world is golden and green
With the marshy meadows, the dimpled wheat,
The hot strong sunshine, the ivy's sheen,
And the high white lights on the shiny beet.
See the far blue line--the retreating sea!
It is good to be here, it is good to be;
Whatever life is, or whatever has been,
To be now--to be here, is nothing but sweet!
211
There's an underground passage here, they say,
Here is the entrance with green set round;
You must stoop your head in this low-roofed way,
Leave day, light candles--pass underground.
Here, under the fields, it is damp and cold,
And whatever secret the place may hold
It has held it closely for many a day,
And will hold it for more in its hush profound.
Down here, last year, so the gossips tell,
Some archæological learned bore
Went chipping with hammer and chisel as well
To chip his way to the secret's core-Shut away from the sun and the browning wheat,
The whitening barley, the purple beet-In the dark with the damp, the earthy smell,
While the days burned through that return no more.
Oh, fool! not to see that the green of the trees,
The blue of the sky and the blue of the sea,
The placid pasture, the baby breeze,
And the outspread meadows' tranquillity,
With eyes to see them, are more than worth
The whole of the secrets of musty earth.
What secret outweighs such delights as these,
Or pays one lost moment's felicity?
Are we wise, we two, when we try to pierce
To the heart of things, to our own hearts' heart,
To learn the secret springs of the years,
And what that is of which we are part?
Free will--the Absolute--matter--mind-Ah, we came like the wind and we go like the wind!
Would solving life's mysteries dry our tears,
Or absolute knowledge heal souls that smart?
And meantime one might lose what I'd die to keep--
212
The power to delight in a day like this,
In the brown wings' whir, and the faint-bell'd sheep,
In the million things that the millions miss.
And, think, had it happened one's in-turned eyes
Had missed the gateway of Paradise,
Had one questioned of dreams till one fell asleep,
Having never dreamed, oh, my Dream, of your kiss!
~ Edith Nesbit,
1315:CHAPTER II—THE LOWEST DEPTHS There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each one is for himself. The I in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf. The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger. From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty—that is the point of departure; to be Satan—that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire emerges. We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified, honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress. The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths, hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point, and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated, the great cavern of evil. This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of everything. Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates. It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination. It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance. All the others, those above it, have but one object—to suppress it. It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and you destroy the lair Crime. Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written. The only social peril is darkness. Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there converted into evil. ~ Anonymous,
1316:He put one of the platters in front of Liv, forcing her to get up-close and personal with his dinner creation. It looked even worse on her plate than it had from a distance. Liv was glad she had a strong stomach. She’d seen some fairly disgusting things during nursing school, especially during her surgery rotation and in the burn unit, but none of them were quite as nasty as Baird’s “pizza.” “Well, go ahead. I thought you were starving.” She looked up to see him watching her, black eyebrows raised in anticipation. Oh my God, I’m actually going to have to eat it! Her stomach rolled at the thought. “You, uh, gave me so much I don’t know where to begin,” she lied weakly. “Only one piece.” He frowned. “Is it too much?” “It’s just a little more than I’m used to. Uh, on Earth we cut a pizza into eight or ten wedges.” And we don’t top it with fruit cocktail! “I can cut it into smaller pieces if you want,” he offered. “No, no. That’s okay. I’ll make do.” There was no putting it off anymore. Taking a deep breath, Liv lifted the huge sloppy slice and forced herself to take a bite. “You like it?” Baird stared at her suspiciously. “Mmm, delicious,” Liv mumbled, fighting her gag reflex. Inside her mouth the flavors of canned salmon, lima beans, and fruit cocktail were fighting and she wondered how in the world she would swallow without throwing up. But the big warrior was still watching her carefully for her reaction and she didn’t want to insult him. With a monumental effort she choked down the mess and prayed it wouldn’t come back up. “So it’s good?” he asked again. “Unforgettable,” Liv assured him which for once was the absolute truth. “Glad you like it.” Baird lifted his own piece of pizza and, keeping his eyes on her the entire time, took a huge bite. But when he started to chew, his face turned a peculiar shade of red. “Gods!” Getting up from the table in a hurry, he ran to the sink and spat out the mouthful. Then he turned back to Liv. “That was fuckin’ horrible. Why didn’t you tell me?” Liv shrugged, not sure if she should laugh or feel sorry for him. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” “I’d rather have my feelings hurt than eat that slop.” Baird frowned. “I don’t understand what you humans see in that dish anyway.” “Well…” Liv tried to think of a way to put it tactfully. “We don’t always make it exactly like that.” She nodded at the half a pizza she’d put back down on the metal serving tray. “But I did everything the clerk told me to,” Baird protested. “He said it was mistake proof. That anyone could do it.” “Anyone can do it. You just put a little too much on it, that’s all.” “Damn it to hell.” Baird sighed. “I’m sorry, Olivia. I wanted to make all your favorites—the things I saw you eating in my dreams. It was between this and that other stuff you like with the raw sea creatures rolled in the white grains. I thought this would be easier.” “Sushi?” Liv bit her lip to keep from laughing. “You were going to try and make me sushi?” As badly as he’d screwed up the pizza, she couldn’t imagine what his version of sushi would look like. Visions of a whole dead fish coated in sticky rice and rolled in peas and carrots instead of roe rose to mind. Ugh. Baird shrugged. “I wanted to. I wanted to make you something special every night. But I guess I’m not very good at cooking human food. Sorry.” He sounded so crestfallen and his broad shoulders slumped so sadly that Liv couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. She rose and went to put a hand lightly on his arm. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m sure if I tried to make Kindred cuisine I wouldn’t do any better.” Baird ~ Evangeline Anderson,
1317:We have now completed our view of the path of Knowledge and seen to what it leads. First, the end of Yoga of Knowledge is God-possession, it is to possess God and be possessed by him through consciousness, through identification, through reflection of the divine Reality. But not merely in some abstraction away from our present existence, but here also; therefore to possess the Divine in himself, the Divine in the world, the Divine within, the Divine in all things and all beings. It is to possess oneness with God and through that to possess also oneness with the universal, with the cosmos and all existences; therefore to possess the infinite diversity also in the oneness, but on the basis of oneness and not on the basis of division. It is to possess God in his personality and his impersonality; in his purity free from qualities and in his infinite qualities; in time and beyond time; in his action and in his silence; in the finite and in the infinite. It is to possess him not only in pure self, but in all self; not only in self, but in Nature; not only in spirit, but in supermind, mind, life and body; to possess him with the spirit, with the mind, with the vital and the physical consciousness; and it is again for all these to be possessed by him, so that our whole being is one with him, full of him, governed and driven by him. It is, since God is oneness, for our physical consciousness to be one with the soul and the nature of the material universe; for our life, to be one with all life; for our mind, to be one with the universal mind; for our spirit, to be identified with the universal spirit. It is to merge in him in the absolute and find him in all relations. Secondly, it is to put on the divine being and the divine nature. And since God is Sachchidananda, it is to raise our being into the divine being, our consciousness into the divine consciousness, our energy into the divine energy, our delight of existence into the divine delight of being. And it is not only to lift ourselves into this higher consciousness, but to widen into it in all our being, because it is to be found on all the planes of our existence and in all our members, so that our mental, vital, physical existence shall become full of the divine nature. Our intelligent mentality is to become a play of the divine knowledge-will, our mental soul-life a play of the divine love and delight, our vitality a play of the divine life, our physical being a mould of the divine substance. This God-action in us is to be realised by an opening of ourselves to the divine gnosis and divine Ananda and, in its fullness, by an ascent into and a permanent dwelling in the gnosis and the Ananda. For though we live physically on the material plane and in normal outwardgoing life the mind and soul are preoccupied with material existence, this externality of our being is not a binding limitation. We can raise our internal consciousness from plane to plane of the relations of Purusha with prakriti, and even become, instead of the mental being dominated by the physical soul and nature, the gnostic being or the bliss-self and assume the gnostic or the bliss nature. And by this raising of the inner life we can transform our whole outward-going existence; instead of a life dominated by matter we shall then have a life dominated by spirit with all its circumstances moulded and determined by the purity of being, the consciousness infinite even in the finite, the divine energy, the divine joy and bliss of the spirit.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge [511] [T1], #index,
1318:There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.

And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is
said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs.

On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a
phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open. ~ Henry Miller,
1319:Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a symbolic retrogression to Chaos. In order to be created anew, the old world must first be annihilated. The various rites performed in connection with the New Year can be put in two chief categories: (I) those that signify the return to Chaos (e.g., extinguishing fires, expelling 'evil' and sins, reversal of habitual behavior, orgies, return of the dead); (2) those that symbolize the cosmogony (e.g., lighting new fires, departure of the dead, repetition of the acts by which the Gods created the world, solemn prediction of the weather for the ensuing year). In the scenario of initiatory rites, 'death' corresponds to the temporary return to Chaos; hence it is the paradigmatic expression of the end of a mode of being the mode of ignorance and of the child's irresponsibility. Initiatory death provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new man. We shall later describe the different modalities of birth to a new, spiritual life. But now we must note that this new life is conceived as the true human existence, for it is open to the values of spirit. What is understood by the generic term 'culture,' comprising all the values of spirit, is accessible only to those who have been initiated. Hence participation in spiritual life is made possible by virtue of the religious experiences released during initiation.

All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this characteristic of the archaic mentality: the belief that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated-in the present instance, without the child's dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this obsession with beginnings, which, in sum, is the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For a thing to be well done, it must be done as it was done the first time. But the first time, the thing-this class of objects, this animal, this particular behavior-did not exist: when, in the beginning, this object, this animal, this institution, came into existence, it was as if, through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing.

Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life. Its function must be understood in relation to what it prepares: birth to a higher mode of being. As we shall see farther on, initiatory death is often symbolized, for example, by darkness, by cosmic night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster. All these images express regression to a preformal state, to a latent mode of being (complementary to the precosmogonic Chaos), rather than total annihilation (in the sense in which, for example, a member of the modern societies conceives death). These images and symbols of ritual death are inextricably connected with germination, with embryology; they already indicate a new life in course of preparation. Obviously, as we shall show later, there are other valuations of initiatory death-for example, joining the company of the dead and the Ancestors. But here again we can discern the same symbolism of the beginning: the beginning of spiritual life, made possible in this case by a meeting with spirits.

For archaic thought, then, man is made-he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings. They are only the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model. ~ Mircea Eliade,
1320:In short the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers. This is the Absolute's own world. He calls upon the phenomenal world to be, and it IS, exactly as he calls for it, no other condition being required. In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first. So Being grows under all sorts of resistances in this world of the many, and, from
compromise to compromise, only gets organized gradually into what may be called secondarily rational shape. We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest.
But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?"
Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice?
Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy- minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer—"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way.
Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal. There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son. We mistrust the chances of things. We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father's neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea.
The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life.
And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words: "All is needed and essential—even you with your sick soul and heart. All are one ~ William James,
1321:My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without.
Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.
[…] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence. ~ Ren Girard,
1322:My spirits were high as I joined Nee and Bran. But instead of walking down the stairs to go into the ballroom with the rest of the guests, Nee and Bran led the way across the hall, to the gallery that overlooked the ballroom, and stopped at the landing at the top of the grand stairway.
And there we found Shevraeth waiting for us, looking formidable and remote in his usual dark colors. Remembering with dismaying intensity that the last time we had talked with one another I had managed--again--to instigate a quarrel, I felt embarrassment chase away my anticipation.
Shevraeth greeted us in his customary calm manner. When he turned at last to Bran, I muttered out of the side of my mouth to Nee, “You mean we have to go down these stairs--with him--and everyone looking at us?”
“We’re the guests of honor,” she whispered back, obviously trying not to laugh. She looked fabulous in her dark brown velvet gown, embroidered all over with tiny gold leaves dotted with little rubies. “We’re supposed to be looked at! We’ll open the ball. You remember? I know I told you.”
Bran flicked my shoulder. “Brace up, Mel. You’ll like it. I promise.”
My attempt at a bland face obviously wasn’t convincing. I studied the toes of my dancing slippers, wishing with all my strength that I was back in Tlanth, riding the mountain trails with no humans in sight.
“Savona’s waiting,” Nee whispered to me.
Some invisible servant must have given a signal, for the music started: an entire orchestra filling the vaulted room with the strains of an ancient promenade. Had I been downstairs among the glittering throng, I would have loved it, but I now had Shevraeth standing right beside me, holding out his arm. I just knew I would manage to do something embarrassing.
I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and tried my best to smooth my face into a polite smile as I put my hand on his sleeve.
Just before we started down, he murmured, “Think of this as a battle.”
“A battle?” I repeated, so surprised I actually looked up at his face. He didn’t look angry, or disgusted, or sarcastic. But there was suppressed laughter in the way his gray eyes were narrowed.
He replied so softly I could just barely hear it. “You’ve a sword in your hand, and vast numbers of ravening minions of some dreaded evil sorcerer await below. The moment you step among them, you’ll leap into battle, mowing them down in droves…”
The absolute unlikelihood of it made me grin, on the verge of laughter. And I realized that while he’d spoken we had come safely down the stairs and were halfway along the huge room to the Duke of Savona, who waited alone. On either side people bowed and curtsied, as graceful as flowers in the wind.
I’d almost made it, and my smile was real--until I lost the image and remembered where I was, and who I was with, and I muttered defensively, “I don’t really like battles, you know.”
“Of course I know,” he returned, still in that soft voice. “But you’re used to them.” And then we were before Savona, who was resplendent in black and crimson and gold; and as the Duke bowed, fanfare after fanfare washed over me like waves of brilliant light.
Because Shevraeth was also a guest of honor, and had the highest rank, it was his choice for the first dance, and he held out his hand to me. Savona went to Nee, and Bran went to Nee’s cousin Tamara.
We danced. I moved through the complicated steps with sureness, my whole body in harmony with the singing strings, my eyes dazzled by the swirl of color all around me. Above our dancing figures, and around us, flowers and ribbons and hangings of every shade of violet and lavender made the room seem almost impossibly elegant.
When the dance ended, Shevraeth bowed and handed me to Savona, and once again I danced, relieved that I had somehow managed to get through the first one without any awkwardness at all. It’s the music, I thought happily as I spun and stepped; music is truly like magic. ~ Sherwood Smith,
1323:"There is a true movement of the intellect and there is a wrong movement: one helps, the other hinders." Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (5 May 1929)

   What is the true movement of the intellect?


What exactly do you understand by intellect? Is it a function of the mind or is it a part of the human being? How do you understand it?

   A function of the mind.

A function of the mind? Then it is that part of the mind which deals with ideas; is that what you mean?

Not ideas, Mother.

Not ideas? What else, then?

Ideas, but...

There is a part of the mind which receives ideas, ideas that are formed in a higher mind. Still, I don't know, it is a question of definition and one must know what exactly you mean to say.

It is intellect that puts ideas in the form of thoughts, gathering and organising the thoughts at the same time. There are great ideas which lie beyond the ordinary human mentality, which can put on all possible forms. These great ideas tend to descend, they want to manifest themselves in precise forms. These precise forms are the thoughts; and generally it is this, I believe, that is meant by intellect: it is this that gives thought-form to the ideas.

And then, there is also the organisation of the thoughts among themselves. All that has to be put in a certain order, otherwise one becomes incoherent. And after that, there is the putting of these thoughts to use for action; that is still another movement.

To be able to say what the true movement is, one must know first of all which movement is being spoken about. You have a body, well, you don't expect your body to walk on its head or its hands nor to crawl flat on its belly nor indeed that the head should be down and the legs up in the air. You give to each limb a particular occupation which is its own. This appears to you quite natural because that is the habit; otherwise, the very little ones do not know what to do, neither with their legs nor with their hands nor with their heads; it is only little by little that they learn that. Well, it is the same thing with the mind's functions. You must know which part of the mind you are speaking about, what its own function is, and then only can you say what its true movement is and what is not its true movement. For example, for the part which has to receive the master ideas and change them into thought, its true movement is to be open to the master ideas, receive them and change them into as exact, as precise, as expressive a thought as possible. For the part of the mind which has the charge of organising all these thoughts among themselves so that they might form a coherent and classified whole, not a chaos, the true movement is just to make the classification according to a higher logic and in a thoroughly clear, precise and expressive order which may be serviceable each time a thought is referred to, so that one may know where to look for it and not put quite contradictory things together. There are people whose mind does not work like that; all the ideas that come into it, without their being even aware of what the idea is, are translated into confused thoughts which remain in a kind of inner chaos. I have known people who, from the philosophical point of view - although there is nothing philosophical in it - could put side by side the most contradictory things, like ideas of hierarchic order and at the same time ideas of the absolute independence of the individual and of anarchism, and both were accepted with equal sympathy, knocked against each other in the head in the midst of a wild disorder, and these people were not even aware of it!... You know the saying: "A question well put is three-fourths solved." So now, put your question. What do you want to speak about? I am stretching out a helping hand, you have only to catch it. What is it you are speaking about, what is it that you call intellect? Do you know the difference between an idea and a thought?
   ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1953, 107,
1324:The recurring beat that moments God in Time.
Only was missing the sole timeless Word
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
The single sign interpreting every sign,
The absolute index to the Absolute.

There walled apart by its own innerness
In a mystical barrage of dynamic light
He saw a lone immense high-curved world-pile
Erect like a mountain-chariot of the Gods
Motionless under an inscrutable sky.
As if from Matter's plinth and viewless base
To a top as viewless, a carved sea of worlds
Climbing with foam-maned waves to the Supreme
Ascended towards breadths immeasurable;
It hoped to soar into the Ineffable's reign:
A hundred levels raised it to the Unknown.
So it towered up to heights intangible
And disappeared in the hushed conscious Vast
As climbs a storeyed temple-tower to heaven
Built by the aspiring soul of man to live
Near to his dream of the Invisible.
Infinity calls to it as it dreams and climbs;
Its spire touches the apex of the world;
Mounting into great voiceless stillnesses
It marries the earth to screened eternities.
Amid the many systems of the One
Made by an interpreting creative joy
Alone it points us to our journey back
Out of our long self-loss in Nature's deeps;
Planted on earth it holds in it all realms:
It is a brief compendium of the Vast.
This was the single stair to being's goal.
A summary of the stages of the spirit,
Its copy of the cosmic hierarchies
Refashioned in our secret air of self
A subtle pattern of the universe.
It is within, below, without, above.
Acting upon this visible Nature's scheme
It wakens our earth-matter's heavy doze
To think and feel and to react to joy;
It models in us our diviner parts,
Lifts mortal mind into a greater air,
Makes yearn this life of flesh to intangible aims,
Links the body's death with immortality's call:
Out of the swoon of the Inconscience
It labours towards a superconscient Light.
If earth were all and this were not in her,
Thought could not be nor life-delight's response:
Only material forms could then be her guests
Driven by an inanimate world-force.
Earth by this golden superfluity
Bore thinking man and more than man shall bear;
This higher scheme of being is our cause
And holds the key to our ascending fate;

It calls out of our dense mortality
The conscious spirit nursed in Matter's house.
The living symbol of these conscious planes,
Its influences and godheads of the unseen,
Its unthought logic of Reality's acts
Arisen from the unspoken truth in things,
Have fixed our inner life's slow-scaled degrees.
Its steps are paces of the soul's return
From the deep adventure of material birth,
A ladder of delivering ascent
And rungs that Nature climbs to deity.
Once in the vigil of a deathless gaze
These grades had marked her giant downward plunge,
The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall.
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
An idol of self is our mortality.
Our earth is a fragment and a residue;
Her power is packed with the stuff of greater worlds
And steeped in their colour-lustres dimmed by her drowse;
An atavism of higher births is hers,
Her sleep is stirred by their buried memories
Recalling the lost spheres from which they fell.
Unsatisfied forces in her bosom move;
They are partners of her greater growing fate
And her return to immortality;
They consent to share her doom of birth and death;
They kindle partial gleams of the All and drive
Her blind laborious spirit to compose
A meagre image of the mighty Whole.
The calm and luminous Intimacy within
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Stair,
1325:[the sevenfold ignorance and the integral knowledge:]

   We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence,-that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, -that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self,-that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end,-that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of that in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence,-that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations,-that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal,-that is the seventh, the practical ignorance.

   Our conception of the Ignorance will necessarily determine our conception of the Knowledge and determine, therefore, since our life is the Ignorance at once denying and seeking after the Knowledge, the goal of human effort and the aim of the cosmic endeavour. Integral knowledge will then mean the cancelling of the sevenfold Ignorance by the discovery of what it misses and ignores, a sevenfold self-revelation within our consciousness:- it will mean [1] the knowledge of the Absolute as the origin of all things; [2] the knowledge of the Self, the Spirit, the Being and of the cosmos as the Self's becoming, the becoming of the Being, a manifestation of the Spirit; [3] the knowledge of the world as one with us in the consciousness of our true self, thus cancelling our division from it by the separative idea and life of ego; [4] the knowledge of our psychic entity and its immortal persistence in Time beyond death and earth-existence; [5] the knowledge of our greater and inner existence behind the surface; [6] the knowledge of our mind, life and body in its true relation to the self within and the superconscient spiritual and supramental being above them; [7] the knowledge, finally, of the true harmony and true use of our thought, will and action and a change of all our nature into a conscious expression of the truth of the Spirit, the Self, the Divinity, the integral spiritual Reality.

   But this is not an intellectual knowledge which can be learned and completed in our present mould of consciousness; it must be an experience, a becoming, a change of consciousness, a change of being. This brings in the evolutionary character of the Becoming and the fact that our mental ignorance is only a stage in our evolution. The integral knowledge, then, can only come by an evolution of our being and our nature, and that would seem to signify a slow process in Time such as has accompanied the other evolutionary transformations. But as against that inference there is the fact that the evolution has now become conscious and its method and steps need not be altogether of the same character as when it was subconscious in its process. The integral knowledge, since it must result from a change of consciousness, can be gained by a process in which our will and endeavour have a part, in which they can discover and apply their own steps and method: its growth in us can proceed by a conscious self-transformation. It is necessary then to see what is likely to be the principle of this new process of evolution and what are the movements of the integral knowledge that must necessarily emerge in it,-or, in other words, what is the nature of the consciousness that must be the base of the life divine and how that life may be expected to be formed or to form itself, to materialise or, as one might say, to realise.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 680-683 [T1],
1326:Amours De Voyage, Canto V
There is a city, upbuilt on the quays of the turbulent Arno,
Under Fiesole's heights,--thither are we to return?
There is a city that fringes the curve of the inflowing waters,
Under the perilous hill fringes the beautiful bay,-Parthenope, do they call thee?--the Siren, Neapolis, seated
Under Vesevus's hill,--are we receding to thee?-Sicily, Greece, will invite, and the Orient;--or are we turn to
England, which may after all be for its children the best?
I. Mary Trevellyn, at Lucerne, to Miss Roper, at Florence.
So you are really free, and living in quiet at Florence;
That is delightful news; you travelled slowly and safely;
Mr. Claude got you out; took rooms at Florence before you;
Wrote from Milan to say so; had left directly for Milan,
Hoping to find us soon;--if he could, he would, you are certain.-Dear Miss Roper, your letter has made me exceedingly happy.
You are quite sure, you say, he asked you about our intentions;
You had not heard as yet of Lucerne, but told him of Como.-Well, perhaps he will come; however, I will not expect it.
Though you say you are sure,--if he can, he will, you are certain.
O my dear, many thanks from your ever affectionate Mary.
II. Claude to Eustace.
Florence.
Action will furnish belief,--but will that belief be the true one?
This is the point, you know. However, it doesn't much matter.
What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action,
So as to make it entail, not a chance belief, but the true one.
Out of the question, you say; if a thing isn't wrong we may do it.
Ah! but this wrong, you see--but I do not know that it matters.
Eustace, the Ropers are gone, and no one can tell me about them.
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Pisa.
Pisa, they say they think, and so I follow to Pisa,
Hither and thither inquiring. I weary of making inquiries.
I am ashamed, I declare, of asking people about it.-Who are your friends? You said you had friends who would certainly know them.
Florence.
But it is idle, moping, and thinking, and trying to fix her
Image once more and more in, to write the whole perfect inscription
Over and over again upon every page of remembrance.
I have settled to stay at Florence to wait for your answer.
Who are your friends? Write quickly and tell me. I wait for your answer.
III. Mary Trevellyn to Miss Roper.--at Lucca Baths.
You are at Lucca baths, you tell me, to stay for the summer;
Florence was quite too hot; you can't move further at present.
Will you not come, do you think, before the summer is over?
Mr. C. got you out with very considerable trouble;
And he was useful and kind, and seemed so happy to serve you.
Didn't stay with you long, but talked very openly to you;
Made you almost his confessor, without appearing to know it,-What about?--and you say you didn't need his confessions.
O my dear Miss Roper, I dare not trust what you tell me!
Will he come, do you think? I am really so sorry for him.
They didn't give him my letter at Milan, I feel pretty certain.
You had told him Bellaggio. We didn't go to Bellaggio;
So he would miss our track, and perhaps never come to Lugano,
Where we were written in full, To Lucerne across the St. Gothard.
But he could write to you;--you would tell him where you were going.
IV. Claude to Eustace.
Let me, then, bear to forget her. I will not cling to her falsely:
Nothing factitious or forced shall impair the old happy relation.
I will let myself go, forget, not try to remember;
41
I will walk on my way, accept the chances that meet me,
Freely encounter the world, imbibe these alien airs, and
Never ask if new feelings and thoughts are of her or of others.
Is she not changing herself?--the old image would only delude me.
I will be bold, too, and change,--if it must be. Yet if in all things,
Yet if I do but aspire evermore to the Absolute only,
I shall be doing, I think, somehow, what she will be doing;-I shall be thine, O my child, some way, though I know not in what way,
Let me submit to forget her; I must; I already forget her.
V. Claude to Eustace.
Utterly vain is, alas! this attempt at the Absolute,--wholly!
I, who believed not in her, because I would fain believe nothing,
Have to believe as I may, with a wilful, unmeaning acceptance.
I, who refused to enfasten the roots of my floating existence
In the rich earth, cling now to the hard, naked rock that is left me,-Ah! she was worthy, Eustace,--and that, indeed, is my comfort,-Worthy a nobler heart than a fool such as I could have given her.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yes, it relieves me to write, though I do not send, and the chance that
Takes may destroy my fragments. But as men pray, without asking

Whether One really exist to hear or do anything for them,-Simply impelled by the need of the moment to turn to a Being

In a conception of whom there is freedom from all limitation,-So in your image I turn to an ens rationis of friendship,

Even so write in your name I know not to whom nor in what wise.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------There was a time, methought it was but lately departed,
When, if a thing was denied me, I felt I was bound to attempt it;

Choice alone should take, and choice alone should surrender.

There was a time, indeed, when I had not retired thus early,

Languidly thus, from pursuit of a purpose I once had adopted,

But it is all over, all that! I have slunk from the perilous field in

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Whose wild struggle of forces the prizes of life are contested.

It is over, all that! I am a coward, and know it.

Courage in me could be only factitious, unnatural, useless.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Comfort has come to me here in the dreary streets of the city,
Comfort--how do you think?--with a barrel-organ to bring it.

Moping along the streets, and cursing my day as I wandered,

All of a sudden my ear met the sound of an English psalm-tune,

Comfort me it did, till indeed I was very near crying.

Ah, there is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful,

Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of the English psalm-tune.

Comfort it was at least; and I must take without question

Comfort, however it come, in the dreary streets of the city.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------I shall behold thee again (is it so?) at a new visitation,
O ill genius thou! I shall at my life's dissolution

(When the pulses are weak, and the feeble light of the reason

Flickers, an unfed flame retiring slow from the socket),

Low on a sick-bed laid, hear one, as it were, at the doorway,

And, looking up, see thee standing by, looking emptily at me;

I shall entreat thee then, though now I dare to refuse thee,-Pale and pitiful now, but terrible then to the dying.-Well, I will see thee again, and while I can, will repel thee.

VI. Claude to Eustace.

Rome is fallen, I hear, the gallant Medici taken,

Noble Manara slain, and Garibaldi has lost il Moro;-Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical Venice.

I, meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl, sit

Moping and mourning here,--for her, and myself much smaller.

Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle,

Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes with them?

Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous pinions of angels

43

Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their labour,

And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and burning moisture

Wiped from the generous eyes? or do they linger, unhappy,

Pining, and haunting the grave of their by-gone hope and endeavour?

All declamation, alas! though I talk, I care not for Rome nor

Italy; feebly and faintly, and but with the lips, can lament the

Wreck of the Lombard youth, and the victory of the oppressor.

Whither depart the brave?--God knows; I certainly do not.

VII. Mary Trevellyn to Miss Roper.

He has not come as yet; and now I must not expect it.

You have written, you say, to friends at Florence, to see him,

If he perhaps should return;--but that is surely unlikely.

Has he not written to you?--he did not know your direction.

Oh, how strange never once to have told him where you were going!

Yet if he only wrote to Florence, that would have reached you.

If what you say he said was true, why has he not done so?

Is he gone back to Rome, do you think, to his Vatican marbles?-O my dear Miss Roper, forgive me! do not be angry!-You have written to Florence;--your friends would certainly find him.

Might you not write to him ?--but yet it is so little likely!

I shall expect nothing more.--Ever yours, your affectionate Mary.

VIII. Claude to Eustace.

I cannot stay at Florence, not even to wait for a letter.

Galleries only oppress me. Remembrance of hope I had cherished

(Almost more than as hope, when I passed through Florence the first time)

Lies like a sword in my soul. I am more a coward than ever,

Chicken-hearted, past thought. The caffès and waiters distress me.

All is unkind, and, alas! I am ready for anyone's kindness.

Oh, I knew it of old, and knew it, I thought, to perfection,

If there is any one thing in the world to preclude all kindness

It is the need of it,--it is this sad, self-defeating dependence.

Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell you.

But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression,

Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose.

44

All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something.

Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks,

Is not I will, but I must. I must,--I must,--and I do it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------After all, do I know that I really cared so about her?
Do whatever I will, I cannot call up her image;

For when I close my eyes, I see, very likely, St. Peter's,

Or the Pantheon facade, or Michel Angelo's figures,

Or, at a wish, when I please, the Alban hills and the Forum,-But that face, those eyes,--ah, no, never anything like them;

Only, try as I will, a sort of featureless outline,

And a pale blank orb, which no recollection will add to.

After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it;

I have had pain, it is true: I have wept; and so have the actors.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------At the last moment I have your letter, for which I was waiting;
I have taken my place, and see no good in inquiries.

Do nothing more, good Eustace, I pray you. It only will vex me.

Take no measures. Indeed, should we meet, I could not be certain;

All might be changed, you know. Or perhaps there was nothing to be changed.

It is a curious history, this; and yet I foresaw it;

I could have told it before. The Fates, it is clear, are against us;

For it is certain enough I met with the people you mention;

They were at Florence the day I returned there, and spoke to me even;

Stayed a week, saw me often; departed, and whither I know not.

Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence partly.

What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered.

Ah, no, that isn't it. But yet I retain my conclusion.

I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances.

Do nothing more, I beg. If you love me, forbear interfering.

IX. Claude to Eustace.

Shall we come out of it all, some day, as one does from a tunnel?

45

Will it be all at once, without our doing or asking,

We shall behold clear day, the trees and meadows about us,

And the faces of friends, and the eyes we loved looking at us?

Who knows? Who can say? It will not do to suppose it.

X. Claude to Eustace,-from Rome.

Rome will not suit me, Eustace; the priests and soldiers possess it;

Priests and soldiers:--and, ah! which is the worst, the priest or the soldier?

Politics, farewell, however! For what could I do? with inquiring,

Talking, collating the journals, go fever my brain about things o'er

Which I can have no control. No, happen whatever may happen,

Time, I suppose, will subsist; the earth will revolve on its axis;

People will travel; the stranger will wander as now in the city;

Rome will be here, and the Pope the custode of Vatican marbles.

I have no heart, however, for any marble or fresco;

I have essayed it in vain; 'tis in vain as yet to essay it:

But I may haply resume some day my studies in this kind;

Not as the Scripture says, is, I think, the fact. Ere our death-day,

Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but Knowledge abideth.

Let us seek Knowledge;--the rest may come and go as it happens.

Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.

Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy.

Seek it, and leave mere Faith and Love to come with the chances.

As for Hope,--to-morrow I hope to be starting for Naples.

Rome will not do, I see, for many very good reasons.

Eastward, then, I suppose, with the coming of winter, to Egypt.

XI. Mary Trevellyn to Miss Roper.

You have heard nothing; of course I know you can have heard nothing.

Ah, well, more than once I have broken my purpose, and sometimes,

Only too often, have looked for the little lake steamer to bring him.

But it is only fancy,--I do not really expect it.

Oh, and you see I know so exactly how he would take it:

Finding the chances prevail against meeting again, he would banish

Forthwith every thought of the poor little possible hope, which

I myself could not help, perhaps, thinking only too much of;

46

He would resign himself, and go. I see it exactly.

So I also submit, although in a different manner.

Can you not really come? We go very shortly to England.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil!

Go, little book! thy tale, is it not evil and good?

Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer.

Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age,

Say, 'I am flitting about many years from brain unto brain of

Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days:

But,' so finish the word, 'I was writ in a Roman chamber,

When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.'

~ Arthur Hugh Clough,
1327:No more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk.
A final glass for me, though: cool, i' faith!
We ought to have our Abbey back, you see.
It's different, preaching in basilicas,
And doing duty in some masterpiece
Like this of brother Pugin's, bless his heart!
I doubt if they're half baked, those chalk rosettes,
Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere;
It's just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh?
These hot long ceremonies of our church
Cost us a littleoh, they pay the price,
You take meamply pay it! Now, we'll talk.

So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.
No deprecation,nay, I beg you, sir!
Beside 't is our engagement: don't you know,
I promised, if you'd watch a dinner out,
We'd see truth dawn together?truth that peeps
Over the glasses' edge when dinners done.                    
And body gets its sop and holds its noise
And leaves soul free a little. Now's the time:
'T is break of day! You do despise me then.
And if I say, "despise me,"never fear!
I know you do not in a certain sense
Not in my arm-chair, for example: here,
I well imagine you respect my place
( Status, entourage , worldly circumstance)
Quite to its valuevery much indeed:
Are up to the protesting eyes of you
In pride at being seated here for once
You'll turn it to such capital account!
When somebody, through years and years to come,
Hints of the bishop,names methat's enough:
"Blougram? I knew him"(into it you slide)
"Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,
"All alone, we two; he's a clever man:
"And after dinner,why, the wine you know,
"Oh, there was wine, and good!what with the wine . .
"'Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!
"He's no bad fellow, Blougram; he had seen
"Something of mine he relished, some review:
"He's quite above their humbug in his heart,
"Half-said as much, indeedthe thing's his trade.
"I warrant, Blougram's sceptical at times:
"How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!"
                    
Che che , my dear sir, as we say at Rome,
Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take;
You have had your turn and spoken your home-truths:
The hand's mine now, and here you follow suit.

Thus much conceded, still the first fact stays
You do despise me; your ideal of life
Is not the bishop's: you would not be I.
You would like better to be Goethe, now,
Or Buonaparte, or, bless me, lower still,
Count D'Orsay,so you did what you preferred,
Spoke as you thought, and, as you cannot help,
Believed or disbelieved, no matter what,
So long as on that point, whate'er it was,
You loosed your mind, were whole and sole yourself.
That, my ideal never can include,
Upon that element of truth and worth
Never be based! for say they make me Pope
(They can'tsuppose it for our argument!)
Why, there I'm at my tether's end, I've reached
My height, and not a height which pleases you:
An unbelieving Pope won't do, you say.
It's like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;                      

Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now?
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!

So, drawing comfortable breath again,
You weigh and find, whatever more or less
I boast of my ideal realized,
Is nothing in the balance when opposed
To your ideal, your grand simple life,
Of which you will not realize one jot.
I am much, you are nothing; you would be all,
I would be merely much: you beat me there.

No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why!
The common problem, yours, mine, every one's,
Isnot to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be,but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means: a very different thing!
No abstract intellectual plan of life
Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws,
                      
But one, a man, who is man and nothing more,
May lead within a world which (by your leave)
Is Rome or London, not Fool's-paradise.
Embellish Rome, idealize away,
Make paradise of London if you can,
You're welcome, nay, you're wise.

A simile!
We mortals cross the ocean of this world
Each in his average cabin of a life;
The best's not big, the worst yields elbow-room.
Now for our six months' voyagehow prepare?
You come on shipboard with a landsman's list
Of things he calls convenient: so they are!
An India screen is pretty furniture,
A piano-forte is a fine resource,
All Balzac's novels occupy one shelf,
The new edition fifty volumes long;
And little Greek books, with the funny type
They get up well at Leipsic, fill the next:
Go on! slabbed marble, what a bath it makes!
And Parma's pride, the Jerome, let us add!
'T were pleasant could Correggio's fleeting glow
Hang full in face of one where'er one roams,
Since he more than the others brings with him
Italy's self,the marvellous Modenese!
                      
Yet was not on your list before, perhaps.
Alas, friend, here's the agent . . . is't the name?
The captain, or whoever's master here
You see him screw his face up; what's his cry
Ere you set foot on shipboard? "Six feet square!"
If you won't understand what six feet mean,
Compute and purchase stores accordingly
And if, in pique because he overhauls
Your Jerome, piano, bath, you come on board
Barewhy, you cut a figure at the first
While sympathetic landsmen see you off;
Not afterward, when long ere half seas over,
You peep up from your utterly naked boards
Into some snug and well-appointed berth,
Like mine for instance (try the cooler jug
Put back the other, but don't jog the ice!)
And mortified you mutter "Well and good;
"He sits enjoying his sea-furniture;
"'T is stout and proper, and there's store of it:
"Though I've the better notion, all agree,
"Of fitting rooms up. Hang the carpenter,
"Neat ship-shape fixings and contrivances
"I would have brought my Jerome, frame and all!"
And meantime you bring nothing: never mind
You've proved your artist-nature: what you don't
You might bring, so despise me, as I say.                      

Now come, let's backward to the starting-place.
See my way: we're two college friends, suppose.
Prepare together for our voyage, then;
Each note and check the other in his work,
Here's mine, a bishop's outfit; criticize!
What's wrong? why won't you be a bishop too?

Why first, you don't believe, you don't and can't,
(Not statedly, that is, and fixedly
And absolutely and exclusively)
In any revelation called divine.
No dogmas nail your faith; and what remains
But say so, like the honest man you are?
First, therefore, overhaul theology!
Nay, I too, not a fool, you please to think,
Must find believing every whit as hard:
And if I do not frankly say as much,
The ugly consequence is clear enough.

Now wait, my friend: well, I do not believe
If you'll accept no faith that is not fixed,
Absolute and exclusive, as you say.
You're wrongI mean to prove it in due time.
Meanwhile, I know where difficulties lie
I could not, cannot solve, nor ever shall,
So give up hope accordingly to solve
                      
(To you, and over the wine). Our dogmas then
With both of us, though in unlike degree,
Missing full credenceoverboard with them!
I mean to meet you on your own premise:
Good, there go mine in company with yours!

And now what are we? unbelievers both,
Calm and complete, determinately fixed
To-day, to-morrow and for ever, pray?
You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think!
In no wise! all we've gained is, that belief,
As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,
Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's
The gain? how can we guard our unbelief,
Make it bear fruit to us?the problem here.
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,
The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly.
There the old misgivings, crooked questions are
This good God,what he could do, if he would,                      
Would, if he couldthen must have done long since:
If so, when, where and how? some way must be,
Once feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense, in which it might be, after all.
Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?"

That way
Over the mountain, which who stands upon
Is apt to doubt if it be meant for a road;
While, if he views it from the waste itself,
Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,
Not vague, mistakeable! what's a break or two
Seen from the unbroken desert either side?
And then (to bring in fresh philosophy)
What if the breaks themselves should prove at last
The most consummate of contrivances
To train a man's eye, teach him what is faith?
And so we stumble at truth's very test!
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt:
We called the chess-board white,we call it black.

"Well," you rejoin, "the end's no worse, at least;
"We've reason for both colours on the board:
"Why not confess then, where I drop the faith
"And you the doubt, that I'm as right as you?"                      

Because, friend, in the next place, this being so,
And both things even,faith and unbelief
Left to a man's choice,we'll proceed a step,
Returning to our image, which I like.

A man's choice, yesbut a cabin-passenger's
The man made for the special life o' the world
Do you forget him? I remember though!
Consult our ship's conditions and you find
One and but one choice suitable to all;
The choice, that you unluckily prefer,
Turning things topsy-turvythey or it
Going to the ground. Belief or unbelief
Bears upon life, determines its whole course,
Begins at its beginning. See the world
Such as it is,you made it not, nor I;
I mean to take it as it is,and you,
Not so you'll take it,though you get nought else.
I know the special kind of life I like,
What suits the most my idiosyncrasy,
Brings out the best of me and bears me fruit
In power, peace, pleasantness and length of days.
I find that positive belief does this
For me, and unbelief, no whit of this.
For you, it does, however?that, we'll try!
'T is clear, I cannot lead my life, at least,

                      
Induce the world to let me peaceably,
Without declaring at the outset, "Friends,
"I absolutely and peremptorily
"Believe!"I say, faith is my waking life:
One sleeps, indeed, and dreams at intervals,
We know, but waking's the main point with us
And my provision's for life's waking part.
Accordingly, I use heart, head and hand
All day, I build, scheme, study, and make friends;
And when night overtakes me, down I lie,
Sleep, dream a little, and get done with it,
The sooner the better, to begin afresh.
What's midnight doubt before the dayspring's faith?
You, the philosopher, that disbelieve,
That recognize the night, give dreams their weight
To be consistent you should keep your bed,
Abstain from healthy acts that prove you man,
For fear you drowse perhaps at unawares!
And certainly at night you'll sleep and dream,
Live through the day and bustle as you please.
And so you live to sleep as I to wake,
To unbelieve as I to still believe?
Well, and the common sense o' the world calls you
Bed-ridden,and its good things come to me.
Its estimation, which is half the fight,
That's the first-cabin comfort I secure:                      
The next . . . but you perceive with half an eye!
Come, come, it's best believing, if we may;
You can't but own that!

Next, concede again,
If once we choose belief, on all accounts
We can't be too decisive in our faith,
Conclusive and exclusive in its terms,
To suit the world which gives us the good things.
In every man's career are certain points
Whereon he dares not be indifferent;
The world detects him clearly, if he dare,
As baffled at the game, and losing life.
He may care little or he may care much
For riches, honour, pleasure, work, repose,
Since various theories of life and life's
Success are extant which might easily
Comport with either estimate of these;
And whoso chooses wealth or poverty,
Labour or quiet, is not judged a fool
Because his fellow would choose otherwise:
We let him choose upon his own account
So long as he's consistent with his choice.
But certain points, left wholly to himself,
When once a man has arbitrated on,
We say he must succeed there or go hang.
                    
Thus, he should wed the woman he loves most
Or needs most, whatsoe'er the love or need
For he can't wed twice. Then, he must avouch,
Or follow, at the least, sufficiently,
The form of faith his conscience holds the best,
Whate'er the process of conviction was:
For nothing can compensate his mistake
On such a point, the man himself being judge:
He cannot wed twice, nor twice lose his soul.

Well now, there's one great form of Christian faith
I happened to be born inwhich to teach
Was given me as I grew up, on all hands,
As best and readiest means of living by;
The same on examination being proved
The most pronounced moreover, fixed, precise
And absolute form of faith in the whole world
Accordingly, most potent of all forms
For working on the world. Observe, my friend!
Such as you know me, I am free to say,
In these hard latter days which hamper one,
Myselfby no immoderate exercise
Of intellect and learning, but the tact
To let external forces work for me,
Bid the street's stones be bread and they are bread;
                    
Bid Peter's creed, or rather, Hildebrand's,
Exalt me o'er my fellows in the world
And make my life an ease and joy and pride;
It does so,which for me's a great point gained,
Who have a soul and body that exact
A comfortable care in many ways.
There's power in me and will to dominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else:
In many ways I need mankind's respect,
Obedience, and the love that's born of fear:
While at the same time, there's a taste I have,
A toy of soul, a titillating thing,
Refuses to digest these dainties crude.
The naked life is gross till clothed upon:
I must take what men offer, with a grace
As though I would not, could I help it, take!
An uniform I wear though over-rich
Something imposed on me, no choice of mine;
No fancy-dress worn for pure fancy's sake
And despicable therefore! now folk kneel
And kiss my handof course the Church's hand.
Thus I am made, thus life is best for me,
And thus that it should be I have procured;
And thus it could not be another way,
I venture to imagine.                      

You'll reply,
So far my choice, no doubt, is a success;
But were I made of better elements,
With nobler instincts, purer tastes, like you,
I hardly would account the thing success
Though it did all for me I say.

But, friend,
We speak of what is; not of what might be,
And how't were better if't were otherwise.
I am the man you see here plain enough:
Grant I'm a beast, why, beasts must lead beasts' lives!
Suppose I own at once to tail and claws;
The tailless man exceeds me: but being tailed
I'll lash out lion fashion, and leave apes
To dock their stump and dress their haunches up.
My business is not to remake myself,
But make the absolute best of what God made.
Orour first similethough you prove me doomed
To a viler berth still, to the steerage-hole,
The sheep-pen or the pig-stye, I should strive
To make what use of each were possible;
And as this cabin gets upholstery,
That hutch should rustle with sufficient straw.

But, friend, I don't acknowledge quite so fast
I fail of all your manhood's lofty tastes
                    
Enumerated so complacently,
On the mere ground that you forsooth can find
In this particular life I choose to lead
No fit provision for them. Can you not?
Say you, my fault is I address myself
To grosser estimators than should judge?
And that's no way of holding up the soul,
Which, nobler, needs men's praise perhaps, yet knows
One wise man's verdict outweighs all the fools'
Would like the two, but, forced to choose, takes that.
I pine among my million imbeciles
(You think) aware some dozen men of sense
Eye me and know me, whether I believe
In the last winking Virgin, as I vow,
And am a fool, or disbelieve in her
And am a knave,approve in neither case,
Withhold their voices though I look their way:
Like Verdi when, at his worst opera's end
(The thing they gave at Florence,what's its name?)
While the mad houseful's plaudits near out-bang
His orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones,
He looks through all the roaring and the wreaths
Where sits Rossini patient in his stall.

Nay, friend, I meet you with an answer here
That even your prime men who appraise their kind
                    
Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self,
Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street
Sixty the minute; what's to note in that?
You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;
Him you must watchhe's sure to fall, yet stands!
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demirep
That loves and saves her soul in new French books
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway: one step aside,
They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line
Before your sages,just the men to shrink
From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad
You offer their refinement. Fool or knave?
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
When there's a thousand diamond weights between?
So, I enlist them. Your picked twelve, you'll find,
Profess themselves indignant, scandalized
At thus being held unable to explain
How a superior man who disbelieves
May not believe as well: that's Schelling's way!
It's through my coming in the tail of time,
Nicking the minute with a happy tact.
Had I been born three hundred years ago
                    
They'd say, "What's strange? Blougram of course believes;"
And, seventy years since, "disbelieves of course."
But now, "He may believe; and yet, and yet
"How can he?" All eyes turn with interest.
Whereas, step off the line on either side
You, for example, clever to a fault,
The rough and ready man who write apace,
Read somewhat seldomer, think perhaps even less
You disbelieve! Who wonders and who cares?
Lord So-and-sohis coat bedropped with wax,
All Peter's chains about his waist, his back
Brave with the needlework of Noodledom
Believes! Again, who wonders and who cares?
But I, the man of sense and learning too,
The able to think yet act, the this, the that,
I, to believe at this late time of day!
Enough; you see, I need not fear contempt.

Except it's yours! Admire me as these may,
You don't. But whom at least do you admire?
Present your own perfection, your ideal,
Your pattern man for a minuteoh, make haste
Is it Napoleon you would have us grow?
Concede the means; allow his head and hand,
(A large concession, clever as you are)
                      
Good! In our common primal element
Of unbelief (we can't believe, you know
We're still at that admission, recollect!)
Where do you findapart from, towering o'er
The secondary temporary aims
Which satisfy the gross taste you despise
Where do you find his star?his crazy trust
God knows through what or in what? it's alive
And shines and leads him, and that's all we want.
Have we aught in our sober night shall point
Such ends as his were, and direct the means
Of working out our purpose straight as his,
Nor bring a moment's trouble on success
With after-care to justify the same?
Be a Napoleon, and yet disbelieve
Why, the man's mad, friend, take his light away!
What's the vague good o' the world, for which you dare
With comfort to yourself blow millions up?
We neither of us see it! we do see
The blown-up millionsspatter of their brains
And writhing of their bowels and so forth,
In that bewildering entanglement
Of horrible eventualities
Past calculation to the end of time!
Can I mistake for some clear word of God
(Which were my ample warrant for it all)
                      
His puff of hazy instinct, idle talk,
"The State, that's I," quack-nonsense about crowns,
And (when one beats the man to his last hold)
A vague idea of setting things to rights,
Policing people efficaciously,
More to their profit, most of all to his own;
The whole to end that dismallest of ends
By an Austrian marriage, cant to us the Church,
And resurrection of the old rgime ?
Would I, who hope to live a dozen years,
Fight Austerlitz for reasons such and such?
No: for, concede me but the merest chance
Doubt may be wrongthere's judgment, life to come!
With just that chance, I dare not. Doubt proves right?
This present life is all?you offer me
Its dozen noisy years, without a chance
That wedding an archduchess, wearing lace,
And getting called by divers new-coined names,
Will drive off ugly thoughts and let me dine,
Sleep, read and chat in quiet as I like!
Therefore I will not.

Take another case;
Fit up the cabin yet another way.
What say you to the poets? shall we write
Hamlet, Othellomake the world our own,
                      
Without a risk to run of either sort?
I can'tto put the strongest reason first.
"But try," you urge, "the trying shall suffice;
"The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life:
"Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!"
Spare my self-knowledgethere's no fooling me!
If I prefer remaining my poor self,
I say so not in self-dispraise but praise.
If I'm a Shakespeare, let the well alone;
Why should I try to be what now I am?
If I'm no Shakespeare, as too probable,
His power and consciousness and self-delight
And all we want in common, shall I find
Trying for ever? while on points of taste
Wherewith, to speak it humbly, he and I
Are dowered alikeI'll ask you, I or he,
Which in our two lives realizes most?
Much, he imaginedsomewhat, I possess.
He had the imagination; stick to that!
Let him say, "In the face of my soul's works
"Your world is worthless and I touch it not
"Lest I should wrong them"I'll withdraw my plea.
But does he say so? look upon his life!
Himself, who only can, gives judgment there.
He leaves his towers and gorgeous palaces
To build the trimmest house in Stratford town;
                      
Saves money, spends it, owns the worth of things,
Giulio Romano's pictures, Dowland's lute;
Enjoys a show, respects the puppets, too,
And none more, had he seen its entry once,
Than "Pandulph, of fair Milan cardinal."
Why then should I who play that personage,
The very Pandulph Shakespeare's fancy made,
Be told that had the poet chanced to start
From where I stand now (some degree like mine
Being just the goal he ran his race to reach)
He would have run the whole race back, forsooth,
And left being Pandulph, to begin write plays?
Ah, the earth's best can be but the earth's best!
Did Shakespeare live, he could but sit at home
And get himself in dreams the Vatican,
Greek busts, Venetian paintings, Roman walls,
And English books, none equal to his own,
Which I read, bound in gold (he never did).
Terni's fall, Naples' bay and Gothard's top
Eh, friend? I could not fancy one of these;
But, as I pour this claret, there they are:
I've gained themcrossed St. Gothard last July
With ten mules to the carriage and a bed
Slung inside; is my hap the worse for that?
We want the same things, Shakespeare and myself,
And what I want, I have: he, gifted more,
                      
Could fancy he too had them when he liked,
But not so thoroughly that, if fate allowed,
He would not have them also in my sense.
We play one game; I send the ball aloft
No less adroitly that of fifty strokes
Scarce five go o'er the wall so wide and high
Which sends them back to me: I wish and get
He struck balls higher and with better skill,
But at a poor fence level with his head,
And hithis Stratford house, a coat of arms,
Successful dealings in his grain and wool,
While I receive heaven's incense in my nose
And style myself the cousin of Queen Bess.
Ask him, if this life's all, who wins the game?

Believeand our whole argument breaks up.
Enthusiasm's the best thing, I repeat;
Only, we can't command it; fire and life
Are all, dead matter's nothing, we agree:
And be it a mad dream or God's very breath,
The fact's the same,belief's fire, once in us,
Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself:
We penetrate our life with such a glow
As fire lends wood and ironthis turns steel,
That burns to ashall's one, fire proves its power
For good or ill, since men call flare success.
                      
But paint a fire, it will not therefore burn.
Light one in me, I'll find it food enough!
Why, to be Lutherthat's a life to lead,
Incomparably better than my own.
He comes, reclaims God's earth for God, he says,
Sets up God's rule again by simple means,
Re-opens a shut book, and all is done.
He flared out in the flaring of mankind;
Such Luther's luck was: how shall such be mine?
If he succeeded, nothing's left to do:
And if he did not altogetherwell,
Strauss is the next advance. All Strauss should be
I might be also. But to what result?
He looks upon no future: Luther did.
What can I gain on the denying side?
Ice makes no conflagration. State the facts,
Read the text right, emancipate the world
The emancipated world enjoys itself
With scarce a thank-you: Blougram told it first
It could not owe a farthing,not to him
More than Saint Paul! 't would press its pay, you think?
Then add there's still that plaguy hundredth chance
Strauss may be wrong. And so a risk is run
For what gain? not for Luther's, who secured
A real heaven in his heart throughout his life,
Supposing death a little altered things.                      

"Ay, but since really you lack faith," you cry,
"You run the same risk really on all sides,
"In cool indifference as bold unbelief.
"As well be Strauss as swing 'twixt Paul and him.
"It's not worth having, such imperfect faith,
"No more available to do faith's work
"Than unbelief like mine. Whole faith, or none!"

Softly, my friend! I must dispute that point
Once own the use of faith, I'll find you faith.
We're back on Christian ground. You call for faith:
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say,
If faith o'ercomes doubt. How I know it does?
By life and man's free will, God gave for that!
To mould life as we choose it, shows our choice:
That's our one act, the previous work's his own.
You criticize the soul? it reared this tree
This broad life and whatever fruit it bears!
What matter though I doubt at every pore,
Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my fingers' ends,
Doubts in the trivial work of every day,
Doubts at the very bases of my soul
In the grand moments when she probes herself
If finally I have a life to show,
The thing I did, brought out in evidence
                      
Against the thing done to me underground
By hell and all its brood, for aught I know?
I say, whence sprang this? shows it faith or doubt?
All's doubt in me; where's break of faith in this?
It is the idea, the feeling and the love,
God means mankind should strive for and show forth
Whatever be the process to that end,
And not historic knowledge, logic sound,
And metaphysical acumen, sure!
"What think ye of Christ," friend? when all's done and said,
Like you this Christianity or not?
It may be false, but will you wish it true?
Has it your vote to be so if it can?
Trust you an instinct silenced long ago
That will break silence and enjoin you love
What mortified philosophy is hoarse,
And all in vain, with bidding you despise?
If you desire faiththen you've faith enough:
What else seeks Godnay, what else seek ourselves?
You form a notion of me, we'll suppose,
On hearsay; it's a favourable one:
"But still" (you add), "there was no such good man,
"Because of contradiction in the facts.
"One proves, for instance, he was born in Rome,
"This Blougram; yet throughout the tales of him
                    
"I see he figures as an Englishman."
Well, the two things are reconcileable.
But would I rather you discovered that,
Subjoining"Still, what matter though they be?
"Blougram concerns me nought, born here or there."

Pure faith indeedyou know not what you ask!
Naked belief in God the Omnipotent,
Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much
The sense of conscious creatures to be borne.
It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare
Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth:
I say it's meant to hide him all it can,
And that's what all the blessed evil's for.
Its use in Time is to environ us,
Our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough
Against that sight till we can bear its stress.
Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain
And lidless eye and disemprisoned heart
Less certainly would wither up at once
Than mind, confronted with the truth of him.
But time and earth case-harden us to live;
The feeblest sense is trusted most; the child
Feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place,
Plays on and grows to be a man like us.
                    
With me, faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.
Or, if that's too ambitious,here's my box
I need the excitation of a pinch
Threatening the torpor of the inside-nose
Nigh on the imminent sneeze that never comes.
"Leave it in peace" advise the simple folk:
Make it aware of peace by itching-fits,
Say Ilet doubt occasion still more faith!

You'll say, once all believed, man, woman, child,
In that dear middle-age these noodles praise.
How you'd exult if I could put you back
Six hundred years, blot out cosmogony,
Geology, ethnology, what not
(Greek endings, each the little passing-bell
That signifies some faith's about to die),
And set you square with Genesis again,
When such a traveller told you his last news,
He saw the ark a-top of Ararat
But did not climb there since 't was getting dusk
And robber-bands infest the mountain's foot!
How should you feel, I ask, in such an age,
How act? As other people felt and did;
With soul more blank than this decanter's knob,                
Believeand yet lie, kill, rob, fornicate
Full in belief's face, like the beast you'd be!

No, when the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feetboth tug
He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!
Never leave growing till the life to come!
Here, we've got callous to the Virgin's winks
That used to puzzle people wholesomely:
Men have outgrown the shame of being fools.
What are the laws of nature, not to bend
If the Church bid them?brother Newman asks.
Up with the Immaculate Conception, then
On to the rack with faith!is my advice.
Will not that hurry us upon our knees,
Knocking our breasts, "It can't beyet it shall!
"Who am I, the worm, to argue with my Pope?
"Low things confound the high things!" and so forth.
That's better than acquitting God with grace
As some folk do. He's triedno case is proved,
Philosophy is lenienthe may go!

You'll say, the old system's not so obsolete
But men believe still: ay, but who and where?
                    
King Bomba's lazzaroni foster yet
The sacred flame, so Antonelli writes;
But even of these, what ragamuffin-saint
Believes God watches him continually,
As he believes in fire that it will burn,
Or rain that it will drench him? Break fire's law,
Sin against rain, although the penalty
Be just a singe or soaking? "No," he smiles;
"Those laws are laws that can enforce themselves."

The sum of all isyes, my doubt is great,
My faith's still greater, then my faith's enough.
I have read much, thought much, experienced much,
Yet would die rather than avow my fear
The Naples' liquefaction may be false,
When set to happen by the palace-clock
According to the clouds or dinner-time.
I hear you recommend, I might at least
Eliminate, decrassify my faith
Since I adopt it; keeping what I must
And leaving what I cansuch points as this.
I won'tthat is, I can't throw one away.
Supposing there's no truth in what I hold
About the need of trial to man's faith,
Still, when you bid me purify the same,
To such a process I discern no end.
                
Clearing off one excrescence to see two,
There's ever a next in size, now grown as big,
That meets the knife: I cut and cut again!
First cut the Liquefaction, what comes last
But Fichte's clever cut at God himself?
Experimentalize on sacred things!
I trust nor hand nor eye nor heart nor brain
To stop betimes: they all get drunk alike.
The first step, I am master not to take.

You'd find the cutting-process to your taste
As much as leaving growths of lies unpruned,
Nor see more danger in it,you retort.
Your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise
When we consider that the steadfast hold
On the extreme end of the chain of faith
Gives all the advantage, makes the difference
With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule:
We are their lords, or they are free of us,
Just as we tighten or relax our hold.
So, others matters equal, we'll revert
To the first problemwhich, if solved my way
And thrown into the balance, turns the scale
How we may lead a comfortable life,
How suit our luggage to the cabin's size.                    

Of course you are remarking all this time
How narrowly and grossly I view life,
Respect the creature-comforts, care to rule
The masses, and regard complacently
"The cabin," in our old phrase. Well, I do.
I act for, talk for, live for this world now,
As this world prizes action, life and talk:
No prejudice to what next world may prove,
Whose new laws and requirements, my best pledge
To observe then, is that I observe these now,
Shall do hereafter what I do meanwhile.
Let us concede (gratuitously though)
Next life relieves the soul of body, yields
Pure spiritual enjoyment: well, my friend,
Why lose this life i' the meantime, since its use
May be to make the next life more intense?

Do you know, I have often had a dream
(Work it up in your next month's article)
Of man's poor spirit in its progress, still
Losing true life for ever and a day
Through ever trying to be and ever being
In the evolution of successive spheres
Before its actual sphere and place of life,
Halfway into the next, which having reached,
It shoots with corresponding foolery
                    
Halfway into the next still, on and off!
As when a traveller, bound from North to South,
Scouts fur in Russia: what's its use in France?
In France spurns flannel: where's its need in Spain?
In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers!
Linen goes next, and last the skin itself,
A superfluity at Timbuctoo.
When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?
I'm at ease now, friend; worldly in this world,
I take and like its way of life; I think
My brothers, who administer the means,
Live better for my comfortthat's good too;
And God, if he pronounce upon such life,
Approves my service, which is better still.
If he keep silence,why, for you or me
Or that brute beast pulled-up in to-day's "Times,"
What odds is't, save to ourselves, what life we lead?

You meet me at this issue: you declare,
All special-pleading done withtruth is truth,
And justifies itself by undreamed ways.
You don't fear but it's better, if we doubt,
To say so, act up to our truth perceived
However feebly. Do then,act away!
'T is there I'm on the watch for you. How one acts
Is, both of us agree, our chief concern:
                    
And how you'll act is what I fain would see
If, like the candid person you appear,
You dare to make the most of your life's scheme
As I of mine, live up to its full law
Since there's no higher law that counterchecks.
Put natural religion to the test
You've just demolished the revealed withquick,
Down to the root of all that checks your will,
All prohibition to lie, kill and thieve,
Or even to be an atheistic priest!
Suppose a pricking to incontinence
Philosophers deduce you chastity
Or shame, from just the fact that at the first
Whoso embraced a woman in the field,
Threw club down and forewent his brains beside,
So, stood a ready victim in the reach
Of any brother savage, club in hand;
Hence saw the use of going out of sight
In wood or cave to prosecute his loves:
I read this in a French book t' other day.
Does law so analysed coerce you much?
Oh, men spin clouds of fuzz where matters end,
But you who reach where the first thread begins,
You'll soon cut that!which means you can, but won't,
Through certain instincts, blind, unreasoned-out,
                    
You dare not set aside, you can't tell why,
But there they are, and so you let them rule.
Then, friend, you seem as much a slave as I,
A liar, conscious coward and hypocrite,
Without the good the slave expects to get,
In case he has a master after all!
You own your instincts? why, what else do I,
Who want, am made for, and must have a God
Ere I can be aught, do aught?no mere name
Want, but the true thing with what proves its truth,
To wit, a relation from that thing to me,
Touching from head to footwhich touch I feel,
And with it take the rest, this life of ours!
I live my life here; yours you dare not live.

Not as I state it, who (you please subjoin)
Disfigure such a life and call it names,
While, to your mind, remains another way
For simple men: knowledge and power have rights,
But ignorance and weakness have rights too.
There needs no crucial effort to find truth
If here or there or anywhere about:
We ought to turn each side, try hard and see,
And if we can't, be glad we've earned at least
The right, by one laborious proof the more,
To graze in peace earth's pleasant pasturage.
                    
Men are not angels, neither are they brutes:
Something we may see, all we cannot see.
What need of lying? I say, I see all,
And swear to each detail the most minute
In what I think a Pan's faceyou, mere cloud:
I swear I hear him speak and see him wink,
For fear, if once I drop the emphasis,
Mankind may doubt there's any cloud at all.
You take the simple lifeready to see,
Willing to see (for no cloud's worth a face)
And leaving quiet what no strength can move,
And which, who bids you move? who has the right?
I bid you; but you are God's sheep, not mine:
" Pastor est tui Dominus ." You find
In this the pleasant pasture of our life
Much you may eat without the least offence,
Much you don't eat because your maw objects,
Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock
Open great eyes at you and even butt,
And thereupon you like your mates so well
You cannot please yourself, offending them;
Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep,
You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats
And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears
Restrain you, real checks since you find them so;
Sometimes you please yourself and nothing checks:
                      
And thus you graze through life with not one lie,
And like it best.

But do you, in truth's name?
If so, you beatwhich means you are not I
Who needs must make earth mine and feed my fill
Not simply unbutted at, unbickered with,
But motioned to the velvet of the sward
By those obsequious wethers' very selves.
Look at me, sir; my age is double yours:
At yours, I knew beforehand, so enjoyed,
What now I should beas, permit the word,
I pretty well imagine your whole range
And stretch of tether twenty years to come.
We both have minds and bodies much alike:
In truth's name, don't you want my bishopric,
My daily bread, my influence and my state?
You're young. I'm old; you must be old one day;
Will you find then, as I do hour by hour,
Women their lovers kneel to, who cut curls
From your fat lap-dog's ear to grace a brooch
Dukes, who petition just to kiss your ring
With much beside you know or may conceive?
Suppose we die to-night: well, here am I,
Such were my gains, life bore this fruit to me,
While writing all the same my articles
                    
On music, poetry, the fictile vase
Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon's Greek.
But youthe highest honour in your life,
The thing you'll crown yourself with, all your days,
Isdining here and drinking this last glass
I pour you out in sign of amity
Before we part for ever. Of your power
And social influence, worldly worth in short,
Judge what's my estimation by the fact,
I do not condescend to enjoin, beseech,
Hint secrecy on one of all these words!
You're shrewd and know that should you publish one
The world would brand the liemy enemies first,
Who'd sneer"the bishop's an arch-hypocrite
"And knave perhaps, but not so frank a fool."
Whereas I should not dare for both my ears
Breathe one such syllable, smile one such smile,
Before the chaplain who reflects myself
My shade's so much more potent than your flesh.
What's your reward, self-abnegating friend?
Stood you confessed of those exceptional
And privileged great natures that dwarf mine
A zealot with a mad ideal in reach,
A poet just about to print his ode,
A statesman with a scheme to stop this war,
An artist whose religion is his art
    
~ Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology
,
1328:The Unknown Eros. Book I.
Saint Valentine’s Day
Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to hold
In vestal February;
Not rather choosing out some rosy day
From the rich coronet of the coming May,
When all things meet to marry!
O, quick, prævernal Power
That signall'st punctual through the sleepy mould
The Snowdrop's time to flower,
Fair as the rash oath of virginity
Which is first-love's first cry;
O, Baby Spring,
That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth
A month before the birth;
Whence is the peaceful poignancy,
The joy contrite,
Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight,
That burthens now the breath of everything,
Though each one sighs as if to each alone
The cherish'd pang were known?
At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart,
With it the Blackbird breaks the young Day's heart;
In evening's hush
About it talks the heavenly-minded Thrush;
The hill with like remorse
Smiles to the Sun's smile in his westering course;
The fisher's drooping skiff
In yonder sheltering bay;
The choughs that call about the shining cliff;
The children, noisy in the setting ray;
Own the sweet season, each thing as it may;
Thoughts of strange kindness and forgotten peace
In me increase;
And tears arise
Within my happy, happy Mistress' eyes,
And, lo, her lips, averted from my kiss,
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Ask from Love's bounty, ah, much more than bliss!
Is't the sequester'd and exceeding sweet
Of dear Desire electing his defeat?
Is't the waked Earth now to yon purpling cope
Uttering first-love's first cry,
Vainly renouncing, with a Seraph's sigh,
Love's natural hope?
Fair-meaning Earth, foredoom'd to perjury!
Behold, all amorous May,
With roses heap'd upon her laughing brows,
Avoids thee of thy vows!
Were it for thee, with her warm bosom near,
To abide the sharpness of the Seraph's sphere?
Forget thy foolish words;
Go to her summons gay,
Thy heart with dead, wing'd Innocencies fill'd,
Ev'n as a nest with birds
After the old ones by the hawk are kill'd.
Well dost thou, Love, to celebrate
The noon of thy soft ecstasy,
Or e'er it be too late,
Or e'er the Snowdrop die!
II
Wind And Wave
The wedded light and heat,
Winnowing the witless space,
Without a let,
What are they till they beat
Against the sleepy sod, and there beget
Perchance the violet!
Is the One found,
Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace,
To make Heaven's bound;
So that in Her
All which it hath of sensitively good
Is sought and understood
After the narrow mode the mighty Heavens prefer?
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She, as a little breeze
Following still Night,
Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas
Into delight;
But, in a while,
The immeasurable smile
Is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent
With darkling discontent;
And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,
And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,
T'ward the void sky-line and an unguess'd weal;
Until the vanward billows feel
The agitating shallows, and divine the goal,
And to foam roll,
And spread and stray
And traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands;
And so the whole
Unfathomable and immense
Triumphing tide comes at the last to reach
And burst in wind-kiss'd splendours on the deaf'ning beach,
Where forms of children in first innocence
Laugh and fling pebbles on the rainbow'd crest
Of its untired unrest.
III
Winter
I, singularly moved
To love the lovely that are not beloved,
Of all the Seasons, most
Love Winter, and to trace
The sense of the Trophonian pallor on her face.
It is not death, but plenitude of peace;
And the dim cloud that does the world enfold
Hath less the characters of dark and cold
Than warmth and light asleep,
And correspondent breathing seems to keep
With the infant harvest, breathing soft below
Its eider coverlet of snow.
Nor is in field or garden anything
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But, duly look'd into, contains serene
The substance of things hoped for, in the Spring,
And evidence of Summer not yet seen.
On every chance-mild day
That visits the moist shaw,
The honeysuckle, 'sdaining to be crost
In urgence of sweet life by sleet or frost,
'Voids the time's law
With still increase
Of leaflet new, and little, wandering spray;
Often, in sheltering brakes,
As one from rest disturb'd in the first hour,
Primrose or violet bewilder'd wakes,
And deems 'tis time to flower;
Though not a whisper of her voice he hear,
The buried bulb does know
The signals of the year,
And hails far Summer with his lifted spear.
The gorse-field dark, by sudden, gold caprice,
Turns, here and there, into a Jason's fleece;
Lilies, that soon in Autumn slipp'd their gowns of green,
And vanish'd into earth,
And came again, ere Autumn died, to birth,
Stand full-array'd, amidst the wavering shower,
And perfect for the Summer, less the flower;
In nook of pale or crevice of crude bark,
Thou canst not miss,
If close thou spy, to mark
The ghostly chrysalis,
That, if thou touch it, stirs in its dream dark;
And the flush'd Robin, in the evenings hoar,
Does of Love's Day, as if he saw it, sing;
But sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer or Spring
Are Winter's sometime smiles, that seem to well
From infancy ineffable;
Her wandering, languorous gaze,
So unfamiliar, so without amaze,
On the elemental, chill adversity,
The uncomprehended rudeness; and her sigh
And solemn, gathering tear,
And look of exile from some great repose, the sphere
Of ether, moved by ether only, or
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By something still more tranquil.
IV
Beta
Of infinite Heaven the rays,
Piercing some eyelet in our cavern black,
Ended their viewless track
On thee to smite
Solely, as on a diamond stalactite,
And in mid-darkness lit a rainbow's blaze,
Wherein the absolute Reason, Power, and Love,
That erst could move
Mainly in me but toil and weariness,
Renounced their deadening might,
Renounced their undistinguishable stress
Of withering white,
And did with gladdest hues my spirit caress,
Nothing of Heaven in thee showing infinite,
Save the delight.
The Day After To-Morrow
Perchance she droops within the hollow gulf
Which the great wave of coming pleasure draws,
Not guessing the glad cause!
Ye Clouds that on your endless journey go,
Ye Winds that westward flow,
Thou heaving Sea
That heav'st 'twixt her and me,
Tell her I come;
Then only sigh your pleasure, and be dumb;
For the sweet secret of our either self
We know.
Tell her I come,
And let her heart be still'd.
One day's controlled hope, and then one more,
And on the third our lives shall be fulfill'd!
Yet all has been before:
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Palm placed in palm, twin smiles, and words astray.
What other should we say?
But shall I not, with ne'er a sign, perceive,
Whilst her sweet hands I hold,
The myriad threads and meshes manifold
Which Love shall round her weave:
The pulse in that vein making alien pause
And varying beats from this;
Down each long finger felt, a differing strand
Of silvery welcome bland;
And in her breezy palm
And silken wrist,
Beneath the touch of my like numerous bliss
Complexly kiss'd,
A diverse and distinguishable calm?
What should we say!
It all has been before;
And yet our lives shall now be first fulfill'd,
And into their summ'd sweetness fall distill'd
One sweet drop more;
One sweet drop more, in absolute increase
Of unrelapsing peace.
O, heaving Sea,
That heav'st as if for bliss of her and me,
And separatest not dear heart from heart,
Though each 'gainst other beats too far apart,
For yet awhile
Let it not seem that I behold her smile.
O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,
Love in each moment years and years of rest,
Be calm, as being not.
Ye oceans of intolerable delight,
The blazing photosphere of central Night,
Be ye forgot.
Terror, thou swarthy Groom of Bride-bliss coy,
Let me not see thee toy.
O, Death, too tardy with thy hope intense
Of kisses close beyond conceit of sense;
O, Life, too liberal, while to take her hand
Is more of hope than heart can understand;
Perturb my golden patience not with joy,
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Nor, through a wish, profane
The peace that should pertain
To him who does by her attraction move.
Has all not been before?
One day's controlled hope, and one again,
And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,
O Life, Death, Terror, Love!
But soon let your unrestful rapture cease,
Ye flaming Ethers thin,
Condensing till the abiding sweetness win
One sweet drop more;
One sweet drop more in the measureless increase
Of honied peace.
VI
Tristitia
Darling, with hearts conjoin'd in such a peace
That Hope, so not to cease,
Must still gaze back,
And count, along our love's most happy track,
The landmarks of like inconceiv'd increase,
Promise me this:
If thou alone should'st win
God's perfect bliss,
And I, beguiled by gracious-seeming sin,
Say, loving too much thee,
Love's last goal miss,
And any vows may then have memory,
Never, by grief for what I bear or lack,
To mar thy joyance of heav'n's jubilee.
Promise me this;
For else I should be hurl'd,
Beyond just doom
And by thy deed, to Death's interior gloom,
From the mild borders of the banish'd world
Wherein they dwell
Who builded not unalterable fate
On pride, fraud, envy, cruel lust, or hate;
Yet loved too laxly sweetness and heart's ease,
And strove the creature more than God to please.
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For such as these
Loss without measure, sadness without end!
Yet not for this do thou disheaven'd be
With thinking upon me.
Though black, when scann'd from heaven's surpassing bright,
This might mean light,
Foil'd with the dim days of mortality.
For God is everywhere.
Go down to deepest Hell, and He is there,
And, as a true but quite estranged Friend,
He works, 'gainst gnashing teeth of devilish ire,
With love deep hidden lest it be blasphemed,
If possible, to blend
Ease with the pangs of its inveterate fire;
Yea, in the worst
And from His Face most wilfully accurst
Of souls in vain redeem'd,
He does with potions of oblivion kill
Remorse of the lost Love that helps them still.
Apart from these,
Near the sky-borders of that banish'd world,
Wander pale spirits among willow'd leas,
Lost beyond measure, sadden'd without end,
But since, while erring most, retaining yet
Some ineffectual fervour of regret,
Retaining still such weal
As spurned Lovers feel,
Preferring far to all the world's delight
Their loss so infinite,
Or Poets, when they mark
In the clouds dun
A loitering flush of the long sunken sun,
And turn away with tears into the dark.
Know, Dear, these are not mine
But Wisdom's words, confirmed by divine
Doctors and Saints, though fitly seldom heard
Save in their own prepense-occulted word,
Lest fools be fool'd the further by false hope,
And wrest sweet knowledge to their own decline;
217
And (to approve I speak within my scope)
The Mistress of that dateless exile gray
Is named in surpliced Schools Tristitia.
But, O, my Darling, look in thy heart and see
How unto me,
Secured of my prime care, thy happy state,
In the most unclean cell
Of sordid Hell,
And worried by the most ingenious hate,
It never could be anything but well,
Nor from my soul, full of thy sanctity,
Such pleasure die
As the poor harlot's, in whose body stirs
The innocent life that is and is not hers:
Unless, alas, this fount of my relief
By thy unheavenly grief
Were closed.
So, with a consecrating kiss
And hearts made one in past all previous peace,
And on one hope reposed,
Promise me this!
VII
The Azalea
There, where the sun shines first
Against our room,
She train'd the gold Azalea, whose perfume
She, Spring-like, from her breathing grace dispersed.
Last night the delicate crests of saffron bloom,
For this their dainty likeness watch'd and nurst,
Were just at point to burst.
At dawn I dream'd, O God, that she was dead,
And groan'd aloud upon my wretched bed,
And waked, ah, God, and did not waken her,
But lay, with eyes still closed,
Perfectly bless'd in the delicious sphere
By which I knew so well that she was near,
My heart to speechless thankfulness composed.
Till 'gan to stir
218
A dizzy somewhat in my troubled head—
It was the azalea's breath, and she was dead!
The warm night had the lingering buds disclosed,
And I had fall'n asleep with to my breast
A chance-found letter press'd
In which she said,
‘So, till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu!
Parting's well-paid with soon again to meet,
Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet,
Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you!’
VIII
Departure
It was not like your great and gracious ways!
Do you, that have nought other to lament,
Never, my Love, repent
Of how, that July afternoon,
You went,
With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten'd eye,
Upon your journey of so many days,
Without a single kiss, or a good-bye?
I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;
And so we sate, within the low sun's rays,
You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,
Your harrowing praise.
Well, it was well,
To hear you such things speak,
And I could tell
What made your eyes a growing gloom of love,
As a warm South-wind sombres a March grove.
And it was like your great and gracious ways
To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,
Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash
To let the laughter flash,
Whilst I drew near,
Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.
But all at once to leave me at the last,
More at the wonder than the loss aghast,
With huddled, unintelligible phrase,
219
And frighten'd eye,
And go your journey of all days
With not one kiss, or a good-bye,
And the only loveless look the look with which you pass'd:
'Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.
IX
Eurydice
Is this the portent of the day nigh past,
And of a restless grave
O'er which the eternal sadness gathers fast;
Or but the heaped wave
Of some chance, wandering tide,
Such as that world of awe
Whose circuit, listening to a foreign law,
Conjunctures ours at unguess'd dates and wide,
Does in the Spirit's tremulous ocean draw,
To pass unfateful on, and so subside?
Thee, whom ev'n more than Heaven loved I have,
And yet have not been true
Even to thee,
I, dreaming, night by night, seek now to see,
And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursue
Thro' sordid streets and lanes
And houses brown and bare
And many a haggard stair
Ochrous with ancient stains,
And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,
In whose unhaunted glooms
Dead pauper generations, witless of the sun,
Their course have run;
And ofttimes my pursuit
Is check'd of its dear fruit
By things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,
Furious that I should keep
Their forfeit power to weep,
And mock, with living fear, their mournful malice thin.
But ever, at the last, my way I win
To where, with perfectly sad patience, nurst
By sorry comfort of assured worst,
220
Ingrain'd in fretted cheek and lips that pine,
On pallet poor
Thou lyest, stricken sick,
Beyond love's cure,
By all the world's neglect, but chiefly mine.
Then sweetness, sweeter than my tongue can tell,
Does in my bosom well,
And tears come free and quick
And more and more abound
For piteous passion keen at having found,
After exceeding ill, a little good;
A little good
Which, for the while,
Fleets with the current sorrow of the blood,
Though no good here has heart enough to smile.
The Toys
My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
221
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood,
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’
XI
Tired Memory
The stony rock of death's insensibility
Well'd yet awhile with honey of thy love
And then was dry;
Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove,
Nor all thy kind, long letters, nor the band
Which really spann'd
Thy body chaste and warm,
Thenceforward move
Upon the stony rock their wearied charm.
At last, then, thou wast dead.
Yet would I not despair,
But wrought my daily task, and daily said
Many and many a fond, unfeeling prayer,
To keep my vows of faith to thee from harm.
In vain.
‘For 'tis,’ I said, ‘all one,
The wilful faith, which has no joy or pain,
As if 'twere none.’
Then look'd I miserably round
If aught of duteous love were left undone,
And nothing found.
But, kneeling in a Church, one Easter-Day,
It came to me to say:
‘Though there is no intelligible rest,
In Earth or Heaven,
For me, but on her breast,
222
I yield her up, again to have her given,
Or not, as, Lord, Thou wilt, and that for aye.’
And the same night, in slumber lying,
I, who had dream'd of thee as sad and sick and dying,
And only so, nightly for all one year,
Did thee, my own most Dear,
Possess,
In gay, celestial beauty nothing coy,
And felt thy soft caress
With heretofore unknown reality of joy.
But, in our mortal air,
None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,
And fresh despair
Bade me seek round afresh for some extreme
Of unconceiv'd, interior sacrifice
Whereof the smoke might rise
To God, and 'mind Him that one pray'd below.
And so,
In agony, I cried:
‘My Lord, if Thy strange will be this,
That I should crucify my heart,
Because my love has also been my pride,
I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss
Wherein She has no part.’
And I was heard,
And taken at my own remorseless word.
O, my most Dear,
Was't treason, as I fear?
'Twere that, and worse, to plead thy veiled mind,
Kissing thy babes, and murmuring in mine ear,
‘Thou canst not be
Faithful to God, and faithless unto me!’
Ah, prophet kind!
I heard, all dumb and blind
With tears of protest; and I cannot see
But faith was broken. Yet, as I have said,
My heart was dead,
Dead of devotion and tired memory,
When a strange grace of thee
In a fair stranger, as I take it, bred
To her some tender heed,
Most innocent
223
Of purpose therewith blent,
And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet such
That the pale reflex of an alien love,
So vaguely, sadly shown,
Did her heart touch
Above
All that, till then, had woo'd her for its own.
And so the fear, which is love's chilly dawn,
Flush'd faintly upon lids that droop'd like thine,
And made me weak,
By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn,
And Nature's long suspended breath of flame
Persuading soft, and whispering Duty's name,
Awhile to smile and speak
With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine;
Thy Sister sweet,
Who bade the wheels to stir
Of sensitive delight in the poor brain,
Dead of devotion and tired memory,
So that I lived again,
And, strange to aver,
With no relapse into the void inane,
For thee;
But (treason was't?) for thee and also her.
XII
Magna Est Veritas
Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not fail:
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
XIII
224
1867
In the year of the great crime,
When the false English Nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,
One said, Take up thy Song,
That breathes the mild and almost mythic time
Of England's prime!
But I, Ah, me,
The freedom of the few
That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,
Can song renew?
Ill singing 'tis with blotting prison-bars,
How high soe'er, betwixt us and the stars;
Ill singing 'tis when there are none to hear;
And days are near
When England shall forget
The fading glow which, for a little while,
Illumes her yet,
The lovely smile
That grows so faint and wan,
Her people shouting in her dying ear,
Are not two daws worth two of any swan!
Ye outlaw'd Best, who yet are bright
With the sunken light,
Whose common style
Is Virtue at her gracious ease,
The flower of olden sanctities,
Ye haply trust, by love's benignant guile,
To lure the dark and selfish brood
To their own hated good;
Ye haply dream
Your lives shall still their charmful sway sustain,
Unstifled by the fever'd steam
That rises from the plain.
Know, 'twas the force of function high,
In corporate exercise, and public awe
Of Nature's, Heaven's, and England's Law
That Best, though mix'd with Bad, should reign,
Which kept you in your sky!
225
But, when the sordid Trader caught
The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,
And soon, to the Mechanic vain,
Sold the proud toy for nought,
Your charm was broke, your task was sped,
Your beauty, with your honour, dead,
And though you still are dreaming sweet
Of being even now not less
Than Gods and Goddesses, ye shall not long so cheat
Your hearts of their due heaviness.
Go, get you for your evil watching shriven!
Leave to your lawful Master's itching hands
Your unking'd lands,
But keep, at least, the dignity
Of deigning not, for his smooth use, to be,
Voteless, the voted delegates
Of his strange interests, loves and hates.
In sackcloth, or in private strife
With private ill, ye may please Heaven,
And soothe the coming pangs of sinking life;
And prayer perchance may win
A term to God's indignant mood
And the orgies of the multitude,
Which now begin;
But do not hope to wave the silken rag
Of your unsanction'd flag,
And so to guide
The great ship, helmless on the swelling tide
Of that presumptuous Sea,
Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly bright
With lights innumerable that give no light,
Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right,
Rejoicing to be free.
And, now, because the dark comes on apace
When none can work for fear,
And Liberty in every Land lies slain,
And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,
And heavy prophecies, suspended long
At supplication of the righteous few,
And so discredited, to fulfilment throng,
Restrain'd no more by faithful prayer or tear,
226
And the dread baptism of blood seems near
That brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace,
Breathless be song,
And let Christ's own look through
The darkness, suddenly increased,
To the gray secret lingering in the East.
XIV
‘If I Were Dead’
‘If I were dead, you'd sometimes say, Poor Child!’
The dear lips quiver'd as they spake,
And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
Poor Child, poor Child!
I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.
It is not true that Love will do no wrong.
Poor Child!
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,
And of those words your full avengers make?
Poor Child, poor Child!
And now, unless it be
That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,
O God, have Thou no mercy upon me!
Poor Child!
XV
Peace
O England, how hast thou forgot,
In dullard care for undisturb'd increase
Of gold, which profits not,
The gain which once thou knew'st was for thy peace!
Honour is peace, the peace which does accord
Alone with God's glad word:
‘My peace I send you, and I send a sword.’
O England, how hast thou forgot,
How fear'st the things which make for joy, not fear,
Confronted near.
227
Hard days? 'Tis what the pamper'd seek to buy
With their most willing gold in weary lands.
Loss and pain risk'd? What sport but understands
These for incitements! Suddenly to die,
With conscience a blurr'd scroll?
The sunshine dreaming upon Salmon's height
Is not so sweet and white
As the most heretofore sin-spotted soul
That darts to its delight
Straight from the absolution of a faithful fight.
Myriads of homes unloosen'd of home's bond,
And fill'd with helpless babes and harmless women fond?
Let those whose pleasant chance
Took them, like me, among the German towns,
After the war that pluck'd the fangs from France,
With me pronounce
Whether the frequent black, which then array'd
Child, wife, and maid,
Did most to magnify the sombreness of grief,
Or add the beauty of a staid relief
And freshening foil
To cheerful-hearted Honour's ready smile!
Beneath the heroic sun
Is there then none
Whose sinewy wings by choice do fly
In the fine mountain-air of public obloquy,
To tell the sleepy mongers of false ease
That war's the ordained way of all alive,
And therein with goodwill to dare and thrive
Is profit and heart's peace?
But in his heart the fool now saith:
‘The thoughts of Heaven were past all finding out,
Indeed, if it should rain
Intolerable woes upon our Land again,
After so long a drought!’
‘Will a kind Providence our vessel whelm,
With such a pious Pilot at the helm?’
‘Or let the throats be cut of pretty sheep
228
That care for nought but pasture rich and deep?’
‘Were 't Evangelical of God to deal so foul a blow
At people who hate Turks and Papists so?’
‘What, make or keep
A tax for ship and gun,
When 'tis full three to one
Yon bully but intends
To beat our friends?’
‘Let's put aside
Our costly pride.
Our appetite's not gone
Because we've learn'd to doff
Our caps, where we were used to keep them on.’
‘If times get worse,
We've money in our purse,
And Patriots that know how, let who will scoff,
To buy our perils off.
Yea, blessed in our midst
Art thou who lately didst,
So cheap,
The old bargain of the Saxon with the Dane.’
Thus in his heart the fool now saith;
And, lo, our trusted leaders trust fool's luck,
Which, like the whale's 'mazed chine,
When they thereon were mulling of their wine,
Will some day duck.
Remnant of Honour, brooding in the dark
Over your bitter cark,
Staring, as Rispah stared, astonied seven days,
Upon the corpses of so many sons,
Who loved her once,
Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways,
Who could have dreamt
That times should come like these!
Prophets, indeed, taught lies when we were young,
And people loved to have it so;
For they teach well who teach their scholars' tongue!
229
But that the foolish both should gaze,
With feeble, fascinated face,
Upon the wan crest of the coming woe,
The billow of earthquake underneath the seas,
And sit at ease,
Or stand agape,
Without so much as stepping back to 'scape,
Mumbling, ‘Perchance we perish if we stay:
'Tis certain wear of shoes to stir away!’
Who could have dreamt
That times should come like these!
Remnant of Honour, tongue-tied with contempt,
Consider; you are strong yet, if you please.
A hundred just men up, and arm'd but with a frown,
May hoot a hundred thousand false loons down,
Or drive them any way like geese.
But to sit silent now is to suborn
The common villainy you scorn.
In the dark hour
When phrases are in power,
And nought's to choose between
The thing which is not and which is not seen,
One fool, with lusty lungs,
Does what a hundred wise, who hate and hold their tongues,
Shall ne'er undo.
In such an hour,
When eager hands are fetter'd and too few,
And hearts alone have leave to bleed,
Speak; for a good word then is a good deed.
XVI
A Farewell
With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part.
My Very Dear,
Our solace is, the sad road lies so clear.
It needs no art,
With faint, averted feet
And many a tear,
In our opposed paths to persevere.
230
Go thou to East, I West.
We will not say
There's any hope, it is so far away.
But, O, my Best,
When the one darling of our widowhead,
The nursling Grief,
Is dead,
And no dews blur our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies,
Perchance we may,
Where now this night is day,
And even through faith of still averted feet,
Making full circle of our banishment,
Amazed meet;
The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet
Seasoning the termless feast of our content
With tears of recognition never dry.
XVII
1880-85
Stand by,
Ye Wise, by whom Heav'n rules!
Your kingly hands suit not the hangman's tools.
When God has doom'd a glorious Past to die,
Are there no knaves and fools?
For ages yet to come your kind shall count for nought.
Smoke of the strife of other Powers
Than ours,
And tongues inscrutable with fury fraught
'Wilder the sky,
Till the far good which none can guess be wrought.
Stand by!
Since tears are vain, here let us rest and laugh,
But not too loudly; for the brave time's come,
When Best may not blaspheme the Bigger Half,
And freedom for our sort means freedom to be dumb.
Lo, how the dross and draff
Jeer up at us, and shout,
‘The Day is ours, the Night is theirs!’
231
And urge their rout
Where the wild dawn of rising Tartarus flares.
Yon strives their Leader, lusting to be seen.
His leprosy's so perfect that men call him clean!
Listen the long, sincere, and liberal bray
Of the earnest Puller at another's hay
'Gainst aught that dares to tug the other way,
Quite void of fears
With all that noise of ruin round his ears!
Yonder the people cast their caps o'erhead,
And swear the threaten'd doom is ne'er to dread
That's come, though not yet past.
All front the horror and are none aghast;
Brag of their full-blown rights and liberties,
Nor once surmise
When each man gets his due the Nation dies;
Nay, still shout ‘Progress!’ as if seven plagues
Should take the laggard who would stretch his legs.
Forward! glad rush of Gergesenian swine;
You've gain'd the hill-top, but there's yet the brine.
Forward! to meet the welcome of the waves
That mount to 'whelm the freedom which enslaves.
Forward! bad corpses turn into good dung,
To feed strange futures beautiful and young.
Forward! God speed ye down the damn'd decline,
And grant ye the Fool's true good, in abject ruin's gulf
As the Wise see him so to see himself!
Ah, Land once mine,
That seem'd to me too sweetly wise,
Too sternly fair for aught that dies,
Past is thy proud and pleasant state,
That recent date
When, strong and single, in thy sovereign heart,
The thrones of thinking, hearing, sight,
The cunning hand, the knotted thew
Of lesser powers that heave and hew,
And each the smallest beneficial part,
And merest pore of breathing, beat,
Full and complete,
The great pulse of thy generous might,
Equal in inequality,
232
That soul of joy in low and high;
When not a churl but felt the Giant's heat,
Albeit he simply call'd it his,
Flush in his common labour with delight,
And not a village-Maiden's kiss
But was for this
More sweet,
And not a sorrow but did lightlier sigh,
And for its private self less greet,
The whilst that other so majestic self stood by!
Integrity so vast could well afford
To wear in working many a stain,
To pillory the cobbler vain
And license madness in a lord.
On that were all men well agreed;
And, if they did a thing,
Their strength was with them in their deed,
And from amongst them came the shout of a king!
But, once let traitor coward meet,
Not Heaven itself can keep its feet.
Come knave who said to dastard, ‘Lo,
‘The Deluge!’ which but needed ‘No!’
For all the Atlantic's threatening roar,
If men would bravely understand,
Is softly check'd for evermore
By a firm bar of sand.
But, dastard listening knave, who said,
‘'Twere juster were the Giant dead,
That so yon bawlers may not miss
To vote their own pot-belly'd bliss,’
All that is past!
We saw the slaying, and were not aghast.
But ne'er a sun, on village Groom and Bride,
Albeit they guess not how it is,
At Easter or at Whitsuntide,
But shines less gay for this!
XVIII
The Two Deserts
233
Not greatly moved with awe am I
To learn that we may spy
Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.
The best that's known
Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.
View'd close, the Moon's fair ball
Is of ill objects worst,
A corpse in Night's highway, naked, fire-scarr'd, accurst;
And now they tell
That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst
Too horribly for hell.
So, judging from these two,
As we must do,
The Universe, outside our living Earth,
Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth,
Forecasting at the time Man's spirit deep,
To make dirt cheap.
Put by the Telescope!
Better without it man may see,
Stretch'd awful in the hush'd midnight,
The ghost of his eternity.
Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye
The things which near us lie,
Till Science rapturously hails,
In the minutest water-drop,
A torment of innumerable tails.
These at the least do live.
But rather give
A mind not much to pry
Beyond our royal-fair estate
Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.
Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,
Pressing to catch our gaze,
And out of obvious ways
Ne'er wandering far.
XIX
Crest And Gulf
Much woe that man befalls
234
Who does not run when sent, nor come when Heaven calls;
But whether he serve God, or his own whim,
Not matters, in the end, to any one but him;
And he as soon
Shall map the other side of the Moon,
As trace what his own deed,
In the next chop of the chance gale, shall breed.
This he may know:
His good or evil seed
Is like to grow,
For its first harvest, quite to contraries:
The father wise
Has still the hare-brain'd brood;
'Gainst evil, ill example better works than good;
The poet, fanning his mild flight
At a most keen and arduous height,
Unveils the tender heavens to horny human eyes
Amidst ingenious blasphemies.
Wouldst raise the poor, in Capuan luxury sunk?
The Nation lives but whilst its Lords are drunk!
Or spread Heav'n's partial gifts o'er all, like dew?
The Many's weedy growth withers the gracious Few!
Strange opposites, from those, again, shall rise.
Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest
Of mankind's progress; all its spectral race
Mere impotence of rest,
The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self,
Crest altering still to gulf
And gulf to crest
In endless chace,
That leaves the tossing water anchor'd in its place!
Ah, well does he who does but stand aside,
Sans hope or fear,
And marks the crest and gulf in station sink and rear,
And prophesies 'gainst trust in such a tide:
For he sometimes is prophet, heavenly taught,
Whose message is that he sees only nought.
Nathless, discern'd may be,
By listeners at the doors of destiny,
The fly-wheel swift and still
Of God's incessant will,
235
Mighty to keep in bound, tho' powerless to quell,
The amorous and vehement drift of man's herd to hell.
XX
‘Let Be!’
Ah, yes; we tell the good and evil trees
By fruits: But how tell these?
Who does not know
That good and ill
Are done in secret still,
And that which shews is verily but show!
How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood:
But not all height is holiness,
Nor every sweetness good;
And grace will sometimes lurk where who could guess?
The Critic of his kind,
Dealing to each his share,
With easy humour, hard to bear,
May not impossibly have in him shrined,
As in a gossamer globe or thickly padded pod,
Some small seed dear to God.
Haply yon wretch, so famous for his falls,
Got them beneath the Devil-defended walls
Of some high Virtue he had vow'd to win;
And that which you and I
Call his besetting sin
Is but the fume of his peculiar fire
Of inmost contrary desire,
And means wild willingness for her to die,
Dash'd with despondence of her favour sweet;
He fiercer fighting, in his worst defeat,
Than I or you,
That only courteous greet
Where he does hotly woo,
Did ever fight, in our best victory.
Another is mistook
Through his deceitful likeness to his look!
Let be, let be:
Why should I clear myself, why answer thou for me?
That shaft of slander shot
236
Miss'd only the right blot.
I see the shame
They cannot see:
'Tis very just they blame
The thing that's not.
XXI
‘Faint Yet Pursuing’
Heroic Good, target for which the young
Dream in their dreams that every bow is strung,
And, missing, sigh
Unfruitful, or as disbelievers die,
Thee having miss'd, I will not so revolt,
But lowlier shoot my bolt,
And lowlier still, if still I may not reach,
And my proud stomach teach
That less than highest is good, and may be high.
An even walk in life's uneven way,
Though to have dreamt of flight and not to fly
Be strange and sad,
Is not a boon that's given to all who pray.
If this I had
I'd envy none!
Nay, trod I straight for one
Year, month or week,
Should Heaven withdraw, and Satan me amerce
Of power and joy, still would I seek
Another victory with a like reverse;
Because the good of victory does not die,
As dies the failure's curse,
And what we have to gain
Is, not one battle, but a weary life's campaign.
Yet meaner lot being sent
Should more than me content;
Yea, if I lie
Among vile shards, though born for silver wings,
In the strong flight and feathers gold
Of whatsoever heavenward mounts and sings
I must by admiration so comply
That there I should my own delight behold.
237
Yea, though I sin each day times seven,
And dare not lift the fearfullest eyes to Heaven,
Thanks must I give
Because that seven times are not eight or nine,
And that my darkness is all mine,
And that I live
Within this oak-shade one more minute even,
Hearing the winds their Maker magnify.
XXII
Victory In Defeat
Ah, God, alas,
How soon it came to pass
The sweetness melted from thy barbed hook
Which I so simply took;
And I lay bleeding on the bitter land,
Afraid to stir against thy least command,
But losing all my pleasant life-blood, whence
Force should have been heart's frailty to withstand.
Life is not life at all without delight,
Nor has it any might;
And better than the insentient heart and brain
Is sharpest pain;
And better for the moment seems it to rebel,
If the great Master, from his lifted seat,
Ne'er whispers to the wearied servant ‘Well!’
Yet what returns of love did I endure,
When to be pardon'd seem'd almost more sweet
Than aye to have been pure!
But day still faded to disastrous night,
And thicker darkness changed to feebler light,
Until forgiveness, without stint renew'd,
Was now no more with loving tears imbued,
Vowing no more offence.
Not less to thine Unfaithful didst thou cry,
‘Come back, poor Child; be all as 'twas before.
But I,
‘No, no; I will not promise any more!
Yet, when I feel my hour is come to die,
And so I am secured of continence,
238
Then may I say, though haply then in vain,
'My only, only Love, O, take me back again!'’
Thereafter didst thou smite
So hard that, for a space,
Uplifted seem'd Heav'n's everlasting door,
And I indeed the darling of thy grace.
But, in some dozen changes of the moon,
A bitter mockery seem'd thy bitter boon.
The broken pinion was no longer sore.
Again, indeed, I woke
Under so dread a stroke
That all the strength it left within my heart
Was just to ache and turn, and then to turn and ache,
And some weak sign of war unceasingly to make.
And here I lie,
With no one near to mark,
Thrusting Hell's phantoms feebly in the dark,
And still at point more utterly to die.
O God, how long!
Put forth indeed thy powerful right hand,
While time is yet,
Or never shall I see the blissful land!
Thus I: then God, in pleasant speech and strong,
(Which soon I shall forget):
‘The man who, though his fights be all defeats,
Still fights,
Enters at last
The heavenly Jerusalem's rejoicing streets
With glory more, and more triumphant rites
Than always-conquering Joshua's, when his blast
The frighted walls of Jericho down cast;
And, lo, the glad surprise
Of peace beyond surmise,
More than in common Saints, for ever in his eyes.
XXIII
Remembered Grace
Since succour to the feeblest of the wise
239
Is charge of nobler weight
Than the security
Of many and many a foolish soul's estate,
This I affirm,
Though fools will fools more confidently be:
Whom God does once with heart to heart befriend,
He does so till the end:
And having planted life's miraculous germ,
One sweet pulsation of responsive love,
He sets him sheer above,
Not sin and bitter shame
And wreck of fame,
But Hell's insidious and more black attempt,
The envy, malice, and pride,
Which men who share so easily condone
That few ev'n list such ills as these to hide.
From these unalterably exempt,
Through the remember'd grace
Of that divine embrace,
Of his sad errors none,
Though gross to blame,
Shall cast him lower than the cleansing flame,
Nor make him quite depart
From the small flock named ‘after God's own heart,’
And to themselves unknown.
Nor can he quail
In faith, nor flush nor pale
When all the other idiot people spell
How this or that new Prophet's word belies
Their last high oracle;
But constantly his soul
Points to its pole
Ev'n as the needle points, and knows not why;
And, under the ever-changing clouds of doubt,
When others cry,
‘The stars, if stars there were,
Are quench'd and out!’
To him, uplooking t'ward the hills for aid,
Appear, at need display'd,
Gaps in the low-hung gloom, and, bright in air,
Orion or the Bear.
240
XXIV
Vesica Piscis
In strenuous hope I wrought,
And hope seem'd still betray'd;
Lastly I said,
‘I have labour'd through the Night, nor yet
Have taken aught;
But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!’
And, lo, I caught
(Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,)
Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea,
For food, my wish,
But Thee!
Then, hiding even in me,
As hid was Simon's coin within the fish,
Thou sigh'd'st, with joy, ‘Be dumb,
Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.’
~ Coventry Patmore,

IN CHAPTERS [150/536]



  204 Integral Yoga
   48 Yoga
   33 Philosophy
   26 Occultism
   26 Christianity
   16 Psychology
   11 Poetry
   6 Fiction
   4 Science
   4 Integral Theory
   3 Mythology
   3 Buddhism
   2 Hinduism
   1 Theosophy
   1 Thelema
   1 Sufism
   1 Kabbalah
   1 Education
   1 Baha i Faith
   1 Alchemy


  210 Sri Aurobindo
   80 The Mother
   55 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   50 Satprem
   30 Sri Ramakrishna
   18 Plotinus
   12 Carl Jung
   12 Aleister Crowley
   10 Paul Richard
   9 Swami Krishnananda
   8 Franz Bardon
   8 A B Purani
   7 Swami Vivekananda
   7 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   6 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   6 H P Lovecraft
   6 Friedrich Nietzsche
   5 George Van Vrekhem
   4 Plato
   4 Aldous Huxley
   3 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
   3 Joseph Campbell
   3 Jordan Peterson
   2 Patanjali
   2 Nirodbaran
   2 Mahendranath Gupta
   2 Ken Wilber
   2 Jorge Luis Borges
   2 Hakuin
   2 Genpo Roshi
   2 Edgar Allan Poe
   2 Bokar Rinpoche


   58 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   29 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
   27 The Life Divine
   18 Savitri
   14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   13 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   12 Letters On Yoga II
   12 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   10 The Human Cycle
   10 Essays On The Gita
   9 The Study and Practice of Yoga
   9 Talks
   9 Record of Yoga
   8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
   8 Prayers And Meditations
   8 Liber ABA
   8 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   8 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   8 Essays Divine And Human
   7 The Practice of Magical Evocation
   7 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   7 Agenda Vol 02
   6 Twilight of the Idols
   6 The Secret Doctrine
   6 Questions And Answers 1956
   6 Questions And Answers 1955
   6 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
   6 Lovecraft - Poems
   6 Agenda Vol 08
   5 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   5 Preparing for the Miraculous
   5 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
   5 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   4 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   4 The Perennial Philosophy
   4 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   4 Questions And Answers 1954
   4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
   4 Magick Without Tears
   4 Letters On Yoga IV
   4 Agenda Vol 09
   4 Agenda Vol 05
   4 Agenda Vol 03
   3 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
   3 The Future of Man
   3 Questions And Answers 1953
   3 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
   3 On the Way to Supermanhood
   3 Maps of Meaning
   3 Letters On Yoga I
   3 Isha Upanishad
   3 Bhakti-Yoga
   3 Agenda Vol 12
   3 Agenda Vol 10
   3 Agenda Vol 01
   3 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
   2 Words Of The Mother II
   2 Words Of Long Ago
   2 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
   2 The Phenomenon of Man
   2 The Integral Yoga
   2 Tara - The Feminine Divine
   2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
   2 Raja-Yoga
   2 Poe - Poems
   2 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
   2 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   2 Letters On Yoga III
   2 Letters On Poetry And Art
   2 Labyrinths
   2 Kena and Other Upanishads
   2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
   2 Amrita Gita
   2 Aion
   2 Agenda Vol 11
   2 Agenda Vol 07


00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In Yajnavalkya's enumeration, however, it is to be noted, first of all, that he stresses on the number three. The principle of triplicity is of very wide application: it permeates all fields of consciousness and is evidently based upon a fundamental fact of reality. It seems to embody a truth of synthesis and comprehension, points to the order and harmony that reigns in the cosmos, the spheric music. The metaphysical, that is to say, the original principles that constitute existence are the well-known triplets: (i) the superior: Sat, Chit, Ananda; and (ii) the inferior: Body, Life and Mindthis being a reflection or translation or concretisation of the former. We can see also here how the dual principle comes in, the twin godhead or the two gods to which Yajnavalkya refers. The same principle is found in the conception of Ardhanarishwara, Male and Female, Purusha-Prakriti. The Upanishad says 14 yet again that the One original Purusha was not pleased at being alone, so for a companion he created out of himself the original Female. The dual principle signifies creation, the manifesting activity of the Reality. But what is this one and a half to which Yajnavalkya refers? It simply means that the other created out of the one is not a wholly separate, independent entity: it is not an integer by itself, as in the Manichean system, but that it is a portion, a fraction of the One. And in the end, in the ultimate analysis, or rather synthesis, there is but one single undivided and indivisible unity. The thousands and hundreds, very often mentioned also in the Rig Veda, are not simply multiplications of the One, a graphic description of its many-sidedness; it indicates also the Absolute fullness, the complete completeness (prasya pram) of the Reality. It includes and comprehends all and is a rounded totality, a full circle. The hundred-gated and the thousand-pillared cities of which the ancient Rishis chanted are formations and embodiments of consciousness human and divine, are realities whole and entire englobing all the layers and grades of consciousness.
   Besides this metaphysics there is also an occult aspect in numerology of which Pythagoras was a well-known adept and in which the Vedic Rishis too seem to take special delight. The multiplication of numbers represents in a general way the principle of emanation. The One has divided and subdivided itself, but not in a haphazard way: it is not like the chaotic pulverisation of a piece of stone by hammer-blows. The process of division and subdivision follows a pattern almost as neat and methodical as a genealogical tree. That is to say, the emanations form a hierarchy. At the top, the apex of the pyramid, stands the one supreme Godhead. That Godhead is biune in respect of manifestation the Divine and his creative Power. This two-in-one reality may be considered, according to one view of creation, as dividing into three forms or aspects the well-known Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra of Hindu mythology. These may be termed the first or primary emanations.
  --
   Man has two souls corresponding to his double status. In the inferior, the soul looks downward and is involved in the current of Impermanence and Ignorance, it tastes of grief and sorrow and suffers death and dissolution: in the higher it looks upward and communes and joins with the Eternal (the cosmic) and then with the Absolute (the transcendent). The lower is a reflection of the higher, the higher comes down in a diminished and hence tarnished light. The message is that of deliverance, the deliverance and reintegration of the lower soul out of its bondage of worldly ignorant life into the freedom and immortality first of its higher and then of its highest status. It is true, however, that the Upanishad does not make a trenchant distinction between the cosmic and the transcendent and often it speaks of both in the same breath, as it were. For in fact they are realities involved in each other and interwoven. Indeed the triple status, including the Individual, forms one single totality and the three do not exclude or cancel each other; on the contrary, they combine and may be said to enhance each other's reality. The Transcendence expresses or deploys itself in the cosmoshe goes abroad,sa paryagt: and the cosmic individualises, concretises itself in the particular and the personal. The one single spiritual reality holds itself, aspects itself in a threefold manner.
   The teaching of Yama in brief may be said to be the gospel of immortality and it consists of the knowledge of triple immortality. And who else can be the best teacher of immortality than Death himself, as Nachiketas pointedly said? The first immortality is that of the physical existence and consciousness, the preservation of the personal identity, the individual name and formthis being in itself as expression and embodiment and instrument of the Inner Reality. This inner reality enshrines the second immortality the eternity and continuity of the soul's life through its incarnations in time, the divine Agni lit for ever and ever growing in flaming consciousness. And the third and final immortality is in the being and consciousness beyond time, beyond all relativities, the Absolute and self-existent delight.
   Rig Veda, X. 14-11, 12.

0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
   The main temple is dedicated to Kali, the Divine Mother, here worshipped as Bhavatarini, the Saviour of the Universe. The floor of this temple also is paved with marble. The basalt image of the Mother, dressed in gorgeous gold brocade, stands on a white marble image of the prostrate body of Her Divine Consort, Siva, the symbol of the Absolute. On the feet of the Goddess are, among other ornaments, anklets of gold. Her arms are decked with jewelled ornaments of gold. She wears necklaces of gold and pearls, a golden garland of human heads, and a girdle of human arms. She wears a golden crown, golden ear-rings, and a golden nose-ring with a pearl-drop. She has four arms. The lower left hand holds a severed human head and the upper grips a blood-stained sabre. One right hand offers boons to Her children; the other allays their fear. The majesty of Her posture can hardly be described. It combines the terror of destruction with the reassurance of motherly tenderness. For She is the Cosmic Power, the totality of the universe, a glorious harmony of the pairs of opposites. She deals out death, as She creates and preserves. She has three eyes, the third being the symbol of Divine Wisdom; they strike dismay into the wicked, yet pour out affection for Her devotees.
   The whole symbolic world is represented in the temple garden — the Trinity of the Nature Mother (Kali), the Absolute (Siva), and Love (Radhakanta), the Arch spanning heaven and earth. The terrific Goddess of the Tantra, the soul-enthralling Flute-Player of the Bhagavata, and the Self-absorbed Absolute of the Vedas live together, creating the greatest synthesis of religions. All aspects of Reality are represented there. But of this divine household, Kali is the pivot, the sovereign Mistress. She is Prakriti, the Procreatrix, Nature, the Destroyer, the Creator. Nay, She is something greater and deeper still for those who have eyes to see. She is the Universal Mother, "my Mother" as Ramakrishna would say, the All-powerful, who reveals Herself to Her children under different aspects and Divine Incarnations, the Visible God, who leads the elect to the Invisible Reality; and if it so pleases Her, She takes away the last trace of ego from created beings and merges it in the consciousness of the Absolute, the undifferentiated God. Through Her grace "the finite ego loses itself in the illimitable Ego — Atman — Brahman". (Romain Holland, Prophets of the New India, p. 11.)
   Rani Rasmani spent a fortune for the construction of the temple garden and another fortune for its dedication ceremony, which took place on May 31, 1855.
  --
   And, indeed, he soon discovered what a strange Goddess he had chosen to serve. He became gradually enmeshed in the web of Her all-pervading presence. To the ignorant She is, to be sure, the image of destruction; but he found in Her the benign, all-loving Mother. Her neck is encircled with a garland of heads, and Her waist with a girdle of human arms, and two of Her hands hold weapons of death, and Her eyes dart a glance of fire; but, strangely enough, Ramakrishna felt in Her breath the soothing touch of tender love and saw in Her the Seed of Immortality. She stands on the bosom of Her Consort, Siva; it is because She is the Sakti, the Power, inseparable from the Absolute. She is surrounded by jackals and other unholy creatures, the denizens of the cremation ground. But is not the Ultimate Reality above holiness and unholiness? She appears to be reeling under the spell of wine. But who would create this mad world unless under the influence of a divine drunkenness? She is the highest symbol of all the forces of nature, the synthesis of their antinomies, the Ultimate Divine in the form of woman. She now became to Sri Ramakrishna the only Reality, and the world became an unsubstantial shadow. Into Her worship he poured his soul. Before him She stood as the transparent portal to the shrine of Ineffable Reality.
   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.
  --
   The average man wishes to enjoy the material objects of the world. Tantra bids him enjoy these, but at the same time discover in them the presence of God. Mystical rites are prescribed by which, slowly, the sense-objects become spiritualized and sense attraction is transformed into a love of God. So the very "bonds" of man are turned into "releasers". The very poison that kills is transmuted into the elixir of life. Outward renunciation is not necessary. Thus the aim of Tantra is to sublimate bhoga, or enjoyment into yoga, or union with Consciousness. For, according to this philosophy, the world with all its manifestations is nothing but the sport of Siva and Sakti, the Absolute and Its inscrutable Power.
   The disciplines of Tantra are graded to suit aspirants of all degrees. Exercises are prescribed for people with "animal", "heroic", and "divine" outlooks. Certain of the rites require the presence of members of the opposite sex. Here the aspirant learns to look on woman as the embodiment of the Goddess Kali, the Mother of the Universe. The very basis of Tantra is the Motherhood of God and the glorification of woman. Every part of a woman's body is to be regarded as incarnate Divinity. But the rites are extremely dangerous. The help of a qualified guru is absolutely necessary. An unwary devotee may lose his foothold and fall into a pit of depravity.
   According to the Tantra, Sakti is the active creative force in the universe. Siva, the Absolute, is a more or less passive principle. Further, Sakti is as inseparable from Siva as fire's power to burn is from fire itself. Sakti, the Creative Power, contains in Its womb the universe, and therefore is the Divine Mother. All women are Her symbols. Kali is one of Her several forms. The meditation on Kali, the Creative Power, is the central discipline of the Tantra. While meditating, the aspirant at first regards himself as one with the Absolute and then thinks that out of that Impersonal Consciousness emerge two entities, namely, his own self and the living form of the Goddess. He then projects the Goddess into the tangible image before him and worships it as the Divine Mother.
   Sri Ramakrishna set himself to the task of practising the disciplines of Tantra; and at the bidding of the Divine Mother Herself he accepted the Brahmani as his guru. He performed profound and delicate ceremonies in the Panchavati and under the bel-tree at the northern extremity of the temple compound. He practised all the disciplines of the sixty-four principal Tantra books, and it took him never more than three days to achieve the result promised in any one of them. After the observance of a few preliminary rites, he would be overwhelmed with a strange divine fervour and would go into samadhi, where his mind would dwell in exaltation. Evil ceased to exist for him. The word "carnal" lost its meaning. The whole world and everything in it appeared as the lila, the sport, of Siva and Sakti. He beheld held everywhere manifest the power and beauty of the Mother; the whole world, animate and inanimate, appeared to him as pervaded with Chit, Consciousness, and with Ananda, Bliss.
  --
   The path of the Vedantic discipline is the path of negation, "neti", in which, by stern determination, all that is unreal is both negated and renounced. It is the path of jnana, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute. After the negation of everything relative, including the discriminating ego itself, the aspirant merges in the One without a Second, in the bliss of nirvikalpa samadhi, where subject and object are alike dissolved. The soul goes beyond the realm of thought. The domain of duality is transcended. Maya is left behind with all its changes and modifications. The Real Man towers above the delusions of creation, preservation, and destruction. An avalanche of indescribable Bliss sweeps away all relative ideas of pain and pleasure, good and evil. There shines in the heart the glory of the Eternal Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Knower, knowledge, and known are dissolved in the Ocean of one eternal Consciousness; love, lover, and beloved merge in the unbounded Sea of supreme Felicity; birth, growth, and death vanish in infinite Existence. All doubts and misgivings are quelled for ever; the oscillations of the mind are stopped; the momentum of past actions is exhausted. Breaking down the ridge-pole of the tabernacle in which the soul has made its abode for untold ages, stilling the body, calming the mind, drowning the ego, the sweet joy of Brahman wells up in that superconscious state. Space disappears into nothingness, time is swallowed in eternity, and causation becomes a dream of the past. Only Existence is. Ah! Who can describe what the soul then feels in its communion with the Self?
   Even when man descends from this dizzy height, he is devoid of ideas of "I" and "mine"; he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought for the future, and looks with indifference on the present. He surveys everything in the world with an eye of equality; he is no longer touched by the infinite variety of phenomena; he no longer reacts to pleasure and pain. He remains unmoved whether he — that is to say, his body — is worshipped by the good or tormented by the wicked; for he realizes that it is the one Brahman that manifests Itself through everything. The impact of such an experience devastates the body and mind. Consciousness becomes blasted, as it were, with an excess of Light. In the Vedanta books it is said that after the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi the body drops off like a dry leaf. Only those who are born with a special mission for the world can return
  --
   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.
  --
   Totapuri asked the disciple to withdraw his mind from all objects of the relative world, including the gods and goddesses, and to concentrate on the Absolute. But the task was not easy even for Sri Ramakrishna. He found it impossible to take his mind beyond Kali, the Divine Mother of the Universe. "After the initiation", Sri Ramakrishna once said, describing the event, "Nangta began to teach me the various conclusions of the Advaita Vedanta and asked me to withdraw the mind completely from all objects and dive deep into the Atman. But in spite of all my attempts I could not altogether cross the realm of name and form and bring my mind to the unconditioned state. I had no difficulty in taking the mind from all the objects of the world. But the radiant and too familiar figure of the Blissful Mother, the Embodiment of the essence of Pure Consciousness, appeared before me as a living reality. Her bewitching smile prevented me from passing into the Great Beyond. Again and again I tried, but She stood in my way every time. In despair I said to Nangta: 'It is hopeless. I cannot raise my mind to the unconditioned state and come face to face with Atman.' He grew excited and sharply said: 'What? You can't do it? But you have to.' He cast his eyes around. Finding a piece of glass he took it up and stuck it between my eyebrows. 'Concentrate the mind on this point!' he thundered. Then with stern determination I again sat to meditate. As soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it clove Her in two. The last barrier fell. My spirit at once soared beyond the relative plane and I lost myself in samadhi."
   Sri Ramakrishna remained completely absorbed in samadhi for three days. "Is it really true?" Totapuri cried out in astonishment. "Is it possible that he has attained in a single day what it took me forty years of strenuous practice to achieve? Great God! It is nothing short of a miracle!" With the help of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna's mind finally came down to the relative plane.
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   Sri Ramakrishna, on the other hand, though fully aware, like his guru, that the world is an illusory appearance, instead of slighting maya, like an orthodox monist, acknowledged its power in the relative life. He was all love and reverence for maya, perceiving in it a mysterious and majestic expression of Divinity. To him maya itself was God, for everything was God. It was one of the faces of Brahman. What he had realized on the heights of the transcendental plane, he also found here below, everywhere about him, under the mysterious garb of names and forms. And this garb was a perfectly transparent sheath, through which he recognized the glory of the Divine Immanence. Maya, the mighty weaver of the garb, is none other than Kali, the Divine Mother. She is the primordial Divine Energy, Sakti, and She can no more be distinguished from the Supreme Brahman than can the power of burning be distinguished from fire. She projects the world and again withdraws it. She spins it as the spider spins its web. She is the Mother of the Universe, identical with the Brahman of Vedanta, and with the Atman of Yoga. As eternal Lawgiver, She makes and unmakes laws; it is by Her imperious will that karma yields its fruit. She ensnares men with illusion and again releases them from bondage with a look of Her benign eyes. She is the supreme Mistress of the cosmic play, and all objects, animate and inanimate, dance by Her will. Even those who realize the Absolute in nirvikalpa samadhi are under Her jurisdiction as long as they still live on the relative plane.
   Thus, after nirvikalpa samadhi, Sri Ramakrishna realized maya in an altogether new role. The binding aspect of Kali vanished from before his vision. She no longer obscured his understanding. The world became the glorious manifestation of the Divine Mother. Maya became Brahman. The Transcendental Itself broke through the Immanent. Sri Ramakrishna discovered that maya operates in the relative world in two ways, and he termed these "avidyamaya" and "vidyamaya". Avidyamaya represents the dark forces of creation: sensuous desires, evil passions, greed, lust, cruelty, and so on. It sustains the world system on the lower planes. It is responsible for the round of man's birth and death. It must be fought and vanquished. But vidyamaya is the higher force of creation: the spiritual virtues, the enlightening qualities, kindness, purity, love, devotion. Vidyamaya elevates man to the higher planes of consciousness. With the help of vidyamaya the devotee rids himself of avidyamaya; he then becomes mayatita, free of maya. The two aspects of maya are the two forces of creation, the two powers of Kali; and She stands beyond them both. She is like the effulgent sun, bringing into existence and shining through and standing behind the clouds of different colours and shapes, conjuring up wonderful forms in the blue autumn heaven.
   The Divine Mother asked Sri Ramakrishna not to be lost in the featureless Absolute but to remain, in bhavamukha, on the threshold of relative consciousness, the border line between the Absolute and the Relative. He was to keep himself at the "sixth centre" of Tantra, from which he could see not only the glory of the seventh, but also the divine manifestations of the Kundalini in the lower centres. He gently oscillated back and forth across the dividing line. Ecstatic devotion to the Divine Mother alternated with serene absorption in the Ocean of Absolute Unity. He thus bridged the gulf between the Personal and the Impersonal, the immanent and the transcendent aspects of Reality. This is a unique experience in the recorded spiritual history of the world.
   --- TOTAPURI'S LESSON
  --
   The Knowledge of Brahman in nirvikalpa samadhi had convinced Sri Ramakrishna that the gods of the different religions are but so many readings of the Absolute, and that the Ultimate Reality could never be expressed by human tongue. He understood that all religions lead their devotees by differing paths to one and the same goal. Now he became eager to explore some of the alien religions; for with him understanding meant actual experience.
   --- ISLAM
   Toward the end of 1866 he began to practise the disciplines of Islam. Under the direction of his Mussalman guru he abandoned himself to his new sadhana. He dressed as a Mussalman and repeated the name of Allah. His prayers took the form of the Islamic devotions. He forgot the Hindu gods and goddesses — even Kali — and gave up visiting the temples. He took up his residence outside the temple precincts. After three days he saw the vision of a radiant figure, perhaps Mohammed. This figure gently approached him and finally lost himself in Sri Ramakrishna. Thus he realized the Mussalman God. Thence he passed into communion with Brahman. The mighty river of Islam also led him back to the Ocean of the Absolute.
   --- CHRISTIANITY
  --
   Second, the three great systems of thought known as Dualism, Qualified Non-dualism, and Absolute Non-dualism — Dvaita, Visishtadvaita, and Advaita — he perceived to represent three stages in man's progress toward the Ultimate Reality. They were not contradictory but complementary and suited to different temperaments. For the ordinary man with strong attachment to the senses, a dualistic form of religion, prescribing a certain amount of material support, such as music and other symbols, is useful. A man of God-realization transcends the idea of worldly duties, but the ordinary mortal must perform his duties, striving to be unattached and to surrender the results to God. The mind can comprehend and describe the range of thought and experience up to the Visishtadvaita, and no further. The Advaita, the last word in spiritual experience, is something to be felt in samadhi. for it transcends mind and speech. From the highest standpoint, the Absolute and Its manifestation are equally real — the Lord's Name, His Abode, and the Lord Himself are of the same spiritual Essence. Everything is Spirit, the difference being only in form.
   Third, Sri Ramakrishna realized the wish of the Divine Mother that through him She should found a new Order, consisting of those who would uphold the universal doctrines illustrated in his life.
  --
   To spread his message to the four corners of the earth Sri Ramakrishna needed a strong instrument. With his frail body and delicate limbs he could not make great journeys across wide spaces. And such an instrument was found in Narendranath Dutta, his beloved Naren, later known to the world as Swami Vivekananda. Even before meeting Narendranath, the Master had seen him in a vision as a sage, immersed in the meditation of the Absolute, who at Sri Ramakrishna's request had agreed to take human birth to assist him in his work.
   Narendra was born in Calcutta on January 12, 1863, of an aristocratic kayastha family. His mother was steeped in the great Hindu epics, and his father, a distinguished attorney of the Calcutta High Court, was an agnostic about religion, a friend of the poor, and a mocker at social conventions. Even in his boyhood and youth Narendra possessed great physical courage and presence of mind, a vivid imagination, deep power of thought, keen intelligence, an extraordinary memory, a love of truth, a passion for purity, a spirit of independence, and a tender heart. An expert musician, he also acquired proficiency in physics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, history, and literature. He grew up into an extremely handsome young man. Even as a child he practised meditation and showed great power of concentration. Though free and passionate in word and action, he took the vow of austere religious chastity and never allowed the fire of purity to be extinguished by the slightest defilement of body or soul.
  --
   One day when Narendra was on the ground floor, meditating, the Master was lying awake in his bed upstairs. In the depths of his meditation Narendra felt as though a lamp were burning at the back of his head. Suddenly he lost consciousness. It was the yearned-for, all-effacing experience of nirvikalpa samadhi, when the embodied soul realizes its unity with the Absolute. After a very long time he regained partial consciousness but was unable to find his body. He could see only his head. "Where is my body?" he cried. The elder Gopal entered the room and said, "Why, it is here, Naren!" But Narendra could not find it. Gopal, frightened, ran upstairs to the Master. Sri Ramakrishna only said: "Let him stay that way for a time. He has worried me long enough."
   After another long period Narendra regained full consciousness. Bathed in peace, he went to the Master, who said: "Now the Mother has shown you everything. But this revelation will remain under lock and key, and I shall keep the key. When you have accomplished the Mother's work you will find the treasure again."

0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
     the Absolute and the Conditioned together make
     The One Absolute.
  --
    superior form, the Absolute, and the conditions forming
    the one absolute.
  --
    those things which bar it from the Absolute.
                  [103]
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    from the Absolute is part of the content of that con-
    sciousness.
  --
  Lingam to the Yoni, and the Ego to the Absolute.
   This idea, "I must give up", I owe, is naturally completed by I pay, and the

0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the Absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in the entire cosmic manifestation.
  

0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  eliminations arrive at the one sole Truth, the Absolute beyond
  form and time and space. It is a long and difficult path, a very

01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There only were Silence and the Absolute.
  Out of that stillness mind new-born arose

01.04 - Motives for Seeking the Divine, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the Absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."
  The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and
  --
  - for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the Absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it is really that that has drawn from the beginning and is there behind - it is the categorical spiritual imperative, the Absolute need of the soul for the Divine.
  I am not saying that there is to be no Ananda. The selfgiving itself is a profound Ananda and what it brings, carries in its wake an inexpressible Ananda - and it is brought by this method sooner than by any other, so that one can say almost,

01.04 - Sri Aurobindos Gita, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   This neo-spirituality which might claim its sanction and authority from the real old-world Indian disciplinesay, of Janaka and Yajnavalkyalabours, however, in reality, under the influence of European activism and ethicism. It was this which served as the immediate incentive to our spiritual revival and revaluation and its impress has not been thoroughly obliterated even in the best of our modern exponents. The bias of the vital urge and of the moral imperative is apparent enough in the modernist conception of a dynamic spirituality. Fundamentally the dynamism is made to reside in the lan of the ethical man,the spiritual element, as a consciousness of supreme unity in the Absolute (Brahman) or of love and delight in God, serving only as an atmosphere for the mortal activity.
   Sri Aurobindo has raised action completely out of the mental and moral plane and has given it an absolute spiritual life. Action has been spiritualised by being carried back to its very source and origin, for it is the expression in life of God's own Consciousness-Energy (Chit-Shakti).

01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   the Absolute passivity is attainable, perhaps, only by the Yogi. And in this sense the supreme poet is a Yogi, for in his consciousness the higher, deeper, subtler or other modes of experiences pass through and are recorded with the minimum aberration or diffraction.
   But the Yogi is a wholly conscious being; a perfect Yogi is he who possesses a conscious and willed control over his instruments, he silences them, as and when he likes, and makes them convey and express with as little deviation as possible truths and realities from the Beyond. Now the question is, is it possible for the poet also to do something like that, to consciously create and not to be a mere unconscious or helpless channel? Conscious artistry, as we have said, means to be conscious on two levels of consciousness at the same time, to be at home in both equally and simultaneously. The general experience, however, is that of "one at a time": if the artist dwells more in the one, the other retires into the background to the same measure. If he is in the over-consciousness, he is only half-conscious in his brain consciousness, or even not conscious at allhe does not know how he has created, the sources or process of his creative activity, he is quite oblivious of them" gone through them all as if per saltum. Such seems to have been the case with the primitives, as they are called, the elemental poetsShakespeare and Homer and Valmiki. In some others, who come very near to them in poetic genius, yet not quite on a par, the instrumental intelligence is strong and active, it helps in its own way but in helping circumscribes and limits the original impulsion. The art here becomes consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versificationalthough here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this order in French poetry.

01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   the Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone
  Has called out of the Silence his mute Force

01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity. This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those great Upanishadic phrases,mahvkyas,(1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is nothing else than theOneekamevdvityam; (2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is that One, thereare no separate existences:sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nnsti kincaa; (3) That One is I, you too are that One:so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity. Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul. The world, we have seen, according to the Christian discipline has to be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution, not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahmansi, pravttiit has to be rolled back into its, cause and substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of nivitti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I", is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not inherent in Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One. The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans-muted into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity, who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church, the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said, the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked, 'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality, one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no difference between the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every objectsarvabhtsthitam yo mm bhajati ekatvamsthitah"he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."2
   This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of manone level or mode of his being and consciousness purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity.

01.09 - The Parting of the Way, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   So, in man also, especially of that order which forms the crown of humanityin poets and artists and seers and great men of actioncan be observed a certain characteristic form of consciousness, which is something other than, greater than the consciousness of the mere self. It is difficult as yet to characterise definitely what that thing is. It is the awakening of the self to something which is beyond itselfit is the cosmic self, the oversoul, the universal being; it is God, it is Turiya, it is sachchidanandain so many ways the thing has been sought to be envisaged and expressed. The consciousness of that level has also a great variety of names given to it Intuition, Revelation, cosmic consciousness, God-consciousness. It is to be noted here, however, that the thing we are referring to, is not the Absolute, the Infinite, the One without a second. It is not, that is to say, the supreme Reality the Brahmanin its static being, in its undivided and indivisible unity; it is the dynamic Brahman, that status of the supreme Reality where creation, the diversity of Becoming takes rise, it is the Truth-worldRitam the domain of typal realities. The distinction is necessary, as there does seem to be such a level of consciousness intermediary, again, between man and the Absolute, between self-consciousness and the supreme consciousness. The simplest thing would be to give that intermediate level of consciousness a negative namesince being as yet human we cannot foresee exactly its composition and function the super-consciousness.
   The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, something which escapes all our familiar schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel sometimes within us invading and enveloping our individuality, lifting up our sense of self and transmuting our personality into a reality which can hardly be called merely human. All this life of ego-bound rationality then melts away and opens out the passage for a life of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has felt when he says, "there is this incalculable element in human life influencing us from the mystery which envelops our being, and when reason is satisfied, there is something deeper than Reason which makes us still uncertain of truth. Above the human reason there is a transcendental sphere to which the spirit of men sometimes rises, and the will may be forged there at a lordly smithy and made the unbreakable pivot."(A.E.)

0 1958-05-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   I saw and understood very well that by concentrating, I could have given it the attitude of the Absolute authority of the eternal Mother. When Sri Aurobindo told me, You are She, at the same time he bestowed upon my body this attitude of absolute authority. But as I had the inner vision of this truth, I concerned myself very little with the imperfections of the physical body I didnt bother about that, I only used it as an instrument. Sri Aurobindo did the sadhana for this body, which had only to remain constantly open to his action.1
   Afterwards, when he left and I had to do the Yoga myself, to be able to take his physical place, I could have adopted the attitude of the sage, which is what I did since I was in an unparalleled state of calm when he left. As he left his body and entered into mine, he told me, You will continue, you will go right to the end of the work. It was then that I imposed a calm upon this body the calm of total detachment. And I could have remained like that.

0 1958-10-10, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   We always come back to the same thing: the Absolute necessity for perfect sincerity, perfect honesty and a sense of the dignity of all we do so that we may do it as it should be done.
   If we could truly, perfectly know all the details of the ceremony of life, the worship of the Lord in physical life, it would be wonderfulto know, and no longer to err, never again to err. To perform the ceremony as perfectly as an initiation.

0 1959-05-19 - Ascending and Descending paths, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   When you follow the ascending path, the work is relatively easy. I had already covered this path by the beginning of the century and had established a constant relationship with the SupremeThat which is beyond the Personal and the gods and all the outward expressions of the Divine, but also beyond the Absolute Impersonal. Its something you cannot describe; you must experience it. And this is what must be brought down into Matter. Such is the descending path, the one I began with Sri Aurobindo; and there, the work is immense.
   The thing can still be brought down as far as the mental and vital planes (although Sri Aurobindo said that thousands of lifetimes would be needed merely to bring it down to the mental plane, unless one practiced a perfect surrender1). With Sri Aurobindo, we went down below Matter, right into the Subconscient and even into the Inconscient. But after the descent comes the transformation, and when you come down to the body, when you attempt to make it take one step forwardoh, not even a real step, just a little step!everything starts grating; its like stepping on an anthill And yet the presence, the help of the supreme Mother, is there constantly; thus you realize that for ordinary men such a task is impossible, or else millions of lives would be needed but in truth, unless the work is done for them and the sadhana of the body done for the entire earth consciousness, they will never achieve the physical transformation, or else it will be so remote that it is better not even to speak of it. But if they open themselves, if they give themselves over in an integral surrender, the work can be done for themthey have only to let it be done.

0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The most violent attack came immediately after that experience [of January 24]. But of all the experiences in my life, this was the most wonderful for the simple reason that it was NOT EVEN preceded by an aspiration, not even an aspiration from the body it came directly as the Supreme Will, bang! (Mother bangs down her hands in an irresistible gesture) And then there was nothing, nothing but THE thing, WITHOUT ANY PERSONAL PARTICIPATION WHATSOEVER: no will, no aspiration, not even the satisfaction of itnothing. It was. I was (in my higher consciousness) filled with wonder at the AbsoluteNESS of the experience. It came, a thing DECREED and eternallike that (same irresistible gesture).
   (silence)

0 1961-02-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   the Absolute and indisputable certainty of an infallible knowledge through identity.
   Mother then made the following commentary regarding the 'impact' of circumstances, happenings, etc.:

0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   the Absolute certainty of the Victory is unquestionable; but I am not speaking at the scale of our bounded mind. Its up to us to CHANGE TACKthis is whats expected of us, to change tack and not keep going round in circles.
   There you are, petit.

0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But things as they are wouldnt be changed at all. I have had a very clear experience of this: the Absoluteness of all that is materially; everything we think we are doing, or are planning, or intending, doesnt change anything about anything. But then, I was intent upon understanding what difference there can be between the true and the false state, SINCE MATERIALLY EVERYTHING IS EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD BE. (We think that things are like this or like that because of certain reactions we have, but our very reactions are as absolute and decreed as the thing itself.) And yet.
   I have had this experience, and I remember it even went on for several days; I saw all material circumstances as an absolutean absolute that we perceive as an unfolding, but which is an eternally existing absolute. I had this experience, and at the same time I had a very clear perception of what falsehood is the lie; what, from the psychological, the mental point of view, Sri Aurobindo, translating from the Sanskrit, called crookedness.3 We attribute the course of circumstances to our psychological reactionsand indeed, they are used momentarily because everything collaborates either consciously or unconsciously to make things be what they have to be but things could be what they have to be without the intervention of this falsehood. I lived in that consciousness for several days, and it became apparent that this was what separated falsehood from truth. In this state of knowledge-consciousness, the distinction can be made between falsehood and truth; and when seen in that truth-consciousness, material circumstances change character.

0 1961-04-25, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   And each one has the Absolute Truth!
   (Laughing) But it made me so angry (why, I dont know). Not anger, but a kind of oh, its exasperating!

0 1961-07-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I am putting this purposely into rather childish terms so that it will be clearly understood. But this is the way it is. I am sure of it because I have observed it in myself for a VERY long time, and I had to. Due to the whole subconscious formation of childhoodenvironment, education, and so forthwe have to DRUM into this (Mother touches her body) the consciousness of Unity : the Absolute, EXCLUSIVE unity of the Divineexclusive in the sense that nothing exists apart from this Unity, even the things which seem most repulsive.
   Sri Aurobindo also had to struggle against this because he too received a Christian education. And these Aphorisms are the result the floweringof the necessity to struggle against the subconscious formation which has produced such questions (Mother takes on a scandalized tone): How can God be weak? How can God be foolish? How. But there is nothing but God! He alone exists, there is nothing outside of Him. And whatever seems repugnant to us is something He no longer wishes to existHe is preparing the world so that this no longer manifests, so that the manifestation can pass beyond this state to something else. So of course we violently reject everything in us that is destined to leave the active manifestation. There is a movement of rejection.

0 1961-08-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It was rather interesting in that I wasnt expecting it; it came suddenly when I was walking in my room in the evening the feeling not positively that the body no longer existed, since it kept walking, but that there was no more center. I cant put it any other waythere was no more center. There was only one Center. It was all, all the same thing, and from the Absolutely material standpoint, the standpoint of sensationsmaterial sensations, exchanges, vibrationseverything. At one point it even became so strong that something laughed and said, Ah! So thats how to no longer exist!
   It was very interesting. However, the experience could not last because after a while I wasnt alone anymore. Actually, it was dinner time. Not that I couldnt eat in that stateit makes no difference (I can eat very easily through others, for instance: it has happened quite frequently that someone else eats and I am satisfied; theres no need to put anything inside, its very convenient! These are experiments.) But this was it was the almost total annihilation of the center. It didnt last because of the people (four, as always) bringing in dinner, serving the plates, etc.their concentration weakened the experience: it faded. The feeling of Im eating returned a littlenot I! That notion disappeared a long time ago! Not my true Imy true I has been settled up above for a very long time, and it doesnt move from there. But this body is eating; this body which has been put at the disposal of the work is eating (it didnt come in so many words and sentences, but still!). In short, the experience faded with the sensation of eating and I was unable to know its effect.

0 1962-02-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Obviously a great, great deal of stability and inner calm is required. There was a keen sense of the Absolute pettiness, stupidity and dullness of all outer circumstances, of this whole bodily life in its external form, and AT THE SAME TIME a great symphony of divine joy. And both states were together like pulsations.
   But it makes your head spin. You have to be very careful, it it makes you giddy!

0 1962-05-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   When I was those gusts, those gusts of Love. When I was conscious of the last one, the one organized outwardly, as it were, by Sri Aurobindomaterializing as the avatar Sri Aurobindo then came the Absolute certainty that the thing was done, that it was decreed.
   And the moment I became aware that it was decreed, I thought, But how can THAT be translated into that? How can the two be joined? That was when the words came: You promised to do it, therefore you will do it; and slowly the transition began, as if I were again being sent back to do it. Yes, as if You promised to do it and you will do it; well, thats what I meant by a promise. And I came back towards this body to do it.

0 1962-11-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Id had the contact with the inner Divine, Id had the realization of Eternity, Id had all those realizations, but as long as I was living with Sri Aurobindo I felt the Absolute through him, and (what shall I say?). All those imperative needs I called the seeds of evolution are the levers or springboards to make man realize that the ONE AND ONLY, the one and only absolute is the Supreme; the one and only permanence is the Supreme; the one and only security is the Supreme; the one and only immortality is the Supreme. That the only purpose of manifestation is to lead YOU THERE.
   Thats essentially it: from my experience of the Supreme through the manifestation of Sri Aurobindo, I was projected into a direct experience, with no intermediary.
  --
   One thing alone is unfailing: the Absolute All.
   (silence)

0 1962-12-04, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   In the true movement, you feel the Absolute and Eternity physically. How? Its impossible to describe, but thats how it is. And the minute you get out of That, when you fall back even slightly into the ordinary movement, the old movement, theres a feeling of ABSOLUTE uncertainty! Uncertainty at every second. It would be impossible for an ordinary human being to live in that consciousness, with that sense of total and absolute uncertainty, of total and absolute impermanenceits no longer a destruction,1 but its not yet an ascending transformation. Absolute instability. It doesnt last more than a fraction of a secondjust enough time to become aware of oneself, thats all.
   If the other movement werent getting more and more established, it would be unbearable, as they say in English.
  --
   And its not what one might imagine, its not one form entering anotherit doesnt keep him from being wherever he wants to be and doing whatever he wants to do, appearing as he wants to appear and being involved with everything happening on earth: it doesnt change any of that. And its not just a part of him [that is in Mother, but his totality]. And thats how I know he was manifesting the Absolute, he was a manifestation of the Absolute. Of course, afterwards he revealed himself as what I had called the Master of Yoga; that was the reason he came on earth (what people here in India call an Avatar). But thats still a way of seeing things SEPARATELY: its not the thingTHE thing.
   Well see tomorrow [December 5].

0 1964-04-04, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   You go through all kinds of states, but curiously enough, I discovered in the being, somewhere in the consciousness, a sort of joy or intense interest in the Absolutely unexpected the unexpected, which to the mentality is unspeakably farcical.
   Interesting.

0 1964-05-17, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Of course, Nature is wonderful, the sea is so beautiful, the climate delightful, but ultimately, when I close my eyes and meditate, I feel something fuller and more solid than all the degrees centigrade on a pearly sea. In reality, I spend my days waiting for my hours of japa-meditation, it is the real open sea, the peace that refreshes. It is something, and if it is nothing, its a nothing that is worth everything. Yet there is no progress of consciousness, I dont see anything, least of all youyou tell me that you know the reason, I would really like to know what it is. I cannot understand why I am so blocked (my Western atavism?). I know the Light, I see the Space, I feel the Force, there is the Absolute Truth that rules everything, pacifies everything, but inside there is nothing, not even the tip of your nosewhy? I dont see Mother either, its complete blackout. Inside, there is the Light, without a doubt, but why is it all black outside?No communication between the two. Do you make sense of it? Drat!
   S.

0 1964-07-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The left side. And the American doctor isnt quite happy about the extent of the cure. Which means, as always, that however things seem to be in the world, when they are brought into contact with the Light, that is to say, a concentration of Truth, they appear in their stark reality: all the ballyhoo about that operation and all the illusion gathered around that miraculous power of surgical cure, it all vanished into thin air. The American doctor himself, according to Dr. S.s letter, was shaken and lost trust in the Absoluteness of his system. But from the first minute, you know, I saw that there wasnt even sixty percent of truth in it. There is an entire obscure field, which they deliberately ignore and which showed itself in broad daylight in order to make itself known. And for Dr. S., its the same thing: A doctor COULD NOT be deluded, and he didnt want to admit it. When I told him that one operation might not be enough, he almost got angry: Why do you say such things! (Mother laughs) He knew it as well as I did, but he didnt want to admit it.
   He will have gone through a terrible experience.

0 1964-10-24a, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Now the conditions are totally different, but I see the mass of aspirations, of approaches, and I always compare with my attitude towards Sri Aurobindo at that time, when it was he who, to me, represented the Intermediary; well, I understand I understand that the Absolutely pure thing, that is, free of all mixture with the ego consciousness (its the ego consciousness), free of all mixture with the ego consciousness, is its still rare.
   And its this mixture with the ego consciousness (I am speaking here not from the personal, but from the general standpoint) that, when the words were written, was swept away by something as powerful as a hurricane, without the violence of a hurricanescattered, dissolved, swept away! All those things that were pressing, against which I constantly had to strive in order to move onswept away! And they didnt come back completely.

0 1966-03-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I have tried many things, a great many, I have looked a great deal, and I see only one thats absoluteonly one thats absolute and can bring the Absolute result, its this (gesture turned Upward): the complete annulment of all that, leaving it all, To You, LordYou, You, to You. And it isnt a being with a form, thats not it; it isnt a formless force, its It has nothing to do with thought, only with this: the contact. And the contact, an unmistakable contact, which nothing can imitatenothing, nothing at all has the power to imitate it. And for every difficulty, every time, whatever it is, simply this: Everything to You, Lord. Everything for You, to You. You alone can do it, You, You alone, You alone. You alone are the Truth; You alone are the Power. And those words are nothing, they are only the very clumsy expression of something a stupendous Power.
   Its only the incapacity, the clumsiness, the lack of faith we mix into it that takes away His power. The minute we are truly pure, that is, under His influence alone, there are no limits, no limitsnothing, nothing, there is nothing, no law of Nature that can resist, nothing, nothing.

0 1966-04-16, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The last rung is the Absolutely pure Thing. And the power the creative and transforming power of that Vibration is unimaginable! While you are living it, nothing is impossible. Its unimaginable.
   At first one loves only when one is loved.

0 1967-01-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Before going to sleep I was in that frame of mind, and during the night there was a series of experiences to show all the different states of consciousness of the different states of being. When I got up in the morning, there was a very keen observation of the difference contri buted by the physical. I saw how that difference could persist in the new physical state once it had shed its false side. And then, for I dont know, certainly two hours, there was a concrete Presence of what I call the Supreme Lord (but we can call it by any name, it doesnt matter: Truth, Consciousness, whatever we like the words dont matter, its something beyond all that). A concrete presence, there, like this (Mother clenches her two fists as if to evoke a palpable solidity), in all the cells, in the whole being. I went on doing all the Absolutely trivial and tiny little thingslike bathing, the usual things, eating too, speaking and it stayed there. And it was as if telling me, This is how it will be. A joy, a power, a blossomingextraordinary, to such a point that I wondered how it was that this (body) didnt change. Its because THE STATE DIDNT LAST LONG ENOUGH. It lasted for only about two hours (give or take a little); afterwards, back came the everyday routine, everyone with their problems, etc. (Mother makes the familiar gesture of the truckload being dumped). But I am not accusing anything of having made the state go away: it went away because this (body) isnt yet capable of holding it, thats all. That is to say, at that moment, while it was there, there was an intimation that I had to write a note. Thats what I wanted to tell you. I had to write a note. (Mother breaks off abruptly, then speaks as if words were being dictated to her:)
   Because of the necessities of the transformation, this body may enter a state of trance that will appear cataleptic.

0 1967-08-02, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But its not the full Presence yet, not the complete Presence of the being, which, through an incontrovertible omnipotence, changes things. And then, the body, with something so very moving in the simplicity of its prayer and its childlike astonishment, asks, Since You are there, how can that be? And all that is ready to be transformed is transformed. But it isnt yet (how can I explain?) the compelling thing (gesture of irresistible descent), the Absolute authority that nothing can resistits not that, not yet, far from it.
   Theres no knowing how much more time it will take.

0 1967-09-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Did you feel anything special? Because the last two or three days, but especially last night and this morning, it was the body learning, the cells have learnt I told you that the work till now has been the change the transferfrom acting out of habit and reaction to letting the divine Consciousness act. And this morning, for a part of the night and the whole morning until people started coming, with every action, every movement, every gesture, all the tiny little things (when, for instance, a problem is put by someone or a decision has to be taken, since years the answer comes from above), but now with all material movements, also the inner movements, with the attitude of the body, the attitude of the cells, the Absolutely material consciousness, with everything, everything the old method was gone.
   It began with the perception of the remaining difference between how things were and how they should be, then that perception disappeared and there only remained that. Something (how can I explain?) The English word smooth is the most expressive; everything is done smoothly, everything without exception: bathing, brushing ones teeth, washing ones face, everything (eating, since long has been worked on in order for it to be done in the true way). It always begins with this sort of (Mother opens her hands) surrender (I dont know the right word, its neither abdication nor offering but between the two; I dont know, there is no French word for it), the surrender of the WAY in which we do things: not of the thing in itself, which is quite unimportant (in that state there is no big and small, no important and unimportant). And its something so (even gesture) uniform in its multiplicity, there is nothing that clashes or grates or causes difficulties anymore or (all those words express things so crudely): its something that moves forward, on and on in a movement so (same even gesture) the nearest word is smooth, that is, without resistance. I dont know. And its not an intensity of delight, its not that: that also is so even, so regular (same even gesture), but not uniform: its innumerable. And EVERYTHING is like that (same gesture), in one same rhythm (the word rhythm is violent). Its not uniformity, but something so even, and which feels so sweet, you know, and with a TREMENDOUS power in the smallest things.

0 1967-10-19, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   And I saw Yesterday was the doctors birthday, I gave him a meditation (he had asked for one). Before the meditation, he asked me very sweetly, Oh, I would like peace in my whole body, my body doesnt have peace. I put Peace. For a quarter of an hour he was blissful, then there suddenly came (gesture floating in the atmosphere at a rather low level) something like a cloud, and he had a kind of unconsciousness: miserable, miserable, so miserablehe was appalled. So I had to stop the meditation. And it wasnt him: it didnt come from him, you understand, I saw it (same floating gesture). As for me, I see it, so it doesnt matter I see it, I even see the nature of it, the suggestions it gives and so on. It comes with such power that I am compelled to see it I see. So there is only ONE solution (so far): the Absolute stillness of the supreme Force but no retaliation, simply like this (inflexible, still gesture). Then, after a time, it exhausts itself and falls away. But one must hold out, and few people are able to hold outits hard. Its hardits nasty, mean, like that (gesture at ground level), and VERY MATERIAL, very material: it touches the cells, disturbs the order. The body starts feeling ill at ease, uneasy: Whats the matter? Ill at ease. And its like that in everyone; when they ask me what it is, I tell them, Keep stillpeace, peace, peace, peace, like that.
   If you try to reply, its much stronger than you: it comes in, and then the disorder is inside and you fall ill. Or you fall to the ground like the doctor.

0 1967-10-21, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Yesterday afternoon, I had an experience concerning a woman who has been in a coma for sixty-five days (!). After fifty or fifty-five days (the whole family was around her, but her son had gone to work), all of a sudden after fifty-five days, because her son had left, she started calling for him, shouting frantically! (Laughing) I think they all had a scare. And the usual stupid remarks: She was unconscious. I said, Good God! But why do you say she was unconscious, you know nothing about it! She cant express herself, but she isnt unconscious. She is entirely conscious, only the means of expression are damaged, she can no longer use them. And I made a long speech on the subject, but there was no one to record it and I can never say the same thing twice. It came clearly (Sri Aurobindo was there), and with the Absolutely clear picture of what death is. Now I cant repeat it.
   In reality, to put it practically (but its not any longer the thing), what people call death is when the instrument of expression the instrument of connection with the milieu, and of expressionhas deteriorated to the point where it can no longer be used, and so there comes a moment when the consciousness abandons it. Probably for all sorts of reasons (there must be different reasons in each case), but the consciousness abandons it because it can no longer be used.

0 1967-11-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   For a long time I used the Talks Q. had left, until the day when I realized they were totally truncated. Then I finally discovered another collection, but I have realized that that too is not the Absolute original. So every time its a huge work to collect everything together again in order to reconstruct the exact original.
   But who did the recording?

0 1968-03-16, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Not divided. Its the union of the two states that constitutes the true consciousness; the union of the two (union still implies division), the identification of the two states is what constitutes the true consciousness. Then you get the sensation that its this consciousness which is the supreme Power. You understand, Power is limited by oppositions and negations: the most powerful power is the one that dominates the most but thats a complete imperfection! There is an all-powerful Power made up of the fusion of the two thats the Absolute Power. And if That were realized physically probably it would be the end of the problem.
   In fact, during the few hours I lived in that state this morning, there was the impression of having mastered everything and understood everythingunderstood, I mean this sort of understanding that constitutes absolute power. But naturally, it cant be expressed.

0 1968-06-26, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The education of the physical consciousness (not the bodys global consciousness, but the consciousness of the cells) consists in teaching them First of all its a choice (it looks like one): its choosing the divine Presence the divine Consciousness, the divine Presence, the divine Power (all that wordlessly), the something we define as the Absolute Master. Its a choice of EVERY SECOND between the old laws of Naturewith some mental influence and the whole life as it has been organized the choice between that, the government by that, and the government by the supreme Consciousness, which is equally present (the feeling of the Presence is equally strong); the other thing is more habitual, and then theres the Presence. Its every second (its infinitely interesting), and with illustrations: the nerves, for instance if a nerve obeys all the various laws of Nature and mental conclusions and all that the whole caboodle then it starts aching; if it obeys the influence of the supreme Consciousness, then a strange phenomenon takes place its not like something getting cured I might rather say, like an unreality fading away.
   And thats the life of every second, for the smallest thing, the whole bodily functioning: sleep, food, washing, activities, everything, everythingevery second. And the body is learning. There are naturally hesitations stemming from the power of habit and also old ideas floating about in the air (gesture of a swarming in the atmosphere): none of that is personal. As a work, its tremendous.

0 1968-06-29, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Its like a studya really accelerated study, you cant imagine, one minute after another, like this (snowballing gesture)from the standpoint of the work, that is, the purpose of physical existence in a body, and the usefulness of physical presence. And the Absolutely clear, precise vision, in minutes detail, of whats real and whats illusory, whats truly necessary and whats only imagination (that of others, but also, at times, ones own). But I would need hours to tell it all. With (is it a basis?) the perception in the consciousness (but a detailed perception I dont mean ideas, it has nothing to do with ideas or principles, etc.: theres no mental translation), the perception of what, in the work, demands or depends on the bodily presence (I am purposely not saying physical presence, because theres a subtle physical presence thats independent of the body), the bodily presence. And then, at the same time, such a clear, precise, detailed vision of the relationship each one has with this body (a relationship which is thought, feelings and physical reactions all at once), and thats what gives the impression of the necessity of bodily presencegives its measure also. So there is, at the same time, the perception of the TRUE usefulness of physical presence and the perception of the reaction in individuals. Its a world! A world, because of the fantastic amount of details. A world unfolding every second. And accompanied by an inner perception, first, of the effect it has on the cells, and then that the cohesion has now really become, I may say, the result of a supreme Will, to the extent that its necessary for lets say for the experience, or the work (anythingwe can call it what we like). In other words, there is the aspect of progress of the cells as an aggregate. There is hardlyhardly, very weakly the sense of a personality or a physical individuality, its hardly that; neither is it a habit of being together, because its very fluid in there: its truly held together by a higher Will with a definite aim in view, but that too is fluidnothing is fixed.
   (silence)

0 1968-12-04, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The bodys tapasya is something quite interesting, really interesting. The body You know, its modesty is total; it has a keen sense of all its limitations, all its incapacities, all its ignorance, all and at the same timeat the same time the Absolute sense of the divine Presence, absolute; and a divine Presence that can break everything to pieces if it wants to. Its quite interesting. A Presence with such power! A power which is incalculable, with no possible comparison with earthly things.
   The body has a very, very strong impression (a sort of awareness) that its sufferings stem from its incapacity. Theres a sort of perception that it has a HABIT of turning into suffering something it cant bear.

0 1969-02-15, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The cells themselves were saying their effort to be transformed, and there was a Calm. (How can I explain this?) The body was saying its aspiration and will to prepare itself, and, not asking but striving to be what it should be; all that always with this question (its not the body that asks it, its the environment, those around the world, as if the world were asking the question): Will it continue, or will it have to dissolve? The body is like this (gesture of abandon, hands open upward), it says, What You will, Lord. But then, it knows the question is decided, and One doesnt want to tell itit accepts. It doesnt lose patience, it accepts, it says, Very well, it will be as You will. But That which knows and That which doesnt answer is something that cant be expressed. It is yes, I think the only word that can describe the sensation it gives is an Absolutean Absolute. Absolute. Thats the sensation: of being in the presence of the Absolute. the Absolute: absolute Knowledge, absolute Will, absolute Power Nothing, nothing can resist. And then this Absolute (theres this sensation, concrete) is so merciful! But if we compare it with all that we regard as goodness, mercy ugh! thats nothing at all. Its THE Mercy with the Absolute power and its not Wisdom, not Knowledge, its It has nothing to do with our process. And That is everywhere, its everywhere. Its the bodys experience. And to That it has given itself entirely, totally, without asking anythinganything. A single aspiration (same gesture, hands open upward), To be capable of being That, what That wills, of serving Thatnot even serving, of BEING That.
   But that state, which lasted for several hours never had this body, in the ninety-one years its been on earth, felt such happiness: freedom, absolute power, and no limits (gesture here and there and everywhere), no limits, no impossibilities, nothing. It was all other bodies were itself. There was no difference, it was only a play of the consciousness (gesture like a great Rhythm) moving about.

0 1969-02-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   In the ordinary functioning of life, there is the sense of things are fine, which in people is expressed by a sensation of good health, and on the other hand, disequilibrium, disorganization; well, now that opposition appears WHOLLY artificial: theres only a continuous movement, with transitions from one type of vibration to another type of vibration whose origin is (what should I say? Its not deeper, not higher, and truer gives only one side, its not that), anyway, superior in some waywords are idiotic, quite idiotic. Thats how it is, how it is all the time [this continuous movement]. So then, you are drawn to one place or another: its simply the play of our consciousness. But to an all-seeing consciousness, its a continuous and overall movement towards yes, thats it, its for this inert Inconscient to become the Absolute Conscient. I dont know, I have a vague impression that theyve discovered that a certain intensity of movement (that is, what we call speed) results in a sense of immobility I have a vague impression that Ive been told that. But it corresponds to something. What Ive called peace in the message, that peace (I hesitate to speak because words are stupid), that peace, whats felt as peace, is a paroxysm of movement, but a general movementharmonious, general.
   As soon as one speaks, it becomes a caricature.

0 1969-05-24, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Theres the Absolute CERTITUDE (Mother clenches her two fists) that theres only ONE way out of all that, only ONEonly one, not two, theres no choice, there arent a few possibilities, theres only one: its the supreme Door. The Marvel of Marvels. All the rest all the rest is an impossibility.
   And all that is the experience of this (Mother points to her body), its not mental, but wholly and completely material.

0 1970-02-21, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   the Absolutely concrete experience for the body, it had it the whole morning, and the conclusion came during the meditation.
   Its a bit difficult to definewords diminish a lot. It resembles what we call peace, but its luminous, with such an impression of (whats the word?) ease, well-being something Its not turned this way (gesture to oneself), its turned that way (gesture outward), and thats what makes it so hard to explain. Its not in the body, in itself, that it finds its well-being, its a well-being (gesture in every direction), a sort of radiating well-being, and so yes, something resembling a certitude theres no more anxiety is quite out of the question (question is quite out of the question!), but it is its more what we call positively well-being and certitude. Something inexpressible. Its so vast (in the body, thats the point), so vast Really it was like an offering for today.

0 1970-10-24, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   A miracle of the Absolute was born,
   Infinity put on a finite soul,

0 1971-09-04, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Yes, when one is here, near you, one is taken up into a kind of absolute ray. Its. In the past, I remember my meditations up above, they were vast and quite pleasant, but here its a kind of ABSOLUTE. You say: this is IT. This is IT, you know, absolutely IT, its the Absolute which is here and seizes you. But when one is no longer near you. Through concentration, you can still capture IT again, to a certain degree.
   Yes.

0 1971-10-16, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Only people will stumble upon some vital force and mistake it for the soul, so. You have to be VERY sincere, that is the Absolute condition. You have to be VERY sincere, VERY sincerenot only must you not deceive others, but you must not deceive yourself. You have to be VERY sincere. And then you find it. You find it, its an absolutely concrete experience.
   I had the experience before coming here. Before I came, before knowing Sri Aurobindo, I had the experience. So three quarters of the work was already done, you could say. I didnt have mental knowledge (the mental knowledge was nothing to talk about), but its not necessary for the experience. If youre sincere, you have the experience without thinking, you dont NEED to think. But you have to be sincere.

0 1971-12-18, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   You see, whats taking root permanently, as it were, is this: the nonentity of the person the Absolute nonentity and incapacity. And then youre youre fine; youre quite naturally like a child, you say to the Divine, Do everything for me (theres nothing left, so you cant do anything!), then everything goes well immediatelyimmediately.
   You see, the body has given itself entirely. It even said to the Divine, I beg You to make me want my dissolution if I must die, so that EVEN THERE I wont offer any resistance, should it be necessary for this body to dieto want my dissolution. Thats its attitude, it was like this (gesture of open hands). But instead, there came a sort of (I could put it into words, but it wasnt words): If you accept suffering and discomfort, transformation is better than dissolution. And so when it feels uncomfortable, it accepts.

0 1972-03-29a, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I think I am correctly interpreting the feeling of my young Indian friends when I say that they see the heroes of your novels as raw mystics, to use Claudels description of Rimbaud. This may seem a surprising attribute, considering your heroes atheism, but that is because we have too often confused mysticism or spirituality with religion, as Sri Aurobindo stresses. One need not believe in a personal, extracosmic God to be a mystic. (That is certainly why religion has from time to time taken upon itself to bum alive all the non-regular mystics.) Here we touch upon a huge confusion rooted in religions. Through their monks, sannyasins and ascetics, religions have shown us a purely contemplative, austere and lifeless side of mysticismindeed those mystics, like the religions they practice, live in a negation of life; they go through this vale of tears with their eyes exclusively fixed on the Beyond. But true mysticism is not so limited as that, it seeks to transform life, to reveal the Absolute hidden in it; it seeks to establish the kingdom of God in man, as Sri Aurobindo wrote, and not the kingdom of a Pope, clergy or sacerdotal class. If the modem world lives in conflict and anguish, if it is torn between being and doing, it is because religion has driven away God from this world, severed him from his creation and flung him back to some distant heaven or empty nirvana, thus denying any possibility of human perfection on this earth and digging an unbridgeable gulf between being and doing, between mystics sunk in their dreams and this world abandoned to the forces of evil, to Satan and all those who consent to get their hands dirty.
   That contradiction is powerfully expressed in your books, it is striking to my Indian students. And they are surprised, for the urge to do something at all coststo do anything at all, as long as we do something, as one often hears in Europewithout this action being based on a being which it expresses and of which it is but the material translation, appears to them a strange attitude. Neither the despair, the silence or the revolt, nor the absurd pointlessness that sometimes surrounds the death of many of your heroes escape them. They feel that your heroes flee from themselves rather than express themselves. This torment between being and doing can be found in each one of them. They have apparently renounced to be something in order to do something, as one character stresses in Hope, but are they not desperately seeking to be through their actions, a being that they will capture only as time is abolished, in death? The same obsession seems to run through each of them: from Perken, who wants to leave his scar on the map, to outlive himself through twenty tribes, who fights against time as one fights against cancer, to Tchen, who shuts himself in the world of terrorism: an eternal world where time does not exist, and to Katow, who whispers to himself, O prisons, where time stops. In that respect, these characters clearly symbolize the impotence of a religion that has not been able to give the earth its meaning and plenitude.
  --
   The tragedies we are experiencingcommunism, Nazismare not rooted, as the Swedish magazine implies, in the weakening or disappearance of religion, it is religion itself which is the source of the disequilibrium insofar as it is fossilized in dogmas, as it clings to a power it possesses in a human cycle drawing to its close, and as it refuses to open itself to a new deeper notion in man which would at long last reconcile heaven and earth. As a result, men go elsewhere to seek what religion is unable to provide: in communism or any other ism, so great and persistent is their thirst for the Absolute for that? abides under one name or another and that very thirst is the surest sign of a fullness to come.
   At this crucial juncture in human evolution, Sri Aurobindo brings a luminous message to which I hope to draw your attention through this letter and the book I am taking the liberty of sending you. I think the youth of Europe have a profound need to hear a great voice that would bring them face to face with their fundamental truths; none can, better than you, touch that youth and awaken the anguished Occident.

02.01 - Metaphysical Thought and the Supreme Truth, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  European metaphysical thought - even in those thinkers who try to prove or explain the existence and nature of God or of the Absolute - does not in its method and result go beyond the intellect. But the intellect is incapable of knowing the supreme
  Truth; it can only range about seeking for Truth and catching fragmentary representations of it, not the thing itself, and trying to piece them together. Mind cannot arrive at Truth; it can only make some constructed figure that tries to represent it or a combination of figures. At the end of European thought, therefore, there must always be Agnosticism, declared or implicit. Intellect, if it goes sincerely to its own end, has to return and give this report: "I cannot know; there is or at least it seems to me that there may be or even must be Something beyond, some ultimate

02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   To the regard of one line of experience, Matter seems opposed to Spirit only so far as the actual and outer formulation of Matter is concerned: even then the opposition is only apparent and relative. This is the very crux of the problem. For, to such a regard Spirit becomes Matter also, it is also Matterannam brahma eva. Spirit is consciousness, cit; and Matter, it is said, is unconsciousness, acit. But unconsciousness need not be and is not, in our view, the Absolute negation or utter absence of consciousness, it is only an involved or involute consciousness. If consciousness is wakefulness, unconsciousness is nothing more than forgetfulness: it is only an abeyance or suspension of consciousness, not annihilation.
   Thus the spiritualisation of Matter becomes possible simply because Matter and Spirit are not absolutely different, contradictory or incommensurable entities; they are one and the same reality, in different modeseven as water or water vapour and ice are in substance one and identical, although different in appearance. Spirit has become Matter and Matter at heart is Spirit. Spirit is latent in Matter, as Matter itself is a possible formulation involved in Spirit. Matter has come out of Spirit as Spirit pressed upon itself and gradually condensed and consolidated into the concrete material reality. Spirit has become Matter by a process of crystallisation, of self-limitation and exclusive concentration. The movement follows a definite line of self-modification, along a downward gradient till it is consummated: it is one among an infinite variety of possible self-modifications, chosen and exclusively developed with a special purpose and a definite fulfilment In view.

02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     the Absoluteness of their single cry
    And the sovereign sweetness or violent poetry
  --
       the Absolute index to the Absolute.
  Section 26
  --
    A miracle of the Absolute was born;
    Infinity put on a finite soul,

02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   the Absolute in its triple or triune status (not in its supreme being but as we see it prior to manifestation) is in essence and principle an infinity and unity. Indeed, it is the infinite unity, and its fundamental character is a supreme and utter equalitysamam brahma. It is then a status or statis, that is to say, a state of perfectly stable equilibrium in which there is no movement of difference or distinction, no ripple of high and low or ebb and flow, no mark of quantity or quality. It is a stilled sea of self-identity, a vast limitless or pure consciousness brooding in trance and immobility. And yet in the bosom of this ineffable and inviolable equality, in the very hush and lull there lies secreted an urge, a pressure, a possibility towards activity, variation and even an eventual inequality. For the presence and possibility of dynamism is posited by the very infinity of the Infinite, since without it, the Infinite would be incapable of motion, expression and fulfilment of its Force.
   There is thus inherent in the vast inalienable equality of the Absolute Reality, a Force which can bring out centres of pressure, nuclei of dynamism, nodes of modulation. It is precisely round these centres of precipitation that the original and basic unity crystallises itself and weaves a pattern of harmonious multiplicity. Consciousness, by self-pressure,tapas taptv turns its even and undifferentiated pristine equanimity into ripples and swirls, eddies and vortices of delight, matrices of creative activity. Thus the One becomes Many by a process of self-concentration and self-limitation.
   At the very outset when and where the Many has come out into manifestation in the Onehere also it must be remembered that we are using a temporal figure in respect of an extra-temporal factthere and then is formed a characteristic range of reality which is a perfect equation of the one and the many: that is to say, the one in becoming many still remains the same immaculate one in and through the many, and likewise the many in spite of its manifoldnessand because of the special quality of the manifoldnessstill continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root consciousness-forms, ta cit, in Vedic terminology. They are seed-truths, the original mother-truths in the Divine Consciousness. They comprise the fundamental essential many aspects and formulations of an infinite Infinity. At this stage these do not come into clash or conflict, for here each contains all and the All contains each one in absolute unity and essential identity. Each individual formation is united with and partakes of the nature of the one supreme Reality. Although difference is born here, separation is not yet come. Variety is there, but not discord, individuality is there, not egoism. This is the first step of Descent, the earliest one-not, we must remind ourselves again, historically but psychologically and logically the descent of the Transcendent into the Cosmic as the vast and varied Supermindcitra praketo ajania vibhw of the Absolute into the relational manifestation as Vidysakti (Gnosis).
   The next steps, farther down or away, arrive when the drive towards differentiation and multiplication gathers momentum becomes accentuated, and separation and isolation increase in degree and emphasis. The lines of individuation fall more and more apart from each other, tending to form closed circles, each confining more and more exclusively to itself, stressing its own particular and special value and function, in contradistinction to or even against other lines. Thus the descent or fall from the Supermind leads, in the first instance, to the creation or appearance of the Overmind. It is the level of consciousness where the perfect balance of the One and the Many is disturbed and the emphasis begins to be laid on the many. The source of incompatibility between the two just starts here as if Many is notOne and One is not Many. It is the beginning of Ignorance, Avidya, Maya. Still in the higher hemisphere of the Overmind, the sense of unity is yet maintained, although there is no longer the sense of absolute identity of the two; they are experienced as complementaries, both form a harmony, a harmony as of different and distinct but conjoint notes. The Many has come forward, yet the unity is also there supporting it-the unity is an immanent godhead, controlling the patent reality of the Many. It is in the lower hemisphere of the Overmind that unity is thrown into the background half-submerged, flickering, and the principle of multiplicity comes forward with all insistence. Division and rivalry are the characteristic marks of its organisation. Yet the unity does not disappear altogether, only it remains very much inactive, like a sleeping partner. It is not directly perceived and envisaged, not immediately felt but is evoked as reminiscence. The Supermind, then, is the first crystallisation of the Infinite into individual centres, in the Overmind these centres at the outset become more exclusively individualised and then jealously self-centred.
  --
   This is, so far then, the original and primal line of descent. It is the line down which the Absolute Reality, the Absolute Consciousness and the Absolute Delight have turned into unreality and unconsciousness and un delight. But it is not all loss and debit. There is a credit side too. For it is only in this way, viz, by the manifestation of utter Ignorance, that the supreme Absolute has become concrete, the Formless has entered into form, the Bodiless has found a body: what was originally an indeterminate equal Infinity of pure consciousness, has become determinate and dynamic in the individual multiplicity of corporeal consciousness. What is the sense in all that, what is the gain or upshot? We shall presently see.
   When consciousness has reached the farthest limit of its opposite, when it has reduced itself to absolutely unconscious and mechanical atoms of Matter, when the highest has descended into and become the lowest, then, by the very force of its downward drive, it has swung round and begun to mount up again. As it could not proceed farther on the downward gradient, having reached the extreme and ultimate limit of inconscience, consciousness had to turn round, as it were, by the very pressure of its inner impetus. First, then, there is a descent, a gradual involution, a veiling and closing up; next, an ascent, a gradual evolution, unfoldment and expression. We now see, however, that the last limit at the bottomMatteralthough appearing to be unconscious, is really not so: it is inconscient. That is to say, it holds consciousness secreted and involved within itself; it is, indeed, a special formulation of consciousness. It is the exclusive concentration of consciousness upon single points in itself: it is consciousness throwing itself out in scattered units and, by reason of separative identification with them and absorption into them, losing itself, forgetting itself in an absolute fixation of attention. The phenomenon is very similar to what happens when in the ordinary consciousness a worker, while doing a work, becomes so engrossed in it that he loses consciousness of himself, identifies himself with the work and in fact becomes the work, the visible resultant being a mechanical execution.
  --
   Next is the domain of the Supermind with which the manifestation of the Divine starts. We have said it is the world of typal realities, of the first seed-realities, where the One and the Many are united and fused in each other, where the Absolute unity of the Supreme maintains itself in undiminished magnitude and expresses and formulates itself perfectly in and through the original multiplicity. Here take birth the first personalities, absolute truth-forms of the Divine. Here are the highest gods, the direct formations of the Divine himself. Here are the Four Powers and Personalities of swara whom Sri Aurobindo has named after the Vaishnava terminology: (i) Mahavira, embodying the Brahmin quality of Knowledge and Light and wide Consciousness, (ii) Balarama, embodying the Kshatriya quality of Force and intense dynamism, (iii) Pradyumna, embodying the quality of love and beauty the Vaishya virtue of mutuality and harmony and solidarity, and (iv) Aniruddha, embodying the Sudra quality of competent service, of organisation and execution in detail. Corresponding with these Four there are the other Four Powers and Personalities of the Divine Mother war (i) Maheshwari, (ii) Mahakali, (iii) Mahalakshmi and (iv) Mahasaraswati. Next in the downward gradient comes the Overmind where the individualised powers and personalities of the Divine tend to become self-sufficient and self-regarding; their absolute unity is loosened and the lines of multiplicity begin to be more independent of each other, each aiming at a special fulfilment of its own. Still the veil that is being drawn over the unity is yet transparent which continues to be sufficiently dynamic. This is the abode of the gods, the true and high gods: it is these that the Vedic Rishis appear to have envisaged and sought after. The all gods (vive dev) were indeed acknowledged to be but different names and forms of one supreme godhead (dev) it is the one god, says Rishi Dirghatamas, who is called multifariously whether as Agni or Yam a or Matariswan; it is the one god, again, who is described as having a thousand heads and a thousand feet. And yet they are separate entities, each has his own distinct and distinctive character and attribute, each demands a characteristic way of approach and worship. The tendency towards an exclusive stress is already at work on this level and it is the perception of this truth that lies behind the term henotheism used by European scholars to describe the Vedic Religion.
   The next stage of devolution is the Mind proper. There or perhaps even before, on the lower reaches of the Overmind, the gods have become all quite separate, self-centred, each bounded in his own particular sphere and horizon. The overmind gods the true godsare creators in a world of balanced or harmoniously held difference; they are powers that fashion each a special fulfilment, enhancing one another at the same time (parasparam bhvayantah). Between the Overmind and the Mind there is a class of lesser godsthey have been called formateurs; they do not create in the strict sense of the term, they give form to what the anterior gods have created and projected. These form-makers that consolidate the encasement, fix definitely the image, have most probably been envisaged in the Indian dhynamrtis. But in the Mind the gods become still more fixed and rigid, stereotyped; the mental gods inspire exclusive systems, extreme and abstract generalisations, theories and principles and formulae that, even when they seek to force and englobe all in their cast-iron mould, can hardly understand or tolerate each other.

02.02 - The Kingdom of Subtle Matter, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To seize the Absolute in shapes that pass,
  To fix the eternal's touch in time-made things,
  --
  Although the Absolute Image lacks, the Word
  Incarnate, the sheer spiritual ecstasy,

02.04 - The Right of Absolute Freedom, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   A nation cannot claim the right, even in the name of freedom, to do as it pleases. An individual has not that right, the nation too has not. A nation is a member of humanity, there are other members and there is the common welfare of all. A nation by choosing a particular line of action, in asserting its absolute freedom, may go against other nations, or against the general good. Such freedom has to be curbed and controlled. Collective lifeif one does not propose to live the life of the solitary the animal or the saintis nothing if not such a system of controls. "The whole of politics is an interference with personal liberty. Law is such an interference; protection is such an interference; the rule which makes the will of the majority prevail is such an interference. The right to prevent such use of personal liberty as will injure the interests of the race is the fundamental law of society. From this point of view the nation is only using its primary rights when it restrains the individual from buying or selling foreign goods." Thus spoke a great Nationalist leader in the days of Boycott and Swadeshi. What is said here of the individual can be said of the nation too in relation to the greater good of humanity. The ideal of a nation or state supreme all by itself, with rights that none can challenge, inevitably leads to the cult of the Super-state, the Master-race. If such a monster is not to be tolerated, the only way left is to limit the Absolute value of nationhood, to view a nation only as a member in a comity of nations forming the humanity at large.
   A nation not free, still in bondage, cannot likewise justify its claim to absolute freedom by all or any means, at all times, in all circumstances. There are times and circumstances when even an enslaved nation has to bide its time. Man, in order to assert his freedom and individuality, cannot sign a pact with Mephistopheles; if he does so he must be prepared for the consequences. The same truth holds with regard to the nation. A greater danger may attend a nation than the loss of freedom the life and soul of humanity itself may be in imminent peril. Such a cataclysmic danger mankind has just passed through or is still passing through. All nations, however circumstanced in the old world, who have stood and fought on the side of humanity, by that very gesture, have acquired the rightand the might too,to gain freedom and greatness and all good things which would not be possible otherwise.

02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Some hue of the Absolute could fall on life,
  Some glory of knowledge and intuitive sight,
  --
  And all perfection fringes the Absolute.
  A child of heaven who never saw his home,
  --
  She would bring the glory here of the Absolute's force,
  Change poise into creation's rhythmic swing,

02.09 - The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Made body a nectar-cup of the Absolute.
  In sudden moments of revealing flame,

02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Prophet of the seeings of the Absolute,
  Sows the Idea's significance in Form
  --
  And in nothingness the Absolute positive.
  A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,

02.15 - The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  All it became that figures the Absolute,
  A high vast peak whence Spirit could see the worlds,

03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   And yet there can be a status even beyond. For beyond the cosmic reality, lies the transcendent reality. It is the Absolute, neti, neti, into which individual and cosmos, all disappear and vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanismit is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights; but in the status of the transcendent Selfhood humanism is totally transcended and transmuted, one dwells then in the Bliss that passeth all feeling.
   The Upanishadic summit is not suffused with humanism or touched by it, because it is supra-human, not because there is a lack or want or deficiency in the human feeling, but because there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To man, to human valuation, the Boddhisattwa may appear to be greater than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God Himself but that is an inferior viewpoint, that of particular or local interest.

03.01 - The Malady of the Century, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   To the moderns truth is merely relative; the Absolute is an ever-receding reality and has only a theoretical existence. The true reality, whatever it is, we can never reach or possess; we may say that we are approaching it nearer and nearer, but shall never come up to itthere is no end to our pursuit. An eternally progressive rapprochement between our knowledge or realization and the object of it is our destiny and also perhaps our privilege. It is this movement without end or finality that is life and all its zest and beauty. The ancients, on the other hand, aimed and worked at siddhi, that is to say, definite and final achievement. This did not mean, however, that there was a dead stop and they stagnated after siddhi. It means that the consciousness having undergone a change in character, takes a different kind of movement altogether: it proceeds now from truth to truth, from light to light, from siddhi to siddhi. The modern consciousness moves, on the other hand, from uncertainty to uncertainty, at best, from the more obscure to the less obscure.
   Ours is an age of hungerhunger for knowledge, for power, for enjoyment. But we do not know, nor care to know, the conditions under which alone such hunger can really be appeased. First of all, we think that to satisfy our hunger we have simply to go straight and pounce upon the object; we do not consider it at all necessary to look beforeh and to our assimilative nature and capacity. Our hunger serves only to multiply the objects of hunger; and the objects of hunger again multiply our hunger; this is the vicious circle in which we are entrapped. We hungered for progress, but what we have succeeded in getting is change and movement, speed and restlessness; we yearned for light, we have found only information; we looked for power, we have mastered a few tricks or clever manipulations; we aspired for happiness, we have stopped with stray pleasures and hence with dissatisfaction.

03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an art, as any other orthodox art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophyperhaps the very large element of philosophy that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of au thentic art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy the metaphysicsof it, but only into the science the physicsof it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly formkavi kavitva divi rpam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the Absolute truth is not the philosopher's taskit is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a my as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to doand nothing lessthan to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.
   Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the otherhand, the march of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: thereis something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).

03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  A communality of the Absolute.
  There was no sob of suffering anywhere;

03.05 - Some Conceptions and Misconceptions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   A question is asked, where, at what stage or level of Involution does the principle of exclusive concentration (the principle of Ignorance) come in? If, as Sri Aurobindo says, it comes subsequently at a later stage, where was it then before? Was it not in the Absolute Reality itself? There can be nothing that is not inherent in the Absolute Reality. We all know, nothing comes out of nothing. Then, if it is in the original Reality already, why should it come out at a later stage and not be active from the very beginning? This standpoint seems to have been anticipated by some schools (Visishtadwaita Vedanta, for example) who describe in consequence the Reality (Brahman) as consisting, when viewed as a totality, of both Knowledge and Ignorancecit-acit; the Ignorance is a sort of peripheral reality not touching or affecting the Knowledge, but connected with or depending upon the nuclear reality, something like the physical body coexisting with and depending on the soul or self. One can also remember in this connection the Purusha-Prakriti relation in Sankhya. Such a standpoint, I suppose, is the precursor or philosophical background of what is well known as the Manichean principle.
   Sri Aurobindo's view is different. It is something like this I am putting the thing as simply as possible, without entering into details or mysteries that merely confuse the brain. the Absolute Reality contains all, nothing can be outside it, pain and sin and all; true. But these do not exist as such in the supreme status, they are resolved each into its ultimate and fundamental force of consciousness. When we say I all things, whatever they are, exist in the Divine Consciousness, the Absolute, we have an idea that they exist there as they do here as objects or entities; it goes without saying, they do not. Naturally we have to make a distinction between things of Knowledge and things of Ignorance. Although there is a gradation between the twoKnowledge rolls or wraps itself gradually into Ignorance and Ignorance unrolls or unfolds itself slowly into Knowledgestill in the Divine Consciousness things of Knowledge alone exist, things of Ignorance cannot be said to exist there on the same title, because, as I have said, the original truths of things alone are therenot their derivations and deformations. One can say, indeed, that in the supreme Light darkness exists as a possibility; but this is only a figure of speech. Possibility does not mean that it is there like a seedor even a chromosome rodto sprout and grow. Possibility really means just a chance of the consciousness acting in a certain way, developing in a particular direction under certain conditions.
   Matter exists in the Absolute Consciousness, not as Matter but as its fundamental substratum, as that radical mode of being or consciousness which by the devolution of consciousness and the interaction of Knowledge and Ignorance in the end works itself out as Matter. So also with regard to Life and with regard to Mind. If things are to exist in the highest status of consciousness, the Divine Consciousness, exactly as they exist now, there would be no point or meaning in creation or manifestation. Manifestation or creation does not mean merely unveiling or unrolling in the sense of unpacking. It means a gradual shift in the stress of consciousness, giving it a particular mode of action.
   The unrolling or Involution is the path traced by consciousness in its changing modes of concentration. The principle of concentration is inherent in consciousness. Sri Aurobindo speaks of four modes or degrees of this concentration: (I) the essential, (2) the integral, (3) the total or global and (4) the separative. The first is a sole in-dwelling or an entire absorption in the essence of its own being it is the superconscient Silence, at one end, and the Inconscience, at the other. The second is the total Sachchidananda, the supramental concentration; the third, multiple or totalising overmental awareness; the fourth is the concentration of Ignorance. All the four, however, form the integral play of one indivisible consciousness.
  --
   Such a synthetic poise is not a mere theoretical possibility: it is an actuality and is being demonstrated by the fact of evolution. The partial release of the Absolutely exclusive concentration of consciousness in Matter has given rise to Life which is a double poise: Life plays in and through Matter and has not dissolved Matter. Likewise a further release of concentration has given birth to Mind which still bases itself upon and is woven into Life and Matter. The change-over from unconsciousness to consciousness and from consciousness to super-consciousness is the movement of consciousness from a unilateral towards an ever widening multiple poise and functioning of concentration.
   The exclusive concentration was the logical and inevitable final term of a movement of separativity and exteriorisation. It had its necessity and utility. Its special function was utilised by Nature for precision and perfection in details of execution in the most material order of reality. Indeed, what can be more exact and accurate than the laws of physics, the mathematical laws that govern the movements of the material particles? Furthermore, if we look at the scientist himself, do we not find in him an apt image of the same phenomenon? A scientist means a specialist the more specialised and restricted his view, the surer he is likely to be in his particular domain. And specialised knowledge means a withdrawal from other fields and viewpoints of knowledge, an ignorance of them. Likewise, a workman who moulds the head of a pin is all concentrated upon that single point of existencehe forgets the whole world and himself in that act whose perfect execution seems to depend upon the measure of his self-oblivion. But evidently this is not bound to be so. A one-pointed self-absorption that is Ignoranceis certainly an effective way of dealing with material objectsthings of Ignorance; but it is not the only way. It is a way or mechanism adopted by Nature in a certain status under certain conditions. One need not always forget oneself in the act in order to do the act perfectly. An unconscious instinctive act is not always best doneit can be done best consciously, intuitively. A wider knowledge, a greater acquaintance with objects and facts and truths of other domains too is being more and more insisted upon as a surer basis of specialisation. The pinpointed (one might almost say geometrically pointed) consciousness in Matter that resolves itself into unconsciousness acts perfectly but blindly; the vast consciousness also acts there with absolute perfection but consciouslyconscious in the highest degree.
  --
   It is to be added that the limitation in Ignorance is after all apparent; that does not mean it is unreal or illusory, in the sense of Mayavada. Here is the distinction: Mayavada holds all formation as my, illusory, makes no difference between limitation and delimitation: according to it, all delimitation is ignorant and illusory limitation; none has real or essential existence. In Sri Aurobindo's view limitation is real, as also delimitation: only the former is a temporary reality, it is the latter itself but under certain conditions. Again, Mayavada speaks of the Brahman, the Absolute or Transcendent as the sole and true reality: it is the Stable, the Unmoving, the utter Unity cancelling, negating all movement and multiplicity. Sri Aurobindo views the highest reality as dynamic also, permeating the multiplicity and becoming the multiplicity, becoming or existing as the multiplicity in a movement of Knowledge, becoming and appearing also at first in a movement and mode of Ignorance as the material multiplicity but gradually transmuting this ignorant multiplicity into a movement and embodiment of Knowledge. For the Knowledge was always there in and behind the Ignorance, secretly informing and guiding, moulding and transforming it.
   Thus, for example, we would not say pain is an illusion, because Ananda is the root of all and is the All. We say pain is also a reality: it is a temporary and localised form of Ananda, Ananda muted and deformed, under certain stresses and conditions. Ananda is there always but not away and aloof from pain; it is not the opposite or the negation of pain. Nor is pain a superimposition, as something foreign, upon Ananda, so that when it passes away, like a cloud, Ananda appears automatically in its full glory. We consider pain as a formation of Ananda, it is the first result of an effort of consciousness to hold Ananda in and through a form, but it need not and cannot be the last consummation.

03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   And yet there can be a status even beyond. For, beyond the cosmic reality lies the transcendent reality. It is the Absolute, neti, neti, into which individual and cosmos, all disappear and vanish. In compassion, the cosmic communion, there is a trace and an echo of humanismit is perhaps one of the reasons why Europeans generally are attracted to Buddhism and find it more congenial than Hinduism with its dizzy Vedantic heights. But in the status of the transcendent Self-hood, humanism is totally transcended and transmuted; one dwells there in the Bliss that passeth all feeling.
   The Upanishadic summit is not suffused with humanism or touched by it, because it is supra-human, not because there is a lack or deficiency in the human feeling, but because there is a heightening and a transcendence in the consciousness and being. To man, to human valuation, the Bodhisattva may appear to be greater than the Buddha; even so to the sick a physician or a nurse may seem to be a diviner angel than any saint or sage or perhaps God himself but that is an inferior view-point, that of particular or local interest.

03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   An Indian Madonna owes its conception to an experience at the very other end of consciousness. The Indian artist does not at all think of a human mother; he has not before his mind's eye an idealized mother, nor even a subtilized feeling of motherhood. He goes deep into the very origin of things, and, from there seeks to bring out that which belongs to the Absolute I and the universal. He endeavours to grasp the sense that : motherhood bears in its ultimate truth and reality. Beyond the form, beyond even the rhythm, he enters into bhva, the: spiritual substance of things. An Indian Madonna (Ganesh-janani, for example) is not solely or even primarily a human I mother, but the mother, universal and transcendent, of sentientand insentient creatures and supersentient beings. She embodies not the human affection only, but also the parallel sentiment that finds play in the lower and in the higher creations as well. She expresses in her limbs not only the gladness of the mother animal tending its young, but also the exhilaration that a plant feels in the uprush of its sap while giving out new shoots, and, above all, the supreme nanda which has given birth to the creation itself. The lines that portray such motherhood must have the largeness, the sweep, the au thenticity of elemental forces, the magic and the mystery of things behind the veil.
   It is this quality which has sometimes made Indian art seem deficient in its human appeal: the artist chose deliberately to be non-human, even in the portrayal of human subjects, in order to bring out the universal and the transcendent element in the truth and beauty of things. Man is not the measure of creation, nor human motives the highest or the deepest of nature's movements: at best, man is but a symbol of truths beyond his humanity.

03.15 - Origin and Nature of Suffering, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Suffering there is, some say, because the soul takes delight in it: if there was not the soul's delight behind, there would not be any suffering at all. There are still two other positions with regard to suffering which we do not deal with in the present context, namely, (1) that it does not exist at all, the Absolute Ananda of the Brahman being the sole reality, suffering, along with the manifested world of which it is a part, is illusion pure and simple, (2) that suffering exists, but it comes not from soul or God but from the Anti-divine: it is at the most tolerated by God and He uses it as best as He can for His purpose. That, however, is not our subject here. We ask then what delight can the soul take when the body is suffering, say, from cancer. If it is delight, it must be of a perverse variety. Is it not the whole effort of mankind to get rid of pain and suffering, make of our life and of the world, if possible, a visible play of pure and undefiled Ananda?
   On the other hand, we do find that suffering is not always mere suffering, that it can be turned into a thing of joy; it is a fact proved in the lives of many a martyr and many a saint. Many indeed are those who have not only borne suffering passively but have welcomed it and courted it with happiness and delight. If it is said it is a perverse kind of pleasure, and if one wishes to hang it by calling it masochism, well, we do not solve the problem in that way, we seek to hide it behind a big word; it is at the most a point of view. What agrees with one's temperament (or prejudices) one calls natural and what one does not like appears to him perverse. Another person may have a different temperament and accordingly a different vocabulary.

04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   This superconsciousness has a special mode of its quintessential energy which is omnipotent in action, immediate in effectivity. It is pure as the purest incandescent solar light and embodies the concentrated force of consciousness. It is the original creative vibration of the Absolute or supreme Being. Sri Aurobindo calls this supreme form of superconscient consciousness-energy, the Supermind. There are of course other layers and strata of superconsciousness leading up to the super-mind which are of various potentials and embody different degrees of spiritual power and consciousness.
   We have spoken of the Inner Consciousness. But there is also, we must now point out, an Inmost Consciousness. As the Superconsciousness is a consciousness-energy in height, the Inmost Consciousness is a consciousness-energy in depth, the deepest depth, beyond or behind the Inner Consciousness. If we wish to put it geometrically, we can say, the vertical section of consciousness represents the line from the superconsciousness to the subconscious or vice versa; the horizontal section represents the normal waking state of consciousness; and there is a transverse section leading from the surface first to the Inner and finally to the Inmost. This inmost consciousness the consciousness most profound and secreted in the cave of the heart, guhhitam gahvaretham,is the consciousness of the soul, the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it: it is the immortal in the mortal. It is, as has often been described, the nucleus round which is crystallised and organised the triple nature of man consisting of his mind and life and body, the centre of dynamic energy that secretly vivifies them, gradually purifies and transforms them into higher functions and embodiments of consciousness. As a matter of fact, it is this inmost consciousness that serves as the link, at least as the most powerful link, between the higher and lower forms of consciousness, between the Superconscient and the Subsconscient or Inconscient. It takes up within itself all the elements of consciousness that the past in its evolutionary career from the very lowest and basic levels has acquired and elaborated, and by its inherent pressure and secret gestation delivers what was crude and base and unformed as the purest luminous noble substance of the perfectly organised superconscient reality. Indeed, that is the mystic alchemy which the philosophers experimented in the Middle Ages. In this context, the Inner Consciousness, we may note, serves as a medium through which the action of the Inmost (as well as that of the Uppermost) takes place.

04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The balance is upset exactly when we say that the higher depends on the lower or that it comes after. Not only so, the statement is likely to involve an error, a mistaken view. If one has to make a distinction between higher and lower, inner and outer, it will be nearer the truth and fact to say that the lower depends on the higher, it is the inner reality that upholds and inspires the outer form: without this inner cohesive deity all the external frame would fall to pieces. It is not the contingencies of time and circumstances, of day-to-day existence that determine the nature and form of power of the soul and spirit. It is the pressure of the Inner Being, antarym, that brings about the pattern and organisation of the outer life. At the summit of being, at the Absolute point of consciousness the two are identical, absolutely one and the same. In the lower ranges as manifestation and variation begin the two maintain their union and harmony and mutuality so long as the consciousness retains its purity and the being is not invaded by Ignorance. Ignorance means the gradual predominance of the outer and the lower, till it reaches its last point in Inconscience where Matter is the only reality and everything is made to stand and depend on the grossest reality.
   Even then, even from that nadir, let us consider things a little more closely. We have still consciousness left in us as human beings. Now, because 'man has a body and because he has to live and move in physical surroundings and circumstances, therefore body and physical conditions must necessarily come to his consciousness first in importancethis is not a valid argument nor a statement of fact. For man has and is something else besides: and this something else, in other words, the spiritual being, is quite a free and independent entity and can act as it wills ignoring and ignorant of the body and its circumstances. Whether one is poor or rich, successful or frustrated, happy or unhappy, one can always listen and follow the call of the Spirit.

05.01 - At the Origin of Ignorance, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Divine Consciousness, basically and essentially one and unique, has inherent in it four cardinal attributesprinciples of its modulation, modes of its vibrationdeveloping into or appearing as four aspects and personalities. They are Light, Force, Delight and Knowledge. Originally and in the supreme status the four movements are one and indivisible and form one indissoluble identity with the Divine's pure essence and absolute unity. The differentiation or variability there in the Immutable is a play immanent in the integral self-nature of the Supreme. The one and the many form on that level a single entity, an undivided whole: the unity running in and through and holding the multiplicity and the multiplicity being the playfulness of the unity. Multiplicity, however, implies freedom of movement in the Unique. In other words, the very character of variability is the Absolute freedom of the variables; the play consists precisely in the free choice and self-determination of the partners, the differentiated units. For a formation in the Divine Consciousness, an individualised formulation of its being must necessarily have the Divine's own freedom. Now, the result of this freedom is somewhat unexpected, to put it in the human way, that is to say, it was not explicit at that point, in that field of consciousness. For the freedom, in the normal course of its play, reached a degree or arrived at a mode which brought about I a shift and an impulsion meaning a rift and a clear separation: I the momentum of the free movement carried the individual formation beyond the range of its sense of unity and identity with all and the One. More and more it isolated itself, limiting itself to its own orbit and to its own fund of energy. This isolation, it must be noted, occurs at the origin without any sense of perversity or revolt or disobedience on the part of the free entity, as the legend formulated by the human mind imaged it. The movement of freedom and individual formation in its urge crosses, as it were, a borderline, passes from the safe zone within the Divine's own status into a different zone, creates it, as a matter of fact, by that overzealous and self-concentrated free movement. But, as I have said, there is no premeditation or arrire pense or bad will or spirit of contradiction there at the origin of the deviation. It is no original sin: it is a spontaneous, almost a logical consequence, an inevitable expression of the freedom that particulars enjoy as part and parcel of the Divine Universal.
   And yet the result is strange and revolutionary. The game once begun develops its own scheme and pattern and modality. For that crucial step in the movement of freedom, that definite moving away, the assertion of complete independence and isolation immediately brought about a reversal of realities, a complete negation of the original attri butes. Thus Light became obscurity or Inconscience, Life became death, Delight became pain and suffering, Power became incapacity, Knowledge became Ignorance, and Truth became falsehood. In other words, Spirit became forthright Matter.

05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is a long dredging process, tedious and arduous, requiring the utmost patience and perseverance, even to the Absolute degree. For Inconscience, in essence, although a contingent reality, local and temporal, and therefore transient, is nonetheless the hardest, most obdurate and resistant reality: it lies thick and heavy upon the human vehicle. It is massed layer upon layer. Its first formation in the higher altitudes of the mind is perhaps like a thin fluid deposit; it begins as anindividualised separative consciousness stressing more and more its exclusiveness. Through the lower ranges of the mind and the vitality it crystallises and condenses gradually; in the worlds of thinking and feeling, enjoying and dynamic activity, it has still a malleable and mixed consistency, but when it reaches and possesses the physical being, it becomes the impervious solid obscurity that Matter presents.
   The root of the Cosmic Evil is in Matter. From there it shoots up and overshadows the upper layers of our being and consciousness. Even if the mind is cleaned, the vital cleared, still if the physical consciousness is not sufficiently probed into, purified and reclaimed, then nothing permanent is done, one would build upon sand. All efforts, spiritual or other, at the regeneration and reformation of mankind and a good many individual endeavours too have come to a sorry end, because the foundation was not laid sufficiently deep and secure. One must dig into Matter as far down as possiblelike Rishi Agastya in the Vedaeven to the other end. For there is another mystery there, perhaps the Mystery of mysteries. The deeper you go down into Matter, as you clear up the jungle and bring in the higher light, you discover and unlock strange and mighty energies of consciousness secreted there, even like the uranium pile in the atomic world. It is revealed to you that Inconscience is not total absence of consciousness, it is simply consciousness asleep, in-gathered, entranced. And this nether consciousness is, after all, one with the supreme Consciousness. It is itself the best weapon to bring about its own transformation. Not only the higher self, but the lower self too must be salvaged and saved by its own selftman tmnam uddharet.
  --
   The Divine incarnates, as an individual in the concrete material actuality, this double aspect of the utter truth and reality. There are, what may be called, intermediary incarnations, some representing powersaspects of the Divinein the higher mental or overmental levels of consciousness, others those of the inner heart, yet others again those of the dynamic vital consciousness. But the integral Divine, he who unites and reconciles in his body the highest height and the lowest depth, who has effectuated in him something like the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" is an event of the futureeven perhaps of the immediate future. The descent into hell is an image that has been made very familiar to man, but all its implications have not been sounded. For what we were made familiar with was more or less an image of hell, not hell itself, a region or experience in the vital (may be even in the mental): real hell is not the mass of desires or weaknesses of the flesh, not "living flesh", but dead Matter whose other name is Inconscience. In the older disciplines the central or key truth, the heart of reality where the higher and the lowerBrahman and Maya, the Absolute and the Contingency, the One and the Many, God and the Worldmet and united in harmony was bypassed: one shot from below right into the supreme Absolute; the matrix of truth-creation was ignored. Even so, at the other end, the reality of brute matter was not given sufficient weight, the spiritual light disdained to reach it (vijigupsate).
   The integral Divine not merely suffers (as in the Christian tradition) a body material, He accepts it in his supernal delight, for it is his own being and substance: it is He in essence and it will become He in actuality. When he comes into the world, it is not as though it were a foreign country; he comes to his own,only he seeks to rebuild it on another scale, the scale of unity and infinity, instead of the present scale of separativism and finiteness. He comes among men not simply because he is' moved by human miseries; he is no extra-terrestrial person, a bigger human being, but is himself this earth, this world, all these miseries; he is woven into the fabric of the universe, he is the warp and woof that constitute creation. It is not a mere movement of sympathy or benevolence that actuates him, it is a total and absolute identification that is the ground and motive of his activity. When he assumes the frame of mortality, it is not that something outside and totally incongruous is entering into him, it is part and parcel of himself, it is himself in one of his functions and phases. Consequently, his work in and upon the material world and life may be viewed as that of self-purification and self-illumination, self-discipline and selfrealisation. Also, the horrors of material existence, being part of the cosmic play and portion of his infinity, naturally find shelter in the individual divine incarnation, are encompassed in his human embodiment. It is the energy of his own consciousness that brought out or developed even this erring earth from within it: that same energy is now available, stored up in the individual formation, for the recreation of that earth. The advent and acceptance of material existence meant, as a kind of necessity in a given scheme of divine manifestation, the appearance and play of Evil, the negation of the very divinity. Absolute Consciousness brought forth absolute unconsciousness the inconscientbecause of its own self-pressure, a play of an increasingly exclusive concentration and rigid objectivisation. That same consciousness repeats its story in the individual incarnation: it plunges into the material life and matter and identifies itself with Evil. But it is then like a pressed or tightened spring; it works at its highest potential. In other words, the Divine in the body now works to divinise the body itself, to make of the negation a concrete affirmation. The inconscient will be embodied consciousness.

05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   A popular conundrum. Are the souls finite or infinite in number? Supposing they are finite, then a time is sure to come when there will be no more souls upon earth; for, as it is said, all souls are evolving and in the end will pass out of earthly life and get merged in their source, the Brahman, the Absolute Reality. On the other hand, if they are infinite, then, since all of them cannot appear on earth at the same time, the number of human bodies that house the souls being limited (at the most, a few thousand millions, according to statisticians), what happens to those that are not embodied, where do they wait or what do they do in that period? Do all come down or embody in course of time? Will all have the chance, will it be needed for all to take a body and sojourn on earth? No doubt, there is a continual increase of population upon earth, does that mean that new souls are slowly coming away from the waiting list? Even then, the list cannot be exhausted, since it is infinite; so there is bound to be a very large number who would not get the chance of visiting the earth. For, however much the population increases, it cannot increase to infinity. It can do so only if the world continues to exist eternally and humanity too. But both science and religion say that the world will come to an end sometime. There is a pralayaan extinctionalthough it may be followed by a new creation and a new cycle of growth and evolution, but of a different kind and constituting quite other elements.
   I have put the popular case in figures of popular mentality;almost foolish and childish on the face of it, as it would appear; but if one "tries to answer, one finds it is not easy, children's questions are always so. Let us then try to be wise and face the problem squarely. The whole difficulty comes from the popular, perhaps normal human conception of the soul; it is considered almost something like the physical body (even as Virochana of old did in the Upanishadic days), namely, it has a definite form and figure, even perhaps a definite mass: each is an isolated entity shut out from everyone else by a fixed contour within which each one is housed. In fact, however, it is not so. The soul is an individual, no doubt, it has even a kind of recognisable form, but nothing of the kind by which matter or a material body is characterised. It is an essential form, form of the form, swarpa; it is a basic or typal individuality, the individual seated within the 'individual. The characteristic of material individuality is, as I have said, exclusiveness, where -as the soul individuality is characterised by a comprehensiveness which does not diminish but gives a special mode and movement to that individuality. In the growth of life-forms, we know how a single unit, a cell, divides and subdivides itself and each division grows into a whole, a complete life-form. But the process is not reversible. Developed forms, coming out of a single parent cannot be resolved back into the original unit. Organisms do not combine to form a single unitary organism, although one or more may be taken up and assimilated into another: for this is not combination, but practically the annihilation of one into another. The second law of thermodynamics seems to hold good even in the biological field. On a still higher or deeper level, in the psychological and spiritual realm, such combinations or resolutions are however possible and form a characteristic movement of the occult world.

05.04 - The Measure of Time, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Looked at from the higher source of things, the time-factor itself appears as an illusion. What is true is a certain set of conditions in which forces work themselves out. And in this pattern of conditions, time (along with space) does not give the Absolute and fixed frame of reference, as is usually taken for granted, but is a varying background, even if it is not a side-issue or a by-product. The conscious force at work in the world aims at a change in the conditions; it is a work primarily of rearrangement and order. The state of Nature, of actualityof ignorance and inertiais one of chaos. What the Divine Will behind, the Consciousness standing over, does is to develop a cosmos out of that chaos. Things are placed wrongly, at random, pell-mell: they have to be assorted, arranged, docketed, each item in its own place. We know, for example, of the material particle in which the atoms are huddled together, each pointing to a different direction, but when they are arranged in such a way that one half points in one way and the other half the contrary way, we have what is called a magnetised body.
   It is when things are arranged in this manner, the right thing in the right place, that divine perfection, the Realisation in the material, is attained. And for this consummation to come about, the process that is followed is a greater and greater infiltration of higher and higher forces into the field of disorder, of our normal life and consciousness. The time taken simply indicates that the process is being worked out; it is an expression of the rhythm of procedure. But to the Divine; the Supreme Consciousness that works, time itself has no separate meaning or intrinsic value; for it a thousand or a million years do not mean more than what is one moment for us. Indeed, the slowness of time simply marks the steps of events in the lower ranges of creation: as we rise higher and higher, forces from there come down into the lower field, and the tempo of events quickens; finally, when the highest peak is attained and its forces descend and intervene in the ordering of the lowest levels, then the change, the arrangement that is being worked out, is accomplished immediately and without delay: the time lag is abolished altogether. Time may be compared to a kind of elastic bond connecting the highest and the lowest and running through the intermediate zones. It contracts as one moves upward and is telescoped, as it were, at the top.

05.05 - Man the Prototype, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Man too as a species has a generic personality, his prototype. Only, in opposition to the scientific view, that is an earlier phenomenon belonging to the very origin of things. Man in his essential form and reality is found at the source and beginning of creation. When the unmanifest Transcendent steps forward to manifest, when there is the first expression of typal variations in the infinite as the basis of physical creation, then and there appears Man in his essential and eternal divine form. He is there almost as a sentinel, guarding the passage from the formless to form. Indeed, he is the first original form of the formless. A certain poet says that man is the archetype of all living forms. A bird is a flying man, a fish a swimming man, a worm a crawling man, even a plant is but a rooted man. His form belongs to a region beyond even the first principles of creation. The first principles that bring out and shape and uphold the manifested universe are the trinity: Life, Light and Delightin other terms, Sachchidananda. The whole complex of the manifest universe is resolvable into that unity of triple status. But behind even this supernal, further on towards the final disappearance into the Absolute Unmanifestsumming up, as it were, in him the whole manifestationstands this original primordial form, this first person, this archetypal Man.
   The essential appearance of Man is, as we have said, the prototype of the actual man. That is to say, the actual man is a projection, even though a somewhat disfigured projection, of the original form; yet there is an essential similarity of pattern, a commensurability between the two. The winged angels, the cherubs and seraphs are reputed to be ideal figures of beauty, but they are nothing akin to the Prototype, they belong to a different line of emanation, other than that of the human being. We may have some idea of what it is like by taking recourse to the distinction that Greek philosophers used to make between the formal and the material cause of things. The prototype is the formal reality hidden and imbedded in the material reality of an object. The essential form is made of the original configuration of primary vibrations that later on consolidate and become a compact mass, arriving finally at its end physico-chemical composition. A subtle yet perfect harmony of vibrations forming a living whole is what the prototype essentially is. An artist perhaps is in a better position to understand what we have been labouring to describe. The artist's eye is not confined to the gross physical form of an object, even the most realistic artist does not hold up the mirror to Nature in that sense: he goes behind and sees the inner contour, the subtle figuration that underlies the external volume and mass. It is that that is beautiful and harmonious and significant, and it is that which the artist endeavours to bring out and fix in a system or body of lines and colours. That inner form is not the outer visible form and still it is that form fundamentally, essentially. It is that and it is not that. We may add another analogy to illustrate the point. Pythagoras, for example, spoke of numbers being realities, the real realities of all sensible objects. He was evidently referring to the basic truth in each individual and this truth appeared to him as a number, the substance and relation that remain of an object when everything concrete and superficial is extractedor abstractedout of it. A number to him is a quality, a vibration, a quantum of wave-particles, in the modern scientific terminology, a norm. The human prototype can be conceived as something of the category of the Pythagorean number.

05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The whole business of experimental science was just to find the Absolutes of Nature, that is to say, facts and laws governing facts that do not depend for their existence upon anything but themselves. The purely objective world without any taint of an intruding subject was the field of its inquiry. In fact, the old-world or Mediaeval Science there was a Science even thencould not develop properly, did not strike the right line of growth, precisely because it had a strong subjective bias: the human factor, the personal element of the observer or experimenter was unconsciously (at times even deliberately) introduced into the facts and explanations of Nature. The new departure of Modern Science consisted exactly in the elimination of this personal element and making observation and experiment absolutely impersonal and thoroughly objective.
   Well, the old-world spirit has had its revenge complete and absolute in a strange manner. We are coming to that presently. Now, the constants or absolutes of which we spoke, which were the bed-rock of Modern Science, were gradually found to be rather shakyvery inconstant and relative. Take, for example, the principle of conservation of matter. The principle posited that in a given system the quantity of matter is constant in and through all transformations. Modern Science has found out that this law holds good only in respect of gross matter belonging to man-size Nature. But as soon as we enter into the domain 'of the ultimate constituents of matter, the units of electric charges, the infinitesimals, we find that matter is destroyed and is or can be recreated: material particles are dematerialised into light waves or quanta, and light quanta are precipitated back again into electric particles of matter. Similarly, the law of conservation of energy that energy= mv (m being mass, v velocity)does not hold good in respect of particles that move with the speed of light: mass is not a constant as in Newtonian mechanics, but varies with velocity. Again, in classical mechanics, position and velocity are two absolute determinates for all scientific measurement, and Science after all is nothing if not a system of measurements. Now, in the normal size world, the two are easily determined; but in the sub-atomic world things are quite different; only one can be determined accurately; the more accurate the one, the less so the other; and if both are to be determined, it can be only approximatively, the closer the approximation, the hazier the measure, and the farther the approximation, the more definite the measure. That is to say, here we find not the exact measures of things, but only the probable measures. Indeed, not fixity and accuracy, but probability has become the central theme of modern physical calculation.
  --
   Einstein's was, perhaps, the most radical and revolutionary solution ever proposed. Indeed, it meant the reversal of the whole scientific outlook, but something of the kind was an imperative need in order to save Science from inconsistencies that seemed to be inherent in it. The scientific outlook was vitiated, Einstein said, because we started from wrong premises; two assumptions mainly were responsible for the bank-ruptcy which befell latter-day Science. First, it was assumed that a push and pulla force (a gravitational or, more generally, a causal force) existed and that acted upon isolated and independent particles strewn about; and secondly, they were strewn about in an independently existing time and an independently existing space. Einstein has demonstrated, it seems, successfully that there is no Time and no Space actually, but times and spaces (this reminds one of a parallel conception in Sankhya and Patanjali) , that time is not independent of space (nor space of time) but that time is another co-ordinate or dimension necessary for all observation in addition to the three usual co-ordinates (or dimensions). This was the explanation he found of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect any difference in the velocity of light whether it moved with or against a moving object, which is an inconsistency according to the mechanistic view. 1 the Absolute dependence of time and space upon each other was further demonstrated by the fact that it was absolutely impossible to synchronise two distant clocks (moving with different speeds and thus forming different systems) with perfect accuracy, or determine exactly whether two events happened simultaneously or not. In the final account of things, this relative element that varies according to varying particulars had to be eliminated, sublated. In order to make a law applicable to all fieldsfrom the astronomical through the normal down to the microscopic or sub-atomicin an equally valid manner, the law had to divest itself of all local colour. Thus, a scientific law became a sheer 'mathematical formula; it was no longer an objective law that governed the behaviour of things, but merely a mental rule or mnemonics to string together as many diverse things as possible in order to be able to memorise them easily.
   Again, the generalised law of relativity (that is to say, laws governing all motions, even accelerated motion and hot merely uniform motion) that sought to replace the laws of gravitation did away also with the concepts of force and causality: it stated that things moved not because they were pulled or pushed but because they followed the natural curve of space (they describe geodesics, i.e., move in the line of least distance). Space is not a plain surface, smooth and uniform, but full of dimples and hollows, these occurring in the vicinity of masses of matter, the sun, for instance, (although one does not see how or why a mass of matter should roll down the inclined plane of a curved surface without some kind of push and pull the problem is not solved but merely shifted and put off). All this means to say that the pattern of the universe is absolutely geometrical and science in the end resolves itself into geometry: the laws of Nature are nothing but theorems or corollaries deduced and deducible from a few initial postulates. Once again, on this line, of enquiry also the universe is dissolved into abstract and psychological factors.

05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In any case, at the end of all our peregrinations we seem to circle back to our original Cartesian-cum-Berkeleyean position; we discover that it is not easy to extricate the observed from the observer: the observer is so deep set in the observed, part and parcel of it that there are scientists who consider their whole scientific scheme of the world as only a mental set-up, we may replace it very soon by another scheme equally cogent, subjective all the same. The subject has entered into all objects and any definition of the object must necessarily depend upon the particular poise of the subject. That is the cosmic immanence of the Purusha spoken of in the Upanishads the one Purusha become many and installed in the heart of each and, every object. There is indeed a status of the Subject in which the subject and the object are gathered into or form one reality. The observer and the observed are the two ends, the polarisation of a single entity: and all are reals at that level. But the scientific observer is only the mental purusha and in his observation the Absolute objectivisation is not possible. The Einsteinian equations that purport to rule out all local view-points can hardly be said to have transcended the co-ordinates of the subject. That is possible only to the consciousness of the cosmic Purusha.
   II

05.09 - Varieties of Religious Experience, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The Sufi doctrine also occupies an intermediate position, like the Christian, between the Chaldean and the Vedantic. the Absolute identity of the human lover and the Divine Beloved, a complete fusion of the two at a particular stage or moment of consciousness is one of the cardinal experiences in the Sufi discipline. But that is an innermost state, not normal or habitual in life and activity, where the difference, the separation between the adorer and the adored is maintained exactly for the delight of play. But the dualism in the Indian discipline is more than compensated by the doctrine of Incarnation which obliterates fundamentally all difference between the human and the Divine. According to it, God does not become man only once, as in the Christian view, but that it is one of his constant functions. Indeed, the Indian tradition is that He is always the leader of terrestrial evolution; at each crisis, at each moment of need for guidance, He comes down in flesh and blood, in the form of an earthly creature to show the way, how to live and move and act.
   The special gift of the Chaldean line of discipline lay in another direction. It cultivated not so much the higher lines of spiritual realisation but was occupied with what may be called the mid regions, the occult world. This material universe is not moved by the physical, vital or mental forces that are apparent and demonstrable, but by other secret and subtle forces; in fact, these are the motive forces, the real agents that work out and initiate movements in Nature, while the apparent ones are only the external forms and even masks. This occultism was also practised very largely in ancient Egypt from where the Greeks took up a few threads. The MysteriesOrphic and Eleusiniancultivated the tradition within a restricted circle and in a very esoteric manner. The tradition continued into the Christian Church also and an inner group formed in its heart that practised and kept alive something of this ancient science. The external tenets and dogmas of the Church did not admit or tolerate this which was considered as black magic, the Devil's Science. The evident reason was that if one pursued this line of occultism and tasted of the power it gave, one might very likely deviate from the straight and narrow path leading to the Spirit and spiritual salvation. In India too the siddhis or occult powers were always shunned by the truly spiritual, although sought by the many who take to the spiritual lifeoften with disastrous results. In Christianity, side by side with the major saints, there was always a group or a line of practicants that followed the occult system, although outwardly observing the official creed. It is curious to note that often where the original text of the Bible speaks of gods, in the plural, referring to the deities or occult powers, the official version translates it as God, to give the necessary theistic value and atmosphere.

05.11 - The Place of Reason, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Another point in Sri Aurobindo's view of consciousness which troubles Prof. Das is about the exact nature and function of Reason. For while on one side Sri Aurobindo never seems to be tired of pointing out the inherent incapacity of Reasonin the good company of the ancient Rishisas an instrument for the discovery or realisation of the Absolute or the integral Reality, he asserts, on the other hand, almost in the same breath as it were, that mind can have some idea or conception of what is beyond it, which it so often vainly strives to seize or represent. Evidently, the rationalist logic fails to hold together the two ends, as it is further seen in Prof. Das's failure to perceive any distinction between types or gradations of "thinking".1 He thinks that just as a philosopher thinks, or a cabman thinks or an animal thinks, all must think in the same way and through the same function of the same organ: either there is thinking (thinking proper, of one particular kind) or there is no thinking. That Nature consists of a graduated scale in every line of its movements, and that the gradations shade off into each othernot only so but that each scale or principle may contain within itself all the others2is a phenomenon which runs contrary to the "either this or that" or "no-overlapping" principle, like the colour-blind for whom things are either black or white. In the global outlook, however, we do not stand in the relation of division, separation, mutual exclusiveness. There is a consciousness in which all contraries find a harmonising truth and rhythm.
   In Sri Aurobindo, Reason and Intuition possess a dual relation of mutual negation and mutual affirmation, of exclusiveness and inclusiveness, as indeed is the relation of Brahman and the World. One negates the other in the sphere of ignorance but in knowledge one affirms the other. That is to say, Reason or mental logic, so long as it is dominated by the senses, by the external impressions from things and by its analytic or exclusively separative method of procedure, is a denial of Intuition and a bar to spiritual experience. But Reason can be purified, relieved of its dross, illumined (sam-buddha)sublimated and uplifted then it comes to its own, becomes what it really is and should bea frame to give body to what is beyond and unembodied, a mirror in conceptual terms to what is supra-conceptual. It loses its hard rigidity and becomes supple, loses its obscurity, density and becomes transparent: it attains a new rhythm and gait and capacity. Many of the Upanishadic mantras, a good part of the Gita, do that. And Sri Aurobindo's own exposition is a miracle in that style. "Reason was a helper, Reason is the bar"and, we can add, Reason will again be an aid. The world, as it is, is anything but Divine; and yet it is nothing but the Divine essentially and fundamentally; it can and will attain the divine figure apparently and externally too. Even so with regard to man's mind and reason and all his other limbs.

05.17 - Evolution or Special Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The point is still being debated and, it seems, is still debatable whether evolution is truly the fact behind the origin of species or is it special creation. The latter, we know, was the old- world pre-Copernican theory advocated by theologians and religious minds. It was thoroughly discredited and demolished by the new illumination that Science brought in with the nineteenth century. Till lately it was considered as a pure superstition and to be its advocate would be nothing but blind bigotry. But evidently things in Nature are not so simple; what at one time is brushed aside as a meaningless futility comes back later with a meaning and suggestiveness and truth of reality. We were once laughing at the corpuscular theory of light advocated by the great Newton and putting on a patronising air at the frailty of an otherwise mighty intelligence.But the tables are now turned and we accept it as an undoubted fact when Planck says today that a light ray consists also of particles (quanta) of light. Similarly if in some scientific quarter a doubt has arisen as to the Absolute and exclusive truth of the principle of evolution and if the old conception of special creation is exhumed for fresh consideration,well, one should not be astonished at the turn over.
   The most serious lacuna in the concept of evolution, at least in the Darwinian form of it, is, as is well known, the missing link. The transition stage between one form of life and another, between one species and its higher evolute is always absent, has left no trace of any kind and it is a matter of any man's guess. So the theory of mutation, saltum, sudden change, has been advanced. But that only restates the fact, clinches the matter, but does not explain it. If a sudden and thorough change is possible, if one object can be transformed into something quite different and unpredictable, one can as well call it special creation. That would, some might say, be facing the fact squarely.

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

06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.
  "O mortal who complainst of death and fate,

06.05 - The Story of Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Consciousness is the source and basis of creation. Even the most material object, apparently unconscious, the stone, for example, has inherent in it a vibration of consciousness. Where there is absolutely no consciousness, it is the Inconscient. If you ever descend into the Inconscient, that is to say, further down the scale from the inanimate stone, you will know the difference. The gulf between the stone and the Inconscient is very much, very much indeed, greater than that between the stone and man. For it is a secret consciousness that links man to the stone, but beyond there is a hiatus, something unbridgeable. The Inconscient is the Void, the Absolute zero (Inane, Sri Aurobindo names it in Savitri): it is hot sub-stance, it is pure negation. Consciousness is at the back of the material universe: without that consciousness there would not be the marvellous organisation that is found within the material particle of atom. The Inconscient is pre-existent to the material creation.
   The one indivisible Reality and its pure consciousness: that is the origin. This Supreme Consciousness chose to objectify himself, bring himself out of himself, witness himself in play the Upanishad says, the One wished to have a second, a companion to himself, sa dwityam aichhat. This power of self-objectification is a free-will given to the consciousness to move out of its original unified status and move abroad and away, as it liked. Thus the Supreme saw himself as his own power of self-manifestation, and that is the Mother Consciousness, Adya Shakti, Aditiconsciousness-power, who again in her forward creative urge expressed herself in the first four major Emanations (Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati). But this free urge, free to separate itself and proceed in an independent movement of self-expression and evolution precipitated itself immediately, almost as a logical consequence of its career of free choice, into the Denial, the Negation that is inconscience. So, against the Supreme, the Divine Consciousness, there stood out the utter unconsciousness: the Light disappeared into absolute Darkness. It was the result of a self-choice in the consciousness: but the end was the very opposite of consciousness.

06.19 - Mental Silence, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is possible to put a violent pressure upon oneself and forcibly push out all this confused movement and make the mind vacant. But the effect of mental will upon mind cannot be perfect or enduring. Besides it is not that, the Absolute vacancy, that is our goal. Some other way and manner has to be found for stilling the mind's activities.
   It is to call in the peace that is beyond, that is already there somewhere. It happens, with a sincere demand or aspiration in the consciousness, a certain readiness in the being. When that happens (something in the manner of the Upanishadic vivute tanum svmhe unveils himself his own body), you feel as if a sheer blank, even a black void has entered into you and captured you. In the very midst of whirlwind activity comes a dead stop. Nothing is there now, no idea, no thought, no notion, no motion evenan immense emptiness has eaten up, engulfed everything. Keep steady and await. In that stillness something rises upup and upand goes out beyond, a tranquil beam of consciousness. And then something descends, from afara peace, luminousness, au thentic and absolute in its reality. It comes down, enters into you, possesses your brain and body. It has, you find, resolved all problems, harmonised all contraries and conflicts; for it comes from the home of mother truth. Now you do not strive, but you know, you do not grope, for you are led. You await and at each moment you receive the direction as to what is to be done; you have no thought or preoccupation, the inspired movement happens automatically and infallibly.

06.32 - The Central Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Very often this was the experience: union with the Supreme is established, but as soon as the consciousness was about to settle and merge in the bliss of the union, it was called back and had to turn to the outside world to the ordinary affairs of ordinary consciousness. As if I was given to understand that it was not for me to forget and reject the life of the physical world and pass into the Beyond, but to maintain the contact, the closest contact, between this world and the Beyond and hold both together in one consciousness. The process is some-what like this: you withdraw the consciousness from the world outside and turn inward; you withdraw even from your own physical activities and physical perceptions; you with-draw further in this way step by step through all the grades of life movements and mental movements, go deep inward and high upward till you reach the highest summit: the Absolute silence and indivisible unity with the immutable single reality. This was the aim and, generally, the end of all the greatest spiritual disciplines of the past. We too have to possess this realisation; but for us, it is the basis, the indispensable basis, no doubt, all the same it is the starting-point. Sri Aurobindo has always said that our yoga begins where other yogas end. For what we aim at is not merely the attainment of the summit reality, the consciousness beyond, but to bring it down, make it a living and actual reality in the physical world. The older yogas intended to save the world, but accomplished only the salvation of the individual, one's own self, by passing beyond the world, realising the supreme Spirit and Truth and never coming back. Thus the world remained what it has ever been: only a few escaped out of it. Our yoga enters its crucial phase, its characteristic and its most difficult turn, when it seeks to bring down the highest consciousness once realised on the heights and make it enter into the life of the world and fix it there as the permanent possession of earthly life.
   The key is to find the poise where both the extremes meet, the junction of the two levels of consciousness, the transcendent and the manifested, where the two not only do not contradict or oppose each other, but are aspects or modes of the same Truth, indissolubly united and unified. It is just the border-line, the last point of the manifested world and the first point of the Unmanifest (as one goes upward). If you are able to find the point you have not to make a choice between two irreconcilables, either the Brahman or the world. It is only when you miss the point that you are forced to the choice: some choose the other side of the border, the static consciousness, the eternal immutable pure being, self-absorbed and self-sufficient; others who dare not do that, turn to the world and remain entangled and drowned in its darkness, ignorance, travail, undelight, impotency and misery. But, as I have said, this is not the necessary or inevitable solutionif solution it is at allof the enigma.

07.03 - This Expanding Universe, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Now, one can be seated or fixed exclusively in the status of the unmanifest; to such a one the infinite and eternal is an ever-present reality, there is nothing like past or future, every-thing is. One knows and is in the presence of a fixed actuality; whatever happened, whatever will happenas it seems to us all are there realised on the same plane and at the same moment (although the terms plane and moment do not quite apply there). It is the world or status of the Absolutely determined. Free choice or indeterminacy, the unexpected and the unforeseen have no place here.
   On the contrary, the sphere of manifestation is precisely the field of the sudden and the incalculable, that is to say, of free will. Things appear here that were not before, forces come into play that were not expected or even imagined. They all move along lines that shift and change continually. This is the status of becomingsambhuti, as designated by the Upanishad and described by the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, in the words, panta reei, everything flows on. Here, often a certain disposition that seems quite stable or predictable is upset all of a sudden by the irruption of a new and novel factor from somewhere else.

07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And the sole autocracy of the Absolute Light.
  August on her seat in the inner world of Mind,
  --
  And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.
  Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

07.05 - The Finding of the Soul, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To the sheer consciousness and the Absolute force
  And the unimaginable and formless bliss,

07.06 - Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  For still was far the repose of the Absolute
  543

07.07 - The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Invaded by a streak of the Absolute,
  They marvelled at her, for she seemed to know
  --
  She knew him as the Absolute's self-space,
  One with her self and ground of all things here

08.07 - Sleep and Pain, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   That requires some kind of yogic power. The best way, the Absolute one, is to get out of the body.
   When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is sufficiently materialised. You see your body and with the consciousness and the power which you have then, you can direct the rays of the Force upon the spot where the body suffers. This is a top process, but it gives the Absolutely sure means of getting cured. If the power and the knowledge are there, it is infallible. You can cure any disease with that and in a short time. Only it means a considerable education and training. You cannot improvise it. But as a matter off act men help themselves naturally and automatically when the pain becomes unbearable; they faint. To faint is to get out of the body. So persons who are not too much tied down to the body faint away when the bodily suffering becomes too strong. Only, when you go out of the body, leaving it as an inert mass, there must be someone near sensible and intelligent enough. The body must not be shaken violently to make you wake up. If people by the side are seized by a panic and hurl buckets of water upon your head, the result may be worse. Otherwise, the fainting fit passes quietly, little by little, into a restful condition as there is no longer the consciousness recording the bodily suffering. In the so-called fit the body becomes gradually quiet and immobile, so that it may rest in spite' of the suffering.
   There are lesser means with lesser results. These too are not very easy either. One is to cut the connection between the brain and the part that suffers. The brain not receiving the vibration, the pain is no longer felt. In fact, this is what doctors do when they operate under anaesthesia. The nervous connection round the affected part is made insensitive and the pain is not felt or it is reduced to a minimum. But here you have to do it with your will and consciousness; and that requires an occult power. Some can do it automatically, but their number is very few. If you are unable to go so far, there is another way which should be within your reach. Do not concentrate or dwell upon your pain and suffering; withdraw your attention and direct it elsewhere. The more you think of your pain, the worse it becomes. If you are busy observing its signs and signals, almost awaiting its attack, you surely welcome it in a way, you indulge it and help its continuance. That is why you are advised in that condition to do some light reading or hear things read out, so that the attention may be diverted.

08.08 - The Mind s Bazaar, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In fact, if you wish to be truly intelligent, you must learn a bit of mental gymnastics, even as you have to do physical gymnastics if you wish to have a strong powerful body. People who have never done mental gymnastics have a small elementary brain; all their life they think like children. Mental exercise means that you must know how to do it and do it seriously. First of all, it means that you must not have fixed convictions, namely, that this idea is right and that one is wrong, this formulation is correct, the other one is inexact or that this religion is true, the other is false and so on. If you go on in that train you become very soon stupid, a blockhead. What you have to do, say, in the matter of religion, is to take up all the religions one by one and see how all have expressed the same human aspiration for the Absolute of some kind. You can compare and contrast, understand, weigh and balance, the game will be extremely interesting. Now, when you have mastered all the ideas, seized all the modes of expression, you can try to go beyond, look at them and smile at the eternal wranglings mankind indulges in. You are then master of your mind and no longer subject to what seems to be the commonest habit of mankindgetting into a fury simply because someone else does not happen to think like you.
   ***

08.16 - Perfection and Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   For a very long time, perhaps from the very beginning I do not mean from the beginning of human evolution, for there have been earlier periods when, before the true man appeared, intermediate beings at first were tried who were much nearer to the animal; I mean the beginning of a sufficiently developed human form when it became ready to receive something from abovethere have been always and there are still individuals who carry in them this need of the eternal and the Absolute. It is only little by little, very gradually, through cycles of enlightenment and obscurity that something like a collective consciousness in humanity awakes to the need of such a higher existence. And today this necessity seems evidently very general, cutting across all turmoils and stupidities of mankind: that shows that the time is near.
   Yes, for a very long time, men were told, "It will be, it will be," were given the promise. It was promised, thousands and thousands of years ago, that a new consciousness, a new world, something of the Divine would manifest itself upon earth; it was always in the future, somewhere in the revolution of the ages. One had not this feeling, this sensation that it is here and now.

08.28 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   If you are capable of traversing all these planes in your consciousness, so to say, in a vertical line and reach the highest and then, through this joining up, if you are able to bring down this determinism of perfect freedom into the material determinism, then you can change everything. And all the intermediaries also will undergo the change. Because of these changes it will all look like total freedom. For the intervention or the descent of one plane upon another will have unforeseen consequences for the lower one. The higher planes may foresee, but the lower ones cannot. Being unforeseen, things and events have then an air of the Absolutely free and the totally unexpected.
   It is only when you live consciously and constantly on the highest level, that is to say, the level of the supreme consciousness, that you are able to see that everything is absolutely determined, but at the same time by the very complexity of the intermixture of these determinisms everything is absolutely free. You may call this phenomenon as you like, but it is a kind of absolute determinism and absolute freedom combined. It is the level where there are no contradictions, where all things exist and exist in harmony without contradicting each other.

08.37 - The Significance of Dates, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   In fact, much of our knowledge originates in the same way. Thus, a certain medicine is found, because of favourable circumstances, to cure a number of people suffering from a particular disease. Then it is announced that the medicine is an absolute remedy for that disease. But it is not true. If the same medicine is given to a hundred persons, it will affect them in a hundred different ways: sometimes the reactions are quite opposite. In no two cases will the result be similar. Therefore it is not the virtue of the medicine itself that effects that cure. It is a superstition to believe in the Absolute efficacy of medicines.
   But going further we can say that there is very little difference between science and superstition! The only difference is in the manner of expressing oneself. If you take care to say like the scientists, "it seems it is like that, one might conclude that things appear like that" etc., etc. then it is no longer superstition. But if you assert point-blank, "it is like that", then you land in superstition.

09.11 - The Supramental Manifestation and World Change, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   True. But if you look at the thing in the light of what I have told you that there are no two universal combinations that are alike then how can you establish laws and what is the Absolute truth of such laws?
   There is no such truth. For, if you are logical, that is to say, with a little higher logic, how can you say that a thing repeats itself, since there are no two things, no two combinations, no two universal manifestations that are the same? The "sameness" could be only an appearance, not a fact. The mind sets up rigid laws, and when it does that, you do not cut yourself off from the apparent surface existence, for the surface, in a very obliging manner, seems to satisfy these laws. But that is an appearance, and it does cut you off from the creative Power of the Spirit, cut you off from the true Power of Grace. You can understand that if, by your aspiration and your attitude, you bring down a higher element, a new elementwhich now we may call the Supramentalinto the existing combinations, you can all on a sudden change their nature and then all these so-called necessary and inexorable laws become absurdities. It is you, with your conception, your attitude, your acceptance of certain so-called principles, it is yourself who shut the door against the possibility of what you call miracles. They are not miracles, if you know how they come about, but evidently for your consciousness they have the look of the miraculous.

10.01 - The Dream Twilight of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But Maya is a veil of the Absolute;
  A Truth occult has made this mighty world:

10.02 - Beyond Vedanta, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The first step in the spiritual life is the Vedantic experience that the world is an illusion, an absolute illusion. Rather it is the Buddhist experience of nihil, nothingness, extinction that is the first step, the very basic realisation of all spiritual life. It is not the summit the nee plus ultra, beyond which there is nothing but it is the very foundation, the Absolute minimum of spiritualitysine qua non, without which it is not. The one experience with which you start your spiritual journey is the total negation of whatever exists, reducing existence to zero: world-existence being equated with Ignorance. Life is a falsehood, one has to reject it outright. The next step in Vedanta would be, when you have eliminated everything, reduced all to zero, to contemplate, to find what remains, the irreducible reality the unity, the One, Sat, Brahman.
   First, then, the total and absolute dissolution of this creation of ignorance, the Creation which is ignorance, and attaining a status of nothingness, absolute annihilation, then in that blank void emerges the Residue, the One True Realitya silent, infinite eternal immobility, a pure Existence. In the beginning the Non-Existence (Asat), then there arises the Pure Existence (Sat). That pure Existence is gradually found to possess or be Delight also. As Being is not the being in creation even so the Consciousness is not the normal or mental consciousness, and Delight too is not the joy of life; they are all of quite another quality and category.

10.03 - The Debate of Love and Death, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In symbol minds and lives the Absolute.
  A miracle-monger her mechanical craft;
  --
  Love is man's lien on the Absolute."
  But to the woman Death the god replied,

10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Transcending both, he enters the Absolute.
  His being is a mystery beyond mind,

1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
  Eighth. When the "will to live" vanishes, then the "Sons of Necessity" cease from objective manifestation. This is logically inevitable, and its working out can be seen in every case of entifed objectivity. When the Thinker on his own plane withdraws his attention from his little system within the three worlds and gathers within himself all his forces, then physical plane existence comes to an end and all returns within the causal consciousness; this is as much an abstraction in the three worlds of the Thinker as the Absolute is in the threefold solar system of the Logos. This demonstrates on the physical plane in the withdrawing from out of the top of the head of the radiant etheric body and the consequent disintegration of the physical. The framework goes and the dense physical form falls apart; the pranic life is abstracted bodily from out of the dense sheath, and the stimulation of the fires of matter ceases to be. The latent fire of the atom remains; it is inherent, but the form is made by the action of the two fires of matteractive and latent, radiatory and inherentaided by the fire of the second Logos, and when they are separated the form falls apart. This is a picture in miniature of the essential duality of all things acted upon by Fohat.
  [86]
  --
  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

1.00c - INTRODUCTION, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
  which is better, the Absolute or this state? There are not
  wanting people who think that this manifested state is the
  --
  being, and this differentiated state is higher than the Absolute.
  Because in the Absolute there cannot be any quality they
  imagine that it must be insensate, dull, and lifeless, that only

10.10 - A Poem, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  You are the Absolute Vaishnava, do the Buddha-hymn
  Vishnu Rudra is one body, different form

1.013 - Defence Mechanisms of the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Hence, the Yoga Vasishtha prescribes other psychological methods of mind-control apart from this utter dependence on the Absolute, which is meant only for very advanced practioners. Psychological techniques of mind-control are of various types. We have to determine the weaknesses of the mind first. The weak spots and the vulnerable areas of the mind have to be detected before we tackle the mind's functions in respect of objects. Everyone has some weaknesses, and if we touch a weak spot, the person automatically becomes different from his usual self. But in the ordinary course, these weaknesses are always covered over by the veneer of social activity and public etiquette, etc. There is no one without some sort of a vulnerable spot, and that spot is the essential point to be tackled not only in our workaday life, but also in our spiritual life.
  Each one knows one's vulnerable spot. If one can carefully investigate into one's own self in a fairly dispassionate manner, this vulnerable spot can be discovered in oneself. There may be a little liking for something, and that little liking is the weak spot; like a small hole in a pot, or rather a small hole in a ship a little hole is sufficient and through it the whole ocean can enter the ship. Likewise, in the individual we can find a little hole which is always concealed by other external factors. These weaknesses of the mind are its pressing needs, we may say, in another sense a need which it feels irresistibly, and also feels that it is to be fulfilled by hook or by crook, by any method whatsoever. The all-surpassing weakness of the mind is its dependence on things.

1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  Husband and Wife for the Absolute Being, who is the crea-
  tor, and his Knowledge or Power, who is the creatrix, are

1.01 - Introduction, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The mind that looks deeply into existence, finds there no shadow but that of appearances, and the most obscure and infinitesimal of these can uncover to its search sovereign realities, once it has accustomed its gaze to the light of the mystery which every appearance conceals. Where the indifferent sees only a valueless object or a fortuitous and unimportant detail, the thinker whom no coverings can deceive, is able to detect one of the signs by which eternal laws yield up their secret. A stone that falls, a ripe fruit that opens, become to his vision initiating symbols, keys to a supreme knowledge. By relativities that all disdain, the Absolute delivers up to him the secrets reserved for the sages.
  For him the very darkness becomes light, because all is light. But what light can be sufficient for eyes that keep themselves closed, for the mind which remains sealed?

1.01 - Tara the Divine, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
  manifestation of the Absolute Body, beyond duality,
  beyond any notion of "I" and "another," the Absolute
  Body with which our mind has merged.
  --
  a spontaneous expression of the Absolute Body, a
  clarity of the mind in which there is no subject and no
  --
  expression of the Absolute Body. The activity that is
  exerted is spontaneous, lacking will and effort, lacking
  --
  Question: the Absolute Body of a buddha is emptiness in
  essence and is not subject to interruption. Does the Body of
  --
  emptiness of the Absolute Body (Dharmakaya). This
  emptiness, however, as we previously explained, has

1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  In the present section we shall confine our attention to but a single feature of this traditional psychology the most important, the most emphatically insisted upon by all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy and, we may add, the least psychological. For the doctrine that is to be illustrated in this section belongs to autology rather than psychologyto the science, not of the personal ego, but of that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground. Based upon the direct experience of those who have fulfilled the necessary conditions of such knowledge, this teaching is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (That art thou); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being is to discover the fact for himself, to find out Who he really is.
  The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without.

1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  21:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being (caitya guru or antaryamin), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
  22:To see, know, become and fulfil this One in our inner selves and in all our outer nature, was always the secret goal and becomes now the conscious purpose of our embodied existence.

1.01 - The True Aim of Life, #Words Of The Mother II, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  We seek not our personal salvation but the Absolute surrender
  of our being to the Divine.

1.02.2.1 - Brahman - Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  and unfettered than the mind. It is the pure omnipotent selfawareness of the Absolute unbound by any law of the relativity.
  The laws of the relativity, upheld by the gods, are Its temporary
  --
  Brahman as the Absolute or the Universal has the power
  of standing back from Itself in the relativity. It conceives, by a
  --
  than the universal, the relative as different from the Absolute.
  Without this separative movement, the individual would always
  --
  symbolic; it cannot conceive the thing-in-itself, the Absolute,
  except by negation, in a sort of void, by emptying it of all
  that it seems in the universe to contain. But the Absolute is
  not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond
  --
  supreme Chit. Neither Vidya nor Avidya by itself is the Absolute
  knowledge. (See verses 9 - 11.)

1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
  and immortality. He has to realise the universal in the individual and the Absolute in the relative. He is Brahman growing
  self-conscious in the objective multiplicity. He is the ego in the

1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  One hundred times the happiness of the emperor of this world is the happiness of the pitris, another level which is superior to the physical world. One hundred times the happiness of the pitris is the happiness of the gandharvas, who are celestial musicians in a world which is still higher than that of the pitris. One hundred times the happiness of the gandharvas is the happiness of the celestials in heaven the devas, as we call them. One hundred times the happiness of these celestials is the happiness of Indra, the king of the gods. One hundred times the happiness of the king of the gods is the happiness of the preceptor, the Guru of the gods Brihaspati. One hundred times the happiness of Brihaspati is the happiness of Prajapati, the Creator Brahma. One hundred times the happiness of Brahma the Creator is the happiness of Virat, the Supreme. Beyond that is Hiranyagarbha, and beyond that, Ishvara, and beyond Ishvara is the Absolute.
  So where are we in this scheme? What is our happiness? It is the happiness of a cup of coffee, cup of tea, or a sweet which has no meaning compared to these calculations of astounding existences which are transcendent to human comprehension. When I say a hundred times, it is not merely a mathematical increase of the quantity of happiness; it is also a corresponding increase of the quality of happiness. As mentioned earlier, the quality of happiness in waking life is superior to the happiness in dream; it is not merely quantitative increase, but is also a qualitative increase. The joy of waking life is greater and more intense than the quality of joy in dream. So these calculations given in the Upanishad mean an increase of happiness one hundred times, both in quantity and in quality, so that when we go to the top, we are in an uncontrollable ecstasy of unbounded bliss.

10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.||124.71||
   Then shall the holy marriage be achieved,

1.025 - Sadhana - Intensifying a Lighted Flame, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  In the practice of one reality, ekatattva abhyasah, mentioned by Sage Patanjali in one of his sutras for the purpose of restraining the modifications of the mind, there are, again, grades of approach. The one reality is not necessarily the Absolute Reality, though that is the aim, ultimately. As was mentioned previously, a reality, for the purpose of practice, is that condition which can fulfil a particular need of a specific state of mind under a given condition. So until the Absolute Reality is reached, all other realities are relative realities. Every reality, as far as we are concerned empirically, is relative subject to transcendence. Nevertheless, it is a reality to us, which only goes to prove that we are also only relative realities. We, as individuals, are not absolute realities and, therefore, we are satisfied with what is relative. We are not in daily contact with the Absolute; what we are in contact with is a relative reality. And inasmuch as the subject experiencing and the object experienced are on the same level or degree of reality, it goes without saying that the empirical subjects that we all are come under relative reality, and not the Absolute Reality.
  In the concentration of the mind on one reality, ekatattva, what is intended is that the attention should be focused on a system or order of values which is immediately superior to, or transcendent to, the current state of affairs, the present state of experience, and the conditions through which we are passing through at this moment. Anything which can include particulars in a more organised whole can be regarded as a higher reality for this purpose. There are tentative realities created for the purpose of practical convenience by organisations, associations or systems which we have created for the purpose of subjugating the individual ego and compelling it to affiliate itself to a larger body to which also it ought to belong and is made to belong.
  --
  The practice of yoga is nothing but a conscious participation in the universal working of nature itself and, therefore, it is the most natural thing that we can do, and the most natural thing that we can conceive. There can be nothing more natural than to participate consciously in the evolutionary work of the universe, which is the attempt of the cosmos to become Self-conscious in the Absolute. Evolution is nothing but a movement of the whole universe towards Self-awareness this is called God-realisation. Our every activity from the cup of tea that we take, to the breath that we breathe, from even the sneeze that we jet forth, to the least action that we perform, from even a single thought which occurs in the mind everything is a part of this cosmic operation which is the evolution of the universe towards Self-realisation. Therefore, the practice of yoga is the most natural thing that we can think of and the most necessary duty of a human being. Nothing can be more obligatory on our part than this duty. It is from this point of view, perhaps, that Lord Krishna proclaims, towards the end of the Bhagavadgita, sarvadharmnparityajya mmeka araa vraja (B.G. XVIII.66): Renounce every other duty and come to Me for rescue which means to say, take resort in the law of the Absolute. This is the practice of yoga, and every other dharma is subsumed under it and included within it, as every drop and every river is in the ocean. In this supreme duty, every other duty is included. There is no need to think of every individual, discrete and isolated duty, because all duties are included in this one duty, which is the mother of all duties.
  This peculiar feature of spiritual practice, sadhana, being so difficult to understand intellectually, cannot be regarded as merely an individual's affair. Sadhana is God's affair, ultimately. Spiritual sadhana is God's grace working. Though it appears that is individual effort, it only seems to be so, but really it is something else. Not even the greatest of philosophical thinkers, such as Shankara, could logically answer the question, "How does knowledge arise in the jiva?" How can it be said that individual effort produces knowledge of God? Knowledge of God cannot rise by individual effort, because individual effort is so puny, so inadequate to the purpose, to the task, that we cannot expect such an infinite result to follow from the finite cause. The concept of God is an inscrutable event that takes place in the human mind. Can we imagine an ass thinking about God? However much it may put forth effort and go on trying its best throughout its life, the concept of God will never arise in an ass's mind or in a buffalo's mind. How it arises is a mystery. Suddenly, it comes.

1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  How many things there are in your body in reference to which you do not know their reality and essence, such as [46] desire, love, misery and pleasure. Their existence is admitted, but their quantity and quality cannot be measured. If you desire to learn the Absolute truth about them, you cherish a vain longing; and it is the same, if you desire to know the Absolute nature of voice, nutrition or hearing. As that which is perceived by the eye has no relation to voice, and as that which is perceived by the ear has no relation to form, and as that which is perceived by the sense of smelling has no relation to taste, so that the one can be known by means of the other, in the same manner that which is perceived through the medium of the mind or of divine power, cannot be perceived by the senses. Again, as the spirit exists and controls the body, and yet we know not the mode and essence of it, so God is present in all things, and controls and governs all things, but his form, essence and quality are exempt from being known. Exemption and freedom may be illustrated in still another manner. In the same way that the spirit pervades all the limbs and the body, and the body is entirely subject to its control, and that the spirit is indivisible, while the body is divisible, so also in relation to God, all that exists, springs from him, all creatures exist by his word, and in all possible things his operations are seen, yet still he is not related to place, nor does he reason about anything, and he is free from relation or affinity to any quality of bodies or to quantity.
  This topic of exemption and freedom, beloved, cannot be perfectly explained, until the mystery about the soul shall have been developed. The law, however, gives no permission to develop this secret, and it is not lawful to stretch out one's hand to do what the legislator forbids. But the language of his excellency the glory of the world,1 "God created man in his own image," cannot be explained [47] until die mystery about the nature of the soul or spirit has been explained.

1.02 - Pranayama, Mantrayoga, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
  4. Aum shivaya vashi; three trochees. Note that "shi" means rest, the Absolute or male aspect of the Deity; "va" is energy, the manifested or female side of the Deity. This Mantra therefore expresses the whole course of the Universe, from Zero through the finite back to Zero.
  IV.

1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
  of the infinite. We cannot think of the Absolute Infinite, but
  we can think of the infinite sky.
  --
  Sutra is cfcf: hTUT II hh II "Pratyahara results in the Absolute
  control of the sense organs. Swami Vivekananda has not commented

1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  24:It is nothing less that is meant in the end when we speak of the Absolute consecration of the individual to the Divine. But this total fullness of consecration can only come by a constant progression when the long and difficult process of transforming desire out of existence is completed in an ungrudging measure. Perfect self-consecration implies perfect self-surrender.
  25:For here, there are two movements with a transitional stage between them, two periods of this Yoga, -- one of the process of surrender, the other of its crown and consequence. In the first the individual prepares himself for the reception o? the Divine into his members. For all this first period he has to work by means of the instruments of the lower Nature, but aided more and more from above. But in the later transitional stage of this movement our personal and necessarily ignorant effort more and more dwindles and a higher Nature acts; the eternal shakti descends into this limited form of mortality and progressively possesses and transmutes it. In the second period the greater movement wholly replaces the lesser, formerly indispensable first action; but this can be done only when our self-surrender is complete. The ego person in us cannot transform itself by its own force or will or knowledge or by any virtue of its own into the nature of the Divine; all it can do is to fit itself for the transformation and make more and more its surrender to that which it seeks to become. As long as the ego is at work in us, our personal action is and must always be in its nature a part of the lower grades of existence; it is obscure or half-enlightened, limited in its field, very partially effective in its power. If a spiritual transformation, not a mere illumining modification of our nature, is to be done at all, we must call in the Divine shakti to effect that miraculous work in the individual; for she alone has the needed force, decisive, all-wise and illimitable. But the entire substitution of the divine for the human personal action is not at once entirely possible. All interference from below that would falsify the truth of the superior action must first be inhibited or rendered impotent, and it must be done by our own free choice. A continual and always repeated refusal of the impulsions and falsehoods of the lower nature is asked from us and an insistent support to the Truth as it grows in our parts: for the progressive settling into our nature and final perfection of the incoming informing Light, Purity and Power needs for its development and sustenance our free acceptance of it and our stubborn rejection of all that is contrary to it, inferior or incompatible.

1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  They found and held it with enthusiasm in the discoveries of physical Science. The triumphant domination, the all-shattering and irresistible victory of Science in nineteenth-century Europe is explained by the Absolute perfection with which it at least seemed for a time to satisfy these great psychological wants of the Western mind. Science seemed to it to fulfil impeccably its search for the two supreme desiderata of an individualistic age. Here at last was a truth of things which depended on no doubtful Scripture or fallible human authority but which Mother Nature herself had written in her eternal book for all to read who had patience to observe and intellectual honesty to judge. Here were laws, principles, fundamental facts of the world and of our being which all could verify at once for themselves and which must therefore satisfy and guide the free individual judgment, delivering it equally from alien compulsion and from erratic self-will. Here were laws and truths which justified and yet controlled the claims and desires of the individual human being; here a science which provided a standard, a norm of knowledge, a rational basis for life, a clear outline and sovereign means for the progress and perfection of the individual and the race. The attempt to govern and organise human life by verifiable Science, by a law, a truth of things, an order and principles which all can observe and verify in their ground and fact and to which therefore all may freely and must rationally subscribe, is the culminating movement of European civilisation. It has been the fulfilment and triumph of the individualistic age of human society; it has seemed likely also to be its end, the cause of the death of individualism and its putting away and burial among the monuments of the past.
  For this discovery by individual free-thought of universal laws of which the individual is almost a by-product and by which he must necessarily be governed, this attempt actually to govern the social life of humanity in conscious accordance with the mechanism of these laws seems to lead logically to the suppression of that very individual freedom which made the discovery and the attempt at all possible. In seeking the truth and law of his own being the individual seems to have discovered a truth and law which is not of his own individual being at all, but of the collectivity, the pack, the hive, the mass. The result to which this points and to which it still seems irresistibly to be driving us is a new ordering of society by a rigid economic or governmental Socialism in which the individual, deprived again of his freedom in his own interest and that of humanity, must have his whole life and action determined for him at every step and in every point from birth to old age by the well-ordered mechanism of the State.1 We might then have a curious new version, with very important differences, of the old Asiatic or even of the old Indian order of society. In place of the religio-ethical sanction there will be a scientific and rational or naturalistic motive and rule; instead of the Brahmin Shastrakara the scientific, administrative and economic expert. In the place of the King himself observing the law and compelling with the aid and consent of the society all to tread without deviation the line marked out for them, the line of the Dharma, there will stand the collectivist State similarly guided and empowered. Instead of a hierarchical arrangement of classes each with its powers, privileges and duties there will be established an initial equality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps with a subsequent determination of function by experts who shall know us better than ourselves and choose for us our work and quality. Marriage, generation and the education of the child may be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the Shastra. For each man there will be a long stage of work for the State superintended by collectivist authorities and perhaps in the end a period of liberation, not for action but for enjoyment of leisure and personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprastha and Sannyasa Asramas of the old Aryan society. The rigidity of such a social state would greatly surpass that of its Asiatic forerunner; for there at least there were for the rebel, the innovator two important concessions. There was for the individual the freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation of the social for the free spiritual life, and there was for the group the liberty to form a sub-society governed by new conceptions like the Sikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departures from the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic and rigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too, there would grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom and a body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowed to question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, since that would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thus we should have a new typal order based upon purely economic capacity and function, guakarma, and rapidly petrifying by the inhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalistic conventions. And quite certainly this static order would at long last be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led probably by the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism.

1.02 - The Eternal Law, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  gods is also, at the same time, the country of a monolithic faith in Oneness: "One, He presides over all wombs and natures; Himself the womb of all." (Swetaswatara Upanishad V.5) But not everyone can at once merge with the Absolute; there are many degrees in the Ascent,
  and one who is ready to understand a little Lalita's childlike face and to bring her his incense and flowers may not be able to address the Eternal Mother in the silence of his heart; still another may prefer to deny all forms and plunge into the contemplation of That which is formless. "Even as men come to Me, so I accept them. It is my path that men follow from all sides," says the Bhagavad Gita (IV,11). 14 As we see, there are so many ways of conceiving of God, in three or three million persons, that we should not dogmatize, lest we eliminate everything, finally leaving nothing but a Cartesian God, one and universal by virtue only of his narrowness. Perhaps we still confuse unity with uniformity. It was in the spirit of that tradition that Sri Aurobindo was soon to write: The perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation.15

1.02 - The Great Process, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Yet the process, the Great Process, is here, just as it began as long ago as the Pleistocene era that idle little second, that introspection of the second kind but the movement revealed to the monkey and the movement revealed to the spiritualist of ages past (and surpassed) are in no way an indication of the next direction it is to take. There is no continuity that is a delusion! There is no refinement of the same movement, no improving upon the ape or man, no perfecting of the stone tool or the mental tool, no climbing higher peaks, no thinking loftier thoughts, no deeper meditations or discoveries that would be a glorification of the existing state, a sublimation of the old flesh, a sublime halo around the old beast there is SOMETHING ELSE, something radically different, a new threshold to cross, as different from ours as the threshold of plant life was from the animal, another discovery of the already-here, which will change our world as drastically as the human look changed the world of the caterpillar yet it is the same world, but seen with two different looks another Spirit, we might say, as different from the religious or intellectual spirit or the great naked Spirit on the heights of the Absolute, as man's thought is different from the first quivering of a wild rose under a ray of sunlight yet it is the same eternal Spirit but in a greater concretization of itself, for, in fact, the Spirit's true direction is not from the bottom up, but from the top down, and it becomes ever more in matter, because it is the world's very Matter, wrested bit by bit from our false caterpillar look and false human look and false spiritual look or, let us say, recognized little by little by our growing true look. This new threshold of vision depends first on a pause in our regular mental and visual routine and that is the Great Process, the movement of introspection of the second kind but the path is entirely new: this is a new life on earth, another discovery to make; and the less weighed down we are by past wisdom, past ascents, past illuminations, all the disciplines and virtues and old gilded frills of the Spirit, the freer we are and more open to the new, the more the path shall spring up under our feet, as if by magic, as if it sprang from that total desecration.
  This superman, whom we have said is the next goal of evolution, will therefore in no way be a paroxysm of man, a gilded hypertrophy of the mental capacity, nor will he be a spiritual paroxysm, a sort of demigod appearing in a halo of light and outfitted with an oversized consciousness (cosmic, of course) streaked with bolts of lightning, marvelous phenomena and Experiences that would make the poor laggards of evolution pale with envy. It is true that both things are possible, both exist. There are marvelous Experiences; there are superhuman capacities that would make the man in the street turn pale. It is not a myth; it is a fact. But Truth, as always, is simple. The difficulty does not lie in discovering the new path; it lies in clearing away what blocks the view. The path is new, completely new; it has never been seen before by human eyes, never been trodden before by the athletes of the Spirit, yet it is walked every day by millions of ordinary men unaware of the treasure at hand.

1.02 - The Magic Circle, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
  The books dealing with the construction of the magic circle clearly state that during the act of invocation the magician must not leave the circle, which, in its magic sense, means nothing else but that the consciousness of, or contact with, the Absolute, (i. e. the macrocosm), must not be interrupted. Needless to say that the magician, during his magic operation with the help of a magic circle and with the being standing in front of him, must not step out of the circle with his physical body, unless he has finished his experiment and dismissed the relevant being.
  All this clearly shows that a true magic circle is really the best means to practice ceremonial magic. The magician will always find that the magic circle is, in every respect, the highest symbol in his hand.

1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
  Mahayana Buddhism teaches these same metaphysical doctrines in terms of the Three Bodies of Buddha the Absolute Dharmakaya, known also as the Primordial Buddha, or Mind, or the Clear Light of the Void; the Sambhogakaya, corresponding to Isvara or the personal God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and finally the Nirmanakaya, the material body, in which the Logos is incarnated upon earth as a living, historical Buddha.
  Among the Sufis, Al Haqq, the Real, seems to be thought of as the abyss of Godhead underlying the personal Allah, while the Prophet is taken out of history and regarded as the incarnation of the Logos.
  --
  Like St. Augustine, Eckhart was to some extent the victim of his own literary talents. Le style cest Ihomme. No doubt. But the converse is also partly true. Lhomme cest le style. Because we have a gift for writing in a certain way, we find ourselves, in some sort, becoming our way of writing. We mould ourselves in the likeness of our particular brand of eloquence. Eckhart was one of the inventors of German prose, and he was tempted by his new-found mastery of forceful expression to commit himself to extreme positionsto be doctrinally the image of his powerful and over-emphatic sentences. A statement like the foregoing would lead one to believe that he despised what the Vedantists call the lower knowledge of Brahman, not as the Absolute Ground of all things, but as the personal God. In reality he, like the Vedantists, accepts the lower knowledge as genuine knowledge and regards devotion to the personal God as the best preparation for the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. Another point to remember is that the attri buteless Godhead of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Christian and Sufi mysticism is the Ground of all the qualities possessed by the personal God and the Incarnation. God is not good, I am good, says Eckhart in his violent and excessive way. What he really meant was, I am just humanly good; God is supereminently good; the Godhead is, and his isness (istigkeit, in Eckharts German) contains goodness, love, wisdom and all the rest in their essence and principle. In consequence, the Godhead is never, for the exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, the mere Absolute of academic metaphysics, but something more purely perfect, more reverently to be adored than even the personal God or his human incarnationa Being towards whom it is possible to feel the most intense devotion and in relation to whom it is necessary (if one is to come to that unitive knowledge which is mans final end) to practise a discipline more arduous and unremitting than any imposed by ecclesiastical authority.
  There is a distinction and differentiation, according to our reason, between God and the Godhead, between action and rest. The fruitful nature of the Persons ever worketh in a living differentiation. But the simple Being of God, according to the nature thereof, is an eternal Rest of God and of all created things.
  --
  What Eckhart describes as the pure One, the Absolute not-God in whom we must sink from nothingness to nothingness is called in Mahayana Buddhism the Clear Light of the Void. What follows is part of a formula addressed by the Tibetan priest to a person in the act of death.
  O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state (the intermediate state immediately following death, in which the soul is judgedor rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character formed during its life on earth, what sort of an after-life it shall have). In this Bardo state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or centre. At this moment know thou thyself and abide in that state. I too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.
  --
  Going back further into the past, we find in one of the earliest Upanishads the classical description of the Absolute One as a Super-Essential No-Thing.
  The significance of Brahman is expressed by neti neti (not so, not so); for beyond this, that you say it is not so, there is nothing further. Its name, however, is the Reality of reality. That is to say, the senses are real, and the Brahman is their Reality.
  --
  In other words, there is a hierarchy of the real. The manifold world of our everyday experience is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality has its being within and because of the Absolute Reality, which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it.
  The extract which follows next is of great historical significance, since it was mainly through the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names of the fifth-century author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite that mediaeval Christendom established contact with Neoplatonism and thus, at several removes, with the metaphysical thought and discipline of India. In the ninth century Scotus Erigena translated the two books into Latin and from that time forth their influence upon the philosophical speculations and the religious life of the West was wide, deep and beneficent. It was to the authority of the Areopagite that the Christian exponents of the Perennial Philosophy appealed, whenever they were menaced (and they were always being menaced) by those whose primary interest was in ritual, legalism and ecclesiastical organization. And because Dionysius was mistakenly identified with St. Pauls first Athenian convert, his authority was regarded as all but apostolic; therefore, according to the rules of the Catholic game, the appeal to it could not lightly be dismissed, even by those to whom the books meant less than nothing. In spite of their maddening eccentricity, the men and women who followed the Dionysian path had to be tolerated. And once left free to produce the fruits of the spirit, a number of them arrived at such a conspicuous degree of sanctity that it became impossible even for the heads of the Spanish Inquisition to condemn the tree from which such fruits had sprung.

1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
  Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara.
  In the fourth Pda of the fourth chapter of his Sutras, after stating the almost infinite power and knowledge which will come to the liberated soul after the attainment of Moksha, Vysa makes the remark, in an aphorism, that none, however, will get the power of creating, ruling, and dissolving the universe, because that belongs to God alone. In explaining the Sutra it is easy for the dualistic commentators to show how it is ever impossible for a subordinate soul, Jiva, to have the infinite power and total independence of God. The thorough dualistic commentator Madhvchrya deals with this passage in his usual summary method by quoting a verse from the Varha Purna.
  --
   "The way is more difficult for those whose mind is attached to the Absolute!" Bhakti has to float on smoothly with the current of our nature. True it is that we cannot have; any idea of the Brahman which is not anthropomorphic, but is it not equally true of everything we know? The greatest psychologist the world has ever known, Bhagavan Kapila, demonstrated ages ago that human consciousness is one of the elements in the make-up of all the objects of our perception and conception, internal as well as external. Beginning with our bodies and going up to Ishvara, we may see that every object of our perception is this consciousness plus something else, whatever that may be; and this unavoidable mixture is what we ordinarily think of as reality. Indeed it is, and ever will be, all of the reality that is possible for the human mind to know. Therefore to say that Ishvara is unreal, because He is anthropomorphic, is sheer nonsense. It sounds very much like the occidentals squabble on idealism and realism, which fearful-looking quarrel has for its foundation a mere play on the word "real". The idea of Ishvara covers all the ground ever denoted and connoted by the word real, and Ishvara is as real as anything else in the universe; and after all, the word real means nothing more than what has now been pointed out. Such is our philosophical conception of Ishvara.
  (Bhagavata) "Unto them appeared Krishna with a smile on His lotus face, clad in yellow robes and having garlands on, the embodied conqueror (in beauty) of the god of love."

1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  (Magick). By Yoga is meant that rigorous system of mental and self discipline which has as its primary aim the Absolute and complete control of the thinking principle, the
  Ruach; the ultimate object being to obtain the faculty with which to still the stream of thought at will, so that
  --
  Victorians so simple, objective, and intelligible-such as matter, energy, space, etc.-have completely failed to resist analysis. A few modern thinkers, seeing clearly the Absolute debacle in which the old positivist science was bound to lead them, the breaking up of this icy expanse of frozen thought, determined at all costs to find a modus vivendi for
  Athena. This necessity was emphasized in the most surprising way by the result of the Michelson-Morley experiments, when Physics itself calmly and frankly offered a contradiction in terms. It was not the metaphysicians this time who were picking holes in a vacuum. It was the mathematicians and the physicists who found the ground completely cut away from under their feet. It was not enough to replace the geometry of Euclid by those of Riemann and Lobatchevsky and the mechanics of Newton by those of Einstein, so long as any of the axioms of the old thought and the definitions of its terms survived. They deliberately abandoned positivism and materialism for an indeterminate mysticism, creating a new mathematical philosophy and a new logic, wherein infinite-or rather transfinite-ideas might be made commensurable with those of ordinary thought in the forlorn hope that all might live happily ever after. In short, to use a Qabalistic nomenclature, they found it incumbent upon themselves to adopt for inclusion of terms of Ruach (intellect) concepts which are proper only to Neschamah (the organ and faculty of direct spiritual apperception and intuition). This same process took place in Philosophy years earlier. Had the dialectic of Hegel been only. half understood, the major portion of philosophical speculation from the Schoolmen to

1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
  Once the student has found the beginnings of spiritual vision by means of such exercises, he may proceed to the contemplation of man himself. Simple phenomena of human life must first be chosen. But before making any attempt in this direction it is imperative for the student to strive for the Absolute purity of his moral character. He must banish all through of ever using knowledge gained in this way for his own personal benefit. He must be convinced that he would never, under any circumstances, avail himself in an evil sense of any power he may gain over his fellow-creatures. For this reason, all who seek to discover through personal vision the secrets in
   p. 69

1.02 - What is Psycho therapy?, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  common work. In my experience the Absolute period of cure is not
  shortened by too many sittings. It lasts a fair time in all cases requiring

1.031 - Intense Aspiration, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  Therefore, we should block the avenues of the distraction of energy the channelising of it in various ways, in an unwanted manner and then conserve it so that this centralised force within us, which is the conserved energy, will give such a push to the aspiration within that the soul will rush to the Absolute like a bullet that has been fired by a gun. That kind of aspiration is referred to in this sutra of Patanjali tvra savegnm sanna.

1.032 - Our Concept of God, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  The extent of our love of God, the intensity of our feeling for God, will depend upon our idea of God, our concept of God. There are various concepts of the Creator, of God, the Absolute, etc., according to the various philosophical theories, doctrines, and religious traditions. One of the primitive forms of conceiving God is that He is the Creator of the world. We have a childish idea of a creator. A creator is one who makes things, and God is someone who has made this world. "God made this world" is an old saying which we often repeat. God made the world and, therefore, God is the Creator of the world. God is the Father of the world and, therefore, all His children should love Him as the Supreme Parent. The idea of creatorship that is in our minds is the conditioning factor of our love towards this Creator. We have seen in this world that if someone makes something, he is the efficient or sometimes the instrumental cause of that particular thing that he has made, and the thing that he has made is an effect that is produced by him, standing outside him. God can thus be regarded as extra-cosmic, which is the usual way in which we conceive God.
  We cannot imagine God usually, normally speaking, in any other way than as someone standing outside the world. If a carpenter makes a table or a chair, we can call him the creator of the table or the chair; and the table stands outside him, so that there is no proper relationship between what he has made and his own existence. Hence, we have to cry to God in a loud tone so that our voices may reach Him in the transcendent paradise where He is seated. We have a concept of paradise in every religion. In the Hindu religion we call it Vaikuntha, or Brahmaloka, Kailasa, etc., but whatever term we use, it is a concept of heaven the highest heaven where God is seated which we have to reach. We love God as we love any other object in this world, because God Himself has become an object of the love of the individual.

1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  beginnings, which, in sum, is the obsession with the Absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For a thing to
  be well done, it must be done as it was the first time. But the first time, the thing this class of objects,

1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes, I can protect you if you have the Absolute faith and make the right choice. If you make the wrong choice I cannot protect you. You must know that this is not a simple affair at all. It is not a revolt against the British Government which anyone can easily do. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature and so one must think deeply before enrolling oneself with me.
   There will be tremendous forces that will attack you and you have constantly to go on making the right choice and giving consent to the working of the Higher Truth and thereby prove your strength. If you begin this Yoga the first result is likely to be a feverish internal commotion, Ashanti, rather than the Shanti that you are in search of. And when you come to the material plane, there especially, the odds are almost insurmountable.

1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  to the Absolute invariance of laws of Nature, which thereby
  underwrote the meaningfulness of the scientific enterprise

1.03 - .REASON. IN PHILOSOPHY, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
  highest concepts--that of Being, of the Absolute, of Goodness, of
  Truth, and of Perfection; all these things cannot have been evolved,
  --
  emptiest thing is postulated as the first thing, as the Absolute cause,
  as _ens realissimum._ Fancy humanity having to take the brain diseases

1.03 - Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of The Gita, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Even for those whose first natural movement is a consecration, a surrender and a resultant entire transformation of the thinking mind and its knowledge, or a total consecration, surrender and transformation of the heart and its emotions, the consecration of works is a needed element in that change. Otherwise, although they may find God in other-life, they will not be able to fulfil the Divine in life; life for them will be a meaningless undivine inconsequence. Not for them the true victory that shall be the key to the riddle of our terrestrial existence; their love will not be the Absolute love triumphant over self, their knowledge will not be the total consciousness and the all-embracing knowledge. It is possible, indeed, to begin with knowledge or Godward emotion solely or with both together and to leave works for the final movement of the Yoga. But there is then this disadvantage that we may tend to live too exclusively within, subtilised in subjective experience, shut off in our isolated inner parts; there we may get incrusted in our spiritual seclusion and find it difficult later on to pour ourselves triumphantly outwards and apply to life our gains in the higher Nature. When we turn to add this external kingdom also to our inner conquests, we shall find ourselves too much accustomed to an activity purely subjective and ineffective on the material plane. There will be an immense difficulty in transforming the outer life and the body.
  Or we shall find that our action does not correspond with the inner light: it still follows the old accustomed mistaken paths, still obeys the old normal imperfect influences; the Truth within us continues to be separated by a painful gulf from the ignorant mechanism of our external nature. This is a frequent experience because in such a process the Light and Power come to be selfcontained and unwilling to express themselves in life or to use the physical means prescribed for the Earth and her processes.
  --
  The test it lays down is an absolute equality of the mind and the heart to all results, to all reactions, to all happenings. If good fortune and ill fortune, if respect and insult, if reputation and obloquy, if victory and defeat, if pleasant event and sorrowful event leave us not only unshaken but untouched, free in the emotions, free in the nervous reactions, free in the mental view, not responding with the least disturbance or vibration in any spot of the nature, then we have the Absolute liberation to which the Gita points us, but not otherwise. The tiniest reaction is a proof that the discipline is imperfect and that some part of us accepts ignorance and bondage as its law and clings still to the old nature. Our self-conquest is only partially accomplished; it is still imperfect or unreal in some stretch or part or smallest spot of the ground of our nature. And that little pebble of imperfection may throw down the whole achievement of the Yoga!
  There are certain semblances of an equal spirit which must not be mistaken for the profound and vast spiritual equality which the Gita teaches. There is an equality of disappointed resignation, an equality of pride, an equality of hardness and indifference: all these are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher level, the equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resignation or a sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first approaches they can be, but they are at most early soul-phases only or imperfect mental preparations for our entry into the true and absolute self-existent wide evenness of the spirit.

1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
  savor of the Absolute. Even more, everything is animated with a
  flow of Presence and of Love the spirit which, emanating from

1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
  La Histoire de la Magie as follows : " the Absolute hiero- glyphical science had for its basis an alphabet of which all the gods were letters, all the letters ideas, all the ideas numbers, and all the numbers perfect signs. This hiero- glyphical alphabet, of which Moses made the great secret of his Cabalah, is the famous book of Thoth ".
  The leaves of this "famous book " are also called the
  --
  It is the Absolute or the Unknowable of the Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer ; the thrice-great Darkness of the
  Egyptian sacerdotal caste ; and the Chinese Tao which
  --
  Doctrine, recognizes the difficulty, and endeavours to solve the problem by stating that the Absolute (Ain) while incomprehensible in itself, has several aspects from which we can view it - Infinite Space, Eternal Duration, and
  Absolute Motion. The latter aspect is graphically con- ceived under the Hindu expression of the Great Breath of
  --
   manifestation commences with the appearance of a laya or neutral centre which we call Keser. This cyclic or periodic law of cosmic manifestation cannot be anything other than the Will of the Absolute to manifest. In which case, we are necessitated, in all accuracy, to fall back on to the old postulate that the Absolute manifests the laya point or
  Keser from which, eventually, all is to evolve.
  --
  Orange - derived from the Red of Geburah and the Yellow of Tipharas ; its Yetsiratic title being " the Absolute or
  Perfect Intelligence ", The Tarot attri butions are the four

1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  The idea of the relative excludes every antecedent which does not itself contain at least some virtual element of relativity. Between the Absolute and the relative there can be no point of origin, kinship or dependence. They affirm each other, no doubt, like all contraries, but they can exist only by a mutual exclusion.
  We can say that something there is beyond all conditioning by origin, causality or concomitance, something absolute, infinite and eternal for which there can be no relativity either of Time or of Space. It is this precisely which, because it is alien to all the categories of mind, constitutes for us the unknowable.
  We can say also that this Unknowable is indispensable to the very existence of all that is and that the relative only is because of the Absolute, the finite because of the infinite, the ephemeral because of the eternal, without these unknowable realities being therefore the cause or the origin of the relative.
  That which is unknowable cannot have any knowable relation with that which is real to our thought. That which is absolute cannot be conceived as the cause of the relative. The relative has no origin but itself. When, therefore, we seek to derive the first principles of being from something more absolute, we give to this word, Absolute, no more than a negative significance. It marks for us the limit of thought, where the transcendencies of the relative can no longer be discerned and escape entirely from the grasp of the mind.
  --
  That which is absolute, infinite, eternal, has never ceased to be eternal, infinite and absolute. Behind every relative reality, in it, yet at the same time outside its relativities, we find all the Absolute, all that is infinite, all that is eternal, all that is unknowable.
  There is then an inverse side of the world, a Reality without beginning or end, without change or limit, in relation to which everything other than it is illusory, even as it is itself, for all that is other than it, unthinkable.

1.04 - ADVICE TO HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
  Now and then he would say: "O Mother, Thou art verily Brahman, and Thou art verily akti. Thou art Purusha and Thou art Prakriti. Thou art Virat. Thou art the Absolute, and Thou dost manifest Thyself as the Relative. Thou art verily the twenty-four cosmic principles."
  In the mean time the morning service had begun in the temples of Kli and Radhakanta.
  --
  Praising Sri Krishna, Arjuna said, 'Thou art Brahman Absolute.' Sri Krishna replied, 'Follow Me, and you will know whether or not I am Brahman Absolute.' So saying, Sri Krishna led Arjuna to a certain place and asked him what he saw there. 'I see a huge tree,' said Arjuna, 'and on it I notice fruits hanging like clusters of blackberries.' Then Krishna said to Arjuna, 'Come nearer and you will find that these are not clusters of blackberries, but clusters of innumerable Krishnas like Me, hanging from the tree.' In other words, Divine Incarnations without number appear and disappear on the tree of the Absolute Brahman.
  "Kavirdas was strongly inclined to the formless God. At the mention of Krishna's name he would say: 'Why should I worship Him? The gopis would clap their hands while He performed a monkey dance.' (With a smile) But I accept God with form when I am in the company of people who believe in that ideal, and I also agree with those who believe in the formless God."

1.04 - Nada Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
  17. It becomes absorbed in Brahman or the Absolute. You will then attain the Seat of Eternal Bliss.
  THUS ENDS NADA YOGA

1.04 - Reality Omnipresent, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  6:But, still, there is the Absolute withdrawal, there is the NonBeing. Out of the Non-Being, says the ancient Scripture, Being appeared.2 Then into the Non-Being it must surely sink again. If the infinite indiscriminate Existence permits all possibilities of discrimination and multiple realisation, does not the NonBeing at least, as primal state and sole constant reality, negate and reject all possibility of a real universe? The Nihil of certain Buddhist schools would then be the true ascetic solution; the Self, like the ego, would be only an ideative formation by an illusory phenomenal consciousness.
  7:But again we find that we are being misled by words, deceived by the trenchant oppositions of our limited mentality with its fond reliance on verbal distinctions as if they perfectly represented ultimate truths and its rendering of our supramental experiences in the sense of those intolerant distinctions. NonBeing is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception. We erect a fiction of nothingness in order to overpass, by the method of total exclusion, all that we can know and consciously are. Actually when we examine closely the Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions, but is in fact the only true Existence.3
  --
  10:When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual mind which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity. We affirm the One and Identical by passionately discriminating and asserting the egoism of our own opinions and partial experiences against the opinions and partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to learn, to grow, and, since we are obliged for the sake of our self-perfection to speak of these things which no human speech can express, to search for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony.
  11:We recognise, then, that it is possible for the consciousness in the individual to enter into a state in which relative existence appears to be dissolved and even Self seems to be an inadequate conception. It is possible to pass into a Silence beyond the Silence. But this is not the whole of our ultimate experience, nor the single and all-excluding truth. For we find that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice with a desireless but effective action without. This possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness, was perhaps the real gist of the Buddha's teaching, - this superiority to ego and to the chain of personal workings and to the identification with mutable form and idea, not the petty ideal of an escape from the trouble and suffering of the physical birth. In any case, as the perfect man would combine in himself the silence and the activity, so also would the completely conscious soul reach back to the Absolute freedom of the Non-Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe. It would thus reproduce in itself perpetually the eternal miracle of the divine Existence, in the universe, yet always beyond it and even, as it were, beyond itself. The opposite experience could only be a concentration of mentality in the individual upon Non-existence with the result of an oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal Being.
  12:Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it does not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  consequence and this would in fact be true if the Absolute stasis of the state did not constitute a more
  fundamental danger. Figure 51: The Crucified Redeemer as Dragon of Chaos and Transformation 430
  --
  The constant transcendence of the future continually serves to destroy the Absolute sufficiency of all
  previous historically-determined systems, and ensures that the path defined by the revolutionary hero
  --
  The true absolute in the individual, which can meet the Absolute unknown, is the heroic aspect, which
  cannot be made finally subject to tyranny and is not ruled by the past. This is the spirit that created

1.04 - The Core of the Teaching, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  And so long as these positions are accepted, the duty remains clear, a practical matter of course even when it is not a point of honour or affection, and overrides the Absolute religious or moral law. But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyer is awakened to the Absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judge becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that
  The Core of the Teaching

1.04 - The Crossing of the First Threshold, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
  ment) which shatters the illusory realities of the world. the Absolute, or Adi
  Buddha, is represented in the images of Tibet as Vajra-Dhara (Tibetan: DorjeChang) "Holder of the Adamantine Bolt."

1.04 - The Praise, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
  Worlds designates the Absolute Body (Dharmakaya),
  - 98 -
  --
  from the dynamics of the Absolute Body.
  Stanza 2
  --
  of the Absolute Body.
  - 107-
  --
  of the Absolute Body. The deity and her mantra are
  truly inseparable. The mantra OM TARE TUTTARE TURE

1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  However, in the Absoluteness of the God of Gods there
  is also the opposite side, the terrible dark side completing

1.052 - Yoga Practice - A Series of Positive Steps, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
  In the Vedanta Shastras and yoga scriptures we are told that there are at least three types of self: the external, the personal and the Absolute. We are not concerned here with the Absolute Self. This is not the Self that we are going to restrain. It is, on the other hand, the Self that we are going to realise. That is the goal the Absolute Self which is unrelated to any other factor or condition, which stands on its own right and which is called the Infinite, the Eternal, and so on. But the self that is to be restrained is that peculiar feature in consciousness which will not fulfil the conditions of absoluteness at any time. It is always relative. It is the relative self that is to be subjected to restraint for the sake of the realisation of the Absolute Self. The aim of life is the Absolute, and not the relative. The experience of the relative, the attachment of the mind in respect of the relative, and the exclusive emphasis on the importance of relativity in things is the obstructing factor in ones enterprise towards the realisation of the Absolute Self.
  The external self is that atmosphere that we create around us which we regard as part of our life and to which we get attached in some manner or the other. This is also a self. A family is a self, for example, to mention a small instance. The head of the family regards the family as his own self, though it is not true that the family is his self. He has got an attachment to the members of the family. The attachment is a movement of his own consciousness in respect of those objects around him known as the members of the family. This permeating of his consciousness around that atmosphere known as the family creates a false, externalised self in his experience. This social self, we may call it, is the external self, inasmuch as this externalised, social self is not the real Self. Because it is conditioned by certain factors which are subject to change, it has to be restrained. That is one of the necessities of self-restraint.
  --
  The third step of self is the Absolute, as I mentioned, which is the goal of the practice of yoga and the goal of life itself. Self-restraint is, therefore, the limitation of the false self to the minimum of self-affirmation. Here, again, one has to exercise caution. We should not mortify this self too much. We cannot whip it beyond the prescribed limit; otherwise, it will revolt. Though it is true that false relationships have to be overcome by wisdom, philosophical analysis, etc., this achievement cannot be successful at one stroke, because even a false relationship appears to be a real relationship when it has got identified with consciousness. That is why there is so much intensity and so much attachment so much significance is seen in that relationship. There is nothing unreal in this world as long as it has become part of our experience. It becomes unreal only when we are in a different state of experience and we compare the earlier state with it and then make a judgement about it.
  Inasmuch as our external relationships which constitute the outward form of the relative self have become part and parcel of our experience, they are inseparable from our consciousness. It requires a careful peeling out of these layers of self by very intelligent means. The lowest attachment, or the least of attachments, should be tackled first. The intense attachments should not be tackled in the beginning. We have many types of attachment there may be fifty, sixty, a hundred but all of them are not of the same intensity. There are certain vital spots in us which cannot be touched. They are very vehement, and it is better not to touch them in the beginning. But there are some milder aspects which can be tackled first, and the gradation of these attachments should be understood properly. How many attachments are there, and how many affections? What are the loves that are harassing the mind and causing agony? Make a list of them privately in your own diary, if you like. They say Swami Rama Tirtha used to do that. He would make a list of all the desires and find out how many of them had been fulfilled: What is the condition? Where am I standing? and so on. This is a kind of spiritual diary that you can create for yourself: How many loves are there which are troubling me? How many things do I like in this world?
  --
  These are various silly things which come in the way of our yoga practice because the extent of trouble that they can create will come to our notice only when we actually touch them, or interfere with them, or try to avoid them. As long as we are friendly with things, they also look friendly, but when we try to avoid them, we will see their reactions are of a different type altogether. It is very necessary to use tact even in avoiding the unnecessary things; otherwise, there can be a resentment on the part of those things. This is the philosophy of moderation the via media and the golden mean of philosophy and yoga where the self that is redundant, external and related has to be made subservient to the ultimate goal which is the Absolute Self.
  The social self is easier to control than the personal self, known as the bodily self. We cannot easily control our body, because that has a greater intimacy with our pure state or consciousness than the intimacy that is exhibited by external relations like family members, etc. We may for a few days forget the existence of the members of the family, but we cannot forget for a few days that we have a body; that is a greater difficulty. So, the withdrawal of consciousness from attachment has to be done by degrees, as I mentioned, and the problems have to be gradually thinned out by the coming back of consciousness from its external relationships, stage by stage, taking every step with fixity so that it may not be retraced, and missing not a single link in this chain of steps taken. We should not take jumps in this practice of self-restraint, because every little item is an important item and one single link that we missed may create trouble one day. There may be small desires which do not look very big or troublesome, but they can become troublesome if they are completely ignored, because there is nothing in this world which can be regarded as wholly unimportant. Everything has some importance or the other; and if the time comes, it can help us, or it can trouble us.

1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  subject, not only a cerebral function but the Absolute condition of
  consciousness itself.

1.05 - The Creative Principle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  Whether we consider the creator to be immanent or transcendent, alien to the world or one with it, whether we confound the idea of God with that of the universe, as in Pantheism, or identify the universe with the thought of God, as in Idealism, the question of the creator remains that of the creation itself. And the problem remains the same, whether it be of a first Being or of a first Thing. How could this being, if it is relative, rise out of the Absolute? And how if it is absolute, could it create the relative? Can the Absolute create anything that does not already exist? And if anything in the Absolute can create itself other than it is, how in so creating itself does it become the relative? Or more simply, how, by what mystery of evolution does it become?
  ***
  Absolute, relative, these words return with an indefatigable monotony at the term of each view of the problem. For the problem, in whatever aspect we may envisage it, is precisely that of the relations between the Absolute and the relative. It cannot then be resolved by the simple affirmation of the eternal Being or of the eternal substance which are postulated by the various theories. It is not in the Absolute alone, under the form of person or thing, that we must seek for the principle of the relative, but in a sort of relation between the two, between that which is, if we may use the expression, most absolute in the relative and that which is most relative in the Absolute. This relation cannot, indeed, be one of dependence or causality. But nothing prevents us from conceiving it as allowing the pure spontaneities of the relative to find in the Absolute realities their own possible conditions or, if you prefer, the pure possibilities of the Absolute to realise themselves as relative. Why should not the Absolute have the power of forgetting itself in the relative?
  These two abstract terms, which appear to us so irreducible, are in fact exclusive only from one point of view, that of our own relative conceptions. There can be no exclusion in the Absolute. And here appears as something essentially distinctive and specific that character of exclusive affirmation which is assumed by the very principle of existence.
  But if we must attribute this form of relative affirmation to some power of primary activity and of creation, we may at least discover a preliminary and fundamental antecedent in the affirmation, also creative, of the Absolute itself in which all is included.
  If this Absolute escapes our thought, it is because all our contradictories become indistinguishable in its identity. It is indivisible and indiscernable unity. And nevertheless it discerns in this very unity the infinite multiplicity. It is the non-manifest which manifests itself to itself. And in its eternal objectivisation at once conscient and substantial is contained the foundation of the principle of distinction, determination, differentiation, without which things and the idea of things could not be.
  In order that from their absolute creation relative creations should come into existence, it suffices that to this principle of differentiation there should be added the principle of exclusive affirmation imposing as an absolute relativity that which was only a relative determination in the Absolute; or, rather, it is sufficient that from the infinity of being that which is to be the finite existence should exclude itself, should cut itself off by self-limitation.
  ***
  --
  The philosophical theories are therefore right, both those which place in the universe itself its immanent cause and those which seek its cause outside it in some transcendent beyond. And when their respective affirmations oppose and exclude each other, in that very opposition, unknown to them, lies the secret for which they seek. For if the wherefore of things is founded on the decree of the Eternity which includes them all, it resides also in the law of mutual exclusion which they impose on themselves. Participating in the infinite possibilities of the Being, they draw from its essence their power of becoming and from its pure liberty the bond of their future determinisms. Being, they make themselves. Children of the Uncreated, they create themselves, give birth to themselves, bring themselves into the world. From the play of the Absolute they pass into that which every relativity plays for itself. And their initial principle becomes by their own initiative that which affirms and manifests itself in every being, which becomes conscious in every ego as the desire to exist for oneself.
  A thing in itself and a desire to exist for oneself, a cause without cause, eternal and incognizable, mother of beings and things, and the spontaneity of an effort evolving things towards being, is not this the double origin absolute and relative, the double reason for existence of all that is, the creative principle of the worlds?

WORDNET














IN WEBGEN [10000/52]

Wikipedia - Ajativada -- The Absolute is not subject to birth, change and death
Wikipedia - Local Tate duality -- Duality for Galois modules for the absolute Galois group of a non-archimedean local field
Wikipedia - Paramatman -- The Absolute Atman, or supreme Self, in various philosophies
Wikipedia - The Absolute (novel) -- Animorphs series book by K. A. Applegate
Wikipedia - The Absolute Sound -- High-end home audio magazine
Wikipedia - The Absolute
Wikipedia - The absolute
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Kheper - The_Absolute_Reality -- 5
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https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Cult_of_the_Absolute
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/The_Absolute
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https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Absolute_and_Star_Trek
https://ninjago.fandom.com/wiki/The_Absolute_Worst
https://ninjago.fandom.com/wiki/The_Absolute_Worst/Transcript
https://riseoftheguardians.fandom.com/wiki/William_the_Absolute_Youngest
https://tales-of-the-rays.fandom.com/wiki/The_Absolute_Winner
https://ultra.fandom.com/wiki/Ultra_Galaxy_Fight:_The_Absolute_Conspiracy
Mieruko-chan -- -- Passione -- ? eps -- Manga -- Comedy Horror Supernatural -- Mieruko-chan Mieruko-chan -- Miko is a typical high school student whose life turns upside down when she suddenly starts to see gruesome and hideous monsters. Despite being completely terrified, Miko carries on with her daily life, pretending not to notice the horrors that surround her. She must endure the fear in order to keep herself and her friend Hana out of danger, even if that means coming face to face with the absolute worst. Blending both comedy and horror, Mieruko-chan tells the story of a girl who tries to deal with the paranormal by acting indifferent toward it. -- -- TV - ??? ??, 2021 -- 12,421 N/ABetterman -- -- Sunrise -- 26 eps -- Original -- Action Adventure Psychological Comedy Mecha Drama Horror Mystery Sci-Fi -- Betterman Betterman -- A deadly virus known as "Algernon" has attacked humanity with vicious meaning. At the forefront of the battle is the mystifying Akamatsu Industries—disguised as a heavy machine factory in Tokyo, this undercover organization uses neural enhanced weapons known as NeuroNoids to battle Algernon. Also helping with their secret efforts is the mysterious mutant who is only known as "Betterman." -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment, Sentai Filmworks -- 12,269 6.59
Mieruko-chan -- -- Passione -- ? eps -- Manga -- Comedy Horror Supernatural -- Mieruko-chan Mieruko-chan -- Miko is a typical high school student whose life turns upside down when she suddenly starts to see gruesome and hideous monsters. Despite being completely terrified, Miko carries on with her daily life, pretending not to notice the horrors that surround her. She must endure the fear in order to keep herself and her friend Hana out of danger, even if that means coming face to face with the absolute worst. Blending both comedy and horror, Mieruko-chan tells the story of a girl who tries to deal with the paranormal by acting indifferent toward it. -- -- TV - ??? ??, 2021 -- 12,421 N/A -- -- Akira (Shin Anime) -- -- Sunrise -- ? eps -- Manga -- Action Military Sci-Fi Supernatural Seinen -- Akira (Shin Anime) Akira (Shin Anime) -- A new anime adaptation for Otomo's highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic cyberpunk manga series Akira. -- -- (Source: MAL News) -- - - ??? ??, ???? -- 12,362 N/A -- -- Hakuouki Hekketsuroku Episode 0 -- -- Studio Deen -- 1 ep -- Visual novel -- Action Harem Historical Supernatural Drama Samurai Vampire Josei -- Hakuouki Hekketsuroku Episode 0 Hakuouki Hekketsuroku Episode 0 -- Summary of the first season of Hakuouki Shinsengumi Kitan. Aired the week before the second season began. -- Special - Oct 3, 2010 -- 12,346 7.12
Legacy: The Absolute Best
The Absolute at Large
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
The Absolutely Very Best of Peter Combe (So Far) Recorded in Concert
The Absolute (novel)
The Day the Earth Shook The Absolute Power



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authors -- Crowley - Peterson - Borges - Wilber - Teresa - Aurobindo - Ramakrishna - Maharshi - Mother
places -- Garden - Inf. Art Gallery - Inf. Building - Inf. Library - Labyrinth - Library - School - Temple - Tower - Tower of MEM
powers -- Aspiration - Beauty - Concentration - Effort - Faith - Force - Grace - inspiration - Presence - Purity - Sincerity - surrender
difficulties -- cowardice - depres. - distract. - distress - dryness - evil - fear - forget - habits - impulse - incapacity - irritation - lost - mistakes - obscur. - problem - resist - sadness - self-deception - shame - sin - suffering
practices -- Lucid Dreaming - meditation - project - programming - Prayer - read Savitri - study
subjects -- CS - Cybernetics - Game Dev - Integral Theory - Integral Yoga - Kabbalah - Language - Philosophy - Poetry - Zen
6.01 books -- KC - ABA - Null - Savitri - SA O TAOC - SICP - The Gospel of SRK - TIC - The Library of Babel - TLD - TSOY - TTYODAS - TSZ - WOTM II
8 unsorted / add here -- Always - Everyday - Verbs


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