TERMS STARTING WITH
the Infinite ::: **A designation of the Deity or the absolute Being; God. Infinite"s. ::: *
TERMS ANYWHERE
7. Indra's Net (Yintuoluo wang fajie men): Just as with the reflective jewels at each knot of the infinitely expansive Indrajāla, any one phenomenon captures and reflects the images of all phenomena. The images of all phenomena are thus reflected infinitely in a single instant as they are redirected to, and multiplied within, all the facets of the myriad jewels that make up Indra's Net.
9. emptiness of the infinite (S. atyantasunyatā; T. mtha' las 'das pa stong pa nyid; C. bijing kong 畢竟空)
. a (anandamaya purusha) ::: "the Bliss-Self of the spirit"; the supreme and universal Soul, "the one and yet innumerable Personality, the infinite Godhead, the self-aware and self-unfolding Purusha", whose essential nature is ananda, a "transcendent Bliss, unimaginable and inexpressible by the mind and speech"; also called ananda purus.a. anandamaya sagun anandamaya saguna
Abel's test: A sufficient but not necessary criterion for the convergence of a series. A convergent series an and a bounded monotonic sequence bn imply that the infinite series a1b1 + a2b2+ ... +anbn+ . .. is convergent.
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.
Abyss [from Greek a not + byssos, bythos deep, depth] Bottomless, unfathomable; chaos, space, the watery abyss which becomes the field of manifestation or cosmos — a concept found in all mythologies. With the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians the great Deep gave birth to Ea, the All-wise, unknowable infinite deity, while in the Chaldean cosmogony Tiamat, the female principle, is the imbodiment of chaos. The Abyss or chaos was the abode of cosmic wisdom. Egyptian cosmogony speaks of Nut as the celestial abyss while Scandinavian cosmogony tells of Ginnungagap (chasm of offspring of Ginn), the infinite void or the abyss of illusion (SD 1:367).
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.
aditaye anagasah ::: blameless before the Infinite Mother. [cf. RV I.24. 1 5; 5.82.6]
Aditi ::: the indivisible conscious-force and ananda of the Supreme; the Mother; the infinite Mother of the gods; supreme Nature or infinite Consciousness.
“Aditi, the infinite Consciousness, Mother of the worlds.” The Secret of the Veda
Adityah (Adityas) ::: Solar gods, children of Infinity (sons of Aditi). [Ved.] ::: Adityasah [vocative], O Sons of the infinite Mother. [RV 7.52.1]
ADVAITA. :::One Existence; the One without a second; non-dual, absolute and indivisible unity; Monism.
People are apt to speak of the Advaita as if it were identical with Mayavada monism, just as they speak of Vedanta as if it were identical with Advaita only; that is not the case. There are several forms of Indian philosophy which base themselves upon the One Reality, but they admit also the reality of the world, the reality of the Many, the reality of the differences of the Many as well as the sameness of the One (bhedābheda). But the Many exist in the One and by the One, the differences are variations in manifestation of that which is fundamentally ever the same. This we actually see in the universal law of existence where oneness is always the basis with an endless multiplicity and difference in the oneness; as for instance there is one mankind but many kinds of man, one thing called leaf or flower, but many forms, patterns, colours of leaf and flower. Through this we can look back into one of the fundamental secrets of existence, the secret which is contained in the one reality itself. The oneness of the Infinite is not something limited, fettered to its unity; it is capable of an infinite multiplicity. The Supreme Reality is an Absolute not limited by either oneness or multiplicity but simultaneously capable of both; for both are its aspects, although the oneness is fundamental and the multiplicity depends upon the oneness.
Wide Realistic Advaita.
Again, the question whether the dimensions belong to space or to material objects arises from a false separation between these two, so that we speak of objects being in space, just as we speak of life as being in matter. We think of space as an absence of matter, as we think of darkness as an absence of light, and silence as absence of sound; and having thus created vacuums we proceed to fill them. In the view of occultism it would be nearer the truth to say that light is the absence of darkness, sound the absence of silence, and matter a form of the presence of space; and this is true in the sense that those things which appear to us most real are derived from those which seem to us most unreal, because not immediately physically perceivable. In theosophy, space is the infinite, eternal background of Being, Being itself, the ever-lasting substratum of, as well as the presence of, the universe; its apparent vacuity is due only to its lack of physical qualities to which our senses respond, and also to its perfect unity and uniformity. Space is living, incomprehensibly conscious, and hence a divinity; it is the only real world, while our manifested world born from and in it is a mayavi (illusory) one.
“Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” The Secret of the Veda
*[Agni]. Sri Aurobindo: "Agni is the leader of the sacrifice and protects it in the great journey against the powers of darkness. The knowledge and purpose of this divine Puissance can be entirely trusted; he is the friend and lover of the soul and will not betray it to evil gods. Even for the man sitting far off in the night, enveloped by the darkness of the human ignorance, this flame[Agni] is a light which, when it is perfectly kindled and in proportion as it mounts higher and higher, enlarges itself into the vast light of the Truth. Flaming upward to heaven to meet the divine Dawn, it rises through the vital or nervous mid-world and through our mental skies and enters at last the Paradise of Light, its own supreme home above where joyous for ever in the eternal Truth that is the foundation of the sempiternal Bliss the shining Immortals sit in their celestial sessions and drink the wine of the infinite beatitude.” *The Secret of the Veda
AIM. ::: To return to the truth of the Divine now clouded over by Ignorance is the soul’s aim in life.
There is only one aim to be followed, the increase of Peace, Light, Power and the growth of a new consciousness in the being. With that new consciousness the true knowledge, understanding, strength, feeling will come.
Aim of yoga ::: to find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the rest is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him, - that is, first of all to transform one’s own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one’s essential nature and, as a consequence. to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one’s active nature.
Aim of Integral yoga ::: it is the rendering in personal experience of the truth which universal Nature has hidden in herself and which she travails to discover. It is the conversion of the human soul into the divine soul and of natural life into a divine living.
ajña ::: "the Lord of Wisdom", brahman in the last of the three states symbolised by the letters of AUM, manifest behind virat. and hiran.yagarbha "in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite"; the Self (atman) supporting the deep sleep state (sus.upti) or causal (karan.a) consciousness, "a luminous status of Sleep-self, a massed consciousness which is the origin of cosmic existence". pr praj ajña-hiran ña-hiranya-virat
Al-Akhir ::: The infinitely subsequent One, to all creation.
“All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite’s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit’s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being,—an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves,—but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” The Life Divine
"All existence is existence of the one Eternal and Infinite. Ekamevadvitiyam, — there is one without a second and there can be nothing else at any time or anywhere. Even existence in Time is that, even the finite is that; for the finite is only a circumstance of the Infinite and Time is only a phase of Eternity. What we call undivine is that, for it is only a disguise of the omnipresent Divinity.” Essays Divine and Human
“All existence is existence of the one Eternal and Infinite. Ekamevadvitiyam,—there is one without a second and there can be nothing else at any time or anywhere. Even existence in Time is that, even the finite is that; for the finite is only a circumstance of the Infinite and Time is only a phase of Eternity. What we call undivine is that, for it is only a disguise of the omnipresent Divinity.” Essays Divine and Human
All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 785-86
Almost all Jewish philosophers with the exception of Gabirol, ha-Levi, and Gersonides produce proofs for the existence of God. These proofs are based primarily on principles of physics. In the case of the Western philosophers, they are Aristotelian, while in the case of the Eastern, they are a combination of Aristotelian and those of the Mutazilites. The Eastern philosophers, such as Saadia and others and also Bahya of the Western prove the existence of God indirectly, namely that the world was created and consequently there is a creator. The leading Western thinkers, such as Ibn Daud (q.v.) and Maimonides employ the Aristotelian argument from motion, even to positing hypothetically the eternity of the world. Ha-LevI considers the conception of the existence of God an intuition with which man is endowed by God Himself. Crescas, who criticized Aristotle's conception of space and the infinite, in his proof for the existence of God, proves it by positing the need of a being necessarily existent, for it is absurd to posit a world of possibles.
ana [Greek and Sanskrit] ::: a term used in October 1920 for three levels encompassing much of what was formerly called logistic ideality; applied more specifically to the highest of these levels, also termed highest representative ideality, which corresponds to full revelatory ideality and "has to deal with three movements": actualities, potentialities and the "imperatives of the infinite".
anakosa (vijnanakosha; vijnana-kosha) ::: the sheath (kosa) corresponding to vijñana, "the knowledge-sheath, the causal [karan.a] body", by living in which the human being "will be able to draw down entirely into his terrestrial existence the fullness of the infinite spiritual consciousness". vij ñana
ana loka ::: the world (loka) of vijñana, same as maharloka, "the plane of the gnosis" where "the infinite . . . is very concretely . . . the foundation from which everything finite forms itself". vij ñanam
anandaloka (anandaloka; ananda-loka; ananda loka) ::: the world anandaloka (loka) of the supreme bliss (ananda) of saccidananda, the plane of "the joy of absolute identity in innumerable oneness", where all "consciousness is of the bliss of the Infinite, all power is power of the bliss of the Infinite, all forms and activities are forms and activities of the bliss of the Infinite"; there is also "a repetition of the Ananda plane in each lower world of consciousness", but "in the lower planes not only is it reached by a sort of dissolution into it of the pure mind or the life-sense or the physical awareness, but it is, as it were, itself diluted by the dissolved form of mind, life or matter, held in the dilution and turned into a poor thinness wonderful to the lower consciousness but not comparable to its true intensities".
ananda ::: the infinite delight (ananda) of saccidananda; (in brahmadarsana) "the sense of the infinite Ananda in each thing".
anantagun.a (anantaguna; ananta guna; anantagunam) ::: "the infinite anantaguna qualities of the spirit" of which "Nature is only the power in being and the development in action"; brahman as "an Infinite teeming with innumerable qualities, properties, features"; capable of infinite qualities; same as anantagun.amaya.
ananta ::: infinite; brahman as the Infinite (short for ananta brahman). ananta ananda
anante antah ::: within the Infinite. [RV 1.130.3; 4.1.7]
ana (vijnana; vijnanam; vijnan) ::: "the large embracing consciousness . . . which takes into itself all truth and idea and object of knowledge and sees them at once in their essence, totality and parts or aspects", the "comprehensive consciousness" which is one of the four functions of active consciousness (see ajñanam), a mode of awareness that is "the original, spontaneous, true and complete view" of existence and "of which mind has only a shadow in the highest operations of the comprehensive intellect"; the faculty or plane of consciousness above buddhi or intellect, also called ideality, gnosis or supermind (although these are distinguished in the last period of the Record of Yoga as explained under the individual terms), whose instruments of knowledge and power form the vijñana catus.t.aya; the vijñana catus.t.aya itself; the psychological principle or degree of consciousness that is the basis of maharloka, the "World of the Vastness" that links the worlds of the transcendent existence, consciousness and bliss of saccidananda to the lower triloka of mind, life and matter, being itself usually considered the lowest plane of the parardha or higher hemisphere of existence. Vijñana is "the knowledge of the One and the Many, by which the Many are seen in the terms of the One, in the infinite unifying Truth, Right, Vast [satyam r.taṁ br.hat] of the divine existence". vij ñana ana ananda
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500?-428 BC) A Greek scientific philosopher who lived in Athens and associated with the distinguished men of the Periclean era. Like Parmenides he denied the existence of birth or death, seeing the two processes as a mingling and unmingling. The ultimate elements of this process are the infinite number of indivisible, imperishable particles (atoms or homoeomere), acted on and ordered by spirit or pure cosmic reason (nous, equivalent to the Hindu mahat). He openly taught the Pythagorean astronomical ideas concerning the movement and nature of the planets, moon, sun, stars, etc., and attempted to explain all phenomena by natural causes. He “firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless ether, where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned from earth” (IU 1:158).
Anaximander: (6th Cent. B.C.) With Thales and Anaximenes he formed the Milesian School of Greek Philosophy; with these and the other thinkers of the cosmological period he sought the ground of the manifold processes of nature in a single world-principle or cosmic stuff which he identified with "the Infinite". He was the first to step out of the realm of experience and ascribed to his "Infinite" the attributes of eternity, imperishability and inexhaustability. Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy; Diels, Frag. d. i Vorsokr. -- M.F.
Ancient names were always symbols or representations; thus all the names of the Eternal, the infinite and incomprehensible, are substitutes, merely names, attempts to define what is indefinable and unutterable. “The word Jehovah, if Masonry adheres to it, will ever remain as a substitute, never be identified with the lost mirific name” (IU 2:398). See also INEFFABLE NAME; LOST WORD
Anergy: The hypothesis interpreting sensations in terms of the infinite phases of negative energy, which is motion less than zero. (Montague.) -- H.H.
**Angel of the Way *Sri Aurobindo: "Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. ‘By Bhakti" says the Lord in the Gita ‘shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me." Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one"s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, [work, knowledge, love] the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover"s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
Angra-Mainyu (Avestan) The personification of evil of the later Avesta. In the Gathas, Zarathustra speaks of two spirits that Mazda created who revealed themselves as twin co-workers, constantly at war with each other — one created life, the other nonlife; one truth, the other falsehood (druj). These opposing forces that maintain the visible universe are Spenta-Mainyu and Angra-Mainyu, the root cause respectively of all good and of all evil. Angra-Mainyu being taken for Ahriman has made some scholars arrive at the conclusion that Spenta-Mainyu must also represent Ahura-Mazda. In Mazdean philosophy Ahura-Mazda is the supreme creator whereas Ahriman is a created being. In the Avesta, Angra-Mainyu is described as the fiendish Druj, the Daeva of the Daevas, the leader of the evil powers; he is all darkness and ignorance, dwelling in the infinite night.
Animan (Sanskrit) Aṇiman [from aṇu atom] Minuteness, fineness, thinness; the condition of the infinitesimal or atomic, often used in the nominative form anima. The first of the eight mahasiddhis (great powers): that of making oneself infinitesimal, or as minute as an atom in size.
“An Occultist or a philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying it with Karma-Nemesis, he will teach that nevertheless it guards the good and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes the evil-doer — aye, even to his seventh rebirth. So long, in short, as the effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in the Infinite World of harmony, has not been finally readjusted. For the only decree of Karma — an eternal and immutable decree — is absolute Harmony in the world of matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we, who reward or punish ourselves according to whether we work with, through and along with nature, abiding by the laws on which that Harmony depends, or — break them.
Apathia: (Gr. apathla, no feeling) In Epicurean (q.v.) and Stoic (q.v.) ethics: the inner equilibrium and peace of mind, freedom from emotion, that result from contemplation, for its own sake, on the ends of life. Apeiron: (Gr. apeiron) The boundless; the indeterminate; the infinite. In the philosophy of Anaximander the apeiron is the primal indeterminate matter out of which all things come to be. The apeiron appears frequently elsewhere in early Greek philosophy, notably in the dualism of the Pythagoreans, where it is opposed to the principle of the Limit (peras), or number. -- G.R.M.
Arham-ar-rahimeen ::: The One who manifests the infinite qualities of His Names with His grace.
Arich Anpin (&
Ar-Rahim ::: Ar-Rahim is the Name that brings the infinite qualities of ar-Rahman into engendered existence. In this sense, it is the ‘observation’of the potential. Ar-Rahim observes itself through the forms of existence, by guiding the conscious beings to the awareness that their lives and their essential reality are comprised of and governed by the Names.
ascaryam. ::: the marvel of the infinite Self beyond nature
ASCENT AND RETURN. ::: Once the being or its different parts begin to ascend to the planes above, any part of the being may do it, frontal or other. The samskāra that one cannot come back must be got rid of. One can have the experience of Nirvana at the summit of the mind or anywhere in those planes that are now superconscient to the mind; the mind spiritualised by the ascent into Self has the sense of laya, dissolution of itself, its thoughts, movements, samskāras into a superconscient Silence and Infinity which it is unable to grasp, - the Unknowable. But this would bring or lead to some form of Nirvana only if one makes Nirvana the goal, if one is tied to the mind and accepts its dissolution into the Infinite as one’s own dissolution or if one has not the capacity to reorganise experience on a higher than the mental plane. But otherwise what was superconscient becomes conscient, one begins to possess or else to be the instrument of the dynamis of the higher planes and there is a movement, not of liberation into Nirvana but of liberation and transformation. However high one goes one can always return, unless one has the will not to do so.
"A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
"As the eyes of the sage are opened to the light, so is his ear unsealed to receive the vibrations of the Infinite; from all the regions of the Truth there comes thrilling into him its Word which becomes the form of his thoughts.” Essays on the Gita
“As the eyes of the sage are opened to the light, so is his ear unsealed to receive the vibrations of the Infinite; from all the regions of the Truth there comes thrilling into him its Word which becomes the form of his thoughts.” Essays on the Gita
"A supramental Truth-Consciousness is at once the self-awareness of the Infinite and Eternal and a power of self-determination inherent in that self-awareness;” *The Life Divine
“A supramental Truth-Consciousness is at once the self-awareness of the Infinite and Eternal and a power of self-determination inherent in that self-awareness;” The Life Divine
asya (madhura dasya; madhuradasya; madhura-dasya) ::: dasya in the relation of madhura bhava, "passionate service to the divine Beloved", giving "that joy of mastery of the finite nature by the Infinite and of service to the Highest by which there comes freedom from the ego and the lower nature"; the condition symbolised by the madhura dasi, in which the jiva or prakr.ti is the enamoured "slave". of the isvara so that with "a passionate delight it does all he wills it to do without questioning and bears all he would have it bear, because what it bears is the burden of the beloved being". madhura-d madhura-dasya asya bh bhava ava (madhura-dasya bhava; madhura dasya bhava)
Attribute: Commonly, what is proper to a thing (Latm, ad-tribuere, to assign, to ascribe, to bestow). Loosely assimilated to a quality, a property, a characteristic, a peculiarity, a circumstance, a state, a category, a mode or an accident, though there are differences among all these terms. For example, a quality is an inherent property (the qualities of matter), while an attribute refers to the actual properties of a thing only indirectly known (the attributes of God). Another difference between attribute and quality is that the former refers to the characteristics of an infinite being, while the latter is used for the characteristics of a finite being. In metaphysics, an attribute is what is indispensable to a spiritual or material substance; or that which expresses the nature of a thing; or that without which a thing is unthinkable. As such, it implies necessarily a relation to some substance of which it is an aspect or conception. But it cannot be a substance, as it does not exist by itself. The transcendental attributes are those which belong to a being because it is a being: there are three of them, the one, the true and the good, each adding something positive to the idea of being. The word attribute has been and still is used more readily, with various implications, by substantialist systems. In the 17th century, for example, it denoted the actual manifestations of substance. [Thus, Descartes regarded extension and thought as the two ultimate, simple and original attributes of reality, all else being modifications of them. With Spinoza, extension and thought became the only known attributes of Deity, each expressing in a definite manner, though not exclusively, the infinite essence of God as the only substance. The change in the meaning of substance after Hume and Kant is best illustrated by this quotation from Whitehead: "We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions and within actual occasions" (Process and Reality, p. 471).] The use of the notion of attribute, however, is still favoured by contemporary thinkers. Thus, John Boodin speaks of the five attributes of reality, namely: Energy (source of activity), Space (extension), Time (change), Consciousness (active awareness), and Form (organization, structure). In theodicy, the term attribute is used for the essential characteristics of God. The divine attributes are the various aspects under which God is viewed, each being treated as a separate perfection. As God is free from composition, we know him only in a mediate and synthetic way thrgugh his attributes. In logic, an attribute is that which is predicated or anything, that which Is affirmed or denied of the subject of a proposition. More specifically, an attribute may be either a category or a predicable; but it cannot be an individual materially. Attributes may be essential or accidental, necessary or contingent. In grammar, an attribute is an adjective, or an adjectival clause, or an equivalent adjunct expressing a characteristic referred to a subject through a verb. Because of this reference, an attribute may also be a substantive, as a class-name, but not a proper name as a rule. An attribute is never a verb, thus differing from a predicate which may consist of a verb often having some object or qualifying words. In natural history, what is permanent and essential in a species, an individual or in its parts. In psychology, it denotes the way (such as intensity, duration or quality) in which sensations, feelings or images can differ from one another. In art, an attribute is a material or a conventional symbol, distinction or decoration.
Avyakta-drishti: The view from the standpoint of the Infinite, Eternal, Whole.
bhava ::: becoming; state of being (sometimes added to an adjective to bhava form an abstract noun and translatable by a suffix such as "-ness", as in br.hadbhava, the state of being br.hat [wide], i.e., wideness); condition of consciousness; subjectivity; state of mind and feeling; physical indication of a psychological state; content, meaning (of rūpa); spiritual experience, realisation; emotion, "moved spiritualised state of the affective nature"; (madhura bhava, etc.) any of several types of relation between the jiva and the isvara, each being a way in which "the transcendent and universal person of the Divine conforms itself to our individualised personality and accepts a personal relation with us, at once identified with us as our supreme Self and yet close and different as our Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher"; attitude; mood; temperament; aspect; internal manifestation of the Goddess (devi), in . her total divine Nature (daivi prakr.ti or devibhava) or in the "more seizable because more defined and limited temperament" of any of her aspects, as in Mahakali bhava; a similar manifestation of any personality or combination of personalities of the deva or fourfold isvara, as in Indrabhava or Aniruddha bhava; in the vision of Reality (brahmadarsana), any of the "many aspects of the Infinite" which "disclose themselves, separate, combine, fuse, are unified together" until "there shines through it all the supreme integral Reality"; especially, the various "states of perception" in which the divine personality (purus.a) is seen in the impersonality of the brahman, ranging from the "general personality" of sagun.a brahman to the "vivid personality" of Kr.s.n.akali. bh bhavasamrddhi
Bhavani (Bhawani) ::: [a name of the Goddess]; the Mother; the Infinite Energy.
Bindu ::: Symbol of the Infinite in the exceedingly small, the individual point which is yet the Universal.
bogo-sort ::: (algorithm, humour) /bohgoh-sort/ (Or stupid-sort) The archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to bubble sort, which is merely the a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort.Also known as monkey sort after the Infinite Monkey Theorem.Compare brute force, Lasherism. .[Jargon File](2002-04-07)
brahmaloka ::: the world of the brahman in which the soul is one with the infinite existence and yet able to enjoy differentiation in the oneness.
brahmaloka ::: world of the brahman, in which the soul is one with the infinite existence and yet in a sense still a soul able to enjoy differentiation in the oneness; the highest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable by the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable.
Brahmananda: Bliss of the Infinite Absolute; supreme transcendental joy.
Brahman ::: Whatever reality is in existence, by which all the rest subsists, that is Brahman. An Eternal behind all instabilities, a Truth of things which is implied, if it is hidden in all appearances, a Constant which supports all mutations, but is not increased, diminished, abrogated,—there is such an unknown x which makes existence a problem, our own self a mystery, the universe a riddle. If we were only what we seem to be to our normal self-awareness, there would be no mystery; if the world were only what it can be made out to be by the perceptions of the senses and their strict analysis in the reason, there would be no riddle; and if to take our life as it is now and the world as it has so far developed to our experience were the whole possibility of our knowing and doing, there would be no problem. Or at best there would be but a shallow mystery, an easily solved riddle, the problem only of a child’s puzzle. But there is more, and that more is the hidden head of the Infinite and the secret heart of the Eternal. It is the highest and this highest is the all; there is none beyond and there is none other than it. To know it is to know the highest and by knowing the highest to know all. For as it is the beginning and source of all things, so everything else is its consequence; as it is the support and constituent of all things, so the secret of everything else is explained by its secret; as it is the sum and end of all things, so everything else amounts to it and by throwing itself into it achieves the sense of its own existence. This is the Brahman
Ref: CWSA Vol. 18, Page: 151-152
Brahmopasana: Worship of the Infinite Brahman.
Brentano, Franz: (1838-1917) Who had originally been a Roman Catholic priest may be described as an unorthodox neo-scholastic. According to him the only three forms of psychic activity, representation, judgment and "phenomena of love and hate", are just three modes of "intentionality", i.e., of referring to an object intended. Judgments may be self-evident and thereby characterized as true and in an analogous way love and hate may be characterized as "right". It is on these characterizations that a dogmatic theory of truth and value may be based. In any mental experience the content is merely a "physical phenomenon" (real or imaginary) intended to be referred to, what is psychic is merely the "act" of representing, judging (viz. affirming or denying) and valuing (i.e. loving or hating). Since such "acts" are evidently immaterial, the soul by which they are performed may be proved to be a purely spiritual and imperishable substance and from these and other considerations the existence, spirituality, as also the infinite wisdom, goodness and justice of God may also be demonstrated. It is most of all by his classification of psychic phenomena, his psychology of "acts" and "intentions" and by his doctrine concerning self-evident truths and values that Brentano, who considered himself an Aristotelian, exercised a profound influence on subsequent German philosophers: not only on those who accepted his entire system (such as A. Marty and C. Stumpf) but also those who were somewhat more independent and original and whom he influenced either directly (as A. Meinong and E. Husserl) or indirectly (as M. Scheler and Nik. Hartmann). Main works: Psychologie des Aristoteles, 1867; Vom Dasein Gottes, 1868; Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874; Vom Ursprung sittliches Erkenntnis, 1884; Ueber die Zukunft der Philosophie, 1893; Die vier Phasen der Philos., 1895. -- H.Go. Broad, C.D.: (1887) As a realistic critical thinker Broad takes over from the sciences the methods that are fruitful there, classifies the various propositions used in all the sciences, and defines basic scientific concepts. In going beyond science, he seeks to reach a total view of the world by bringing in the facts and principles of aesthetic, religious, ethical and political experience. In trying to work out a much more general method which attacks the problem of the connection between mathematical concepts and sense-data better than the method of analysis in situ, he gives a simple exposition of the method of extensive abstraction, which applies the mutual relations of objects, first recognized in pure mathematics, to physics. Moreover, a great deal can be learned from Broad on the relation of the principle of relativity to measurement.
Bruno, Giordano: (1548-1600) A Dominican monk, eventually burned at the stake because of his opinions, he was converted from Christianity to a naturalistic and mystical pantheism by the Renaissance and particularly by the new Copernican astronomy. For him God and the universe were two names for one and the same Reality considered now as the creative essence of all things, now as the manifold of realized possibilities in which that essence manifests itself. As God, natura naturans, the Real is the whole, the one transcendent and ineffable. As the Real is the infinity of worlds and objects and events into which the whole divides itself and in which the one displays the infinite potentialities latent within it. The world-process is an ever-lasting going forth from itself and return into itself of the divine nature. The culmination of the outgoing creative activity is reached in the human mind, whose rational, philosophic search for the one in the many, simplicity in variety, and the changeless and eternal in the changing and temporal, marks also the reverse movement of the divine nature re-entering itself and regaining its primordial unity, homogeneity, and changelessness. The human soul, being as it were a kind of boomerang partaking of the ingrowing as well as the outgrowing process, may hope at death, not to be dissolved with the body, which is borne wholly upon the outgoing stream, but to return to God whence it came and to be reabsorbed in him. Cf. Rand, Modern Classical Philosophers, selection from Bruno's On Cause, The Principle and the One. G. Bruno: De l'infinito, universo e mundo, 1584; Spaccio della bestia trionfante, 1584; La cena delta ceneri, 1584; Deglieroici furori, 1585; De Monade, 1591. Cf. R. Honigswald, Giordano Bruno; G. Gentile, Bruno nella storia della cultura, 1907. -- B.A.G.F. Brunschvicg, Leon: (1869-) Professor of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale in Paris. Dismissed by the Nazis (1941). His philosophy is an idealistic synthesis of Spinoza, Kant and Schelling with special stress on the creative role of thought in cultural history as well as in sciences. Main works: Les etapes de la philosophie mathematique, 1913; L'experience humaine et la causalite physique, 1921; De la connaissance de soi, 1931. Buddhism: The multifarious forms, philosophic, religious, ethical and sociological, which the teachings of Gautama Buddha (q.v.) have produced. They centre around the main doctrine of the catvari arya-satyani(q.v.), the four noble truths, the last of which enables one in eight stages to reach nirvana (q.v.): Right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. In the absence of contemporary records of Buddha and Buddhistic teachings, much value was formerly attached to the palm leaf manuscripts in Pali, a Sanskrit dialect; but recently a good deal of weight has been given also the Buddhist tradition in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. Buddhism split into Mahayanism and Hinayanism (q.v.), each of which, but particularly the former, blossomed into a variety of teachings and practices. The main philosophic schools are the Madhyamaka or Sunyavada, Yogacara, Sautrantika, and Vaibhasika (q.v.). The basic assumptions in philosophy are a causal nexus in nature and man, of which the law of karma (q.v.) is but a specific application; the impermanence of things, and the illusory notion of substance and soul. Man is viewed realistically as a conglomeration of bodily forms (rupa), sensations (vedana), ideas (sanjna), latent karma (sanskaras), and consciousness (vijnana). The basic assumptions in ethics are the universality of suffering and the belief in a remedy. There is no god; each one may become a Buddha, an enlightened one. Also in art and esthetics Buddhism has contributed much throughout the Far East. -- K.F.L.
the Infinite ::: **A designation of the Deity or the absolute Being; God. Infinite"s. ::: *
buddhaksetra. (T. sangs rgyas zhing; C. focha; J. bussetsu; K. pulch'al 佛刹). In Sanskrit, "buddha field," the realm that constitutes the domain of a specific buddha. A buddhaksetra is said to have two aspects, which parallel the division of a world system into a BHAJANALOKA (lit. "container world," "world of inanimate objects") and a SATTVALOKA ("world of sentient beings"). As a result of his accumulation of merit (PUnYASAMBHARA), his collection of knowledge (JNANASAMBHARA), and his specific vow (PRAnIDHANA), when a buddha achieves enlightenment, a "container" or "inanimate" world is produced in the form of a field where the buddha leads beings to enlightenment. The inhabitant of that world is the buddha endowed with all the BUDDHADHARMAs. Buddha-fields occur in various levels of purification, broadly divided between pure (VIsUDDHABUDDHAKsETRA) and impure. Impure buddha-fields are synonymous with a world system (CAKRAVAdA), the infinite number of "world discs" in Buddhist cosmology that constitutes the universe; here, ordinary sentient beings (including animals, ghosts, and hell beings) dwell, subject to the afflictions (KLEsA) of greed (LOBHA), hatred (DVEsA), and delusion (MOHA). Each cakravAda is the domain of a specific buddha, who achieves enlightenment in that world system and works there toward the liberation of all sentient beings. A pure buddha-field, by contrast, may be created by a buddha upon his enlightenment and is sometimes called a PURE LAND (JINGTU, more literally, "purified soil" in Chinese), a term with no direct equivalent in Sanskrit. In such purified buddha-fields, the unfortunate realms (APAYA, DURGATI) of animals, ghosts, and hell denizens are typically absent. Thus, the birds that sing beautiful songs there are said to be emanations of the buddha rather than sentient beings who have been reborn as birds. These pure lands include such notable buddhaksetras as ABHIRATI, the buddha-field of the buddha AKsOBHYA, and SUKHAVATĪ, the land of the buddha AMITABHA and the object of a major strand of East Asian Buddhism, the so-called pure land school (see JoDOSHu, JoDO SHINSHu). In the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, after the buddha reveals a pure buddha land, sARIPUTRA asks him why sAKYAMUNI's buddha-field has so many faults. The buddha then touches the earth with his toe, at which point the world is transformed into a pure buddha-field; he explains that he makes the world appear impure in order to inspire his disciples to seek liberation.
cevian: Any line segment joining a vertex of a triangle to a point on the infinite line containing the oppositeside.
Chid-akasa (Sanskrit) Cid-ākāśa [from cit consciousness + ākāśa ether, space] Abstract cosmic consciousness as active in spiritual cosmic substance or akasa; the infinite field of universal consciousness, pure cosmic intelligence in its union with abstract cosmic substance, the spiritual side of svabhavat. Because each universe in the Boundless is in itself a cosmic individual, having its own wide fields of spiritual egoity, the chit is the svabhava (intrinsic individuality) of said universe.
chidakash ::: &
Chinmatra (Sanskrit) Cinmātra [from cit thought + mātra elementary thought, intelligence] Essential thought, mind per se; used in Vedanta philosophy, particularly the Advaita, for the germ of cosmic ideation existing at every geometrical point of the infinite chidakasa (field of cosmic ideation). Not to be confused with collateral Vedantic terms mulaprakriti (undifferentiated elemental cosmic matter) or chidakasa. These three are considered from a subjective standpoint as aspects of parabrahman. In the human constitution it is the seventh principle or atman.
(c) In Spinoza: "that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself." These modes are determinations of the infinite Attributes of Divine Substance; of the attribute, Thought, the two chief modes are intellect and will; of the attribute, Extension, the chief modes are motion and rest. These modes are nothing apart from God's Substance; they are infinite from one point of view (natura naturans) and finite from another (natura naturata).
cit (chit) ::: consciousness; the infinite self-awareness that is "the elemental origin and primal completeness of all this varied consciousness which is here used for various formation and experience", the second term of saccidananda; "an inherent self-consciousness" in brahman,"inseparable from its being [sat] and throwing itself out as a force [tapas] of movement of consciousness which is creative of forces, forms and worlds"; the "universal conscious-stuff of existence", the "original Consciousness" which "modifies itself so as to become on the Truthplane the supermind, on the mental plane the mental reason, will, emotion, sensation, on the lower planes the vital or physical instincts, impulses, habits of an obscure force not in superficially conscious possession of itself".
cit-tapas (chit-tapas; chittapas; chit tapas) ::: consciousness-force; knowledge-power; the unity of cit and tapas; "the infinite divine selfawareness which is also the infinite all-effective Will", represented by cit in the description of the nature of divine being as sat-cit-ananda or saccidananda; the "divine Conscious-Force" which "is omnipresent ... in the material cosmos, but veiled, operative secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things, and it expresses itself there characteristically through its own subordinate term, Life" (pran.a).
cit tapas (Chit Tapas) ::: consciousness-force, pure energy of Consciousness; the infinite divine selfawareness which is also the infinite all-effective Will.
dharmadhātu. (P. dhammadhātu; T. chos kyi dbyings; C. fajie; J. hokkai; K. popkye 法界). In Sanskrit, "dharma realm," viz., "realm of reality," or "dharma element"; a term that has two primary denotations. In the ABHIDHARMA tradition, dharmadhātu means an "element of the dharma" or the "reality of dharma." As one of the twelve ĀYATANA and eighteen DHĀTU, the dharmadhātu encompasses every thing that is or could potentially be an object of cognition and refers to the "substance" or "quality" of a dharma that is perceived by the mind. Dhātu in this context is sometimes read as "the boundary" or "delineation" that separates one distinct dharma from the other. The ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA lists the sensation aggregate (VEDANĀ-SKANDHA), the perception aggregate (SAMJNĀ-skandha), the conditioning forces aggregate (SAMSKĀRA-skandha), unmanifest materiality (AVIJNAPTIRuPA), and unconditioned dharmas (viz., NIRVĀnA) to be the constituents of this category. ¶ In the MAHĀYĀNA, dharmadhātu is used primarily to mean "sphere of dharma," which denotes the infinite domain in which the activity of all dharmas takes place-i.e., the universe. It also serves as one of several terms for ultimate reality, such as TATHATĀ. In works such as the DHARMADHĀTUSTAVA, the purpose of Buddhist practice is to recognize and partake in this realm of reality. ¶ In East Asian Mahāyāna, there is a list of "ten dharmadhātus," which are the six traditional levels of nonenlightened existence-hell denizens (NĀRAKA), hungry ghosts (PRETA), animals (TIRYAK), demigods (ASURA), humans (MANUsYA), and divinities (DEVA)-together with the four categories of enlightened beings, viz., sRĀVAKAs, PRATYEKABUDDHAs, BODHISATTVAs, and buddhas. ¶ The Chinese HUAYAN school recognizes a set of four dharmadhātus (SI FAJIE), that is, four successively more profound levels of reality: (1) the dharmadhātu of phenomena (SHI FAJIE); (2) the dharmadhātu of principle (LI FAJIE); (3) the dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomena and principle (LISHI WU'AI FAJIE); and (4) the dharmadhātu of unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon and phenomena (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). ¶ In YOGATANTRA, the dharmadhātu consists of the realms of vajradhātu (see KONGoKAI) and garbhadhātu (see TAIZoKAI), categories that simultaneously denote the bivalence in cosmological structure, in modes of spiritual practice, and in the powers and qualities of enlightened beings. Dharmadhātu is believed to be the full revelation of the body of the cosmic buddha VAIROCANA.
D. Interpretations of Probability. The methods and results of mathematical probability (and of probability in general) are the subject of much controversy as regards their interpretation and value. Among the various theories proposed, we shall consider the following Probability as a measure of belief, probability as the relative frequency of events, probability as the truth-frequency of types of argument, probability as a primitive notion, probability as an operational concept, probability as a limit of frequencies, and probability as a physical magnitude determined by axioms. I. Probability as a Measure of Belief: According to this theory, probability is the measure or relative degree of rational credence to be attached to facts or statements on the strength of valid motives. This type of probability is sometimes difficult to estimate, as it may be qualitative as well as quantitative. When considered in its mathematical aspects, the measure of probable inference depends on the preponderance or failure of operative causes or observed occurrences of the case under investigation. This conception involves axioms leading to the classic rule of Laplace, namely: The measure of probability of any one of mutually exclusive and apriori equiprobable possibilities, is the ratio of the number of favorable possibilities to the total number of possibilities. In probability operations, this rule is taken as the definition of direct probability for those cases where it is applicable. The main objections against this interpretation are: that probability is largely subjective, or at least independent of direct experience; that equiprobability is taken as an apriori notion, although the ways of asserting it are empirical; that the conditions of valid equiprobability are not stated definitely; that equiprobability is difficult to determine actually in all cases; that it is difficult to attach an adequate probability to a complex event from the mere knowledge of the probabilities of its component parts, and that the notion of probability is not general, as it does not cover such cases as the inductive derivation of probabilities from statistical data. II. Probability as a Relative Frequency. This interpretation is based on the nature of events, and not on any subjective considerations. It deals with the rate with which an event will occur in a class of events. Hence, it considers probability as the ratio of frequency of true results to true conditions, and it gives as its measure the relative frequency leading from true conditions to true results. What is meant when a set of calculations predict that an experiment will yield a result A with probability P, is that the relative frequency of A is expected to approximate the number P in a long series of such experiments. This conception seems to be more concerned with empirical probabilities, because the calculations assumed are mostly based on statistical data or material assumptions suggested by past experiments. It is valuable in so far as it satisfies the practical necessity of considering probability aggregates in such problems. The main objections against this interpretation are: that it does not seem capable of expressing satisfactorily what is meant by the probability of an event being true; that its conclusions are more or less probable, owing to the difficulty of defining a proper standard for comparing ratios; that neither its rational nor its statistical evidence is made clear; that the degree of relevance of that evidence is not properly determined, on account of the theoretical indefinite ness of both the true numerical value of the probability and of the evidence assumed, and that it is operational in form only, but not in fact, because it involves the infinite without proper limitations. III. Probability as Truth-Frequency of Types of Arguments: In this interpretation, which is due mainly to Peirce and Venn, probability is shifted from the events to the propositions about them; instead of considering types and classes of events, it considers types and classes of propositions. Probability is thus the ability to give an objective reading to the relative tiuth of propositions dealing with singular events. This ability can be used successfully in interpreting definite and indefinite numerical probabilities, by taking statistical evaluations and making appropriate verbal changes in their formulation. Once assessed, the relative truth of the propositions considered can be communicated to facts expressed by these propositions. But neither the propositions nor the facts as such have a probability in themselves. With these assumptions, a proposition has a degree of probability, only if it is considered as a member of a class of propositions; and that degree is expressed by the proportion of true propositions to the total number of propositions in the class. Hence, probability is the ratio of true propositions to all the propositions of the class examined, if the class is finite, or to all the propositions of the same type in the long run, if the class is infinite. In the first case, fair sampling may cover the restrictions of a finite class; in the second case, the use of infinite series offers a practical limitation for the evidence considered. But in both cases, probability varies with the class or type chosen, and probability-inferences are limited by convention to those cases where numerical values can be assigned to the ratios considered. It will be observed that this interpretation of probability is similar to the relative frequency theory. The difference between these two theories is more formal than material in both cases the probability refers ultimately to kinds of evidence based on objective matter of fact. Hence the Truth-Frequency theory is open to the sime objections as the Relative-Frequency theory, with proper adjustments. An additional difficulty of this theory is that the pragmatic interpretation of truth it involves, has yet to be proved, and the situation is anything but improved by assimilating truth with probability.
disciples ::: “In considering the action of the Infinite we have to avoid the error of the disciple who thought of himself as the Brahman, refused to obey the warning of the elephant-driver to budge from the narrow path and was taken up by the elephant’s trunk and removed out of the way; ‘You are no doubt the Brahman,’ said the master to his bewildered disciple, ‘but why did you not obey the driver Brahman and get out of the path of the elephant Brahman?’” The Life Divine
Divine is such a realistic Advaita. The world is a manifestation of the Rea! and therefore itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-
Divine ::: One sole Reality constitutes all the infinite, the One, the Divine, the Eternal and Infinite—there is That alone and no other existence. Ekamevadvitiyam.Infinite, but the finite existence is also that one being, that infinite Being; it has no separate reality: Eternal, but the temporal is nothing more than a movement of that Eternity, Time has no independent self-sustenance: Divine, but all that seems undivine is a disguise of the Divinity, it is no creation out of some unaccountable Opposite.
Divisibility: The property in virtue of which a whole (whether physical, psychical or mathematical) may be divided into parts which do not thereby necessarily sever their relation with the whole. Divisibility usually implies not merely analysis or distinction of parts, but actual or potential resolution into parts. From the beginning philosophers have raised the question whether substances are infinitely or finitely divisible. Ancient materialism conceived of the physical atom as an indivisible substance. Descartes, however, and after him Leibniz, maintained the infinite divisibility of substance. The issue became the basis of Kant's cosmological antinomy (Crit. of pure Reason), from which he concluded that the issue was insoluble in metaphysical terms. In recent decades the question has had to take account of (1) researches in the physical atom, before which the older conception of physical substance has steadily retreated; and (2) the attempt to formulate a satisfactory definition of infinity (q.v.). -- O.F.K.
Docta ignorantia: Liteially, learned ignorance, refers to men's knowledge of God which unavoidably includes a negative element, since He immeasurably surpasses the knowledge of Him gleaned from this phenomenal world, yet for man this is truly a real learning. Title given to one of his philosophical treatises by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) who understood it in the sense of an insight into the incomprehensibility of the infinite. -- J.J.R.
Doda ignorantia: Latin for learned ignorance; it refers to men’s knowledge of God which unavoidably includes a negative element, since He immeasurably surpasses the knowledge of Him gleaned from this phenomenal world, yet for man this is truly a real learning. Title given to one of his philosophical treatises by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) who understood it in the sense of an insight into the incomprehensibility of the infinite.
"Each form is a symbol of some divine power, vibhûti, concealed in it and to the seeing eye each finite carries in it its own revelation of the infinite.” Essays on the Gita
“Each form is a symbol of some divine power, vibhûti, concealed in it and to the seeing eye each finite carries in it its own revelation of the infinite.” Essays on the Gita
Ecstasy ::: “It has been held that ecstasy is a lower and transient passage, the peace of the Supreme is the supreme realisation, the consummate abiding experience. This may be true on the spiritual-mind plane: there the first ecstasy felt is indeed a spiritual rapture, but it can be and is very usually mingled with a supreme happiness of the vital parts taken up by the Spirit; there is an exaltation, exultation, excitement, a highest intensity of the joy of the heart and the pure inner soul-sensation that can be a splendid passage or an uplifting force but is not the ultimate permanent foundation. But in the highest ascents of the spiritual bliss there is not this vehement exaltation and excitement; there is instead an illimitable intensity of participation in an eternal ecstasy which is founded on the eternal Existence and therefore on a beatific tranquillity of eternal peace. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. The Supermind, reconciling and fusing all differences as well as all contradictions, brings out this unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-existence are among its first steps of self-realisation, but this calm and this delight rise together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite.” The Life Divine
Ein Sof (lit. “without end”) ::: the Infinite G‑d as enclothed in Creation
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.
‘Either to fade in the Unknowable/Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite’.”
". . . equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
“… equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Euclidean norm "mathematics" The most common {norm}, calculated by summing the squares of all coordinates and taking the square root. This is the essence of {Pythagoras's theorem}. In the infinite-dimensional case, the sum is infinite or is replaced with an integral when the number of dimensions is {uncountable}. (2004-02-15)
Euclidean norm ::: (mathematics) The most common norm, calculated by summing the squares of all coordinates and taking the square root. This is the essence of Pythagoras's theorem. In the infinite-dimensional case, the sum is infinite or is replaced with an integral when the number of dimensions is uncountable.(2004-02-15)
factorial series: One representation of the exponential function with base e (Euler's Number) shown as the sum of the infinite series
fajie yuanqi. (J. hokkai engi; K. popkye yon'gi 法界起). In Chinese, "conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA) of the dharma-element (DHARMADHĀTU)," an East Asian theory of causality elaborated within the HUAYAN school. Unlike the Indian systematization of the twelvefold chain of pratītyasamutpāda, which views existence as an endless cycle of painful rebirths that begins with ignorance (AVIDYĀ) and ends with old age and death (jarāmarana; see JARĀ), this Huayan vision of causality instead regards the infinitely interdependent universe as the manifestation of the truth to which the Buddha awakens. The term "fajie yuanqi" does not appear in the Huayan jing (AVATAMSAKASuTRA) itself and seems to have been first coined by ZHIYAN (602-668), the "second patriarch" of the Huayan lineage. Zhiyan used fajie yuanqi to refer to the concurrency between cause (C. yin; S. HETU) and fruition (C. guo; S. PHALA), here meaning the "causal" practices (hsing) that are conducive to enlightenment and their "fruition" in the realization (zheng) of the quiescence that is NIRVĀnA. As this Huayan theory of pratītyasamutpāda is elaborated within the tradition, it is broadened to focus on the way in which every single phenomenal instantiation of existence both contains, and is contained by, all other instantiations, so that one existence is subsumed by all existences (yi ji yiqie) and all existences by one existence (yiqie ji yi); in this vision, all things in the universe are thus mutually creative and mutually defining, precisely because they all lack any independent self-identity (SVABHĀVA). Each phenomenon constitutes a part of an organic whole that is defined by the harmonious relationship between each and every member: just as the whole is defined by all of its independent constituents, each independent constituent is defined by the whole with which it is integrated. This relationship is called endless multiplication (chongchong wujin), because the process of mutual penetration and mutual determination (xiangru xiangji) is infinite. Due to this unlimited interdependence among all phenomena, this type of pratītyasamutpāda may also be termed "inexhaustible conditioned origination" (wujin yuanqi). This interdependence between one phenomenon and all other phenomena developed through fajie yuanqi is indicative also of the Huayan "dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon with phenomena" (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE). The Huayan doctrines of the "ten profound mysteries" (SHI XUANMEN) and the "consummate interfusion of the six aspects" (LIUXIANG YUANRONG) also offer systematic elaborations of the doctrine of fajie yuanqi.
Fibonacci sequence ::: (mathematics) The infinite sequence of numbers beginning 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... in which each term is the sum of the two terms preceding it.The ratio of successive Fibonacci terms tends to the golden ratio, namely (1 + sqrt 5)/2.[Why not Fibonacci series?](2002-10-15)
fluxion ::: n. --> The act of flowing.
The matter that flows.
Fusion; the running of metals into a fluid state.
An unnatural or excessive flow of blood or fluid toward any organ; a determination.
A constantly varying indication.
The infinitely small increase or decrease of a variable or flowing quantity in a certain infinitely small and constant period of
::: "For in reality, no man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. To know that and live in the presence and in the being of the Master of Nature, free from desire and the illusion of personal impulsion, is the one thing needful. That and not the bodily cessation of action is the true release; for the bondage of works at once ceases. A man might sit still and motionless for ever and yet be as much bound to the Ignorance as the animal or the insect. But if he can make this greater consciousness dynamic within him, then all the work of all the worlds could pass through him and yet he would remain at rest, absolute in calm and peace, free from all bondage.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
“For in reality, no man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. To know that and live in the presence and in the being of the Master of Nature, free from desire and the illusion of personal impulsion, is the one thing needful. That and not the bodily cessation of action is the true release; for the bondage of works at once ceases. A man might sit still and motionless for ever and yet be as much bound to the Ignorance as the animal or the insect. But if he can make this greater consciousness dynamic within him, then all the work of all the worlds could pass through him and yet he would remain at rest, absolute in calm and peace, free from all bondage.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law of the Truth, rtasya panthâh.” The Renaissance in India
Foxing lun. (J. Busshoron; K. Pulsong non 佛性論). In Chinese, "Treatise on the Buddha-Nature," an important exposition of the MAHĀLĀNA theories of buddha-nature (FOXING) and storehouse, womb, or matrix of the tathāgatas (TATHĀGATAGARBHA). Authorship of the treatise is traditionally attributed to the Indian scholiast VASUBANDHU (fl. c. mid-fourth to mid-fifth centuries CE), with the Chinese translation made by the Indian YOGĀLĀRA exegete PARAMĀRTHA (499-569). Scholars now generally accept, however, that the text at the very least displays the heavy editorial hand of Paramārtha and may in fact have been written by him. The text offers a tripartite account of the buddha-nature as "dwelling in itself," "emergent," and "attained" (see discussion in FOXING, s.v.). It is also well known for its outline of three aspects of the tathāgatagarbha, as (1) the contained, (2) the concealed or hidden, and (3) the container. The "contained" means the "embryo" of enlightenment that is contained within the womb of the tathāgatas. "Concealment" denotes both the tathāgata as (a) an active agent of liberation, secreting himself inside the minds of ordinary sentient beings in order to motivate them toward enlightenment, and (b) a passive factor that is covered over and hidden by the afflictions (KLEsA). As the "container," the tathāgatagarbha is the fulfillment of the infinite numbers of meritorious qualities perfected by the buddhas. See also RATNAGOTRAVIBHĀGA.
gnosis ::: "a power above mind working in its own law, out of the direct identity of the supreme Self", a faculty superior to buddhi or intellect, possessing not only the "concentrated consciousness of the infinite Essence", but "also and at the same time an infinite knowledge of the myriad play of the Infinite"; (in 1919-20) the supra-intellectual consciousness (also called ideality or vijñana) with its three planes of logistic, hermetic and seer gnosis, each successive level being more "intense and large in light, imperative, instantaneous, the scope of the active knowledge larger, the way nearer to the knowledge by identity, the thought more packed with the luminous substance of self-awareness and all-vision"; (in most of 1927 before 29 October) a plane of consciousness usually referred to as above the supreme ...64 supermind and descending into it to form supreme supermind gnosis, also rising to the "invincible Gnosis of the Divine"; (in April 1927) a term encompassing three degrees of supramental gnosis (corresponding to planes later redefined as parts of the overmind system) and a fourth degree of divine gnosis; (from 29 October 1927 onwards) equivalent to "divine gnosis", a grade of consciousness above overmind (but sometimes distinguished from supermind, which occupies a similar position) and descending into it to form gnostic overmind or gnosis in overmind.
golden Sphinx ::: Sri Aurobindo: "…the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom.” The Life Divine
Gravitation, like all the other phenomena of nature, is to be attributed to living beings of cosmic magnitude by reason of the vital electricity or vital magnetism emanating from these beings, which electricity or magnetism is at once one of the phenomena of life and of cosmic intelligence. In the lower scale of magnitudes found in and among the molecules, atoms, and electronic particles, the same observations apply. Cohesion among the infinitesimals is the microcosmic working of the same fundamental qualities that manifest themselves in macrocosmic phenomena, such as gravitation.
haihui. (J. kaie; K. haehoe 海會). In Chinese, lit. "oceanic congregation," referring, e.g., to congregations of sages, divinities, bodhisattvas, etc., that are said to be as vast as the ocean. "A congregation that is [as vast as] the ocean" is a common motif in MAHĀYĀNA sutras, whose expositions are typically attended by astronomical numbers of beings. Such "oceanic congregations" also sometimes refer to the extraordinary entourages of celestial buddhas. For example, "the oceanic congregation of SUKHĀVATĪ" (jile haihui) usually involves a religious vision of the buddha AMITĀBHA and the infinite numbers of inhabitants resident in his PURE LAND. Congregations in Chan monasteries (see CONGLIN) are also called a "congregation that is [as vast as the confluence of rivers in] the ocean" to symbolize the coming together of many sincere practitioners.
height The shortest distance between the base (or the infinite extension of the base) of a geometric figure and its vertex or another base (or infinite extension of a base). The height of an obtuse triangle with one of the sides adjacent to the obtuse angle considered to be the base must necessarily be extended to find the shortest distance that is correctly interpreted as the height of the triangle.
He must live in his o^v^ soul beyond the written Truth. For he is not the sadhaka of a book or of many books ; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite.
HOLOCAUST OF THE DIVINE. ::: The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser tnple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nafure-b^y and Nature-force, and they exist because moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was fbere «i the possibilities of The Infinite she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow assimilate it ; avoid self-dispersion and all externalising of the consciousness.
holocaust ::: “The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass though the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.” The Mother
Hsiao yao yu: The happy excursion, that is, roaming outside of the realm of matter, following nature, and drifting in the Infinite, resulting in transcendental bliss. (Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.) -- W.T.C.
imagination ::: “… our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: . . . . Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind’s way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
imperative ::: (in 1920) being of the nature of a "revealingly imperative power of the spirit"s knowledge by identity", the element in the logos vijñana or highest representative ideality (see full revelatory ideality) that deals with "the imperatives of the infinite", connected with revelation in much the same way as representative with intuition and interpretative with inspiration, and evidently entering into the logistic ideality from a higher plane of imperative vijñana; (in early 1927) a plane related to, but higher than, the imperative vijñana of 1920, apparently occupying a position between the supreme supramental and the supreme supermind, for one of its forms "acts as an intermediary force, lifting the former into the latter". The forms of "the imperative" in 1927 are perhaps the "intuitive forms" which by January of that year had been arranged "in the gnosis", making them part of what at the end of October is called the overmind system. imperative vij ñana
In connection with the infinite sequence of real numbers a1, a2, a3 . . ., a monadic function a may be introduced for which the range of the independent variable consists of the positive integers 1, 2, 3, . . . and a(1)=a1, a(2)=a2, a(3)=a3, . . . . It can then be shown that the limit of the infinite sequence as above defined is the same as the limit of a(x) as x approaches infinity.
inconscience ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscience is an inverse reproduction of the supreme superconscience: it has the same absoluteness of being and automatic action, but in a vast involved trance; it is being lost in itself, plunged in its own abyss of infinity.” *The Life Divine
"All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite"s power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit"s potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being, — an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, — but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, all-knowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.” *The Life Divine
"Once consciousnesses separated from the one consciousness, they fell inevitably into Ignorance and the last result of Ignorance was Inconscience.” Letters on Yoga
*inconscience.
inconscient ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come in collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass.” *Letters on Savitri
". . . in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient — the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe — or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat.” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it — ‘an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force".” Letters on Yoga
"The Inconscient is the last resort of the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga
"The body, we have said, is a creation of the Inconscient and itself inconscient or at least subconscient in parts of itself and much of its hidden action; but what we call the Inconscient is an appearance, a dwelling place, an instrument of a secret Consciousness or a Superconscient which has created the miracle we call the universe.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga :::
"The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the superconscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal.” The Life Divine
"Men have not learnt yet to recognise the Inconscient on which the whole material world they see is built, or the Ignorance of which their whole nature including their knowledge is built; they think that these words are only abstract metaphysical jargon flung about by the philosophers in their clouds or laboured out in long and wearisome books like The Life Divine. Letters on Savitri :::
"Is it really a fact that even the ordinary reader would not be able to see any difference between the Inconscient and Ignorance unless the difference is expressly explained to him? This is not a matter of philosophical terminology but of common sense and the understood meaning of English words. One would say ‘even the inconscient stone" but one would not say, as one might of a child, ‘the ignorant stone". One must first be conscious before one can be ignorant. What is true is that the ordinary reader might not be familiar with the philosophical content of the word Inconscient and might not be familiar with the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. But I don"t see how I can acquaint him with these things in a single line, even with the most. illuminating image or symbol. He might wonder, if he were Johnsonianly minded, how an Inconscient could be teased or how it could wake Ignorance. I am afraid, in the absence of a miracle of inspired poetical exegesis flashing through my mind, he will have to be left wondering.” Letters on Savitri
**inconscient, Inconscient"s.**
Indrajāla. (Indra's Net) (T. Dbang po'i dra ba; C. Yintuoluo wang/Di-Shi wang; J. Indaramo/Taishakumo; K. Indara mang/Che-Sok mang 因陀羅網/帝釋網). In Sanskrit, "Indra's net"; a metaphor used widely in the HUAYAN ZONG of East Asian Buddhism to describe the multivalent web of interconnections in which all beings are enmeshed. As depicted in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, the central scripture of the Huayan school, above the palace of INDRA, the king of the gods, is spread an infinitely vast, bejeweled net. At each of the infinite numbers of knots in the net is tied a jewel that itself has an infinite number of facets. A person looking at any single one of the jewels on this net would thus see reflected in its infinite facets not only everything in the cosmos but also an infinite number of other jewels, themselves also reflecting everything in the cosmos; thus, every jewel in this vast net is simultaneously reflecting, and being reflected by, an infinite number of other jewels. This metaphor of infinite, mutually reflecting jewels is employed to help convey how all things in existence are defined by their interconnection with all other things, but without losing their own independent identity in the process. The metaphor of Indra's net thus offers a profound vision of the universe, in which all things are mutually interrelated to all other things, in simultaneous mutual identity and mutual intercausality. The meditation on Indra's net (C. Diwang guan; J. Taimo kan; K. Chemang kwan) is the last of the six contemplations outlined by Fazang in his Xiu Huayan aozhi wangjin huanyuan guan ("Cultivation of the Inner Meaning of Huayan: The Contemplations That End Delusion and Return to the Source"), which helps the student to visualize the DHARMADHĀTU of the unimpeded interpretation between phenomenon and phenomena (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE).
"In every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there lives hidden and works unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite.” Essays Divine and Human*
“In every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there lives hidden and works unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite.” Essays Divine and Human
infinite ::: a. --> Unlimited or boundless, in time or space; as, infinite duration or distance.
Without limit in power, capacity, knowledge, or excellence; boundless; immeasurably or inconceivably great; perfect; as, the infinite wisdom and goodness of God; -- opposed to finite.
Indefinitely large or extensive; great; vast; immense; gigantic; prodigious.
Greater than any assignable quantity of the same kind; --
INFINITE. ::: . It is felt by some as an infinity above, by others as an infinity around in which the mind disappears (as an energy) by losing its limits. Some feel not the absorption of the mind-energy into the infinite, but a falling entirely inactive ; others feel it as a lapse or disappearance of energy into pure
infinitival ::: a. --> Pertaining to the infinite mood.
“… in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient—the Inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe—or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat.” Letters on Yoga
"In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
“In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
In relation to the individual the Supreme is our own true and highest self, that which ultimately we are in our essence, that of which we are in our manifested nature. A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 294
"In relation to the individual the Supreme is our own true and highest self, that which ultimately we are in our essence, that of which we are in our manifested nature. A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“In relation to the individual the Supreme is our own true and highest self, that which ultimately we are in our essence, that of which we are in our manifested nature. A spiritual knowledge, moved to arrive at the true Self in us, must reject, as the traditional way of knowledge rejects, all misleading appearances. It must discover that the body is not our self, our foundation of existence; it is a sensible form of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
integer ::: (mathematics) (Or whole number) One of the finite numbers in the infinite set ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... number, the part after the decimal (or other base) point will be zero.A natural number is a non-negative integer.(2002-04-07)
INTEGRAL YOGA ::: This yoga accepts the value of cosmic existence and holds it to be a reality; its object is to enter into a higher Truth-Consciousness or Divine Supramental Consciousness in which action and creation are the expression not of ignorance and imperfection, but of the Truth, the Light, the Divine Ānanda. But for that, the surrender of the mortal mind, life and body to the Higher Consciousnessis indispensable, since it is too difficult for the mortal human being to pass by its own effort beyond mind to a Supramental Consciousness in which the dynamism is no longer mental but of quite another power. Only those who can accept the call to such a change should enter into this yoga.
Aim of the Integral Yoga ::: It is not merely to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter.
Conditions of the Integral Yoga ::: This yoga can only be done to the end by those who are in total earnest about it and ready to abolish their little human ego and its demands in order to find themselves in the Divine. It cannot be done in a spirit of levity or laxity; the work is too high and difficult, the adverse powers in the lower Nature too ready to take advantage of the least sanction or the smallest opening, the aspiration and tapasyā needed too constant and intense.
Method in the Integral Yoga ::: To concentrate, preferably in the heart and call the presence and power of the Mother to take up the being and by the workings of her force transform the consciousness. One can concentrate also in the head or between the eye-brows, but for many this is a too difficult opening. When the mind falls quiet and the concentration becomes strong and the aspiration intense, then there is the beginning of experience. The more the faith, the more rapid the result is likely to be. For the rest one must not depend on one’s own efforts only, but succeed in establishing a contact with the Divine and a receptivity to the Mother’s Power and Presence.
Integral method ::: The method we have to pursue is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform Our entire being into His, so that in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sādhaka of the sādhana* as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sādhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid, - the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for the weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It” makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a Succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.
There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but with a sort of free, scattered and yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates, the helpful materials which his nature offers and the obstacles which it presents to purification and perfection. In a sense, therefore, each man in this path has his own method of Yoga. Yet are there certain broad lines of working common to all which enable us to construct not indeed a routine system, but yet some kind of Shastra or scientific method of the synthetic Yoga.
Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such as it stands organised by our past evolution and without rejecting anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change. Everything in us is seized by the hands of a mighty Artificer and transformed into a clear image of that which it now seeks confusedly to present. In that ever-progressive experience we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the more or less distorted or imperfect figure of some elements or action in the harmony of the divine Nature. We begin to understand what the Vedic Rishis meant when they spoke of the human forefathers fashioning the gods as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy.
Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as the means of this integral Yoga. Every experience and outer contact with our world-environment, however trifling or however disastrous, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even to the most repellent suffering or the most humiliating fall, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognise in ourselves with opened eyes the method of God in the world, His purpose of light in the obscure, of might in the weak and fallen, of delight in what is grievous and miserable. We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in Nature, in the other it becomes swift and selfconscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the Master. All life is a Yoga of Nature seeking to manifest God within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.
Key-methods ::: The way to devotion and surrender. It is the psychic movement that brings the constant and pure devotion and the removal of the ego that makes it possible to surrender.
The way to knowledge. Meditation in the head by which there comes the opening above, the quietude or silence of the mind and the descent of peace etc. of the higher consciousness generally till it envelops the being and fills the body and begins to take up all the movements.
Yoga by works ::: Separation of the Purusha from the Prakriti, the inner silent being from the outer active one, so that one has two consciousnesses or a double consciousness, one behind watching and observing and finally controlling and changing the other which is active in front. The other way of beginning the yoga of works is by doing them for the Divine, for the Mother, and not for oneself, consecrating and dedicating them till one concretely feels the Divine Force taking up the activities and doing them for one.
Object of the Integral Yoga is to enter into and be possessed by the Divine Presence and Consciousness, to love the Divine for the Divine’s sake alone, to be tuned in our nature into the nature of the Divine, and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine.
Principle of the Integral Yoga ::: The whole principle of Integral Yoga is to give oneself entirely to the Divine alone and to nobody else, and to bring down into ourselves by union with the Divine Mother all the transcendent light, power, wideness, peace, purity, truth-consciousness and Ānanda of the Supramental Divine.
Central purpose of the Integral Yoga ::: Transformation of our superficial, narrow and fragmentary human way of thinking, seeing, feeling and being into a deep and wide spiritual consciousness and an integrated inner and outer existence and of our ordinary human living into the divine way of life.
Fundamental realisations of the Integral Yoga ::: The psychic change so that a complete devotion can be the main motive of the heart and the ruler of thought, life and action in constant union with the Mother and in her Presence. The descent of the Peace, Power, Light etc. of the Higher Consciousness through the head and heart into the whole being, occupying the very cells of the body. The perception of the One and Divine infinitely everywhere, the Mother everywhere and living in that infinite consciousness.
Results ::: First, an integral realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sāyujya mukti, by which it becomes free even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the sālokya mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda ; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the divine, sādharmya mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.
By this integral realisation and liberation, the perfect harmony of the results of Knowledge, Love and Works. For there is attained the complete release from ego and identification in being with the One in all and beyond all. But since the attaining consciousness is not limited by its attainment, we win also the unity in Beatitude and the harmonised diversity in Love, so that all relations of the play remain possible to us even while we retain on the heights of our being the eternal oneness with the Beloved. And by a similar wideness, being capable of a freedom in spirit that embraces life and does not depend upon withdrawal from life, we are able to become without egoism, bondage or reaction the channel in our mind and body for a divine action poured out freely upon the world.
The divine existence is of the nature not only of freedom, but of purity, beatitude and perfection. In integral purity which shall enable on the one hand the perfect reflection of the divine Being in ourselves and on the other the perfect outpouring of its Truth and Law in us in the terms of life and through the right functioning of the complex instrument we are in our outer parts, is the condition of an integral liberty. Its result is an integral beatitude, in which there becomes possible at once the Ānanda of all that is in the world seen as symbols of the Divine and the Ānanda of that which is not-world. And it prepares the integral perfection of our humanity as a type of the Divine in the conditions of the human manifestation, a perfection founded on a certain free universality of being, of love and joy, of play of knowledge and of play of will in power and will in unegoistic action. This integrality also can be attained by the integral Yoga.
Sādhanā of the Integral Yoga does not proceed through any set mental teaching or prescribed forms of meditation, mantras or others, but by aspiration, by a self-concentration inwards or upwards, by a self-opening to an Influence, to the Divine Power above us and its workings, to the Divine Presence in the heart and by the rejection of all that is foreign to these things. It is only by faith, aspiration and surrender that this self-opening can come.
The yoga does not proceed by upadeśa but by inner influence.
Integral Yoga and Gita ::: The Gita’s Yoga consists in the offering of one’s work as a sacrifice to the Divine, the conquest of desire, egoless and desireless action, bhakti for the Divine, an entering into the cosmic consciousness, the sense of unity with all creatures, oneness with the Divine. This yoga adds the bringing down of the supramental Light and Force (its ultimate aim) and the transformation of the nature.
Our yoga is not identical with the yoga of the Gita although it contains all that is essential in the Gita’s yoga. In our yoga we begin with the idea, the will, the aspiration of the complete surrender; but at the same time we have to reject the lower nature, deliver our consciousness from it, deliver the self involved in the lower nature by the self rising to freedom in the higher nature. If we do not do this double movement, we are in danger of making a tamasic and therefore unreal surrender, making no effort, no tapas and therefore no progress ; or else we make a rajasic surrender not to the Divine but to some self-made false idea or image of the Divine which masks our rajasic ego or something still worse.
Integral Yoga, Gita and Tantra ::: The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishvara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it.
The Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishvari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it.
This yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulfilment of the object of the yoga.
Integral Yoga and Hatha-Raja Yogas ::: For an integral yoga the special methods of Rajayoga and Hathayoga may be useful at times in certain stages of the progress, but are not indispensable. Their principal aims must be included in the integrality of the yoga; but they can be brought about by other means. For the methods of the integral yoga must be mainly spiritual, and dependence on physical methods or fixed psychic or psychophysical processes on a large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher action. Integral Yoga and Kundalini Yoga: There is a feeling of waves surging up, mounting to the head, which brings an outer unconsciousness and an inner waking. It is the ascending of the lower consciousness in the ādhāra to meet the greater consciousness above. It is a movement analogous to that on which so much stress is laid in the Tantric process, the awakening of the Kundalini, the Energy coiled up and latent in the body and its mounting through the spinal cord and the centres (cakras) and the Brahmarandhra to meet the Divine above. In our yoga it is not a specialised process, but a spontaneous upnish of the whole lower consciousness sometimes in currents or waves, sometimes in a less concrete motion, and on the other side a descent of the Divine Consciousness and its Force into the body.
Integral Yoga and other Yogas ::: The old yogas reach Sachchidananda through the spiritualised mind and depart into the eternally static oneness of Sachchidananda or rather pure Sat (Existence), absolute and eternal or else a pure Non-exist- ence, absolute and eternal. Ours having realised Sachchidananda in the spiritualised mind plane proceeds to realise it in the Supramcntal plane.
The suprcfhe supra-cosmic Sachchidananda is above all. Supermind may be described as its power of self-awareness and W’orld- awareness, the world being known as within itself and not out- side. So to live consciously in the supreme Sachchidananda one must pass through the Supermind.
Distinction ::: The realisation of Self and of the Cosmic being (without which the realisation of the Self is incomplete) are essential steps in our yoga ; it is the end of other yogas, but it is, as it were, the beginning of outs, that is to say, the point where its own characteristic realisation can commence.
It is new as compared with the old yogas (1) Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into Heaven and Nir- vana, but at a change of life and existence, not as something subordinate or incidental, but as a distinct and central object.
If there is a descent in other yogas, yet it is only an incident on the way or resulting from the ascent — the ascent is the real thing. Here the ascent is the first step, but it is a means for the descent. It is the descent of the new coosdousness attain- ed by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even the Tantra and Vaishnavism end in the release from life ; here the object is the divine fulfilment of life.
(2) Because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic acbievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing of a Power of consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
(3) Because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of the consciousness and nature, taking up old methods, but only as a part action and present aid to others that are distinctive.
Integral Yoga and Patanjali Yoga ::: Cilia is the stuff of mixed mental-vital-physical consciousness out of which arise the movements of thought, emotion, sensation, impulse etc.
It is these that in the Patanjali system have to be stilled altogether so that the consciousness may be immobile and go into Samadhi.
Our yoga has a different function. The movements of the ordinary consciousness have to be quieted and into the quietude there has to be brought down a higher consciousness and its powers which will transform the nature.
interpretative ::: (in 1920) being of the nature of an "ideative vision and thought" that "interpret . . . the illimitable unity and variety of the Infinite", the characteristic of the hermetic ideality or srauta vijñana, the plane of vijñana whose essence is sruti, also attributed to the highest forms of logistic ideality containing an element of inspiration; specifically, pertaining to the highest form of inspired revelatory logistis, called interpretative revelatory vijñana, to the second element in the highest representative ideality or to the srauta vijñana itself, from which these derive; (in 1927) short for interpretative imperative. interpretative dr drsti
In the rationalistic tradition, Descartes introduces a distinction between finite and infinite substance. To conceive of substance is to conceive an existing thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist. Strictly speaking, God alone is substance. Created or finite substances are independent in the sense that they need only the concurrence of God in order to exist. 'Everything in which there resides immediately, as in a subject, or by means of which there exists anything that we perceive, i.e., any property, quality, or attribute, of which we have a real idea, is called a Substance." (Reply to Obj. II, Phil. Works, trans, by Haldane and Ross, vol. II, p. 53, see Prin. of Phil. Pt. I, 51, 52). Substance is that which can exist by itself without the aid of any other substance. Reciprocal exclusion of one another belongs to the nature of substance. (Reply to Obj. IV). Spinoza brings together medieval Aristotelian meanings and the Cartesian usage, but rejects utterly the notion of finite substance, leaving only the infinite. The former is, in effect, a contradiction in terms, according to him. Spinoza further replaces the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident with that between substance and mode. (See Wolfson, The Phil. of Spinoza, vol. I, ch. 3). "By substance, I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words that, the conception of which does not need the conception of another thing from which it must be formed." (Ethics, I, Def. III). Substance is thus ultimate being, self-caused or from itself (a se), and so absolutely independent being, owing its being to itself, and eternally self-sustaining. It is in itself (in se), and all things are within it. Substance is one and there can be but one substance; God is this substance. For Descartes, every substance has a principal attribute, an unchangeable essential nature, without which it can neither be nor be understood. The attribute is thus constitutive of substance, and the latter is accessible to mind only through the former. By virtue of having different constitutive essences or attributes, substances are opposed to one another. Spinoza, rejecting the idea of finite substance, necessarily rejects the possibility of a plurality of substances. The attributes of the one substance are plural and are constitutive. But the plurality of attributes implies that substance as such cannot be understood by way of any one attribute or by way of several. Accordingly, Spinoza declares that substance is also per se, i.e., conceived through itself. The infinite mode of an attribute, the all pervasive inner character which defines an attribute in distinction from another, is Spinoza's adaptation of the Cartesian constitutive essence.
In The Secret Doctrine, fohat is spoken of as the vahana of the “Primordial Seven”; physical forces as the vehicles of the elements; and the sun as the vahana or buddhi of Aditi (I 108, 470. 527n). Again, all gods and goddesses are “represented as using vahanas to manifest themselves, which vehicles are ever symbolical. So, for instance, Vishnu has during Pralayas, Ananta ‘the infinite’ (Space), symbolized by the serpent Sesha, and during the Manvantaras — Garuda the gigantic half-eagle, half-man, the symbol of the great cycle; Brahma appears as Brahma, descending into the planes of manifestation on Kalahansa, the ‘swan in time or finite eternity’; Siva . . . appears as the bull Nandi; Osiris as the sacred bull Apis; Indra travels on an elephant; Karttikeya, on a peacock; Kamadeva on Makara, at other times a parrot; Agni, the universal (and also solar) Fire-god, who is, as all of them are, ‘a consuming Fire,’ manifests itself as a ram and a lamb, Aja, ‘the unborn’; Varuna, as a fish; etc., etc., while the vehicle of Man is his body” (TG 357-8).
"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.” The Life Divine
“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.” The Life Divine
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
It is the insinimentation of the Sachchidananda, — the Infinite consciousness higher than the mental being. It Is a Self- awareness of the Infinite and Eternal and a power of Self- determination Inherent in that Self-awareness. Supermind keeps always and in every status and condition the spiritual realisation of the unity of all. It is the Consciousness creatrix of the world, a W”!!! to light and vision and also a will to power of works. It
“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
Its symbol, the circle, represents at once nothing and everything; it is the symbol of boundless infinity; and a circle may be defined either as a single undivided and unterminated line, or as an infinite number of infinitely short lines. Ends meet; there is no essential difference between the infinitely great and infinitesimal. The zero point is the vanishing point, the laya or neutral state. In mathematics it is the neutral position between the series of positive and negative numbers. It is also the neutral state of matter between two planes; when physical matter is reduced to the zero or laya-state, it is ready to become manifest on the next higher plane, or vice versa. The same applies to consciousness and its planes.
Kiyozawa Manshi. (清沢満之) (1863-1903). Meiji-era Japanese Buddhist leader in the HIGASHI-HONGANJIHA of JoDO SHINSHu. Kiyozawa was born into a poor warrior class family in a small town east of Nagoya and ordained in 1878 as a Higashi-Honganji priest. After studying Western philosophy at college and graduate school in Tokyo, he served his sect as an educator. In 1888, he was appointed principal of a Higashi-Honganji middle school in Kyoto and taught Western philosophy at a Higashi-Honganji seminary. In 1890, however, Kiyozawa left his position as principal to lead a rigorous ascetic life, wearing Buddhist robes, separating himself from his family, and living on simple food. Around this time, Kiyozawa launched a reform movement within Higashi-Honganji to return the school to the spirit of its founder, SHINRAN (1173-1262), and to make its ecclesiastical structure conform better to modern secular society, such as by having its deacons elected democratically. However, his movement failed and he was excommunicated in 1897. After being reinstated a year later, Kiyozawa again played an important role in the sect's education, serving in 1901 and 1902 as a dean of Higashi-Honganji's newly founded college (present-day otani University). He died at the age of forty from the tuberculosis he had contracted during his practice of asceticism. Kiyozawa is credited with popularizing the TANNISHo, a short collection of Shinran's sayings that previously were not widely known. Kiyozawa emphasized individual religious experience, in which the adherent's self-awareness of his or her incapacity for moral perfection would instead prompt the adept to realize the truth of salvation through absolute reliance on the infinite. Kiyozawa argued that such individual spiritual realization could contribute to the welfare of society at large. Although Kiyozawa's thought was not widely accepted during his own age, it influenced a younger generation of Higashi-Honganji scholars, such as Akegarasu Haya (1877-1967), Soga Ryojin (1875-1971), and Kaneko Dai'ei (1881-1976), who later became leading intellectual figures in the sect.
Kosmic Life ::: All the great religions and philosophies of past times, all the ancient sciences likewise, taught the fact ofthe existence of inner, invisible, intangible, but causal realms, as the foundation and background of thesevarious systems. According to them all, our physical world is but the outer shell or garment or veil ofother worlds which are inner, vital, alive, and causal, which in their aggregate imbody the kosmic life.This kosmic life is not a person, not an individualized entity. It is far, far different from any such merelyhuman conception, because it is infinite, boundless, beginningless, endless, coextensive with infinity,coextensive with eternity. The kosmic life is in very truth the ultimate reality behind and within all thatis.All the energies and matters in our world are really only various and innumerable manifestations of thekosmic life existing in truly infinitely large variety. The kosmic life, therefore, is, as said, the realitybehind all the infinitely varied hosts of entities and things. But this reality is no personal orindividualized Deity. It is precisely what theosophy calls it: the boundless and, in its totality,incomprehensible life-substance-consciousness.
law ::: “… all cosmic and real Law is a thing not imposed from outside, but from within, all development is self-development, all seed and result are seed of a Truth of things and result of that seed determined out of its potentialities. For the same reason no Law is absolute, because only the infinite is absolute, and everything contains within itself endless potentialities quite beyond its determined form and course, which are only determined through a self-limitation by Idea proceeding from an infinite liberty within.” The Life Divine
laya ::: dissolution, disappearance; annullation of the individual soul in the Infinite.
least fixed point "mathematics" A {function} f may have many {fixed points} (x such that f x = x). For example, any value is a fixed point of the identity function, (\ x . x). If f is {recursive}, we can represent it as f = fix F where F is some {higher-order function} and fix F = F (fix F). The standard {denotational semantics} of f is then given by the least fixed point of F. This is the {least upper bound} of the infinite sequence (the {ascending Kleene chain}) obtained by repeatedly applying F to the totally undefined value, bottom. I.e. fix F = LUB {bottom, F bottom, F (F bottom), ...}. The least fixed point is guaranteed to exist for a {continuous} function over a {cpo}. (2005-04-12)
::: "Liberty in one shape or another ranks among the most ancient and certainly among the most difficult aspirations of our race: it arises from a radical instinct of our being and is yet opposed to all our circumstances, it is our eternal good and our condition of perfection, but our temporal being has failed to find its key. That perhaps is because true freedom is only possible if we live in the infinite, live, as the Vedanta bids us, in and from our self-existent being; but our natural and temporal energies seek for it first not in ourselves, but in our external conditions. This great indefinable thing, liberty, is in its highest and ultimate sense a state of being; it is self living in itself and determining by its own energy what is shall be inwardly and, eventually, by the growth of a divine spiritual power within determining too what it shall make of its external circumstances and environment." War and Self-Determination
“Liberty in one shape or another ranks among the most ancient and certainly among the most difficult aspirations of our race: it arises from a radical instinct of our being and is yet opposed to all our circumstances, it is our eternal good and our condition of perfection, but our temporal being has failed to find its key. That perhaps is because true freedom is only possible if we live in the infinite, live, as the Vedanta bids us, in and from our self-existent being; but our natural and temporal energies seek for it first not in ourselves, but in our external conditions. This great indefinable thing, liberty, is in its highest and ultimate sense a state of being; it is self living in itself and determining by its own energy what is shall be inwardly and, eventually, by the growth of a divine spiritual power within determining too what it shall make of its external circumstances and environment.” War and Self-Determination
Magne (Icelandic) [from magn main, strength] Thor, Norse god of thunder and lightning, in his capacity as electromagnetism in the infinite reaches of space, has two sons: Mode and Magne. Both mean power, though Mode has the connotation of anger, suggesting a repelling force, whereas Magne connotes power that is granted one. These two sons of Thor may represent attraction and repulsion, or gravitation and radiation on the cosmic level.
mahatma. ::: a great soul; highly spiritual person; a master in tune with the Infinite
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” *The Future Poetry
mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
mantra ::: : “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry
mata devanam aditer anikam ::: Mother of the gods, force of the Infinite. [RV 1.113.19]
maya ::: (in the Veda) "originally a formative power of knowledge, maya the true magic of the supreme Mage, the divine Magician, but . . . also used for the adverse formative power of a lower knowledge, the deceit, illusion and deluding magic of the Rakshasa"; measuring and limiting consciousness, "a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality" (brahman); the power of phenomenal creation by which "out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight"; illusion, "a bewildering partial consciousness which loses hold of the complete reality, lives in the phenomenon of mobile Nature [prakr.ti] and has no sight of the Spirit [purus.a] of which she is the active Power".
ṁ brahma ::: the realisation of "the Brahman infinite in being and infinite in quality", in which all quality (gun.a) and action is experienced as the play of a "universal and infinite energy", the second member of the brahma catus.t.aya; the divine Reality (brahman) "realised in its absolute infinity", bringing the perception of "Infinite Force and Quality at play in all forms". This has two aspects, "one in which the Infinite Force acts as if it were a mechanical entity, knowledge standing back from it, the other in which Life Force & Knowledge act together & the Infinite Force is an intelligent or at least a conscious force"...
Meditation The attempt to raise the self-conscious mind to the level of its spiritual counterpart, to unite manas with a ray from buddhi. It is a positive attitude of mind, a state of consciousness rather than a system or a time period of intensive thinking. It corresponds in its more perfect form to the ecstasy of Plotinus, which he defines as “the liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming one and identified with the Infinite.” It is silent prayer in one real sense, for the heart aspires upwards to become freed from all desire for personal benefit, and the mind frames no specific object, but both unite in the aspiration; not my will, but thine, be done. When engaged in at the outset of the day, or on retiring to sleep, it often takes the form of reflecting profoundly and impersonally on spiritual teachings, as well as self-examination, attuning of the mind and heart to calm and unselfish thought and feelings, as well as the endeavor to realize in consciousness one’s highest ideals of duty, purity, and truth, and inducing thereby a general harmonizing and one-pointed adjustment of the whole nature.
Mode (Icelandic) [from mod; cf English mood, German Muth wrath] Thor, Norse god of thunder and lightning, in his capacity as electromagnetism in the infinite reaches of space, has two sons: Mode and Magne. Both mean power, though Mode has the connotation of anger, suggesting a repelling force, whereas Magne connotes power that is granted one. These two sons of Thor may represent attraction and repulsion, or gravitation and radiation on the cosmic level.
moksha. :::final liberation from birth, death and re-birth; the state of abiding as the Self; complete freedom &
Monad ::: A spiritual entity which to us humans is indivisible; it is a divine-spiritual life-atom, but indivisiblebecause its essential characteristic, as we humans conceive it, is homogeneity; while that of the physicalatom, above which our consciousness soars, is divisible, is a composite heterogeneous particle.Monads are eternal, unitary, individual life-centers, conscious-ness-centers, deathless during any solarmanvantara, therefore ageless, unborn, undying. Consequently, each one such -- and their number isinfinite -- is the center of the All, for the divine or the All is THAT which has its center everywhere, andits circumference or limiting boundary nowhere.Monads are spiritual-substantial entities, self-motivated, self-impelled, self-conscious, in infinitelyvarying degrees, the ultimate elements of the universe. These monads engender other monads as one seedwill produce multitudes of other seeds; so up from each such monad springs a host of living entities inthe course of illimitable time, each such monad being the fountainhead or parent, in which all others areinvolved, and from which they spring.Every monad is a seed, wherein the sum total of powers appertaining to its divine origin are latent, that isto say unmanifested; and evolution consists in the growth and development of all these seeds or childrenmonads, whereby the universal life expresses itself in innumerable beings.As the monad descends into matter, or rather as its ray -- one of other innumerable rays proceeding fromit -- is propelled into matter, it secretes from itself and then excretes on each one of the seven planesthrough which it passes, its various vehicles, all overshadowed by the self, the same self in you and inme, in plants and in animals, in fact in all that is and belongs to that hierarchy. This is the one self, thesupreme self or paramatman of the hierarchy. It illumines and follows each individual monad and all thelatter's hosts of rays -- or children monads. Each such monad is a spiritual seed from the previousmanvantara, which manifests as a monad in this manvantara; and this monad through its rays throws outfrom itself by secretion and then excretion all its vehicles. These vehicles are, first, the spiritual ego, thereflection or copy in miniature of the monad itself, but individualized through the manvantaric evolution,"bearing" or "carrying" as a vehicle the monadic ray. The latter cannot directly contact the lower planes,because it is of the monadic essence itself, the latter a still higher ray of the infinite Boundless composedof infinite multiplicity in unity. (See also Individuality)
Monogenesis [from Greek monos single + genesis origin] The theory that all forms of life were developed from a single cell, or that all humanity is sprung from a single primitive stock or root; opposed to polygenesis. Monogenesis may also mean that any living stock of beings, such as the human, sprang from a single pair formerly living on some one part on the earth’s surface. Modern scientific theories of polygenesis are a far closer approximation to the theosophic view, which states that the earliest or primordial forms of the human stock on earth sprang more or less contemporaneously from seven different roots (imbodied groups of lunar monads) living more or less together in the regions surrounding what is now the north pole, which then enjoyed a tropic or semi-tropic climate. It was from the dispersion of these seven different root-stocks that later sprang the various human races known in legend, story, and history. In a cosmic sense it is possible to trace back all living forms to the original cosmic monad from which, as from a cosmic fountain, flowed forth into later manifestation the infinitely varied phenomena of the solar system. However, even this quasi-mongenetic origin of a solar system was brought about by polygenetic seeds of life cooperating to produce it.
mother of the worlds ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Aditi, the infinite Consciousness, Mother of the worlds.” *The Secret of the Veda
" She is the first Radiance, Aditi, the infinite Consciousness of the infinite conscious Being which is the mother of the worlds.” The Secret of the Veda*
Name ::: “Name in its deeper sense is not the word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality, character of the reality which a form of things embodies and which we try to sum up by a designating sound, a knowable name, Nomen. Nomen in this sense, we might say, is Numen; the secret Names of the Gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the consciousness and made conceivable. The Infinite is nameless, but in that namelessness all possible names, Numens of the gods, the names and forms of all realities, are already envisaged and prefigured, because they are there latent and inherent in the All-Existence.” The Life Divine
name ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Name in its deeper sense is not the word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality, character of the reality which a form of things embodies and which we try to sum up by a designating sound, a knowable name, Nomen. Nomen in this sense, we might say, is Numen; the secret Names of the Gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the consciousness and made conceivable. The Infinite is nameless, but in that namelessness all possible names, Numens of the gods, the names and forms of all realities, are already envisaged and prefigured, because they are there latent and inherent in the All-Existence.” The Life Divine
"Nature, because she is a power of spirit, is essentially qualitative in her action. One may almost say that Nature is only the power in being and the development in action of the infinite qualities of the spirit, . . . .” *The Synthesis of Yoga
“Nature, because she is a power of spirit, is essentially qualitative in her action. One may almost say that Nature is only the power in being and the development in action of the infinite qualities of the spirit, …” The Synthesis of Yoga
nityakarma ::: (in traditional Hinduism) daily ritual, "the Vedic rule, the routine of ceremonial sacrifice, daily conduct and social duty"; the routine of daily activities, a routine that "is ritam & necessary for karma, only it must be ritam of the brihat, part of the infinite, not narrow & rigid, a flexible instrument, not a stiff & unpliant bondage".
“Non-Being 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. And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time.” The Life Divine
Non-Being / Non-Existence ::: Non-Being 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 beingmore 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.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 32
non-Being ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Non-Being 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. And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time.” The Life Divine ::: Non-Being"s, Non-being"s, non-being, non-being"s,
Nuit: Infinite Space and the infinite stars thereof In a meta physical sense, Nuit is the Continuum of Bliss that results from the resoluton of mundane existence into the elements of non-existence. She (Nuit) isrepresented as a human female form arched over the earth, as in the Ste'le' of Revealing. In a more specialized and magical sense Nuit is the complement of Hadit, the omnipresent point of which she is the infinite circumference. She is North, and equates with Horns; he is South, and equates with Set.
One By itself the One represents not pure unalloyed spirit, which is signified by the zero — the all-containing womb of space and being — but is the First Logos or Pythagorean Monas monadum (monad of monads). From this monad of monads flows forth through emanation the duad, then the triad, and then the entire manifested universe of interlocking hierarchies, emanated from the cosmic womb of being or the zero through the First Logos or the One of primordial manifested spirit. “The sacredness of numbers begins with the great First — the one, and ends only with the nought or zero — symbol of the infinite and boundless circle which represents the universe. All the intervening figures, in whatever combination, or however multiplied, represent philosophical ideas, from vague outlines down to a definitely-established scientific axiom, relating either to a moral or a physical fact in nature. They are a key to the ancient views on cosmogony, in its broad sense, including man and beings, and the evolution of the human race, spiritually as well as physically” (IU 2:407).
One ::: “The Being is one, but this oneness is infinite and contains in itself an infinite plurality or multiplicity of itself: the One is the All; it is not only an essential Existence, but an All-Existence. The infinite multiplicity of the One and the eternal unity of the Many are the two realities or aspects of one reality on which the manifestation is founded.” The Life Divine
Or Ein Sof ::: Hebrew for “Light of the Infinite”; metaphor for Divine energy used in Creation
Overmind is a sort of delegation from the Supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary uni- verse in which we live here in Matter. Though luminous in itself, it keeps from us the full indivisible Supramental Tight, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictor^ to it. But this does not create a disharmony, because the Over- mind has the sense of the Infinite and in the true (not spatial)
para prakrti (Para Prakriti) ::: the supreme Nature; the very nature of the Divine; the infinite timeless conscious power of the self-existent being out of which all existences in the cosmos are manifested. ::: para prakrtih [nominative]
paritta. [alt. parittā] (BHS. parītta, T. yongs su skyob pa; C. minghu/minghu jing; J. myogo/myogokyo; K. myongho/myongho kyong 明護/明護經). In Pāli, "protection" (classical S. paritrāna); referring to both the practice of reciting a short passage from a SuTRA in order to draw on the text's apotropaic powers, as well as to the passages themselves. The use of paritta are said to have been sanctioned by the Buddha: after a monk had died of a snake bite, the Buddha recited a text (the Khandhaparitta, or "Protection of the Aggregates") for the monks to repeat as protection, which states that loving-kindness (P. mettā; S. MAITRĪ) and the infinite power of the Buddha, DHARMA, and SAMGHA would guard the monks from the finite power of snakes, scorpions, and other dangerous creatures. There were many specific instances that subsequently led the Buddha to deliver different paritta verses, including protection from evil spirits, the assurance of good fortune, exorcism, curing serious illness, and even safe childbirth. The power of these verses often is thought to derive from an asseveration of truth (S. SATYAVACANA; P. saccavacana, saccakiriyā), as in the famous paritta associated with AnGULIMĀLA, who offered this statement to help ease a woman's labor pains: "Since I was born of āryan birth, O sister, I am not aware of having intentionally deprived any living being of its life. By this asseveration of truth, may you be well and may your unborn child be well." (There is intentional irony in this statement, since Angulimāla was well known to have been a murderous highwayman before he became a monk; his "āryan birth" here refers to his ordination into the SAMGHA.) ¶ Collections of paritta are particularly common in Southeast Asian Buddhism, and the texts included in these collections are among the most widely known of Buddhist scriptures among the laity. One of the most popular such Pāli anthologies is the Catubhanavara ("The Text of the Four Recitals"), which contains twenty-nine (or in some recensions twenty-four) Pāli suttas whose protective powers are thought to be particularly efficacious. (This text is widely used in Sri Lanka, where it is known as the Pirit Potha.) Scriptures commonly presumed to have apotropaic powers in Pāli Buddhism include the METTĀSUTTA ("Discourse on Loving-Kindness"), the MAnGALASUTTA ("Discourse on the Auspicious"), the RATANASUTTA ("Discourse on the Precious"), and the ĀTĀNĀTIYASUTTA ("Discourse on the Ātānātiya Protective Spell"). The recitation of these texts accompanies all sorts of Buddhist ceremonies, from weddings to funerals to house blessings. In Southeast Asia, the monks performing a parittarecitation ritual are sometimes connected to the congregation with a ritual string, through which blessings and protection are transferred to the participants. See also RAKsĀ.
peak upon peak. (3) Symbols that have an inherent apposition and form of their own, e.g. akdsa or ethcric space, a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. (4) Mental symbols, e.g. numbers or alphabets.
Personal God The personal anthropomorphic extra-cosmic God of theology is a purely human creation — for personality is a limitation utterly inconsistent with the nature of the boundless and eternal. This theological God is merely a reflection of man. The infinite source of all cannot be defined, since every possible attribute which we might assign to it is a human mental creation. We are forced to speak of God as impersonal, but must beware lest in doing so we reduce the conception to an empty abstraction. God may denote a divine being, a being who was once in our present human stage but has evolved beyond it, having transcended the limit of personality but without losing individuality. Or God may be applied to a being who has emanated from the divine source but is on the downward arc of evolution, not having yet become man; or again it may be a projection of the human mind, like the personal God of theology, but in this case it is a human mental creation — therefore containing human limitations because the human mind is finite — and therefore inadmissible.
Power or possibility of the Infinite Consciousness can be admitted, its power of self-absorption, of plunging into itself, into a state in which self-awareness exists but not as knowledge and not as all-knowledge; the all would then be involved in pure self-awareness, and knowledge and the inner consciousness itself would be lost in pure being. This is, luminously, the state which we call the Superconscience in an absolute sense,—although most of what we call superconscient is in reality not that but only a higher conscient, something that is conscious to itself and only superconscious to our own limited level of awareness. This self-absorption, this trance of infinity is again, no longer luminously but darkly, the state which we call the Inconscient; for the being of the Infinite is there though by its appearance of inconscience it seems to us rather to be an infinite non-being: a self-oblivious intrinsic consciousness and force are there in that apparent non-being, for by the energy of the Inconscient an ordered world is created; it is created in a trance of self-absorption, the force acting automatically and with an apparent blindness as in a trance, but still with the inevitability and power of truth of the Infinite.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 358-359
Pratishtha (Sanskrit) Pratiṣṭhā [from prati-sthā to stand towards, stay from prati towards, upon, in the direction of + the verbal root sthā to stand] Dwelling place, residence, receptacle; preeminence, superiority. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna refers to himself as a pratishtha of Brahman or parabrahman; an image or manifestation of parabrahman or a hypostasis or representation of the divine in the worlds of manifestation. Thus the hierarch or manifested divinity in any world system is a pratishtha of the surrounding invisible life or Brahman, Brahman again being one of the infinitely numerous channels or pratishthas of parabrahman.
Purnoham: I am full, the absolute, the infinite; I am Brahman.
purus.a (purusha) ::: man; person; soul; spirit; the Self (atman) "as purusa originator, witness, support and lord and enjoyer of the forms and works of Nature" (prakr.ti); the conscious being, universal or individual, observing and upholding the activity of Nature on any plane of existence; the infinite divine Person (purus.ottama), "the Existent who .. transcends all definition by personality and yet is always that which is the essence of personality"; any of the ten types of consciousness (dasa-gavas) in the evolutionary scale. purusa purus
Realistic Advaita ::: There is possible a realistic as well as an illusionist Adwaita. The philosophy of The Life Divine is such a realistic Adwaita. The world is a manifestation of the Real and th
refore is itself real. The reality is the infinite and eternal Divine, infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This Divine by his power has created the world or rather manifested it in his own infinite Being. But here in the material world or at its basis he has hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites, Non-Being, Inconscience and Insentience. This is what we nowadays call the Inconscient which seems to have created the material universe by its inconscient Energy; but this is only an appearance, for we find in the end that all the dispositions of theworld can only have been arranged by the working of a supreme secret intelligence. The Being which is hidden in what seems to be an inconscient void emerges in the world first in Matter, then in Life, then in Mind and finally as the Spirit. The apparently inconscient Energy which creates is in fact the Consciousness-Force of the Divine and its aspect of consciousness, secret in Matter, begins to emerge in Life, finds something more of itself in Mind and finds its true self in a spiritual consciousness and finally a supramental consciousness through which we become aware of the Reality, enter into it and unite ourselves with it. This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. Thus also, the delight of existence emerges from the original insentience first in the contrary forms of pleasure and pain and then has to find itself in the bliss of the Spirit or as it is called in the Upanishads, the bliss of the Brahman.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 91-92
real number "mathematics" One of the infinitely divisible range of values between positive and negative {infinity}, used to represent continuous physical quantities such as distance, time and temperature. Between any two real numbers there are infinitely many more real numbers. The {integers} ("counting numbers") are real numbers with no fractional part and real numbers ("measuring numbers") are {complex numbers} with no imaginary part. Real numbers can be divided into {rational numbers} and {irrational numbers}. Real numbers are usually represented (approximately) by computers as {floating point} numbers. Strictly, real numbers are the {equivalence classes} of the {Cauchy sequences} of {rationals} under the {equivalence relation} "~", where a ~ b if and only if a-b is {Cauchy} with limit 0. The real numbers are the minimal {topologically closed} {field} containing the rational field. A sequence, r, of rationals (i.e. a function, r, from the {natural numbers} to the rationals) is said to be Cauchy precisely if, for any tolerance delta there is a size, N, beyond which: for any n, m exceeding N, | r[n] - r[m] | " delta A Cauchy sequence, r, has limit x precisely if, for any tolerance delta there is a size, N, beyond which: for any n exceeding N, | r[n] - x | " delta (i.e. r would remain Cauchy if any of its elements, no matter how late, were replaced by x). It is possible to perform addition on the reals, because the equivalence class of a sum of two sequences can be shown to be the equivalence class of the sum of any two sequences equivalent to the given originals: ie, a~b and c~d implies a+c~b+d; likewise a.c~b.d so we can perform multiplication. Indeed, there is a natural {embedding} of the rationals in the reals (via, for any rational, the sequence which takes no other value than that rational) which suffices, when extended via continuity, to import most of the algebraic properties of the rationals to the reals. (1997-03-12)
real number ::: (mathematics) One of the infinitely divisible range of values between positive and negative infinity, used to represent continuous physical quantities such as distance, time and temperature.Between any two real numbers there are infinitely many more real numbers. The integers (counting numbers) are real numbers with no fractional part and real numbers (measuring numbers) are complex numbers with no imaginary part. Real numbers can be divided into rational numbers and irrational numbers.Real numbers are usually represented (approximately) by computers as floating point numbers.Strictly, real numbers are the equivalence classes of the Cauchy sequences of rationals under the equivalence relation ~, where a ~ b if and only if a-b is Cauchy with limit 0.The real numbers are the minimal topologically closed field containing the rational field.A sequence, r, of rationals (i.e. a function, r, from the natural numbers to the rationals) is said to be Cauchy precisely if, for any tolerance delta there is a size, N, beyond which: for any n, m exceeding N, | r[n] - r[m] | delta there is a size, N, beyond which: for any n exceeding N, | r[n] - x | delta (i.e. r would remain Cauchy if any of its elements, no matter how late, were replaced by x).It is possible to perform addition on the reals, because the equivalence class of a sum of two sequences can be shown to be the equivalence class of the sum of extended via continuity, to import most of the algebraic properties of the rationals to the reals. (1997-03-12)
Reason is a clarified, ordered and organised Ignorance. It is a half-enlightened Ignorance seeking for truth, but a truth which it insists on founding upon the data and postulates of the Ignorance. Reason is not in possession of the Truth, it is a seeker. It is [unable to] discover the Truth or embody it; it leaves Truth covered but rendered into mental representations, a verbal and ideative scheme, an abstract algebra of concepts, a theory of the Ignorance. Sense-evidence is its starting point and it never really gets away from that insecure beginning. Its concepts start from sense-data and though like a kite it can fly high into an air of abstractions, it is held to the earth of sense by a string of great strength; if that string is broken it drifts lazily [in] the clouds and always it falls back by natural gravitation to its original earth basis—only so can it receive strength to go farther. Its field is the air and sky of the finite, it cannot ascend into the stratosphere of the spiritual vision, still less can it move at ease in the Infinite.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 256
"Religion in fact is not knowledge, but a faith and aspiration; it is justified indeed both by an imprecise intuitive knowledge of large spiritual truths and by the subjective experience of souls that have risen beyond the ordinary life, but in itself it only gives us the hope and faith by which we may be induced to aspire to the intimate possession of the hidden tracts and larger realities of the Spirit. That we turn always the few distinct truths and the symbols or the particular discipline of a religion into hard and fast dogmas, is a sign that as yet we are only infants in the spiritual knowledge and are yet far from the science of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga*
“Religion in fact is not knowledge, but a faith and aspiration; it is justified indeed both by an imprecise intuitive knowledge of large spiritual truths and by the subjective experience of souls that have risen beyond the ordinary life, but in itself it only gives us the hope and faith by which we may be induced to aspire to the intimate possession of the hidden tracts and larger realities of the Spirit. That we turn always the few distinct truths and the symbols or the particular discipline of a religion into hard and fast dogmas, is a sign that as yet we are only infants in the spiritual knowledge and are yet far from the science of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Reshimu (&
RFC 2795 ::: (networking, standard) The RFC describing The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite . .
sahasradala (sahasradala; sahasradal) ::: the "thousand-petalled lotus"; the cakra above the head which is "the centre of communication direct between the individual being and the infinite Consciousness above".
samsaktti. ::: attachment; selfimposed conditioning where the infinite Self is taken to be identical with the physical body
sarvaṁ (brahma) ::: brahman as Bliss, as Knowledge, as the Infinite, as the All; the formula of the brahma catus.t.aya with its terms in reverse order. ananda purus ananda purusa
sat-cit-ananda (sat-chit-ananda) ::: (usually spelled saccidananda) sat-cit-ananda Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, "the infinite being [sat], the infinite consciousness [cit], the infinite delight [ananda] which are the supreme planes of existence and from which all else derives or descends into this obscurer ambiguous manifestation"; referred to as "thrice seven" planes because "each of the divine principles contains in itself the whole potentiality of all the other six notes of our being" (see loka).
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.
"Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe.” The Synthesis of Yoga
self-knowledge ::: knowing of oneself, without help from another.
Sri Aurobindo: The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of knowledge, although still classified, even when its value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate. *The Life Divine
"Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for various expression.” The Life Divine
"The Truth-Consciousness is everywhere present in the universe as an ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity.” The Life Divine
Sephirah is especially applied to the first emanation, Kether (the Crown), the other nine Sephiroth being involved or held in germ within the first emanation, and emanating therefrom one by one in serial order as “nine splendid lights” (Zohar 111 288a). The first Sephirah is also called ’eyn soph ’or (boundless light). “The Spiritual substance sent forth by the Infinite Light is the first Sephira or Shekinah: Sephira exoterically contains all the other nine Sephiroth in her. Esoterically she contains but two, Chochmah or Wisdom, a masculine, active potency whose divine name is Jah (יה), and Binah, a feminine passive potency, Intelligence, represented by the divine name Jehovah (יהוה); which two potencies form, with Sephira the third, the Jewish trinity or the Crown, Kether” (SD 1:355).
“ She is the first Radiance, Aditi, the infinite Consciousness of the infinite conscious Being which is the mother of the worlds.” The Secret of the Veda
shishi wu'ai fajie. (J. jijimugehokkai; K. sasa muae popkye 事事無礙法界). In Chinese, "dharma-realm of the unimpeded interpenetration between phenomenon and phenomena," the fourth of the four dharma-realms (DHARMADHĀTU), according to the HUAYAN ZONG. In this Huayan conception of ultimate reality, what the senses ordinarily perceive to be discrete and separate phenomena (SHI) are actually mutually pervading and mutually validating. Reality is likened to the bejeweled net of the king of the gods INDRA (see INDRAJĀLA), in which a jewel is hung at each knot in the net and the net stretches out infinitely in all directions. On the infinite facets of each individual jewel, the totality of the brilliance of the expansive net is captured, and the reflected brilliance is in turn re-reflected and multiplied by all the other jewels in the net. The universe is in this manner envisioned to be an intricate web of interconnecting phenomena, where each individual phenomenon owes its existence to the collective conditioning effect of all other phenomena and therefore has no absolute, self-contained identity. In turn, each individual phenomenon "creates" the universe as it is because the totality of the universe is inconceivable without the presence of each of those individual phenomena that define it. The function and efficacy of individual phenomena so thoroughly interpenetrate all other phenomena that the respective boundaries between individual phenomena are rendered moot; instead, all things are mutually interrelated with all other things, in a simultaneous mutual identity and mutual intercausality. In this distinctively Huayan understanding of reality, the entire universe is subsumed and revealed within even the most humble of individual phenomena, such as a single mote of dust, and any given mote of dust contains the infinite realms of this self-defining, self-creating universe. "Unimpeded" (wu'ai) in this context therefore has two important meanings: any single phenomenon simultaneously creates and is created by all other phenomena, and any phenomenon simultaneously contains and is contained by the universe in all its diversity. A common Huayan simile employs the image of ocean waves to describe this state of interfusion: because individual waves form, permeate, and infuse all other waves, they both define all waves (which in this simile is the ocean in its entirety), and in turn are defined themselves in the totality that is the ocean. The Huayan school claims this reputedly highest level of understanding to be its exclusive sectarian insight, thus ranking it the "consummate teaching" (YUANJIAO) in the scheme of the HUAYAN WUJIAO (Huayan fivefold taxonomy of the the teachings).
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.
Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self-expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe. …
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . all cosmic and real Law is a thing not imposed from outside, but from within, all development is self-development, all seed and result are seed of a Truth of things and result of that seed determined out of its potentialities. For the same reason no Law is absolute, because only the infinite is absolute, and everything contains within itself endless potentialities quite beyond its determined form and course, which are only determined through a self-limitation by Idea proceeding from an infinite liberty within.” The Life Divine
*(Sri Aurobindo: "And finally all is lifted up and taken into the supermind and made a part of the infinitely luminous consciousness, knowledge and experience of the supramental being, the Vijnana Purusha.” The Synthesis of Yoga*) ::: Angel of the House. The guardian spirit of the home.
Sri Aurobindo: A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation…. But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are, however, different kinds of symbols: 1. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because the same word `go ‘ meant both ray and cow, and because the cow was their most precious possession which maintained their life and was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy were quite evident. 2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a railway-trip. 3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning. Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine Gnosis. 4.* Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets. Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful. Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations. In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them; they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same symbol may also express many different ideas. Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "In considering the action of the Infinite we have to avoid the error of the disciple who thought of himself as the Brahman, refused to obey the warning of the elephant-driver to budge ::: from the narrow path and was taken up by the elephant"s trunk and removed out of the way; ‘You are no doubt the Brahman," said the master to his bewildered disciple, ‘but why did you not obey the driver Brahman and get out of the path of the elephant Brahman?"” *The Life Divine
"Sri Aurobindo: "It has been held that ecstasy is a lower and transient passage, the peace of the Supreme is the supreme realisation, the consummate abiding experience. This may be true on the spiritual-mind plane: there the first ecstasy felt is indeed a spiritual rapture, but it can be and is very usually mingled with a supreme happiness of the vital parts taken up by the Spirit; there is an exaltation, exultation, excitement, a highest intensity of the joy of the heart and the pure inner soul-sensation that can be a splendid passage or an uplifting force but is not the ultimate permanent foundation. But in the highest ascents of the spiritual bliss there is not this vehement exaltation and excitement; there is instead an illimitable intensity of participation in an eternal ecstasy which is founded on the eternal Existence and therefore on a beatific tranquillity of eternal peace. Peace and ecstasy cease to be different and become one. The Supermind, reconciling and fusing all differences as well as all contradictions, brings out this unity; a wide calm and a deep delight of all-existence are among its first steps of self-realisation, but this calm and this delight rise together, as one state, into an increasing intensity and culminate in the eternal ecstasy, the bliss that is the Infinite.” The Life Divine
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: “Love fulfilled does not exclude knowledge, but itself brings knowledge; and the completer the knowledge, the richer the possibility of love. ‘By Bhakti’ says the Lord in the Gita ‘shall a man know Me in all my extent and greatness and as I am in the principles of my being, and when he has known Me in the principles of my being, then he enters into Me.’ Love without knowledge is a passionate and intense, but blind, crude, often dangerous thing, a great power, but also a stumbling-block; love, limited in knowledge, condemns itself in its fervour and often by its very fervour to narrowness; but love leading to perfect knowledge brings the infinite and absolute union. Such love is not inconsistent with, but rather throws itself with joy into divine works; for it loves God and is one with him in all his being, and therefore in all beings, and to work for the world is then to feel and fulfil multitudinously one’s love for God. This is the trinity of our powers, [work, knowledge, love] the union of all three in God to which we arrive when we start on our journey by the path of devotion with Love for the Angel of the Way to find in the ecstasy of the divine delight of the All-Lover’s being the fulfilment of ours, its secure home and blissful abiding-place and the centre of its universal radiation.” The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: . . . . Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind"s way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The Being is one, but this oneness is infinite and contains in itself an infinite plurality or multiplicity of itself: the One is the All; it is not only an essential Existence, but an All-Existence. The infinite multiplicity of the One and the eternal unity of the Many are the two realities or aspects of one reality on which the manifestation is founded.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The Infinite is not a sum of things, it is That which is all things and more.” The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: "The Infinite pauses always in the finite; the finite arrives always in the Infinite. This is the wheel that circles forever through Time and Eternity.” *Essays Divine and Human
Sri Aurobindo: "The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of her sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass though the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.” The Mother
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
superconscience ::: “But a third power or possibility of the Infinite Consciousness can be admitted, its power of self-absorption, of plunging into itself, into a state in which self-awareness exists but not as knowledge and not as all-knowledge; the all would then be involved in pure self-awareness, and knowledge and the inner consciousness itself would be lost in pure being. This is, luminously, the state which we call the Superconscience in an absolute sense,—although most of what we call superconscient is in reality not that but only a higher conscient, something that is conscious to itself and only superconscious to our own limited level of awareness.” The Life Divine
superconscience ::: Sri Aurobindo: "But a third power or possibility of the Infinite Consciousness can be admitted, its power of self-absorption, of plunging into itself, into a state in which self-awareness exists but not as knowledge and not as all-knowledge; the all would then be involved in pure self-awareness, and knowledge and the inner consciousness itself would be lost in pure being. This is, luminously, the state which we call the Superconscience in an absolute sense, — although most of what we call superconscient is in reality not that but only a higher conscient, something that is conscious to itself and only superconscious to our own limited level of awareness.” The Life Divine
supermind ::: "a principle superior to mentality", which "has the knowledge of the One, but is able to draw out of the One its hidden multitudes" and "manifests the Many, but does not lose itself in their differentiations", forming a link between "the unitarian or indivisible consciousness of pure Sachchidananda in which there are no separating distinctions" and "the analytic or dividing consciousness of Mind which can only know by separation and distinction" and making it "possible for us to realise the one Existence, Consciousness,Delight in the mould of the mind, life and body"; (up to 1920) a general term for the supra-intellectual faculty or plane (vijñana); (c.December 1926) the "Truth-Mind" or plane of "luminous DivineMind-Existence" below the "Divine Truth and Vastness" of mahad . brahma; (in 1927 before 29 October) same as supreme supermind, one of a series of planes above ideality which seem to correspond to those later included in the overmind system, a series that also included other planes sometimes designated as forms of "supermind", such as supreme supramental supermind and gnostic supermind; (from 29October 1927 onwards) equivalent to divine gnosis, the plane of "selfdetermining infinite consciousness" above overmind, from which it differs in that "the overmind knows the One as the support, essence, fundamental power of all things, but in the dynamic play proper to it it lays emphasis on its divisional power of multiplicity", while in the supermind all is "held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence" even in its "working out of the diversity of the Infinite".
symbol ::: A symbol, as I understand it, is the form on one plane that represents a truth of another. For instance, a flag is the symbol of a nation…. But generally all forms are symbols. This body of ours is a symbol of our real being and everything is a symbol of some higher reality. There are, however, different kinds of symbols: 1. Conventional symbols, such as the Vedic Rishis formed with objects taken from their surroundings. The cow stood for light because the same word `go ‘ meant both ray and cow, and because the cow was their most precious possession which maintained their life and was constantly in danger of being robbed and concealed. But once created, such a symbol becomes alive. The Rishis vitalised it and it became a part of their realisation. It appeared in their visions as an image of spiritual light. The horse also was one of their favourite symbols, and a more easily adaptable one, since its force and energy were quite evident. 2. What we might call Life-symbols, such as are not artificially chosen or mentally interpreted in a conscious deliberate way, but derive naturally from our day-to-day life and grow out of the surroundings which condition our normal path of living. To the ancients the mountain was a symbol of the path of yoga, level above level, peak upon peak. A journey, involving the crossing of rivers and the facing of lurking enemies, both animal and human, conveyed a similar idea. Nowadays I dare say we would liken yoga to a motor-ride or a railway-trip. 3. Symbols that have an inherent appositeness and power of their own. Akasha or etheric space is a symbol of the infinite all-pervading eternal Brahman. In any nationality it would convey the same meaning. Also, the Sun stands universally for the supramental Light, the divine Gnosis. 4. Mental symbols, instances of which are numbers or alphabets. Once they are accepted, they too become active and may be useful. Thus geometrical figures have been variously interpreted. In my experience the square symbolises the supermind. I cannot say how it came to do so. Somebody or some force may have built it before it came to my mind. Of the triangle, too, there are different explanations. In one position it can symbolise the three lower planes, in another the symbol is of the three higher ones: so both can be combined together in a single sign. The ancients liked to indulge in similar speculations concerning numbers, but their systems were mostly mental. It is no doubt true that supramental realities exist which we translate into mental formulas such as Karma, Psychic evolution, etc. But they are, so to speak, infinite realities which cannot be limited by these symbolic forms, though they may be somewhat expressed by them; they might be expressed as well by other symbols, and the same symbol may also express many different ideas. Letters on Yoga
tathāgata. (T. de bzhin gshegs pa; C. rulai; J. nyorai; K. yorae 如來). In Sanskrit and Pāli, lit., "one who has thus come/gone," and generally translated into English as the "thus gone one." Tathāgata is, along with BHAGAVAT, one of the most common epithets of the Buddha and a term the Buddha commonly uses in the SuTRAs to refer both to himself and to the buddhas of the past. The Sanskrit compound may be parsed to mean either "one who is thus gone" (tathā + gata), or "one who has thus come" (tathā + āgata), and for this reason the translations of the Sanskrit vary across languages. The Sanskrit root √gam is also used with prepositions in words that mean "understand," so a secondary denotation of the term is to "understand" things "as they are" (tathā). The Chinese settled on the translation "thus come one" (rulai). The Tibetan translation de bzhin gshegs pa reflects the ambiguity of the Sanskrit and can mean either "one who has thus gone" or "one who has thus come." The Pāli commentaries typically provide eight (and sometimes as many as sixteen) denotations of tathāgata, some of which may be of pre- or non-Buddhist origin, perhaps deriving from the JAINA tradition. In the early Pāli scriptures, the term seems to evoke the infinite knowledge of the Buddha, with little attempt to provide a clear etymology. Later commentators would offer a number of interpretations, among the most common of which are that the Buddha has "thus come" into the world like the other buddhas of the past, or that he has "thus gone" on to achieve NIRVĀnA like the other buddhas of the past. Other explanations equate it with the word TATHATĀ.
“the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM,—OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name—it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self—existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13—Page 315
"the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM, - OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name – it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self- existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13 – Page 315*
The births and rebirths of worlds are not the haphazard productions of a consciousness eternal in its working on matter, eternal in itself and different from consciousness; but are the offspring or productions of consciousness-life-substance periodically manifesting its inherent life and powers by the appearances of different world systems — be these galaxies, solar systems, individual suns, or planetary bodies; or again, in the infinitesimal realms, atoms and their component electronic monads. The entire process of the appearances and disappearances of world systems is dependent on inherent karmic causality manifesting on all planes and taking its rise in the characteristics and action of consciousness and consciousnesses.
The centre at the crown must be part of the sahasradala, the centre of communication direct between the individual being and the infinite consciousness above.
“The Chhandogya,… is to be a work in the right and perfect way of devoting oneself to the Brahman; its subject is the Brahman, but the Brahman as symbolised in the OM, the sacred syllable of the Veda, not therefore, the pure state of existence only, but that existence in all its parts… OM is the symbol and the thing symbolised.”the basic syllable OM, which is the foundation of all the perfect creative sounds of the revealed word; OM is the one universal formulation of the energy of sound and speech, that which contains and sums up, synthesises and releases, all the spiritual power and all the potentiality of Vak (speech, the goddess Speech) and Shabda (sound, vibration, word). The mantra of the divine consciousness brings its light of revelation, the Mantra of the divine Power, its will of effectuation, the Mantra of the divine Ananda is equal fulfilment of the spiritual delight of existence. All word and thought are an outflowing of he great OM,—OM, the Word, the Eternal Manifest in the forms of sensible objects; manifest in that conscious play of creative self-conception of which forms and objects are the figures, manifest behind in the self-gathered superconscient power of the Infinite, OM is the sovereign source, seed, womb of thing and idea, form and name—it is itself, integrally, the supreme Intangible, the original Unity, the timeless Mystery self—existent above all manifestation in supernal being.” SABCL Volume 13—Page 315
The early Gnostics also considered ten to contain the knowledge of the universe, both metaphysical and material. The Pythagorean dekad “representing the Universe and its evolution out of Silence and the unknown Depths of the Spiritual Soul, or anima mundi, presented two sides or aspects to the student. It could be, and was at first so used and applied to the Macrocosm, after which it descended to the Microcosm, or Man. There was, then, the purely intellectual and metaphysical, or the ‘inner Science,’ and the as purely materialistic or ‘surface science,’ both of which could be expounded by and contained in the Decade. It could be studied, in short, from the Universals of Plato, and the inductive method of Aristotle. The former started from a divine comprehension, when the plurality proceeded from unity, or the digits of the decade appeared, but to be finally re-absorbed, lost in the infinite Circle. The latter depended on sensuous perception alone, when the Decade could be regarded either as the unity that multiplies, or matter which differentiates, its study being limited to the plane surface; to the Cross, or the Seven which proceeds from the ten — or the perfect number, on Earth as in heaven” (SD 2:573).
The history of human evolution has passed down to us transfigured by the progressive accretion of myths, so that the name cyclopes was handed down to various owners until it meant merely giants who built vast walls. Hesiod’s original three were the last three subraces of the Lemurians, the one eye was the wisdom eye, the other eyes not being fully developed as physical organs until the beginning of the fourth root-race. Odysseus, a fourth-race hero, though he destroys a barbarous race in the interests of culture, nevertheless puts out the third eye. It is an allegory of the passage from a simpler Cyclopean civilization of huge stone buildings to the more sensual civilization of the Atlanteans (SD 2:769). Disciples of the initiates of the fourth root-race were said to hand over divine knowledge to their cyclopes, sons of cycles or of the infinite (SD 1:208), while the cyclopes supposed to have built walls were masons in the sense of initiators (SD 2:345).
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 creates and is Brahma.” The Renaissance in India ::: "Brahman is not only the cause and supporting power and indwelling principle of the universe, he is also its material and its sole material. Matter also is Brahman and it is nothing other than or different from Brahman.” The Life Divine*
“The Infinite creates and is Brahma.” The Renaissance in India
“The Infinite is not a sum of things, it is That which is all things and more.” The Life Divine
::: "The inner mind is something very wide projecting itself into the infinite and finally identifying itself with the infinity of universal Mind.” Letters on Yoga*
"The inner mind is something very wide projecting itself into the infinite and finally identifying itself with the infinity of universal Mind.” Letters on Yoga*
“The inner mind is something very wide projecting itself into the infinite and finally identifying itself with the infinity of universal Mind.” Letters on Yoga
"The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“…the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom.” The Life Divine
The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 27, Page: 26-27
The Mother (to a young person): "It is very simple, as you will see. 1) The Infinite is the inexhaustible storehouse of forces. The individual is a battery, a storage cell which runs down after use. Consecration is the wire that connects the individual battery to the infinite reserve of forces. Or 2) The Infinite is the river that flows without cease; the individual is the little pond that dries up slowly in the sun. Consecration is the canal that connects the river to the pond and prevents the pond from drying up.” Some Answers from the Mother, MCW *Vol. 16.
The Mother (to a young person): “It is very simple, as you will see. 1) The Infinite is the inexhaustible storehouse of forces. The individual is a battery, a storage cell which runs down after use. Consecration is the wire that connects the individual battery to the infinite reserve of forces. Or 2) The Infinite is the river that flows without cease; the individual is the little pond that dries up slowly in the sun. Consecration is the canal that connects the river to the pond and prevents the pond from drying up.” Some Answers from the Mother, MCW Vol. 16.
The Mother (to a young person): “It is very simple, as you will see. 1) The Infinite is the inexhaustible storehouse of forces. The individual is a battery, a storage cell which runs down after use. Consecration is the wire that connects the individual battery to the infinite reserve of forces. Or 2) The Infinite is the river that flows without cease; the individual is the little pond that dries up slowly in the sun. Consecration is the canal that connects the river to the pond and prevents the pond from drying up.” The Mother—Collected Works, Centenary Ed., Vol. 16—Some Answers from the Mother
::: The Mother (to a young person): "It is very simple, as you will see. 1) The Infinite is the inexhaustible storehouse of forces. The individual is a battery, a storage cell which runs down after use. Consecration is the wire that connects the individual battery to the infinite reserve of forces. Or 2) The Infinite is the river that flows without cease; the individual is the little pond that dries up slowly in the sun. Consecration is the canal that connects the river to the pond and prevents the pond from drying up.” The Mother - Collected Works, Centenary Ed., Vol. 16 - Some Answers from the Mother*
"The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge," says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâd rtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyad astîti vâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita*
“The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,’ says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâd rtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyad astîti vâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita
“The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,’ says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâdrtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyadastîtivâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heartof man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita
“Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in consciousness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for various expression.” The Life Divine
The sky as ether indicates also the infinite.
The Truth-Consciousness is everywhere present in the universe as an ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity It is the characteristic power of selfdetermination of the Infinite.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 141, Page: 689
The Visishtadvaita school teaches that the human spirit is separate and different from the one supreme spirit, though dependent on it and ultimately to be united with it, as well as originally in some manner springing forth from it. The Visishtadvaita speaks of the supreme spirit almost as monists do, because apparently ascribing to it a type of individuality, which is as offensive to the rigid logical impersonal eternal All of the Advaita as is the franker dualism of the Dvaitins. This arises from the fact that the Advaitins claim that it is utterly improper to ascribe individuality, personality, or monadism of any kind to the infinite — a claim which is precisely that of modern theosophy. However, “Dualistic and anthropomorphic as may be the philosophy of the Visishtadwaita, when compared with that of the Adwaita — the non-dualists, — it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the cosmogony accepted by either Christianity, or its great opponent, modern Science” (SD 1:522).
"The whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight. Physical he seeks for this immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the infinite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.
“The whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight. Physical he seeks for this immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the infinite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.
The word Sabean itself has come down to us mainly through Greek and Latin writers, but so thoroughly imbued were the ancient Hebrews with this idea of the celestial hosts or cosmic spirits that the Bible is full of references where the context even wrongly endows the celestial hosts with the properties of the Most High God, and it has been so understood by Christian theologians; forgetting, however, that manifested deities, however high, are but the manifestations of the infinite and ineffable Mystery or parabrahman, from which all the celestial hosts flow or emanate. Thus not only ancient and modern Judaism, but Christianity itself, is filled with the thought of the ancient Sabeans.
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 the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence— to give it an inadequate name—the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 785-86
" To become ourselves by exceeding ourselves, — so we may turn the inspired phrases of a half-blind seer who knew not the self of which he spoke, — is the difficult and dangerous necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable divine Maya. To exceed ego and be our true self, to be aware of our real being, to possess it, to possess a real delight of being, is therefore the ultimate meaning of our life here; it is the concealed sense of our individual and terrestrial existence.” The Life Divine*
“ To become ourselves by exceeding ourselves,—so we may turn the inspired phrases of a half-blind seer who knew not the self of which he spoke,—is the difficult and dangerous necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable divine Maya. To exceed ego and be our true self, to be aware of our real being, to possess it, to possess a real delight of being, is therefore the ultimate meaning of our life here; it is the concealed sense of our individual and terrestrial existence.” The Life Divine
“To become ourselves by exceeding ourselves,—so we may turn the inspired phrases of a half-blind seer who knew not the self of which he spoke,—is the difficult and dangerous necessity, the cross surmounted by an invisible crown which is imposed on us, the riddle of the true nature of his being proposed to man by the dark Sphinx of the Inconscience below and from within and above by the luminous veiled Sphinx of the infinite Consciousness and eternal Wisdom confronting him as an inscrutable divine Maya. To exceed ego and be our true self, to be aware of our real being, to possess it, to possess a real delight of being, is therefore the ultimate meaning of our life here; it is the concealed sense of our individual and terrestrial existence.” The Life Divine
trikaladr.s.t.i (trikaladrishti; trikaldrishti; trikaldristi) ::: literally "the trikaladrsti vision of the three times", i.e., "the direct knowledge of the past, the intuitive knowledge of the present and the prophetic knowledge of the future", the second member of the vijñana catus.t.aya. It is a special faculty of jñana "by which that general power is applied to the actuality of things"; its essence is a consciousness of "the Infinite deploying in itself and organising all things in time", making possible "a total view of the three times as one movement singly and indivisibly seen even in their succession of stages, periods, cycles".
Tso wang: Chinese for “sitting in forgetfulness”; that state of absolute freedom, in which the distinctions between others and self is forgotten, in which life and death are equated, in which all things have become one. A state of pure experience, in which one becomes at one with the infinite soul.
Tso wang: 'Sitting in forgetfulness'; that state of absolute freedom, in which the distinctions between others and self is forgotten, in which life and death are equated, in which all things have become one. A state of pure experience, in which one becomes at one with the infinite. (Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.). -- H.H.
Tum [possibly Sanskrit tvam thou] An ancient fraternity, formerly existing in Northern India, and well known in the days of the persecution of Buddhists there. Tum “has a double meaning, that of darkness (absolute darkness), which as absolute is higher than the highest and purest of lights, and a sense resting on the mystical greeting among Initiates, ‘Thou art thou, thyself,’ equivalent to saying ‘Thou art one with the Infinite and the All’ ”; “The ‘Tum B’hai’ have now become the ‘Aum B’hai,’ spelt, however, differently at present, both schools having merged into one. The first was composed of Kshatriyas, the second of Brahmans” (TG 345).
Two opposite errors have to be avoided, two misconceptions that disfigure opposite sides of the truth of gnosis. One error of intellect-bounded thinkers takes vijnana as synonymous with the other Indian term buddhi and buddhi as synonymous with the reason, the discerning intellect, the logical intelligence. The systems that accept this significance, pass at once from a plane of pure intellect to a plane of pure spirit. No intermediate power is recognised, no diviner action of knowledge than the pure reason is admitted; the limited human means for fixing truth is taken for the highest possible dynamics of consciousness, its topmost force and original movement. An opposite error, a misconception of the mystics identifies vijnana with the consciousness of the Infinite free from all ideation or else ideation packed into one essence of thought, lost to other dynamic action in the single and invariable idea of the One. This is the caitanyaghana of the Upanishad and is one movement or rather one thread of the many-aspected movement of the gnosis. The gnosis, the Vijnana, is not only this concentrated consciousness of the infinite Essence; it is also and at the same time an infinite knowledge of the myriad play of the Infinite. It contains all ideation (not mental but supramental), but it is not limited by ideation, for it far exceeds all ideative movement.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 476-77
Vach is also mystic speech “by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are communicated to man, and thus Vach is said to have ‘entered the Rishis.’ . . . she is called ‘the mother of the Vedas,’ since it was through her power (as mystic speech) that Brahma revealed them . . . ” (SD 1:430). The Rig-Veda and Upanishads give four kinds of Vach — vaikhari, madhyama, pasyanti, and para — corresponding to the four cosmic principles: the physical universe, the light of the Logos, the Logos itself, and parabrahman or the infinite.
Varuna ::: "he of the Wideness", [Ved.]: the deva as the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine supporting and perfecting the world, he represents the ethereal purity and oceanic wideness of the infinite Truth; [Purana]: the deity of the waters; [in the Gita called chief among the peoples of the sea].
Varun.a ::: "the Lord of Wideness", a Vedic god who "brings to us Varuna the infinite oceanic space of the divine soul and its ethereal, elemental purity", one of the Four who represent the "working of the Truth in the human mind and temperament"; in post-Vedic mythology, the god of the sea.
"Veda, then, is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that original epoch thought proceeded by other methods than those of our logical reasoning and speech accepted modes of expression which in our modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then depended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind"s ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner. Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this account of the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer (drashtâ ) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda itself is shruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge.” The Secret of the Veda
“Veda, then, is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that original epoch thought proceeded by other methods than those of our logical reasoning and speech accepted modes of expression which in our modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then depended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind’s ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner. Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this account of the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer (drashtâ ) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda itself is shruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge.” The Secret of the Veda
Vijnana is the knowledge of the One and the Many, by which the Many are seen in the terms of the One, in the infinite unifying Truth, Right, Vast of the divine existence.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 414
vis.ayadr.s.t.i (vishayadrishti) ::: subtle sense-perception (sūks.ma dr.s.t.i) visayadrsti .. in general or any particular form of such perception, especially perception of the sūks.ma vis.ayas of sound, touch, smell and taste (sabda, sparsa, gandha and rasa), with vision of rūpa often mentioned separately; the faculty or faculties constituting the instrumentation of saṁjñana or "sense in its purity", which "exists behind and beyond the mind it uses and is a movement of the self, a direct and original activity of the infinite power of its consciousness", capable of presenting to us "things concealed from the limited receptivity or beyond the range of the physical organs, . . . scenes, forms, happenings, symbols of the vital, psychical, mental, supramental, spiritual worlds".
way, the upward ::: Sri Aurobindo: "For the gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother; the way to immortality is the upward way of the gods, the way of the Truth, a journey, an ascent by which there is a growth into the law of the Truth, rtasya panthâh.” The Renaissance in India
"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
*What is meant here is the Divine in its essential manifestation which reveals itself to us as Light and Consciousness, Power, Love and Beauty. But in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme, being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in itself, in its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience, Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient—the inconscient Ocean of the Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this Universe,— or, as it is sometimes called, the non-being, Asat. The Ignorance which is the characteristic of our mind and life is the result of this origin in the Inconscience. Moreover, in the evolution out of inconscient existence there rise up naturally powers and beings which are interested in the maintenance of all negations of the Divine, error and unconsciousness, pain, suffering, obscurity, death, weakness, illness, disharmony, evil. Hence the perversion of the manifestation here, its inability to reveal the true essence of the Divine. Yet in the very base of this evolution all that is divine is there involved and pressing to evolve, Light, Consciousness, Power, Perfection, Beauty, Love. For in the Inconscient itself and behind the perversions of the Ignorance Divine Consciousness lies concealed and works and must more and more appear, throwing off in the end its disguises. That is why it is said that the world is called to express the Divine.
"What we call Chance is a play of the possibilities of the Infinite; . . . .” Essays Divine and Human*
“What we call Chance is a play of the possibilities of the Infinite; …” Essays Divine and Human
". . . what we call Necessity is a truth of things working itself out in a Time-sequence of the Infinite.” Essays Divine and Human ::: *necessity"s
“… what we call Necessity is a truth of things working itself out in a Time-sequence of the Infinite.” Essays Divine and Human
Wheel ::: “The Infinite pauses always in the finite; the finite arrives always in the Infinite. This is the wheel that circles forever through Time and Eternity.” Essays Divine and Human
"When we see with the inner vision and sense and not with the physical eye a tree or other object, what we become aware of is an infinite one Reality constituting the tree or object, pervading its every atom and molecule, forming them out of itself, building the whole nature, process of becoming, operation of indwelling energy; all of these are itself, are this infinite, this Reality: we see it extending indivisibly and uniting all objects so that none is really separate from it or quite separate from other objects. ‘It stands," says the Gita, ‘undivided in beings and yet as if divided." Thus each object is that Infinite and one in essential being with all other objects that are also forms and names, — powers, numens, — of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
“When we see with the inner vision and sense and not with the physical eye a tree or other object, what we become aware of is an infinite one Reality constituting the tree or object, pervading its every atom and molecule, forming them out of itself, building the whole nature, process of becoming, operation of indwelling energy; all of these are itself, are this infinite, this Reality: we see it extending indivisibly and uniting all objects so that none is really separate from it or quite separate from other objects. ‘It stands,’ says the Gita, ‘undivided in beings and yet as if divided.’ Thus each object is that Infinite and one in essential being with all other objects that are also forms and names,—powers, numens,—of the Infinite.” The Life Divine
work: Symbol: W. For a simple case, with a force that remains constant and movement in the same direction as the force, it is the product of the magnitude of the force and the distance travelled "due to the force". In vector form, work is the scalar product of force and displacement vector. And in the case of a variable force, it is the integral (i.e. "infinite sum of the infinitely small") of their product.
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
::: "Yet the highest power and manifestation is only a very partial revelation of the Infinite; even the whole universe is informed by only one degree of his greatness, illumined by one ray of his splendour, glorious with a faint hint of his delight and beauty.” *Essays on the Gita
“Yet the highest power and manifestation is only a very partial revelation of the Infinite; even the whole universe is informed by only one degree of his greatness, illumined by one ray of his splendour, glorious with a faint hint of his delight and beauty.” Essays on the Gita
yuanrong. (J. ennyu; K. wonyung 圓融). In Chinese, "consummate interfusion," "perfectly interfused"; a term used in the HUAYAN and TIANTAI traditions to refer to the ultimate state of reality wherein each individual phenomenon is perceived to be perfectly interfused and completely harmonized with every other phenomena. Yuanrong is contrasted with "separation" (GELI), the understanding of reality in terms of the discriminative phenomena of the conventional realm. ¶ The concept of yuanrong is deployed soteriologically as one of the two modes of describing the bodhisattva path in the Huayan tradition, viz., the "approach of consummate interfusion" (yuanrong men), also known as the "approach of consummate interfusion and mutual conflation" (YUANRONG XIANGSHE MEN); this mode is contrasted with the "approach of sequential practices" (CIDI XINGBU MEN). The approach of sequential practices refers to the different stages in the process of religious training, which progress through the fifty-two stages of the bodhisattva path (MĀRGA). By contrast, the yuanrong men focuses instead on the principle of equivalency (pingdeng) and indicates the way in which any one stage of training subsumes all stages of the path, or how the inception of the path is in fact identical to its consummation. According to this mode of description, then, the completion of the ten stages of faith (shixin), a preliminary stage of the mārga in the Huayan tradition, is often stated to be identical to the achievement of buddhahood (XINMAN CHENGFO). In the Huayan school's fivefold taxonomy of the teachings (HUAYAN WUJIAO) as systematized by FAZANG (643-712), the three vehicles are considered to represent the xingbu men, while the "consummate teaching" (YUANJIAO), the final and highest level of teaching in this schema, corresponds to the yuanrong men. ¶ Yuanrong is also used in accounts of contemplation practice in the Huayan school, as, for example, in the "contemplation on the consummate interfusion of the three sages" (sansheng yuanrong guan), which was treated by both CHENGGUAN (738-839) and LI TONGXUAN (635-730). In this Huayan meditation, the bodhisattvas MANJUsRĪ and SAMANTABHADRA represent the causal aspects of practice (yinfen), and the buddha VAIROCANA, the fruition aspect (guofen); the consummate interfusion of the causal and effect aspects of practice thus indicates enlightenment. Samantabhadra and MaNjusrī are juxtaposed as, respectively, the DHARMADHĀTU as the object of faith (suoxin) and the mind as the subject of faith (nengxin), as practice (xing) and understanding (jie), and as principle (LI) and wisdom (zhi). When these juxtaposed aspects are perfectly interfused with each other, the causal aspect is consummated and becomes perfectly interfused with the effect aspect. Thus Samantabhadra as the "empty TATHĀGATAGARBHA" (kong rulaizang) and MaNjusrī as the "nonempty tathāgatagarbha" (bukong rulaizang) are interfused with Vairocana Buddha's "comprehensive tathāgatagarbha" (zong rulaizang). ¶ In the Tiantai tradition, the "consummate interfusion of the three truths" (yuanrong sandi) is one of the two ways of interpreting the three truths (SANDI), viz., of emptiness (kongdi), provisionally real (jiadi), and the mean (zhongdi). The yuanrong sandi, also termed the "nonsequential three truths" (BU CIDI SANDI), refers to the notion that each truth (di) is endowed with all three of these truths together, and thus the particular and the universal are not separate from one another. This mode is distinguished from the "differentiated three truths" (GELI SANDI), also known as the "sequential three truths" (cidi sandi), where each truth is treated independently; in this mode, the first two truths represent the aspect of phenomena, while the last truth, of the mean, refers to the aspect of principle. In the Tiantai doctrinal taxonomy (see TIANTAI BAJIAO; WUSHI BAJIAO), geli sandi and yuanrong sandi are said to correspond, respectively, to the "distinct teaching" (biejiao) and the "consummate teaching" (yuanjiao), the third and fourth of the "four types of teaching according to their content" (huafa sijiao) in the Tiantai doctrinal classification. ¶ In both the Huayan and Tiantai traditions, yuanrong is also employed as a defining characteristic of the "dharma realm" (fajie; S. dharmadhātu). The term "consummate interfusion of the dharma realm" (fajie yuanrong) describes both the infinitely interdependent state of the Huayan "dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon with phenomena" (SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE), as well as the Tiantai doctrine of "intrinsic inclusiveness" (xingju), in which each individual phenomenon is said to be endowed with the TRICHILIOCOSM (SANQIAN DAQIAN SHIJIE; see TRISĀHASRAMAHĀSĀHASRALOKADHĀTU), which represents the entirety of existence in the Tiantai cosmology. The Huayan "dharmadhātu of the unimpeded interpenetration of phenomenon with phenomena" is systematized in the doctrine of the Huayan version of causality, the "conditioned origination of the dharmadhātu" (FAJIE YUANQI), and this Huayan causality of the dharmadhātu is also explained as the "consummate interfusion of the six aspects" (LIUXIANG yuanrong).
KEYS (10k)
119 Sri Aurobindo
5 The Mother
5 Swami Vivekananda
4 Peter J Carroll
3 Giordano Bruno
3 Sri Ramakrishna
3 Saint Thomas Aquinas
2 Vivekananda
2 Sri Aurobindo
2 Pasteur
2 Manly P Hall
2 Baha-ullah
2 Aleister Crowley
1 Upanishad
1 SWAMI BRAHMANANDA
1 Suzanne Segal
1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Maharaj
1 Schopenhauer
1 SATM?
1 Rowan Williams
1 Robert Adams
1 Ralph W. Trine
1 Rainer Maria Rilke
1 Paramahansa Yogananda
1 Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche
1 Nolini Kanta Gupta
1 Nikola Tesla
1 Lacordaire
1 Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
1 Ken Wilber
1 Jorge Luis Borge
1 JB
1 James Clerk Maxwell
1 Goethe
1 Emerson
1 Cicero
1 Baha-Ullah: The Seven Valleys
1 Anaximander
1 Alfred Korzybski
1 Aldous Huxley
1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
1 Kabir
1 Jorge Luis Borges
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
84 Sri Aurobindo
37 Swami Vivekananda
33 Victor Hugo
26 Anonymous
21 Blaise Pascal
17 Frederick Lenz
15 Deepak Chopra
14 Paramahansa Yogananda
14 John Piper
12 Rabindranath Tagore
12 Joseph Murphy
10 Thomas Merton
10 Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 Mehmet Murat ildan
10 Leo Tolstoy
10 G K Chesterton
10 Eckhart Tolle
9 John Green
9 Charles Haddon Spurgeon
8 Ursula K Le Guin
1:No matter which rooms one is in, there are many paths in the Infinite Building. ~ JB, #KEYS
2:The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen. ~ Aldous Huxley, #KEYS
3:To think is to move in the Infinite. ~ Lacordaire, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
4:The inmost is the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Power of the Spirit, #KEYS
5:Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty." ~ Kabir, #KEYS
6:There are no partitions between ourselves and the Infinite. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
7:to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally
~ Peter J Carroll,#KEYS
8:He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5],#KEYS
9:The straight way is the love of the infinite essence. ~ Baha-Ullah: The Seven Valleys, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
10:A divine incarnation is hard to comprehend -- It is the play of the infinite on the finite. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
11:Wouldst thou penetrate the infinite? Advance, then, on all sides in the finite. ~ Goethe, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
12:Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon, #KEYS
13:Necessity rules all the infinite world, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Birth of Sin, #KEYS
14:The Vedantic idea is the infinite principle of God embodied in everyone of us. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. VIII. 126), #KEYS
15:All spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #KEYS
16:No Law is absolute, because only the infinite is absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Sevenfold Chord of Being, #KEYS
17:Each of our good thoughts tears the veil behind which appears the pure, the infinite, God, our self. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
18:An entry into the gnostic consciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #KEYS
19:The reason deals with the finite and is helpless before the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Vijnana or Gnosis, #KEYS
20:It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #KEYS
21:this ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defense.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 241,#KEYS
22:The body of God,
The link of the finite with the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan and Savitri,#KEYS
23:Mind cannot possess the infinite, it can only suffer it or be possessed by it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Mind and Supermind, #KEYS
24:Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #KEYS
25:A disciple, having firm faith in the infinite power of his Guru, walked over a river by simply uttering his name. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
26:Life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Lord of the Sacrifice, #KEYS
27:The finite is a circumstance and not a contradiction of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #KEYS
28:Each of our good thoughts tears the veil behind which appears the pure, the infinite, God, our self. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
29:The origin of things is the Infinite: necessarily they disappear into that which put them into birth. ~ Anaximander, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
30:The infinite could not be known actually, unless all its parts were counted, which is impossible ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.86.2)., #KEYS
31:Ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Double Soul in Man, #KEYS
32:Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #KEYS
33:The infinite can only be reached after we have grown in the finite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - IV, #KEYS
34:There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borge, #KEYS
35:The Infinite would not be the Infinite if it could not assume a manifold finiteness; ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Sevenfold Chord of Being, #KEYS
36:All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind, the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
37:Our humanity is the conscious meeting place of the finite and the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Involution and Evolution, #KEYS
38:In the silence of the self there is no time—it is akāla. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Experiences of the Self, the One and the Infinite, #KEYS
39:What is magic to our finite reason is the logic of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #KEYS
40:The one reward of the works of right Knowledge is to grow perpetually into the infinite Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Rebirth, #KEYS
41:The infinite variety of particular objects constitutes one sole and identical Being. To know that unity is the aim of all philosophy and of all knowledge of Nature. ~ Giordano Bruno, #KEYS
42:This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.2.3ad1). #KEYS
43:By the influence of the deep devotion of his worshiper, the Infinite reduces himself into the finite and appears as a being with form. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
44:This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.2.3ad1)., #KEYS
45:In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,#KEYS
46:The Supreme is infinite, therefore He is also finite.
To be finite is one of the infinite aspects of the Infinite.
Creation is the definition of the Infinite. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta,#KEYS
47:Extended within the Infinite,...headless and footless, concealing his two ends. - Rig Veda
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Boundaries of the Ignorance,#KEYS
48:The true call upon us is the call of the Infinite and the Supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #KEYS
49:It is the Infinite's blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#KEYS
50:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#KEYS
51:Our smallness saves us from the Infinite
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 07.04 - The Triple Soul-Forces,#KEYS
52:The mighty power of the infinite is most worthy of great and loving contemplation [Summa vero vis infinitatis et magna ac diligenti contemplatione dignissima est]. ~ Cicero, De natura deorum 1.50, #KEYS
53:In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Unseen Infinite,#KEYS
54:Supermind carries in it the unity, but also the largeness and multiplicities of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
55:No man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Work, #KEYS
56:The rays of the divine sun, the infinite Orient, shine equally on all that exists and the illumination of Unity repeats itself everywhere. ~ Baha-ullah, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
57:When asked "Who I Am', the only answer possible is: I am the infinite, the vastness that is the substance of all things. I am no one and everyone, nothing and everything - just as you are." ~ Suzanne Segal, #KEYS
58:Without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine and the Undivine, #KEYS
59:Light, burning Light from the Infinite's diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#KEYS
60:Gesture (Mudra)
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,#KEYS
61:All forces are to us invisible,—but they are not invisible to the spiritual vision of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #KEYS
62:Each thing that exists is real in its own degree of the manifestation and is so seen by the consciousness of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #KEYS
63:The lines of safety Reason draws that bar
Mind's soar, soul's dive into the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,#KEYS
64:Surya Savitri, who is Bhaga, stands between the Infinite and the created worlds within us and without. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Selected Hymns, To Bhaga Savitri - the Enjoyer, #KEYS
65:He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#KEYS
66:The gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - II, #KEYS
67:The essence of religion is an aspiration and adoration of the soul towards the Divine, the Self, the Supreme, the Eternal, the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Sun of Poetic Truth, #KEYS
68:The architecture of the Infinite
Discovered here its inward-musing shapes
Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,#KEYS
69:He that sees the Lord in the temple, the living body, by seeking Him within, can alone see Him, the Infinite, in the temple of the universe, having become the Endless Eye. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
70:Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.06,#KEYS
71:The infinite variety of particular objects constitutes one sole and identical Being. To know that unity is the aim of all philosophy and of all knowledge of Nature. ~ Giordano Bruno, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
72:The enjoyment of the infinite delight of existence free from ego, founded on oneness of all in the Lord, is what is meant by the enjoyment of Immortality ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #KEYS
73:All finites are in their spiritual essence the Infinite and, if we look deep enough into them, manifest to intuition the Identical and Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #KEYS
74:Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #KEYS
75:Compose your mind and fix it on God. Say to your mind: "Plunge into the ocean of God." Make the best use of this Divine grace. Do not sacrifice the infinite bliss of God for the sake of the ephemeral pleasures of the world. ~ SWAMI BRAHMANANDA, #KEYS
76:Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind,
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace. ~ Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche,#KEYS
77:We are the children of the Almighty, we are sparks of the infinite, divine fire. How can we be nothings? We are everything, ready to do everything, we can do everything, and man must do everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
78:The Divine's words comfort and bless, soothe and illumine, and the Divine's generous hand lifts a fold of the veil which hides the infinite knowledge.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The Divine Is with You [T1],#KEYS
79:In Nature in the infinite scale of being there are no wide gulfs, no abrupt chasms to be overleaped, but a melting of one thing into another, a subtle continuity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Planes of Our Existence, #KEYS
80:Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
They were not made on earth, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,#KEYS
81:If your sadhana itself assumes the existence of the limitations, how can it help you to transcend them? Hence I say know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self Absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
82:It is the one Infinite that appears to us as the many finite: the creation adds nothing to the Infinite; it remains after creation what it was before. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #KEYS
83:To be first in tune with the Infinite, in harmony with the Divine, and then to be unified with the Infinite, taken into the Divine is its condition of perfect strength and mastery. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Nature, #KEYS
84:World-naked hermits with their matted hair
Immobile as the passionless great hills
Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast mood
Awaiting the Infinite's behest to end. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Quest,#KEYS
85:He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#KEYS
86:Freedom means letting go. People just do not care to let go everything. They do not know that the finite is the price of the infinite, as death is the price of immortality. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Maharaj, #KEYS
87:Lure of the Infinite
With a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ahana, Lure of the Infinite#KEYS
88:He who lives in the realization of his oneness with the Infinite Power becomes a magnet to attract to himself a continual supply of whatever things he desires… " ~ Ralph W. Trine, (1866-1958) American philosopher, author & teacher, wrote on the New Thought movement, Wikipedia., #KEYS
89:Jnani sees the infinite Self in all and all in the infinite Self, which is his being. He is infinite, imperishable, Self-luminous, Self-existent, without beginning or end, birthless, deathless, without change or decay. Jnani permeate and interpenetrate all things. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
90:When man has seen that he is one with the infinite being of the universe, all separation is at an end, all men, women, angels, gods, animals, plants, the whole world lost in this oneness, then all fear disappears. ~ Vivekananda, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
91:The darkness of prayer is not the result of a gap between what we can know as creatures and the unknowable depths of God...It is our assimilation into the infinite's self-unveiling in the dark places of the finite world, in the wordless helplessness of the cross. ~ Rowan Williams, #KEYS
92:Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, understands nothing else, that is the infinite. But where one sees something else, hears something else, understands something else, that is the finite. The infinite is the same as the immortal, the finite - the mortal. ~ Upanishad, #KEYS
93:Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #KEYS
94:Philosophy not only purifies the reason and predisposes it to the contact of the universal and the infinite, but tends to stabilise the nature and create the tranquillity of the sage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #KEYS
95:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, #KEYS
96:358. Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma,#KEYS
97:Freedom means letting go. People just don't care to let go of everything. They do not know that the finite is the price of the infinite, as death is the price of immortality. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
98:God cannot cease from leaning towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga,#KEYS
99:The finite is a frontal aspect and a self-determination of the Infinite; no finite can exist in itself and by itself, it exists by the Infinite and because it is of one essence with the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #KEYS
100:In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different manner according to the thing that has to be done, according to the predetermined process, dynamism, self-deploying of the Infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance,#KEYS
101:A person doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe and seems possessed of amazing good luck. In beginning the great work of obtaining the knowledge and conversation, the magician vows to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally
~ Peter J Carroll,#KEYS
102:fruits of the sacrifice :::
The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [109],#KEYS
103:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
104:He who suffers himself to be transported by the love of things on high, who drinks at the sources of eternal beauty, who lives by the Infinite and combats for the ideal of all virtue and all knowledge, who shows for that cult an enthusiasm pushed to a very fury,-he is the hero. ~ Giordano Bruno, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
105:In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #KEYS
106:Process is merely a utility; it is a habitual adoption of certain effective relations which might in the infinite possibility of things have been arranged otherwise, for the production of effects which might equally have been quite different. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, #KEYS
107:The mind can reflect the Infinite, it can dissolve itself into it, it can live in it by a large passivity, it can take its suggestions and act them out in its own way, a way always fragmentary, derivative and subject to a greater or less deformation, but ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #KEYS
108:A schoolman mind had captured life's large space,
But chose to live in bare and paltry rooms
Parked off from the too vast dangerous universe,
Fearing to lose its soul in the infinite.
Even the Idea's ample sweep was cut
Into a system, chained to ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#KEYS
109:This cannot be done without an uncompromising abolition of the ego-sense at its very basis and source. In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
110:The material movements are an exterior notation by which the soul represents its perceptions of certain truths of the Infinite and makes them effective in the terms of Substance. These things are a language, a notation, a hieroglyphic, a system of symbols, not themselves the deepest truest sense of the things they intimate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
111:Having become a citizen of two worlds, the individual must act accordingly. There can be no backsliding, because the individual must reach a state of certainty before this enlightenment is given that makes it utterly and completely impossible to backslide. He cannot 'get it' and then fail and turn from it. If he turns from it, it means he never had it. If he fails, he fails himself. He cannot fail the infinite. ~ Manly P Hall, #KEYS
112:The white magician consecrates his life to study, meditation, and service, that he may know the law and may direct force to its appointed ends. He mods himself into the plan, becoming part of the divine rhythm by sacrificing himself and his wishes to the will of the Infinite, asking only to know wherein his duty lies and how he may be of the greatest service to the greatest number. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics, #KEYS
113:I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death,
Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.
O Void that makest room for all to be ...
Thou art my shadow and my instrument.
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread
And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain
To force the soul of man to struggle for light"
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#KEYS
114:Our human consciousness has windows that open on the Infinite but generally men keep these windows carefully shut. They have to be opened wide and allow the Infinite freely to enter into us and transform us.
Two conditions are necessary for opening the windows:
1) ardent aspiration;
2) progressive dissolution of the ego.
The Divine help is assured to those who set to work sincerely. ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
115:Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but purity, living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realisation. Let there be a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world.
~ Swami Vivekananda,#KEYS
116:By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 57,#KEYS
117:Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling. . . . That which is immortal in mortals and possessed of the truth, is a god and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers. . . . Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead. Vamadeva - Rig Veda.2 ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, #KEYS
118:377. God made the infinite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulfilling. He used ignorance to limit His infinity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the instruments by which He destroys what He created. When these things are turned on what is evil or harmful & ill-regulated within thee, then it is well; but if they attack thy very sources of life & strength, then seize & expel them or thou diest.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#KEYS
119:Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.~ Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, #KEYS
120:... Krishna, the great Lord of Yoga,
revealed to Arjuna his majestic,
transcendent, limitless form.
With innumerable mouths and eyes,
faces too marvelous to stare at,
dazzling ornaments, innumerable
weapons uplifted, flaming-
crowned with fire, wrapped
in pure light, with celestial fragrance,
he stood forth as the infinite
God, composed of all wonders.
If a thousand suns were to rise
and stand in the noon sky, blazing,
such brilliance would be like the fierce
brilliance of that mighty Self. ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa,#KEYS
121:States of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
122:The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers-by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work-is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN? ~ Aleister Crowley, Little Essays Towards Truth, #KEYS
123:O son of earth, be blind and thou shalt see My beauty; be deaf and thou shalt hear My sweet song, My pleasant melody; be ignorant and thou shalt partake My knowledge; be in distress and thou shalt have an eternal portion of the infinite ocean of My riches:-blind to all that is not My beauty, deaf to all that is not My word, ignorant of all that is not My knowledge. Thus with a gaze that is pure, a spirit without stain, an understanding refined, thou shalt enter into my sacred presence. ~ Baha-ullah, "The Hidden Words in Persian.", the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
124:The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent towards God and a descent of Godhead into the embodied nature.
The ascent can only be achieved by a one-centered all-gathering upward aspiration of the soul and mind and life and body; the descent can only come by a call of the whole being towards the infinite and the eternal Divine. If this call and this aspiration are there, or if by any means they can be born and grow constantly and seize all the nature, then and then only a supramental uplifting and transformation becomes possible.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, [T2],#KEYS
125:We have in this figure of various psychological levels, each considered as a world in itself, a key to the conceptions of the Vedic Rishis.
And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person of Surya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is the causal Idea in the infinite being,—the idea, not abstract, but real and dynamic,—that originates the law, the energies, the formations of things and the working out of their potentialities in determined forms by determined processes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Selected Hymns, Surya Savitri - Creator and Increaser,#KEYS
126:Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot - we are introduced to the all-pervading Spiritual domain that the growing tip of our honored ancestors were the first to discover. And they were good enough to leave us a general map to that infinite domain, a map called the Great Nest of Being, a map of our own interiors, an archeology of our own Spirit. ~ Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology, p. 190, #KEYS
127:That status of knowledge is then the aim of this path and indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which intellectual discrimination and conception and all concentration and psychological self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart through love and by the senses through beauty and by the will through power and works and by the soul through peace and joy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of the ascent which we have to use and to follow till the wide and infinite levels are attained and the divine doors swing open into the infinite Light.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
128:The Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, p. 114, #KEYS
129:the individual is a self-expression of the universal and the transcendent,-it is not a contradiction or something quite other than it, it is the universal concentrated and selective, it is one with the Transcendent in its essence of being and its essence of nature. In the view of this unitarian comprehensive seeing there is nothing contradictory in a formless Essence of being that carries a multitude of forms, or in a status of the Infinite supporting a kinesis of the Infinite, or in an infinite Oneness expressing itself in a multiplicity of beings and aspects and powers and movements, for they are beings and aspects and powers and movements of the One.
~ SATM?,#KEYS
130:The system of negation is indispensable to it in order to get rid of its own definitions and limited experience; it is obliged to escape through a vague Indefinite into the Infinite. For it lives in a closed prison of constructions and representations that are necessary for its action but are not the self-existent truth either of Matter or Life or Mind or Spirit. But if we can once cross beyond the Minds frontier twilight into the vast plane of supramental Knowledge, these devices cease to be indispensable. supermind has quite another, a positive and direct and living experience of the supreme Infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
131:DR. MANILAL: How can one succeed in meditation?
SRI AUROBINDO: By quietude of mind. There is not only the Infinite in itself, but also an infinite sea of peace, joy, light, power above the head. The golden Lid, Hiranmaya Patram, intervenes between the mind and what is above the mind. Once you break this lid ( making a movement of the hands above the head ) they can come down any time at your will. But for that, quietude is essential. Of course, there are people who can get them without first establishing the quietude, but it is very difficult. ( On 13-12-1938 ) ~ Sri Aurobindo, TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO VOLUME 1, BY NIRODBARAN (Page no.17),#KEYS
132:abolishing the ego :::
In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere. This, if persistently done, changes in the end the mental outlook on oneself and the whole world and there is a kind of mental realisation; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the beginning the mental realisation deepens into spiritual experience - a realisation in the very substance of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Ego, 363,#KEYS
133:The glory he had glimpsed must be his home. ||19.2||
A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume
This dusk room with its dark internal stair,
The infant soul in its small nursery school
Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned
Outgrow its early grammar of intellect
And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art,
Its earthly dialect to God-language change,
In living symbols study Reality
And learn the logic of the Infinite. ||19.3||
The Ideal must be Nature’s common truth,
The body illumined with the indwelling God,
The heart and mind feel one with all that is,
A conscious soul live in a conscious world. ||19.4|| ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 1:5, || 19.2 - 19.4 ||,#KEYS
134: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],#KEYS
135:Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.
Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. ~ James Clerk Maxwell,#KEYS
136:But the vijnana or gnosis is not only truth but truth power, it is the very working of the infinite and divine nature; it is the divine knowledge one with the divine will in the force and delight of a spontaneous and luminous and inevitable self-fulfilment. By the gnosis, then, we change our human into a divine nature. But even the intuitive reason is not the gnosis; it is only an edge of light of the supermind finding its way by flashes of illumination into the mentality like lightnings in dim and cloudy places. Its inspirations, revelations, intuitions, self-luminous discernings are messages from a higher knowledge-plane that make their way opportunely into our lower level of consciousness.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
137:But his most important capacity is that of developing the powers of the higher principles in himself, a greater power of life, a purer light of mind, the illumination of supermind, the infinite being, consciousness and delight of spirit. By an ascending movement he can develop his human imperfection towards that greater perfection. But whatever his aim, however exalted his aspiration, he has to begin from the law of his present imperfection, to take full account of it and see how it can be converted to the law of a possible perfection. This present law of his being starts from the inconscience of the material universe, an involution of the soul in form and subjection to material nature; and
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Psychology Of Perfection,#KEYS
138:It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophic reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable: it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5],#KEYS
139: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,#KEYS
140:Thou must teach us the path to be followed and Thou must give us the power to follow it to the very end. . . .
O Thou source of all love and all light, Thou whom we cannot know in Thyself but can manifest ever more completely and perfectly, Thou whom we cannot conceive but can approach in profound silence, to complete Thy incommensurable boons Thou must come to our help until we have gained Thy victory. . . .
Let that true love be born which soothes all suffering; establish that immutable peace wherein resides true power; give us the sovereign knowledge which dispels all darkness. . . .
From the infinite depths to this most external body, in its smallest elements, Thou dost move and live and vibrate and set all in motion, and the whole being is now only a single block, infinitely multiple yet absolutely coherent, animated by one tremendous vibration: Thou.
~ The Mother, Prayers And Meditations,#KEYS
141:She sets the hard inventions of her brain
In a pattern of eternal fixity:
Indifferent to the cosmic dumb demand,
Unconscious of too close realities,
Of the unspoken thought, the voiceless heart,
She leans to forge her credos and iron codes
And metal structures to imprison life
And mechanic models of all things that are.
For the world seen she weaves a world conceived:
She spins in stiff but unsubstantial lines
Her gossamer word-webs of abstract thought,
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
And myths by which she explains the inexplicable.
At will she spaces in thin air of mind
Like maps in the school-house of intellect hung,
Forcing wide Truth into a narrow scheme,
Her numberless warring strict philosophies;
Out of Nature's body of phenomenon
She carves with Thought's keen edge in rigid lines,
Like rails for the World-Magician's power to run, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,#KEYS
142:A person doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe and seems possessed of amazing good luck. In beginning the great work of obtaining the knowledge and conversation, the magician vows 'to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally'
To do this is to enter the magical world view in its totality. He takes complete responsibility for his present incarnation and must consider every experience, thing, or piece of information which assails him from any source, as a reflection of the way he is conducting his existence. The idea that things happen to one that may or may not be related to the way one acts is an illusion created by our shallow awareness.
Keeping a close eye on the walls of the labyrinth, the conditions of his existence, the magician may then begin his invocation. The genius is not something added to oneself. Rather it is a stripping away of excess to reveal the god within.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null, Liber LUX, Augoeides [49-50],#KEYS
143:Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present.
A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe. ~ Nikola Tesla,#KEYS
144:There is only one thing painful in the beginning to a raw or turbid part of the surface nature; it is the indispensable discipline demanded, the denial necessary for the merging of the incomplete ego. But for that there can be a speedy and enormous compensation in the discovery of a real greater or ultimate completeness in others, in all things, in the cosmic oneness, in the freedom of the transcendent Self and Spirit, in the rapture of the touch of the Divine. Our sacrifice is not a giving without any return or any fruitful acceptance from the other side; it is an interchange between the embodied soul and conscious Nature in us and the eternal Spirit. For even though no return is demanded, yet there is the knowledge deep within us that a marvellous return is inevitable. The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [109],#KEYS
145:...the present terms are there not as an unprofitable recurrence, but in active pregnant gestation of all that is yet to be unfolded by the spirit, no irrational decimal recurrence helplessly repeating for ever its figures, but an expanding series of powers of the Infinite. What is in front of us is the greater potentialities, the steps yet unclimbed, the intended mightier manifestations. Why we are here is to be this means of the spirit's upward self-unfolding. What we have to do with ourselves and our significances is to grow and open them to greater significances of divine being, divine consciousness, divine power, divine delight and multiplied unity, and what we have to do with our environment is to use it consciously for increasing spiritual purposes and make it more and more a mould for the ideal unfolding of the perfect nature and self-conception of the Divine in the cosmos. This is surely the Will in things which moves, great and deliberate, unhasting, unresting, through whatever cycles, towards a greater and greater informing of its own finite figures with its own infinite Reality.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga,#KEYS
146:An integral method and an integral result. First, an integral realisation of Divine Being; not only a realisation of the One in its indistinguishable unity, but also in its multitude of aspects which are also necessary to the complete knowledge of it by the relative consciousness; not only realisation of unity in the Self, but of unity in the infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures. Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sayujyamukti, by which it becomes free even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the salokyalmukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the divine, sadharmyamukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mould of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, p.47-8,#KEYS
147:Art is the human language of the nervous plane, intended to express and communicate the Divine, who in the domain of sensation manifests as beauty.
The purpose of art is therefore to give those for whom it is meant a freer and more perfect communion with the Supreme Reality. The first contact with this Supreme Reality expresses itself in our consciousness by a flowering of the being in a plenitude of vast and peaceful delight. Each time that art can give the spectator this contact with the infinite, however fleetingly, it fulfils its aim; it has shown itself worthy of its mission. Thus no art which has for many centuries moved and delighted a people can be dismissed, since it has at least partially fulfilled its mission - to be the powerful and more or less perfect utterance of that which is to be expressed. What makes it difficult for the sensibility of a nation to enjoy the delight that another nation finds in one art or another is the habitual limitation of the nervous being which, even more than the mental being, is naturally exclusive in its ability to perceive the Divine and which, when it has entered into relation with Him through certain forms, feels an almost irresistible reluctance to recognise Him through other forms of sensation. ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, 122,#KEYS
148:So too we can rise to a consciousness above and observe the various parts of our being, inner and outer, mental, vital and physical and the subconscient below all, and act upon one or other or the whole from that higher status. It is possible also to go down from that height or from any height into any of these lower states and take its limited light or its obscurity as our place of working while the rest that we are is either temporarily put away or put behind or else kept as a field of reference from which we can get support, sanction or light and influence or as a status into which we can ascend or recede and from it observe the inferior movements. Or we can plunge into trance, get within ourselves and be conscious there while all outward things are excluded; or we can go beyond even this inner awareness and lose ourselves in some deeper other consciousness or some high superconscience. There is also a pervading equal consciousness into which we can enter and see all ourselves with one enveloping glance or omnipresent awareness one and indivisible. All this which looks strange and abnormal or may seem fantastic to the surface reason acquainted only with our normal status of limited ignorance and its movements divided from our inner higher and total reality, becomes easily intelligible and admissible in the light of the larger reason and logic of the Infinite or by the admission of the greater illimitable powers of the Self, the Spirit in us which is of one essence with the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 1.2.02 #KEYS
149:need for the soul's spiritualization :::
And yet even the leading of the inmost psychic being is not found sufficient until it has succeeded in raising itself out of this mass of inferior Nature to the highest spiritual levels and the divine spark and flame descended here have rejoined themselves to their original fiery Ether. For there is there no longer a spiritual consciousness still imperfect and half lost to itself in the thick sheaths of human mind, life and body, but the full spiritual consciousness in its purity, freedom and intense wideness. There, as it is the eternal Knower that becomes the Knower in us and mover and user of all knowledge, so it is the eternal All-Blissful who is the Adored attracting to himself the eternal divine portion of his being and joy that has gone out into the play of the universe, the infinite Lover pouring himself out in the multiplicity of his own manifested selves in a happy Oneness. All Beauty in the world is there the beauty of the Beloved, and all forms of beauty have to stand under the light of that eternal Beauty and submit themselves to the sublimating and transfiguring power of the unveiled Divine Perfection. All Bliss and Joy are there of the All-Blissful, and all inferior forms of enjoyment, happiness or pleasure are subjected to the shock of the intensity of its floods or currents and either they are broken to pieces as inadequate things under its convicting stress or compelled to transmute themselves into the forms of the Divine Ananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 168,#KEYS
150:What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some mighty possibility in the universe which it has created? And what is its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge, to unfettered Power? Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana, the visvamanava as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine?
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
151:...that personality, like consciousness, life, soul is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence. This fine flower of the cosmic Energy carries in it a forecast of the aim and a hint of the very motive of the universal labour. As an occult vision opens in him, he becomes aware of worlds behind in which consciousness and personality hold an enormous place and assume a premier value; even here in the material world to this occult vision the inconscience of Matter fills with a secret pervading consciousness, its inanimation harbours a vibrant life, its mechanism is the device of an indwelling Intelligence, God and soul are everywhere. Above all stands an infinite conscious Being who is variously self-expressed in all these worlds; impersonality is only a first means of that expression. It is a field of principles and forces, an equal basis of manifestation; but these forces express themselves through beings, have conscious spirits at their head and are the emanation of a One Conscious Being who is their sorce. A multiple innumberable personality expressing that One is the very sense and central aim of the manifestation and if now personality seems to be narrow, fragmentary, restrictive, it is only because it has not opened to its source or flowered into its own divine truth and fullness packing itself with the universal and the infinite. Thus the world-creation is no more an illusion, a fortuitous mechanism, a play that need not have happened, a flux without consequence; it is an intimate dynamism of the conscious and living Eternal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice and the Lord of the Sacrifice, 127,#KEYS
152:[the first aid, shastra, the lotus of the eternal knowledge:]
The supreme Shastra of the Integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being. The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite. All life, all thought, all energising of the faculties, all experiences passive or active, become thenceforward so many shocks which disintegrate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the inevitable efflorescence. He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite. He has received the divine touch without which there is no awakening, no opening of the spirit; but once it is received, attainment is sure, whether conquered swiftly in the course of one human life or pursued patiently through many stadia of the cycle of existence in the manifested universe.
Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within him. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids [53] [T1],#KEYS
153:The link between the spiritual and the lower planes of the mental being is that which is called in the old Vedantic phraseology the vijnana and which we may term the Truth-plane or the ideal mind or supermind where the One and the Many meet and our being is freely open to the revealing light of the divine Truth and the inspiration of the divine Will and Knowledge. If we can break down the veil of the intellectual, emotional, sensational mind which our ordinary existence has built between us and the Divine, we can then take up through the Truth-mind all our mental, vital and physical experience and offer it up to the spiritual -- this was the secret or mystic sense of the old Vedic "sacrifice" -- to be converted into the terms of the infinite truth of Sachchidananda, and we can receive the powers and illuminations of the infinite Existence in forms of a divine knowledge, will and delight to be imposed on our mentality, vitality, physical existence till the lower is transformed into the perfect vessel of the higher. This was the double Vedic movement of the descent and birth of the gods in the human creature and the ascent of the human powers that struggle towards the divine knowledge, power and delight and climb into the godheads, the result of which was the possession of the One, the Infinite, the beatific existence, the union with God, the Immortality. By possession of this ideal plane we break down entirely the opposition of the lower and the higher existence, the false gulf created by the Ignorance between the finite and the Infinite, God and Nature, the One and the Many, open the gates of the Divine, fulfil the individual in the complete harmony of the cosmic consciousness and realise in the cosmic being the epiphany of the transcendent Sachchidananda. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 2.15, #KEYS
154:IN OUR scrutiny of the seven principles of existence it was found that they are one in their essential and fundamental reality: for if even the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of being of Spirit made an object of sense, envisaged by the Spirit's own consciousness as the stuff of its forms, much more must the life-force that constitutes itself into form of Matter, and the mind-consciousness that throws itself out as Life, and the Supermind that develops Mind as one of its powers, be nothing but Spirit itself modified in apparent substance and in dynamism of action, not modified in real essence. All are powers of one Power of being and not other than that All-Existence, All-Consciousness, All-Will, All-Delight which is the true truth behind every appearance. And they are not only one in their reality, but also inseparable in the sevenfold variety of their action. They are the seven colours of the light of the divine consciousness, the seven rays of the Infinite, and by them the Spirit has filled in on the canvas of his self-existence conceptually extended, woven of the objective warp of Space and the subjective woof of Time, the myriad wonders of his self-creation great, simple, symmetrical in its primal laws and vast framings, infinitely curious and intricate in its variety of forms and actions and the complexities of relation and mutual effect of all upon each and each upon all. These are the seven Words of the ancient sages; by them have been created and in the light of their meaning are worked out and have to be interpreted the developed and developing harmonies of the world we know and the worlds behind of which we have only an indirect knowledge. The Light, the Sound is one; their action is sevenfold.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 7 - The Knowledge and the Ignorance, 499,#KEYS
155:Though the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say, organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not only the material universe present to our senses, but whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence. All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion, not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities, and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that compels created things to act and evolve each according to its own nature. The Intelligence- to give it an inadequate name-the Logos that thus organises its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power, large both in the delight of its self-existence and the delight of its active being and works than the mental intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly organic in its self-creation and its works that we may give for our present purpose the name of the divine supermind or gnosis.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 785-86,#KEYS
156:When a corner of Maya, the illusion of individual life, is lifted before the eyes of a man in such sort that he no longer makes any egoistic difference between his own person and other men, that he takes as much interest in the sufferings of others as in his own and that he becomes succourable to the point of devotion, ready to sacrifice himself for the salvation of others, then that man is able to recognise himself in all beings, considers as his own the infinite sufferings of all that lives and must thus appropriate to himself the sorrow of the world. No distress is alien to him. All the torments which he sees and can so rarely soften, all the torments of which he hears, those even which it is impossible for him to conceive, strike his spirit as if he were himself the victim. Insensible to the alternations of weal and woe which succeed each other in his destiny, delivered from all egoism, he penetrates the veils of the individual illusion : all that lives, all that suffers is equally near to his heart. He conceives the totality of things, their essence, their eternal flux, the vain efforts, the internal struggles and sufferings without end ; he sees to whatever side he turns his gaze man who suffers, the animal who suffers and a world that is eternally passing away. He unites himself henceforth to the sorrows of the world as closely as the egoist to his own person. How can he having such a knowledge of the world affirm by incessant desires his will to live, attach himself more and more to life and clutch it to him always more closely ? The man seduced by the illusion of individual life, a slave of his egoism, sees only the things that touch him personally and draws from them incessantly renewed motives to desire and to will : on the contrary one who penetrates the essence of things and dominates their totality, elevates himself to a state of voluntary renunciation, resignation and true tranquillity. ~ Schopenhauer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
157:mastering the lower self and leverage for the march towards the Divine :::
In proportion as he can thus master and enlighten his lower self, he is man and no longer an animal. When he can begin to replace desire altogether by a still greater enlightened thought and sight and will in touch with the Infinite, consciously subject to a diviner will than his own, linked to a more universal and transcendent knowledge, he has commenced the ascent towards tile superman; he is on his upward march towards the Divine.
It is, then, in the highest mind of thought and light and will or it is in the inner heart of deepest feeling and emotion that we must first centre our consciousness, -- in either of them or, if we are capable, in both together, -- and use that as our leverage to lift the nature wholly towards the Divine. The concentration of an enlightened thought, will and heart turned in unison towards one vast goal of our knowledge, one luminous and infinite source of our action, one imperishable object of our emotion is the starting-point of the Yoga. And the object of our seeking must be the very fount of the Light which is growing in us, the very origin of the Force which we are calling to move our members. Our one objective must be the Divine himself to whom, knowingly or unknowingly, something always aspires in our secret nature. There must be a large, many-sided yet single concentration of the thought on the idea, the perception, the vision, the awakening touch, the soul's realisation of the one Divine. There must be a flaming concentration of the heart on the All and Eternal and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful. There must be a strong and immovable concentration of the will on the attainment and fulfilment of all that the Divine is and a free and plastic opening of it to all that he intends to manifest in us. This is the triple way of the Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 80-81,#KEYS
158:The way of integral knowledge supposes that we are intended to arrive at an integral self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the Ignorance. Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity of the life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical round of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of the Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate the falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows and to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can open through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply to it. Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions and desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open with its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity of the thought with its imperfect mental constructions, its arrogant assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive concentrations; a greater faculty of knowledge is behind that can open to the true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the universe. An integral self-fulfilment, - an absolute, a culmination for the experiences of the heart, for its instinct of love, joy, devotion and worship; an absolute, a culmination for the senses, for their pursuit of divine beauty and good and delight in the forms of things; an absolute, a culmination for the life, for its pursuit of works, of divine power, mastery and perfection; an absolute, a culmination beyond its own limits for the thought, for its hunger after truth and light and divine wisdom and knowledge. Not something quite other than themselves from which they are all cast away is the end of these things in our nature, but something supreme in which they at once transcend themselves and find their own absolutes and infinitudes, their harmonies beyond measure.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,#KEYS
159:the spiritual force behind adoration :::
All love, indeed, that is adoration has a spiritual force behind it, and even when it is offered ignorantly and to a limited object, something of that splendor appears through the poverty of the rite and the smallness of its issues. For love that is worship is at once an aspiration and a preparation: it can bring even within its small limits in the Ignorance a glimpse of a still more or less blind and partial but surprising realisation; for there are moments when it is not we but the One who loves and is loved in us, and even a human passion can be uplifted and glorified by a slight glimpse of this infinite Love and Lover. It is for this reason that the worship of the god, the worship of the idol, the human magnet or ideal are not to be despised; for these are steps through which the human race moves towards that blissful passion and ecstasy of the Infinite which, even in limiting it, they yet represent for our imperfect vision when we have still to use the inferior steps Nature has hewn for our feet and admit the stages of our progress. Certain idolatries are indispensable for the development of our emotional being, nor will the man who knows be hasty at any time to shatter this image unless he can replace it in the heart of the worshipper by the Reality it figures. Moreover, they have this power because there is always something in them that is greater than their forms and, even when we reach the supreme worship, that abides and becomes a prolongation of it or a part of its catholic wholeness. our knowledge is still imperfect in us, love incomplete if even when we know That which surpasses all forms and manifestations, we cannot still accept the Divine in creature and object, in man, in the kind, in the animal, in the tree, in the flower, in the work of our hands, in the Nature-Force which is then no longer to us the blind action of a material machinery but a face and power of the universal Shakti: for in these things too is the presence of the Eternal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, The Works of Love - The Works of Life, 159,#KEYS
160:But usually the representative influence occupies a much larger place in the life of the sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by a received written Shastra, - some Word from the past which embodies the experience of former Yogins, - it may be practised either by personal effort alone or with the aid of a Guru. The spiritual knowledge is then gained through meditation on the truths that are taught and it is made living and conscious by their realisation in the personal experience; the Yoga proceeds by the results of prescribed methods taught in a Scripture or a tradition and reinforced and illumined by the instructions of the Master. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits, because it follows a well-beaten track to a long familiar goal.
For the sadhaka of the integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, - if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses. The Gita itself thus declares that the Yogin in his progress must pass beyond the written Truth, - sabdabrahmativartate - beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, - srotavyasya srutasya ca. For he is not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids,#KEYS
161: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,#KEYS
162:the three stages of the ascent :::
There are three stages of the ascent, -at the bottom the bodily life enslaved to the pressure of necessity and desire, in the middle the mental, the higher emotional and psychic rule that feels after greater interests, aspirations, experiences, ideas, and at the summits first a deeper psychic and spiritual state and then a supramental eternal consciousness in which all our aspirations and seekings discover their own intimate significance.In the bodily life first desire and need and then the practical good of the individual and the society are the governing consideration, the dominant force. In the mental life ideas and ideals rule, ideas that are half-lights wearing the garb of Truth, ideals formed by the mind as a result of a growing but still imperfect intuition and experience. Whenever the mental life prevails and the bodily diminishes its brute insistence, man the mental being feels pushed by the urge of mental Nature to mould in the sense of the idea or the ideal the life of the individual, and in the end even the vaguer more complex life of the society is forced to undergo this subtle process.In the spiritual life, or when a higher power than Mind has manifested and taken possession of the nature, these limited motive-forces recede, dwindle, tend to disappear. The spiritual or supramental Self, the Divine Being, the supreme and immanent Reality, must be alone the Lord within us and shape freely our final development according to the highest, widest, most integral expression possible of the law of our nature. In the end that nature acts in the perfect Truth and its spontaneous freedom; for it obeys only the luminous power of the Eternal. The individual has nothing further to gain, no desire to fulfil; he has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal can move him to action. Mental ideas, opinions, constructions are his no more; for his mind has fallen into silence, it is only a channel for the Light and Truth of the divine knowledge. Ideals are too narrow for the vastness of his spirit; it is the ocean of the Infinite that flows through him and moves him for ever.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supreme Will,#KEYS
163: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,#KEYS
164:Satya Sattva - "Sri Yukteswar's intuition was penetrating; heedless of remarks, he often replied to one's unexpressed thoughts. The words a person uses, and the actual thoughts behind them, may be poles apart. 'By calmness,' my guru said, 'try to feel the thoughts behind the confusion of men's verbiage.' [...]
Many teachers talked of miracles but could manifest nothing. Sri Yukteswar seldom mentioned the subtle laws but secretly operated them at will. 'A man of realization doesn't perform any miracle until he receives an inward sanction', master explained. 'God does not wish the secrets of His creation revealed promiscuously. Also, every individual in the world has an inalienable right to his free will. A saint will not encroach on that independence.'
The silence habitual to Sri Yukteswar was caused by his deep perceptions of the Infinite. [...] Because of my guru's unspectacular guise, only a few of his contemporaries recognized him as a superman. The adage: 'He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom,' could never be applied to my profound and quiet master. Though born a mortal like all others, Sri Yukteswar achieved identity with the Ruler of time and space. Master found no insuperable obstacles to the mergence of human and Divine. No such barrier exists, I came to understand. [...]
Though my guru's undissembling speech prevented a large following during his years on Earth, nevertheless, through an ever-growing number of sincere students of his teachings, his spirit lives on in the world today. [...]
The disclosures of the Divine insight are often painful to worldly ears. Master was not popular with superficial students. The wise, always few in number, deeply revered him. I daresay Sri Yukteswar would have been the most sought-after guru in India had his speech not been so candid and so censorious. [...]
He added, 'You will go to foreign lands, where blunt assaults on the ego are not appreciated. A teacher could not spread India's message in the West without an ample fund of accommodative patience and forbearance.' [...]
I am immeasurably grateful for the humbling blows he dealt my vanity. I sometimes felt that, metaphorically, he was discovering and uprooting every diseased tooth in my jaw. The hard core of egotism is difficult to dislodge except rudely. With its departure, the Divine finds at last un unobstructed channel. In vain It seeks to percolate through flinty hearts of selfishness. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi,#KEYS
165: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,#KEYS
166:The Godhead, the spirit manifested in Nature appears in a sea of infinite quality, Ananta-guna. But the executive or mechanical prakriti is of the threefold Guna, Sattwa, Rajas, Tamas, and the Ananta-guna, the spiritual play of infinite quality, modifies itself in this mechanical nature into the type of these three gunas. And in the soul-force in man this Godhead in Nature represents itself as a fourfold effective Power, caturvyuha , a Power for knowledge, a Power for strength, a Power for mutuality and active and productive relation and interchange, a Power for works and labour and service, and its presence casts all human life into a nexus and inner and outer operation of these four things. The ancient thought of India conscious of this fourfold type of active human personality and nature, built out of it the four types of the Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Sudra, each with its spiritual turn, ethical ideal, suitable upbringing, fixed function in society and place in the evolutionary scale of the spirit. As always tends to be the case when we too much externalise and mechanise the more subtle truths of our nature, this became a hard and fast system inconsistent with the freedom and variability and complexity of the finer developing spirit in man. Nevertheless the truth behind it exists and is one of some considerable importance in the perfection of our power of nature; but we have to take it in its inner aspects, first, personality, character, temperament, soul-type, then the soul-force which lies behind them and wears these forms, and lastly the play of the free spiritual shakti in which they find their culmination and unity beyond all modes. For the crude external idea that a man is born as a Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya or Sudra and that alone, is not a psychological truth of our being. The psychological fact is that there are these four active powers and tendencies of the Spirit and its executive shakti within us and the predominance of one or the other in the more well-formed part of our personality gives us our main tendencies, dominant qualities and capacities, effective turn in action and life. But they are more or less present in an men, here manifest, there latent, here developed, there subdued and depressed or subordinate, and in the perfect man will be raised up to a fullness and harmony which in the spiritual freedom will burst out into the free play of the infinite quality of the spirit in the inner and outer life and in the self-enjoying creative play of the Purusha with his and the world's Nature-Power. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 4:15 - Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality, #KEYS
167:10000 ::: The True Object of Spiritual Seeking:
To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the rest is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him,-that is, first of all to transform one's own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one's essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one's active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for humanity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth-these things cannot be the first or true object of spiritual seeking. We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in the inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforehand by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a half-way formation the true growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outflowing of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an outflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outward, not by the working out of a mental principle.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, [T1],#KEYS
168:If we look at this picture of the Self-Existence and its works as a unitary unlimited whole of vision, it stands together and imposes itself by its convincing totality: but to the analysis of the logical intellect it offers an abundance of difficulties, such as all attempts to erect a logical system out of a perception of an illimitable Existence must necessarily create; for any such endeavour must either effect consistency by an arbitrary sectioning of the complex truth of things or else by its comprehensiveness become logically untenable. For we see that the Indeterminable determines itself as infinite and finite, the Immutable admits a constant mutability and endless differences, the One becomes an innumerable multitude, the Impersonal creates or supports personality, is itself a Person; the Self has a nature and is yet other than its nature; Being turns into becoming and yet it is always itself and other than its becomings; the Universal individualises itself and the Individual universalises himself; Brahman is at once void of qualities and capable of infinite qualities, the Lord and Doer of works, yet a non-doer and a silent witness of the workings of Nature. If we look carefully at these workings of Nature, once we put aside the veil of familiarity and our unthinking acquiescence in the process of things as natural because so they always happen, we discover that all she does in whole or in parts is a miracle, an act of some incomprehensible magic. The being of the Self-existence and the world that has appeared in it are, each of them and both together, a suprarational mystery. There seems to us to be a reason in things because the processes of the physical finite are consistent to our view and their law determinable, but this reason in things, when closely examined, seems to stumble at every moment against the irrational or infrarational and the suprarational: the consistency, the determinability of process seems to lessen rather than increase as we pass from matter to life and from life to mentality; if the finite consents to some extent to look as if it were rational, the infinitesimal refuses to be bound by the same laws and the infinite is unseizable. As for the action of the universe and its significance, it escapes us altogether; if Self, God or Spirit there be, his dealings with the world and us are incomprehensible, offer no clue that we can follow. God and Nature and even ourselves move in a mysterious way which is only partially and at points intelligible, but as a whole escapes our comprehension. All the works of Maya look like the production of a suprarational magical Power which arranges things according to its wisdom or its phantasy, but a wisdom which is not ours and a phantasy which baffles our imagination. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2.02, #KEYS
169: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,#KEYS
170:- for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of mental and vital self-expression or world-expression, - all that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent can be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an ignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned into a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge.
For all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning. The Yogin's aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine Consciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries, the symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin's aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or occult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit's mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin's aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing the Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its own works, to express that One Divine in ideal forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must substitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual aspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself the sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive. The Yogin's distinction from other men is this that he lives in a higher and vaster spiritual consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then spring from there: it must not be made in the mind, - for it is a greater truth and vision than mental man's that he has to express or rather that presses to express itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but for a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 142 [T4],#KEYS
171:Concentration is a gathering together of the consciousness and either centralising at one point or turning on a single object, e.g., the Divine; there can be also be a gathered condition throughout the whole being, not at a point. In meditation it is not indispensable to gather like this, one can simply remain with a quiet mind thinking of one subject or observing what comes in the consciousness and dealing with it. ... Of this true consciousness other than the superficial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest), one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it and all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and Consciousness which is waiting above us. To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the first way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other ways.
That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward and in the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the Infinite. There it begins to come into contact with the universal Self, the Divine Peace, Light, Power, Knowledge, Bliss, to enter into that and become that, to feel the descent of these things into the nature. To concentrate in the head with the aspiration for quietude in the mind and the realisation of the Self and Divine above is the second way of concentration. It is important, however, to remember that the concentration of the consciousness in the head in only a preparation for its rising to the centre above; otherwise, one may get shut up in one's own mind and its experiences or at best attain only to a reflection of the Truth above instead of rising into the spiritual transcendence to live there. For some the mental concentration is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternatively - but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the most desirable.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
172:There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge. This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundlessness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is in all, and all is the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,#KEYS
173:An integral Yoga includes as a vital and indispensable element in its total and ultimate aim the conversion of the whole being into a higher spiritual consciousness and a larger divine existence. Our parts of will and action, our parts of knowledge, our thinking being, our emotional being, our being of life, all our self and nature must seek the Divine, enter into the Infinite, unite with the Eternal. But mans present nature is limited, divided, unequal, -- it is easiest for him to concentrate in the strongest part of his being and follow a definite line of progress proper to his nature: only rare individuals have the strength to take a large immediate plunge straight into the sea of the Divine Infinity. Some therefore must choose as a starting-point a concentration in thought or contemplation or the minds one-pointedness to find the eternal reality of the Self in them; others can more easily withdraw into the heart to meet there the Divine, the Eternal: yet others are predominantly dynamic and active; for these it is best to centre themselves in the will and enlarge their being through works. United with the Self and source of all by their surrender of their will into its infinity, guided in their works by the secret Divinity within or surrendered to the Lord of the cosmic action as the master and mover of all their energies of thought, feeling, act, becoming by this enlargement of being selfless and universal, they can reach by works some first fullness of a spiritual status. But the path, whatever its point of starting, must debouch into a vaster dominion; it must proceed in the end through a totality of integrated knowledge, emotion, will of dynamic action, perfection of the being and the entire nature. In the supramental consciousness, on the level of the supramental existence this integration becomes consummate; there knowledge, will, emotion, the perfection of the self and the dynamic nature rise each to its absolute of itself and all to their perfect harmony and fusion with each other, to a divine integrality, a divine perfection. For the supermind is a Truth-Consciousness in which the Divine Reality, fully manifested, no longer works with the instrumentation of the Ignorance; a truth of status of being which is absolute becomes dynamic in a truth of energy and activity of the being which is self-existent and perfect. Every movement there is a movement of the self-aware truth of Divine Being and every part is in entire harmony with the whole. Even the most limited and finite action is in the Truth-Consciousness a movement of the Eternal and Infinite and partakes of the inherent absoluteness and perfection of the Eternal and Infinite. An ascent into the supramental Truth not only raises our spiritual and essential consciousness to that height but brings about a descent of this Light and Truth into all our being and all our parts of nature. All then becomes part of the Divine Truth, an element and means of the supreme union and oneness; this ascent and descent must be therefore an ultimate aim of this Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Supermind and the Yoga of Works [279-280],#KEYS
174:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83],#KEYS
175: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],#KEYS
176:It is thus by an integralisation of our divided being that the Divine Shakti in the Yoga will proceed to its object; for liberation, perfection, mastery are dependent on this integralisation, since the little wave on the surface cannot control its own movement, much less have any true control over the vast life around it. The Shakti, the power of the Infinite and the Eternal descends within us, works, breaks up our present psychological formations, shatters every wall, widens, liberates, presents us with always newer and greater powers of vision, ideation, perception and newer and greater life-motives, enlarges and newmodels increasingly the soul and its instruments, confronts us with every imperfection in order to convict and destroy it, opens to a greater perfection, does in a brief period the work of many lives or ages so that new births and new vistas open constantly within us. Expansive in her action, she frees the consciousness from confinement in the body; it can go out in trance or sleep or even waking and enter into worlds or other regions of this world and act there or carry back its experience. It spreads out, feeling the body only as a small part of itself, and begins to contain what before contained it; it achieves the cosmic consciousness and extends itself to be commensurate with the universe. It begins to know inwardly and directly and not merely by external observation and contact the forces at play in the world, feels their movement, distinguishes their functioning and can operate immediately upon them as the scientist operates upon physical forces, accept their action and results in our mind, life, body or reject them or modify, change, reshape, create immense new powers and movements in place of the old small functionings of the nature. We begin to perceive the working of the forces of universal Mind and to know how our thoughts are created by that working, separate from within the truth and falsehood of our perceptions, enlarge their field, extend and illumine their significance, become master of our own minds and active to shape the movements of Mind in the world around us. We begin to perceive the flow and surge of the universal life-forces, detect the origin and law of our feelings, emotions, sensations, passions, are free to accept, reject, new-create, open to wider, rise to higher planes of Life-Power. We begin to perceive too the key to the enigma of Matter, follow the interplay of Mind and Life and Consciousness upon it, discover more and more its instrumental and resultant function and detect ultimately the last secret of Matter as a form not merely of Energy but of involved and arrested or unstably fixed and restricted consciousness and begin to see too the possibility of its liberation and plasticity of response to higher Powers, its possibilities for the conscious and no longer the more than half-inconscient incarnation and self-expression of the Spirit. All this and more becomes more and more possible as the working of the Divine Shakti increases in us and, against much resistance or labour to respond of our obscure consciousness, through much struggle and movement of progress and regression and renewed progress necessitated by the work of intensive transformation of a half-inconscient into a conscious substance, moves to a greater purity, truth, height, range. All depends on the psychic awakening in us, the completeness of our response to her and our growing surrender. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 183, #KEYS
177: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],#KEYS
178:The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies unendingly all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking from innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods. Arjuna sees him, God magnificent and beautiful and terrible, the Lord of souls who has manifested in the glory and greatness of his spirit this wild and monstrous and orderly and wonderful and sweet and terrible world, and overcome with marvel and joy and fear he bows down and adores with words of awe and with clasped hands the tremendous vision. "I see" he cries "all the gods in thy body, O God, and different companies of beings, Brahma the creating lord seated in the Lotus, and the Rishis and the race of the divine Serpents. I see numberless arms and bellies and eyes and faces, I see thy infinite forms on every side, but I see not thy end nor thy middle nor thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form universal. I see thee crowned and with thy mace and thy discus, hard to discern because thou art a luminous mass of energy on all sides of me, an encompassing blaze, a sun-bright fire-bright Immeasurable. Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence."
But in the greatness of this vision there is too the terrific image of the Destroyer. This Immeasurable without end or middle or beginning is he in whom all things begin and exist and end.
This Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy. The form of him is fierce and marvellous and alone it fills all the regions and occupies the whole space between earth and heaven. The companies of the gods enter it, afraid, adoring; the Rishis and the Siddhas crying "May there be peace and weal" praise it with many praises; the eyes of Gods and Titans and Giants are fixed on it in amazement. It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into its mouths of flame like many rivers hurrying in their course towards the ocean or like moths that cast themselves on a kindled fire. With those burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres. The world and its nations are shaken and in anguish with the terror of destruction and Arjuna shares in the trouble and panic around him; troubled and in pain is the soul within him and he finds no peace or gladness. He cries to the dreadful Godhead, "Declare to me who thou art that wearest this form of fierceness. Salutation to thee, O thou great Godhead, turn thy heart to grace. I would know who thou art who wast from the beginning, for I know not the will of thy workings." ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays On The Gita, 2.10_-_The_Vision_of_the_World-Spirit_-_Time_the_Destroyer,#KEYS
179::::
As an inner equality increases and with it the sense of the true vital being waiting for the greater direction it has to serve, as the psychic call too increases in all the members of our nature, That to which the call is addressed begins to reveal itself, descends to take possession of the life and its energies and fills them with the height, intimacy, vastness of its presence and its purpose. In many, if not most, it manifests something of itself even before the equality and the open psychic urge or guidance are there. A call of the veiled psychic element oppressed by the mass of the outer ignorance and crying for deliverance, a stress of eager meditation and seeking for knowledge, a longing of the heart, a passionate will ignorant yet but sincere may break the lid that shuts off that Higher from this Lower Nature and open the floodgates. A little of the Divine Person may reveal itself or some Light, Power, Bliss, Love out of the Infinite. This may be a momentary revelation, a flash or a brief-lived gleam that soon withdraws and waits for the preparation of the nature; but also it may repeat itself, grow, endure. A long and large and comprehensive working will then have begun, sometimes luminous or intense, sometimes slow and obscure. A Divine Power comes in front at times and leads and compels or instructs and enlightens; at others it withdraws into the background and seems to leave the being to its own resources. All that is ignorant, obscure, perverted or simply imperfect and inferior in the being is raised up, perhaps brought to its acme, dealt with, corrected, exhausted, shown its own disastrous results, compelled to call for its own cessation or transformation or expelled as worthless or incorrigible from the nature. This cannot be a smooth and even process; alternations there are of day and night, illumination and darkness, calm and construction or battle and upheaval, the presence of the growing Divine Consciousness and its absence, heights of hope and abysses of despair, the clasp of the Beloved and the anguish of its absence, the overwhelming invasion, the compelling deceit, the fierce opposition, the disabling mockery of hostile Powers or the help and comfort and communion of the Gods and the Divine Messengers. A great and long revolution and churning of the ocean of Life with strong emergences of its nectar and its poison is enforced till all is ready and the increasing Descent finds a being, a nature prepared and conditioned for its complete rule and its all-encompassing presence. But if the equality and the psychic light and will are already there, then this process, though it cannot be dispensed with, can still be much lightened and facilitated: it will be rid of its worst dangers; an inner calm, happiness, confidence will support the steps through all the difficulties and trials of the transformation and the growing Force profiting by the full assent of the nature will rapidly diminish and eliminate the power of the opposing forces. A sure guidance and protection will be present throughout, sometimes standing in front, sometimes working behind the veil, and the power of the end will be already there even in the beginning and in the long middle stages of the great endeavour. For at all times the seeker will be aware of the Divine Guide and Protector or the working of the supreme Mother-Force; he will know that all is done for the best, the progress assured, the victory inevitable. In either case the process is the same and unavoidable, a taking up of the whole nature, of the whole life, of the internal and of the external, to reveal and handle and transform its forces and their movements under the pressure of a diviner Life from above, until all here has been possessed by greater spiritual powers and made an instrumentation of a spiritual action and a divine purpose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 2, 179,#KEYS
180:AUGOEIDES:
The magicians most important invocation is that of his Genius, Daemon, True Will, or Augoeides. This operation is traditionally known as attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is sometimes known as the Magnum Opus or Great Work.
The Augoeides may be defined as the most perfect vehicle of Kia on the plane of duality. As the avatar of Kia on earth, the Augoeides represents the true will, the raison detre of the magician, his purpose in existing. The discovery of ones true will or real nature may be difficult and fraught with danger, since a false identification leads to obsession and madness. The operation of obtaining the knowledge and conversation is usually a lengthy one. The magician is attempting a progressive metamorphosis, a complete overhaul of his entire existence. Yet he has to seek the blueprint for his reborn self as he goes along. Life is less the meaningless accident it seems. Kia has incarnated in these particular conditions of duality for some purpose. The inertia of previous existences propels Kia into new forms of manifestation. Each incarnation represents a task, or a puzzle to be solved, on the way to some greater form of completion.
The key to this puzzle is in the phenomena of the plane of duality in which we find ourselves. We are, as it were, trapped in a labyrinth or maze. The only thing to do is move about and keep a close watch on the way the walls turn. In a completely chaotic universe such as this one, there are no accidents. Everything is signifcant. Move a single grain of sand on a distant shore and the entire future history of the world will eventually be changed. A person doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe and seems possessed of amazing good luck. In beginning the great work of obtaining the knowledge and conversation, the magician vows to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally.
To do this is to enter the magical world view in its totality. He takes complete responsibility for his present incarnation and must consider every experience, thing, or piece of information which assails him from any source, as a reflection of the way he is conducting his existence. The idea that things happen to one that may or may not be related to the way one acts is an illusion created by our shallow awareness.
Keeping a close eye on the walls of the labyrinth, the conditions of his existence, the magician may then begin his invocation. The genius is not something added to oneself. Rather it is a stripping away of excess to reveal the god within.
Directly on awakening, preferably at dawn, the initiate goes to the place of invocation. Figuring to himself as he goes that being born anew each day brings with it the chance of greater rebirth, first he banishes the temple of his mind by ritual or by some magical trance. Then he unveils some token or symbol or sigil which represents to him the Holy Guardian Angel. This symbol he will likely have to change during the great work as the inspiration begins to move him. Next he invokes an image of the Angel into his minds eye. It may be considered as a luminous duplicate of ones own form standing in front of or behind one, or simply as a ball of brilliant light above ones head. Then he formulates his aspirations in what manner he will, humbling himself in prayer or exalting himself in loud proclamation as his need be. The best form of this invocation is spoken spontaneously from the heart, and if halting at first, will prove itself in time. He is aiming to establish a set of ideas and images which correspond to the nature of his genius, and at the same time receive inspiration from that source. As the magician begins to manifest more of his true will, the Augoeides will reveal images, names, and spiritual principles by which it can be drawn into greater manifestation. Having communicated with the invoked form, the magician should draw it into himself and go forth to live in the way he hath willed.
The ritual may be concluded with an aspiration to the wisdom of silence by a brief concentration on the sigil of the Augoeides, but never by banishing. Periodically more elaborate forms of ritual, using more powerful forms of gnosis, may be employed. At the end of the day, there should be an accounting and fresh resolution made. Though every day be a catalog of failure, there should be no sense of sin or guilt. Magic is the raising of the whole individual in perfect balance to the power of Infinity, and such feelings are symptomatic of imbalance. If any unnecessary or imbalanced scraps of ego become identified with the genius by mistake, then disaster awaits. The life force flows directly into these complexes and bloats them into grotesque monsters variously known as the demon Choronzon. Some magicians attempting to go too fast with this invocation have failed to banish this demon, and have gone spectacularly insane as a result.
~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,#KEYS
181:summary of the entire process of psychic awakening :::
You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience. The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your consciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activity on the surface which veils the real Self. But there is another, a hidden consciousness within behind the surface one in which we can become aware of the real Self and of a larger deeper truth of nature, can realise the Self and liberate and transform the nature. To quiet the surface mind and begin to live within is the object of this concentration. Of this true consciousness other then the superficial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest), one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the individual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern the nature, to turn it an d all its movements towards the Truth, towards the Divine, and to call down into it all that is above. It brings the consciousness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and Consciousness which is waiting above us. To concentrate in the heart centre with the offering of oneself to the Divine and the aspiration for this inward opening and for the Presence in the heart is the first way and, if it can be done, the natural beginning; for its result once obtained makes the spiritual path far more easy and safe than if one begins the other way.
That other way is the concentration in the head, in the mental centre. This, if it brings about the silence of the surface mind, opens up an inner, larger, deeper mind within which is more capable of receiving spiritual experience and spiritual knowledge. But once concentrated here one must open the silent mental consciousness upward to all that is above mind. After a time one feels the consciousness rising upward and it the end it rises beyond the lid which has so long kept it tied in the body and finds a centre above the head where it is liberated into the Infinite. There it behind to come into contact with the universal Self, the Divine Peace, Light, Power, Knowledge, Bliss, to enter into that and become that, to feel the descent of these things into the nature. To concentrate in the head with the aspiration for quietude in the mind and the realisation of the Self and Divine above is the second way of concentration. It is important, however, to remember that the concentration of the consciousness in the head is only a preparation for its rising to the centre above; otherwise, one may get shut up in one's own mind and its experiences or at best attain only to a reflection of the Truth above instead of rising into the spiritual transcendence to live there. For some the mental consciousness is easier, for some the concentration in the heart centre; some are capable of doing both alternatively - but to begin with the heart centre, if one can do it, is the more desirable.
The other side of the discipline is with regard to the activities of the nature, of the mind, of the life-self or vital, of the physical being. Here the principle is to accord the nature with the inner realisation so that one may not be divided into two discordant parts. There are here several disciplines or processes possible. One is to offer all the activities to the Divine and call for the inner guidance and the taking up of one's nature by a Higher Power. If there is the inward soul-opening, if the psychic being comes forward, then there is no great difficulty - there comes with it a psychic discrimination, a constant intimation, finally a governance which discloses and quietly and patiently removes all imperfections, bring the right mental and vital movements and reshapes the physical consciousness also. Another method is to stand back detached from the movements of the mind, life, physical being, to regard their activities as only a habitual formation of general Nature in the individual imposed on us by past workings, not as any part of our real being; in proportion as one succeeds in this, becomes detached, sees mind and its activities as not oneself, life and its activities as not oneself, the body and its activities as not oneself, one becomes aware of an inner Being within us - inner mental, inner vital, inner physical - silent, calm, unbound, unattached which reflects the true Self above and can be its direct representative; from this inner silent Being proceeds a rejection of all that is to be rejected, an acceptance only of what can be kept and transformed, an inmost Will to perfection or a call to the Divine Power to do at each step what is necessary for the change of the Nature. It can also open mind, life and body to the inmost psychic entity and its guiding influence or its direct guidance. In most cases these two methods emerge and work together and finally fuse into one. But one can being with either, the one that one feels most natural and easy to follow.
Finally, in all difficulties where personal effort is hampered, the help of the Teacher can intervene and bring above what is needed for the realisation or for the immediate step that is necessary.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, 6, {871},#KEYS
182:[an Integral conception of the Divine :::
But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration, 82-83 [T1],#KEYS
183:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study
Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.
The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.
Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.
Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.
Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.
Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.
The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.
The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.
Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.
The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.
The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.
The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.
Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.
The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.
The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.
The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.
The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.
The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.
The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.
Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.
The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.
The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.
The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.
The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.
Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.
Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.
Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.
Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.
The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.
The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.
The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.
The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.
The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.
Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.
Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.
Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.
The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.
Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.
Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.
Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.
First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.
Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.
The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.
The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.
The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants#KEYS
184:This, in short, is the demand made on us, that we should turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice. Every moment and every movement of our being is to be resolved into a continuous and a devoted self-giving to the Eternal. All our actions, not less the smallest and most ordinary and trifling than the greatest and most uncommon and noble, must be performed as consecrated acts. Our individualised nature must live in the single consciousness of an inner and outer movement dedicated to Something that is beyond us and greater than our ego. No matter what the gift or to whom it is presented by us, there must be a consciousness in the act that we are presenting it to the one divine Being in all beings. Our commonest or most grossly material actions must assume this sublimated character; when we eat, we should be conscious that we are giving our food to that Presence in us; it must be a sacred offering in a temple and the sense of a mere physical need or self-gratification must pass away from us. In any great labour, in any high discipline, in any difficult or noble enterprise, whether undertaken for ourselves, for others or for the race, it will no longer be possible to stop short at the idea of the race, of ourselves or of others. The thing we are doing must be consciously offered as a sacrifice of works, not to these, but either through them or directly to the One Godhead; the Divine Inhabitant who was hidden by these figures must be no longer hidden but ever present to our soul, our mind, our sense. The workings and results of our acts must be put in the hands of that One in the feeling that that Presence is the Infinite and Most High by whom alone our labour and our aspiration are possible. For in his being all takes place; for him all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on his altar. Even in those things in which Nature is herself very plainly the worker and we only the witnesses of her working and its containers and supporters, there should be the same constant memory and insistent consciousness of a work and of its divine Master. Our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats can and must be made conscious in us as the living rhythm of the universal sacrifice.
It is clear that a conception of this kind and its effective practice must carry in them three results that are of a central importance for our spiritual ideal. It is evident, to begin with, that, even if such a discipline is begun without devotion, it leads straight and inevitably towards the highest devotion possible; for it must deepen naturally into the completest adoration imaginable, the most profound God-love. There is bound up with it a growing sense of the Divine in all things, a deepening communion with the Divine in all our thought, will and action and at every moment of our lives, a more and more moved consecration to the Divine of the totality of our being. Now these implications of the Yoga of works are also of the very essence of an integral and absolute Bhakti. The seeker who puts them into living practice makes in himself continually a constant, active and effective representation of the very spirit of self-devotion, and it is inevitable that out of it there should emerge the most engrossing worship of the Highest to whom is given this service. An absorbing love for the Divine Presence to whom he feels an always more intimate closeness, grows upon the consecrated worker. And with it is born or in it is contained a universal love too for all these beings, living forms and creatures that are habitations of the Divine - not the brief restless grasping emotions of division, but the settled selfless love that is the deeper vibration of oneness. In all the seeker begins to meet the one Object of his adoration and service. The way of works turns by this road of sacrifice to meet the path of Devotion; it can be itself a devotion as complete, as absorbing, as integral as any the desire of the heart can ask for or the passion of the mind can imagine.
Next, the practice of this Yoga demands a constant inward remembrance of the one central liberating knowledge, and a constant active externalising of it in works comes in too to intensify the remembrance. In all is the one Self, the one Divine is all; all are in the Divine, all are the Divine and there is nothing else in the universe, - this thought or this faith is the whole background until it becomes the whole substance of the consciousness of the worker. A memory, a self-dynamising meditation of this kind, must and does in its end turn into a profound and uninterrupted vision and a vivid and all-embracing consciousness of that which we so powerfully remember or on which we so constantly meditate. For it compels a constant reference at each moment to the Origin of all being and will and action and there is at once an embracing and exceeding of all particular forms and appearances in That which is their cause and upholder. This way cannot go to its end without a seeing vivid and vital, as concrete in its way as physical sight, of the works of the universal Spirit everywhere. On its summits it rises into a constant living and thinking and willing and acting in the presence of the Supramental, the Transcendent. Whatever we see and hear, whatever we touch and sense, all of which we are conscious, has to be known and felt by us as That which we worship and serve; all has to be turned into an image of the Divinity, perceived as a dwelling-place of his Godhead, enveloped with the eternal Omnipresence. In its close, if not long before it, this way of works turns by communion with the Divine Presence, Will and Force into a way of Knowledge more complete and integral than any the mere creature intelligence can construct or the search of the intellect can discover.
Lastly, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice compels us to renounce all the inner supports of egoism, casting them out of our mind and will and actions, and to eliminate its seed, its presence, its influence out of our nature. All must be done for the Divine; all must be directed towards the Divine. Nothing must be attempted for ourselves as a separate existence; nothing done for others, whether neighbours, friends, family, country or mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and sentiment or because the ego takes a preferential interest in their welfare. In this way of doing and seeing all works and all life become only a daily dynamic worship and service of the Divine in the unbounded temple of his own vast cosmic existence. Life becomes more and more the sacrifice of the eternal in the individual constantly self-offered to the eternal Transcendence. It is offered in the wide sacrificial ground of the field of the eternal cosmic Spirit; and the Force too that offers it is the eternal Force, the omnipresent Mother. Therefore is this way a way of union and communion by acts and by the spirit and knowledge in the act as complete and integral as any our Godward will can hope for or our soul's strength execute.
It has all the power of a way of works integral and absolute, but because of its law of sacrifice and self-giving to the Divine Self and Master, it is accompanied on its one side by the whole power of the path of Love and on the other by the whole power of the path of Knowledge. At its end all these three divine Powers work together, fused, united, completed, perfected by each other.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [111-114],#KEYS
185:The Supreme Discovery
IF WE want to progress integrally, we must build within our conscious being a strong and pure mental synthesis which can serve us as a protection against temptations from outside, as a landmark to prevent us from going astray, as a beacon to light our way across the moving ocean of life.
Each individual should build up this mental synthesis according to his own tendencies and affinities and aspirations. But if we want it to be truly living and luminous, it must be centred on the idea that is the intellectual representation symbolising That which is at the centre of our being, That which is our life and our light.
This idea, expressed in sublime words, has been taught in various forms by all the great Instructors in all lands and all ages.
The Self of each one and the great universal Self are one. Since all that is exists from all eternity in its essence and principle, why make a distinction between the being and its origin, between ourselves and what we place at the beginning?
The ancient traditions rightly said:
"Our origin and ourselves, our God and ourselves are one."
And this oneness should not be understood merely as a more or less close and intimate relationship of union, but as a true identity.
Thus, when a man who seeks the Divine attempts to reascend by degrees towards the inaccessible, he forgets that all his knowledge and all his intuition cannot take him one step forward in this infinite; neither does he know that what he wants to attain, what he believes to be so far from him, is within him.
For how could he know anything of the origin until he becomes conscious of this origin in himself?
It is by understanding himself, by learning to know himself, that he can make the supreme discovery and cry out in wonder like the patriarch in the Bible, "The house of God is here and I knew it not."
That is why we must express that sublime thought, creatrix of the material worlds, and make known to all the word that fills the heavens and the earth, "I am in all things and all beings."When all shall know this, the promised day of great transfigurations will be at hand. When in each atom of Matter men shall recognise the indwelling thought of God, when in each living creature they shall perceive some hint of a gesture of God, when each man can see God in his brother, then dawn will break, dispelling the darkness, the falsehood, the ignorance, the error and suffering that weigh upon all Nature. For, "all Nature suffers and laments as she awaits the revelation of the Sons of God."
This indeed is the central thought epitomising all others, the thought which should be ever present to our remembrance as the sun that illumines all life.
That is why I remind you of it today. For if we follow our path bearing this thought in our hearts like the rarest jewel, the most precious treasure, if we allow it to do its work of illumination and transfiguration within us, we shall know that it lives in the centre of all beings and all things, and in it we shall feel the marvellous oneness of the universe.
Then we shall understand the vanity and childishness of our meagre satisfactions, our foolish quarrels, our petty passions, our blind indignations. We shall see the dissolution of our little faults, the crumbling of the last entrenchments of our limited personality and our obtuse egoism. We shall feel ourselves being swept along by this sublime current of true spirituality which will deliver us from our narrow limits and bounds.
The individual Self and the universal Self are one; in every world, in every being, in every thing, in every atom is the Divine Presence, and man's mission is to manifest it.
In order to do that, he must become conscious of this Divine Presence within him. Some individuals must undergo a real apprenticeship in order to achieve this: their egoistic being is too all-absorbing, too rigid, too conservative, and their struggles against it are long and painful. Others, on the contrary, who are more impersonal, more plastic, more spiritualised, come easily into contact with the inexhaustible divine source of their being.But let us not forget that they too should devote themselves daily, constantly, to a methodical effort of adaptation and transformation, so that nothing within them may ever again obscure the radiance of that pure light.
But how greatly the standpoint changes once we attain this deeper consciousness! How understanding widens, how compassion grows!
On this a sage has said:
"I would like each one of us to come to the point where he perceives the inner God who dwells even in the vilest of human beings; instead of condemning him we would say, 'Arise, O resplendent Being, thou who art ever pure, who knowest neither birth nor death; arise, Almighty One, and manifest thy nature.'"
Let us live by this beautiful utterance and we shall see everything around us transformed as if by miracle.
This is the attitude of true, conscious and discerning love, the love which knows how to see behind appearances, understand in spite of words, and which, amid all obstacles, is in constant communion with the depths.
What value have our impulses and our desires, our anguish and our violence, our sufferings and our struggles, all these inner vicissitudes unduly dramatised by our unruly imagination - what value do they have before this great, this sublime and divine love bending over us from the innermost depths of our being, bearing with our weaknesses, rectifying our errors, healing our wounds, bathing our whole being with its regenerating streams?
For the inner Godhead never imposes herself, she neither demands nor threatens; she offers and gives herself, conceals and forgets herself in the heart of all beings and things; she never accuses, she neither judges nor curses nor condemns, but works unceasingly to perfect without constraint, to mend without reproach, to encourage without impatience, to enrich each one with all the wealth he can receive; she is the mother whose love bears fruit and nourishes, guards and protects, counsels and consoles; because she understands everything, she can endure everything, excuse and pardon everything, hope and prepare for everything; bearing everything within herself, she owns nothing that does not belong to all, and because she reigns over all, she is the servant of all; that is why all, great and small, who want to be kings with her and gods in her, become, like her, not despots but servitors among their brethren.
How beautiful is this humble role of servant, the role of all who have been revealers and heralds of the God who is within all, of the Divine Love that animates all things....
And until we can follow their example and become true servants even as they, let us allow ourselves to be penetrated and transformed by this Divine Love; let us offer Him, without reserve, this marvellous instrument, our physical organism. He shall make it yield its utmost on every plane of activity.
To achieve this total self-consecration, all means are good, all methods have their value. The one thing needful is to persevere in our will to attain this goal. For then everything we study, every action we perform, every human being we meet, all come to bring us an indication, a help, a light to guide us on the path.
Before I close, I shall add a few pages for those who have already made apparently fruitless efforts, for those who have encountered the pitfalls on the way and seen the measure of their weakness, for those who are in danger of losing their self-confidence and courage. These pages, intended to rekindle hope in the hearts of those who suffer, were written by a spiritual worker at a time when ordeals of every kind were sweeping down on him like purifying flames.
You who are weary, downcast and bruised, you who fall, who think perhaps that you are defeated, hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows, he has shared them, he has suffered like you from the ills of the earth; like you he has crossed many deserts under the burden of the day, he has known thirst and hunger, solitude and abandonment, and the cruellest of all wants, the destitution of the heart. Alas! he has known too the hours of doubt, the errors, the faults, the failings, every weakness.
But he tells you: Courage! Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message of solace.
You who weep, who suffer and tremble, who dare not expect an end to your ills, an issue to your pangs, behold: there is no night without dawn and the day is about to break when darkness is thickest; there is no mist that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild, no tear that it will not dry one day, no storm that is not followed by its shining triumphant bow; there is no snow that it does not melt, nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring.
And for you too, there is no affliction which does not bring its measure of glory, no distress which cannot be transformed into joy, nor defeat into victory, nor downfall into higher ascension, nor solitude into radiating centre of life, nor discord into harmony - sometimes it is a misunderstanding between two minds that compels two hearts to open to mutual communion; lastly, there is no infinite weakness that cannot be changed into strength. And it is even in supreme weakness that almightiness chooses to reveal itself!
Listen, my little child, you who today feel so broken, so fallen perhaps, who have nothing left, nothing to cover your misery and foster your pride: never before have you been so great! How close to the summits is he who awakens in the depths, for the deeper the abyss, the more the heights reveal themselves!
Do you not know this, that the most sublime forces of the vasts seek to array themselves in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's yearning with the most royal light!
If ordeal or fault has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of suffering, do not grieve - for there indeed the divine love and the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness: then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!
You are walking in the depths of night: then gather the priceless treasures of the night. In bright sunshine, the ways of intelligence are lit, but in the white luminosities of the night lie the hidden paths of perfection, the secret of spiritual riches.
You are being stripped of everything: that is the way towards plenitude. When you have nothing left, everything will be given to you. Because for those who are sincere and true, from the worst always comes the best.
Every grain that is sown in the earth produces a thousand. Every wing-beat of sorrow can be a soaring towards glory.
And when the adversary pursues man relentlessly, everything he does to destroy him only makes him greater.
Hear the story of the worlds, look: the great enemy seems to triumph. He casts the beings of light into the night, and the night is filled with stars. He rages against the cosmic working, he assails the integrity of the empire of the sphere, shatters its harmony, divides and subdivides it, scatters its dust to the four winds of infinity, and lo! the dust is changed into a golden seed, fertilising the infinite and peopling it with worlds which now gravitate around their eternal centre in the larger orbit of space - so that even division creates a richer and deeper unity, and by multiplying the surfaces of the material universe, enlarges the empire that it set out to destroy.
Beautiful indeed was the song of the primordial sphere cradled in the bosom of immensity, but how much more beautiful and triumphant is the symphony of the constellations, the music of the spheres, the immense choir that fills the heavens with an eternal hymn of victory!
Hear again: no state was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at the very centre of his being; since he could commune no more with the transcendent love, that love offered itself in a holocaust and chose each terrestrial being, each human self as its dwelling-place and sanctuary.
That is how, in this despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as man, neither is any as divine as he!
In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory! 28 April 1912 ~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, The Supreme Discovery,#KEYS
186:It does not matter if you do not understand it - Savitri, read it always. You will see that every time you read it, something new will be revealed to you. Each time you will get a new glimpse, each time a new experience; things which were not there, things you did not understand arise and suddenly become clear. Always an unexpected vision comes up through the words and lines. Every time you try to read and understand, you will see that something is added, something which was hidden behind is revealed clearly and vividly. I tell you the very verses you have read once before, will appear to you in a different light each time you re-read them. This is what happens invariably. Always your experience is enriched, it is a revelation at each step.
But you must not read it as you read other books or newspapers. You must read with an empty head, a blank and vacant mind, without there being any other thought; you must concentrate much, remain empty, calm and open; then the words, rhythms, vibrations will penetrate directly to this white page, will put their stamp upon the brain, will explain themselves without your making any effort.
Savitri alone is sufficient to make you climb to the highest peaks. If truly one knows how to meditate on Savitri, one will receive all the help one needs. For him who wishes to follow this path, it is a concrete help as though the Lord himself were taking you by the hand and leading you to the destined goal. And then, every question, however personal it may be, has its answer here, every difficulty finds its solution herein; indeed there is everything that is necessary for doing the Yoga.
*He has crammed the whole universe in a single book.* It is a marvellous work, magnificent and of an incomparable perfection.
You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me, *I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still, I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help.* And you know what it was? It was - before beginning, I warn you in advance - it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... *asserted Himself*. And the day He actually began it, He told me: *I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.
In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended "en masse" from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines - in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course French literature, also in German and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seems to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality - apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like in it the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.
It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there. You can find all the answers to all your questions there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophesies, all that is going to come is presented with the precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience - reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possessed, He has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.
All this is His own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my own experience also. It is my sadhana which He has worked out. Each object, each event, each realisation, all the descriptions, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard. And all this before having read the book. I read Savitri many times afterwards, but earlier, when He was writing He used to read it to me. Every morning I used to hear Him read Savitri. During the night He would write and in the morning read it to me. And I observed something curious, that day after day the experiences He read out to me in the morning were those I had had the previous night, word by word. Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all, I heard it all, put by Him into poetry, into miraculous poetry. Yes, they were exactly my experiences of the previous night which He read out to me the following morning. And it was not just one day by chance, but for days and days together. And every time I used to compare what He said with my previous experiences and they were always the same. I repeat, it was not that I had told Him my experiences and that He had noted them down afterwards, no, He knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences He has presented at length and they were His experiences also. It is, moreover, the picture of Our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind.
These are experiences lived by Him, realities, supracosmic truths. He experienced all these as one experiences joy or sorrow, physically. He walked in the darkness of inconscience, even in the neighborhood of death, endured the sufferings of perdition, and emerged from the mud, the world-misery to breathe the sovereign plenitude and enter the supreme Ananda. He crossed all these realms, went through the consequences, suffered and endured physically what one cannot imagine. Nobody till today has suffered like Him. He accepted suffering to transform suffering into the joy of union with the Supreme. It is something unique and incomparable in the history of the world. It is something that has never happened before, He is the first to have traced the path in the Unknown, so that we may be able to walk with certitude towards the Supermind. He has made the work easy for us. Savitri is His whole Yoga of transformation, and this Yoga appears now for the first time in the earth-consciousness.
And I think that man is not yet ready to receive it. It is too high and too vast for him. He cannot understand it, grasp it, for it is not by the mind that one can understand Savitri. One needs spiritual experiences in order to understand and assimilate it. The farther one advances on the path of Yoga, the more does one assimilate and the better. No, it is something which will be appreciated only in the future, it is the poetry of tomorrow of which He has spoken in The Future Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, - it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed.
And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. Men will know what it is, but in a distant future. It is only the new race with a new consciousness which will be able to understand. I assure you there is nothing under the blue sky to compare with Savitri. It is the mystery of mysteries. It is a *super-epic,* it is super-literature, super-poetry, super-vision, it is a super-work even if one considers the number of lines He has written. No, these human words are not adequate to describe Savitri. Yes, one needs superlatives, hyperboles to describe it. It is a hyper-epic. No, words express nothing of what Savitri is, at least I do not find them. It is of immense value - spiritual value and all other values; it is eternal in its subject, and infinite in its appeal, miraculous in its mode and power of execution; it is a unique thing, the more you come into contact with it, the higher will you be uplifted. Ah, truly it is something! It is the most beautiful thing He has left for man, the highest possible. What is it? When will man know it? When is he going to lead a life of truth? When is he going to accept this in his life? This yet remains to be seen.
My child, every day you are going to read Savitri; read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is through the heart. I tell you, if you try to really concentrate with this aspiration you can light the flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness; as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. You know it is charged, fully charged with consciousness; as if Savitri were a being, a real guide. I tell you, whoever, wanting to practice Yoga, tries sincerely and feels the necessity for it, will be able to climb with the help of Savitri to the highest rung of the ladder of Yoga, will be able to find the secret that Savitri represents. And this without the help of a Guru. And he will be able to practice it anywhere. For him Savitri alone will be the guide, for all that he needs he will find Savitri. If he remains very quiet when before a difficulty, or when he does not know where to turn to go forward and how to overcome obstacles, for all these hesitations and incertitudes which overwhelm us at every moment, he will have the necessary indications, and the necessary concrete help. If he remains very calm, open, if he aspires sincerely, always he will be as if lead by the hand. If he has faith, the will to give himself and essential sincerity he will reach the final goal.
Indeed, Savitri is something concrete, living, it is all replete, packed with consciousness, it is the supreme knowledge above all human philosophies and religions. It is the spiritual path, it is Yoga, Tapasya, Sadhana, in its single body. Savitri has an extraordinary power, it gives out vibrations for him who can receive them, the true vibrations of each stage of consciousness. It is incomparable, it is truth in its plenitude, the Truth Sri Aurobindo brought down on the earth. My child, one must try to find the secret that Savitri represents, the prophetic message Sri Aurobindo reveals there for us. This is the work before you, it is hard but it is worth the trouble. - 5 November 1967
~ The Mother, Sweet Mother, The Mother to Mona Sarkar, [T0],#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:You are the doorway to the infinite. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 2:The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 3:Have faith in yourself; faith in the infinite ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 4:He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 5:Music fills the infinite between two souls. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 6:The greatest romance is with the Infinite. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 7:One link in a chain explains the infinite chain. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 8:Man the infinite dreamer, dreaming finite dreams! ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 9:On the Infinite Universe and Worlds. Book by , 1584. ~ giordano-bruno, @wisdomtrove 10:Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite. ~ francis-bacon, @wisdomtrove 11:The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 12:The infinite library of the Universe is in your mind. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 13:He who chooses the infinite has been chosen by the infinite. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 14:Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 15:Stars are holes in the sky from which the light of the infinite shines. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 16:The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is love. ~ kabir, @wisdomtrove 17:You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 18:Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 19:Whether you know or not, you are the infinite potential of love, peace and joy ~ amit-ray, @wisdomtrove 20:I am a spark from the Infinite. I am not flesh and bones. I am light. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 21:Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-sr, @wisdomtrove 22:Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 23:The Absolute and the Infinite can become this universe only by limitation. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 24:This universe is the wreckage of the infinite on the shores of the finite. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 25:A world is a circumscribed portion of sky... it is a piece cut off from the infinite. ~ epicurus, @wisdomtrove 26:If you want to reach the infinite, then explore every aspect of the finite. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 27:A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words? ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 28:.. a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 29:Science is but a reading by the human mind of the thoughts of the Infinite Mind. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 30:Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. ~ jianzhi-sengcan, @wisdomtrove 31:Excepting the infinite spirit, everything else is changing. There is the whirl of change. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 32:Each soul is a star and all stars are set in the infinite azure, the eternal sky-the Lord. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 33:For me, it's always easy to choose between the Ultimate, the Infinite, and the Chocolate. ~ ashleigh-brilliant, @wisdomtrove 34:We are the space in which thoughts appear, play, and dissolve like clouds drifting in the infinite sky. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 35:Let your mind wander in the pure and simple. Be one with the infinite. Let all things take their course. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 36:Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 37:Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 38:The infinite is a light sleeper. The moment the self awakens, the force of the infinite begins to stir. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 39:Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 40:There is a better way. It is to repudiate our own wisdom and take instead the infinite wisdom of God. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 41:There are ten thousand planes of awareness within the infinite mind of the diamond mind, your deeper mind. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 42:Don't define yourself by your body .. it's the infinite being that's connected to everything in the universe. ~ rhonda-byrne, @wisdomtrove 43:Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal Consciousness. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 44:Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 45:Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 46:We have nothing to lose by trusting the infinite power of the Self, except the bondage of our own ignorance. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 47:As we begin to love and appreciate ourselves as we are, our channels and we access the infinite vitality of life force. ~ shakti-gawain, @wisdomtrove 48:Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 49:The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 50:The ego of man and woman is the soul. If the soul is independent, how then can it be isolated from the infinite whole? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 51:Inner genius is not about being smart. It is about unleashing the infinite creativity of your unique giftedness and passion. ~ aimee-davies, @wisdomtrove 52:Whenever you want to produce something, do not depend upon the outside source: go deep and seek the Infinite Source. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 53:All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 54:Consciousness shakes off the littleness of being and finds the infinite space in which all things have a place. Be in your universality. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 55:Perfection is always infinite. We are the Infinite already. You and I, and all beings, are trying to manifest that infinity. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 56:Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 57:The motive of grace is the infinite, compassionate love of a merciful God, but the work of grace was the death of Christ on the cross. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 58:Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 59:I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 60:One energy field. Our bodies have distracted us from our energy. We are the infinite field of unfolding possibilities. The creative force. ~ rhonda-byrne, @wisdomtrove 61:The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 62:The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 63:The spine is the highway to the Infinite. Your own body is the temple of God. It is within your own self that God must be realized. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 64:In the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd. He only sees each individual ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 65:One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 66:There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 67:You can live constrained within the confines of a solely material perspective, or choose instead the infinite field of quantum possibility. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 68:A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 69:If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 70:The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 71:There is but ONE. That ONE is Spirit. In the Infinite Mind of that ONE SPIRIT there arose the Mental Image or Thought-Form of this Universe. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 72:Come out into the broad light of day, come out from the little narrow paths, for how can the infinite soul rest content to live and die in small ruts? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 73:No more my heart shall sob or grieve. My days and nights dissolve in God's own Light. Above the toil of life, my soul is a Bird of Fire winging the Infinite. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 74:The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me? ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 75:I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 76:For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 77:Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality. ~ abraham-lincoln, @wisdomtrove 78:Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 79:Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 80:All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore make your own future. "Let the dead past bury its dead." The infinite future is before you. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 81:The Universe, with all contained therein, is created in and by REALITY considered as Infinite Mind. All Creation exists as Idea in the Infinite Mind of REALITY. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 82:The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 83:I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 84:The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 85:The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 86:Understand this great truth: The happiness that comes from the pleasures of the world is but a minute reflection of the infinite bliss that comes from within your own Self. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 87:Even the experiencer is secondary. Primary is the infinite expanse of consciousness, the eternal possibility, the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 88:Do not go to the garden of flowers! O friend! go not there; In your body is the garden of flowers. Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the infinite beauty. ~ kabir, @wisdomtrove 89:Man Made & 90:You are the infinite potentiality; the inexhaustible possibility. Because you are, all can be. The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 91:When I look through the mind, I see numberless people. When I look beyond the mind, I see the witness. Beyond the witness there is the infinite intensity of emptiness and silence. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 92:I am perfect because I am inseparable from the infinite, the force of life that creates the stars and the entire universe of light. I am God's creation. I don't need to be what I am not. ~ don-miguel-ruiz, @wisdomtrove 93:God can never be close. God can never be close because it would mean that there is some place where God is not. God is infinite. We cannot exist outside of the infinite. Therefore, God is our Reality. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 94:When there is no more separation between & 95:Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 96:The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 97:Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. ~ yuval-noah-harari, @wisdomtrove 98:I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. And while I rise from my own globe to others and penetrate ever further through the eternal field. That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me. ~ giordano-bruno, @wisdomtrove 99:We seek to unify ourselves with the endless light of truth, of God, of nirvana. We recognize the infinite playing through all beings and all forms, but we only have to concern ourselves with ourselves. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 100:The finite mind of man can never grasp the mysteries of the infinite. It is the highest wisdom, as it is our great happiness, to accept our limitations, to use what we have, and leave the rest to God. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 101:Say to your own minds, "I am He, I am He". Let it ring day and night in your minds like a song, and at the point of death declare : "I am He". That is truth; the infinite strength of the world is yours. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 102:It was nothing less than a stretch of divine love for Jesus to give himself for our sins. It was gracious for the Infinite to conceive of such a thing; but for him to carry it out was glorious beyond all. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 103:The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 104:The greatest romance is with the Infinite. You have no idea how beautiful life can be. When you suddenly find God everywhere, when He comes and talks to you and guides you, the romance of divine love has begun. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 105:In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought; for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it. ~ rene-descartes, @wisdomtrove 106:The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that! ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 107:We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 108:Saints are described as fearing the name of God; they are reverent worshippers; they stand in awe of the Lord's authority; they are afraid of offending Him; they feel their own nothingness in the sight of the Infinite One. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 109:Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 110:What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite? ~ elizabeth-barrett-browning, @wisdomtrove 111:Irrespective of doubts and convictions, and for the Infinite Love I bear for one and all, I continue to come as the Avatar, to be judged time and again by humanity in its ignorance, in order to help man distinguish the Real from the false. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 112: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 113:The language of the Veda itself is sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that same vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit fot the impersonal knowledge. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 114:There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 115:Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 116:That is the great fact which you ought to remember. We are the children of the Almighty, we are sparks of the infinite, divine fire. How can we be nothings? We are everything, ready to do everything, we can do everything, and man must do everything. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 117:Religion is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 118:Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unendi. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 119:Far from being the problem, the personal self is our foundation in the world, from which we can spiritually awaken. It is a gloriously particular expression of the infinite potentiality of being, through which the primal oneness of awareness can experience life. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 120:It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at? ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 121:You are the Self, the infinite Being, the pure, unchanging Consciousness, which pervades everything. Your nature is bliss and your glory is without stain. Because you identify yourself with the ego, you are tied to birth and death. Your bondage has no other cause. ~ adi-shankara, @wisdomtrove 122:I want to suggest that far from being a problem the personal self is the foundation from which we can spiritually awaken. Our individuality is a gloriously particular expression of the infinite potentiality of being, through which the primal oneness can experience life. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 123:Whatever character our theology may ascribe to him, in reality God is the infinite ideal of Man, towards whom men move in their collective growth, with whom they seek their union of love as individuals, in whom they find their ideal of father, friend and beloved. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 124:It will, ultimately, become all that it can be; it will fulfill its potential and thereby enrich God. Every experience of every consciousness will return to the infinite intelligence from which it sprang, but transformed by having lived in and experienced the universe. ~ bernard-haisch, @wisdomtrove 125:Do not seek fame. Do not make plans. Do not be absorbed by activities. Do not think that you know. Be aware of all that is and dwell in the infinite. Wander where there is no path. Be all that heaven gave you, but act as though you have received nothing. Be empty, that is all. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 126:Our own intuition of what we're called to is reality speaking to us individually and perfectly. We have to listen to how the Infinite talks to us and leads us. Reality, Life the Infinite, God, has a way of leading us in just the perfect way, if we will only just listen to it. ~ adyashanti, @wisdomtrove 127:To sum up all, let it be known that science and religion are two identical words. The learned do not suspect this, no more do the religious. These two words express the two sides of the same fact, which is the infinite. Religion-Science, this is the future of the human mind. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 128:Our self (Soul), as a form of God's joy, is deathless. For his joy is amritham, eternal bliss. We know that the life of a Soul, which is finite in its expression and infinite in its principle, must go through the portals of death in its journey to realize the infinite. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 129:Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 130:He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 131:Therefore the perfect, absolutely and in itself, is one, infinite, which cannot be greater or better, and that which nothing can be greater or better. This is one, everywhere, the only God, universal nature, of which nothing can be a perfect image or reflection, but the infinite. ~ giordano-bruno, @wisdomtrove 132:Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 133:The whole world is looking for miracles. Every day it is dying to see miracles. But can there be any miracle More challenging, more illumining And more fulfilling Than to see and feel the infinite Beauty Of my Beloved Supreme Inside this tinier than the tiniest Gratitude-heart of mine? ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 134:I meditated on my own for some time, read spiritual books, became a vegetarian and had incredible experiences every day, every meditation, where I was just thrown into the infinite - never realizing that other people didn't necessarily have those experiences in meditation that quickly. ~ frederick-lenz, @wisdomtrove 135:Who does not observe the immediate glow and security that is diffused over the life of woman, before restless or fretful, by engaging in gardening, building, or the lowest department of art? Here is something that is not routine& 136:Perhaps there is after all nothing mysterious in Zen. Everything is open to your full view. If you eat your food and keep yourself cleanly dressed and work on the farm to raise your rice or vegetables, you are doing all that is required of you on this earth, and the infinite is realized in you. ~ d-t-suzuki, @wisdomtrove 137: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 138:One who has never known the turbulence of life, in whom the petals of the mysterious flower within have never opened; such a one may seem happy, may seem a saint, his single track mind may impress the multitude with its power - but he is ill equipped for life's true adventure into the infinite. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 139:You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 140:Will of REALITY is Universal Energy. The Pure Logic of REALITY is Universal Law. The Being of REALITY is Universal Life. The Substance of REALITY is Universal Substance. The Infinite Mind of REALITY, in its Ideative and Volitional activities, is the Creative and Conative Power of the Universe. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 141:Lord, my God, ... I see Thee to be & 142:Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or absence of knowledge as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. ~ pseudo-dionysius-the-areopagite, @wisdomtrove 143:When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there ‚Ķ now instead of then. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 144:Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and visible. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 145:The Infinite alone exists and is Real; the finite is passing and false. The Original Whim in the Beyond caused the apparent descent of the Infinite into the realm of the seeming finite. This is the Divine Mystery and Divine Game in which Infinite Consciousness for ever plays on all levels of finite consciousness. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 146:God's presence. . . is an inner experience that never changes. It's a relationship that's there all the time, even when we're not paying attention to it. Perhaps the Infinite holds us to Itself in the same way the earth does. Like gravity, if it ever stopped, we would know it instantly. But it never does. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove 147:The answer to any challenge you are having has nothing to do with God's willingness to help. It has to do with your acceptance of how the Infinite is already active within you, how it has already placed within you all that you need to solve and dissolve inner conflict through conscious communion with the Self. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 148:And He [God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble& 149:God is Infinite and His Shadow is also infinite. The Shadow of God is the Infinite Space that accommodates the infinite Gross Sphere which, with its occurrences of millions of universes, within and without the ranges of men's knowledge, is the Creation that issued from the Point of Finiteness in the infinite Existence that is God. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 150:We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 151:I am a spark from the Infinite. I am not flesh and bones. I am light. In helping others to succeed I shall find my own prosperity. In the welfare of others I shall find my own well-being. I am infinite. I am spaceless, I am tireless; I am beyond body thought, and utterance; beyond all matter and mind. I am endless bliss. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 152:Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that comes within its focus of awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil nor ugliness, it hopes, it trusts, it loves. You people do not know how much you miss by not knowing your own true self. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 153:Today, continue to nourish your dreams. Hold fast to your vision and do something every day to bring it into manifestation. Everything is possible in God, because God is the infinite Possibility within everything. Know that you are God's Beloved in whom God is pleased. Never giving up on yourself is what it takes to be your own hero. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 154:Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 155:Art is a window to The Infinite, and opening to the goddess, a portal through which you and I, with the help of the artist, may discover depths and heights of our soul undreamed of by the vulgar world. Art is the eye of the spirit, through which the sublime can reach down to us, and we up to it, and be transformed, transfigured in the process. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 156:In this external world, which is full of finite things, it is impossible to see and find the Infinite. The Infinite must be sought in that alone which is infinite, and the only thing infinite about us is that which is within us, our own soul. Neither the body, nor the mind, nor even our thoughts, nor the world we see around us, is infinite. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 157:Your life began in the heart & mind of the Infinite. Mentally relive the days when as a child you ran free, when there were infinite possibilities of what you could feel, accomplish, and see in the world. Allow for the energy of your remembered freedom to thunder through you, and you will free your self from the false obstacles your adult. ~ michael-beckwith, @wisdomtrove 158:The progressive growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards the universal , the eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existance. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 159:Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove 160:It {Darwin's theory of evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 161:Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 162:Those who have overcome self-will and become instruments to do God's work can accomplish tasks which are seemingly impossible, but they experience no feeling of self achievement. I now know myself to be a part of the infinite cosmos, not separate from other souls or God. My illusory self is dead; the real self controls the garment of clay and uses it for God's work. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 163:The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart's happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 164:When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 165:There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 166:This world, this universe which our senses feel, or our mind thinks, is but one atom, so to say, of the Infinite, projected on to the plane of consciousness; and within that narrow limit, defined by the network of consciousness, works our reason, and not beyond. Therefore, there must be some other instrument to take us beyond, and that instrument is called inspiration. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 167:Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 168:We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. ~ john-odonohue, @wisdomtrove 169:What do we mean by the word & 170:And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 171:For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 172:Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible... It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 173:Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but purity, living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realisation. Let there be a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 174:Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfil them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 175:The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything & 176:The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Nothing worthwhile is easy. Your ability to overcome unfavorable situations will provide you with time to demonstrate your true strength and determination for success. Always set your standards high, your greatest achievements lie within the infinite feats you achieve in your life. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 177:Let us realise [that] we are the infinite power. Who put a limit to the power of mind? Let us realise we are all mind. Every drop has the whole of the ocean in it. That is the mind of man. The Indian mind reflects upon these [powers and potentialities] and wants to bring [them] all out. For himself he doesn't care what happens. It will take a great length of time [to reach perfection]. If it takes fifty thousand years, what of that! ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 178:Knowledge is inherent in man; no knowledge comes from outside; it is all inside. We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere waiting for him? It was in his own mind; the time came and he found it out. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own mind. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 179:Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 180:Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling... . Of that which is in mortal in mortals, and possessed of the truth, is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers... . Become high uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in as the things of the Godhead. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 181:It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. . . . The fact is, though, that if you descend into the depths of your own spirit and arrive somewhere near the center of what you are, you are confronted with the inescapable truth that, at the very root of your existence, you are in constant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 182: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 183:Let us meditate until we perceive the Infinite Christ reigning in our own hearts. Let us learn to love those who love us not; and to forgive those who do ill against us. Let us break all our mental boundaries of color, creed, and nationality, and receive all - even our inanimate and animal brothers - in the endless, all embracing arms of our Christ Consciousness. This will be a true and fitting celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ to this earth. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 184:Patanjali, declares that the true secret of evolution is the manifestation of the perfection which is already in every being; that this perfection has been barred and the infinite tide behind is struggling to express itself. These struggles and competitions are but the results of our ignorance, because we do not know the proper way to unlock the gate and let the water in. This infinite tide behind must express itself; it is the cause of all manifestation. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 185: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 186:We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove 187:Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 188:In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 189:Take life as it comes and death as it comes. Death is really beautiful; if it were a bad thing, God would not let it happen to us. It is really freedom, an entry into another, higher life. We must utilize this life in order to realize the life beyond this one. Beyond this earth garden is the infinite land wherein we meet those whom we have thought lost. Although we must not seek death, when it comes we should know that it is the final examination for a great reward. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 190:May today be peace within. May you trust your highest power that you are exactly where you are meant to be... May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you... May you be content knowing you are a child of God... Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love. It is there for each and every one of you. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 191:The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me? It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion (i.e. without any kind of relationship to the world) as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a religion, just as a person may not know that he has a heart, but it is no more possible for a person to exist without a religion than without a heart. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 192:Man stands in materialism; you and I are materialists. Our talking about God and Spirit is good; but it is simply the vogue in our society to talk thus: we have learnt it parrot-like and repeat it. So we have to take ourselves where we are as materialists, and must take the help of matter and go on slowly until we become real spiritualists, and feel ourselves spirits, understand the spirit, and find that this world which we call the infinite is but a gross external form of that world which is behind. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 193:What is the idea of God in heaven? Materialism. The Vedantic idea is the infinite principle of God embodied in every one of us. God sitting up on a cloud! Think of the utter blasphemy of it! It is materialism - downright materialism. When babies think this way, it may be all right, but when grown - up men try to teach such things, it is downright disgusting - that is what it is. It is all matter, all body idea, the gross idea, the sense idea. Every bit of it is clay and nothing but clay. Is that religion? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 194:The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 195:Personal prayer, it seems to me, is one of the simplest necessities of life, as basic to the individual as sunshine, food and water-and at times, of course, more so. By prayer I mean an effort to get in touch with the Infinite. We know that our prayers are imperfect. Of course they are. We are imperfect human beings. A thousand experiences have convinced me beyond room of doubt that prayer multiplies the strength of the individual and brings within the scope of his capabilities almost any conceivable objective. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 196:Finally you come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure... except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap... the desire to know it all and still be you, "the knower." This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can't know it all. The goal is non-dualistic - as long as there is a "knower" and "known" you are in dualism. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 197:The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 198:To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 199:Taking her hand he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendor. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired, Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandonded her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropial flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fantasy. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 200:The person in misery does not need a look that judges and criticizes but a comforting presence that brings peace and hope and life and says: & 201:One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; ‚ hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; ‚ hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; ‚ hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin ‚ a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it ‚ if such a thing were possible ‚ even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 202:The Inner Teachings of all great religions contain references to a Silent Place of the Soul in which the Individual Spirit communes with the Infinite Spirit of Life. Many are the references to the Inner Chamber, the door to which will be opened to him who gives the Right Knock. Many are the admonitions to “Enter into thine Inner Chamber and shut the Door.” This Inner Chamber is not the physical place which so many have considered it to be. It is the Quiet Place of the Soul— the Sanctuary of the Spirit— the state of Spiritual Consciousness. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 203:Take the case of the infinite ocean. There is no limit to its water. Suppose a pot is immersed in it: there is water both inside and outside the pot. The jnani sees that both inside and outside there is nothing but Paramatman. Then what is this pot? It is & 204:The education of our people should be a lifelong process by which we continue to feed new vigor into the lifestream of the Nation through intelligent, reasoned decisions. Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 205:In love at one of its poles you find the personal, and at the other the impersonal. At one you have the positive assertion ‚ Here I am; at the other the equally strong denial ‚I am not. Without this ego what is love? And again, with only this ego how can love be possible? Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. For love is most free and at the same time most bound. If God were absolutely free there would be no creation. The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 206:The Spiritual Creative Power is available to you. You may secure its services and employ them in the tasks and work of your everyday life, and toward the attainment of your ideals. You, the individual Creative Spirit, are entitled by your birthright to claim and demand the aid and assistance of the Infinite and Eternal SPIRIT in which you live and move and have your being, and from which your life and power proceed and flow. You have the natural and inalienable right to draw upon the Infinite Fount of Creative Power, and to apply that power through your own creative channels. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 207:God is true. The universe is a dream. Blessed am I that I know this moment that I have been and shall be free all eternity; ... that I know that I am worshiping only myself; that no nature, no delusion, had any hold on me. Vanish nature from me, vanish these gods; vanish worship; ... vanish superstitions, for I know myself. I am the Infinite. All these - Mrs. So-and-so, Mr. So-and-so, responsibility, happiness, misery - have vanished. I am the Infinite. How can there be death for me, or birth? Whom shall I fear? I am the One. Shall I be afraid of myself? Who is to be afraid of whom? ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 208:Spirit, or Universal Mind, cannot be conceived as having memory or as being dependent upon it. On the contrary, it must be conceived as having the infinite power, possibility, and capacity of Original Creation by ideation and imagination of Universal Mind. Dependence upon memory or past experience would condition and limit the Infinite and Absolute, which idea is contrary to reason. Moreover, if Creation were dependent upon past experience there would never have been original Creation. Creation must be conceived of as Eternally Original. Memory belongs to phenomenal created things; original creation by ideation and imagination belongs to Universal Mind alone, which is SPIRIT. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 209:As one comes into and lives continually in the full, conscious relation of his oneness with the Infinite Life and Power, then all else follows. This it is that brings the realization of such splendors, and beauties and joys, as a life that is thus related with the Infinite Power alone can know. This it is to come into the realization of heaven’s richest treasures while walking the earth. This it is to bring heaven down to earth, or rather to bring earth up to heaven. This it is to exchange weakness and impotence for strength; to exchange sorrows and sighings for joy; to exchange fears and forebodings for faith; to exchange longings for realizations. This it is to come into Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty. ~ william-walker-atkinson, @wisdomtrove 210:The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:the infinite Manhattan night. ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
2:To think is to move in the Infinite. ~ Lacordaire, #NFDB
3:You are the doorway to the infinite. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
4:Live now for the promise of the Infinite ~ Mos Def, #NFDB
5:I am a spark from the Infinite. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
6:I'm born to succeed; the Infinite within ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
7:The finite mind tries to limit the infinite. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
8:the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
9:The infinite variety of human badness. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
10:There is no ‘time,’ only the infinite now. ~ Justine Avery, #NFDB
11:The thirst for the Infinite proves infinity. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
12:The thirst for the infinite proves infinity. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
13:Have faith in yourself; faith in the infinite ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
14:Home - the nursery of the Infinite. ~ William Ellery Channing, #NFDB
15:The subconscious is a doorway to the infinite. ~ Laird Barron, #NFDB
16:is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
17:He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
18:Music fills the infinite between two souls ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
19:Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
20:Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. ~ Paul Tillich, #NFDB
21:Music fills the infinite between two souls. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
22:The Infinite is only a manner of speaking. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
23:The greatest romance is with the Infinite. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
24:And I fall, fall, fall.
Into the infinite white. ~ Jessica Brody,#NFDB
25:Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
26:The greatest romance is with the Infinite. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
27:Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
28:One link in a chain explains the infinite chain. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
29:Within the infinite myths lies the eternal truth ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
30:Man the infinite dreamer, dreaming finite dreams! ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
31:There are no partitions between ourselves and the Infinite. ~ Emerson, #NFDB
32:You don’t fuck around with the infinite.” —Mean Streets ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
33:All poetry is putting the infinite within the finite. ~ Robert Browning, #NFDB
34:The Infinite struck the void with the sound of the Word. ~ Marek Halter, #NFDB
35:Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
36:I do feel a connection to the divine and to the infinite. ~ Joan Osborne, #NFDB
37:The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
38:Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
39:I can't help it, the idea of the infinite torments me. ~ Alfred de Musset, #NFDB
40:Take away all your labels and you are the Infinite Being. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
41:The infinite library of the Universe is in your mind. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
42:The Infinite Way is not a message, it is an experience. ~ Joel S Goldsmith, #NFDB
43:the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
44:What is there to be seen apart from the infinite eye? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
45:Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self ~ Suzanne Segal, #NFDB
46:He who chooses the infinite has been chosen by the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
47:The infinite possibilities. That's what used to do my nut in. ~ Damien Hirst, #NFDB
48:There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
49:This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
50:The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
51:There is no joy in the finite; there is joy only in the Infinite. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
52:Unrequited love is the infinite curse of a lonely heart. ~ Christina Westover, #NFDB
53:Spirit in the Infinite is the Creative Power of the universe, ~ Thomas Troward, #NFDB
54:The infinite – free, unbounded, full of joy – is our native state. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
55:Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
56:Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
57:The horror of Hell is an echo of the infinite worth of God's glory. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
58:There is no joy in the finite; there is joy only in the Infinite.” I ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
59:You're hungry for the infinite and the infinite is hungry for you. ~ Rob Brezsny, #NFDB
60:Love...is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite... ~ Louis Ferdinand C line, #NFDB
61:Only the man with a free mind has own the infinite horizons! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
62:Housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
63:we are finite, in that we are a product and source of the infinite. ~ Ilyas Kassam, #NFDB
64:Ecstasy is a glimpse of the infinite; horror is full disclosure. ~ Kirk J Schneider, #NFDB
65:Every breath reminds us about our connection with the infinite Universe. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
66:Stars are holes in the sky from which the light of the infinite shines. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
67:The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing, and its sound is love. ~ Kabir, #NFDB
68:Flowers every night Blossom in the sky; Peace in the Infinite, At peace am I. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
69:Neither concepts nor mathematical formulae can explain the infinite. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
70:Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
71:Art is limited to the infinite, and beginning there cannot progress. ~ James Whistler, #NFDB
72:By the infinite abundance of Saint Laina’s left tit . . .’ One ~ Sebastien de Castell, #NFDB
73:No matter which rooms one is in, there are many paths in the Infinite Building. ~ JB, #NFDB
74:The straight way is the love of the infinite essence. ~ Baha-Ullah: The Seven Valleys, #NFDB
75:The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
76:The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life. ~ William Golding, #NFDB
77:You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason. ~ Plotinus, #NFDB
78:The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
79:The inmost is the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Power of the Spirit, #NFDB
80:Wouldst thou penetrate the infinite? Advance, then, on all sides in the finite. ~ Goethe, #NFDB
81:For the Infinite One, there is no place, the individual is himself the place. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
82:Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
83:Stop living inside the limits of a lake. Make the Infinite your home! ~ ~ Jalaluddin Rumi, #NFDB
84:Whether you know or not, you are the infinite potential of love, peace and joy ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
85:The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer. ~ Stanislaw Ulam, #NFDB
86:All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
87:Know that you are really the Infinite, Pure Being, the Self Absolute. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
88:Necessity rules all the infinite world, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Birth of Sin, #NFDB
89:The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated. ~ Edward Kasner, #NFDB
90:From every spot on earth we are equally near heaven and the infinite. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
91:This book is a drama whose first character is the Infinite. Man is the second. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
92:Our smallness saves us from the Infinite
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Triple Soul-Forces,#NFDB
93:Paranormal events are just edges of the infinite we 'happen' to encounter. ~ C Douglas Dillon, #NFDB
94:Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, #NFDB
95:God’s word to me—new every day—in the infinite riches of interpretation. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
96:He who observes the infinite horizons will see the dangers before others. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
97:Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
98:Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
99:notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
100:The Absolute and the Infinite can become this universe only by limitation. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
101:The cross witnesses to the infinite worth of God and the infinite outrage of sin. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
102:The Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
103:This universe is the wreckage of the infinite on the shores of the finite. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
104:We are chemists in the laboratory of the Infinite. What, then shall we create? ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
105:The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man. ~ David Hilbert, #NFDB
106:[the writer] must copy, with his finite mind, the process of the infinite 'I AM. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
107:We were an extraordinary paradox. We are finite creatures made for the infinite. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
108:A world is a circumscribed portion of sky... it is a piece cut off from the infinite. ~ Epicurus, #NFDB
109:Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite. ~ Paul Tillich, #NFDB
110:Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Vision and the Boon, #NFDB
111:Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life. ~ Joseph Henry, #NFDB
112:In the infinite loneliness of
space, what could Laika possibly be looking at? ~ Haruki Murakami,#NFDB
113:She loves him with an enraged affection, it is past the infinite of thought. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
114:The Vedantic idea is the infinite principle of God embodied in everyone of us. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
115:A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words? ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
116:"At the still-point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things." ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
117:Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine, #NFDB
118:Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity! ~ Louis Ferdinand C line, #NFDB
119:Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
120:To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
121:When we love, we see the infinite in the finite. We find the Creator in the creation. ~ Eliphas Levi, #NFDB
122:While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
123:our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite. ~ Kelly Link, #NFDB
124:Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana, #NFDB
125:the infinite capacity of humans to wound one another without meaning or wanting to ~ Margaret Laurence, #NFDB
126:The infinite intelligence of my subconscious mind reveals to me my true place in life. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
127:There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. ~ Federico Fellini, #NFDB
128:The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
129:To define yourself is to limit yourself. Without labels you remain the infinite being. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
130:Given the infinite variety of human personalities, it was impossible to like everyone. ~ Anne McCaffrey, #NFDB
131:How does a bird feel when it dies? A fish, a bug...the infinite worm? I think it weeps. ~ Dalton Trumbo, #NFDB
132:There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. ~ Federico Fellini, #NFDB
133:With the infinite patience of one who has learned to live broken, he awaited her return. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
134:Amid so many problems, even grave, may we not lose our hope in the infinite mercy of God. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
135:Forgetfulness of the infinite is misery. Forgetfulness of the trivial is ecstasy. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
136:Humor is the contemplation of the finite from the point of view of the infinite. ~ Christian Morgenstern, #NFDB
137:If you want to reach the infinite, then explore every aspect of the finite. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
138:man’s soul cries for the infinite in a finite world. That’s why nothing ever satisfies us. ~ Karan Bajaj, #NFDB
139:Reflection on the infinite seems to call, almost by definition, for infinite reflection. ~ Daniel Taylor, #NFDB
140:Very small investments can release the infinite potential that lies in all of us. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz, #NFDB
141:We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
142:A little of the infinite is projected into consciousness, and that we call our world. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
143:My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future. ~ Franz Liszt, #NFDB
144:Spiritual Intelligence represents our drive for meaning and connection with the infinite. ~ Stephen Covey, #NFDB
145:If in the infinite you want to stride, Just walk in the finite to every side. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
146:There are a lot of questions that come out of the silence. It is so close to the infinite. ~ Elia Suleiman, #NFDB
147:To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley, #NFDB
148:While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
149:Everyone is possessed with an irresistible desire to know his relationship to the Infinite. ~ David O McKay, #NFDB
150:Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
151:Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
152:Every present moment will offer itself as a window onto eternity, a doorway to the infinite. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
153:He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5],#NFDB
154:If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
155:Excepting the infinite spirit, everything else is changing. There is the whirl of change. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
156:It is the infinite alone that cannot be attained, for if it could it would become finite. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
157:Not a coincidence, but events coming full circle. The infinite possibilities of energy and spirit. ~ M J Rose, #NFDB
158:The body of God,
The link of the finite with the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Satyavan and Savitri,#NFDB
159:But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
160:Each soul is a star and all stars are set in the infinite azure, the eternal sky-the Lord. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
161:He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
162:Our green valleys will be greener once we fully grasp the infinite vitality of the green! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
163:Music... a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the Infinite. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
164:Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes. ~ Carl Sandburg, #NFDB
165:Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
166:We are the space in which thoughts appear, play, and dissolve like clouds drifting in the infinite sky. ~ Mooji, #NFDB
167:Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
168:Because love in its many forms always endured. It was the infinite. The eternal. That which sustained. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
169:Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness, and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. ~ Pablo Neruda, #NFDB
170:Where there is the Infinite there is joy. There is no joy in the finite. —THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
171:Each of our good thoughts tears the veil behind which appears the pure, the infinite, God, our self. ~ Vivekananda, #NFDB
172:In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
173:Let your mind wander in the pure and simple. Be one with the infinite. Let all things take their course. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
174:only when we're brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
175:Crowds prevent you to see the infinite horizons; get rid of the crowds and open your horizons. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
176:Each of our good thoughts tears the veil behind which appears the pure, the infinite, God, our self. ~ Vivekananda, #NFDB
177:I was always fascinated by the infinite, strange and 'scandalous' ways that insects copulate. ~ Isabella Rossellini, #NFDB
178:Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
179:Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
180:The origin of things is the Infinite: necessarily they disappear into that which put them into birth. ~ Anaximander, #NFDB
181:Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
182:We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. ~ Luigi Russolo, #NFDB
183:we should reach for the numinous, you see, not through the infinite but through the infinitesimal. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
184:Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ Brene Brown, #NFDB
185:The Infinite Universal Power is more than just a narrow-minded gatekeeper to a spiritual County Club. ~ Benjamin Hoff, #NFDB
186:Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine, #NFDB
187:Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not the infinite. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, #NFDB
188:There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
189:Would you reach the infinite? Then enter into finite things, working out all that they contain. ~ George Herbert Palmer, #NFDB
190:Dieu est le point tangent de ze ro et de l'infini. God is the tangential point of zero and the infinite. ~ Alfred Jarry, #NFDB
191:If the infinite had not desired man to be wise, he would not have bestowed upon him the faculty of knowing. ~ Manly Hall, #NFDB
192:Music fills the infinite between two souls. This has been muffled by the mist of our daily habits. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
193:Only when we’re brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.’” He ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
194:Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
195:All spiritual experience is experience of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #NFDB
196:By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
197:He felt that in the eyes of the Infinite wisdom and folly are the same, for the Infinite knows them not. ~ Leonid Andreyev, #NFDB
198:If the infinite had not desired man to be wise, he would not have bestowed upon him the faculty of knowing. ~ Manly P Hall, #NFDB
199:[I]f thou thinkest the infinite thou perceivest and affirmest the infinitude of the power of thought[.] ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
200:No Law is absolute, because only the infinite is absolute. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Sevenfold Chord of Being, #NFDB
201:The damnest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence... also the damnest fool. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
202:All finites are in their spiritual essence the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #NFDB
203:... romance is unsatisfactory as a religion. It is no use looking for the infinite in the eyes of another. ~ Jennifer Stone, #NFDB
204:Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
205:There are ten thousand planes of awareness within the infinite mind of the diamond mind, your deeper mind. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
206:Don't define yourself by your body .. it's the infinite being that's connected to everything in the universe. ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
207:"Let your mind wander in the pure and simple. Be one with the infinite. Let all things take their course." ~ Zhuangzi#taoism, #NFDB
208:maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering ~ John Green, #NFDB
209:Although we cannot number the infinite, nevertheless it can be comprehended by Him whose knowledge has no bounds. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
210:For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
211:If the infinite had no me, then me would be its limit. It would not be the infinite, therefore it would not be. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
212:In knowing ourselves to be unique, we possess the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then! ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
213:Our brains are not capable of comprehending the infinite so, instead, we ignore it and eat cheese on toast. ~ Jonathan Cainer, #NFDB
214:Each individual has to know himself. He has to know himself as the infinite, eternal and immortal Consciousness. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
215:An entry into the gnostic consciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine Life, #NFDB
216:My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me. ~ Paul Gauguin, #NFDB
217:In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Hill-top Temple,#NFDB
218:Our essential nature is pure consciousness, the infinite source of everything that exists in the physical world. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
219:The reason deals with the finite and is helpless before the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Vijnana or Gnosis, #NFDB
220:You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept… You are not a concept, Africa. You are a glimpse of the infinite. ~ Ali Mazrui, #NFDB
221:Human creativity is borne as a reflection of the infinite creativity of God himself. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) ~ James W Sire, #NFDB
222:In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
223:Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
224:The infinite being which unites in one stream of creation my mind and the outer world. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, #NFDB
225:What is this world? What is it for? It is art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the Infinite. ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
226:What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility? ~ Robert Boswell, #NFDB
227:He was inside that realm of mind, the private universe, the infinite sphere of himself where he went to work magic. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
228:It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #NFDB
229:It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Electron,#NFDB
230:Love is the greatest power and it is, if natural, the highest 'invisible food' from the infinite for soul and body. ~ Arnold Ehret, #NFDB
231:this ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defense.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 241,#NFDB
232:God's knowledge extends to things not in existence, and includes also the infinite. ~ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), #NFDB
233:If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we’d never leave our bedrooms. ~ Jonathan Tropper, #NFDB
234:Music lives and breathes to tell us who we are and what we face. It is a path between ourselves and the infinite. ~ Yehudi Menuhin, #NFDB
235:Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence. ~ Franz Kafka, #NFDB
236:There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
237:There's a difference between the 'moderate' overwhelm of a great bookshop and the infinite overwhelm of the Internet. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
238:This is the definition of the infinite: it is something that can stay the same size even when you subtract from it. ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
239:We have nothing to lose by trusting the infinite power of the Self, except the bondage of our own ignorance. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
240:Whether you're making love to the ladies or postulating the infinite, you'll still get all flabby one day! ~ Louis Ferdinand C line, #NFDB
241:He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
242:Mind cannot possess the infinite, it can only suffer it or be possessed by it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Mind and Supermind, #NFDB
243:The Infinite has to be a relative concept. Go any distance: an infinite space means that there is more to be explored. ~ Joseph Silk, #NFDB
244:to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally
~ Peter J Carroll,#NFDB
245:A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world. ~ Shekhar Kapur, #NFDB
246:Every man should stand under the blue and stars, under the infinite flag of nature, the peer of every other man. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
247:Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself, "Have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today, or have I failed? ~ Don Marquis, #NFDB
248:Sunset is so marvellous that even the sun itself watches it every day in the reflections of the infinite oceans! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
249:Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
250:He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision. ~ Jess Walter, #NFDB
251:Perfection in asana is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached. ~ Patanjali, #NFDB
252:Practicing yoga during the day is a matter of keeping your eyes on the road and one ear turned toward the infinite. ~ Erich Schiffmann, #NFDB
253:Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ahana,#NFDB
254:You have the infinite capacity to do anything you want. You compare yourself to others—that’s why you feel so limited. ~ Garr Reynolds, #NFDB
255:Zeno was concerned with three problems... These are the problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
256:As rivers flow into the sea and so lose name and form, attains the Supreme Being, the Self-Luminous, the Infinite. ~ Gideon Lewis Kraus, #NFDB
257:By ignoble whips of pain, man is driven at last into the Infinite Presence, whose beauty alone should lure him. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
258:Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
259:Knowing Oneself by oneself
Is using our present consciousness—oneself
To know the Infinite Consciousness—Oneself, ~ SantataGamana,#NFDB
260:Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, Et quorum pars magna fui.” —Virgil “You don’t fuck around with the infinite.” —Mean Streets ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
261:The desert is often the locus of prophecies because it naturally offers to the human gaze the horizons of the infinite. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
262:The Infinite Expanse is the Reality known as the Supreme or the Self, which shines as the One in all individuals. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
263:By this Yoga, we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. ~ Sri Aurobindo.#SriAurobind, #NFDB
264:Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
265:Life is not entirely real until it opens into the sense of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Lord of the Sacrifice, #NFDB
266:The finite is a circumstance and not a contradiction of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #NFDB
267:The infinite divinity is unmanifested; it will have to be manifested. This is spirituality, the science of the soul. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
268:Happiness is only gained when your mind is in extended states of attention, when your mind is merging with the infinite. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
269:I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
270:Man and woman as coexistent and eternal with God forever reflect, in glorified quality, the infinite Father-Mother God. ~ Mary Baker Eddy, #NFDB
271:The Christian must be consumed by the conviction of the infinite beauty of holiness and the infinite damnability of sin. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
272:There is always choice, Renna am’Bales,” Inevera said. “It is the ultimate power, what makes the infinite futures finite. ~ Peter V Brett, #NFDB
273:Yin and yang are the left and right hands of the Infinite — creator, destroyer, and reproducer of everything that exists. ~ George Ohsawa, #NFDB
274:Better to not know which moment may be your last. Every morsel of your entire being alive to the infinite mystery of it all. ~ Johnny Depp, #NFDB
275:For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars, but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers. ~ Jean Paul, #NFDB
276:Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances. "I ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
277:Nature is surely the glorified face of God. See the beauty about you and ... see the manifestation of the infinite Mind. ~ Myrtle Fillmore, #NFDB
278:The ego of man and woman is the soul. If the soul is independent, how then can it be isolated from the infinite whole? ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
279:A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
280:I don't think it is a good mental health practice to fantasize that you know the infinite thoughts of imaginary entities. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
281:In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, The Unseen Infinite,#NFDB
282:Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
283:When every aspect of your life is impeccable, then you will find that there's no limit to your journeys into the infinite. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
284:When you feel small and weak, remind yourself that you are a child of the universe who is connected to the infinite source. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
285:All things keep on in everlasting motion,
Out of the infinite come the particles,
Speeding above, below, in endless dance. ~ Lucretius,#NFDB
286:As we begin to love and appreciate ourselves as we are, our channels open and we access the infinite vitality of life force. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
287:Whenever you want to produce something, do not depend upon the outside source: go deep and seek the Infinite Source. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
288:Man's responsibility, then, is to choose his destination; the motive power to bring him there is furnished by the Infinite. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
289:Mathematics is, in many ways, the most precious response that the human spirit has made to the call of the infinite. ~ Cassius Jackson Keyser, #NFDB
290:Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
291:When we connect to the infinite source of wisdom within, creative new ideas, opportunities, and healing spontaneously unfold. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
292:Ego-centrism is our rock of safety against the cosmic and the infinite, our defence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Double Soul in Man, #NFDB
293:Perfection in an asana is achieved when the effort to achieve it becomes effortless, and the infinite being within is reached. ~ Mark Stephens, #NFDB
294:These are the living springs of great thoughts and great actions. Everything grows clear in the reflections from the Infinite. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
295:A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
296:All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
297:Consciousness shakes off the littleness of being and finds the infinite space in which all things have a place. Be in your universality. ~ Mooji, #NFDB
298:Perfection is always infinite. We are the Infinite already. You and I, and all beings, are trying to manifest that infinity. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
299:Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.’ Henry ~ Caroline Mitchell, #NFDB
300:There is in the Sacred Heart the symbol and express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love in return. ~ Pope Leo XIII, #NFDB
301:the sadness it feels in attaining any happiness less than the infinite—all these constitute the mating call of God to the soul. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
302:All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind, the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
303:A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings. Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
304:He felt more cheerful, revived by the journey, released from himself and his poor life, uplifted by thoughts of the infinite. ~ Georges Rodenbach, #NFDB
305:The infinite can only be reached after we have grown in the finite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - IV, #NFDB
306:To concentrate is to come back to the center and contemplate the Infinite Power within you that lies stretched in smiling repose. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
307:What our consciousness is experiencing is just a sliver of the infinite, multiple realities where we exist simultaneously ~ Russell Anthony Gibbs, #NFDB
308:All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics. ~ Martin Gardner, #NFDB
309:Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
310:God is not a being among other beings, but the infinite Whither that makes possible the very functioning of our human spirit. ~ Elizabeth A Johnson, #NFDB
311:In the silence of the self there is no time—it is akāla. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III, Experiences of the Self, the One and the Infinite, #NFDB
312:Man needs air, man needs water, man needs food and man needs adventure also! Adventure is a medicine for the infinite boredom. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
313:No one can know the infinite importance of a tiny drop of water better than a thirsty bird or a little ant or a man of desert! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
314:Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
315:Out of this sorrowful experience I understand more fully all human strivings, thwarted ambitions, and the infinite capacity of hope. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
316:She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
317:Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
318:Substitution . . . the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
319:By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords." (p. 28) ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
320:The Infinite would not be the Infinite if it could not assume a manifold finiteness; ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Sevenfold Chord of Being, #NFDB
321:The son needs the father to have access to his source, and the father needs the son to have access to the future and the infinite. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
322:You can learn to clean out everything that muddies up your perception and stops you from seeing the infinite possibilities of life. ~ Steve Chandler, #NFDB
323:Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
324:Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside. ~ Gilles Deleuze, #NFDB
325:For every soul there are a million harbors. Those who would have you see the infinite as a coin with but two faces are not your friends. ~ Mike Carey, #NFDB
326:How arbitrary, this distinction of time. How like humans to have to cut the infinite down to something they could believe they controlled. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
327:Our humanity is the conscious meeting place of the finite and the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Involution and Evolution, #NFDB
328:The books from which [children] learn must reflect movement and change and all of the infinite possibilities of minds at liberty. ~ Virginia Hamilton, #NFDB
329:The huge liquid eyes seemed to look deep down into my soul, and far, far beyond towards nameless, unexplored vistas of the infinite. ~ Anthony Powell, #NFDB
330:The motive of grace is the infinite, compassionate love of a merciful God, but the work of grace was the death of Christ on the cross. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
331:Of the infinite variety of fruits which spring from the bosom of the earth, the trees of the wood are the greatest in dignity. ~ Susan Fenimore Cooper, #NFDB
332:Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,#NFDB
333:Sin can't enslave a person who is utterly confident and sure and hope-filled in the infinite happiness of life with Christ in the future. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
334:The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as “my god” or “our god. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
335:Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
336:What is magic to our finite reason is the logic of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #NFDB
337:Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine Substance... ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
338:All bores me in the world of facts, I see an end, a limit to all things and my heart thirsts for the infinite and for eternity. ~ Marianne von Werefkin, #NFDB
339:Light, burning Light from the Infinite’s diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Light,#NFDB
340:The definition of freedom is the infinite value of the human being. Everything that is evil teaches people that they have limited value. ~ Jeremy Locke, #NFDB
341:The one reward of the works of right Knowledge is to grow perpetually into the infinite Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Rebirth, #NFDB
342:The rays of the divine sun, the infinite Orient, shine equally on all that exists and the illumination of Unity repeats itself everywhere. ~ Baha-ullah, #NFDB
343: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, #NFDB
344:Know the white, But keep the black, Be an example to the world! Being an example to the world, Ever true and unwavering, Return to the infinite. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
345:Mortal minds are always unsettled by eternal things; they want to catch the infinite and nail it down to something finite. Impossible! ~ Seth Adam Smith, #NFDB
346:I am walking like a bewitched corpse, with the certainty of being eaten by the infinite, of being annulled by the only existing Absurd. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
347:One energy field. Our bodies have distracted us from our energy. We are the infinite field of unfolding possibilities. The creative force. ~ Rhonda Byrne, #NFDB
348:Our life’s repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life,#NFDB
349:Ouroboros, Alex thought. The infinite cycle of creation and destruction, each eternally leading to the other. Not necessarily a bad sign. ~ Bella Forrest, #NFDB
350:The books from which [children] learn must reflect movement and change and all of the infinite possibilities of minds at liberty.
~ Virginia Hamilton,#NFDB
351:28. Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances. [As ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
352:A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
353:If I have a system it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called 'the infinite qualitative distinction' between time and eternity ~ Karl Barth, #NFDB
354:In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
355:It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also his infinite justice. ~ Benjamin Haydon, #NFDB
356:Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance. ~ Clarence Darrow, #NFDB
357:The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
358:The infinite faith I have in people's ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
359:The spine is the highway to the Infinite. Your own body is the temple of God. It is within your own self that God must be realized. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
360:Through the art of affirmative prayer the limitless resources of the Spirit are at my command. The power of the Infinite is at my disposal. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
361:Gesture (Mudra)
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Transformation,#NFDB
362:In the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd. He only sees each individual ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
363:Throughout the infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
364:We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
365:Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained. ~ Arthur Cayley, #NFDB
366:One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
367:Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
368:Extended within the Infinite,...headless and footless, concealing his two ends. - Rig Veda
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Boundaries of the Ignorance,#NFDB
369:The ancestors of printed comics drew, painted and carved their time-paths from beginning to end, without interruption, ... the infinite canvas. ~ Scott McCloud, #NFDB
370:The mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the idea? ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
371:The true call upon us is the call of the Infinite and the Supreme. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, #NFDB
372:You must walk in the very spacious places under the infinite skies to realize how small you are! This is the first step to start being big! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
373:Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
374:There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
375:They’ve just realized sooner than all of us that man’s soul cries for the infinite in a finite world. That’s why nothing ever satisfies us.” Omkara ~ Karan Bajaj, #NFDB
376:whatever the situation is, good or bad, it’s gonna pass. The only thing that remains is the moment. It’s the transformational vortex to the infinite. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
377:You can live constrained within the confines of a solely material perspective, or choose instead the infinite field of quantum possibility. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
378:As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
379:experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
380:A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
381:He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion,#NFDB
382:The infinite has being. It is there. If infinity had no self then self would not be. But it is. Therefore it has a self. The self of infinity is God. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
383:There is a point beyond which the human brain loses its kinship with the Infinite and becomes a mere seething mass of deleterious passions. Malays, ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
384:He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the infinite. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
385:I make no apologies for you. After all, each one of us is little more than the meager residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives. ~ Gregory Frost, #NFDB
386:often it is our narrow focus that limits us, she is saying. When we look only at our own plans, we miss the infinite possibilities of a greater plan. ~ Lisa Wingate, #NFDB
387:There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.
I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,#NFDB
388:It's a challenge to express real life in dramatic terms. In an entirely "made-up" story, you are sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities. ~ Daniel Clowes, #NFDB
389:The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss. ~ Paul Hawken, #NFDB
390:If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
391:My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. . . . In a gentle way you can shake the world. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
392:The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss. ~ Paul Hawken, #NFDB
393:The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
394:"Always the infinite reveals itself to itself without end, and yet there is no anticipation, no seeking, no becoming. Only revealing, unfolding, and awe.” ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
395:He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is ~ William Blake, #NFDB
396:So often it is our narrow focus that limits us, she is saying. When we look only at our own plans, we miss the infinite possibilities of a greater plan. ~ Lisa Wingate, #NFDB
397:The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
398:Transcendental Meditation opens the awareness to the infinite reservoir of energy, creativity, and intelligence that lies deep within everyone. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, #NFDB
399:Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
400:Current data thus favor an ever-expanding universe shaped like the three-dimensional version of the infinite tabletop or of the finite video-game screen. ~ Brian Greene, #NFDB
401:He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
402:In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
403:The lines of safety Reason draws that bar
Mind’s soar, soul’s dive into the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul’s Release,#NFDB
404:One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
405:Come out into the broad light of day, come out from the little narrow paths, for how can the infinite soul rest content to live and die in small ruts? ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
406:We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity. ~ Lewis Thomas, #NFDB
407:all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
408:Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the infinite. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
409:For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
410:in all the vastness of the world, the deepest adventure is not of war or mortal danger, but of heart, of soul, of the infinite discovery of a beloved other. ~ A S Peterson, #NFDB
411:No more my heart shall sob or grieve. My days and nights dissolve in God's own Light. Above the toil of life, my soul is a Bird of Fire winging the Infinite. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
412:Our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator. ~ Eben Alexander, #NFDB
413:Our task and challenge as human beings is to appreciate, in the same instant, both the infinite significance and absolute insignificance of life. ~ Eric Micha el Leventhal, #NFDB
414:When you find a teacher, you devote your time and energy to what they believe in. You surrender not them but to the infinite, which operates through them. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
415:Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
416:Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
417:Meditation is a bright, hopeful practice in which we learn to make our mind quiet so that the infinite, perfect light of enlightenment can flow through us. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
418:Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
419:Supermind carries in it the unity, but also the largeness and multiplicities of the infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #NFDB
420:The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me? ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
421:The trap of the self is the trap that causes unhappiness. We define ourselves too much; whereas the infinite, the pure radiant spirit, is not so definable. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
422:The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. ~ Richard Linklater, #NFDB
423:Beauty is but the sensible image of the infinite. Like truth and justice, it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law, it is a companion of the soul. ~ George Bancroft, #NFDB
424:Be still and quiet, tune in with the Infinite Intelligence, and continue in right thought, right feeling, and right action, and you will arrive at your goal. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
425:Get yourself to a vantage point of seclusion and view the world with your eyes alone. Think of the infinite spaces of the skies and the world beneath. ~ Charles E Burchfield, #NFDB
426:I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
427: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, #NFDB
428:For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
429:No man works, but Nature works through him for the self-expression of a Power within that proceeds from the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Divine Work, #NFDB
430:Perhaps he meant that there is no fact, however insignificant, that does not involve universal history and the infinite concatenation of cause and effect. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
431:Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man. ~ William James, #NFDB
432:Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
433:What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
434:He who knows that he is free is free; he who knows that he is bound is bound. What is the end and aim of life? None, because I know that I am the Infinite. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
435:My Lord, I leave the infinite to Thee, and pray Thee to put far from me such a love for the tree of knowledge as might keep me from the tree of life. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
436:The entire universe is just an expression, projection, of the Being, of the Self. Within this small body, you are able to experience the infinite space. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
437:For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
438:Let us forget the lapse of time;
let us forget the conflict of opinions. Let us make our appeal to the infinite,
and take up our positions there. Chuang Tzu ~ Jed McKenna,#NFDB
439:Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
440:The architecture of the Infinite
Discovered here its inward-musing shapes
Captured into wide breadths of soaring stone. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Growth of the Flame,#NFDB
441:The infinite distance between the mind & the body is a symbol of the distance that is infinitely more, between the intellect & love, for love is divine. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
442:In every moment you are someone new and therefore can be and do anything you wish to be and do, totally unlimited, unrestrained, made in the image of the Infinite. ~ Darryl Anka, #NFDB
443:We should not weep or cry or be upset when we see the generations pass, because all are forms of the infinite creation. They are not real, they are not eternal. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
444:Do not grieve for me, as I shall have been ushered by my great guru into the arms of the Infinite. Farewell, my child; the Cosmic Mother will protect you. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
445:There is no God and we are his inventors. Humanity designed him like some sinister masochistic architects. The infinite blueprint for our intellectual enslavement. ~ C J Anderson, #NFDB
446:If you wish to know the truth about your business or your profession, know that it is an activity of good. It is an activity of your partnership with the infinite. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
447:Regardless of the name a person uses for the Infinite Force that holds us together, it is the source of our miraculous, unpredictable creativity and our dignity. ~ Ashok Gangadean, #NFDB
448:Thus we,’ he said, ‘why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite; our special ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
449:Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
450:Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know every bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke,#NFDB
451:Without experience of pain we would not get all the infinite value of the divine delight of which pain is in travail. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Divine and the Undivine, #NFDB
452:All the strength and succour you want is within yourselves. Therefore make your own future. "Let the dead past bury its dead." The infinite future is before you. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
453:The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. ~ John Green, #NFDB
454:The infinite variety of particular objects constitutes one sole and identical Being. To know that unity is the aim of all philosophy and of all knowledge of Nature. ~ Giordano Bruno, #NFDB
455:The infinite vibratory levels, the dimensions of interconnectedness are without end. There is nothing independent. All beings and things are residents in your awareness. ~ Alex Grey, #NFDB
456:It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev, #NFDB
457:The future will erase everything — there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. ~ John Green, #NFDB
458:The infinite variety of particular objects constitutes one sole and identical Being. To know that unity is the aim of all philosophy and of all knowledge of Nature. ~ Giordano Bruno, #NFDB
459:The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience. ~ Jerry Bridges, #NFDB
460:When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.5 No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite. ~ Charles Eisenstein, #NFDB
461:The Universe, the whole infinite Universe. The infinite suns, the infinite distances between them, and yourself an invisible dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
462:there are only four units in the ring R-1 of Gaussian integers, namely ±1 and ±i; multiplication by any of these units effects a symmetry of the infinite square tiling ~ Timothy Gowers, #NFDB
463:All forces are to us invisible,—but they are not invisible to the spiritual vision of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #NFDB
464:Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
465:Mysticism is the acquired immunodeficiency of regional ontologies; one catches it through unprotected thought intercourse with the stirred-up concept of the infinite. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
466:never complain as long as Christ is thy friend; he is an enriching pearl, a sparkling diamond; the infinite lustre of his merits makes us shine in God's eyes. (Ep. 1. 7) ~ Thomas Watson, #NFDB
467:“Subtract the (play of the) infinite from the infinite, and the infinite remains” ~ Upanishad ~ yes, true of love, and of the energy of play 🙏🏽💜😇 #SpiritChat twitter.com/GThakore/statu…, #NFDB
468:The Infinite, from which comes the impulse that lead us to activity, is not the highest Reason, but higher than reason; not the highest Goodness, but higher than goodness. ~ Felix Adler, #NFDB
469:The infinite space that each man carries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movement of his spirit with the acts of his life, is and overpowering thing. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
470:Feet, she thought. Sea legs. When you pass the last spit of land and commit to the ocean, you are taking a step into the infinite and might set your foot down anywhere. ~ Morgan Llywelyn, #NFDB
471:The Supreme is infinite, therefore He is also finite.
To be finite is one of the infinite aspects of the Infinite.
Creation is the definition of the Infinite. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta,#NFDB
472:Time' is the illusional domain occupied by the state of boredom. 'Space' is the infinite - reality - experienced by the state of higher creative consciousness. Choose wisely. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
473:Let me not strive to understand the infinite, but spend my strength in love. What I cannot gain by intellect I can possess by affection, and let that suffice me. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
474:To attain to the human form must always be a source of joy. And then to undergo continuous transitions, with only the infinite to look forward to: what incomparable bliss is that! ~ Laozi, #NFDB
475:Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
476:There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
477:Each thing that exists is real in its own degree of the manifestation and is so seen by the consciousness of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #NFDB
478:It is music that welds spiritual and sensual, that can convey ecstasy free of guilt, faith without dogma, love as homage, and a person at home with nature and the infinite. ~ Yehudi Menuhin, #NFDB
479:Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
480:The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
481:The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination. ~ Franz Kafka, #NFDB
482:There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
483:What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
484:And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long. ~ John Green, #NFDB
485:Deep in the heart of the infinite darkness, a tiny blue marble is spinning through space. Born in the splendor of God's holy vision, and sliding away like a tear down his face. ~ Johnny Cash, #NFDB
486:Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
487:We/I am a son/daughter of God. In fact, we are all expressions/projections of the Infinite Conciousness, which is love, that is what I mean when I say "I am a son of god "GOD"!" ~ David Icke, #NFDB
488:So the merman cannot belong to Agnes unless, after having made the infinite movement, the movement of repentance, he makes still one more movement by virtue of the absurd. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
489:The basis of successful relief in national distress is to mobilize and organize the infinite number of agencies of self help in the community. That has been the American way. ~ Herbert Hoover, #NFDB
490:The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
491:I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
492:The infinite, absolute character of Virtue has passed into a finite, conditional one; it is no longer a worship of the Beautiful and Good; but a calculation of the Profitable. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
493:The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
494:To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
495:After several minutes, picture that your entire body is merging with the blue sky. Feel that you have become the infinite blue sky that stretches endlessly in every direction. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
496:He that sees the Lord in the temple, the living body, by seeking Him within, can alone see Him, the Infinite, in the temple of the universe, having become the Endless Eye. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
497:"Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
498:the more hours I spend in contemplation, the less I know about God—and the more I realize how arrogant it is for us poor humans to squeeze the Infinite into our limited definitions. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
499:Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
500:God created us with an urge for the infinite. We need to embrace it and never surrender to the seditious and spurious summons of contentment cowering in the sanctuary of security. ~ Daniel Lapin, #NFDB
501:He that sees the Lord in the temple, the living body, by seeking Him within, can alone see Him, the Infinite, in the temple of the universe, having become the Endless Eye. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
502:In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it. ~ William Saroyan, #NFDB
503:The gods are the guardians and increasers of the Truth, the powers of the Immortal, the sons of the infinite Mother. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India, Indian Spirituality and Life - II, #NFDB
504:Oh the joy of an idée fixe! The contentment of a life taken up some ideal, any ideal! A gentle trap to catch the infinite, like the sun in a piece of mirror in a child's hand. ~ Georges Rodenbach, #NFDB
505:The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
506:Understand this great truth: The happiness that comes from the pleasures of the world is but a minute reflection of the infinite bliss that comes from within your own Self. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
507:I hate the sun, too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
508:Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite , which dislocate all mathematical operations. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
509:Somewhere, out in the infinite distance, lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb.
(from "The Fish can Sing") ~ Halld r Kiljan Laxness,#NFDB
510:The ultimate language of yoga is expressed in doing yoga, a practice that transcends words as we open our lives to living more consciously through the infinite wisdom of the heart. ~ Mark Stephens, #NFDB
511:Every canvas that can awaken us more exquisitely and accurately to the infinite and various surface of our experience does that much to sharpen life, and thereby render it more alive. ~ Alton Tobey, #NFDB
512:The essence of religion is an aspiration and adoration of the soul towards the Divine, the Self, the Supreme, the Eternal, the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, The Sun of Poetic Truth, #NFDB
513:The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
514:We all start out so damn sure, thinking we’ve got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we’d never leave our bedrooms. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
515:In fact, we are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
516:The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
517:The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
518:i am perfect because i am inseparable from the infinite, the force of life that creates the stars and the entire universe of light. i am God's creation. i don't need to be what i am not. ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
519:The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
520:Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unrolling of its billows; Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
521:Our souls and heaven are of an equal stature
And have a dateless birth;
The unending seed, the infinite mould of Nature,
They were not made on earth, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Rebirth,#NFDB
522:The aim of Zen training is to attain the state of consciousness which occurs when the individual ego is emptied of itself and becomes identified with the infinite reality of all things. ~ Anne Bancroft, #NFDB
523:As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform... them... that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
524:I was placeless. I carried everything on my back, exactly what I needed to survive. I didn’t know how I’d survive without this structure, silent bears and vista highs, the infinite beauty. ~ Aspen Matis, #NFDB
525:Only real love of the infinite will motivate you. While pain motivates, once we feel comfortable and the pain has stopped, we'll stop evolving. Love is a far superior spiritual vehicle. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
526:Poor boy," the libertine then said, "he builds machines to count the infinite, and we have terrified him with the eternal silence of too many infinities. Voila, the end of a fine vocation. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
527:Tantric Zen is for the individual who is in love with both the finite and the infinite, who gets a kick out of this weird transitory world and at the same time, wants to step beyond it. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
528:Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
529:What is certain in death is somewhat softened by what is uncertain; it is an indefiniteness in the time, which holds a certain relation to the infinite, and what is called eternity. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
530:anyone doubts the infinite mercy of God, let him have a look at these sacred places. How much hypocrisy and irreligion does the Prince of Yogis suffer to be perpetrated in His holy name? ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
531:When asked Who I Am, the only answer possible is: I am the infinite, the vastness that is the substance of all things. I am no one and everyone, nothing and everything -- just as you are. ~ Suzanne Segal, #NFDB
532:No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart. ~ Andre Dubus, #NFDB
533:We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms. ~ Jonathan Tropper, #NFDB
534:I love mathematics...principally because it is beautiful; because man has breathed his spirit of play into it, and because it has given him his greatest game the encompassing of the infinite. ~ Rozsa Peter, #NFDB
535:The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us. ~ Maria Mitchell, #NFDB
536:When we see a beautiful object, a beautiful garden, or a beautiful flower, let us think that there we behold a ray of the infinite beauty of God, who has given existence to that object. ~ Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
537:i am perfect because i am inseparable from the infinite, the force of life that creates the stars and the entire universe of light. i am God's creation. i don't need to be what i am not. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz, #NFDB
538:Let us hope that life grant an opportunity to those miserable who live in the golden palaces to taste the infinite peace of a wooden cottage in the countryside and so their misery ends! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
539:To meditate what you need to do is free yourself from your ideas and your thoughts. All of the higher dimensional planes, the higher realities, the infinite cosmos itself is beyond thought. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
540:To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
541:The more clearly we see the infinite chasm between God's glory and our sinful falling short thereof, the greater will be our appreciation of His grace and love in bridging that gulf to redeem us. ~ Dave Hunt, #NFDB
542:God can never be close. God can never be close because it would mean that there is some place where God is not. God is infinite. We cannot exist outside of the infinite. Therefore, God is our Reality. ~ Mooji, #NFDB
543:In trying to practice religion, eighty percent of people turn cheats and about fifteen percent go mad; only the remaining five percent attain the immediate knowledge of the infinite Truth. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
544:Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, The heart that is not in love will fail the test. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
545:The work of art, though bound by its genetic markings and indelible fingerprints, is boundless in the infinite elaborations of its destiny, and therefore in the range of its interpretations. ~ Russell Sherman, #NFDB
546:We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald, #NFDB
547:He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting. ~ Claude Debussy, #NFDB
548:High as winged imagination’s flight is, Nothing it is able to conceive suffices. But minds uncommon, deep, preserved from arrogance, Have in the infinite infinite confidence. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
549:In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants. ~ Jacques Monod, #NFDB
550:This is why the rabbis tell us that a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite. ~ Nicole Krauss, #NFDB
551:"I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. I am a man. But what is it like to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
552:The enjoyment of the infinite delight of existence free from ego, founded on oneness of all in the Lord, is what is meant by the enjoyment of Immortality ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #NFDB
553:There is nothing more man needs than Divine Mercy - that love which is benevolent, which is compassionate, which raises man above his weakness to the infinite heights to the holiness of God. ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
554: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, #NFDB
555:Man always worships something; always he sees the Infinite shadowed forth in something finite; and indeed can and must so see it in any finite thing, once tempt him well to fix his eyes thereon. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
556:There is no disease nor misery for thee, but thou art like the infinite sky; clouds of various colours come over it, play for a moment, then vanish. But the sky is ever the same eternal blue. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
557:When we see a beautiful object, a beautiful garden, or a beautiful flower, let us think that there we behold a ray of the infinite beauty of God, who has given existence to that object. ~ Saint Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
558:Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Gnostic Being, #NFDB
559:Selfless giving is love in action. Initially you will feel that you should help in a certain way, with a certain result. Do your best, but don't be concerned with results; do it for the infinite. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
560:The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
561:The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
562:He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Omnipresence,#NFDB
563:know that deep and comforting truth: that our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator. ~ Eben Alexander, #NFDB
564:There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
565:True religion is that relationship, in accordance with reason and knowledge which man establishes with the infinite world around him, and which binds his life to that infinity and guides his actions. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
566:Eternity is now. Right now, right here, you're an infinite being. Once you get past the fear of death as an end, you merge with the infinite and feel the comfort and relief that this realization brings. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
567:There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
568:You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth./The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
569:"He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
570:I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet...He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
571:The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past? ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
572:When you are exposed to others' negativity, you do not need to respond. You can choose to put your attention elsewhere and let their words be a tiny drop in the infinite ocean of your peaceful silence. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
573:Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
574:...but the truth is, the more hours I spend in contemplation, the less I know about God-and the more I realize how arrogant it is for us poor humans to squeeze the Infinite into our limited definitions. ~ Patry Francis, #NFDB
575:We seek to unify ourselves with the endless light of truth, of God, of nirvana. We recognize the infinite playing through all beings and all forms, but we only have to concern ourselves with ourselves. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
576:Watching the infinite horizons gives you infinite dreams, infinite ideas, infinite paths! Choose a great target and then you will see that great instruments will appear for you to reach that target! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
577:Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
578:World-naked hermits with their matted hair
Immobile as the passionless great hills
Around them grouped like thoughts of some vast mood
Awaiting the Infinite’s behest to end. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Quest,#NFDB
579:I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite. And while I rise from my own globe to others and penetrate ever further through the eternal field. That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me. ~ Giordano Bruno, #NFDB
580:Personal initiative, competitive selection, the profit motive, corrected by failure and the infinite process of good housekeeping and the personal ingenuity-here constitute the life of a free society. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
581:the Age of Pisces, an age of mirrors, tenacity, instinct, twinship, and hidden things. We are contented by this notion. It further affirms our faith in the vast and knowing influence of the infinite sky. ~ Eleanor Catton, #NFDB
582:The finite mind of man can never grasp the mysteries of the infinite. It is the highest wisdom, as it is our great happiness, to accept our limitations, to use what we have, and leave the rest to God. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
583:The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it would not exist. There is, then, an I. That I of the infinite is God. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
584:There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
585:When I do comedy, my brain sort of locks up in the infinite possibilities. That's where I get sort of lost. I think, "Oh, there are six other jokes that we could say here!" I feel more at home with drama. ~ Ryan Reynolds, #NFDB
586:God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
587:If I penetrate to the depths of my existence, the indefinable, am, that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very nature of the Almighty. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
588:I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in it's presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it's tired of us ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
589:I look up at the stars hanging low in a sky that makes me think I’m seeing the infinite. But beneath their cold gaze, I feel small. All the beauty of the stars means nothing when life here on earth is so ugly ~ Sabaa Tahir, #NFDB
590:Jesus is saying that we may address the infinite, transcendent, almighty God with the intimacy, familiarity, and unshaken trust that a sixteen-month-old baby has sitting on his father’s lap—da, da, daddy. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
591:Say to your own minds, "I am He, I am He". Let it ring day and night in your minds like a song, and at the point of death declare : "I am He". That is truth; the infinite strength of the world is yours. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
592:I look up at the stars hanging low in a sky that makes me think I'm seeing the infinite. But beneath their cold gaze, I feel small. All the beauty of the stars means nothing when life here on earth is so ugly. ~ Sabaa Tahir, #NFDB
593:It was nothing less than a stretch of divine love for Jesus to give himself for our sins. It was gracious for the Infinite to conceive of such a thing; but for him to carry it out was glorious beyond all. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
594:My work speaks of the finite and the infinite, of the macroscopic and the microscopic, the internal and external, by the masculine and feminine powers, but sex is like a snake, it slithers through everything. ~ Ernesto Neto, #NFDB
595:No contradictions will arise as long as Finite Man does not mistake the infinite for something fixed, as long as he is not led by an acquired habit of mind to regard the infinite as something bounded. ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss, #NFDB
596:It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
597:Joel’s message was called The Infinite Way and reintroduced, with contemporary clarity, a message of immense value to those who are prepared for it and are equally dedicated to studying and working with it. ~ Joel S Goldsmith, #NFDB
598:Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory. ~ Hermann Weyl, #NFDB
599:Whatever is certain in death is slightly alleviated by what is not so infallible; the time when it shall happen is undefined, but it is more or less connected with the infinite, and what we call eternity. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
600:I unpetalled you, like a rose, to see your soul, and I didn't see it. But everything around -horizons of land and of seas-, everything, out to the infinite, was filled with a fragrance, enormous and alive. ~ Juan Ramon Jimenez, #NFDB
601:The tragedy of human life consists in our vain attempts to stretch the limits of things which can never become unlimited, to reach the infinite by absurdly adding to the rungs of the ladder of the finite. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
602:Breathing attentively is yoga. Complete absorption in your work is yoga. Thinking about others instead of yourself is yoga. Anything which makes you forget your small self and become one with the infinite is yoga. ~ Karan Bajaj, #NFDB
603:In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
604:Lack of wisdom does not make a fool. A fool, in the truest sense, is the man who regards his own misfortunes or those of others as a source of doubt or criticism of the infinite mercy of the Gohonzon.-Josei Toda ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
605:No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite. ~ David Hilbert, #NFDB
606:The Divine's words comfort and bless, soothe and illumine, and the Divine's generous hand lifts a fold of the veil which hides the infinite knowledge.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II, The Divine Is with You [T1], #index,#NFDB
607:The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain — although it may think it can — the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
608:When man has seen that he is one with the infinite being of the universe, all separation is at an end, all men, women, angels, gods, animals, plants, the whole world lost in this oneness, then all fear disappears. ~ Vivekananda, #NFDB
609:As it turns out, public defenders are less Superman and more Sisyphus, and there’s no small number of lawyers who wind up crushed under the weight of the infinite caseloads and the crappy hours and the shitty pay. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
610:Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
611:Pause here, devout reader, and see if thou canst without ecstatic amazement, contemplate the infinite condescension of the Son of God in thus exalting thy wretchedness into blessed union with his glory. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
612:there is no Earth corresponding to the infinite horizon of the Global, but at the same time the Local is much too narrow, too shrunken, to accommodate the multiplicity of beings belonging to the terrestrial world. ~ Bruno Latour, #NFDB
613:Once we open our eyes to the infinite magic that the universe has in abundance, we are sure to be enthralled by what we see and this miraculous creation gets us closer to our dreams and to the world as a whole. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
614:What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
615:In Nature in the infinite scale of being there are no wide gulfs, no abrupt chasms to be overleaped, but a melting of one thing into another, a subtle continuity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Planes of Our Existence, #NFDB
616:We all shook hands, and the policeman, having retrieved a piece of chewing-gum from the underside of a chair, where he had parked it against a rainy day, went off into a corner and began to contemplate the infinite. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
617:All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
618:Moreover, the infinite intelligence in your subconscious can impart to you wonderful kinds of knowledge of an original nature. It can reveal to you and open the way for perfect expression and true place in your life. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
619:Obedience does not consist in paying God back and thus turning grace into a trade. Obedience comes from trusting in God for more grace - future grace - and thus magnifying the infinite resources of God's love and power. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
620:A most useful approach to meditation practice is to consider it the most important activity of each day. Shedule it as you would an extremely important appointment, and unfailingly keep your appointment with the infinite. ~ Roy Davis, #NFDB
621:Nothing can be more destructive to ambition, and the passion for conquest, than the true system of astronomy. What a poor thing is even the whole globe in comparison of the infinite extent of nature! ~ Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, #NFDB
622:By manipulating the physical configuration of [any situation], you make it produce a subset of the infinite pattern of [possibilities]. And even if you don't know how to play [above situation], you can still play with it. ~ Ian Bogost, #NFDB
623:I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine. Time is my drama or my pageant dream.Now are my illumined cells joy's flaming scheme And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine.(Collected Poems ~ Transformation)#SriAurobindo, #NFDB
624:Vivekananda once remarked: In trying to practice religion, eighty percent of people turn cheats and about fifteen percent go mad; only the remaining five percent attain the immediate knowledge of the infinite Truth. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
625:It is the one Infinite that appears to us as the many finite: the creation adds nothing to the Infinite; it remains after creation what it was before. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #NFDB
626:It's no wonder most religions are born in the desert, because when men lay beneath that boundless night sky and look up at the infinite expanse of creation they have an uncontrollable urge to put something in the way . ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
627:Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite. ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
628:Doesn't it seem to you," asked Madame Bovary, "that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal? ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
629:THE ARTISTIC IMAGE IS ALWAYS A METONYM, WHERE ONE THING IS SUBSTITUTED FOR ANOTHER, THE SMALLER FOR THE GREATER. TO TELL OF WHAT IS LIVING, THE ARTIST USES SOMETHING DEAD; TO SPEAK OF THE INFINITE, HE SHOWS THE FINITE. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
630:In God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought; for it is the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it. ~ Rene Descartes, #NFDB
631:Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How? traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
632:The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that! ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
633:The solution of all the possible questions of life could evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in terms of the infinite, and vice versa. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
634:Man is the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
635:The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite. ~ Simon Singh, #NFDB
636:The acute experience of great beauty readily evokes a nameless yearning for something more than earth can offer. Elegant splendor reawakens our spirit's aching need for the infinite, a hunger for more than matter can provide. ~ Thomas Dubay, #NFDB
637:This is my religion—we’re all animals, perfect animals created in the infinite image and imagination of nature. It’s a life not without pain and competition and suffering, but it can be a life of dignity and mutual respect. ~ David Duchovny, #NFDB
638:We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
639:Saints are described as fearing the name of God; they are reverent worshippers; they stand in awe of the Lord's authority; they are afraid of offending Him; they feel their own nothingness in the sight of the Infinite One. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
640:To be first in tune with the Infinite, in harmony with the Divine, and then to be unified with the Infinite, taken into the Divine is its condition of perfect strength and mastery. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Soul and Nature, #NFDB
641:Why does the sea induce these feelings of transcendence in us? Is it because an unobstructed view of overarching sky meeting endlessly stirring water is as close as we can come on this earth to a visual symbol of the infinite? ~ William Boyd, #NFDB
642:Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
643:Of course, I don’t know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it’s probably more accurate to say that I don’t know anything. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
644:The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; … in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
645:You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
646:At the edge of our world, at the edge of the otherworld, the beautiful and mysterious faeries stand, watching and waiting to greet us, inviting us to journey with them as our guides while we walk the infinite paths of the Faerie. ~ Brian Froud, #NFDB
647:Our life is a reflection of what we believe we deserve. As we deepen our acceptance of and open ourselves to the Infinite love of the universe, a new power flows through us, releasing us from the bondage of our old way of life. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
648:Except God no substance can be granted or conceived. .. Everything, I say, is in God, and all things which are made, are made by the laws of the infinite nature of God, and necessarily follows from the necessity of his essence. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
649:It was like hermits. There was no point freezing your nadgers off on top of some mountain while communing with the Infinite unless you could rely on a lot of impressionable young women to come along occasionally and say “Gosh. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
650:My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. The more you develop it in your own being, the more it overwhelms your surroundings and by and by might oversweep the world. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
651:Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
652:Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind,
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace. ~ Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche,#NFDB
653:Our dreams are firsthand creations, rather than residues of waking life. We have the capacity for infinite creativity; at least while dreaming, we partake of the power of the Spirit, the infinite Godhead that creates the cosmos. ~ Jackie Gleason, #NFDB
654:We know the existence of the infinite without knowing its nature, because it too has extension but unlike us no limits.
But we do not know either the existence or the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits. ~ Blaise Pascal,#NFDB
655:How can you possibly overcome your fears, doubts, worries and other problems? You can't. You simply don't have the capacity. Fortunately, the infinite can do all of these things for you. How? Because it is lacking in nothing. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
656:Silent harmony is the gift you give yourself... As you push past the infinite, you can feel your own music, your own frequency, beginning to project itself past you, beyond infinity, into nowhere, starting to generate its own star. ~ Robert Young, #NFDB
657:To every one of us there must come a time when the whole universe will be found to have been a dream, when we find the soul is infinitely better than its surroundings. It is only a question of time, and time is nothing in the infinite. ~ Sai Baba, #NFDB
658:We can most easily fulfill our desires when our actions are motivated by love. We expand the least effort, and we offer no resistance. We tap into the infinite organizing power of the universe to do less and accomplish everything. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
659:What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite? ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, #NFDB
660:I unpetalled you, like a rose,
to see your soul,
and I didn't see it.
But everything around
-horizons of land and of seas-,
everything, out to the infinite,
was filled with a fragrance,
enormous and alive. ~ Juan Ram n Jim nez,#NFDB
661:The very moment that any form becomes a necessity in our experience, we are placing our dependence, our happiness, and our joy in that, instead of in the Infinite Invisible which is the cause of the form, and we are idolaters. We ~ Joel S Goldsmith, #NFDB
662:If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
663:Nature is hieroglyphic. Each prominent fact in it is like a type; its final use is to set up one letter of the infinite alphabet, and help us by its connections to read some statement or statute applicable to the conscious world. ~ Thomas Starr King, #NFDB
664:Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
665:Shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time. A curtain of purple wisteria partially conceals the entrance to a familiar garden... In a wink, a lifetime, we pass through the infinite movements of a silent overture. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
666:That is the way it is, we always fall in love because of a detail, a nuance. It is a marker we set up for ourselves in the midst of the confusion, in the infinite space of love. The greatest passions come from such little causes. ~ Georges Rodenbach, #NFDB
667:The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain – although it may think it can – the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
668:The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
669:From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the infinite, was the principle inspiration of that winged and flat-footed creature, the scientist. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
670:Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
671:Irrespective of doubts and convictions, and for the Infinite Love I bear for one and all, I continue to come as the Avatar, to be judged time and again by humanity in its ignorance, in order to help man distinguish the Real from the false. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
672:Just as space has parts lying alongside one another, time has parts following one another. The Infinite has no parts, of either (or any other conceivable) sort. Eternity is not time, however much we may try to glorify the concept of time. ~ Frank Sheed, #NFDB
673:It is thus that life at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its infinite ache.
- Oh, life! oh, youth! of, hope! oh, years! Oh pain-winged fancy, beating forth with fears. ~ Theodore Dreiser,#NFDB
674:Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life? ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
675:The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
676:And then there’s religion—God, angels, sin—but none of that has ever appealed to me. Fiction masquerading as cosmology is what it feels like to me, and all too self-important, too self-serious. ~ Tim Wirkus, The Infinite Future (2018), Part 1, Chapter 14, #NFDB
677:Life itself must be founded upon the infinite possibility for choice and accident. And if we cannot prove that it is, we must believe that it is. We must believe that we can change, that we can control, that we can direct our own destinies. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
678:Once you begin to control your thought processes, you can apply the powers of your subconscious to any problem or difficulty. You will actually be consciously cooperating with the infinite power and omnipotent law that governs all things. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
679:Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, #NFDB
680:Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite. ~ Louis Pasteur, #NFDB
681:Let us not depreciate Earth. There is no atom in it but is alive and astir in the all-penetrating splendor of God. From the infinitesimal to the infinite, everything is striving to express the thought of His Presence with which it overflows. ~ Lucy Larcom, #NFDB
682:The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
683:Hence in his Divinity School Address, Emerson bemoaned "this eastern monarchy of a Christianity" that dwells so noxiously, so slavishly, on the person of Jesus instead of the divinity of the one mind, of the infinite soul shared equally by all. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
684:God made us alive and secured us in Christ so that he could make us the beneficiaries of everlasting kindness from infinite riches of grace. This is not because we are worthy. Quite the contrary, it is to show the infinite measure of his worth. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
685:Rome fell silently to ruins. A New city rose in its place, and it was too erased by emptiness. Like phantom Giants, cities, kingdoms, and countries swiftly fell and disappeared into emptiness-- swallowed up in the black maw of the Infinite ~ Leonid Andreyev, #NFDB
686:Science at its limits, even physical Science, is compelled to perceive in the end the infinite, the universal, the spirit, the divine intelligence and will in the material universe. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #NFDB
687:Because I am still learning to walk and talk, and it is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, than it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
688:Eyes the infinite black of the night sky bore into her and carved deep grooves along every curve. She felt the weight of his desire wash over her like the slow rise of dawn creeping across the bed in the morning. It singed every inch of her. ~ Airicka Phoenix, #NFDB
689:I don't believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won't persuade mother nature to alter her ways. Nature is never wrong. ~ Janna Levin, #NFDB
690:I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, thumoi phileousa te, kedomene te. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
691:Philosophy not only purifies the reason and predisposes it to the contact of the universal and the infinite, but tends to stabilise the nature and create the tranquillity of the sage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge, #NFDB
692:They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Æolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule. ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
693:Aum is the most powerful of all mantras. It is good to chant Aum seven or more times before and after each meditation. Chanting "Aum" puts you in harmony with the vibration of Eternity. "Aum" opens the gateway to the infinite highway of light. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
694:The language of the Veda itself is sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that same vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit fot the impersonal knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
695:Buddhism also generated two divergent currents; the one impersonal, preaching the abnegation of self through discipline, and the other personal, preaching the cultivation of sympathy for all creatures, and devotion to the infinite truth of love; the ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
696:If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
697:Quant au mode de prier, peu importe le nom, pourvu qu'il soit sincère. Tournez votre livre à l'envers et soyez à l'infini"
As for how you pray, the words do not matter if they are sincere. Turn your prayer book upside down and face the infinite. ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
698:That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic,and therefore the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is true for morality and love. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
699:I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him-they were part of his “road,” the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work. ~ Joyce Johnson, #NFDB
700:Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea.
The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be
free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite
from life? ~ Thomas Mann,#NFDB
701:There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
702:Didn’t Notai ships usually have long names? Like Ineluctable Ascendancy of Mind Unfolding or The Finite Contains the Infinite Contains the Finite?” Both of those ship names were fictional, characters in more or less famous melodramatic entertainments. ~ Ann Leckie, #NFDB
703:I like contradictions. We have never attained the infinite variety and contradictions that exist in nature. Tomorrow I shall contradict myself. That is the one way I have of asserting my liberty, the real liberty one does not find as a member of society. ~ Man Ray, #NFDB
704:I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work. ~ Joyce Johnson, #NFDB
705:There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
706:Those eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities, such as Lyons and Zurich, and they hypnotize me as do empty theaters, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite. ~ Jean Genet, #NFDB
707:It is almost a matter of no account how far Marguerite will penetrate, whether she will ever be brought back or whether she will fall a prey to some wandering tramp—the sleepwalking of the infinite has seized upon her and never more will let her go. ~ Hermann Broch, #NFDB
708:There is no better show of human power than to be a proud purveyor of death, to attempt slaughter. To kill for sport, for indulgence, speaks to the infinite depths of human desire, an innate need to demonstrate the irreversible, to have lasting effect. ~ Julia Fine, #NFDB
709:There is no sin , and there can be no sin on all the earth , which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God . Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
710:Lastly (4) in each of his infinite bodies there would be already present infinite flesh and blood and brain—having a distinct existence, however, from one another, and no less real than the infinite bodies, and each infinite: which is contrary to reason. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
711:358. Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, Karma,#NFDB
712:Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
713:The simplicity we are looking for is not found in thought. It knows what you have to listen to in every moment and knows it can never make a mistake. It is the infinite working in the infinite. It projects into this world because we are here to do that. ~ Robert Young, #NFDB
714:That is the great fact which you ought to remember. We are the children of the Almighty, we are sparks of the infinite, divine fire. How can we be nothings? We are everything, ready to do everything, we can do everything, and man must do everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
715:We are finite creatures, bound to this place and this time, and helpless before an endless expanse. It is within the calculus that for the first time the infinite is charmed into compliance, its luxuriance subordinated to the harsh concept of a limit. ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
716:I don't know what it is, exactly, but there's a negative drag on film sets after the second week or so, a mutinous vibe because the infinite capacities of the directors and everybody else become quite finite and everybody's under the gun and it becomes work. ~ Diane Lane, #NFDB
717:Madness it is to hope that human minds
can ever understand the Infinite
that comprehends Three Persons in One Being.
Be satisfied with quia unexplained,
O Human race! If you knew everything,
no need for Mary to have borne a son. ~ Dante Alighieri,#NFDB
718:Religion is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
719:The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience. But it is not meant to be a one-time experience; the truth needs to be reaffirmed daily. ~ Jerry Bridges, #NFDB
720:Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
721:The infinite zero of a black hole-mass crammed into zero space, curving space infinitely-punches a hole in the smooth rubber sheet. The equations of general relativity cannot deal with the sharpness of zero. In a black hole, space and time are meaningless. ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
722:The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,
And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were Vacancy? ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley,#NFDB
723:A gentleman who doesn't have the physical and/or emotional sensitivity to use condoms couldn't possibly possess the self-confidence required to fully procure the infinite sounding of pleasure from the depth of a woman's being, via the endlessness of her cunt. ~ Inga Muscio, #NFDB
724:If you should take the human heart and listen to it, it would be like listening to a sea-shell; you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its profoundest inspiration, and for which it yearns. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
725:My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta.
But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless. ~ Alison Bechdel,#NFDB
726:Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation; and our attitude toward the Infinite Being must also in its expression have a variety of individuality ceaseless and unendi. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
727:Ultimately, we lacked the courage to face up to our own true selves—our bare forms noble though petty, everything though nothing, almighty though powerless, filled with all the cruelty of matter and all the infinite kindness of spirit. Human, all too human. ~ Sakyo Komatsu, #NFDB
728:Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
729:Even someone like Mrs. Bonnaventura, who had lived a mostly blameless life, when ushered into the awesome presence of the Creator of the infinite universe and also of the butterfly, would discover ten thousand fearsome new layers of meaning in the word humility. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
730:By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite ~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte, #NFDB
731:Every relationship of man to the infinite is religion, namely of a man in the full abundance of his humanity. Whenever a mathematician calculates infinity, that, to be sure, is not religion. Infinity conceived in this abundance is the Godhead. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
732:God reveals more or less of his glory in different times and settings. But it is always his glory! It is never minor. Never insignificant. Never negligible. It is always some measure of the infinite excellence. It is always worthy of seeing and knowing and loving. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
733:Mathematics, in an earlier view, is the science of space and quantity; in a later view, it is the science of pattern and deductive structure. Since the Greeks, mathematics is also the science of the infinite. ~ Philip J. Davis, Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience (1980)., #NFDB
734:Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
735:What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of deductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords of the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" is identified with. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
736:in infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex, is differentiated",is to say nothing at all. Those are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite is neither complex nor simple, no forward nor backward, or better or worse. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
737:This view [of the infinite], which I consider to be the sole correct one, is held by only a few. While possibly I am the very first in history to take this position so explicitly, with all of its logical consequences, I know for sure that I shall not be the last! ~ Georg Cantor, #NFDB
738:What you usually refer to when you say “I” is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of “I” in your mind and whatever the “I” has identified with. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
739:I had reached the conclusion myself that sex was not a division but a continuum, that almost nobody was altogether of one sex or another, and that the infinite subtlety of the shading from one extreme to the other was one of the most beautiful of nature's phenomena. ~ Jan Morris, #NFDB
740:It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at? ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
741:There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today. ~ Carl Linnaeus, #NFDB
742:Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death... ("Mr. Arcularis") ~ Conrad Aiken, #NFDB
743:It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at? ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
744:It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
745:This, I thought, is what it means to be alone: You are solid, intact, and then, without warning, a hinge unlatches, the chimney flue swings open, the infinite freezing black night rushes in, and there is nothing to do but grope in the cold to set things right again. ~ Kate Bolick, #NFDB
746:To escape the distress caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace. ~ Jean Pierre de Caussade, #NFDB
747:God cannot cease from leaning towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga,#NFDB
748:It is a beautiful impulse to contain the infinite in the finite, to rest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb towards higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. ~ Maria Popova, #NFDB
749:Learn to see it in thyself and thou wilt understand the infinite essence, hidden in all illusory forms. Understand that the world which thou knowest is only one of the aspects of the infinite world, and things and phenomena are merely hierolgyphics of deeper ideas. ~ P D Ouspensky, #NFDB
750:St. Oscar, keep your mighty lid closed over me. Look grouchily but kindly upon me and protect me as I travel through the infinite trashcan of your world. Show me the beautiful usefulness of your Blessed Rubbish. Let me not be Taken Out before I find my destiny. ~ John Joseph Adams, #NFDB
751:The finite is a frontal aspect and a self-determination of the Infinite; no finite can exist in itself and by itself, it exists by the Infinite and because it is of one essence with the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #NFDB
752:the Great Redemption that God’s love has provided. The everlasting certainty, the wonderful sufficiency, the infinite efficacy of the Holiness that God has prepared for us in His Son, are all revealed in this blessed, Holy in Christ. ‘The Holy Ones in Christ Jesus! ~ Andrew Murray, #NFDB
753:the old man raised his finger toward heaven, and said, 'The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no ME, the ME would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a ME. This ME of the infinite is God. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
754:The Structure of Magic I by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I've done without knowing about them. ~ Milton H Erickson, #NFDB
755:All appearances have a determinate magnitude (the relation of which to another assignable). The infinite does not appear as such, likewise not the simple. For the appearances are included between two boundaries (points) and are thus themselves determinate magnitudes. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
756:Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite. ~ Henri Fr d ric Amiel, #NFDB
757:In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. ~ John Green, #NFDB
758:There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. ~ James A Garfield, #NFDB
759:Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary.
He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place. ~ R my de Gourmont,#NFDB
760:Nothing but the infinite can ever satisfy me; I am such a great sinner that I must have infinite merit to wash my sin away;" but we have had our sin removed, and found that there was merit to spare; we have had our hunger relieved at the feast of sacred love ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
761:The world of sense, if it is limited, lies necessarily within the infinite void. If we ignore this, and with it, space in general, as an a priori condition of the possibility of phenomena, the whole world of sense vanishes, which alone forms the object of our enquiry. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
762:A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web "God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father," but it can be known only as love. ~ Joan Z Borysenko, #NFDB
763:Here are wonders upon wonders: the Strong One is weak; the Infinite One lies in a manger; the Prince of Life dies; the Crucified One lives; the Humiliated One is glorified.
Meekness and majesty, indeed!
Behold, then, your newborn King! Come and worship Him! ~ Sinclair B Ferguson,#NFDB
764:Stars looking at our planet, watching entropy and pain and maybe startin' to wonder how the chaos in our lives could pass as sane. I've been thinkin' 'bout the meaning of resistance of a world beyond our own and suddenly the infinite and penitent began to look like home. ~ Jon Foreman, #NFDB
765:The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
766:The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be. ~ John Shelby Spong, #NFDB
767:Whatever character our theology may ascribe to him, in reality God is the infinite ideal of Man, towards whom men move in their collective growth, with whom they seek their union of love as individuals, in whom they find their ideal of father, friend and beloved. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
768:Whether an island such as Easter Island can be considered remote is simply a matter of perspective. Those who live there, the Rapa Nui, call their homeland Te Pito Te Henua, 'the navel of the world'. Any point on the infinite globe of the Earth can become a centre. ~ Judith Schalansky, #NFDB
769:The religion of the Bible is the best in the world. I see the infinite value of religion. Let it be always encouraged. A world ofsuperstition and folly have grown up around its forms and ceremonies. But the truth in it is one of the deep sentiments in human nature. ~ Rutherford B Hayes, #NFDB
770:As she began losing track of herself, she though it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes - telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression - that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
771:The intimate and the infinite are tangled together in this incandescent book, lit by Aristotle’s bright spark of a daughter. Lucid even in nightmare, The Sweet Girl slips sideways around the philosopher to examine the lives of girls and women when we were not yet human. ~ Marina Endicott, #NFDB
772:We applaud the people who are film stars, who get elected to an office, who are very athletic, the small group who play with power in a very limited way. But we're completely oblivious to what can be done to the infinite realities that exist in front of us. We deny them. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
773:We waste our lives when we do not pray and think and dream and plan and work toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
774:Which country is real, mine or the teacher's? My wish is that we might progressively lose our confidence in what we think we believe and the things we consider stable and secure, in order to remind ourselves of the infinite number of things still waiting to be discovered. ~ Antoni Tapies, #NFDB
775:Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. ~ Arshile Gorky, #NFDB
776:Our own intuition of what we're called to is reality speaking to us individually and perfectly. We have to listen to how the Infinite talks to us and leads us. Reality, Life the Infinite, God, has a way of leading us in just the perfect way, if we will only just listen to it. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
777:To sum up all, let it be known that science and religion are two identical words. The learned do not suspect this, no more do the religious. These two words express the two sides of the same fact, which is the infinite. Religion-Science, this is the future of the human mind. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
778:If I represent the pinnacle of family success for all the Jason Dessens, Jason2 represents the professional and creative apex. We’re opposite poles of the same man, and I suppose it isn’t a coincidence that Jason2 sought out my life from the infinite possibilities available. ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
779:Amar a nossa falta mesma de amor,
E na secura nossa, amar a água implícita,
E o beijo tácito, e a sede infinita.
(To love even our own lack of love,
and in our parched state, to love the implicit water,
the implied kiss, the infinite thirst.) ~ Carlos Drummond de Andrade,#NFDB
780:Our self (Soul), as a form of God's joy, is deathless. For his joy is amritham, eternal bliss. We know that the life of a Soul, which is finite in its expression and infinite in its principle, must go through the portals of death in its journey to realize the infinite. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
781:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, #NFDB
782:for the least love to God, and the simplest act of obedience to him, are better than the profoundest knowledge. My Lord, I leave the infinite to thee, and pray thee to put far from me such a love for the tree of knowledge as might keep me from the tree of life. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
783:The man who proclaims the existence of the Infinite accumulates, in this affirmation, more of the supernatural than there is in the miracles of all the religions. So long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs upon human thought, temples will be raised for the cult of the Infinite. ~ Pasteur, #NFDB
784:Is this not the collector's exquisite pleasure, that his desire should know no bounds, should reach out into the infinite, should never know full possession which disappoints by its very completeness. O what joy to be able to postpone the fulfillment of desire to infinity! ~ Georges Rodenbach, #NFDB
785:One day the sun admitted,
I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you the infinite incandescence
That has cast my brilliant image!
I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The astonishing Light
Of your own Being!
~ Hafiz, My Brilliant Image
,#NFDB
786:I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist. ~ Francis A Schaeffer, #NFDB
787:If you would serve God and be truly religious, do not kneel before God, but learn to walk with God, and do something
tangible every day to increase the happiness of mankind. This is religion that is worthwhile, and it is such religion alone that can please the Infinite. ~ Christian D Larson,#NFDB
788:I watched the night sky with it's countless stars and its moon, and I wondered about the universe and all that had been created, why the stars and the moon rose at night and the sun in the day, how vast it must be, how I could never understand the infinite measure of its size. ~ Patrick Carman, #NFDB
789:Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
790:For the most part, it is true, ordinary men and women regard mathematics with energetic distaste, counting its concepts as rhapsodic as cauliflower. This is a mistake-there is no other word. Where else can the restless human mind find means to tie the infinite in a finite bow? ~ David Berlinski, #NFDB
791:He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
792:He who suffers himself to be transported by the love of things on high, who drinks at the sources of eternal beauty, who lives by the Infinite and combats for the ideal of all virtue and all knowledge, who shows for that cult an enthusiasm pushed to a very fury,—he is the hero. ~ Giordano Bruno, #NFDB
793:Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin. -- Frank Moore Colby, Imaginary Obligations ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
794:Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery which the cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as the mystery of the cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest. ~ Charles Kingsley, #NFDB
795:How does the genius make itself known? In the way that in nature
Shows the Creator himself,e'en in the infinite whole.
Clear is the ether, and yet of depth that ne'er can be fathomed;
Seen by the eye, it remains evermore closed to the sense.
~ Friedrich Schiller, Geniality
,#NFDB
796:I am the mystery of Love itself, the lust and spirit of unity aflame with the infinite passion for the Unknown. Thus are all things made one, in me, by virtue of my secret force; and in this light there is the unspeakable joy, the ineffable bliss, the orgasmic ecstasy of the ages. ~ David Cherubim, #NFDB
797:If Jesus undertook to bring me to glory, and if the Father promised that He would give me to the Son to be a part of the infinite reward of the travail of His soul; then, my soul, till God Himself shall be unfaithful, till Jesus shall cease to be the truth, thou art safe. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
798:There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear their breathings and feel the pulsations of the heart of the infinite. JAMES A. GARFIELD ~ Candice Millard, #NFDB
799:The useless search of philosophers for a cause of the universe is a regressus in infinitum (a stepping backwards into the infinite) and resembles climbing up an endless ladder, the recurring question as to the cause of the cause rendering the attainment of a final goal impossible. ~ Ludwig Buchner, #NFDB
800:Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
801:The very act of recall is like trying to photograph the sky. The infinite and ever-shifting colors of memory, its rippling light, cannot really be captured. Show someone who has never seen the sky a picture of the sky and you show them a picture of nothing.
Still I have to try. ~ Rachel Lyon,#NFDB
802:When you have gaps in your memory like I do, you come to better appreciate the things you do remember. The way your hands just repeat a task you've done enough times, without even needing to think. Who needs Legacies when we have the infinite power of the human mind at our disposal? ~ Pittacus Lore, #NFDB
803:Do not go to the garden of flowers!
Do not go to the garden of flowers!
O Friend! go not there;
In your body is the garden of flowers.
Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus,
and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty.
~ Kabir, Do Not Go To The Garden Of Flowers
,#NFDB
804:It horribly skews the meaning of the cross when contemporary prophets of self-esteem say that the cross is a witness to my infinite worth. The biblical perspective is that the cross in a witness to the infinite worth of God's glory, and a witness to the immensity of the sin of my pride. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
805:The whole world is looking for miracles. Every day it is dying to see miracles. But can there be any miracle More challenging, more illumining And more fulfilling Than to see and feel the infinite Beauty Of my Beloved Supreme Inside this tinier than the tiniest Gratitude-heart of mine? ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
806:(Official Interdimensional Travel Observation #2: you’d think that meeting yourself in another dimension would cause a total freak-out of the infinite order, pants-pissing, screaming, etc. But it’s the total opposite: weirdly calming. Like “Hey bro, I know you! Let’s go get a beer.”) But ~ Rob Dircks, #NFDB
807:Who does not observe the immediate glow and security that is diffused over the life of woman, before restless or fretful, by engaging in gardening, building, or the lowest department of art? Here is something that is not routine--something that draws forth life towards the infinite. ~ Margaret Fuller, #NFDB
808:Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
809:I meditated on my own for some time, read spiritual books, became a vegetarian and had incredible experiences every day, every meditation, where I was just thrown into the infinite - never realizing that other people didn't necessarily have those experiences in meditation that quickly. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
810:Josh Hanagarne has an astonishing story to tell, and he does so with insight, humor, grace, and wonder. All human beings suffer and struggle. Through the lens of his own miraculous experiences, Mr. Hanagarne illuminates the path to joy and the infinite possibilities of transcendence. ~ Melanie Rae Thon, #NFDB
811:Nowhere is black magic more apparent than in the modern phases of religion. In both the new and old doctrines, instead of emphasizing the will of the Logos as the law of men, students have been taught to demand of the Infinite, and that He will obey. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics, #NFDB
812:What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves. ~ August Weismann, #NFDB
813:In each case it is Tapas that is effective, but it acts in a different manner according to the thing that has to be done, according to the predetermined process, dynamism, self-deploying of the Infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance,#NFDB
814:In the spiritual lore, the human body is considered supremely sacred, as this is the only mechanism that can take a being from the limited identification of the self to the unlimited, from a bounded existence to the realm of the unbounded, to the final plunge into the vastness of the Infinite. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
815:Every sacred scripture, holy picture or spoken word, produces the impression of its identity upon the mirror of the soul; but music stands before the soul without producing any impression of this objective world, in either name or form, thus preparing the soul to realize the Infinite. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
816:The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
817:Therefore the perfect, absolutely and in itself, is one, infinite, which cannot be
greater or better, and that which nothing can be greater or better. This is one, everywhere,
the only God, universal nature, of which nothing can be a perfect image
or reflection, but the infinite. ~ Giordano Bruno,#NFDB
818:When you add love to sex, it feels as if your soul is being drawn from the chains of gravity into the core of the infinite. New feelings come to life, emotions without explanations that we try to name with that perplexing little word we avoid using as if the word is sacred or sacrilegious. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB
819:Any of us that have been around for any length of time have had our hearts broken. That’s life. That’s all it is. Loving, getting hurt, but daring to love again, even though you know you’re probably going to get hurt again. That’s the triumph of the human spirit. The infinite capacity to love. ~ Lori Wilde, #NFDB
820:When he makes you a promise, he is assuring you that however the world changes, his word will not change. Thus, he is creating the future inside the present. Even more: he is creating the present inside the present. He is establishing on stationary point amid the infinite flux of events. ~ Stephen Mitchell, #NFDB
821:Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
822:Christ to the thief: Come with me. We die together, a thief and the Maker of the world. Walk with the Infinite made flesh into the belly of the whale. Stand close while reality quakes. Watch while Death is taken by the throat. Today you will be with me in Paradise.
Stories don't end at death. ~ N D Wilson,#NFDB
823:You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it... ~ Louis Bayard,#NFDB
824:The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
825:Your master will bestow that experience shortly. Your body is not tuned just yet. As a small lamp cannot withstand excessive electrical voltage, so your nerves are unready for the cosmic current. If I gave you the infinite ecstasy right now, you would burn as if every cell were on fire. ~ Paramhansa Yogananda, #NFDB
826:Therefore, sanctification is an infinite journey, because only the infinite power of God can complete it. And only the infinitely powerful priestly ministry of Christ at the right hand of God can keep us from all spiritual harm and enable us to make a single step forward in our sanctification. ~ Andrew M Davis, #NFDB
827:And this is why we must do all we can to be with those we love, while we’re still breathing. Because who knows when that time will come. Someday, we might discover that the infinite solitude of death is yet another beginning. But until then, this life is all we have. This day. This moment. ~ Christina L Rozelle, #NFDB
828:Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other. ~ Maurice Maeterlinck, #NFDB
829:He was staring into a greater dark that held all things.. .He had known - dimly he had known when he first gazed into those flat animal shallows that behind them lay this - beauty and terror, all horror and delight, in the infinite darkness upon her eyes opened like windows, paned with emerald glass. ~ C L Moore, #NFDB
830:In the infinite consciousness universes come and go like particles of dust in a beam of sunlight that shines through a hole in the roof. Death is ever keeping a watch over our life. All objects are experienced in the subject and nowhere else. Whole worlds arise and fall like ripples in the ocean. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
831:The dimension that counts for the creative person is the space he creates within himself. This inner space is closer to the infinite than the other, and it is the privilege of the balanced mind... and the search for an equilibrium is essential - to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space. ~ Mark Tobey, #NFDB
832:The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite. ~ Yann Martel, #NFDB
833:Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
834:Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
835:fruits of the sacrifice :::
The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain; claiming nothing, it yet receives the infinite riches of the divine Power and Presence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Divine Works, The Sacrifice, the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice [109],#NFDB
836:The time has come for us to admit our insignificance by making discoveries in the infinite unexplored cosmos. Only then shall we realize that we are nothing but ants in the vast state of the universe. And yet our future and our opportunities lie in the universe, where gods promised they would. ~ Erich von D niken, #NFDB
837: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, #NFDB
838:To claim a limited end to a limitless process, to reduce the infinite to the finite, to draw borders across the borderless, to make measurements of the unfathomable – this is the beginning of the human impulse to create certainty where none exists. It is the birth of pain, of suffering, of delusion. The ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
839:What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances... Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of circumstances. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
840:One who has never known the turbulence of life, in whom the petals of the mysterious flower within have never opened; such a one may seem happy, may seem a saint, his single track mind may impress the multitude with its power - but he is ill equipped for life's true adventure into the infinite. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
841:A magic realm of timelessness had been inserted into time, an intensity of newness and presentness, of the sort usually devoured by past and future. Suddenly, wonderfully, I fount myself exempted from the nagging pressures of past and future and savoring the infinite gift of a complete and perfect now. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
842:To the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul and of personal responsibility, I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued existence in the visible immortality of the nation". ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
843:You know it already that each one of us is the effect of the infinite past; the child is ushered into the world not as something flashing from the hands of nature, as poets delight so much to depict, but he has the burden of an infinite past; for good or evil he comes to work out his own past deeds ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
844:In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite - if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
845:When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
846:Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it. ~ Francis A Schaeffer, #NFDB
847:A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time - in our finite time - to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
848:Does not man lack the force at the very point where he needs it most? And when he soars upward in joy, or sinks down in suffering, is not checked in both, is he not returned again to the dull, cold sphere of awareness, just when he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
849:Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language). ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
850:Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or absence of knowledge as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore He is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. ~ Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, #NFDB
851:A schoolman mind had captured life’s large space,
But chose to live in bare and paltry rooms
Parked off from the too vast dangerous universe,
Fearing to lose its soul in the infinite.
Even the Idea’s ample sweep was cut
Into a system, chained to ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Entry into the Inner Countries,#NFDB
852:In its fundamental truth the original status of Time behind all its variations is nothing else than the eternity of the Eternal, just as the fundamental truth of Space, the original sense of its reality, is the infinity of the Infinite. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #NFDB
853:Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations. By providing the generic notions philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances which rest unrealized in the womb of nature. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
854:Process is merely a utility; it is a habitual adoption of certain effective relations which might in the infinite possibility of things have been arranged otherwise, for the production of effects which might equally have been quite different. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, #NFDB
855:In the infinite consciousness universes come and go like particles of dust in a beam of sunlight that shines through a hole in the roof. Death is ever keeping a watch over our life. All objects are experienced in the subject and nowhere else. Whole worlds arise and fall like ripples in the ocean. Vashistha ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
856:The infinite intelligence, which gave me this desire leads, guides, and reveals to me the perfect plan for the unfolding of my desire. I know the deeper wisdom of my subconscious is now responding, and what I feel and claim within is expressed in the without There is a balance, equilibrium, and equanimity. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
857:The mind can reflect the Infinite, it can dissolve itself into it, it can live in it by a large passivity, it can take its suggestions and act them out in its own way, a way always fragmentary, derivative and subject to a greater or less deformation, but ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #NFDB
858:The process of self-healing is the privilege of every being. Self-healing is not a miracle, nor is self-healing a dramatization of the personality as though you could do something superior. Self-healing is a genuine process of the relationship between the physical and the infinite power of the soul. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi, #NFDB
859:Thirdly, the existent individual is impassioned, impassioned with a passionate thought; he is inspired; he is a kind of incarnation of the infinite in the finite. This passion which animates the existent (and this brings us to the fourth characteristic) is what Kierkegaard calls “the passion of freedom. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
860:In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
861:Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous. We seem to feel that the manifestation of the infinite in the finite forms of creation is music itself, silent and visible. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
862:And He [God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble--delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
863:How could I live above the water or breathe under it. How could I swim in darkness consumed in an ocean of you? Falling or flying towards you, losing or finding myself in you and beauty was never the word to catch all that you are. For now I know the means of the infinite and it all starts and ends with you. ~ Robert M Drake, #NFDB
864:It is pleasant to spend time with Him, to lie close to His breast like the Beloved Disciple and to feel the infinite love present in His Heart....how can we not feel a renewed need to spend time in spiritual converse, in silent adoration, in heartfelt love before Christ present in the Most Holy Sacrament? ~ Pope John Paul II, #NFDB
865:Most important, it seems Stalin wanted to use the example of Shostakovich to scold and worry all of the Soviet Union’s cultural leaders, rebuking them for turning away from “real art, real science, and real literature.” He wanted to assert the infinite power of his regime and to show them that no one was safe. ~ M T Anderson, #NFDB
866:My subconscious knows the answer. It is responding to me now. I give thanks because I know the infinite intelligence of my subconscious knows all things and is revealing the perfect answer to me now. My real conviction is now setting free the majesty and glory of my subconscious mind. I rejoice that it is so. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
867:To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples of the infinite possibilities (or at least the theoretically infinite possibilities) implied in the existence of a human being. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
868:Ah, reader, I understand it is your kindness which fills you with this hubris, but it is hubris still. You presume, not only to advise your Maker, but to demand that He respond to your advice by revising the infinite and perfect Plan of His Creation precisely as you--with your flawed and finite wisdom--recommend? ~ Ada Palmer, #NFDB
869:Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this incomparable agony, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
870:The Infinite alone exists and is Real; the finite is passing and false. The Original Whim in the Beyond caused the apparent descent of the Infinite into the realm of the seeming finite. This is the Divine Mystery and Divine Game in which Infinite Consciousness for ever plays on all levels of finite consciousness. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
871:Beyond thy lectures learn’d professor,
Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics
...
The entities of entities, eidólons.
Unfix’d yet fix’d,
Ever shall be, ever have been and are, Sweeping the present to the infinite future,
Eidólons, eidólons, eidólons. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
872:What is not challenged from outside is open to corruption from within.
-This is the infinite value of a dissenting voice: that where it is not allowed to flourish, an institution- a school or an orphanage or a government or a media consensus....begins to slide toward allowing its worst energies into play. ~ Nuala O Faolain,#NFDB
873:Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, and end your conscious separation from the world. Reconcile yourself a bit better with the realities of life. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
874:When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or
the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity
of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to
see myself here instead of there...now instead of then. ~ Blaise Pascal,#NFDB
875:Every advance in our acuteness of perception will show us something thing new; but the old and first-discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony with them, and more approved as a part of the infinite truth. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
876:God's presence. . . is an inner experience that never changes. It's a relationship that's there all the time, even when we're not paying attention to it. Perhaps the Infinite holds us to Itself in the same way the earth does. Like gravity, if it ever stopped we would know it instantly. But it never does. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen, #NFDB
877:Rise above the dualities, the opposites. See this whole world as the bubbles on the surface of water. See people as bubbles on the surface of the Brahman, of the Infinity...Water bubbles up, rises up. Like that, everybody is rising and having their own games and plays and dissolving back into the Infinite. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
878:The answer to any challenge you are having has nothing to do with God's willingness to help. It has to do with your acceptance of how the Infinite is already active within you, how it has already placed within you all that you need to solve and dissolve inner conflict through conscious communion with the Self. ~ Michael Beckwith, #NFDB
879:For once a person accepted the idea that the Infinite Father of the entire universe actually desired commerce with individual men, literally no sphere of mortal endeavor was untouched. Each and every thought and action had to be examined in light of an expressed partnership with an infinite and eternal patron. ~ Stephen R Lawhead, #NFDB
880:That which makes us specifically human does not signify our separation from nature; it is part of that self-same nature. It's a form that nature has taken here on our planet, in the infinite play of its combinations, through the reciprocal influencing and exchanging of correlations and information among its parts. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
881:All remorse, despair, outraged honour, wasted love, together with the scientific modern theory of Reasonable Nothingness—Life a Nothing, God a Nothing,— when these drive the distracted human unit to make of himself also a nothing, 'temporary insanity' covers up his plunge into the infinite with an untruthful pleasantness ~ Various, #NFDB
882:We all still show too little respect for nature, which in Leonardo's deep words recalling Hamlet's speech "is full of infinite reasons which never appeared in experience." Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the infinite experiments in which these "reasons of nature" force themselves into experience. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
883:How can a website make browsing easier? One solution popularized by digital pinboard site, Pinterest, is the infinite scroll. In the past, getting from one web page to the next required clicking and waiting. However on sites such as Pinterest, whenever the user nears the bottom of a page, more results automatically load. ~ Nir Eyal, #NFDB
884:In these moments of tête-à-tête with the infinite, how different life looks! How all that usually occupies and excites us becomes suddenly puerile, frivolous, and vain. We seem to ourselves mere puppets, marionettes, strutting seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking gewgaws for things of great price. ~ Henri Fr d ric Amiel, #NFDB
885:Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
886:The difficulties in the study of the infinite arise because we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited; but this... is wrong, for we cannot speak of infinite quantities as being the one greater or less than or equal to another. ~ Galileo Galilei, #NFDB
887:Before the work of Georg Cantor in the nineteenth century, the study of the infinite was as much theology as science; now, we understand Cantor’s theory of multiple infinities, each one infinitely larger than the last, well enough to teach it to first-year math majors. (To be fair, it does kind of blow their minds.) ~ Jordan Ellenberg, #NFDB
888:Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
889:It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another's favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the infinite number of fools. ~ Giordano Bruno, #NFDB
890:What else is love,” Mathiax had asked her one day, “but taking the pain of another as your own—especially when you are not obliged to?” Thus, pain was woven into the very fabric of the universe—because there could be no love without it, and because the Infinite Father had set love as the cornerstone of His creation. ~ Stephen R Lawhead, #NFDB
891:You're what my art's all about, Marcus. We see something and think we know it, understand it, but really we're lucky if we ever understand any more than a small piece about anything. The infinite of the universe is in each one of us. You're grace, faith. Hopelessness, despair. Violence and anger. Beauty. You overwhelm me. ~ Joey W Hill, #NFDB
892:A person doing his true will is assisted by the momentum of the universe and seems possessed of amazing good luck. In beginning the great work of obtaining the knowledge and conversation, the magician vows to interpret every manifestation of existence as a direct message from the infinite Chaos to himself personally
~ Peter J Carroll,#NFDB
893:For after all, what is man in creation? Is he not a mere cipher compared with the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a mean between zero & all, infinitely remote from understanding of either extreme? Who can follow these astonishing processes? The Author of these wonders understands them, but no one else can. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
894:Out of the struggles of these men after truth, out of their prayers and meditations, out of debate and controversy, out of feud and schism emerged Christian theology - the product of fallible men, dreaming after the infallible, seeking with finite minds to probe the mysteries of the infinite. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
895:The true scientific mind is not to be tied down by its own conditions of time and space. It builds itself an observatory erected upon the border line of present, which separates the infinite past from the infinite future. From this sure post it makes its sallies even to the beginning and to the end of all things. As ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
896:I am often tempted to think of success in terms that are defined by others: records sold, popularity gained, album reviews, etc. These are impossible demands, however, and they can never be satisfied. Letting finite others define our worth is a horrible way to live. Only the Infinite Other [God] has the authority to do this. ~ Jon Foreman, #NFDB
897:It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation. Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet interest, my own decline and fall. ~ Olaf Stapledon, #NFDB
898:There is a construct in computer programming called 'the infinite loop' which enables a computer to do what no other physical machine can do - to operate in perpetuity without tiring. In the same way it doesn't know exhaustion, it doesn't know when it's wrong and it can keep doing the wrong thing over and over without tiring. ~ John Maeda, #NFDB
899:Love's secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite; and so they are as airy bridges, by which ourfurther shadows pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations; whence all poetical, lovely thoughts are engendered, and drop into us, as though pearls should drop from rainbows. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
900:The first gesture of an architect is to draw a perimeter; in other words, to separate the microclimate from the macro space outside. This in itself is a sacred act. Architecture in itself conveys this idea of limiting space. It's a limit between the finite and the infinite. From this point of view, all architecture is sacred. ~ Mario Botta, #NFDB
901:The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid. ~ Livy, #NFDB
902:Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
903:Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can “infinitize” us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the “small group of people. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, #NFDB
904:The world must be romanticized. Only in that way will one rediscover its original senses. Romanticization is nothing less than a qualitative raising of the power of a thing . . . I romanticize something when I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the known the dignity of the unknown, and the finite the appearance of the infinite. ~ Novalis, #NFDB
905:I want nothing less than a faith founded upon a rock, faith in the constitution of things. The various man-made creeds are fictitious, like the constellations Orion, Cassiopeia’s Chair, the Big Dipper; the only thing real in them is the stars, and the only thing real in the creeds is the soul’s aspiration toward the Infinite. ~ John Burroughs, #NFDB
906:Once a man ceases to recognize the infinite value ofthe human soul... then all he can recognize is that man is something to be used. But then he will also have to go further and recognize that some men can no longer be utilized and he arrives at the concept that there are some lives that have no value at all.
-Helmut Thielicke ~ R C Sproul,#NFDB
907:God is Infinite and His Shadow is also infinite. The Shadow of God is the Infinite Space that accommodates the infinite Gross Sphere which, with its occurrences of millions of universes, within and without the ranges of men's knowledge, is the Creation that issued from the Point of Finiteness in the infinite Existence that is God. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
908:We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
909:For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on the
earth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was a
politically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did not
recognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitude
of one million divided by one million. ~ Arthur Koestler,#NFDB
910:I am a spark from the Infinite. I am not flesh and bones. I am light. In helping others to succeed I shall find my own prosperity. In the welfare of others I shall find my own well-being. I am infinite. I am spaceless, I am tireless; I am beyond body thought, and utterance; beyond all matter and mind. I am endless bliss. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
911:If we slow down and take the time to listen every soul we encounter can teach us something new. Wisdom comes in every shape and size and color and language and form imaginable. The only true limitation is our own inability to see and hear and understand the infinite beauty and wisdom of the human spirit, regardless of its packaging. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
912:The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid. ~ Livy, #NFDB
913:The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid. ~ Livy, #NFDB
914:The infinite reservoir of future grace is flowing back through the present into the ever-growing pool of past grace. The inexhaustible reservoir is invisible except through the promises. But the ever-enlarging pool of past grace is visible; and God means for the certainty and beauty and depth to strengthen our faith in future grace. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
915:The realization of the infinite and the eternal, the longing for the inexpressible, innate in this soul as in others but neglected and forgotten through a whole lifetime, found now, when it swelled up, no outlet, and attempted to express itself in grimaces, gestures, and tones of the strangest kind, absurdly and laughably enough. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
916:Fat had phoned his pharmacy somewhere along the line to get a refill on his Librium prescription; he had taken thirty Librium just before taking the digitalis. The pharmacist had contacted the paramedics. A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
917:This proposal for genetic control exposes the idea of control itself in its ultimate absurdity: the arrogant notion that finite minds, operating with the limited equipment of their particular culture and historic moment, will ever be qualified to exercise absolute control over the infinite future possibilities of human development. ~ Lewis Mumford, #NFDB
918:Commitment is the ultimate assertion of human freedom. It releases all the energy you possess and enables you to take quantum leaps in creativity. When you set a one-pointed intention and absolutely refuse to allow obstacles to dissipate the focused quality of your attention, you engage the infinite organizing power of the universe. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
919:His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways...while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness. ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
920:Allah made the illusion look real and the real an illusion. He concealed the sea and made the foam visible, the wind invisible, and the dust manifest. you see the dust whirling, but how can the dust rise by itself? you see the foam, but not the ocean. invoke Him with deeds, not words; for deeds are real and will save you in the infinite-life. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
921:Gradually, by processing emotion and understanding the psychological action involved, you realize it isn't really complex. It may seem so at first, but that's because you still belong to your emotions and opinions--you think they're yours and that they're real. They aren't--they belong to the ego. The Infinite Self cannot be insecure. ~ Stuart Wilde, #NFDB
922:Life is also, as George Carlin taught us, a zero-sum game. We all lose in the end. We all die screaming. If that’s the case, we might as well make for ourselves a paradise in this world. Make yourself happy and comfortable as often as you can, because sooner or later, the infinite hands you a bill for all these goods and services. What ~ Kevin Smith, #NFDB
923:More than you can possibly imagine," dreaded Marvin. "My capacity for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinite reaches of space itself. Except of course for my capacity for happiness." Stomp, stomp, he went. "My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
924:The infinite forests and frozen lakes of Canada were “very dull, and the people, however socially inclined, thoroughly different in manners and ways of thinking.”5 The troops had so little to do that a sizable number would slip away over the winter months, only to reappear on the other side of the American border as Northern volunteers.6 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
925:Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
926:Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite. ~ Victor Cousin, #NFDB
927:Man has been driven eternally at a primal level within the core of his being to find the intersection of finite matter and infinity, which energy represents in its most un-manifested form. The energy that animates all matter, in particular living matter, is accepted as either representative of, or a subset of, the infinite creation. ~ Gerald R Clark, #NFDB
928:In the infinite universe of literature there are always other avenues to explore, some brand-new and some exceedingly ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of the world. And when literature fails to assure me that I’m not merely chasing dreams, I look to science to sustain my visions in which all heaviness dissolves . . . ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
929:The fool's number is zero, but that's because he represents the infinite possibility of all things. He may become anything. See, he carries all of his possessions in a bundle on his back. He is ready for anything, to go anywhere, to become whatever he needs to be. Don't count out the fool, Pocket, simply because his number is zero. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
930: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, #NFDB
931:Today, continue to nourish your dreams. Hold fast to your vision and do something every day to bring it into manifestation. Everything is possible in God, because God is the infinite Possibility within everything. Know that you are God's Beloved in whom God is pleased. Never giving up on yourself is what it takes to be your own hero. ~ Michael Beckwith, #NFDB
932:.. everything is more difficult once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser, but sometimes the gods offer you flashes of clairvoyance, moments when you contemplate the whole universe, the infinite wheel of worlds, you see yourself, from high up, for few instants truly before leaving, propelled into the next thing, toward the end… ~ Mathias nard, #NFDB
933:Our yearnings are homesicknesses for heaven; our sighings are for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, know not that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
934:If a man lives, then he believes in something. If he didn't believe that one must live for something, then he wouldn't live. If he doesn't see and doesn't understand the illusoriness of the finite, he believes in the infinite; if he does understand the illusoriness of the finite, he must believe in the infinite without which one cannot live. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
935:Art is a window to The Infinite, and opening to the goddess, a portal through which you and I, with the help of the artist, may discover depths and heights of our soul undreamed of by the vulgar world. Art is the eye of the spirit, through which the sublime can reach down to us, and we up to it, and be transformed, transfigured in the process. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
936:More than that, I believe that the grass is green because green is restful to the human eye, that the sky is blue to give us an idea of the infinite. And that blood is red so that murder will be more easily detected and criminals will be brought to justice. Yes, and I believe that I shall live forever, but I shall live without reason. ~ Penelope Fitzgerald, #NFDB
937:When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
938:Whatever is in the mind is like a city in the clouds. The emergence of this world is no more than thoughts coming into manifestation. From the infinite consciousness we have created each other in our imagination. As long as there is “you” and an “I,” there is no liberation. Dear ones, we are all cosmic consciousness assuming individual form. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
939:Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way? ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
940:I myself consider Kriya the most effective device of salvation through self-effort ever to be evolved in man’s search for the Infinite.” Kebalananda concluded with this earnest testimony. “Through its use, the omnipotent God, hidden in all men, became visibly incarnated in the flesh of Lahiri Mahasaya and of a number of his disciples. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
941:Over me, about me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal, that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence, - the infinite and final Night of space. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
942:Your life began in the heart & mind of the Infinite. Mentally relive the days when as a child you ran free, when there were infinite possibilities of what you could feel, accomplish, and see in the world. Allow for the energy of your remembered freedom to thunder through you, and you will free your self from the false obstacles your adult. ~ Michael Beckwith, #NFDB
943:Geology is part of that remarkable dynamic process of the human mind which is generally called science and to which man is driven by an inquisitive urge. By noticing relationships in the results of his observations, he attempts to order and to explain the infinite variety of phenomena that at first sight may appear to be chaotic. ~ Reinout Willem van Bemmelen, #NFDB
944:Life is lived in the extra beats we hold as time unfolds. Soon, the two beats become four, the four become eight, and eventually we will have mastered the art of experiencing life, of feeling who we are and where we are on our path to greatness, of creating real moments, of living as joyous masters in the infinite and divine Freedom of Now. ~ Brendon Burchard, #NFDB
945:They say that each night, when the duties of state permit, she climbs, on foot, and limps, alone, to the highest peak of the palace, where she stands for hour after hour, seeming not to notice the cold peak winds. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars. ~ Neil Gaiman, #NFDB
946:But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
947:I look through the spaces between the iron steps at the colorless flow of the river down below, transporting chunks of ice like white clouds. In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one opens another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
948:In music, sometimes a man will feel that he comes to the edge of breaking out from prison bars of existence, breaking out from the universe altogether. There is a sense that the goal is at hand; that the boundary wall of the universe is crumbling and will be breached at the next moment, when the soul will pass out free into the infinite. ~ Walter Terence Stace, #NFDB
949:In this external world, which is full of finite things, it is impossible to see and find the Infinite. The Infinite must be sought in that alone which is infinite, and the only thing infinite about us is that which is within us, our own soul. Neither the body, nor the mind, nor even our thoughts, nor the world we see around us, is infinite. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
950:Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further responsibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
951:When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years. Which ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
952:Man is a spiritual being, a soul, and at some period of his life everyone is possessed with an irresistible desire to know his relationship to the Infinite. . . . There is something within him which urges him to rise above himself, to control his environment, to master the body and all things physical and live in a higher and more beautiful world. ~ David O McKay, #NFDB
953:Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: "And Amory will have no other adventure like me. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
954:Because of the infinite quality of love, or its egotism, the intellectual and spiritual physiognomy of the people we love are the least objectively defined for us. We are constantly retouching them to suit our desires and our fears; we do not separate them from us; they are but an immense and vague place where our affections exteriorize themselves. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
955:before attempting to perform any good action, or to encounter some failing, we should look at our own weakness on the one hand, and on the other contemplate the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of God. Balancing what we fear from ourselves with what we hope from God, we shall courageously undergo the greatest difficulties and severest trials. ~ Lorenzo Scupoli, #NFDB
956:Hearing my story seemed to give him a license he had been longing for someone to give him: the license to believe what he had seen with his own eyes--to KNOW that deep and comforting truth: that our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator. ~ Eben Alexander, #NFDB
957:Providence is a privilege of man. It expresses the value of man, in distinction from other natural beings … ; it exempts him from the connection of the universe. Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence, - a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things; it is the idealism of religion. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
958:Such contentedness and change of view in regard to every kind of life does the infusion of reason bring about. When Alexander heard from Anaxarchus of the infinite number of worlds, he wept, and when his friends asked him what was the matter, he replied, "Is it not a matter for tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, I have not conquered one? ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
959:And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
960:When fear knocks at the door of your mind, or when worry, anxiety, and doubt cross your mind, behold your vision, your goal. Think of the infinite power within your subconscious mind, which can generate your thinking and imagining. This will give you confidence, power, and courage. Keep on, persevere, until the day breaks, and the shadows flee away. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
961:God bridges the infinite distances between Himself and the spirits created to love Him, by supernatural missions of His own life. The Father, dwelling in the depths of all things and in my own depths, communicates to me His Word and His Spirit. Receiving them I am drawn into His own life and know God in His own Love, being one with Him in His own Son. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
962:Some people would much prefer the infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived. You can either deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that Darwin smashed. (p.25) ~ Daniel C Dennett, #NFDB
963:The progressive growth of the finite consciousness of man towards this Self, towards the universal , the eternal, the infinite, in a word his growth into spiritual consciousness by the development of his ordinary ignorant natural being into an illumined divine nature, this is for Indian thinking the significance of life and the aim of human existance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
964:All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
965:Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
966:In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events. ~ Atul Gawande, #NFDB
967:In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product – because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature – is never the same. ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
968:Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself. ~ Javier Mar as, #NFDB
969:Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ Bren Brown, #NFDB
970:Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ~ Brene Brown, #NFDB
971:Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers—these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
972:[The waves] move across a faint horizon, the rush of love and the surge of grief, the respite of peace and then fear again, the heart that beats and then lies still, the rise and fall and rise and fall of all of it, the incoming and the outgoing, the infinite procession of life. And the ocean wraps the earth, a reminder. The mysteries come forward in waves. ~ Susan Casey, #NFDB
973:Most would sooner attend a conference on self-esteem and self-realization than listen to one sermon on sanctification, without which no one will see the Lord.15 Many would cross land and sea to find their best life now, but they would not walk across the street to attend a series of meetings on the infinite worth of Christ or the sufferings of Calvary! ~ Paul David Washer, #NFDB
974:The development of our spiritual nature should concern us most. Spirituality is the highest acquisition of the soul, the divine in man; 'the supreme, crowning gift that makes him king of all created things.' It is the consciousness of victory over self and of communion with the infinite. It is spirituality alone which really gives one the best in life. ~ David O McKay, #NFDB
975:Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming - the echo of God on the human wall! ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
976:It {Darwin's theory of evolution] was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
977:In whatever part of his mind was still functioning, Watt wanted to shout some primal victory cry. He couldn’t quite believe it. He was in Avery Fuller’s bedroom, on Avery Fuller’s bed, kissing Avery Fuller. The most beautiful, most incredible, most intriguing girl in the entire world. And of all the infinite guys she could have, she had somehow picked him. ~ Katharine McGee, #NFDB
978:To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them. ~ Henry James, #NFDB
979:Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
980:Do not go to the garden of flowers! O friend! go not there; In your body is the garden of flowers. Take your seat on the thousand petals of the lotus, and there gaze on the Infinite Beauty. [bk1sm.gif] -- from One Hundred Poems of Kabir: Translated by Rabindranath Tagore, by Kabir / Translated by Rabindranath Tagore
~ Kabir, Do not go to the garden of flowers!
,#NFDB
981:I have absolutely no doubt that if you are a praying Christian, your faith in God is what is carrying you, through both the good times and the hard times. However, if you are not a praying person, you are carrying your faith - you are trying to make your faith work for you apart from your source of power - and trying to carry the infinite is very exhausting. ~ Ravi Zacharias, #NFDB
982:rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
983:Bringing a child into the world without its consent seems unethical. Leaving the womb just seems insane. The womb is nirvana. It’s tripping in an eternal orb outside the space-time continuum. It’s a warm, wet rave at the center of the earth, but you’re the only raver. There’s no weird New Age guide. There’s no shitty techno. There’s only you and the infinite. ~ Melissa Broder, #NFDB
984:Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
985:Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat. ~ Gregory Benford, #NFDB
986:Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. ~ Jeff VanderMeer, #NFDB
987:Looking out of the window at the infinite sky, I prayed out, 'Dear Baby Jesus, I am sorry for my sin, even though I do not know what they are, which seems a bit unfair if it is going to be held against me. But that is your way. And I am not questioning your wisdomosity. In future, however, would it be possible for my life to be not so entirely crap? Thank you. ~ Louise Rennison, #NFDB
988:The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
989:In truth, I’m not my body, my race, religion, or other beliefs, and neither is anyone else. The real self is infinite and much more powerful-a complete and whole entity that isn’t broken or damaged in any way. The infinite me already contains all the resources I need to navigate through life, because I’m One with Universal energy. In fact, I am Universal energy. ~ Anita Moorjani, #NFDB
990:How long have I been walking? I don’t remember any more, I can’t count days or months. Is that the moon, the sun? I can’t tell. The night star will sometimes light up the infinite fields of snow with an intensity like that of the sun, while the daytime star rises from the fog-shrouded horizon like a pale moon. The ice reflects the light like water does. ~ Valerio Massimo Manfredi, #NFDB
991:Let us then take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the Nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the Infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
992:Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
993:You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
994:Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists". ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
995:Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists". ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, #NFDB
996:This cannot be done without an uncompromising abolition of the ego-sense at its very basis and source. In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
997:Behaviors and lifestyles that are classified as "normal" rarely get so generalized, public perception of heterosexual relationships, for instance, or of the "white" experience, allow for the infinite variety of experiences that exist under such headings, but people love to reduce the vastness of individuality and subjectivity within marginalized types of experience. ~ Melissa Febos, #NFDB
998:Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
999:Lure of the Infinite
With a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems: Ahana
Lure of the Infinite
Lust is the perversion or degradation which prevents love from establishing its reign. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - IV, Sex,#NFDB
1000:true encounter with the God of the universe makes me feel gladly small, perfectly puny, and happily so, in my assigned place and actual size! A true experience of eternity leaves us feeling, as C. S. Lewis said, “the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.”28 ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
1001:When a drop draws help from the ocean, it is an ocean in itself, and a little seed, through the outpouring of rain, the favour of the sun and soul-refreshing breeze, will become a tree with the utmost freshness, full of leaves, blossoms and fruits. Therefore do not consider thy capacity and merit, but rely upon the infinite Bounty and trust to His Highness the Almighty. ~ Bah u ll h, #NFDB
1002:The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
1003:Our task of man is to find the few formulas that will assuage the infinite anguish of free souls. We have to sew up what is torn, to make justice imaginable in a world so obviously unfair, meaningful happiness for people poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it's a superhuman task. But we call superhuman the tasks that men take long to accomplish, that's all. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
1004:If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. —LEWIS CARROLL It’s more important to have the will to grow and stay open to all the infinite possibilities than to know exactly where you’re going. That will change as you change. Goal: Stay open to any and all possibilities that present themselves to you. You never know where success and joy will turn up. ~ Demi Lovato, #NFDB
1005:Netfali's breath caught in his throat at the sight of the infinite colors and the gentle curve of the faraway horizon. He had never imagined the height of the white spray breaking against the rocks, the dark sand, or the air that whispered of fish and salt. He stood, captivated, feeling small and insignificant, and at the same time as if he belonged to something much grander. ~ Peter S s, #NFDB
1006:The heart is built of starlight And time. A pinprick of longing lost in the dark. An unbroken chord linking the Infinite to the Infinite. My heart wishes upon your heart and the wish is granted. Meanwhile the world spins. Meanwhile the universe expands. Meanwhile the mystery of love reveals itself, again and again, in the mystery of you. I have gone. I will return. Glerk ~ Kelly Barnhill, #NFDB
1007:The material movements are an exterior notation by which the soul represents its perceptions of certain truths of the Infinite and makes them effective in the terms of Substance. These things are a language, a notation, a hieroglyphic, a system of symbols, not themselves the deepest truest sense of the things they intimate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
1008:To live without limits, I found I needed: A powerful sense of purpose Hope so strong that it cannot be diminished Faith in God and the infinite possibilities Love and self-acceptance Attitude with altitude A courageous spirit Willingness to change A trusting heart Hunger for opportunities The ability to assess risks and to laugh at life A mission to serve others first Each ~ Nick Vujicic, #NFDB
1009:Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1010:There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
1011:This world, this universe which our senses feel, or our mind thinks, is but one atom, so to say, of the Infinite, projected on to the plane of consciousness; and within that narrow limit, defined by the network of consciousness, works our reason, and not beyond. Therefore, there must be some other instrument to take us beyond, and that instrument is called inspiration. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1012:To each living thing the Mother gave a temporary form that would eventually dissolve, back once more into the infinite churning a cauldron of potential, where matters and energies are constantly exchanger and recombined. She made the world an image of that uterine cauldron, so that every life form sustains itself by absorbing, decomposing , and assimilating other forms. ~ Barbara G Walker, #NFDB
1013:Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca, #NFDB
1014:Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1015:Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to bewritten, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1016:Feel unprotected against the elements or forces or surroundings. Remind yourself how pointless it is to rage and fight and try to one-up those around you. Go and put yourself in touch with the infinite, and end your conscious separation from the world. Reconcile yourself a bit better with the realities of life. Realize how much came before you, and how only wisps of it remain. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
1017:Vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous. To be convinced of this we need only represent, on the one hand,the numberless benefits which result from vanity, as industry, the arts, fashions, politeness, and taste; and on the other, the infinite evils which spring from the pride of certain nations, a laziness, poverty, a total neglect of everything. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
1018:Funny thing, time, how it all fit together despite such arbitrary beginnings and endings, the whole of it played out and calculated down to the very second, each breath, every sunset, dream and waking moment designed, the beat of every heart accounted for, each life a preordained piece of a much larger puzzle, a precisely measured unit in the infinite vacuum of space and time. ~ Greg F Gifune, #NFDB
1019:I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1020:Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation whose transparent network is in continuous communication with the planets and the stars. A captive here on earth for the moment, I commune with the chorus of stars and they join in my sorrows and joys. ~ G rard de Nerval, #NFDB
1021:"I hail thee, almighty and victorious Death,
Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.
O Void that makest room for all to be ...
Thou art my shadow and my instrument.
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread
And thy sharp sword of terror and grief and pain
To force the soul of man to struggle for light"
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,#NFDB
1022:[God] created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
1023:The Infinite Release statement in this case can be: “I now release all worries over whether I can afford a Mercedes Benz S500 (or insert any other item you desire) for an infinite number of times until I remain at zero. I release this worry infinitely, as many times as necessary, until I remain at zero.” You repeat this Infinite Release process for each negative block identified. ~ Richard Dotts, #NFDB
1024:And later, when the sun begins to sink and the infinite sky is streaked with red and gold, I'll stroll out into the courtyard- perhaps even climb the steps to the gatehouse. And I'll gaze across the Chasm to the other side of the island, where I can still sometimes catch sight of a curly-haired urchin running joyously through the tall purple grass, her faithful dog at her heels. ~ Michelle Cooper, #NFDB
1025:I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1026:Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
1027:Vacation time offers the unique opportunity to pause before the thought-provoking spectacles of nature, a wonderful "book" within reach of everyone, adults and children. In contact with nature, a person rediscovers his correct dimension, rediscovers himself as a creature, small but at the same time unique, with a "capacity for God" because interiorly he is open to the Infinite. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1028:I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff: I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
1029:What do we mean by the word 'wisdom'? Usually we mean something superior to knowledge, something deeper. In the spiritual world, the word 'wisdom' is not used in that way. Here wisdom means Light, illumining Light, transforming Light. That which illumines our unlit consciousness is wisdom. That which transforms the finite consciousness into the infinite Consciousness is called wisdom. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
1030:I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.
I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the suckling of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air - and the growing itself in its darkness. ~ Martin Buber,#NFDB
1031:Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture, temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast on the screen of man's consciousness by the infinite creative beam. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1032:That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart's happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin, I say, but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
1033:There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his first ventures toward the infinite horizon of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the boundlessness of the world of thought. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1034:My theory stands as firm as a rock; every arrow directed against it will return quickly to its archer. How do I know this? Because I have studied it from all sides for many years; because I have examined all objections which have ever been made against the infinite numbers; and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things. ~ Georg Cantor, #NFDB
1035:The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment - the infinite, personal God who is really there - then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth. ~ Francis A Schaeffer, #NFDB
1036:Ignorance, vulnerability, fear, anger, and desire are expressions of the infinite potential of your buddha nature. There's nothing inherently wrong or right with making such choices. The fruit of Buddhist practice is simply the recognition that these and other mental afflictions are nothing more or less than choices available to us because our real nature is infinite in scope. ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, #NFDB
1037:When love has carried us above all things ... we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold; because our being, without losing anything of its own personality, is united with the Divine Truth. ~ John of Ruysbroeck, #NFDB
1038:You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind—things that exist only there—and clear out space for yourself: … by comprehending the scale of the world … by contemplating infinite time … by thinking of the speed with which things change—each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1039:The character of God is the basis for our connection to him, not our intrinsic worth. Self-worth, or anything we think would make us acceptable to God, would suit our pride but it has the disturbing side-effect of making the cross of Jesus Christ less valuable. If we have worth in ourselves, there is no reason to connect to the infinite worth of Jesus and receive what he has done for us. ~ Edward T Welch, #NFDB
1040:Somewhere in the infinite that He occupies, God advances and withdraws the pawns of the other games He plays, but it is too soon to worry about this one, all He need do for the present is allow things to take their natural course, apart from the occasional adjustment with the tip of His little finger to make sure some stray thought or action does not interfere with the harmony of destinies. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
1041:Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be are expressions of your longing for happiness. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
1042:The Secret of Enlightenment is not in Perfection but in Completeness. Everything that is below the Abyss carries the imperfection within.
After the Infinite establishes Divine Order, the Life of Duality as we know it on Earth begins. It is Yin and Yang in its Manifestation, and only through the two meeting, marrying, merging, they both reach God.’ Ama Alchemy of Love by Nuit Quote ~ Nata a Nuit Pantovi,#NFDB
1043:C. Samuel Storms has so aptly written, Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit. . . . Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to withdraw it in the presence of human demerit. . . . [Grace] is treating a person without the slightest reference to desert whatsoever, but solely according to the infinite goodness and sovereign purpose of God.4 ~ Jerry Bridges, #NFDB
1044:The raging desire to come to a final conclusion is one the most deadly and sterile obsessions that belong to humanity. Every religion and philosophy has made claims to its own God, to have touched the infinite, to have discovered the recipe for happiness. What pride and what emptiness! To the contrary, I see that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works don't come to final conclusions. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
1045:Everything, it seems, revolves on this reversibility of higher and lower case It/it. The miracle consists in the transubstantiation of higher into lower, extraordinary into ordinary, transcendence into immanence. And vice versa. It is a moment both kenotic (the emptying of Word into flesh) and eucharistic (the celebration of the infinite in the finite bread and wine of quotidian experience). ~ Richard Kearney, #NFDB
1046:The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
But there's another way. There are stories ... And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other--maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long. ~ John Green,#NFDB
1047:In the infinite wisdom of the Lord of all the earth, each event falls with exact precision into its proper place in the unfolding of His divine plan. Nothing, however small, however strange, occurs without His ordering, or without its particular fitness for its place in the working out of His purpose; and the end of all shall be the manifestation of His glory, and the accumulation of His praise. ~ B B Warfield, #NFDB
1048:'Worship' is the term we use to cover all the acts of the heart and mind and body that intentionally express the infinite worth of God. This is what we were created for, as God says in Isaiah 43:7, Everyone who is called by my name, and whom I have created for my glory. That means that we were all created for the purpose of expressing the infinite worth of God's glory. We were created to worship. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1049:As countless as grains of sand by the sea are human passions, and they all differ; all of them, vile or lofty, begin by being under a man's control and then become his terrible masters. Blessed is he who has chosen the most lofty of passions: his immeasurable bliss grows and multiplies tenfold with every hour and minute, and he penetrates deeper and deeper into the infinite paradise of his soul. ~ Nikolai Gogol, #NFDB
1050:Every day after lunch when I was writing my first book, I'd nibble a square of fine chocolate and meditate on all that had gone into its creation: the sun and rain that spilled on the cocoa plant, the soil that nourished it, the hands that picked the beans, and so on. My taste of chocolate became a lesson on the interconnectedness of things, and the infinite blessings for which I am grateful. ~ Laura Hillenbrand, #NFDB
1051:Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite. ~ Richard Holmes, #NFDB
1052:You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind—things that exist only there—and clear out space for yourself: . . . by comprehending the scale of the world . . . by contemplating infinite time . . . by thinking of the speed with which things change—each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1053:If we consider what science already has enabled men to know-the immensity of space, the fantastic philosophy of the stars, the infinite smallness of the composition of atoms, the macrocosm whereby we succeed only in creating outlines and translating a measure into numbers without our minds being able to form any concrete idea of it-we remain astounded by the enormous machinery of the universe. ~ Guglielmo Marconi, #NFDB
1054:Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
1055:God wanted man to know him somehow through his creatures, and since no creature could fittingly reflect the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied his creatures and gave a certain goodness and perfection to each of them so that from them we could judge the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who embraces infinite perfection in the perfection of his one and utterly simple essence. ~ Robert Bellarmine, #NFDB
1056:Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe! ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1057:However late you think you are, however many chances you think you have missed, however many mistakes you feel you have made or talents you think you don’t have, or however far from home and family and God you feel you have traveled, I testify that you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ’s Atonement shines. ~ Jeffrey R Holland, #NFDB
1058:And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
1059:One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact. And when he said, “I am God,” a voice was heard to say, “You are mistaken, Samael.” “Samael” means “blind god”: blind to the infinite Light of which he is a local historical manifestation. This is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah—that he thought he was God. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
1060:The key is to understand that our children don't belong to us—they belong to God. Our goal as parents must not be limited by our own vision. I am a finite, sinful, selfish man. Why would I want to plan out my children's future when I can entrust them to the infinite, omnipotent, immutable, sovereign Lord of the universe? I don't want to tell God what to do with my children—I want Him to tell me! ~ Voddie T Baucham Jr, #NFDB
1061:For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1062:The two together-intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis-are the essence of the aesthetic experience. The first constitutes the moment of truth; the second provides the experience of beauty. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process-that 'earthing' process where 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it were, attainable there' (Carlyle). ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1063:From a human point of view, the difference between the mind of a human and that of a mountain goat is wonderful; from the point of view of the infinite ignorance that surrounds us, the difference is not impressive. Indeed, from that point of view, the goat may have the better mind, for he is more congenially adapted to his place, and he would not endanger his species or his planet for the sake of an idea. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
1064:The heart is built of starlight
And time.
A pinprick of longing lost in the dark.
An unbroken chord linking the Infinite to the Infinite.
My heart wishes upon your heart and the wish is granted.
Meanwhile the world spins.
Meanwhile the universe expands.
Meanwhile the mystery of love reveals itself,
again and again, in the mystery of you.
I have gone.
I will return.
Glerk ~ Kelly Barnhill,#NFDB
1065:Transforming the visible into words, and words into images, we stumbled upon the four elements, and upon each others’ expression of Love, Joy, Suffering, Compassion, Curiosity, and most of all, Wonder towards the Forces of Nature. The poetry, photography, drawings, all, attempt to deeper explore the infinite game of Life… We invite you to do the same - dive into your Being and grow with us Inspired… ~ Nata a Nuit Pantovi, #NFDB
1066:When I consider … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me [‘l’infinie immensité des espaces que j’ignore et qui m’ignorent’], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? Pascal, Pensées, ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
1067:Today I want to belong. I want to feel safe and at home. I want to be aware of what it is like simply to be, without defenses or desires. I will appreciate the flow of life for what it is-my own true self. I will notice those moments of intimacy with myself, when I feel that “I am” is enough to sustain me forever. I will lie on the grass at one with nature, expanding until my being fades into the infinite. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1068:In God's case, if He had said in the infinite sovereignty of His absolute will, "I will have no substitute, but each man shall suffer for himself, he who sinneth shall die," none could have murmured. It was grace, and only grace which led the divine mind to say, "I will accept of a substitute. There shall be a vicarious suffering; and My vengeance shall be content, and My mercy shall be gratified. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1069:Love can become devotion. Love is the first step; only then can devotion flower. But for us even love is a faraway reality, sex is the only real thing. Love has two possibilities: either it falls into sex and becomes a bodily thing, or it rises into devotion and becomes a thing of the spirit. Love is just in between. Just below it is the abyss of sex, and beyond it is the open sky - the infinite sky of devotion. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1070:The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite . ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
1071:The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. ~ Lorrie Moore, #NFDB
1072:The “wonder” felt by the shepherds at the Nativity, or the disciples at Pentecost; that sense of amazement when we experience something that is so far beyond our comprehension and yet it is still revealed to us in all its glory as a gift from the infinite. I think we’ve lost our awareness of what “wonder” really means: the more we content ourselves with the narrow confines of our existence, the less we wonder. ~ James Runcie, #NFDB
1073:Having become a citizen of two worlds, the individual must act accordingly. There can be no backsliding, because the individual must reach a state of certainty before this enlightenment is given that makes it utterly and completely impossible to backslide. He cannot ‘get it’ and then fail and turn from it. If he turns from it, it means he never had it. If he fails, he fails himself. He cannot fail the infinite. ~ Manly P Hall, #NFDB
1074:I am a cautious pilgrim of the night, a tentative wanderer among the stars. My awareness of my home in the universe is fleeting and incomplete. Into the homeless home of the sun-faced buddha I have stepped but briefly. My quest, such as it is, is rewarded with faint lights and scrawny cries, a trait here and trait there, a hint of the infinite and a tingle in the spine. Of "minute particulars" I will make my way. ~ Chet Raymo, #NFDB
1075:Having become a citizen of two worlds, the individual must act accordingly. There can be no backsliding, because the individual must reach a state of certainty before this enlightenment is given that makes it utterly and completely impossible to backslide. He cannot 'get it' and then fail and turn from it. If he turns from it, it means he never had it. If he fails, he fails himself. He cannot fail the infinite. ~ Manly P Hall, #NFDB
1076:The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural.
...Out of all bodies together we could not succeed in creating one little thought. It is impossible, and of a different order. Out of all bodies and minds we could not extract one impulse of true charity. It is impossible, and of a different, supernatural, order. ~ Blaise Pascal,#NFDB
1077:Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible... It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1078:Another ship. It’s the best news I could ever have imagined.
Who are they going to send? Who’s coming?
I stare out of the helm window, straining my eyes against the infinite blackness, pressing my fingernails into my palms so hard they sting. I can’t see anything except the silver pinprick stars.
How long until I’ll be able to see The Eternity?
How long until it will be able to see me? ~ Lauren James,#NFDB
1079:For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in
relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from
understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably
concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing
the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. ~ Blaise Pascal,#NFDB
1080:You have no sensitivity that your soul shall leave in the subtle body and that your subtle body is as sophisticated as anything in the universe can be. So unless you produce in yourself elegance, grace, sophisticatedness in your mind, manners and attitude, and unless you come from the infinite altitude, and ascend to that altitude, you cannot descend in love. The higher is your being, the deeper is the love. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi, #NFDB
1081:Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for the well-being of the whole creation. If faith denies anything, it denies that we are tiny, self-obsessed specks of matter who are reaching for the stars but remain hopelessly nailed to the earth stuck in our own self-absorption. Faith is the first part of the bridge from self-centeredness to generosity. ~ Miroslav Volf, #NFDB
1082:I imagine it great vanity in me to suppose that the Supremely Perfect does in the least regard such an inconsiderable nothing as man. More especially, since it is impossible for me to have any positive, clear idea of that which is infinite and incomprehensible, I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
1083:Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but purity, living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realisation. Let there be a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1084:Our human consciousness has windows that open on the Infinite but generally men keep these windows carefully shut. They have to be opened wide and allow the Infinite freely to enter into us and transform us.
Two conditions are necessary for opening the windows:
1) ardent aspiration;
2) progressive dissolution of the ego.
The Divine help is assured to those who set to work sincerely. ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#NFDB
1085:He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some “thing” alien to himself. And he proves that the “thing” exists. He convinces himself: “I am therefore some thing.” And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a “thing,” an “object,” like other finite and limited objects of our thought! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1086:No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached them, and that he would never move beyond them. ~ E L Doctorow, #NFDB
1087:High as it may be, the number of victims is always measurable; and each one taken one by one is never anything but an individual: yet, through time and space, the triumph of the cause embraces the infinite, it interests the whole collectivity. In order to deny the outrage it is enough to deny the importance of the individual, even though it be at the cost of this collectivity: it is everything, he is only a zero. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1088:My body and all its organs were created by the infinite intelligence in my subconscious mind. It knows how to heal me, its wisdom fashioned all my organs, tissues, muscles and bones. This infinite healing presence within me is now transforming every atom of my being making me whole and perfect now. I give thanks for the healing I know is taking place now. Wonderful are the works of the creative intelligence within me. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1089:Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible...
It was more than diginity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,#NFDB
1090:The white magician consecrates his life to study, meditation, and service, that he may know the law and may direct force to its appointed ends. He mods himself into the plan, becoming part of the divine rhythm by sacrificing himself and his wishes to the will of the Infinite, asking only to know wherein his duty lies and how he may be of the greatest service to the greatest number. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics, #NFDB
1091:Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but purity, living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realisation. Let there be a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world.
~ Swami Vivekananda,#NFDB
1092:The white magician consecrates his life to study, meditation, and service, that he may know the law and may direct force to its appointed ends. He mods himself into the plan, becoming part of the divine rhythm by sacrificing himself and his wishes to the will of the Infinite, asking only to know wherein his duty lies and how he may be of the greatest service to the greatest number. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics, #NFDB
1093:As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America. ~ June Jordan, #NFDB
1094:For to define the infinite you must use quantity in your formula, but not substance or quality. If then Being is both substance and quantity, it is two, not one: if only substance, it is not infinite and has no magnitude; for to have that it will have to be a quantity. Again, (5) ‘one’ itself, no less than ‘being’, is used in many senses, so we must consider in what sense the word is used when it is said that the All is one. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1095:Many of us fear that we are not attractive or desirable enough to attract others. We have believed that we are "not enough." Today let's remind ourselves that we all receive our beauty, energy, and light from the same inexhaustible source. As we acknowledge this and begin to love and appreciate ourselves as we are, our channel opens and we have available to us the infinite vitality, beauty, and magnetism of the life force. ~ Shakti Gawain, #NFDB
1096:We are one with the Creator in a very literal sense, as we are an inseparable part of the infinite, intelligent consciousness that not only brings forth physical reality but also makes up its very fabric. Indeed, the energy that makes up the fabric of existence that we looked at in the first two chapters is nothing but the physical manifestation of the nonphysical consciousness that created it all and maintains its existence. ~ Ziad Masri, #NFDB
1097:All time—past, present, future—existed in the instant the universe came into being, but also in all the infinite number of universes that exist alongside one another. Time is one big ocean encompassing all those possible worlds. And so for those who truly understand time and the uses to which it can be put, not only the past and future can be visited, but so can universes floating far, far away from theirs in the sea of time. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1098:Most important, do not ever think that you and God are separate. Think always, "God is with me; He is inside me; He is around me. All there is is God. I myself am God. I am the Infinite, the Eternal. I am not two; I am one, only one. There is no one else besides me. I and God are one and the same." To realize this Unity, the first step is to develop Self-confidence. It comes when you realize that God is not outside of you. ~ Sathya Sai Baba, #NFDB
1099:My body and all its organs were created by the infinite intelligence in my subconscious mind. It knows how to heal me. Its wisdom fashioned all my organs, tissues, muscles, and bones. This infinite healing presence within me is now transforming every cell of my being, making me whole and perfect. I give thanks for the healing I know is taking place at this time. Wonderful are the works of the creative intelligence within me. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1100:This is the picture of Jesus in the gospel. He is something—someone—worth losing everything for. And if we walk away from the Jesus of the gospel, we walk away from eternal riches. The cost of nondiscipleship is profoundly greater for us than the cost of discipleship. For when we abandon the trinkets of this world and respond to the radical invitation of Jesus, we discover the infinite treasure of knowing and experiencing him. ~ David Platt, #NFDB
1101:There are people nobody notices, but the world revolves around them. They're the quiet ones, the strong, peaceful ones, who form the unbreakable hub for a bunch of fragile spokes. True families aren't bred, they're spun together. And at their center, at the center of the infinite wheel of every family of every kind, blood or otherwise, there is a hub, that person, those people, who hold the wheel together and keep it turning. ~ Deborah Smith, #NFDB
1102:At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness. ~ Henri Fr d ric Amiel, #NFDB
1103:By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 57,#NFDB
1104: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, #NFDB
1105:She did not answer. She could not tell what words to use. She was afraid of saying anything, lest the passion of anger, dislike, indignation - whatever it was that was boiling up in her breast - should find vent in cries and screams, or worse, in raging words that could never be forgotten. It was as if the piece of solid ground on which she stood had broken from the shore, and she was drifting out to the infinite sea alone. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
1106:Now Borluut was seeing it from close to. And to its very end, it seemed, from the way the line of the horizon merged into the infinite. It was bare. Not one ship. It ground out a dirge, in a glaucous tone, opaque, uniform. One sensed that all the colours were below, but faded. At the edge, the waves spilling onto the shore made a sound of washerwomen beating sheets of white linen, a whole supply of shrouds for future storms. ~ Georges Rodenbach, #NFDB
1107:The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence. ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
1108:In this way, his unhappy soul struggled with its anguish. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity come together, He too, while the olive trees trembled in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had brushed away the fearful cup that appeared before him, streaming with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths. (pg. 236) ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1109:Prepare yourself for the coming astral journey of death by daily riding in the balloon of God-perception. Through delusion you are perceiving yourself as a bundle of flesh and bones, which at best is a nest of troubles. Meditate unceasingly, that you may quickly behold yourself as the Infinite Essence, free from every form of misery. Cease being a prisoner of the body; using the secret key of KRIYA, learn to escape into Spirit. ~ Lahiri Mahasaya, #NFDB
1110:have quiet sessions with himself three or four times a day and declare solemnly that the Almighty has given him inspiration and hope and all he need do is tune in on the Infinite and let the harmony, peace and love of the Infinite move through him. . I told him to affirm to himself: "God, or the Supreme Wisdom, gave me this desire. The Almighty Power is within me, enabling me to be, to do and to have. This Wisdom and Power of the ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1111:one of her eyes was lower than the other, which gave her a distinguished look, and if she seemed to squint a little, it was not because she had bad vision but because one of her eyes had simply got stuck while staring beyond the treshold of the infinite into the very center of an equilateral triangle, into the very heart of being, or, as a chatolic existentialist put it, her defective eye symbolized the diamond's eternal blemish. ~ Bohumil Hrabal, #NFDB
1112:The body of the average man is like a fifty-watt lamp, which cannot accommodate the billion watts of power roused by an excessive practice of Kriya. Through gradual and regular increase of the simple and foolproof methods of Kriya, man’s body becomes astrally transformed day by day, and is finally fitted to express the infinite potentials of cosmic energy, which constitutes the first materially active expression of Spirit. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1113:What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know. ~ Voltaire,#NFDB
1114:John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain. ~ James Gleick, #NFDB
1115:mountain. I believe that most people today have lost a sense of God’s awesome size. We reduce God to a domesticated, middle-class-sized deity that we can explain and control. He is not. The infinite God staggers the mind. When we try to reduce God to someone we can explain and control, we actually cripple people’s ability to believe in Him. Charles Misner, one of Einstein’s students, explained that the reason Einstein never believed in ~ J D Greear, #NFDB
1116:Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars. You stand in history with stories stretching out both behind and before. We ~ N D Wilson, #NFDB
1117:Christ is God’s Infinite Intelligence that is present in all creation. The Infinite Christ is the “only begotten son” of God the Father, the only pure Reflection of Spirit in the created realm. That Universal Intelligence, the Kutastha Chaitanya or Krishna Consciousness of the Hindu scriptures, was fully manifested in the incarnation of Jesus, Krishna, and other divine ones; and it can be manifested also in your consciousness. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1118:Japanese often use the expression shikata-ga-nai (there is nothing you can do) as a fatalistic response to a given circumstance. They assume that circumstance is all there is; they face that shikata-ga-nai with stoic resignation. But the Christian God offers a reality far greater, a possibility of the infinite breaking through, even though the fallen world is cursed and operates within the limitations of a natural, closed mechanism. ~ Makoto Fujimura, #NFDB
1119:Man did not give himself the taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal. These sublime instincts are not born of a caprice of his will; they have their immovable foundations in his nature; they exist despite his efforts. He can hinder or deform them, but not destroy them. The soul has needs that must be satisfied; and whatever care one takes to distract it from itself, it soon becomes bored, restive, and agitated. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
1120:I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting. ~ James A Michener, #NFDB
1121:Remember that the frequencies of soul consciousness, or spirit, as outlined in chapter one, include the fastest vibrations of surrender, love, relationship to the infinite, quiet emptiness, generosity, and gratitude, feeling connected rather than separate, and finally a sense of cheerfulness. These are my definitions and they could include many subareas such as faith, hope, patience, sympathy, kindness, forgiveness, and noninterference. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1122:Let us realise [that] we are the infinite power. Who put a limit to the power of mind? Let us realise we are all mind. Every drop has the whole of the ocean in it. That is the mind of man. The Indian mind reflects upon these [powers and potentialities] and wants to bring [them] all out. For himself he doesn't care what happens. It will take a great length of time [to reach perfection]. If it takes fifty thousand years, what of that! ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1123:… an Emperor says, "I will kill you if you do not come", and the man bursts into a laugh and says, "You never told such a falsehood in your life, as you tell just now. Who can kill me? Me you kill, Emperor of the material world! Never! For I am Spirit unborn and undecaying; never was I born and never do I die; I am the Infinite, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient; and you kill me, child that you are!" That is strength, that is strength! ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1124:Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the wido-making unchilding unfathering deeps.
(from "The Wreck of the Deutschland, Part the Second") ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins,#NFDB
1125:Know that you are God/the Universe and that anywhere you aim/focus your consciousness you create reality in one of the infinite physical and nonphysical realms. It all begins with thought, contemplation, prayer, dreams, plans, desires or any method of focusing your consciousness. If you wish to praise or blame God/the Universe for something, you should do it in a mirror. It is you and has always been you in charge of all reality. ~ Russell Anthony Gibbs, #NFDB
1126:The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Nothing worthwhile is easy. Your ability to overcome unfavorable situations will provide you with time to demonstrate your true strength and determination for success. Always set your standards high, your greatest achievements lie within the infinite feats you achieve in your life. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1127:For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées No. 72 ~ Blaise Pascal,#NFDB
1128:My body and all its organs were created by the infinite intelligence in my subconscious mind. It knows how to heal me. Its wisdom created all my organs, tissues, bones, and muscles. This infinite healing presence within me is now transforming every atom of my being, making me whole and perfect. I give thanks for the healing I know is taking place now. Wonderful are the works of the creative intelligence within me! I am now perfectly healthy. ~ John Assaraf, #NFDB
1129:So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breathe of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1130:I know not what discoveries, what inventions, what thoughts may leap from the brain of the world. I know not what garments of glory may be woven by the years to come. I cannot dream of the victories to be won upon the fields of thought; but I do know, that coming from the infinite sea of the future, there will never touch this 'bank and shoal of time' a richer gift, a rarer blessing than liberty for man, for woman, and for child. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
1131:Knowledge is inherent in man; no knowledge comes from outside; it is all inside. We say Newton discovered gravitation. Was it sitting anywhere waiting for him? It was in his own mind; the time came and he found it out. All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own mind. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1132:Solve all your problems through meditation. Exchange unprofitable religious speculations for actual God-contact. Clear your mind of dogmatic theological debris; let in the fresh, healing waters of direct perception. Attune yourself to the active inner Guidance; the Divine Voice has the answer to every dilemma of life. Through man's ingenuity for getting himself into trouble appears to be endless, the Infinite Succor is no less resourceful. ~ Lahiri Mahasaya, #NFDB
1133:Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers. ~ Patti Smith, #NFDB
1134:As I walked in the woods I felt what I often feel that nothing can befall me in life, no calamity, no disgrace (leaving me my eyes) to which Nature will not offer a sweet consolation. Standing on the bare ground with my head bathed by the blithe air, & uplifted into the infinite space, I become happy in my universal relations. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign & accidental. I am the heir of uncontained beauty and power. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1135:In truth, Father said, at the first instant of the universe, all of time was present, all our yesterdays and today and all our tomorrows, everyone and everything that was and ever would be existed at that moment. But more amazing still, in the first instant that the universe came into existence, the fabric of it also included all the infinite ways that things might have been, countless of them terrible in the extreme and countless others glorious. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1136:As the smallest drop of water detached from the ocean contains all the qualities of the ocean, so man, detached in consciousness from the Infinite, contains within him its likeness; and as the drop of water must, by the law of its nature, ultimately find its way back to the ocean and lose itself in its silent depths, so must man, by the unfailing law of his nature, at last return to his source, and lose himself in the great ocean of the Infinite. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1137:In the Father the infinite Love of God is always beginning and in the Son it is always full and in the Holy Spirit it is perfect and it is renewed and never ceases to rest in its everlasting source. But if you follow Love forward and backward from Person to Person, you can never track it to a stop, you can never corner it and hold it down and fix it to one of the Persons as if He could appropriate to Himself the fruit of the love of the others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1138:Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling.... Of that which is in mortal in mortals, and possessed of the truth, is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers.... Become high uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in as the things of the Godhead. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
1139:Spirit must be cultivated; it must be nourished and encouraged. If it is, then a child's innocent spirit grows up to be strong enough to withstand the harsh realities of an often unspiritual world.
Losing touch with spirit does nothing to the infinite field of creativity, which is beyond harm, but it can do much to damage a person's chances in life. With spirit we are all children of the cosmos; without it we are orphaned and set adrift. ~ Deepak Chopra,#NFDB
1140:Spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind. It is this dominant inclination of India which gives character to all the expressions of her culture. In fact, they have grown out of her inborn spiritual tendency of which her religion is a natural out flowering. The Indian mind has always realized that the Supreme is the Infinite and perceived that to the soul in Nature the Infinite must always present itself in an infinite variety of aspects. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
1141:Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity. ~ Kent Nerburn, #NFDB
1142:The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Thoreau: ‘Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations…’ Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1143:All space, all time, The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns, Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use, Fill'd with eidolons only. The noiseless myriads, The infinite oceans where the rivers empty, The separate countless free identities, like eyesight, The true realities, eidolons. Not this the world, Nor these the universes, they the universes, Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life, Eidolons, eidolons... ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
1144:hat a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe—why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1145:Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad. ~ Frederick C Beiser, #NFDB
1146:Reign is no doubt wording that is a little too grand for the contemporary mind, though what it refers to is what everyone actually pursues in life. We have been trained to think of “reigning” as exclusionary of others. But in the heart of the divine conspiracy, it just means to be free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good. In the life of prayer we are training for, we reign in harmonious union with the infinite power of God. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
1147:Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
1148:The round silence of night,
one note on the stave
of the infinite.
Ripe with lost poems,
I step naked into the street.
The blackness riddled
by the singing of crickets:
sound,
that dead
will-o'-the-wisp,
that musical light
perceived
by the spirit.
A thousand butterfly skeletons
sleep within my walls.
A wild crowd of young breezes
over the river.
- Hour of Stars (1920) ~ Federico Garc a Lorca,#NFDB
1149:What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1150:Jesus is the guarantee of the promises. He that spared not his own Son will deny nothing to his people. If he had ever thought of drawing back, he would have done so before he had made the infinite sacrifice of his only-begotten Son. Never can there be a suspicion that the Lord will revoke any one of the promises since he has already fulfilled the greatest and most costly of them all. “How shall he not with him also freely give us all things? ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1151:that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1152:It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. . . . The fact is, though, that if you descend into the depths of your own spirit and arrive somewhere near the center of what you are, you are confronted with the inescapable truth that, at the very root of your existence, you are in constant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1153:Your spirit is protected by nature itself, you need not be afraid of it: you need not be afraid and insecure because your being is protected by the whole of existence. But the help is unconscious, it is not deliberate. And you cannot manipulate it- you have to be in a let-go so that the cosmic force can work through you. If you become deliberate, you become tense. If you become tense, you become narrow. If you become narrow, the infinite cannot work through you. ~ Osho, #NFDB
1154:Life is the most precious and wondrous thing that any of us have. Along the way, one of the real miracles occurs when we realize that what really matters is to deepen our relationship to ourselves and that to do this we have to enter a spiritual journey. We have to discover anew, or for the first time, our own relationship to the Infinite. We must begin to risk trusting a whole new level of intimacy with ourselves, life and the people whose lives we touch. ~ Richard Moss, #NFDB
1155:The flowers that we see all around us are beautiful, beautiful is the rising of the morning sun, beautiful are the variegated hues of nature. The whole universe is beautiful, and man has been enjoying it since his appearance on earth. Sublime and awe-inspiring are the mountains; the gigantic rushing rivers rolling towards the sea, the trackless deserts, the infinite ocean, the starry heavens — all these are awe-inspiring, sublime, and beautiful indeed. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1156:I've never been able to forget the infinite little smile of pure affection that danced across his livid face. Enough gaiety to fill the universe.
Few people past twenty preserve any of the affection, the affection of animals. This world isn't what we expected. So our looks change! They change plenty! We made a mistake! And turned into a thorough stinker in next to no time! Past twenty it shows in our face! A mistake! Our face is just a mistake! ~ Louis Ferdinand C line,#NFDB
1157: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, #NFDB
1158:Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and
yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science
and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and
infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy,
of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a
zero – and an infinity. ~ Charles Seife,#NFDB
1159:I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
1160:Let us meditate until we perceive the Infinite Christ reigning in our own hearts. Let us learn to love those who love us not; and to forgive those who do ill against us. Let us break all our mental boundaries of color, creed, and nationality, and receive all - even our inanimate and animal brothers - in the endless, all embracing arms of our Christ Consciousness. This will be a true and fitting celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ to this earth. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1161:And when I hear it said that God is good and He will pardon us, and then see that men cease not from evil-doing, oh, how it grieves me! The infinite goodness with which God communicates with us, sinners as we are, should constantly make us love and serve Him better; but we, on the contrary, instead of seeing in his goodness an obligation to please Him, convert it into an excuse for sin which will of a certainty lead in the end to our deeper condemnation. ~ Catherine of Genoa, #NFDB
1162:Patanjali, declares that the true secret of evolution is the manifestation of the perfection which is already in every being; that this perfection has been barred and the infinite tide behind is struggling to express itself. These struggles and competitions are but the results of our ignorance, because we do not know the proper way to unlock the gate and let the water in. This infinite tide behind must express itself; it is the cause of all manifestation. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1163:as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1164:I know that in many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be that? Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity, but I cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can man form any definite opinions about himself?. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
1165:We are here to become great men and women, and with that purpose in view, we must eliminate everything in our religion and philosophy that tends to make the human mind a dependent weakling. If you would serve God and be truly religious, do not kneel before God, but learn to walk with God, and do something tangible every day to increase the happiness of mankind. This is religion that is worth while, and it is such religion alone that can please the Infinite. ~ Christian D Larson, #NFDB
1166:...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1167:faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live… ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1168:Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
1169:The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, "You have forgotten - Mine?"
A meditation on her fathers death. ~ Flannery O Connor,#NFDB
1170:faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1171:Man is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality. You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite-a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
1172:A word, and all the infinite fluctuations it may possess. Like that moment when you know you have something to say, and you know you're speaking, even, but you still have no idea how you will say it. Or the moment when, as a reader, you're reading, and you are understanding what you are reading, but still have utterly no idea what will come next for you, what precisely the author wants to say. For me, that is the ultimate level of literary depth, of literary density. ~ Sergio Chejfec, #NFDB
1173:We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1174:I realized once again that what I believed myself to be was an arbitrary deformation, a rational mask floating in the infinite unexplored internal shadows. Later, I understood that diseases do not actually sicken us; they sicken what we believe ourselves to be. Health is achieved by overcoming prohibitions, quitting paths that are not right for us, ceasing to pursue imposed ideals, and becoming ourselves: the impersonal consciousness that does not define itself. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky, #NFDB
1175:The true value of the Christian religion rests, not upon speculative views of the Creator, which must necessarily be different in each individual, according to the extent of the knowledge of the finite being, who employs his own feeble powers in contemplating the infinite: but it rests upon those doctrines of kindness and benevolence which that religion claims and enforces, not merely in favour of man himself but of every creature susceptible of pain or of happiness. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
1176:If the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up. Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything - there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible. But there's another way. There are stories. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1177:That is why I opened Santiniketan under the shady trees and the glories of the sky.” He motioned eloquently to a little group studying in the beautiful garden. “A child is in his natural setting amidst the flowers and songbirds. Only thus may he fully express the hidden wealth of his individual endowment. True education can never be crammed and pumped from without; rather, it must aid in bringing spontaneously to the surface the infinite hoards of wisdom within. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1178:We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression, the infinite seas, the wild rocks, the melancholy language of the black trees in the snow, the wild strength of spring flowers and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer day when Pan, our old friend, sleeps and the ghosts of midday whisper. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
1179:Extremes are for us as though they were not, and we are not within their notice. They escape us, or we them. This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance... This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1180:...if we know God our knowledge of... everything will be brought to perfection, and, in so far as is possible, the infinite, divine and ineffable dwelling place (cf. Jn. 14:2) will be ours to enjoy. For this is what our sainted teacher said in his famous philosophical aphorism: 'Then we shall know as we are known' (I Cor. 13:12), when we mingle our god-formed mind and divine reason to what is properly its own and the image returns to the archetype for which it now longs. ~ Pope Dionysius, #NFDB
1181:1078
They Leave Us With The Infinite
350
They leave us with the Infinite.
But He—is not a man—
His fingers are the size of fists—
His fists, the size of men—
And whom he foundeth, with his Arm
As Himmaleh, shall stand—
Gibraltar's Everlasting Shoe
Poised lightly on his Hand,
So trust him, Comrade—
You for you, and I, for you and me
Eternity is ample,
And quick enough, if true.
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1182:In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
1183:Take life as it comes and death as it comes. Death is really beautiful; if it were a bad thing, God would not let it happen to us. It is really freedom, an entry into another, higher life. We must utilize this life in order to realize the life beyond this one. Beyond this earth garden is the infinite land wherein we meet those whom we have thought lost. Although we must not seek death, when it comes we should know that it is the final examination for a great reward. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1184:WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert. ~ Edmond Jabes, #NFDB
1185:Every possible physical manifestation first exists as invisible, faster vibrating energy in the source energy field. Everything is possible in the infinite energy field. If your personal consciousness is aligned with the source energy field, your desired manifestations will be brought into physical reality with relative ease. If you are misaligned with the source energy field, you will struggle to manifest your desires and will often manifest unwanted things instead. ~ Russell Anthony Gibbs, #NFDB
1186:One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature-inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe. ~ John Muir, #NFDB
1187:At this moment the headmaster found Master Wesendonck's tall pile of books slipping from his grasp. He juggled frantically with them for a moment and then, to the infinite joy of the boarders and day boys, they crashed to the ground in all directions. A bevy of form masters rushed forward to the rescue. Master Wesendonck, realising with immense presence of mind that his natural enemies were for once in their proper place, grovelling on the floor, stood still and did nothing. ~ Angela Thirkell, #NFDB
1188:May today be peace within. May you trust your highest power that you are exactly where you are meant to be... May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you... May you be content knowing you are a child of God... Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love. It is there for each and every one of you. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
1189:That which comes out of the Infinite Whole must also be infinite; hence the Self is infinite. That is the ocean, we are the drops. So long as the drop remains separate from the ocean, it is small and weak; but when it is one with the ocean, then it has all the strength of the ocean. Similarly, so long as man believes himself to be separate from the Whole, he is helpless; but when he identifies himself with It, then he transcends all weakness and partakes of Its omnipotent qualities. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1190:And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
1191:... for as the reality of light cannot be proved or described in terms of visible shape, the reality of the infinite cannot be proved in terms of the finite. For this reason every attempt to prove the existence of God by logic is a foregone failure. Logic cannot reach God. It may travel backwards in time from effect to cause, effect to cause, but as long as it stays in time, as it must, it cannot touch the eternal. That which doesn't not begin with the infinite cannot end with it. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1192:We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.” Other ~ John le Carr, #NFDB
1193:May today there be peace within May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith May you use those gifts that you have received and pass on the love that has been given to you May you be content knowing that you are a child of God Let this presence settle into your bones and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love It is there for each and every one of us. —Saint Teresa of Avila ~ Maria Shriver, #NFDB
1194:We trample the blood of the Son of God underfoot if we think we are forgiven because we are sorry for our sins. The only reason for the forgiveness of our sins by God, and the infinite depth of His promise to forget them, is the death of Jesus Christ...No matter who or what we are, God restores us to right standing with Himself only by means of the death of Jesus Christ...To identify with the death of Jesus Christ means that we must die to everything that was never a part of Him. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
1195:The Admirations—and Contempts—of Time
906
The Admirations—and Contempts—of time—
Show justest—through an Open Tomb—
The Dying—as it were a Height
Reorganizes Estimate
And what We saw not
We distinguish clear—
And mostly—see not
What We saw before—
'Tis Compound Vision—
Light—enabling Light—
The Finite—furnished
With the Infinite—
Convex—and Concave Witness—
Back—toward Time—
And forward—
Toward the God of Him—
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
1196:Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling. . . . That which is immortal in mortals and possessed of the truth, is a god and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers. . . . Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead. Vamadeva - Rig Veda.2 ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, #NFDB
1197:All the species recognized by Botanists came forth from the Almighty Creator's hand, and the number of these is now and always will be exactly the same, while every day new and different florists' species arise from the true species so-called by Botanists, and when they have arisen they finally revert to the original forms. Accordingly to the former have been assigned by Nature fixed limits, beyond which they cannot go: while the latter display without end the infinite sport of Nature. ~ Carl Linnaeus, #NFDB
1198:And it isn’t only that I don’t believe it. I can’t. “I can’t believe it because my reason tells me that such a system, in which anyone dictates our every move—be it a god, or a devil, or our subconscious mind, or our tyrannical genesis simply impossible. “Life itself must be founded upon the infinite possibility for choice and accident. And if we cannot prove that it is, we must believe that it is. We must believe that we can change, that we can control, that we can direct our own destinies. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1199:On the brink of mystery, the spirit of man is seized with giddiness. Mystery is the abyss which ceaselessly attracts our unquiet curiosity by the terror of its depth. The greatest mystery of the infinite is the existence of Him for whom alone all is without mystery. Comprehending the infinite which is essentially incomprehensible, He is Himself that infinite and eternally unfathomable mystery; that is to say, that He is, in all seeming, that supreme absurdity in which Tertullian believed. ~ liphas L vi, #NFDB
1200:When you are trained, like a great athlete, to immediately relax through your edges when they get hit, then it’s all over. You realize that you will always be fine. Nothing can ever bother you except your edges, and now you know what to do with them. You end up loving your edges because they point your way to freedom. All you have to do is constantly relax and lean into them. Then one day, when you least expect it, you fall through into the infinite. That is what it means to go beyond. ~ Michael A Singer, #NFDB
1201:377. God made the infinite world by Self-knowledge which in its works is Will-Force self-fulfilling. He used ignorance to limit His infinity; but fear, weariness, depression, self-distrust and assent to weakness are the instruments by which He destroys what He created. When these things are turned on what is evil or harmful & ill-regulated within thee, then it is well; but if they attack thy very sources of life & strength, then seize & expel them or thou diest.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human,#NFDB
1202:Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain’s lean, suffering frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and what matters did God occupy Himself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other people to protect him from? Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. ~ Joseph Heller, #NFDB
1203:To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of caterpillars. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1204:For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to liberate himself from the dungeon cell of his life. ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
1205:To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin - or meaningful good - than ants, or dust. ~ Alastair Reynolds, #NFDB
1206:When we think of the height of God's infinity we should not despair of His compassion reaching us from such a height; and when we recall the infinite depth of our fall through sin we should not refuse to believe that the virtue which has been killed in us will rise again. For God can accomplish both these things: He can come down and illumine our intellect with spiritual knowledge, and He can raise up the virtue within us and exalt it with Himself through works of righteousness. ~ Saint Maximus the Confessor, #NFDB
1207:Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1208:The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me? It is impossible for there to be a person with no religion (i.e. without any kind of relationship to the world) as it is for there to be a person without a heart. He may not know that he has a religion, just as a person may not know that he has a heart, but it is no more possible for a person to exist without a religion than without a heart. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1209:We Hindus do not merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the Cross of the Christian. We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite. So we gather all these flowers and, binding them together with the cords of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship. ~ Seraphim Rose, #NFDB
1210:Do you know, my friends, that the Spirit within you is very God? Oh that our eyes were opened to see the greatness of God’s gift! Oh that we might realize the vastness of the resources secreted in our own hearts! I could shout with joy as I think, “The Spirit who dwells within me is no mere influence, but a living Person; He is very God. The infinite God is within my heart!” I am at a loss to convey to you the blessedness of this discovery, that the Holy Spirit dwelling within my heart is a Person. ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB
1211:May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us." ... ~ Saint Terese of Liseaux, #NFDB
1212:The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar, #NFDB
1213:I have sought Thee daily at dawn and twilight, I have stretched my hands to Thee, turned my face, Now the cry of a heart athirst I will utter, Like the beggar who cries at my door for grace. The infinite heights are too small to contain Thee, Yet perchance Thou canst niche in the clefts of me. Shall my heart not treasure the hope to gain Thee, Or my yearning fail till my tongue's last plea? Nay, surely Thy name I will worship, while breath in my nostrils be.
~ Solomon ibn Gabirol, I Sought Thee Daily
,#NFDB
1214:The infinite seeks manifestation. It projects itself as the point, defined by its position, one coordinate. Further seeking fulfillment, the point extends outward to become the line, now adding the concept of reference to another, creating length, reaching to infinity. But by manifesting a third point, and forming the triangle, the point has defined itself in relation to two others, and it has become a self-contained unit, the plane, fully independent in two dimensions, at rest in perfect harmony. ~ James Wasserman, #NFDB
1215:Rest in inaction, and the world will be reformed of itself; Forget your body and spit forth intelligence. Ignore all differences and become one with the Infinite. Release your mind, and free your spirit. Be vacuous, be devoid of soul. Thus will things grow and prosper and return to their Rust and Rest. Returning to their Root. Returning to their Root without their knowing it, the result will be a formless whole which will never be cut up, to know it is to cut it up. (Great Nebulous says to General Clouds) ~ Zhuangzi, #NFDB
1216:The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers - by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work - is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN? ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
1217:In the endless universe there has been nothing new, nothing different. What has appeared exceptional to the minute mind of man has been inevitable to the infinite Eye of God. This strange second in a life, that unusual event, those remarkable coincidences of environment, opportunity, and encounter … all of them have been reproduced over and over on the planet of a sun whose galaxy revolves once in two hundred million years and has revolved nine times already. There has been joy. There will be joy again. ~ Alfred Bester, #NFDB
1218:The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1219:here are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
1220:I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality. ~ Laurent Binet, #NFDB
1221:Man stands in materialism; you and I are materialists. Our talking about God and Spirit is good; but it is simply the vogue in our society to talk thus: we have learnt it parrot-like and repeat it. So we have to take ourselves where we are as materialists, and must take the help of matter and go on slowly until we become real spiritualists, and feel ourselves spirits, understand the spirit, and find that this world which we call the infinite is but a gross external form of that world which is behind. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1222:Reason is the true creative power, for it produces itself as Infinite Self-consciousness, and its ongoing creation is...world history. As the only power that exists, Spirit can therefore be determined by nothing other than itself, that is, its essence is Freedom...Freedom is the infinite power of Spirit...Freedom, the only End of Spirit, is also the only End of History, and history is nothing other than Spirit's becoming *conscious* of its Freedom, or the becoming of Real, Free, Infinite Self-consciousness. ~ Bruno Bauer, #NFDB
1223:The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1224:There are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
1225:In everything, depend upon yourself, but work in harmony with all things. Do not depend even upon the Infinite, but learn to work and live in harmony with the Infinite. The highest teachings of the Christ reveal most clearly the principle that no soul was created to be a mere helpless instrument in the hands of Supreme Power, but that every soul should act and live in perfect oneness with that Power. And the promise is that we all are not only to do the things that Christ did, but even greater things. ~ Christian D Larson, #NFDB
1226:Rather, we look in wonder at the infinite space beyond the boundaries of what we currently understand, and dare to step into that unbounded terrain, discovering new problems as we find new solutions, as great scientists do. As the philosopher Karl Popper put it: ‘it is part of the greatness and beauty of science that we can learn through our own critical investigations that the world is utterly different from what we ever imagined – until our imagination was fired by the refutation of our earlier theories’.1 ~ Matthew Syed, #NFDB
1227:Solitude is used to teach us how to live with other people. Rage is used to show us the infinite value of peace. Boredom is used to underline the importance of adventure & spontaneity. Silence is used to teach us to use words responsibly. Tiredness is used so that we can understand the value of waking up. Illness is used to underline the blessing of good health. Fire is used to teach us about water. Earth is used so that we can understand the value of air. Death is used to show us the importance of life. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1228:And then she says, “I feel all these footsteps come loose from the stairs and move forward in the void, then plunge… a crowd falling…” And she digs in her heels. I look through the spaces between the iron steps at the colorless flow of the river down below, transporting chunks of ice like white clouds. In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one, opens into another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1229:What is the idea of God in heaven? Materialism. The Vedantic idea is the infinite principle of God embodied in every one of us. God sitting up on a cloud! Think of the utter blasphemy of it! It is materialism - downright materialism. When babies think this way, it may be all right, but when grown - up men try to teach such things, it is downright disgusting - that is what it is. It is all matter, all body idea, the gross idea, the sense idea. Every bit of it is clay and nothing but clay. Is that religion? ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1230:God created you for a love relationship with Him. He yearns for you to love Him and respond to His immeasurable love for you. God's nature is perfect, holy, total love. He will never relate to you in any other way although you may not always understand His actions. There will be times when you do not comprehend why He allows certain things to occur, and that is to be expected. He is the infinite God while we are limited human creatures. He sees the eternal ramifications of everything that happens. We don't. ~ Henry T Blackaby, #NFDB
1231:May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be content knowing you are a child of God.
Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us. ~ Teresa of vila,#NFDB
1232:If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can re-create ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. That's what the voices said. They said that content is what a man harbors but does not parade. And I love a parade. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
1233:Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.~ Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, #NFDB
1234:The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.
Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. ~ C S Lewis,#NFDB
1235:When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1236:One of the greatest ideas that has ever been produced is the Hindu idea that the world is a drama in which the central and supreme self behind all existence has gotten lost and has come to believe that it is not the one supreme self, but all the creatures that there are. It has come to believe in its own artistry. And the more involved, the more anxious, the more finite, the more limited the infinite manages to feel itself to be, the greater that artistry, the greater the depth of the illusion that it has created. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1237:There must necessarily be agreement between a reason coming from God and a revelation coming from God.46 Let us say, then, that faith teaches truths which seem contrary to reason; let us not say that it teaches propositions contrary to reason. The rustic thinks it contrary to reason that the sun should be larger than the earth. But this proposition seems reasonable to the scientist.47 Let us rest assured that apparent incompatibility between faith and reason is similarly reconciled in the infinite wisdom of God. ~ tienne Gilson, #NFDB
1238:O son of earth, be blind and thou shalt see My beauty; be deaf and thou shalt hear My sweet song, My pleasant melody; be ignorant and thou shalt partake My knowledge; be in distress and thou shalt have an eternal portion of the infinite ocean of My riches:—blind to all that is not My beauty, deaf to all that is not My word, ignorant of all that is not My knowledge. Thus with a gaze that is pure, a spirit without stain, an understanding refined, thou shalt enter into my sacred presence. ~ Baha-ullah, “The Hidden Words in Persian.”, #NFDB
1239:In the West, there was an old debate as to whether mathematical reality was made by mathematicians or, existing independently, was merely discovered by them. Ramanujan was squarely in the latter camp; for him, numbers and their mathematical relationships fairly threw off clues to how the universe fit together. Each new theorem was one more piece of the Infinite unfathomed. So he wasn’t being silly, or sly, or cute when later he told a friend, “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God. ~ Robert Kanigel, #NFDB
1240:You don’t understand the depth of my feelings for you. It has nothing to do with the shell of you. You are my other skin. Do I doubt my own flesh?” He shook his head. “No. Love is too shallow a word for what I feel. We are part of something bigger than ourselves. Like the earth is nothing without the pull of the moon, and night would never know light without the sun’s transformative burn. You and I together are part of the infinite that is. Without you, I am nothing, not even an afterthought of the universe.” Fiona ~ Elaine Levine, #NFDB
1241:But caveat lector: life is waiting, and to read about someone who writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality. ~ Clive James, #NFDB
1242:THE INFINITE CREATOR Assume, if you will, that there exists an infinite Being. There is nothing outside this Being because it is literally infinite. So it is everything and it is One thing simultaneously. It is inherently non-dual. And in non-duality there is no subject and object. There is only Beingness. Assume also that the nature of this infinite, non-dual Being is pure love. But because nothing else exists for this Being to express that love, it is unpotentiated love that is in a state of pure, infinite potential. ~ Ziad Masri, #NFDB
1243:What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
1244:Finally you come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure... except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap... the desire to know it all and still be you, "the knower." This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can't know it all. The goal is non-dualistic - as long as there is a "knower" and "known" you are in dualism. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
1245:That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space. ~ Vladimir Bartol, #NFDB
1246:Do not be thinking of how little you have to bring God, but of how much He wants to give you. Just place yourself before, and look up into, His face; think of His love, His wonderful, tender, pitying love. Just tell Him how sinful and cold and dark all is: it is the Father's loving heart will give light and warmth to yours. O do what Jesus says: Just shut the door, and pray to thy Father, which is in secret. Is it not wonderful? to be able to go alone with God, the infinite God. And then to look up and say: My Father! ~ Andrew Murray, #NFDB
1247:God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
1248:Instead, when you have a symptom—when you feel cloudy, sad, sore, gassy, weepy, tired, or unnecessarily anxious—bring some wonder to it. Ask why and try to make the connections. Your body’s symptoms are telling you something about equilibrium. Your body is trying to tell you that it has lost balance. Stand back and appreciate the infinite complexity of your organism. Know that fear will only drive you to treat your body like a robotic machine that needs oil and gear changes. We are so much more than buttons and levers. ~ Kelly Brogan, #NFDB
1249:What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1250:The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
1251:ANARCHISM (from the Gr. , and , contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. ~ Peter Kropotkin, #NFDB
1252: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, #NFDB
1253:Idiot. Above her head was the only stable point in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business. A moment later the couple went off -- he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter -- their first and last encounter -- with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude? ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1254:Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is [exists]. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. . . There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain. ~ Ian Stewart, #NFDB
1255:Space
From the trees the leaves came down
until we joined hands with a wand
and that act enabled them
somehow then to reach the ground
where they scuttered round our feet
urging the latter to unite
with a baton as if that act
together with the hands can clasp
a dowsing-stick cut from the same
branch from which we launched
converging on gravity's purge-point
at which point we merged to remove
all consonants from our star-maps.
The infinite consists of vowels alone.
~ Bill Knott,#NFDB
1256:Standardisation of intellectual and emotional patterns had become extreme. A main mechanism for achieving this was a device that supplied identical indoctrinational material simultaneously into every living or working unit, whether that of a single person, a family, or an institution, through a whole country. These programmes were standardised, particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic—kindness to animals, for instance—but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition. ~ Doris Lessing, #NFDB
1257:He carries the lambs in His bosom." Here is boundless affection. Would He put them in His bosom if He did not love them much? Here is tender nearness: so near are they, that they could not possibly be nearer. Here is hallowed familiarity: there are precious love-passages between Christ and His weak ones. Here is perfect safety: in His bosom who can hurt them? They must hurt the Shepherd first. Here is perfect rest and sweetest comfort. Surely we are not sufficiently sensible of the infinite tenderness of Jesus! ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1258:Personal prayer, it seems to me, is one of the simplest necessities of life, as basic to the individual as sunshine, food and water-and at times, of course, more so. By prayer I mean an effort to get in touch with the Infinite. We know that our prayers are imperfect. Of course they are. We are imperfect human beings. A thousand experiences have convinced me beyond room of doubt that prayer multiplies the strength of the individual and brings within the scope of his capabilities almost any conceivable objective. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
1259:And in all shalt thou create the Infinite Bliss and the next link of the Infinite Chain. This chain reaches from Eternity to Eternity, ever in triangles—is not my symbol a triangle?—ever in circles—is not the symbol of the Beloved a circle? Therein is all progress base illusion, for every circle is alike and every triangle alike! But the progress is progress, and progress is rapture, constant, dazzling, showers of light, waves of dew, flames of the hair of the Great Goddess, flowers of the roses that are about her neck, Amen! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1260:Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
1261:To crush out fanaticism and revere the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and to reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1262:It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light’s sake. Perhaps he even permits the culpable bondage we spoke of earlier to exist for this reason. It is as if, as the Revelation of St. John portrays it, the infinite black smoke which rises from the mouth of hell, darkening the air and the sun (Rev 9:2), is only permitted so that, ultimately, God’s immaculate light may shine all the more brilliantly. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, #NFDB
1263:The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote. ~ William Blake,#NFDB
1264:He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
1265:The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers-by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work-is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN? ~ Aleister Crowley, Little Essays Towards Truth, #NFDB
1266:The charge of blasphemy is loaded. The point is to pack a wallop behind the charge that in our worship services God simply doesn't come through for who he is. He is unwittingly belittled. For those who are stunned by the indescribable magnitude of what God has made, not to mention the infinite greatness of the One who made it, the steady diet on Sunday morning of practical how-to's and psychological soothing and relational therapy and tactical planning seem dramatically out of touch with Reality - the God of overwhelming greatness. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1267:I know that western sky. Sometimes when I'm alone painting, a blind lifts and I let my mind drift back. I remember walking out into the red sun in Canyon until the night fell. I'd lie down on the scorched hardness of the desert floor, looking up at the stars raining down like small silver bullets into me.
It was all I wanted then – to feel that roar of the infinite that exists within our finite selves. At times it seemed unbearable – that hunger I felt once – like the edges of my skin could not contain it.
I miss that. ~ Dawn Tripp,#NFDB
1268:The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse... By misuse, I mean that people who have never glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statmeent "God is dead. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1269:States of consciousness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal Life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience. To arrive at such states of consciousness may, for the individual, be one of the most important and indispensable steps of his progress towards self-perfection.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#NFDB
1270:I believe what we call the Renaissance artists' preoccupation with structure has a very practical basis in their needs to know the schema of things. For in a away our very concept of "structure," the idea of some basic scaffolding or armature that determines the "essence" of things, reflects our need for a schema with which to grasp the infinite variety of this world of change. No wonder these issues have become somewhat clouded by metaphysical fog which settled over the discussions of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ~ E H Gombrich, #NFDB
1271:4.13. The most striking aspect of Dedekind's definition is that it determines infinity positively, and subordinates the finite negatively. This is its especially modern accent, such as is almost always found in Dedekind. An infinite system has a property of an existential nature: there exists a biunivocal correspondence between it and one of its proper parts. The finite is that for which such a property does not obtain. The finite is simply that which is not infinite, and all the positive simplicity of thought hinges on the infinite. ~ Alain Badiou, #NFDB
1272:Critics are much madder than poets... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1273:The person in misery does not need a look that judges and criticizes but a comforting presence that brings peace and hope and life and says: 'you are a human person: important, mysterious, infinitely precious, what you have to say is important because it flows from a humn person; in you there are those seeds of the infinite, those germs of love... of beauty which must rise from the earth of your misery so humanity be fulfilled. If you do not rise then something will be missing... Rise again because we all need you... be loved beloved.' ~ Jean Vanier, #NFDB
1274:Kierkegaard put it this way: But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself… does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1275:Rest forever, tired heart.
The final illusion has perished.
The one we believed eternal is gone.
Just like that. Out the door desire
follows hope. Rest forever.
Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention
nor is the earth worth a sigh.
Bitterness and boredom is life,
nothing else ever, and the world is mud.
Quiet now. Despair for the last time.
Fate gives us dying as a gift.
Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power
which rules for the common evil
and the infinite vanity of it all. ~ Giacomo Leopardi,#NFDB
1276:So what Jesus taught must be understood from the deepest level and that is one of the best sayings to show that he was talking in that way. In the book Revelations from Christ, I found out something that Yogananda said. That Jesus had said son of men and son of God, and people often misunderstand so sometimes the translations themselves are wrong for that reason. So when he said son of man he meant his human body and personality. When he said son of God, he meant the infinite Christ consciousness with which he'd obtained oneness. ~ Goswami Kriyananda, #NFDB
1277:Take the case of the infinite ocean. There is no limit to its water. Suppose a pot is immersed in it: there is water both inside and outside the pot. The jnani sees that both inside and outside there is nothing but Paramatman. Then what is this pot? It is 'I-consciousness'. Because of the pot the water appears to be divided into two parts; because of the pot you seem to perceive an inside and an outside. One feels that way as long as this pot of 'I' exists. When the 'I' disappears, what is remains. That cannot be described in words. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
1278:Do not entertain the notion that you ought to advance in your prayer. If you do, you will only find you have put on the brake instead of the acceleration. All real progress in spiritual things comes gently, imperceptibly, and is the work of God. Our crude efforts spoil it. Know yourself for the childish, limited and dependent soul you are. Remember that the only growth which matters happens without our knowledge and that trying to stretch ourselves is both dangerous and silly. Think of the Infinite Goodness, never of your own state. ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
1279:God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. ~ David Bentley Hart, #NFDB
1280:I AM TOLD YOU KNOW EVERYTHING.
The holy man opened the other eye. “The secret of existence is to disdain earthly ties, shun the chimera of material worth, and seek oneness with the Infinite,” he said. “And keep your thieving hands off my begging bowl.” The sight of the supplicant was giving him trouble.
I’VE SEEN THE INFINITE, said the stranger. IT’S NOTHING SPECIAL.
The holy man glanced around. “Don’t be daft,” he said. “You can’t see the Infinite. ’Cos it’s infinite.” I HAVE. “All right, what did it look like?” IT’S BLUE. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
1281:The ideal of your soul, the thing that it yearns for, is not more knowledge. It is not interested in comparison, nor winning, nor light, nor ownership, nor even happiness. The ideal of your soul is space, expansion, and immensity, and the one thing it needs more than anything else is to be free to expand, to reach out and to embrace the infinite. Why? Because your soul is infinity itself. It has no restrictions or limitations—it resists being fenced in—and when you attempt to contain it with rules and obligations, it is miserable. ========== ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1282:That's the crazy thing about Christianity — the idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there's an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There's not this weird sort of Greek separation, where there's a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of flesh. It's all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there's a way in which spiritual things are revealed in the physical things that are all around us — bread, wine, people, tears, laughter. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
1283:The world of ideas which it [mathematics] discloses or illuminates, the contemplation of divine beauty and order which it induces, the harmonious connexion of its parts, the infinite hierarchy and absolute evidence of the truths with which it is concerned, these, and such like, are the surest grounds of the title of mathematics to human regard, and would remain unimpeached and unimpaired were the plan of the universe unrolled like a map at our feet, and the mind of man qualified to take in the whole scheme of creation at a glance. ~ James Joseph Sylvester, #NFDB
1284:We can love the Infinite in all, and thus we can find joy in all, as it was so beautifully expressed in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad: It is not for the love of a husband that a husband is dear; but for the love of the Soul in the husband that a husband is dear. It is not for the love of a wife that a wife is dear; but for the love of the Soul in the wife that a wife is dear. It is not for the love of children that children are dear; but for the love of the Soul in children that children are dear. It is not for the love of all that all is dear ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1285:As our planet takes action to cast out its manmade poisons and heal its man-caused wounds, many human inhabitants will no doubt give way to fear. Many will cling to seemingly powerful we're-God's-chosen-people religions, hoping that by so doing they will be saved from the wrath of a Vengeful God (not recognizing that the approaching "vengeance" will in reality be man's own actions coming back at him - and not recognizing that the Infinite Universal Power is far more than the narrow-minded gatekeeper of an exclusive Spiritual Country Club). ~ Benjamin Hoff, #NFDB
1286:taking her hand he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendor. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired, Ardita's last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandonded her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropial flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fantasy. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1287:I don't know if God exists and I don't care. God's will and design for this temporal and spatial vastness, if any, is so patently, deliberately impenetrable that I doubt any mortal has a grasp on it. The very inexplicability of sad events like the tsunami, like the AIDS crisis or even like the cancer death of the father of one of my daughter's 2nd-grade classmates last week are, to me, reminders to focus on our obligations to one another, not to the infinite; to honor the creator, if any, by honoring creation itself and hoping that's good enough. ~ Eric Zorn, #NFDB
1288:In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart, #NFDB
1289:Meanwhile, each and every aborted seed is simply hurled back into the infinite field of possibility, death not being an ending, but a life process. The first law of thermodynamics (one of the classical properties of our earthly existence) is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Why should humans be different? Where does the dream of life go when it is unable to manifest into a particular (temporary, finite) human form? It goes somewhere else. It goes into another, wanted, welcome, and supported form. It moves to the left and to the right ~ Ani DiFranco, #NFDB
1290: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, #NFDB
1291:Generally there is in man a divinity which strives to push him onward and upward. We believe that this power within him is the spirit that comes from God. Man lived before he came to this earth, and he is here now to strive to perfect the spirit within. At sometime in his life, every man is conscious of a desire to come in touch with the Infinite. His spirit reaches out for God. This sense of feeling is universal, and all men ought to be, in deepest truth, engaged in the same great work—the search for and the development of spiritual peace and freedom. ~ David, #NFDB
1292:O LORD Increate, who will serve Thee?
Every votary offers his worship to the God of his own creation: each day he receives service
None seek Him, the Perfect: Brahma, the Indivisible Lord.
They believe in ten Avatars; but no Avatar can be the Infinite Spirit, for he suffers the results of his deeds:
The Supreme One must be other than this.
The Yogi, the Sanyasi, the Ascetics, are disputing one with another:
Kabr says, "O brother! he who has seen that radiance of love, he is saved."
Translated by Rabindranath Tagore
~ Kabir, Poem 7
,#NFDB
1293:If God gives you an abundant harvest of trials, it is a sign of great holiness which He desires you to attain. Do you want to become a great saint? Ask God to send you many sufferings. The flame of Divine Love never rises higher than when fed with the wood of the Cross, which the infinite charity of the Savior used to finish His sacrifice. All the pleasures of the world are nothing compared with the sweetness found in the gall and vinegar offered to Jesus Christ. That is, hard and painful things endured for Jesus Christ and with Jesus Christ. ~ Ignatius of Loyola, #NFDB
1294:One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; — hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin — a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it — if such a thing were possible — even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
1295:Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who died in 1965, wrote of how the mere thought of the infinite led him to contemplate suicide: “A necessity I could not imagine swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or time without a beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless … Under an irresistible compulsion I reeled from one to the other, at times so closely threatened with the danger of madness that I seriously thought of avoiding it by suicide.”8 ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
1296:...Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lies,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. Lose the whole world, get lost in it, and find your soul. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1297:In some ways, no one is tougher on one another than sisters. Like parents, they're hyperaware of another's past foibles and faults; but, without the infinite parental capacity for love and forgiveness, they judge one another far more harshly for them.
I swear there are times when they really might kill one another. Until, of course, one of them is in trouble or threatened by an outside agent, in which case they band together into an unbreakable front.
Internally fractured yet externally united. The world over, it's the very definition of sisterhood. ~ Brad Parks,#NFDB
1298:A blessing to the happy couple. Love is the combination of life’s treasured moments tied together in the infinite circle of life. It never ends. It’s a constant reminder when you’re weak and tired, and it never fails. When you want to quit, love continues. When you want to cry, love uplifts, and when you want to run away, love remains. Each of you are wearing a symbol of fertility, but it’s more than that. They are love beads. They bring good luck and favor in your relationship. May you wear them wisely, and may your lives always be filled with love. ~ Rachel Van Dyken, #NFDB
1299:If God gives you an abundant harvest of trials, it is a sign of great holiness which He desires you to attain. Do you want to become a great saint? Ask God to send you many sufferings. The flame of Divine Love never rises higher than when fed with the wood of the Cross, which the infinite charity of the Savior used to finish His sacrifice. All the pleasures of the world are nothing compared with the sweetness found in the gall and vinegar offered to Jesus Christ. That is, hard and painful things endured for Jesus Christ and with Jesus Christ. ~ Saint Ignatius of Loyola, #NFDB
1300:It may remain for us to learn,... that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;--that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;--that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;--and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
1301:... Krishna, the great Lord of Yoga,
revealed to Arjuna his majestic,
transcendent, limitless form.
With innumerable mouths and eyes,
faces too marvelous to stare at,
dazzling ornaments, innumerable
weapons uplifted, flaming—
crowned with fire, wrapped
in pure light, with celestial fragrance,
he stood forth as the infinite
God, composed of all wonders.
If a thousand suns were to rise
and stand in the noon sky, blazing,
such brilliance would be like the fierce
brilliance of that mighty Self. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa,#NFDB
1302:Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1303:... Krishna, the great Lord of Yoga,
revealed to Arjuna his majestic,
transcendent, limitless form.
With innumerable mouths and eyes,
faces too marvelous to stare at,
dazzling ornaments, innumerable
weapons uplifted, flaming-
crowned with fire, wrapped
in pure light, with celestial fragrance,
he stood forth as the infinite
God, composed of all wonders.
If a thousand suns were to rise
and stand in the noon sky, blazing,
such brilliance would be like the fierce
brilliance of that mighty Self. ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa,#NFDB
1304:A trite but effective tactic against the fear of death: think of the list of people who had to be pried away from life. What did they gain by dying old? In the end, they all sleep six feet under—Caedicianus, Fabius, Julian, Lepidus, and all the rest. They buried their contemporaries, and were buried in turn. Our lifetime is so brief. And to live it out in these circumstances, among these people, in this body? Nothing to get excited about. Consider the abyss of time past, the infinite future. Three days of life or three generations: what’s the difference? ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1305:It may remain for us to learn… that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;--that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;--that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;--and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives. ~ Ursula K Le Guin, #NFDB
1306:My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult. ~ Graham Greene, #NFDB
1307:Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet. The exquisite experience of joy—when I am completely consumed by a pleasurable activity such as conversation with good friends or good food or laughing with my children—is certainly one of the moment. But for some reason, I and many of my fellow travelers are not satisfied with the moment. The Now isn’t enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
1308:I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections. ~ Tahereh Mafi, #NFDB
1309:The education of our people should be a lifelong process by which we continue to feed new vigor into the lifestream of the Nation through intelligent, reasoned decisions. Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1310:For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
1311:He who knows the masculine but keeps to the feminine,
Becomes the ravine of the world.
Being the ravine of the world,
He dwells in constant virtue,
He returns to the state of the babe.
He who knows the white but keeps to the black,
Becomes the model of the world.
Being the model of the world,
He rests in constant virtue,
He returns to the infinite.
He who knows glory but keeps to disgrace,
Becomes the valley of the world.
Being the valley of the world,
He finds contentment in constant virtue,
He returns to the Uncarved Block. ~ Lao Tzu,#NFDB
1312:how easily a man who has never been in any great distress, may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart - or, as I must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So a thick curtain of manners is drawn over the features and expression of men's natures, that to the ordinary observer, the two extremities, and the infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded - the vast and multitudinous line of differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet of elementary sounds. ~ Thomas de Quincey, #NFDB
1313:Be sensible. We make mistakes; what of that? That is all in fun. They go so crazy over their past sins, moaning and weeping and all that. Do not repent! After having done work, do not think of it. Go on! Stop not! Don’t look back! What will you gain by looking back? He who knows that he is free is free; he who knows that he is bound is bound. What is the end and aim of life? None, because I know that I am the Infinite. If you are beggars, you can have aims. I have no aims, no want, no purpose. I come to your country, and lecture — just for fun. (II. 470-71) A ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1314:The journey from the mountain town of Altamont to the tower-masted island of Manhattan is not, as journeys are conceived in America, a long one. The distance is somewhat more than 700 miles, the time required to make the journey a little more than twenty hours. But so relative are the qualities of space and time, and so complex and multiple their shifting images, that in the brief passage of this journey one may live a life, share instantly in 10,000,000 other ones, and see pass before his eyes the infinite panorama of shifting images that make a nation's history. ~ Thomas Wolfe, #NFDB
1315:The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the "I" a suspect quality. The Party did not recognize its existence. The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million. The Party denied the free will of the individual--and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives--and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil--and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1316:When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis (remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day)—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me? ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1317:It's all trivial-your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after but not the life. Believe in god, the solid, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of view. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final. ~ Tom Stoppard, #NFDB
1318:Because I am still learning to walk and talk, and it is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, than it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish. Because I still don't know what I really think or feel, and I'm throwing grenades and filling the air with smoke while I desperately, desperately try to get off the ground: to get elevation. Because I haven't learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind. ~ Caitlin Moran, #NFDB
1319:The novel constitutes the milieu of perversion, par excellence, of all sensibility; it detaches the soul from all that is immediate and natural in feeling and leafs it into an imaginary world of sentiments violent in proportion to their unreality, and less controlled by the gentle laws of nature; 'The existence of so many authors has produced a host of readers, and continued reading generates every nervous complaint; perhaps of all the causes that have harmed women's health, the principal one has been the infinite multiplication of novels in the last hundred years. ~ Michel Foucalt, #NFDB
1320:The object of geometry in all its measuring and computing, is to ascertain with exactness the plan of the great Geometer, to penetrate the veil of material forms, and disclose the thoughts which lie beneath them? When our researches are successful, and when a generous and heaven-eyed inspiration has elevated us above humanity, and raised us triumphantly into the very presence, as it were, of the divine intellect, how instantly and entirely are human pride and vanity repressed, and, by a single glance at the glories of the infinite mind, are we humbled to the dust. ~ Benjamin Peirce, #NFDB
1321:If you blink, you might miss it. You might miss the wet floor at the threshold, symbolically cleansing you before the meal begins. You might overlook the flower arrangement in the corner, a spare expression of the passing season. You might miss the scroll on the wall drawn with a single unbroken line, signaling the infinite continuity of nature. You might not detect the gentle current of young ginger rippling through the dashi, the extra sheet of Hokkaido kelp in the soup, the mochi that is made to look like a cherry blossom at midnight.
You might miss the water. ~ Matt Goulding,#NFDB
1322:There is finitude—unless this were true, infinity would have no meaning. The contrast of finitude and infinity arises from the fundamental metaphysical truth that every entity involves an indefinite array of perspectives, each perspective expressing a finite characteristic of that entity. But any one finite perspective does not enable an entity to shake off its essential connection with totality. The infinite background always remains as the unanalysed reason why that finite perspective of that entity has the special character that it does have. Any analysis ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
1323:The warrior of light has learned that God uses solitude to teach us how to live
with other people.
He uses rage to show us the infinite value of peace. He uses boredom to
underline the importance of adventure and spontaneity.
God uses silence to teach us to use words responsibly. He uses tiredness so
that we can understand the value of waking up. He uses illness to underline the
blessing of good health.
God uses fire to teach us about water. He uses earth so that we can understand
the value of air. He uses death to show us the importance of life ~ Paulo Coelho,#NFDB
1324:In our sins we lack only the power. The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration, our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin, I say; but where we stop, no man has yet discovered, for there is neither limit nor end in the awful and mysterious depths of the triune God. Shoreless ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
1325:The supramental Yoga is at once an ascent towards God and a descent of Godhead into the embodied nature.
The ascent can only be achieved by a one-centered all-gathering upward aspiration of the soul and mind and life and body; the descent can only come by a call of the whole being towards the infinite and the eternal Divine. If this call and this aspiration are there, or if by any means they can be born and grow constantly and seize all the nature, then and then only a supramental uplifting and transformation becomes possible.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine And Human, [T2], #index,#NFDB
1326:The sky was so heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes -- telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression -- that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1327:The squares at least
don't remain squares
and taut
linking loops
Threadbare
wet-looking
ropes
Knotted
trapped and trembling
lie in thirst
The sea at large
lusting
to drink in measures
Through the loops
drainscapes
the sea
Sardines, anchovies and seer
From the infinite
indefinite
water bodies
To the freedom attained
through assured bondage
of a definite ending
For
the fishes
in waiting
the
net's
a mirror
through which
they swim
to another world.
~ Ayyappa Paniker,#NFDB
1328:The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.
Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven. ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
1329:That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1330:We admire Freud for his serious dedication, his willingness to retract, the stylistic tentativeness of some of his assertions, his lifelong review of his pet notions. We admire him for his very deviousness, his hedging,s and his misgivings, because they seem to make him more of an honest scientist, reflecting truthfully the infinite manifold of reality. But this is to admire him for the wrong reason. A basic cause for his own lifelong twistings was that he would never cleanly leave the sexual dogma, never clearly see or admit that the terror of death was the basic repression. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
1331:When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! the artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution... the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
1332:If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy. Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
1333:Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now. “ It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
1334:The Infinite
The day was lingering in the pale northwest,
And night was hanging o'er my headNight, where a myriad stars were spread;
While down in the east, where the light was
least,
Seemed the home of the quiet dead.
And, as I gazed on the field sublime,
To watch the bright, pulsating stars,
Adown the deep where the angels sleep
Came drawn the golden chime
Of those great spheres that sound the years
For the horologe of time.
Millenniums numberless they told,
Millenniums a millionfold
From the ancient hour of prime.
~ Charles Heavysege,#NFDB
1335:The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1336:What does have absolute meaning, however, is the way in which we treat others, including animals. We shape our universe by the love or malice, the compassion or indifference, we bring to our relationships with our fellow beings. Under the God Theory, the requirement that you treat others with respect and compassion is, for all practical purposes, a moral absolute, since all beings participate in the infinite consciousness that created them. Other rules of morality may be judged by how well they do or do not serve the common good, which is not the same at all times and all places. ~ Bernard Haisch, #NFDB
1337:While it is undeniable that many have been driven to immorality and crime by the need to survive, it is equally evident that the possession of a significant surplus of material goods has never been a guarantee against covetousness, rapacity and the infinite variety of vice and pain which spring from such passions. Indeed, it could be argued that the unrelenting compulsion of those who already have much to acquire even more has generated greater injustice, immorality and wretchedness than the cumulative effect of the struggles of the severely underprivileged to better their lot. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, #NFDB
1338:Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
1339:poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic. ~ Ben Lerner, #NFDB
1340:It is he who makes the dams and shuts the flood-gates of corrupted nature so that it cannot break forth in a deluge of abominations to overwhelm the creation with confusion and disorder. That all the earth is not filled with violence is merely from the mighty hand of God working effectually to obstruct sin. Otherwise the highways and fields would be filled with violence, blood, robbery, uncleanness, and every sin that the heart of man can conceive. Oh, the infinite beauty of divine wisdom and providence in the government of the world!
Indwelling Sin in Believers by John owen(pg 117) ~ John Owen,#NFDB
1341:Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now. “
It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life. ~ Jack Kornfield,#NFDB
1342:God is true. The universe is a dream. Blessed am I that I know this moment that I have been and shall be free all eternity; ... that I know that I am worshiping only myself; that no nature, no delusion, had any hold on me. Vanish nature from me, vanish these gods; vanish worship; ... vanish superstitions, for I know myself. I am the Infinite. All these - Mrs. So-and-so, Mr. So-and-so, responsibility, happiness, misery - have vanished. I am the Infinite. How can there be death for me, or birth? Whom shall I fear? I am the One. Shall I be afraid of myself? Who is to be afraid of whom? ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1343:Could not interesting little experiment be tried, by possessor of unusual amount of moral courage, in the shape of suddenly producing perfectly brand new opinions: for example, to the effect that Americans have better manners than we have, or that their divorce laws are a great improvement over our own? Should much like to see the effect of these, or similar, psychological bombs, but should definitely wish Robert to be absent from the scene. Announcement of tea breaks off these intelligent speculations and I am struck, as usual, by the infinite superiority of other people's food to my own. ~ E M Delafield, #NFDB
1344:It includes the exercise of God's perfections to produce a proper effect, in opposition to their lying eternally dormant and ineffectual: as his power being eternally without any act or fruit of that power; his wisdom eternally ineffectual in any wise production, or prudent disposal of any thing, &c. The manifestation of his internal glory to created understandings. The communication of the infinite fullness of God to the creature. The creature's high esteem of God, love to him, and complacence [i.e., satisfaction, delight] and joy in him; and the proper exercises and expressions of these. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1345:Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
1346:Hannah searches the clouds, the gulls, the sun. She wants to leave and she wants to stay. She wants to raise her hand to the heavens and command that everything stop, that time stills, that the rules and the laws retract their grip so nature can have her way. Hannah wants to sit up off her towel and look across her friend's lined-up bodies, frozen in time beneath the sky, and she wants to pull Baker out of their midst, out of time, and walk with her along the shoreline, following the infinite ocean, nothing moving on the whole green earth except for the two of them and the water and the sky ~ Kelly Quindlen, #NFDB
1347:Hannah searches the clouds, the gulls, the sun. She wants to leave and she wants to stay. She wants to raise her hand to the heavens and command that everything top, that time stills, that the rules and the laws retract their grip so nature can have her way. Hannah wants to sit up off her towel and look across her friend's lined-up bodies, frozen in time beneath the sky, and she wants to pull Baker out of their midst, out of time, and walk with her along the shoreline, following the infinite ocean, nothing moving on the whole green earth except for the two of them and the water and the sky. ~ Kelly Quindlen, #NFDB
1348:That status of knowledge is then the aim of this path and indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which intellectual discrimination and conception and all concentration and psychological self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart through love and by the senses through beauty and by the will through power and works and by the soul through peace and joy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of the ascent which we have to use and to follow till the wide and infinite levels are attained and the divine doors swing open into the infinite Light.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
1349:The Divine is in his essence infinite and his manifestation too is multitudinously infinite. If that is so, it is not likely that our true integral perfection in being and in nature can come by one kind of realisation alone; it must combine many different strands of divine experience. It cannot be reached by the exclusive pursuit of a single line of identity till that is raised to its absolute; it must harmonise many aspects of the Infinite. An integral consciousness with a multiform dynamic experience is essential for the complete transformation of our nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, p. 114, #NFDB
1350:She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. [He] looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, this instrument for seeing, could transmit so clearly its entreaty while at the same time—-Look, I am only an eye—-denying that it was doing anything of the sort. ~ Peter Carey, #NFDB
1351:Colin laughed as Hassan returned to counting the pennies of victory, but Colin's brain was spinning with the implications: if the future is forever, he thought, then eventually it will swallow us all up. Even Colin could only name a handful of people who lived, say, 2,400 years ago. In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of that century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything - there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
But there's another way. There are stories. ~ John Green,#NFDB
1352:He found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.
And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward - ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter - maybe less than a lot, but always more than some. ~ John Green,#NFDB
1353:the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human language: it is as if it made sense. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1354:You truly contain within your gentleness, within your humanity, all the unyielding immensity and grandeur of the world. And it is because of this, it is because there exists in you this ineffable synthesis of what our human thought and experience would never have dared join together in order to adore them—element and totality, the one and the many, mind and matter, the infinite and the personal; it is because of the indefinable contours which this complexity gives to your appearance and to your activity, that my heart, enamoured of cosmic reality, gives itself passionately to you. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, #NFDB
1355:Conclusion But given the truth of the three premises, the conclusion is logically inescapable: God is the explanation of the existence of the universe. This is no ill-defined flying spaghetti monster. The argument implies that God is an uncaused, unembodied Mind who transcends the physical universe and even space and time themselves and who exists necessarily. This conclusion is staggering. Leibniz has expanded our minds far beyond the mundane affairs of daily life. In the next chapter our minds will be stretched further still, as we try to grasp the infinite and discover the beginning of the universe. ~ William Lane Craig, #NFDB
1356:Sacrificing earth to paradise is like leaving your fortune to a corpse. I'm not that stupid. Duped by the Infinite! I am nothing; I call myself Count Nothing, the senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Will I after my death? No. What am I? A little dust surrounding an organism. What do I have to do on this earth? I have the choice of pain or pleasure. Where will pain lead me? To nothing. But I will have suffered. Where will pleasure lead me? To nothing. But I will have enjoyed. My choice is made. I must eat or be eaten, and I choose to eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. That's my philosophy. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1357:She asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1358:Enlightenment, or Nirvana, is nothing other than the state beyond all obstacles, in the same way that from the peak of a very high mountain one always sees the sun. Nirvana is not a paradise or some special place of happiness, but is in fact the condition beyond all dualistic concepts, including those of happiness and suffering.
When all our obstacles have been overcome, and we find ourselves in a state of total presence, the wisdom of enlightenment manifests spontaneously without limits, just like the infinite rays of the sun. The clouds have dissolved, and the sun is finally free to shine once again. ~ Namkhai Norbu,#NFDB
1359: by Rabindranath Tagore
It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky. It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence all night from star to star and becomes lyric among rustling leaves in rainy darkness of July. It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joys in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart. [1884.jpg] -- from Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
~ 4) It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world (from Gitanjali)
,#NFDB
1360:The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on. He embarrassed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1361:This solitary hill has always been dear to me
And this hedge, which prevents me from seeing most of
The endless horizon.
But when I sit and gaze, I imagine, in my thoughts
Endless spaces beyond the hedge,
An all encompassing silence and a deeply profound quiet,
To the point that my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind rustling through the trees
I compare its voice to the infinite silence.
And eternity occurs to me, and all the ages past,
And the present time, and its sound.
Amidst this immensity my thought drowns:
And to founder in this sea is sweet to me. ~ Giacomo Leopardi,#NFDB
1362:The strength of the Christian system — the acid test of it — is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits.That is why I am a Christian and no longer an agnostic. In all the other systems, something 'sticks out,' something cannot be included; and it has to be mutilated or ignored. But without losing his own integrity, the Christian can see everything fitting into place beneath the Christian apex of the existence of the infinite-personal God who is there (p. 81). ~ Francis A Schaeffer, #NFDB
1363:Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot - we are introduced to the all-pervading Spiritual domain that the growing tip of our honored ancestors were the first to discover. And they were good enough to leave us a general map to that infinite domain, a map called the Great Nest of Being, a map of our own interiors, an archeology of our own Spirit. ~ Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology, p. 190, #NFDB
1364:For quite some time now, like the foetus inside a womb, a terrible knowledge had been ripening within me and filling my soul with frightened foreboding: that the Infinite Universe is inflating at incredible speed, like some ridiculous soap bubble. I become obsessed with a miser's piercing anxiety whenever I allow myself to think that the Universe may be slipping out into space, like water through cupped hands, and that, ultimately—perhaps even today, perhaps not till tomorrow or for several light years—it will dissolve for ever into emptiness, as though it were made not of solid matter but only of fleeting sound. ~ Tadeusz Borowski, #NFDB
1365:Along with this exaltation of the external world as more primary and more real, went an attribution of greater dignity and value. Galileo himself proceeds to this addition. 'Sight is the most excellent of the senses, because of its relation to light, the most excellent object; but as compared with the latter, it is as inferior as the finite in comparison with the infinite.'
To treat as ultimate and supreme the physical phenomenon of light, and to forget the light of consciousness, itself the highest manifestation of life, shows if anything how effectively the Sun God had stricken his worshippers with blindness. ~ Lewis Mumford,#NFDB
1366:Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1367:There is nothing to figure out, and nothing to understand. You are not a person. There is not such thing as a person. The so-called person is merely a thought in the mind of God. In truth, it’s even not that. There is only pure Awareness, Consciousness - formless, unborn and undying, and that is who you are. How can the apparent mind possibly comprehend this? It is not possible. The finite can never understand the infinite. The mind does not exist. Seek the Source of the mind, the Source of the ‘I-thought’, by constant, patient Self-enquiry. When the mind is quiet, You shine in all your glory. Be Yourself, and be happy. ~ Jeff Foster, #NFDB
1368:There is nothing to figure out, and nothing to understand. You are not a person. There is not such thing as a person. The so-called person is merely a thought in the mind of God. In truth, it’s even not that. There is only pure Awareness, Consciousness - formless, unborn and undying, and that is who you are. How can the apparent mind possibly comprehend this? It is not possible. The finite can never understand the infinite. The mind does not exist. Seek the Source of the mind, the Source of the ‘I-thought’, by constant, patient Self-enquiry. When the mind is quiet, You shine in all your glory. Be Yourself, and be happy. ~ Robert Adams, #NFDB
1369:Fuck what is written," Landsman says. “You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. “I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag. ~ Michael Chabon, #NFDB
1370:The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240) ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann, #NFDB
1371:Knowledge is power, as some say. But on some days it is just as much pain and confusion as it is power; and any wise man worth his salt as a wise man at least understands this. One may be able to comprehend all the human perspectives in the universe, but this gives more to decipher regarding what is actually true; and even after discovering the truth, the challenge is in maintaining a patience for the infinite number of opinions that do not reflect that truth. Its consistency in man is challenge. A worldly knowledge ends at the former challenge of confusion, but the knowledge of Christ ends at the latter challenge of patience. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
1372:To help you remember the triviality of your daily tasks, interrupt your schedule with refreshers. These refreshers should cut to your core and strip the fat off the moment. Consider your own death. Behold an image of the most enlightened being you know. Contemplate the mystery of existence. Relax into the deepest and most profound loving of which you are capable. In your own way, remember the infinite, and then return to the task at hand. This way, you will never lose perspective and begin to think that life is a matter of tasks. You are not a drone. You are the unbounded mystery of love. Be so, without forgetting your tasks. ~ David Deida, #NFDB
1373:Moments left, thought Teddy. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was as fragile as a bird;s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. It didn't matter, he realized, he didn't mind, he was going where millions had gone before and where millions would follow after. He shared his fate with the many. And now. This moment. This moment was infinite. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Now. ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1374:The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At least that explained why reality had a resolution limit; Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort. Past that, though, it had always seemed like angels dancing on the head of a pin. None of it changed anything way up here where life happened, and besides, positing universe as program didn’t seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude. Might as well just say that God did it after all, head off the infinite regress before it drove you crazy. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
1375:Beauty is a function of truth, truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived experience of the creative act-and of its re-creative echo in the beholder-they are inseparable as thought is inseparable from emotion. They signal, one in the language of the brain, the other of the bowels, the moment of the Eureka cry, when 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite'-when eternity is looking through the window of time. Whether it is a medieval stained-glass window or Newton's equation of universal gravity is a matter of upbringing and chance; both are transparent to the unprejudiced eye. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1376:The system of negation is indispensable to it in order to get rid of its own definitions and limited experience; it is obliged to escape through a vague Indefinite into the Infinite. For it lives in a closed prison of constructions and representations that are necessary for its action but are not the self-existent truth either of Matter or Life or Mind or Spirit. But if we can once cross beyond the Minds frontier twilight into the vast plane of supramental Knowledge, these devices cease to be indispensable. supermind has quite another, a positive and direct and living experience of the supreme Infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
1377:Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. It didn’t matter, he realized, he didn’t mind, he was going where millions had gone before and where millions would follow after. He shared his fate with the many. And now. This moment. This moment was infinite. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Now. The ~ Kate Atkinson, #NFDB
1378:DR. MANILAL: How can one succeed in meditation?
SRI AUROBINDO: By quietude of mind. There is not only the Infinite in itself, but also an infinite sea of peace, joy, light, power above the head. The golden Lid, Hiranmaya Patram, intervenes between the mind and what is above the mind. Once you break this lid ( making a movement of the hands above the head ) they can come down any time at your will. But for that, quietude is essential. Of course, there are people who can get them without first establishing the quietude, but it is very difficult. ( On 13-12-1938 ) ~ Sri Aurobindo, TALKS WITH SRI AUROBINDO VOLUME 1, BY NIRODBARAN (Page no.17),#NFDB
1379:This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer 'Scientific humanism.' That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinity mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don't see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
From the article titled "Questions They Never Asked Me ~ Walker Percy,#NFDB
1380:But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
1381:Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis, or the way in which the individual knows things as phenomenon. The boundless world, everywhere full of suffering in the infinite past, in the infinite future, is strange to him, is indeed a fiction. His vanishing person, his extensionless present, his momentary gratification, these alone have reality for him. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1382:Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature. ~ Wade Davis, #NFDB
1383:I believe that the infinite and mysterious charm that lies in the contemplation of a moving vessel is caused, firstly, by the regularity and symmetry that are among the primordial needs of the human spirit, to the same degree as complication and harmony - and, secondly, by the multiplication and generation of all the imaginary curves and figures produced in space by the real elements of the object. The poetic idea released by this operation of movement in the lines is the hypothesis of a being that is vast, immense, complicated but eurythmic, an animal full of genius, suffering and sighing all the sighs and all the human ambitions. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
1384:As soon as man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be--in the country, in the monastery, in the woods or in the city. The lightning flashes from east to west, illuminating the whole horizon and striking where it pleases and at that same instant the infinite liberty of God flashes in the depths of that man's soul, and is illumined. At that moment he sees though he seems to be in the middle of his journey, he has already arrived at the end. For the life of grace on earth is the beginning of the life of glory. Although he is a traveler in time, he has opened his eyes, for a moment, in eternity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1385:There are places in our quest for understanding where we reach the limits of the human mind. The finite does not have the capacity fully to grasp and understand the infinite. But it is how we respond just at this point that is significant. Do we say with Nietzsche, “But to reveal my entire heart to you, my friends, if there were gods, how could I stand not to be a god! Therefore, there are no gods.”15 Or do we bow down, “lost in wonder, love, and praise,”16 because we recognize we have come to the horizon of human understanding and can only gaze in awe at the God who is so infinitely great and glorious—and who loves and cares for us? ~ Sinclair B Ferguson, #NFDB
1386:He knew that if he did not inform to the police a warm welcome would be his when he left prison. There would be a party waiting in his home, the best of food, homemade ravioli, wine, pastries, with all his friends and relatives gathered to rejoice in his freedom. And sometime during the night the Consigliori, Genco Abbandando, or perhaps even the Don himself, would drop by to pay his respects to such a stalwart, take a glass of wine in his honor, and leave a handsome present of money so that he could enjoy a week or two of leisure with his family before returning to his daily toil. Such was the infinite sympathy and understanding of Don Corleone. ~ Mario Puzo, #NFDB
1387:the individual is a self-expression of the universal and the transcendent,-it is not a contradiction or something quite other than it, it is the universal concentrated and selective, it is one with the Transcendent in its essence of being and its essence of nature. In the view of this unitarian comprehensive seeing there is nothing contradictory in a formless Essence of being that carries a multitude of forms, or in a status of the Infinite supporting a kinesis of the Infinite, or in an infinite Oneness expressing itself in a multiplicity of beings and aspects and powers and movements, for they are beings and aspects and powers and movements of the One.
~ SATM?,#NFDB
1388:There comes a point when you realize that these things, these brands, aren't "enough." Having more or better or best doesn't provide you with a lasting sense of having more or being better or being best. It's a rather fleeting experience, this romantic attachment to brands, and I find that if I'm not careful, the search for having more or better or best is a precarious journey into the infinite. When you depend on finite objects-or brands-to provide you with a long-term sense of self or love or pride or achievement, you start yourself out on a path with no end. No object, no product, and no brand can provide you with ultimate, infinite satisfaction. ~ Debbie Millman, #NFDB
1389:abolishing the ego :::
In the path of Knowledge one attempts this abolition, negatively by a denial of the reality of the ego, positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the One and the Infinite in itself or the One and Infinite everywhere. This, if persistently done, changes in the end the mental outlook on oneself and the whole world and there is a kind of mental realisation; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the beginning the mental realisation deepens into spiritual experience - a realisation in the very substance of our being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Release from the Ego, 363,#NFDB
1390:Eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings. The first thing that distinguishes eroticism from sexuality is the infinite variety of forms in which it manifests itself. eroticism is invention, constant variation, sex is always the same.
In every erotic encounter there is an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire.Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness.
Many years ago I wrote: love is a sacrifice without virtue. Today I would say: love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own: the freedom of the other. ~ Octavio Paz,#NFDB
1391:Such a creature—my, I’d love to know him!— I’d call him Mr. Microcosm. FAUST. What am I, then, if it can never be: The realization of all human possibility, That crown my soul so avidly reaches for? MEPHISTO. In the end you are—just what you are. Wear wigs high-piled with curls, oh millions, Stick your legs in yard-high hessians, You’re still you, the one you always were. FAUST. I feel it now, how pointless my long grind 1840 To make mine all the treasures of man’s mind; When I sit back and interrogate my soul, No new powers answer to my call; I’m not a hair’s breadth more in height, A step nearer to the infinite. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1392:The Infinite
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea. ~ Giacomo Leopardi,#NFDB
1393:Of the two or three natural dogmas that mankind, after long centuries of debate and after ceaseless critical examination, is now definitely establishing, the most categorical and the dearest to us is certainly that of the infinite value of the universe and its inexhaustible store of richness. ‘Our world contains within itself a mysterious promise of the future, implicit in its natural evolution.’ When the newborn mind surveys the grandeurs of the cosmos, those are the first words it falters; and that is the final assertion of the scientist as he closes his eyes, heavy and weary from having seen so much that he could not express. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cosmic Life, #NFDB
1394: The Hill-top Temple
After unnumbered steps of a hill-stair
I saw upon earth's head brilliant with sun
The immobile Goddess in her house of stone
In a loneliness of meditating air.
Wise were the human hands that set her there
Above the world and Time's dominion;
The Soul of all that lives, calm, pure, alone,
Revealed its boundless self mystic and bare.
Our body is an epitome of some Vast
That masks its presence by our humanness.
In us the secret Spirit can indite
A page and summary of the Infinite,
A nodus of Eternity expressed
Live in an image and a sculptured face.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Hill-top Temple
,#NFDB
1395:Do you want to know something from the beyond? Do you want to chat with divine beings face to face? It is indispensable to enter into the region of the dead at will, to visit the celestial regions, to know other worlds of the infinite space. Outside of the physical body, one can give to himself the luxury of invoking beloved relatives who already passed through the doors of death. They will concur to our call, then we can personally chat with them... When out of the physical body, we can acquire complete knowledge about the mysteries of death and life. Out of the physical body, we can invoke the angels in order to talk personally with them face to face. ~ Samael Aun Weor, #NFDB
1396:Astarte Syriaca
MYSTERY: lo! betwixt the sun and moon
Astarte of the Syrians: Venus Queen
Ere Aphrodite was. In silver sheen
Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon
Of bliss whereof the heaven and earth commune:
And from her neck's inclining flower-stem lean
Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean
The pulse of hearts to the spheres' dominant tune.
Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel
All thrones of light beyond the sky and sea
The witnesses of Beauty's face to be:
That face, of Love's all-penetrative spell
Amulet, talisman, and oracle,—
Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.
~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti,#NFDB
1397:If one religion true, then all the others also must be true. Thus the Hindu faith is yours as much as mine." And again, in amplification of the same idea: "We Hindus do not merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the cross of the Christian. We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite. So we gather all these flowers, and, binding them together with the cord of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship." To ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1398:The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of space. Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture, temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast on the screen of man’s consciousness by the infinite creative beam. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1399:If a man can realize his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor, even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. [...] man is not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength till it reaches the Glorious Sun. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1400:Over And Undone
IF one might hope that when we say farewell
To life, we two might but be one at last!
But we look back on a divided past,
And a divided future must foretell.
Apart we sowed the seed that flowers in hell,
The seed that blooms in heaven apart we cast:
See what remembrances my heart holds fast-Ask your own heart what deeds you deem done well!
The memory I find my heaven in
Is that one hand-touch you regret as sin;
Your goodness, dear, that stood between us two
And made my hell, may make a heaven for you;
So evermore must lie our souls between
The kiss unkissed, the infinite might-have-been!
~ Edith Nesbit,#NFDB
1401:As the departing saint wades through the stream, and the billows gather around him, and heart and flesh fail him, the same voice sounds in his ears, "Fear not; I am with thee; be not dismayed; I am thy God." As he nears the borders of the infinite unknown, and is almost affrighted to enter the realm of shades, Jesus says, "Fear not, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." Thus strengthened and consoled, the believer is not afraid to die; nay, he is even willing to depart, for since he has seen Jesus as the morning star, he longs to gaze upon him as the sun in his strength. Truly, the presence of Jesus is all the heaven we desire. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1402:From the inaccessible mountains, across the desert which no mortal foot has trod, far as the confines of the unknown ocean, breathes the spirit of the eternal Creator; and every atom to which he has given existence finds favour in his sight. Ah, how often at that time has the flight of a bird, soaring above my head, inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the Infinite, and to partake, if but for a moment even, with the confined powers of my soul, the beatitude of that Creator who accomplishes all things in himself, and through himself! My ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1403:The end of man is God, an end obviously exceeding the limits of reason. Yet man should have some knowledge of his end in order to regulate and order his intentions and actions towards that end. The salvation of man, therefore, demands that divine revelation should make him know a certain number of truths quite beyond the grasp of his reason.43 In other words, since man requires knowledge of the infinite God, who is his end, and since such knowledge exceeds the limits of his reason, he simply must get it by way of faith. Nor does such faith do violence to our reason. Rather, faith in the incomprehensible confers on rational knowledge its perfection and consummation. ~ tienne Gilson, #NFDB
1404:We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god. ~ Heinrich von Kleist, #NFDB
1405: Omnipresence
He is in me, round me, facing everywhere.
Self-walled in ego to exclude His right,
I stand upon its boundaries and stare
Into the frontiers of the Infinite.
Each finite thing I see is a facade;
From its windows looks at me the Illimitable.
In vain was my prison of separate body made;
His occult presence burns in every cell.
He has become my substance and my breath;
He is my anguish and my ecstasy.
My birth is His eternity's sign, my death
A passage of His immortality.
My dumb abysses are His screened abode;
In my heart's chamber lives the unworshipped God.
Sonnets
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Omnipresence
,#NFDB
1406:The Soul's Expression
WITH stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,--as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning,#NFDB
1407:All of us have a natural drift toward a performance-based relationship with God. We know we're saved by grace through faith - not by works (Ephesians 2:8-9), but we somehow get the idea that we earn blessings by our works. After throwing overboard our works as a means to salvation, we want to drag them back on board as a means of maintaining favor with God. Instead of seeing our own righteousness as table scraps to be dumped, we see it as leftovers to be used later to earn answers to prayer.
We need to remind ourselves every day that God's blessings and answers to prayer come to us not on the basis of our works, but on the basis of the infinite merit of Jesus Christ. ~ Jerry Bridges,#NFDB
1408:In fact, however, the most useful analogy to keep in mind is that a language is like a lava lamp. The “lava” slowly swirls and clumps and rises and falls in its fluid in an eternal, mesmerizing flow. Although constantly changing, in no sense is the clump of lava decaying—if one piece is beginning to drip or split into strands, we can be sure that a few inches away, other pieces are joining together. At any given point, we do not see the present configuration of the lava clump as somehow “better” than the one thirty seconds ago—the joy is in the infinite variations that the clump can take while at all times remaining consistent in its expressive motility. DIFFERENT SPINS ~ John McWhorter, #NFDB
1409: The Infinitesimal Infinite
Out of a still immensity we came.
These million universes were to it
The poor light-bubbles of a trivial game,
A fragile glimmer in the Infinite.
It could not find its soul in all that Vast:
It drew itself into a little speck
Infinitesimal, ignobly cast
Out of earth's mud and slime strangely awake, -
A tiny plasm upon a casual globe
In the small system of a dwarflike sun,
A little life wearing the flesh for robe,
A little mind winged through wide space to run.
It lived, it knew, it saw its self sublime,
Deathless, outmeasuring Space, outlasting Time.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Infinitismal Infinite
,#NFDB
1410:Anchored To The Infinite
The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,
Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,
Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite
Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands
To grasp upon the further cliff and draw
A greater cord, and then a greater yet;
Till at the last across the chasm swung
The cable then the mighty bridge in air!
So we may send our little timid thought
Across the void, out to God’s reaching hands—
Send out our love and faith to thread the deep—
Thought after thought until the little cord
Has greatened to a chain no chance can break,
And we are anchored to the Infinite!
~ Edwin Markham,#NFDB
1411:Since thou readest in her what thou thyself hast there written,
And, to gladden the eye, placest her wonders in groups;
Since o'er her boundless expanses thy cords to extend thou art able,
Thou dost think that thy mind wonderful Nature can grasp.
Thus the astronomer draws his figures over the heavens,
So that he may with more ease traverse the infinite space,
Knitting together e'en suns that by Sirius-distance are parted,
Making them join in the swan and in the horns of the bull.
But because the firmament shows him its glorious surface,
Can he the spheres' mystic dance therefore decipher aright?
~ Friedrich Schiller, Human Knowledge
,#NFDB
1412:Evil
While the red-stained mouths of machine guns ring
Across the infinite expanse of day;
While red or green, before their posturing King,
The massed battalions break and melt away;
And while a monstrous frenzy runs a course
That makes of a thousand men a smoking pilePoor fools! - dead, in summer, in the grass,
On Nature's breast, who meant these men to smile;
There is a God, who smiles upon us through
The gleam of gold, the incense-laden air,
Who drowses in a cloud of murmured prayer,
And only wakes when weeping mothers bow
Themselves in anguish, wrapped in old black shawlsAnd their last small coin into his coffer falls.
~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1413:In Altdorfer's painting, infinitude acquires a special pathos and beauty through its religious associations, but in principle, as Nietzsche knew, all claims to copy nature must lead to the demand of representing the infinite. The amount of information reaching us from the visible world is incalculably large, and the artist's medium is inevitably restricted and granular. Even the most meticulous realist can accommodate only a limited number of marks on his panel, and though he may try to smooth out the transition between his dabs of paint beyond the threshold of visibility, in the end he will always have to rely on suggestion when it comes to representing the infinitely small. ~ E H Gombrich, #NFDB
1414:He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye … how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?) ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
1415:Throughout one’s life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabulary absorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance gratifies a subject, however inanimate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastical, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book’s suggestion as to what God is. Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry. Akhmatova’s ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
1416:Nature has the upper hand. For the individual, his is known as death. The Faustian dream of progress without limits in a material world magically responsive to our touch overlooks "the priority of external nature". Today, this is known not as the Faustian dream but the American one. It is a vision which secretly detests the material because it blocks our path to the infinite. This is why the material world has either to be vanquished by force or dissolved into culture. Postmodernism and the pioneer spirit are sides of the same coin. Neither can accept that it is our limits that make us what we are, quite as much as that perpetual transgression of them we know as human history. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
1417:It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
1418:This is quite as clear to the knight of faith, so the only thing that can save him is the absurd, and this he grasps by faith. So he recognizes the impossibility, and that very instant he believes the absurd ; for, if without recognizing the impossibility with all the passion of his soul and with all his heart, he should wish to imagine that he has faith, he deceives himself, and his testimony has no bearing, since he has not even reached the infinite resignation. Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition ; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1419:What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. ~ N D Wilson,#NFDB
1420:The Greeks couldn't do this neat little mathematical trick. They didn't have the concept of a limit because they didn't believe in zero. The terms in the infinite series didn't have a limit or a destination; they seemed to get smaller and smaller without any particular end in sight. As a result, the Greeks couldn't handle the infinite. They pondered the concept of the void but rejected zero as a number, and they toyed with the concept of the infinite but refused to allow infinity-numbers that are infinitely small and infinitely large-anywhere near the realm of numbers. This is the biggest failure in Greek mathematics, and it is the only thing that kept them from discovering calculus. ~ Charles Seife, #NFDB
1421:There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. (Moby Dick chap 35 p 153) ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1422:We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky, #NFDB
1423:Correspondences
(From the French of Charles Baudelaire)
All nature is a temple where the alive
Pillars breathe often a tremor of mixed words;
Man wanders in a forest of accords
That peer familiarly from each ogive.
Like thinning echoes tumbling to sleep beyond
In a unity umbrageous and infinite,
Vast as the night stupendously moonlit,
All smells and colors and sounds correspond.
Odors blown sweet as infants' naked flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as a studded plain,
Others, corrupt, rich and triumphant, thresh
Expansions to the infinite of pain:
Amber and myrrh, benzoin and musk condense
To transports of the spirit and the sense!
~ Allen Tate,#NFDB
1424:This 4th verse of the Tao invites you to consider rearranging your thoughts about who you are. It seems to be saying that cultivating an awareness of the infinite aspect of yourself is the way to tap into the limitless Source of creative energy that flows through you. For example, you may want to help less fortunate people improve their day-to-day existence, but you don’t believe that you have the time or energy to do so because of who you are and what you presently do. As you relax your hold on the idea of yourself as the job you do or the life you’re living and seek to acquaint yourself with the limitless creative energy that’s a part of you, the time and energy you require will appear. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1425:Past and future are two aspects of the same coin. The name of the coin is mind. When the whole coin is dropped, that dropping is innocence. Then you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know what is; there is no knowledge. But you are, existence is, and the meeting of these two is-nesses—the small is-ness of you, meeting with the infinite is-ness of existence—that meeting, that merger, is the experience of beauty. Innocence is the door; through innocence you enter into beauty. The more innocent you become, the more existence becomes beautiful. The more knowledgeable you are, the more and more existence is ugly, because you start functioning from conclusions, you start functioning from knowledge. The ~ Osho, #NFDB
1426:Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church’s resistance to Copernicus, also said: ‘God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and because no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who, in one most simple and perfect essence, contains infinite perfections.’32 On this reading, Copernicus’ breakthrough was an infinitesimal increase in man’s ascent to God. Rousseau, in Émile, said: ‘O Man! Confine thine ~ Peter Watson, #NFDB
1427:I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1428: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],#NFDB
1429:In The Temple
When Lilian comes I scarcely know
If Winter wraps the world in snow,
Or if 'tis Summer strikes a-glow
The fountain in the court below,
When Lilian comes.
Her flower-like eyes, her soft lips bring
The warmth and welcome of the Spring,
And round my room, a fairy ring,
See violets, violets blossoming,
When Lilion comes.
When Lilian goes I hear again
The infinite despair of rain
Drip on my darkening window-pane
The tears of Winter on the wane,
When Lilian goes.
Yet still about my lonely room
The visionary violets bloom,
And with her presence still perfume
The tedious page that I resume
When Lilian goes.
~ Arthur Symons,#NFDB
1430:Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human language: it is as if it made sense. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
1431: Light
Light, endless Light! darkness has room no more,
Life's ignorant gulfs give up their secrecy:
The huge inconscient depths unplumbed before
Lie glimmering in vast expectancy.
Light, timeless Light immutable and apart!
The holy sealed mysterious doors unclose.
Light, burning Light from the Infinite's diamond heart
Quivers in my heart where blooms the deathless rose.
Light in its rapture leaping through the nerves!
Light, brooding Light! each smitten passionate cell
In a mute blaze of ecstasy preserves
A living sense of the Imperishable.
I move in an ocean of stupendous Light
Joining my depths to His eternal height.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Light
,#NFDB
1432: Man the Enigma
A deep enigma is the soul of man.
His conscious life obeys the Inconscient's rule,
His need of joy is learned in sorrow's school,
His heart is a chaos and an empyrean.
His subtle Ignorance borrows Wisdom's plan;
His mind is the Infinite's sharp and narrow tool.
He wades through mud to reach the Wonderful,
And does what Matter must or Spirit can.
All powers in his living's soil take root
And claim from him their place and struggling right:
His ignorant creature mind crawling towards light
Is Nature's fool and Godhead's candidate,
A demigod and a demon and a brute,
The slave and the creator of his fate.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Man the Enigma
,#NFDB
1433: The Infinite Adventure
On the waters of a nameless Infinite
My skiff is launched; I have left the human shore.
All fades behind me and I see before
The unknown abyss and one pale pointing light.
An unseen Hand controls my rudder. Night
Walls up the sea in a black corridor, -
An inconscient Hunger's lion plaint and roar
Or the ocean sleep of a dead Eremite.
I feel the greatness of the Power I seek
Surround me; below me are its giant deeps,
Beyond, the invisible height no soul has trod.
I shall be merged in the Lonely and Unique
And wake into a sudden blaze of God,
The marvel and rapture of the Apocalypse.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Infinite Adventure
,#NFDB
1434:But seriously, if life has no meaning—”
“To say it has no meaning is not to say it has no value.”
“But to say it’s all meaningless. Isn’t that a cop-out?”
“Maybe. But it seems to me that the real cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning but that we ‘mere mortals’ are incapable of ever knowing that meaning. Mystery is part of nature’s style, that’s all. It’s the Infinite Goof. It’s meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning—or the lack of it—in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning. ~ Tom Robbins,#NFDB
1435: The Unseen Infinite
Arisen to voiceless unattainable peaks
I meet no end, for all is boundless He,
An absolute joy the wide-winged spirit seeks,
A Might, a Presence, an Eternity.
In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss
Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite.
The insensible midnight veils His trance of bliss,
A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.
In His ray that dazzles our vision everywhere,
Our half-closed eyes seek fragments of the One:
Only the eyes of Immortality dare
To look unblinded on that living Sun.
Yet are our souls the Immortal's selves within,
Comrades and powers and children of the Unseen.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Unseen Infinite
,#NFDB
1436:Mr. Gresham had been Prime Minister of England, as representative of the Liberal party in politics. There had come to be a split among those who should have been his followers on the terribly vexed question of the Ballot. Then Mr. Daubeny for twelve months had sat upon the throne distributing the good things of the Crown amidst Conservative birdlings, with beaks wide open and craving maws, who certainly for some years previous had not received their share of State honours or State emoluments. And Mr. Daubeny was still so sitting, to the infinite dismay of the Liberals, every man of whom felt that his party was entitled by numerical strength to keep the management of the Government within its own hands. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
1437:Awareness ultimately has no boundaries. It exists in this world but endlessly goes beyond it. The world's great wisdom traditions all derive from a higher reality that is indescribable but can be experienced. This is the greatest wonder and source of awe. As the ancient Indian sages declare, “This isn't knowledge that you learn. It's knowledge that you become.” When you fully absorb this insight, you know what it means to transcend. You don't need to travel anywhere; all of reality exists in you. You exemplify wholeness because you are united with everything and everyone around you. You exist to demonstrate that human beings can reach the infinite, and by simply being who you are, you help others get there. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1438:Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind ~ L on Bloy, #NFDB
1439:Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveller dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind ~ L on Bloy, #NFDB
1440:My philosophy: Don't get caught with a fixed philosophy, a set
of safe beliefs, a particular way of life.
Experiment! With live, with love.
Run an exploration of the real and the true degrees of freedom
of life, of love, of the human condition, inside self and in one's
style of life.
Move! Into new spaces beyond one's present concepts of possible/probable/certain real spaces.
Far vaster than I now know are the innermost/outermost realities.
Far more interesting than I now feel are the deeps of the space, the beyond within, the infinite without.
Love and loving are basic.
Hostility is redundant.
Fear is non-sense.
"Death" is a myth.
I am I. ~ John C Lilly,#NFDB
1441:But the vijnana or gnosis is not only truth but truth power, it is the very working of the infinite and divine nature; it is the divine knowledge one with the divine will in the force and delight of a spontaneous and luminous and inevitable self-fulfilment. By the gnosis, then, we change our human into a divine nature. But even the intuitive reason is not the gnosis; it is only an edge of light of the supermind finding its way by flashes of illumination into the mentality like lightnings in dim and cloudy places. Its inspirations, revelations, intuitions, self-luminous discernings are messages from a higher knowledge-plane that make their way opportunely into our lower level of consciousness.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
1442:Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1443:Madeleine saved herself when she was abducted. Taken while she was a scared woman, one who'd once been veiwed as nothing more than weak and easily controlled, she'd proven that she had the heart of a lion, that she had the spirit of a warrior, that her strength didnt exist only in her ability to fight, but in her ability to endure, in her ability to survive.
Most importantly, through her strength and her bravery, Maddy had not only saved herself, but also Aaron: By opening her eyes and discovering that hidden deeply within the recesses of the executioner's soul, there was goodness, there was compassion, there was love and there was honor; but above it all...deep within the infinite darkness...
There was light. ~ M S Willis,#NFDB
1444:Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies. ~ Paolo Giordano, #NFDB
1445:Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.
Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. ~ James Clerk Maxwell,#NFDB
1446:He would not admit that the difficulties with his wife had their origin in the rarefied air of the house, but blamed them on the very nature of matrimony: an absurd invention that could exist only by the infinite grace of God. It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. He would say: “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez, #NFDB
1447:You were a warrior, Lantern. Such men are not renowned for understanding the infinite shades of gray that govern the actions of men. Black and white are your colors.” “Scholars tend to overcomplicate matters,” said Skilgannon. “If a man runs at you with a sword it would be foolish to spend time wondering what led him to such action. Was his childhood scarred by a cruel father? Did his wife leave him for another man? Was he perhaps misinformed about your intentions, and therefore has attacked you in error?” Skilgannon laughed. “Warriors need black and white, Elder Brother. Shades of gray would kill them.” “True,” admitted the abbot, “and yet a greater understanding that there are shades of gray would prevent many wars beginning. ~ David Gemmell, #NFDB
1448:Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.
Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. ~ James Clerk Maxwell,#NFDB
1449: Moon of Two Hemispheres
A gold moon-raft floats and swings slowly
And it casts a fire of pale holy blue light
On the dragon tail aglow of the faint night
That glimmers far, - swimming,
The illumined shoals of stars skimming,
Overspreading earth and drowning the heart in sight
With the ocean depths and breadths of the Infinite.
A gold moon-ship sails or drifts ever
In our spirit's skies and halts never, blue-keeled,
And it throws its white-blue fire on this grey field,
Night's dragon loop, - speeding,
The illumined star-thought sloops leading
To the Dawn, their harbour home, to the Light unsealed,
To the sun-face Infinite, the Untimed revealed.
564
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Moon of Two Hemispheres
,#NFDB
1450:Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, ‘inhale great draughts of space,’ wonder, wonder at the wind’s unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands… ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
1451:They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginningless past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead, in a holy temple. - I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under bbut the Infinite Nothingness, the Enormousness of it, the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom-worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom-worlds and each atom-world only a figure of speech - inward, outward, up and down, nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
1452:The mind of man, by nature a monist, cannot accept two nothings; he knows there has been one nothing, his biological inexistence in the infinite past, for his memory is utterly blank, and that nothingness, being, as it were, past, is not too hard to endure. But a second nothingness- which perhaps might not be so hard to bear either- is logically unacceptable. When speaking of space we can imagine a live speck in the limitless oneness of space; but there is no analogy in such a concept with our brief life in time... our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining- no matter how narrowly- between the back panel and fore panel. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1453:There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.
But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter-- to inflict that version of himself on other people-- was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him.
He was also afraid that it might hurt.
And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question.
And the question was:
The question was: ~ Jonathan Franzen,#NFDB
1454:Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. ~ Grant Morrison, #NFDB
1455:John Duns Scotus, OFM, taught that the opposite of good was not bad but nonbeing itself. The opposite of truth was not falsity but nonbeing itself. And the opposite of unity was not multiplicity but nonbeing itself. All the opposites are all held and contained within pure being, even the finite and the infinite, matter and Spirit, male and female, etc., and this harmony between things is called beauty, which for some is a fourth transcendental itself. This worldview creates a very positive theology and anthropology based on original blessing instead of original sin. It also creates a philosophical basis for nondual thinking and the nature of evil. Evil is nonbeing and unconsciousness. Beauty is the fullness of being and full consciousness. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
1456:I know that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without distrubing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame.
I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that in back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve. ~ Marianne Wiggins,#NFDB
1457:Earthworm
Slim inquirer, while the old fathers sleep
you are reworking their soil, you have
a grocery store there down under the earth
and it is well stocked with broken wine bottles,
old cigars, old door knobs and earth,
that great brown flour that you kiss each day.
There are dark stars in the cool evening and
you fondle them like killer birds' beaks.
But what I want to know is why when small boys
dig you up for curiosity and cut you in half
why each half lives and crawls away as if whole.
Have you no beginning and end? Which heart is
the real one? Which eye the seer? Why
is it in the infinite plan that you would
be severed and rise from the dead like a gargoyle
with two heads?
~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
1458:Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
1459:But his most important capacity is that of developing the powers of the higher principles in himself, a greater power of life, a purer light of mind, the illumination of supermind, the infinite being, consciousness and delight of spirit. By an ascending movement he can develop his human imperfection towards that greater perfection. But whatever his aim, however exalted his aspiration, he has to begin from the law of his present imperfection, to take full account of it and see how it can be converted to the law of a possible perfection. This present law of his being starts from the inconscience of the material universe, an involution of the soul in form and subjection to material nature; and
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Psychology Of Perfection,#NFDB
1460:Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw earth over her, and she asked God, without fear if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.
"Shit!" she shouted ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez,#NFDB
1461:You're no different than the rest of us, Victor. We all see ourselves as this dissatisfied thing, this ego, looking outside ourselves for just that one other thing that will make us complete. That job, that lover, that pot of money. Even enlightenment, as if that too is a thing we can grab hold of to complete what needs completing. There is always something, we believe, that will make us whole. But if you take a finite thing, like body and mind, and look for something outside it to make it complete, something like money or love or faith, what you are seeking is also just a finite thing. So you have a finite thing reaching for the infinite by grabbing for some other finite thing and you end up with nothing more than a deeper sense of dissatisfaction. ~ William Lashner, #NFDB
1462:When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and saw that in containing Him she contained the world besides. The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm she slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence." -Thomas Merton ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1463:Amitai shook his head, almost smiling, because here he was, feeling for the first time that the tragedy of European Jewry did belong to him. Before today, his lack of personal connection to the Holocaust had made it a distant history, no more relevant to him than any other. But Natalie, the locket, the painting, the Hall of Names, taking responsibility for Komlos in the Pages of Testimony, these had brought him to he realization that, merely by virtue of being a Jew, even a Jew from another place and time, it was his history, too. Not personally, but collectively. It belonged to him, as he belonged to all those Jews rising up into the infinite ceiling in the Hall of Names. He and Natalie were in the same place, but they had come from different directions. ~ Ayelet Waldman, #NFDB
1464:Put another way, Peat thinks that synchronicities reveal the absence of division between the physical world and our inner psychological reality. Thus the relative scarcity of synchronous experiences in our lives shows not only the extent to which we have fragmented ourselves from the general field of consciousness, but also the degree to which we have sealed ourselves off from the infinite and dazzling potential of the deeper orders of mind and reality. According to Peat, when we experience a synchronicity, what we are really experiencing "is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and extending throughout society and nature, moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself. ~ Michael Talbot, #NFDB
1465:In place of the confinement of the infinitesimal, beneath the weight of the Infinite is found the limitlessness or a humanly bearable share in the limitlessness which is the freedom of God. For Ibn Tufayl, at least, this was the meaning of Islam: the progressive assimilation of self to God (so far as lies in human power). This entails acceptance of the divine will, but not as something alien. The transmuting of selfish purpose to the will of God need not imply a surrender of will because the assimilation of self to God does not imply a surrender of self. On the contrary, as Plato and Ibn Tufayl are agreed, this assimilation is the meaning of man's fulfillment qua man, the substance of Plato's answer to the cryptic challenge of the oracle, "Know thyself! ~ Lenn Evan Goodman, #NFDB
1466:Holiness means wholeness. To say “God is holy” is to refer to the wholeness, fullness, beauty, and abundant life that overflows within the Godhead. God lacks nothing. He is unbroken, undamaged, unfallen, completely complete and entire within himself. He is the indivisible One, wholly self-sufficient, and the picture of perfection. When the angels sing “Holy is the Lord,” they are not admiring him for his rule-keeping or sin avoidance. They are marveling at the transcendent totality of his perfection. To worship God in the beauty of his holiness is to be awestruck by the infinite sweep and scale of his sublimity. It is to become lost in the limitless landscape of his loveliness. Holiness is not one aspect of God’s character; it is the whole package in glorious unity. ~ Paul Ellis, #NFDB
1467:Anyone who has played with integers, for example, has doubtless observed that the sum of the first two odd numbers, that is, 1 + 3, is the square of two or 4; the sum of the first three odd numbers, that is, 1 + 3 +5, is the square of three or 9. Similarly for the first four, five, and six odd numbers. Thus, simple calculation suggests a general statement, namely, that the sum of the first n odd numbers, where n is any integer, is the square of n. Of course this possible theorem is not proved by the above calculations. Nor could it ever be proved by such calculations, for mortal man could not make the infinite set of calculations that would be required to establish the conclusion for every n. The calculations do, however, give the mathematician something to work on. ~ Morris Kline, #NFDB
1468:If this practice [black magic] is persisted in long enough, the spirit will be unable to disentangle itself from the substances of the lower worlds, and must remain enmeshed therein until the dissolution of the universe at the time of the night of Brahma, when the divine spark is cast into the blackness of the Infinite through the rings of Saturn. By taking this path, the ego attains darkness, but it is the darkness of the tomb and of unconsciousness, reached through the path of perversion and negation. Its reward is the black death and the loss of the soul. Such an ego wanders in a great unknown without hope, reason, or understanding, while the endless wheels of Chaos dissolve the bodies of which it has failed to make the proper use. ~ Manly P Hall, Magic: A Treatise on Esoteric Ethics, #NFDB
1469:We are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. Every breath we take, every heartbeat, every evolution of every cell comes from God and is sustained by God every second, just as every creation, invention, every bar of music or line of verse, every thought, vision, fantasy, every dumb-ass flop and stroke of genius comes from that infinite intelligence that created us and the universe in all its dimensions, out of the Void, the field of infinite potential, primal chaos, the Muse. To acknowledge that reality, to efface all ego, to let the work come through us and give it back freely to its source, that, in my opinion, is as true to reality as it gets. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
1470:We cannot get away from the infinite. It stares us in the face whether we look at atoms or stars, or at the becauses behind the becauses, stretching back through eternity. Flat-earth science has no more use for it than the flat-earth theologians had in the Dark Ages; but a true science of life must let infinity in, and never lose sight of it. In two earlier books I have tried to show that throughout the ages the great innovators in the history of science had always been aware of the transparency of phenomena towards a different order of reality, of the ubiquitous presence of the ghost in the machine -even such a simple machine as a magnetic compass or a Leyden jar. Once a scientist loses the sense of mystery, he can be an excellent technician, but he ceases to be a savant. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
1471:You can become what you really desire because your divine potential or, as Paul would call it, the Christ, is within you always. Not some of the time, not if you take a class and acquire more knowledge. Human potential studies don’t put potentiality in anyone, but they help you to understand the potential that is always present. You can become what you really desire to be, not because of some divine intervention, not because of some newfangled metaphysical system you’re going to learn, not because someone puts his hands upon you and works some spiritual magic. You can do this because your divine potential, the Christ of you, is always present within you as the Allness of the infinite process expressing as you. This is an important principle by which you can deal with life. ~ Eric Butterworth, #NFDB
1472:Muse, We are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. Every breath we take, every heartbeat, every evolution of every cell comes from God and is sustained by God every second, just as every creation, invention, every bar of music or line of verse, every thought, vision, fantasy, every dumb-ass flop and stroke of genius comes from that infinite intelligence that created us and the universe in all its dimensions, out of the Void, the field of infinite potential, primal chaos, the Muse. To acknowledge that reality, to efface all ego, to let the work come through us and give it back freely to its source, that, in my opinion, is as true to reality as it gets. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
1473:God's holiness is more than just separateness. His holiness is also transcendent. The word transcendence means literally "to climb across." It is defined as "exceeding usual limits." To transcenc is to rise above something, to go above and beyond a certain limit. When we speak of the transcendence of God, we are talking about that sense in which God is above and beyond us. Transcendence describes His supreme and absolute greatness. The word is used to describe God's relationship to the world. He is higher than the world. He has absolute power over the world. The world has no power over Him. Transcendence describes God in His consuming majesty, His exalted loftiness. It points to the infinite distance that separates Him from every creature. He is an infinite cut above everything else. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
1474:How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
1475:Well, take the equation of quantum mechanics that determines the form of the orbitals of an electron. This equation has a certain number of solutions, and these solutions correspond exactly to: hydrogen, helium, oxygen...and the other elements! Mendeleev's periodic table is structured exactly like the set of these solutions. The properties of the elements, with everything else, follows from the solution of this equation. Quantum mechanics deciphers perfectly the secret of the structure of the periodic table of elements.
Pythagoras and Plato's ancient dream is realized: to describe all of the world's substances with a single formula. The infinite complexity of chemistry, captured by the solutions of a single equation! And this is just one of the applications of quantum mechanics. ~ Carlo Rovelli,#NFDB
1476:Now it is impossible that the infinite should be a thing which is itself infinite, separable from sensible objects. If the infinite is neither a magnitude nor an aggregate, but is itself a substance and not an attribute, it will be indivisible; for the divisible must be either a magnitude or an aggregate. But if indivisible, then not infinite, except in the sense (1) in which the voice is 'invisible'. But this is not the sense in which it is used by those who say that the infinite exists, nor that in which we are investigating it, namely as (2) 'that which cannot be gone through'. But if the infinite exists as an attribute, it would not be, qua infinite an element in substances, any more than the invisible would be an element of speech, though the voice is invisible.
Physics, III, 5, 206a ~ Aristotle,#NFDB
1477:omnipresent wings. Like all other God-inspired prophets, Lahiri Mahasaya gave new hope to the outcasts and the downtrodden of society. “Remember that you belong to no one and that no one belongs to you. Reflect that some day you will suddenly have to leave everything in this world—so make the acquaintance of God now,” the great guru told his disciples. “Prepare yourself for the coming astral journey of death by riding daily in a balloon of divine perception. Through delusion you are perceiving yourself as a bundle of flesh and bones, which at best is a nest of troubles. 12 Meditate unceasingly, that you quickly behold yourself as the Infinite Essence, free from every form of misery. Cease being a prisoner of the body; using the secret key of Kriya, learn to escape into Spirit.” The ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
1478:In the world's busy market-place, O Shyama, Thou art flying kites; High up they soar on the wind of hope, held fast by maya's string. Their frames are human skeletons, their sails of the the three gunas made; But all their curious workmanship is merely for ornament. Upon the kite-strings Thou hast rubbed the manja-paste of worldliness, So as to make each straining strand all the more sharp and strong. Out of a hundred thousand kites, at best but one or two break free; And thou dost laugh and clap Thy hands, O Mother, watching them! On favoring winds, says Ramprasad, the kites set loose will speedily Be borne away to the Infinite, across the sea of the world. [1008.jpg] -- from Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, by Elizabeth U. Harding
~ Ramprasad, In the worlds busy market-place, O Shyama
,#NFDB
1479:Just because I, finite man, do not understand everything that God, the infinite, does is no reason to doubt God’s purpose. I may go into someone’s workshop and see all the tools and gadgets that are important to the man’s work. I may see laying on the table, for instance, a little tool that I can make nothing of and have no understanding of its purpose. But in the hands of the craftsman, that little tool has a well-defined purpose and does what it’s supposed to do. Just because the man’s worktable looks cluttered and as if everything is out of place does not mean in his mind there is not order and purpose. In the same regard, I am not going to accuse God of creating a lot of unnecessary things that have no purpose in God’s total scheme of things, just because I don’t understand them. I give you that ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
1480:Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind. Losing all their independence as divine works, things gravitate henceforth round human thought, whence their laws are derived. What wonder, after that, is if criticism had resulted in the virtual disappearance of all metaphysics? [...] As soon as the universe is reduced to the laws of mind, man, now become creator, has no longer any means of rising above himself. Legislator of a world to which his own mind has given birth, he is henceforth the prisoner of his own work, and he will never escape from it anymore. [...] if my thought is the condition of being, never by thought shall I be able to transcend the limits of my being and my capacity for the infinite will never be satisfied. ~ tienne Gilson, #NFDB
1481:Sculpture does not reject resemblance, of which, indeed, it has need. But resemblance is not its first aim.
What it is looking for, in its periods of greatness, is the gesture, the expression, or the empty stare which
will sum up all the gestures and all the stares in the world. Its purpose is not to imitate, but to stylize and
to imprison in one significant expression the fleeting ecstasy of the body or the infinite variety of human
attitudes. Then, and only then, does it erect, on the pediments of teeming cities, the model, the type, the
motionless perfection that will cool, for one moment, the fevered brow of man. The frustrated lover of
love can finally gaze at the Greek caryatides and grasp what it is that triumphs, in the body and face of the
woman, over every degradation ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
1482:When we recall the great influence which Spenser's poetry has exerted on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism - a direct Platonism, and a Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and Middle Ages - combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is now contained in such words as 'love' and 'beauty'. Let us remember, then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly, we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort. ~ Owen Barfield, #NFDB
1483:I've no personality,' I would tell myself. My curiosity embraced everything; I believed in an absolute truth, in the need for moral law; my thoughts adapted themselves to their objects; if occasionally one of them took me by surprise, it was because it reflected something that was surprising. I preferred good to evil and despised that which should be despised. I could find no trace of my own subjectivity. I had wanted myself to be boundless, and I had become as shapeless as the infinite. The paradox was that I became aware of this deficiency at the very moment when I discovered my individuality; my universal aspiration had seemed to me until then to exist in its own right; but now it had become a character trait: 'Simone is interested in everything.' I found myself limited by my refusal to be limited. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1484:There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classified as pathologic, that denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness. To set up a theory that lacks a source of truth is an excellent example of blind assurance. And the odd part of it is the haughty air of superiority and compassion assumed toward the philosophy that sees God, by this philosophy that has to grope its way. It makes one think of a mole exclaiming, "How I pity them with their sun!" There are, we know, illustrious and powerful atheists; with them, the matter is nothing but a question of definitions, and at all events, even if they do not believe in God, they prove God, because they are great minds. We hail, in them, the philosophers, while, at the same time, inexorably disputing their philosophy. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1485:This prayer is for my sister Catherine. She is relaxed and at peace, poised, balanced, serene, and calm. The healing intelligence of her subconscious mind, which created her body, is now transforming every cell, nerve, tissue, muscle, and bone of her being according to the perfect pattern of all organs lodged in her subconscious mind. Silently, quietly, all distorted thought patterns in her subconscious mind are removed and dissolved, and the vitality, wholeness, and beauty of the life principle are made manifest in every atom of her being. She is now open and receptive to the healing currents, which are flowing through her like a river, restoring her to perfect health, harmony, and peace. All distortions and ugly images are now washed away by the infinite ocean of love and peace flowing through her, and it is so. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
1486:Putting it in my own words, [Edwards] said that the infinite complexity of the divine mind is such that God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. He can look through a narrow lens or through a wide-angle lens.
When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD God" (Ezekiel 18:32).
But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic- in all its parts- good and evil- brings him delight. ~ John Piper,#NFDB
1487:The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. ~ Herman Melville, #NFDB
1488:For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin. ~ Thomas Ligotti, #NFDB
1489:Summer is like a slow-cooker bringing everything in the world to a boil 1 degree at a time. It promises a million happy adjectives only to pour stench and sewage into your nose for dinner. I hate the heat and the sticky, sweaty mess left behind. I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us.
The moon is a loyal companion.
It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do.
Every day it's a different version of itself.
Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The mood understands what it means to be human.
Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections. ~ Tahereh Mafi,#NFDB
1490:In particular, if consciousness is an ontological fundamental-that is, a primary element of reality-then it may have the power to achieve what is both the best-documented and at the same time the spookiest effect of the m ind on the material world: the ability of consciousness to transform the infinite possibilities for, say, the position of a subatomic particle as described by quantum mechanics into the single reality for that position as detected by an observer. If that sounds both mysterious and spooky, it is a spookiness that has been a part of science since almost the beginning of the twentieth century. It was physics that first felt the breath of this ghost, with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and it is in the field of neuroscience and the problem of mind and matter that its ethereal presence is felt most markedly today. ~ Jeffrey M Schwartz, #NFDB
1491:ON FEELING On looking back over my life, and especially during the last thirty or forty years, one thing is very clear to me, namely, that feeling is a greater power than thought. This may seem to be a strange statement to make in view of my many writings on the power of thought. For instance I can see that when, about the year 1906, I started making demands upon the Infinite, it was not so much the thoughts expressed or the words used which produced such a startling change in my circumstances, as the intense feeling which I put into the words, which turned my life literally upside down. Therefore my statement neither weakens nor contradicts anything that I have ever said as to the necessity of right thought -for this is of the utmost importance. But it is necessary that we should feel what we think, otherwise the thought has but little power. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1492:The key to the riddle lies in the metaphysics of the Persians, which in turn was derived from the most ancient religious Mysteries of both the Near East and the Far East. It is explained that good and evil, so-called, are but the aspects of qualities of One Principle. For example, creation brings into manifestation the innumerable hosts of lives which lie sleeping in the Infinite. In this respect creation is release, or expression, and therefore good. But creation also infers certain limits and boundaries being placed upon space. Thus the very world which is man's sphere of opportunity is also his living tomb, and in a sense therefore evil or adverse to the luminous inner self that must dwell so long in the fetters of matter. Every action therefore of the creating power is described as bringing into manifestation not only a good but and evil spirit or angel, #NFDB
1493:Is there anybody here?" asked he, aloud and in a startled voice. Then he continued with a laugh, which was like the laugh of an idiot: "What a fool I am! there cannot be anybody here."
There was One; but He who was there was not of such as the human eye can see.
He put the candlesticks on the mantel.
Alas! all his irresolutions were again upon him. He was no further advanced than when he began.
So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breathe of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths. ~ Victor Hugo,#NFDB
1494: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,#NFDB
1495:After some hours, the dogs, exhausted by running round, almost dead, their tongues hanging out, set upon one another and, not knowing what they are doing, tear one another into thousands of pieces with incredible rapidity. Yet they do not do this out of cruelty.
One day, a glazed look in her eyes, my mother said to me: ‘When you are in bed and you hear the barking of the dogs in the countryside, hide beneath your blanket, but do not deride what they do: they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, as you, and I, and all other pale, long-faced human beings do.’
Since that time, I have respected the dead woman’s wish. Like those dogs I feel the need for the infinite. I cannot, cannot satisfy this need. I am the son of a man and a woman, from what I have been told.
This astonishes me…I believed I was something more. ~ Comte de Lautr amont,#NFDB
1496:From castles of bone unknown music comes
But now, that toil rewarded; you, your calculations,
––you, your fits of impatience––are no more than your dancing and your voice, not fixed and certainly not forced, although an added reason for a double consequence of inventiveness + success, ––in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe devoid of images;––force and justice reflect the
dancing and the voices which are only now esteemed.
The voices of instruction in exile... The body’s ingenuousness bit- terly put in its place... –– Adagio –– Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence, the studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings. ~ Arthur Rimbaud,#NFDB
1497: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, #NFDB
1498:Sunrise On The Coast
Grey dawn on the sand-hills -- the night wind has drifted
All night from the rollers a scent of the sea;
With the dawn the grey fog his battalions has lifted,
At the call of the morning they scatter and flee.
Like mariners calling the roll of their number
The sea-fowl put out to the infinite deep.
And far overhead -- sinking softly to slumber -Worn out by their watching the stars fall asleep.
To eastward, where rests the broad dome of the skies on
The sea-line, stirs softly the curtain of night;
And far from behind the enshrouded horizon
Comes the voice of a God saying "Let there be light."
And lo, there is light! Evanescent and tender,
It glows ruby-red where 'twas now ashen-grey;
And purple and scarlet and gold in its splendour -Behold, 'tis that marvel, the birth of a day!
~ Banjo Paterson,#NFDB
1499:The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as “My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false,” or Nietzsche’s famous statement “God is dead.” The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1500:It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. ~ Ted Hughes, #NFDB
274 Integral Yoga
70 Poetry
39 Yoga
33 Christianity
22 Philosophy
22 Occultism
13 Science
13 Fiction
7 Psychology
7 Integral Theory
6 Mysticism
6 Hinduism
5 Sufism
5 Kabbalah
3 Cybernetics
3 Baha i Faith
1 Thelema
1 Philsophy
1 Buddhism
367 Sri Aurobindo
95 The Mother
84 Nolini Kanta Gupta
41 Satprem
26 Sri Ramakrishna
23 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
17 Aleister Crowley
16 A B Purani
12 Swami Vivekananda
11 H P Lovecraft
10 Paul Richard
10 Jorge Luis Borges
7 Plotinus
6 Kabir
5 Walt Whitman
5 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
5 Plato
5 Friedrich Schiller
4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley
4 Patanjali
4 Jordan Peterson
4 Carl Jung
3 Saint Augustine of Hippo
3 Norbert Wiener
3 Lucretius
3 Ken Wilber
3 George Van Vrekhem
3 Baha u llah
3 Aldous Huxley
2 Vyasa
2 Swami Krishnananda
2 Rabindranath Tagore
2 Peter J Carroll
2 Nirodbaran
2 Franz Bardon
98 The Synthesis Of Yoga
45 The Life Divine
32 Savitri
24 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
24 Prayers And Meditations
24 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
17 Essays On The Gita
17 Collected Poems
16 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
16 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
15 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
13 Essays Divine And Human
12 The Secret Of The Veda
11 Record of Yoga
11 Lovecraft - Poems
11 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
10 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
10 Liber ABA
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
9 Labyrinths
9 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
8 The Human Cycle
8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
8 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
8 Isha Upanishad
7 The Phenomenon of Man
7 Talks
7 Some Answers From The Mother
7 Letters On Yoga II
7 Let Me Explain
6 The Future of Man
6 On the Way to Supermanhood
6 Letters On Yoga III
6 Letters On Yoga I
6 Agenda Vol 03
6 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
5 Whitman - Poems
5 Schiller - Poems
5 Questions And Answers 1956
5 General Principles of Kabbalah
4 Words Of Long Ago
4 The Secret Doctrine
4 Songs of Kabir
4 Shelley - Poems
4 Raja-Yoga
4 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
4 Maps of Meaning
4 Magick Without Tears
4 Kena and Other Upanishads
4 Crowley - Poems
4 Bhakti-Yoga
4 Agenda Vol 04
4 Agenda Vol 02
3 Vedic and Philological Studies
3 The Perennial Philosophy
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Questions And Answers 1955
3 Questions And Answers 1953
3 Preparing for the Miraculous
3 Of The Nature Of Things
3 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
3 Hymn of the Universe
3 Cybernetics
3 5.1.01 - Ilion
2 Vishnu Purana
2 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
2 The Study and Practice of Yoga
2 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
2 The Integral Yoga
2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
2 Tagore - Poems
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
2 Liber Null
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 City of God
2 Agenda Vol 12
2 Agenda Vol 11
2 Agenda Vol 09
2 Agenda Vol 07
00.01 - The Mother on Savitri, #Sweet Mother - Harmonies of Light, #unset, #Zen
You know, before writing Savitri Sri Aurobindo said to me, *I am impelled to launch on a new adventure; I was hesitant in the beginning, but now I am decided. Still, I do not know how far I shall succeed. I pray for help.* And you know what it was? It was - before beginning, I warn you in advance - it was His way of speaking, so full of divine humility and modesty. He never... *asserted Himself*. And the day He actually began it, He told me: *I have launched myself in a rudderless boat upon the vastness of the Infinite.* And once having started, He wrote page after page without intermission, as though it were a thing already complete up there and He had only to transcribe it in ink down here on these pages.
In truth, the entire form of Savitri has descended "en masse" from the highest region and Sri Aurobindo with His genius only arranged the lines - in a superb and magnificent style. Sometimes entire lines were revealed and He has left them intact; He worked hard, untiringly, so that the inspiration could come from the highest possible summit. And what a work He has created! Yes, it is a true creation in itself. It is an unequalled work. Everything is there, and it is put in such a simple, such a clear form; verses perfectly harmonious, limpid and eternally true. My child, I have read so many things, but I have never come across anything which could be compared with Savitri. I have studied the best works in Greek, Latin, English and of course French literature, also in German and all the great creations of the West and the East, including the great epics; but I repeat it, I have not found anywhere anything comparable with Savitri. All these literary works seems to me empty, flat, hollow, without any deep reality - apart from a few rare exceptions, and these too represent only a small fraction of what Savitri is. What grandeur, what amplitude, what reality: it is something immortal and eternal He has created. I tell you once again there is nothing like in it the whole world. Even if one puts aside the vision of the reality, that is, the essential substance which is the heart of the inspiration, and considers only the lines in themselves, one will find them unique, of the highest classical kind. What He has created is something man cannot imagine. For, everything is there, everything.
It may then be said that Savitri is a revelation, it is a meditation, it is a quest of the Infinite, the Eternal. If it is read with this aspiration for Immortality, the reading itself will serve as a guide to Immortality. To read Savitri is indeed to practice Yoga, spiritual concentration; one can find there all that is needed to realise the Divine. Each step of Yoga is noted here, including the secret of all other Yogas. Surely, if one sincerely follows what is revealed here in each line one will reach finally the transformation of the Supramental Yoga. It is truly the infallible guide who never abandons you; its support is always there for him who wants to follow the path. Each verse of Savitri is like a revealed Mantra which surpasses all that man possessed by way of knowledge, and I repeat this, the words are expressed and arranged in such a way that the sonority of the rhythm leads you to the origin of sound, which is OM.
My child, yes, everything is there: mysticism, occultism, philosophy, the history of evolution, the history of man, of the gods, of creation, of Nature. How the universe was created, why, for what purpose, what destiny - all is there. You can find all the answers to all your questions there. Everything is explained, even the future of man and of the evolution, all that nobody yet knows. He has described it all in beautiful and clear words so that spiritual adventurers who wish to solve the mysteries of the world may understand it more easily. But this mystery is well hidden behind the words and lines and one must rise to the required level of true consciousness to discover it. All prophesies, all that is going to come is presented with the precise and wonderful clarity. Sri Aurobindo gives you here the key to find the Truth, to discover the Consciousness, to solve the problem of what the universe is. He has also indicated how to open the door of the Inconscience so that the light may penetrate there and transform it. He has shown the path, the way to liberate oneself from the ignorance and climb up to the superconscience; each stage, each plane of consciousness, how they can be scaled, how one can cross even the barrier of death and attain immortality. You will find the whole journey in detail, and as you go forward you can discover things altogether unknown to man. That is Savitri and much more yet. It is a real experience - reading Savitri. All the secrets that man possessed, He has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, even the experience of the conquest of Death. He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral Yoga.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
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
from this height to the valleys of normal life. They live and move in the world for the welfare of mankind. They are invested with a supreme spiritual power. A divine glory shines through them.
--
. What is shallow is worthless and can never give real felicity. But the Knowledge by which one does not see another or hear another or know another, which is beyond duality, is great, and through such Knowledge one attains the Infinite Bliss. How can the mind and senses grasp That which shines in the heart of all as the Eternal Subject?"
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."
--
Durgacharan Nag, also known as Nag Mahashay, was the ideal householder among the lay disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. He was the embodiment of the Master's ideal of life in the world, unstained by worldliness. In spite of his intense desire to become a sannyasi, Sri Ramakrishna asked him to live in the world in the spirit of a monk, and the disciple truly carried out this injunction. He was born of a poor family and even during his boyhood often sacrificed everything to lessen the sufferings of the needy. He had married at an early age and after his wife's death had married a second time to obey his father's command. But he once said to his wife: "Love on the physical level never lasts. He is indeed blessed who can give his love to God with his whole heart. Even a little attachment to the body endures for several births. So do not be attached to this cage of bone and flesh. Take shelter at the feet of the Mother and think of Her alone. Thus your life here and hereafter will be ennobled." The Master spoke of him as a "blazing light". He received every word of Sri Ramakrishna in dead earnest. One day he heard the Master saying that it was difficult for doctors, lawyers, and brokers to make much progress in spirituality. Of doctors he said, "If the mind clings to the tiny drops of medicine, how can it conceive of the Infinite?" That was the end of Durgacharan's medical practice and he threw his chest of medicines into the Ganges. Sri Ramakrishna assured him that he would not lack simple food and clothing. He bade him serve holy men. On being asked where he would find real holy men, the Master said that the sadhus themselves would seek his company. No sannyasi could have lived a more austere life than Durgacharan.
--- GIRISH GHOSH
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
of the Infinite who initiate periods. they are called
Dinosaurs because of their seeming to be terrible
--
Hunger thou, O man, for the Infinite: be insatiable
even for the finite; thus at The End shalt thou
devour the finite, and become the Infinite.
Be thou more greedy that the shark, more full of
--
and the the Infinite.
So wrote not FRATER PERDURABO, but the
--
the Infinite Snake Ananta that surroundeth the
Universe is but the Coffin-Worm!
--
weight of the Karma of the Infinite is with him.
Therefore is he glad indeed; for he hath finished THE
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
As time went on and the number of devotees increased, the staircase room and terrace of the 3rd floor of the Morton Institution became a veritable Naimisaranya of modern times, resounding during all hours of the day, and sometimes of night, too, with the word of God coming from the Rishi-like face of M. addressed to the eager God-seekers sitting around. To the devotees who helped him in preparing the text of the Gospel, he would dictate the conversations of the Master in a meditative mood, referring now and then to his diary. At times in the stillness of midnight he would awaken a nearby devotee and tell him: "Let us listen to the words of the Master in the depths of the night as he explains the truth of the Pranava." ( Vednta Kesari XIX P. 142.) Swami Raghavananda, an intimate devotee of M., writes as follows about these devotional sittings: "In the sweet and warm months of April and May, sitting under the canopy of heaven on the roof-garden of 50 Amherst Street, surrounded by shrubs and plants, himself sitting in their midst like a Rishi of old, the stars and planets in their courses beckoning us to things infinite and sublime, he would speak to us of the mysteries of God and His love and of the yearning that would rise in the human heart to solve the Eternal Riddle, as exemplified in the life of his Master. The mind, melting under the influence of his soft sweet words of light, would almost transcend the frontiers of limited existence and dare to peep into the Infinite. He himself would take the influence of the setting and say,'What a blessed privilege it is to sit in such a setting (pointing to the starry heavens), in the company of the devotees discoursing on God and His love!' These unforgettable scenes will long remain imprinted on the minds of his hearers." (Prabuddha Bharata Vol XXXVII P 497.)
About twenty-seven years of his life he spent in this way in the heart of the great city of Calcutta, radiating the Master's thoughts and ideals to countless devotees who flocked to him, and to still larger numbers who read his Kathmrita (English Edition : The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), the last part of which he had completed before June 1932 and given to the press. And miraculously, as it were, his end also came immediately after he had completed his life's mission. About three months earlier he had come to stay at his home at 13/2 Gurdasprasad Chaudhuary Lane at Thakur Bari, where the Holy Mother had herself installed the Master and where His regular worship was being conducted for the previous 40 years. The night of 3rd June being the Phalahrini Kli Pooja day, M.
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the atom from the nebula, the Infinitesimal from the immense ;
A sense of quality, or of novelty, enabling us to distinguish in
0.03 - Letters to My little smile, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
with the Infinite.
My dear little smile,
--
1) the Infinite is the inexhaustible storehouse of forces. The
individual is a battery, a storage cell which runs down after use.
--
2) the Infinite is the river that flows without cease; the
individual is the little pond that dries up slowly in the sun.
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite."
Never forget this promise of Sri Aurobindo and keep
0.05 - The Synthesis of the Systems, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self, but of unity in the Infinite diversity of activities, worlds and creatures.
Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact and identification of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sayujya-mukti, by which it can become free2 even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the salokya-mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
and protector... and so on in the Infinite variety of possibilities.
Fear nothing: the Divine always answers every sincere aspiration
0.07 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
seem farther away than ever. You are the Infinite Mother
of all your creation and many are your children. But
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo has written: "He who chooses the Infinite
has been chosen by the Infinite."3 And what about the
others, Mother? What good is life if the Divine does not
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Not that this sovereign power will have anything to do with aggression or over-bearingness. It will not be a power that feels itself only by creating an eternal opponentErbfeindby coming in constant clash with a rival that seeks to gain victory by subjugating. It will not be Nietzschean "will to power," which is, at best, a supreme Asuric power. It will rather be a Divine Power, for the strength it will exert and the victory it will achieve will not come from the egoit is the ego which requires an object outside and against to feel and affirm itself but it will come from a higher personal self which is one with the cosmic soul and therefore with other personal souls. The Asura, in spite of, or rather, because of his aggressive vehemence betrays a lack of the sovereign power that is calm and at ease and self-sufficient. The Devic power does not assert hut simply accomplishes; the forces of the world act not as its opponent but as its instrument. Thus the New Man shall affirm his individual sovereignty and do so to perfection by expressing through it his unity with the cosmic powers, with the Infinite godhead. And by being Swarat, Self-Master, he will become Samrat, world-master.
This mastery will be effected not merely in will, but in mind and heart also. For the New Man will know not by the intellect which is egocentric and therefore limited, not by ratiocination which is an indirect and doubtful process, but by direct vision, an inner communion, a soul revelation. The new knowledge will be vast and profound and creative, based as it will be upon the reality of things and not upon their shadows. Truth will shine through every experience and every utterance"a truth shall have its seat on our speech and mind and hearing", so have the Vedas said. The mind and intellect will not be active and constructive agents but the luminous channel of a self-luminous knowledge. And the heart too which is now the field of passion and egoism will be cleared of its noise and obscurity; a serener sky will shed its pure warmth and translucent glow. The knot will be rent asunderbhidyate hridaya granthih and the vast and mighty streams of another ocean will flow through. We will love not merely those to whom we are akin but God's creatures, one and all; we will love not with the yearning and hunger of a mortal but with the wide and intense Rasa that lies in the divine identity of souls.
01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To find the Divine is indeed the first reason for seeking the spiritual Truth and the spiritual life; it is the one thing indispensable and all the resit is nothing without it. The Divine once found, to manifest Him, - that is, first of all to transform one's own limited consciousness into the Divine Consciousness, to live in the Infinite Peace, Light, Love, Strength, Bliss, to become that in one's essential nature and, as a consequence, to be its vessel, channel, instrument in one's active nature. To bring into activity the principle of oneness on the material plane or to work for humanity is a mental mistranslation of the Truth - these things cannot be the first true object of spiritual seeking. We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or a means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforeh and by our limited mental conceptions what they must be is to hamper the growth of the spiritual Truth within. As that grows we shall feel the Divine Light and Truth, the Divine Power and Force, the Divine Purity and Peace working within us, dealing with our actions as well as our consciousness, making use of them to reshape us into the Divine Image, removing the dross, substituting the pure Gold of the Spirit. Only when the Divine Presence is there in us always and the consciousness transformed, can we have the right to say that we are ready to manifest the Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying by a halfway formation the truth growth into the full communion and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outflowing of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but it can only be fulfilled by an ourflowing of the inner realisation, something that grows from within outwards, not by the working out of a mental principle.
The realisation of the Divine is the one thing needful and the rest is desirable only in so far as it helps or leads towards that or when it is realised, extends and manifests the realisation. Manifestation and organisation of the whole life for the divine work, - first, the sadhana personal and collective necessary for the realisation and a common life of God-realised men, secondly, for help to the world to move towards that, and to live in the Light - is the whole meaning and purpose of my Yoga. But the realisation is the first need and it is that round which all the rest moves, for apart from it all the rest would have no meaning.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is also to be noted that as mind is not the last limit of the march of evolution, even so the progress of evolution will not stop with the manifestation and embodiment of the Supermind. There are other still higher principles beyond and they too presumably await manifestation and embodiment on earth. Creation has no beginning in time (andi) nor has it an end (ananta). It is an eternal process of the unravelling of the mysteries of the Infinite. Only, it may be said that with the Supermind the creation here enters into a different order of existence. Before it there was the domain of Ignorance, after it will come the reign of Light and Knowledge. Mortality has been the governing principle of life on earth till now; it will be replaced by the consciousness of immortality. Evolution has proceeded through struggle and pain; hereafter it will be a spontaneous, harmonious and happy flowering.
Now, with regard to the time that the present stage of evolution is likely to take for its fulfilment, one can presume that since or if the specific urge and stress has manifested and come up to the front, this very fact would show that the problem has become a problem of actuality, and even that it can be dealt with as if it had to be solved now or never. We have said that in man, with man's self-consciousness or the consciousness of the psychic being as the instrument, evolution has attained the capacity of a swift and concentrated process, which is the process of Yoga; the process will become swifter and more concentrated, the more that instrument grows and gathers power and is infused with the divine afflatus. In fact, evolution has been such a process of gradual acceleration in tempo from the very beginning. The earliest stage, for example, the stage of dead Matter, of the play of the mere chemical forces was a very, very long one; it took millions and millions of years to come to the point when the manifestation of life became possible. But the period of elementary life, as manifested in the plant world that followed, although it too lasted a good many millions of years, was much briefer than the preceding periodit ended with the advent of the first animal form. The age of animal life, again, has been very much shorter than that of the plant life before man came upon earth. And man is already more than a million or two years oldit is fully time that a higher order of being should be created out of him.
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is the bare truth, "truth in its own home", as I have said already using a phrase of the ancient sages, that is formulated here without the prop of any external symbolism. There is no veil, no mist, no uncertainty or ambiguity. It is clarity itself, an almost scientific exactness and precision. In all this there is something of the straightness and fullness of vision that characterised the Vedic Rishis, something of their supernal genius which could mould speech into the very expression of what is beyond speech, which could sublimate the small and the finite into forms of the Vast and the Infinite. Mark how in these aphoristic lines embodying a deep spiritual experience, the inexpressible has been expressed with a luminous felicity:
Delight that labours in its opposite,
01.02 - The Creative Soul, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The cosmic soul is true. But that truth is borne out, effectuated only by the truth of the individual soul. When the individual soul becomes itself fully and integrally, by that very fact it becomes also the cosmic soul. The individuals are the channels through which flows the Universal and the Infinite in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular figure, aspectBhava, a particular angle of vision of All. The vision is entire and the figure perfect if it is not refracted by the lower and denser parts of our being. And for that the individual must first come to itself and shine in its opal clarity and translucency.
Not to do what others do, but what your soul impels you to do. Not to be others but your own self. Not to be anything but the very cosmic and infinite divinity of your soul. Therein lies your highest freedom and perfect delight. And there you are supremely creative. Each soul has a consortPrakriti, Naturewhich it creates out of its own rib. And in this field of infinite creativity the soul lives, moves and has its being.
01.02 - The Issue, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And with her nude spirit measure the Infinite's night.
3.16
--
And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.
4.21
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And bears the silence of the Infinite. ||20.21||
In a divine retreat from mortal thought,
--
This, I say, is something different from the religious and even from the mystic. It is away from the merely religious, because it is naked of the vesture of humanity (in spite of a human face that masks it at times) ; it is something more than the merely mystic, for it does not stop being a signpost or an indication to the Beyond, but is itself the presence and embodiment of the Beyond. The mystic gives us, we can say, the magic of the Infinite; what I term the spiritual, the spiritual proper, gives in addition the logic of the Infinite. At least this is what distinguishes modern spiritual consciousness from the ancient, that is, Upanishadic spiritual consciousness. The Upanishad gives expression to the spiritual consciousness in its original and pristine purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. It did not buttress itself with any logic. It is the record of fundamental experiences and there was no question of any logical exposition. But, as I have said, the modern mind requires and demands a logical element in its perceptions and presentations. Also it must needs be a different kind of logic that can satisfy and satisfy wholly the deeper and subtler movements of a modern consciousness. For the philosophical poet of an earlier age, when he had recourse to logic, it was the logic of the finite that always gave him the frame, unless he threw the whole thing overboard and leaped straight into the occult, the illogical and the a logical, like Blake, for instance. Let me illustrate and compare a little. When the older poet explains indriyani hayan ahuh, it is an allegory he resorts to, it is the logic of the finite he marshals to point to the Infinite and the beyond. The stress of reason is apparent and effective too, but the pattern is what we are normally familiar with the movement, we can say, is almost Aristotelian in its rigour. Now let us turn to the following:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme. ||26.15||
--
This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the Infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed devious waysstrongly negative at timeseven like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power,kavi kavitv divi rpam sajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
--
A finite movement of the Infinite
Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;
01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite,
This screened unrecognised Inhabitant,
--
Mind's soar, soul's dive into the Infinite.
Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds
--
He plunged his roots into the Infinite,
He based his life upon eternity.
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our early approaches to the Infinite
Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge
01.05 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Spirits Freedom and Greatness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And learn the logic of the Infinite.
The Ideal must be Nature's common truth,
--
He climbed to meet the Infinite more above.
The Immobile's ocean-silence saw him pass,
--
And bears the silence of the Infinite.
\t In a divine retreat from mortal thought,
--
Invaded Nature with the Infinite;
He saw unpathed, unwalled, his titan scope.
--
Her mnemonics of the craft of the Infinite,
Jets of the screened subliminal's caprice,
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.)
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
life, in a blessed moment - the Infinite Splendour which
is within our reach and awaits us. Yet there are so few
0.14 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We have to open them wide and allow the Infinite to enter us
freely in order to transform us.
0 1960-09-20, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But this experience with X was really interesting. I learned many things that day, many things If you concentrate long enough on any one point, you discover the Infinite (and in his own experience he found the Infinite), what could be called your own Infinite. But this is not what WE want, not this; what we want is the direct and integral contact between the manifested universe and the Infinite out of which this universe has emerged. So then it is no longer an individual or personal contact with the Infinite, its a total contact. And Sri Aurobindo insists on this, he says that its absolutely impossible to have the transformation (not the contact, but the supramental transformation) without becoming universalized that is the first condition. You cannot become supramental before being universal. And to be universal means to accept everything, be everything, become everythingreally to accept everything. And as for all those who are shut up in a system, even if it belongs to the highest regions of thought, it is not THAT.
But to each his destiny, to each his work, to each his realization, and to want to change someones destiny or someones realization is very wrong. For it simply throws him off balance thats all it does.
0 1961-03-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It doesnt matter. Fundamentally, it doesnt matter. Yesterday, while I was walking I was walking in a kind of universe that was EXCLUSIVELY the Divineit could be touched, felt: it was within, without, everywhere. For three-quarters of an hour, NOTHING but that, everywhere. Well, I can assure you, at that moment there were certainly no more problems! And what simplicitynothing to think about, nothing to want, nothing to decide: to BE, be, be! (Mother seems to dance) To be in the Infinite complexity of a perfect unity: all was there but nothing was separate; all was in movement yet nothing changed place. Truly an experience.
When we become like that, it will be very easy.
0 1961-06-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like asking if certain elements will disappear from the universe. What can it mean, the destruction of a universe? Once we are out of our stupidity, what can we call destruction? Only the form is destroyed, the appearance (that, yesall appearances are destroyed, one after the other). It is also said (its written everywhere) that the adverse forces will either be converted that is, become aware of their own divinity and become divineor be destroyed. But what does destroyed mean? Their form? Their form of consciousness can be dissolved, but what about the something which brings itand everything elseinto existence? How can that something be destroyed? This, mon petit, is difficult to comprehend. The universe is a conscious objectification of That which exists from all eternity. Well, how can the All cease to be? the Infinite and eternal All, without limits of any kindhow can anything be thrown out of it? There is nowhere to go! (You can rack your brains over it, you know!) Go where? There is only THAT.
And even when we say there is only that we are situating it somewherewhich is perfectly idiotic. It is everywhereso how can anything be thrown out of it?
0 1961-07-15, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I must say that there was a time when, as Sri Aurobindo had entrusted his work to me, there was a kind of tension to do it (it cant be called an anxiety); a tension in the will. This too has now ended (Mother stretches her arms into the Infinite). Its finished. But there MAY still be something tense lurking somewhere in the subconscient or the inconscient I dont know, its possible. Why? I dont know. I mean I have never been told, at any time, neither through Sri Aurobindo nor directly, whether or not I would go right to the end. I have never been told the contrary, either. I have been told nothing at all. And if at times I turn towards Thatnot to question, but simply to know the answer is always the same: Carry on, its not your problem; dont worry about it. So now I have learned not to worry about it; I am consciously not worried about it.
(silence)
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The secret lies in matter. Because Agni is imprisoned in matter and we ourselves are imprisoned there. It is said that Agni is without head or feet, that it conceals its two extremities: above, it disappears into the great heaven of the supraconscient (which the Rishis also called the great ocean), and below, it sinks into the formless ocean of the inconscient (which they also called the rock). We are truncated. But the Rishis were men of a solid realism, a true realism resting upon the Spirit; and since the summits of mind opened out upon a lacuna of lightecstatic, to be sure, but with no hold over the worldthey set upon the downward way.6 Thus begins the quest for the lost sun, the long pilgrimage of descent into the inconscient and the merciless fight against the dark forces, the thieves of the sun, the panis and vritras, pythons and giants, hidden in the dark lair with the whole cohort of usurpers: the dualizers, the confiners, the tearers, the COVERERS. But the divine worker, Agni, is helped by the gods, and in his quest he is led by the intuitive ray, Sarama, the heavenly hound with the subtle sense of smell who sets Agni on the track of the stolen herds (strange, shining herds). Now and again there comes the sudden glimmer of a fugitive dawn then all grows dim. One must advance step by step, digging, digging, fighting every inch of the way against the wolves whose savage fury increases the nearer one draws to their denAgni is a warrior. Agni grows through his difficulties, his flame burns more brilliantly with each blow from the Adversary; for, as the Rishis said, Night and Day both suckled the divine Child; they even said that Night and Day are the two sisters, Immortal, with a common lover [the sun] common they, though different their forms (I.113.2,3). These alternations of night and brightness accelerate until Day breaks at last and the herds of Dawn7 surge upward awakening someone who was dead (I.113.8). the Infinite rock of the inconscient is shattered, the seeker uncovers the Sun dwelling in the darkness (III.39.5), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter. In the very depths of Matter, that is to say, in the body, on earth, the Rishis found themselves cast up into Light that same Light which others sought on the heights, without their bodies and without the earth, in ecstasy. And this is what the Rishis would call the Great Passage. Without abandoning the earth they found the vast dwelling place, that dwelling place of the gods, Swar, the original Sun-world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental World: Human beings [the Rishis emphasize that they are indeed men] slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond both earth and heaven [matter and mind] and made the wide world their dwelling place (I.36.8). They have entered the True, the Right, the Vast, Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the unbroken light, the fearless light, where there is no longer suffering nor falsehood nor death: it is immortality, amritam.
***
All is reconciled. The Rishi is the son of two mothers: son of Aditi, the luminous cow, Mother of infinite Light, creatrix of the worlds; and son as well of Diti, the black cow, Mother of the tenebrous infinite and divided existence for when Diti at last reaches the end of her apparent Night, she gives us divine birth and the milk of heaven. All is fulfilled, The Rishi sets flowing in one movement human strengths and things divine (IX.70.3), he has realized the universal in the individual, become the Infinite in the finite: Then shall thy humanity become as if the workings of these gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light were founded in thee (V.66.2). Far from spurning the earth, he prays: O Godhead, guard for us the Infinite and lavish the finite(IV.2.11).
The voyage draws to its close. Agni has recovered its solar totality, its two concealed extremities. The inviolable work is fulfilled. For Agni is the place where high meets lowand in truth, there is no longer high nor low, but a single Sun everywhere: O Flame, thou goest to the ocean of Heaven, towards the gods; thou makest to meet together the godheads of the planes, the waters that are in the realm of light above the sun and the waters that abide below (III.22.3). O Fire O universal Godhead, thou art the navel-knot of the earths and their inhabitants; all men born thou controllest and supportest like a pillar (I.59.1). O Flame, thou foundest the mortal in a supreme immortality thou createst divine bliss and human joy (I.31.7). For the worlds heart is Joy, Joy dwells in the depths of all things, the well of honey covered by the rock (II.24.4).
0 1962-05-24, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
73When Wisdom comes, her first lesson is, There is no such thing as knowledge; there are only aperus of the Infinite Deity.
Very good.
0 1962-05-31, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The art of letting oneself be carried by the Supreme (Mother clasps her hands together) within the Infinite Becoming.
(long silence)
0 1962-06-12, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That, you know, was what I was always striving for: a sudden surge into the supreme Light, into the Eternal and the Infinite, and then into dazzled wonder. And then, instead of being dazzled by it, it becomes your normal state.
Thats really something. And thats what I wanted to give you.
0 1962-07-18, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like an image. You see, the body is stretched out here on the chaise longue. You know how it is when experiments are done on animals? Its something like that the body is there as the subject of an experiment. Then theres my consciousness, the part focused on the earthly experience and the present transformation (its what I mean when I say I). And then the Lord. I say the Lord Ive adopted that because its the best way of putting it and the easiest for me, but I never, NEVER think of a being. For me, its a simultaneous contact with the Eternal, the Infinite, the Vast, the Totality of everything the totality of everything: all that is, all that has been, all that will be, everything. Words spoil it, but its like thatautomaticallywith consciousness, sweetness and SOLICITUDE. With all the qualities a perfect Personality can offer (I dont know if you follow me, but thats the way it is). And That (I use all these words to say it, and three-fourths is left out) is a spontaneous, constant, immediate experience. So the I I spoke of asks that the body may have the experience, or at least an initial taste, even a shadow of the experience of this Love. And each time its asked for, it comes INSTANTLY. Then I see the three together1in my consciousness and perception the three are together and I see that this Love is dosed out and maintained in exact proportion to what the body can bear.
The body is aware of this and is a little sad about it. But immediately comes something soothing, calming, making it vast. The body instantly senses the immensity and regains its calm.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I shall write and tell you afterwards what this way of yoga is. Or if you come here I shall speak to you about it. In this matter the spoken word is better than the written. At present I can only say that its root-principle is to make a harmony and unity of complete knowledge, complete works and complete Bhakti [Devotion], to raise all this above the mind and give it its complete perfection on the supramental level of Vijnana [Gnosis]. This was the defect of the old yoga the mind and the Spirit it knew, and it was satisfied with the experience of the Spirit in the mind. But the mind can grasp only the divided and partial; it cannot wholly seize the Infinite and indivisible. The minds means to reach the Infinite are Sannyasa [Renunciation], Moksha [Liberation] and Nirvana, and it has no others. One man or another may indeed attain this featureless Moksha, but what is the gain? The Brahman, the Self, God are ever present. What God wants in man is to embody Himself here in the individual and in the community, to realize God in life.
The old way of yoga failed to bring about the harmony or unity of Spirit and life: it instead dismissed the world as Maya [Illusion] or a transient Play. The result has been loss of life-power and the degeneration of India. As was said in the Gita, These peoples would perish if I did not do worksthese peoples of India have truly gone down to ruin. A few sannyasins and bairagis [renunciants] to be saintly and perfect and liberated, a few bhaktas [lovers of God] to dance in a mad ecstasy of love and sweet emotion and Ananda [Bliss], and a whole race to become lifeless, void of intelligence, sunk in deep tamas [inertia]is this the effect of true spirituality? No, we must first attain all the partial experiences possible on the mental level and flood the mind with spiritual delight and illumine it with spiritual light, but afterwards we must rise above. If we cannot rise above, to the supramental level, that is, it is hardly possible to know the worlds final secret and the problem it raises remains unsolved. There, the ignorance which creates a duality of opposition between the Spirit and Matter, between truth of spirit and truth of life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully realize Godto do what is said in the Gita, To know Me integrally. The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda these are the spirits five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman [Absolute] but in the body, in life, in the world. The integral being, the integral consciousness, the integral Ananda blossoms out and takes form in life. This is the central clue of my yoga, its fundamental principle.
--
The meaning of this extraordinarily long talk is that I too am packing my bag. But I believe that this bundle is like the net of St. Peter, only crammed with the catch of the Infinite. I am not going to open the bag now. If I do that before its time, all would escape. Neither am I going back to Bengal now, not because Bengal is not ready, but because I am not ready. If the unripe goes amidst the unripe what work can he do?5
Your Sejda,6
0 1962-08-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its a sort of reply to something I am translating in The Synthesis of Yoga. You know, there are these three aspects that must always be kept united in ones consciousness: jiva (the individual), Shakti, and Ishwara (the Supreme). He gives a wonderful description of how we have all three together in a kind of inner hierarchy. So while reading that (as I translate I have all the experiences, they come spontaneously), I kept saying to myself, No, that jiva hampers me; that jiva hems me in! Its not natural to me. Whats natural to me is its probably Mahashakti. There is always that sense of creative Power, and of the Lord. the Infinite, marvelous, innumerable joy of the Lord, you see, which is so intermingled with the Poweryou can sense the presence of the Lord, yet you cannot distinguish or differentiate between the two. Its all a delectable play. So to introduce the individual, the jiva, into this spoils everything, makes everything so small!
I wanted to put all this into my sentence.
0 1963-03-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont remember in detail (I wrote it down), but the idea was like this: the Lord makes you die only with your consentyour consent is necessary for you to die. And unless He decides, you can never die. Those two things: for you to die, something (the inmost soul, that is) must consent, the soul must say yes, then you die; and when the soul says yes, its for the Lord to decide. Ever since that experience, there had been the certainty that you can die only when the Lord wills it, that it depends entirely and exclusively on His Will, that there are no accidents, no unforeseeable mishaps, as human beings thinkall that doesnt exist: its His Will. From that experience till this latest one [the death of death], I lived in that knowledge. Yet with the feeling of not quite the unknown but the incomprehensible. The feeling of something in the consciousness which doesnt understand (what I mean by understand is having the power to do and undo, thats what I call to understand: the power to realize or to undo, thats the real understanding, the POWER), well, of something which eluded me. It was still the mystery of the Infinite Supreme. And when that experience [the death of death] came, then, Ah, there it is! I have it, Ive caught it! At last, I have it.
I didnt have it long (laughing), it went away! But my position changed. Its one more thing I see from above; I rose above, my position is above.
0 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
4 is the figure of the Manifestation (the square is the figure of the Manifestation). So here you have the manifestation of the Infinite: 4 + 8 = 12.
6 is the figure of the creation.
--
Thus we have first 6, then 12 (a perfection of manifestation), then 30, the manifestation of Sachchidananda, and 48, the manifestation of the Infinite. You see, its beginning to come alive!
Afterwards comes 42: its the dual manifestation, that is to say, the Supreme and Nature.
Then 18 The 10 (unless its 12 12 is two times 6; also 10 plus 2, but that has another meaning), but the 10 in itself is something established (the 11 is something beginning, while the 10 is something established). So if you have 18, it means that the Infinite is established.
Then 36, which is 3 times 12: its the union of 30 (Sachchidananda) and 6, the creation.
0 1963-05-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Mother asks for a box of paints to demonstrate practically the gradation of colors of the levels of consciousness, from the most material Nature to the Supreme. The point is to illustrate the symbol of Infinity, the figure 8, which Mother explained in the conversation of May 11: the Infinite play of the Supreme reaching down to Nature and Nature rising toward the Supreme. Mother speaks in English in the presence of a disciple, who is a painter, so that he may convey her explanations to H., the disciple who is preparing illustrations for "Savitri".)
Of course, all these things are lights, so you cant reproduce them. But still, it must be a violet that is not dull and not dark (Mother starts from the most material Nature). What she has put is too red, but if its too blue, it wont be good eitheryou understand the difficulty? Then after violet there is blue, which must be truly blue, not too light, but it must be a bright blue. Not too light because there are three consecutive blues: there is the blue of the Mind, and then comes the Higher Mind, which is paler, and then the Illumined Mind, which is the color of the flag [Mothers flag], a silver blue, but naturally paler than that. And after this comes yellow, a yellow that is the yellow of the Intuitive Mind; it must not be golden, it must be the color of cadmium. Then after this yellow, which is pale, we have the Overmind with all the colors they must all be bright colors, not dark: blue, red, green, violet, purple, yellow, all of them, all the colors. And after that, we then have all the golds of the Supermind, with its three layers. And then, after that, there is one layer of golden whiteit is white, but a golden white. After this golden white, there is silver whitesilver white: how can I explain that? (H. has sent me some ridiculous pictures of a sun shining on waterit has nothing to do with that.) If you put silver, silver gray (Mother shows a silver box nearby shining brilliantly in the sun), silver gray together with white that is, it is white, but if you put the four whites together you see the difference. There is a white white, then there is a white with a touch of pink, then a silvery white and a golden white. It makes four worlds.
0 1963-07-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The end of December. The Force, the Power may act, mind youonly, X as an instrument is barely conscious. It may pass through him I dont say it wont. Because the remarkable point in the meditations (I took a good look this time) is that at the moment of his best, most complete receptivity, I had to come down to Xs most material form to find a formall the rest, there was no more form. Which means the inner being isnt individualized: its identified, merged. And thats precisely what Sri Aurobindo explains so well: the difference between one who identifies with the Supreme through self-annihilation and one who can express the Supreme (gesture of pulling downward) in a perfected being and everywhere. Thats what makes the whole difference. Of X there remained only the outer husk, so to say (a coarse enough husk, besides, thick and heavy, with very heavy vibrations), it was there, sitting in front of me and empty: the consciousness was gone (gesture showing the consciousness spread out or dissolved in the Infinite). So his power acts in an almost mediumistic manner, which means that when it is X who speaks, its something quite ordinary, but the Force can come through him.
But curiously enough, that yantram seems to exasperate the physical mind.
0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was only this to be done: I kept perfectly still, callingcalling for the Lords Peace and Calm, that ever-widening Peace. the Infinite of the Lords Peace.
Then it became possible to bear the Vibration.
0 1965-07-24, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And what gave me an indication of the falsity of that consciousness and its activities was when I made that efforta tremendous effortto recall that my brother had died years earlier; from that I saw the distance between my true consciousness and the consciousness I was in for that dream. I saw the distance of falsity of that consciousness. It gave me a very clear indication. Instead of that quiet and peaceful consciousness which is like an undulationan undulation of light that always goes like this (gesture of great wings beating in the Infinite), a very vast, very peaceful movement of the consciousness, yet which follows the universal movement very quietlyinstead of that, there was something strained (gesture to the temples), it was as hard as wood or iron and strained, tense, oh! Then I knew how false it was. It gave me the exact measure.
(long silence)
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Looking at it from that angle, we could say that the acceptance of limits is what permitted the manifestation. The possibility of the manifestation came with the acceptance of the sense of limit. Its impossible to express. As soon as you start speaking, you always get a sense of something that goes like this (same gesture of reversal), a sort of tipping over, and then its finished, the essence is gone. Then metaphysical sense comes along and says, We might put it this way, we might put it that way. To make sentences: each point contains the Consciousness of the Infinite and of Eternity (these are words, nothing but words). But the possibility of the experience is there. Its a sort of stepping back outside space. We could say for fun that even the stone, evenoh, certainly water, certainly firehas the power of Consciousness: the original (all the words that come are idiotic!), essential, primordial (all this is meaningless), eternal, infinite Consciousness. Its meaningless, to me its like dust thrown on a pane of glass to prevent it from being transparent! Anyway, conclusion: after having lived that experience (I had it repeatedly over the last few days, it remained there sovereignly despite everythingwork, activitiesand it ruled over everything), all attachment to any formula whatever, even those that have stirred peoples for ages, seems childishness to me. And then it becomes just a choice: you choose things to be like this or like that or like this; you say this or that or thisenjoy yourselves, my children if you find it enjoyable.
But it is certain (this is an observation for common use), it is certain that the human mind, in order to have an impulse to act, needs to build a dwelling for itselfa more or less vast one, more or less complete, more or less supple, but it needs a dwelling. (Laughing) But thats not it! That warps everything!
0 1966-08-31, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And what I am saying now isnt at all something I see, its something I lived during my morning walk at 4:30. There were different successive experiences [which Mother has just described], and then, a very clear, very keen perception of the point at which the true experience (same twisting gesture) gets falsified. And its not something violent, theres nothing dramatic to it, nothing at all, but its clearly the difference between the Infinite and Eternal, the All-Powerful [being turned] into the individuality the individual limitation. And for the ordinary consciousness, the usual consciousness that is to say, the limited, individual consciousness that experience itself is marvelous, but you are the recipient, you are the one who experiences. Thats the point, its the difference between the [pure] experience and, all of a sudden, the one who experiences. And then, with that the one who experiences, its over, everything is distorted. Everything is distorted, but not dramatically, you understand, not like that, no. Its the difference between Truth and falsehood. Its a falsehood (how can I explain?) its the difference between life and death; its the difference between Reality and illusion. And the one IS, while the other remembers having been, or is a witness.
Its very subtle, really very subtle. But its immenseimmense and total.
0 1967-04-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the last part, what he calls the cellular level is indeed the descriptionONE descriptionof cellular phenomena and activities on their level of consciousness, and also on the level of consciousness of the Infinitesimal. He speaks of great currents and cellular transformations and all that; its quite correct, only.1 Its what is going on at present, but its just the consciousness reduced to the dimension of the Infinitesimal. And its a reproduction of what takes place in the other dimensions. But, for example, after all this discipline of the cells that there has been for several years now, his description strikes me as the same thing SEEN THROUGH AN ILLUSION. And the illusion is caused by that very imbalance: the illusion of an absolute reality, while its a quite relative reality. You understand, its the difference between seeing something with a sense of relativity, with a whole immensity of other things, and seeing it all alone as an exclusive and unique reality. Its the sense of the harmony and balance of the Whole that is gone. And so, it becomes dreadful: as he says, some people may find it frightening. And thats precisely because that equilibrium is missing. Its the same thing in a smaller version in an individual: that vision of the whole which gives the proportion of every event, the importance of every event and every thing, changes completely when you have the sense of the Whole, and what appears frightening or catastrophic or marvellous becomes again just a part of the Whole. Its the sense of equilibrium that is gone. When I read the end, it gave me one more confirmation of my experience.
It may be necessary, in certain cases, to disrupt that equilibrium so as to come into contact with something new, but thats always dangerous. And the way of consecration and surrender to the supreme Power is infinitely superiorits slightly more difficult. Its more difficult than swallowing a drug, but infinitely superior.
0 1968-01-06, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the last vestigesyesterday they seemed to be the last ones, because of this text they had asked me to read Naturally, when I speak I say I because its the body that speaks, but it has no sense of I, it Its very hard to explain. Anyway, because of this affair, I said, Ah, but how, how can that be said when its not me?Theres no me, its not me! And at the same time, there was this Consciousness above, saying, No personal reactions theres no more me, and if this must be done, let it be done. And for hours and hours, there was such a peculiar state in which everything It was like kinds of vestiges, or pieces of bark, I dont know; pieces of something a bit hard or shriveled, which had crumbled and were turning into dust, and nothing, nothing but this Great Vibration (gesture like two great wings beating in the Infinite), so powerful, so calm the whole day. A sort of perception that life in a seemingly personal form like this one is only for actiononly for action, for the requirements of action; and there must be no reactions, only the instrument actingacting on the supreme Impulse, without reactions. And the perception was so clear that all, but all memories have been abolished, and are being increasingly abolished, so there may only remain a sort of mass of vibrations organized so as to make you do what needs to be done in the whole for everything to be prepared and (gesture of ascent) for everything to grow, to strive more and more towards the transformation.
That makes speaking difficult, because of this old habit (maybe also a necessity to make oneself understood) of using the word II, whats this I? It no longer corresponds to anything, except for a mere appearance. And this appearance is the only contradiction. Thats the interesting point: this appearance is clearly a contradiction of the truth; its something that still belongs to the old laws, at least, in fact, in its appearance. And because of that, you are forced to say things in a certain way, but it doesnt correspondit doesnt correspond to your state of consciousness, not in the least. There is a fluidity, a breadth, a sort of totality, and above all, more and more strongly the sense that this (pointing to the body) must grow INCREASINGLY SUPPLEsupple, fluid, so to speak, so as to express without resistance or distortion the vision the real vision, the real state of consciousness. To the consciousness, this possibility of fluidity, of plasticity, is growing more and more evident, with only, only just something outwardly which is increasingly becoming an illusion. And yet, yet thats what others see, understand, know and call me. And it truly strives and strives to adapt more and more, but time still appears to have its importance.
0 1968-07-20, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It began yesterday with the notion of the Infinitely small and all those worlds organized like that.1 And the impression of a larger personality (I mean, taking up more space, if I may say so), in which men, all men were only tiny constituent elements. That was yesterday. And today, it was the opposite, but complementary experience. And so the outcome is this vision of the All and of all things the All which, because of our infirmity, we always see with limits.
(Mother goes into a long contemplation, then suddenly smiles)
0 1969-11-26, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Every time I try to look at something, it goes away like this (gesture into the Infinite).
(Mother goes off into meditation again)
0 1970-04-11, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its a curious situation. The being isnt at all turned in on itself: theres nothing, its like this (Mother stretches her arms into the Infinite). Its like this. Maybe thats why: it receives forces but doesnt keep them, they hardly enter at all [into Mother], its like this (gesture of a continuous flow through Mother and spreading outward), all the time. All the time like that. So if I am told about something, it makes a point (Mother pinches a point in space between her two fingers), a point of concentration for a moment; otherwise its all the time like that (same gesture of continuous flow), all the time. It goes like this, like this (same gesture of outward flow). It feels the body feels forces coming, but it doesnt even feel them going through, doesnt feel its giving them, not at all, its like that (same gesture of spreading). It all goes through without through what, one doesnt know Very nonexistent. Very nonexistent. And then, if the body starts being conscious of itself or of something, its MOST unpleasant, a discomfort.
I have noticed that with receptive people (I see people, lots of them), with receptive people, it starts flowing and flowing and flowing like that. And nothing else: no thought, no not even sensation. But the strange thing is that if the body becomes conscious of itself it doesnt suffer, thats not suffering, but something which is an inexpressible discomfort.
0 1970-07-11, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The Mother may throw light on the nature and extent of the transformation the Swami had in the last part of his life. The Swami often declared affirming the transformation and deathlessness of his body by the power of what he calls Arut Perum Joti, the Infinite or vast Grace-Light of the Divine. He also made the forecast and promise around the year 1870, that the supreme Divine would come soon to the earth for establishing his direct rule of Grace-Light (which the Swami also called as the Truth-Light) when a new race of people would arise defying disease, ageing and death.1
Its interesting.
0 1971-12-08, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Our human consciousness has windows opening on the Infinite. But generally men keep the windows tightly closed. We must open them wide and let the Infinite penetrate us freely to transform us.
Two conditions are required to open the windows.
0 1971-12-25, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This creations goal is that Consciousness of the Infinite, the Eternal, which is omnipotent Infinite, Eternal, Omnipotent (which our religions have called God: for us, with respect to life, its the Divine)Infinite and Eternal, All-Powerful outside of time: each individual particle possessing that Consciousness; each individual particle containing that same Consciousness.
Division created the world, and it is in division that the Eternal manifests.
02.01 - A Vedic Story, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
One interesting point in the story is the choice of the gods who formed the search party. They were Mitra, Varuna and Yama. Varuna is the god of the vast consciousness (Brihat), the wide universal, the Infinite. His eye naturally penetrates everywhere and nothing can escape his notice. Mitra is harmony and rhythm of the infinity. Every individual element he embraces and he holds them all together in loving unionhis is the friendly tie of comradeship with all. Finally Yama is the master of the lower regions, the underworld of physical and material consciousness, where precisely Agni has taken refuge. Agni is within the jurisdiction of this trinity and it devolves upon them to tackle the truant god.
There is another point which requires clarification. As a reason for his nervousness and flight he alleges that greater people who preceded him had attempted the work, but evidently failed in the attempt; so how can he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one play explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anteriorin the evolutionary movementand inferior gods that Agni's service is being requisitioned. Mythologically also a parallelism is found in the Greek legends where it is said that the Olympian godsZeus and his companywere a younger generation that replaced, after of course a bloody warfare, their ancestors, the more ancient race of Kronos, the Titans. Titans were the Asuras and Rakshasas who reigned upon earth before the advent of the mentalsattwichuman being, Manu, as referred here.
02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is what some of the old spiritual disciplines taught. Even if there is no unbridgeable gulf between Spirit and Matter, they said, even if they are not incommensurables but form one reality, Spirit is the reality in essence, Matter is an inferior formulation. Matter has unrolled itself out of the Infinite, it can only be and it has got to be rolled back again into the Spirit.
Here comes the second cardinal principle in Sri Aurobindo's vision of the reality, viz, that an inferior formulation of the Spirit, an involute on a lower plane is not essentially or truly, even in its outer and dynamic nature and character, a mere temporary or by-the-way reality, an epiphenomenon; its sole function is not simply to impede, diminish and obscure the real reality so that it has to be gradually rejected and eliminated on the way back to the source. As a matter of fact, an inferior formulation has a double function; in the line of descent it limits, obscures, deviates and in the end falsifies the higher reality; at the same time, however, it concretises, energises, incarnates what it obscures. But in the ascending line, that is to say, in the movement of reversal from the inferior to the superior, the movement need not be always that of disincarnation and dissolution, it may be that of purification and illumination and fulfilment. The analogy will not be, then, that of Matter being dematerialised into pure energy but that of Matter being transformed into a radiant substance, not losing itself in the process of radiation, being wholly made of the undying luminous stuff.
02.01 - The World-Stair, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Revealed the grandeurs of the Infinite:
It flung into the hazards of its play
--
Its happy sidelight on the Infinite.
20
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.
--
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.
The next step of Descent is the Mind where the original unity and identity and harmony are disrupted to a yet greater degree, almost completely. The self-delimitation of consciousness which is proper to the Supermind and even to the Overmind, at least in its higher domainsgives way to self-limitation, to intolerant egoism and solipsism. The consciousness withdraws from its high and wide sweep, narrows down to introvert orbits. The sense of unity in the mind is, at most, a thing of idealism and imagination; it is an abstract notion, a supposition and a deduction. Here we enter into the very arcana of Maya, the rightful possession of Ignorance. The individualities here have become totally isolated and independent and mutually conflicting lines of movement. Hence the natural incapacity of mind, as it is said, to comprehend more than one object simultaneously. The Super mind and, less absolutely, the Overmind have a global and integral outlook: they can take in each one in its purview all at once the total assemblage of things, they differentiate but do not divide the Supermind not at all, the Overmind not categorically. The Mind has not this synthetic view, it proceeds analytically. It observes its object by division, taking the parts piecemeal, dismantling them, separating them, and attending to each one at a time. And when it observes it fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its attention from all the rest. If it bas to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do so by collating, aggregating and summing. Mental consciousness is thus narrowly one pointed: and in narrowing itself, being farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward gazing (parci khni) and superficial. The One Absolute in its downward march towards multiplicity, fragmentation and partiality loses also gradually its subtlety, its suppleness, its refinement, becomes more and more obtuse, crude, rigid and dense.
--
The formulation or revelation of the Psyche marks another line of what we have been describing as the Descent of Consciousness. The phenomenon of individualisation has at its back the phenomenon of the growth of the Psyche. It is originally a spark or nucleus of consciousness thrown into Matter that starts growing and organising itself behind the veil, in and through the movements and activities of the apparent vehicle consisting of the triple nexus of Body (Matter) and Life and Mind. The extreme root of the psychic growth extends perhaps right into the body, consciousness of Matter, but its real physical basis and tenement is found only with the growth and formation of the physical heart. And yet the psychic individuality behind the animal organisation is very rudimentary. All that can be said is that it is there, in potentia, it exists, it is simple being: it has not started becoming. This is man's speciality: in him the psychic begins to be dynamic; to be organised and to organise, it is a psychic personality that he possesses. Now this flowering of the psychic personality is due to an especial Descent, the descent of a Person from another level of consciousness. That Person (or Superperson) is the jvatman, the Individual Self, the central being of each individual formation. The Jivas are centres of multiplicity thrown up in the bosom of the Infinite Consciousness: it is the supreme Consciousness eddying in unit formations to serve as the basis for the play of manifestation. They are not within the frame of manifestation (as the typal formations in the Supermind are), they are above or beyond or beside it and stand there eternally and invariably in and as part and parcel of the one supreme RealitySachchidananda. But the Jivatman from its own status casts its projection, representation, delegated formulationemanation, in the phraseology of the neo-Platonistsinto the manifestation of the triple complex of mind, life and body, that is to say, into the human vehicle, and thus stands behind as the psychic personality or the soul. This soul, we have seen, is a developing, organising focus of consciousness growing from below and comes to its own in the human being: or we can put it the other way, that is to say, when it comes to its own, then the human being appears. And it has come to its own precisely by a descent of its own self from above, in the same manner as with the other descents already described. Now, this coming to its own means that it begins henceforth to exercise its royal power, its natural and inherent divine right, viz, of consciously and directly controlling and organising its terrestrial kingdom which is the body and life and mind. The exercise of conscious directive will, supported and illumined by a self-consciousness, I that occurs with the advent of the Mind is a function of the I Purusha, the self-conscious being, in the Mind; but this self-conscious being has been able to come up, manifest itself and be active, because of pressure of the underlying psychic personality that has formed here.
Thus we have three characteristics of the human personality accruing from the psychic consciousness that supports and inspires it:(1) self-consciousness: an animal acts, feels and even knows, but man knows that he acts, knows that he feels, knows even that he knows. This phenomenon of consciousness turning round upon itself is the hallmark of the human being; (2) a conscious will holding together and harmonising, fashioning and integrating the whole external nature evolved till now; (3) a purposive drive, a deliberate and voluntary orientation towards a higher and ever higher status of individualisation and personalisation,not only a horizontal movement seeking to embrace and organise the normal, the already attained level of consciousness, but also a vertical movement seeking to raise the level, attain altogether a new poise of higher organisation.
02.03 - The Glory and the Fall of Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An impulse and passion of the Infinite.
Assuming whatever shape her fancy wills,
--
Her moods are faces of the Infinite:
Beauty and happiness are her native right,
02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
An ecstasy of the Infinite is her cause.
40.18
--
In the passion and self-loss of the Infinite
When all was plunged in the negating Void,
--
A finite movement of the Infinite
Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;
02.05 - The Godheads of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Imposing smallness on the Infinite,
The ruling spirit of its littleness,
02.06 - The Integral Yoga and Other Yogas, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Highest, the Infinite and Eternal is not anything worth doing or recommending to anybody - is "not a very difficult stage"!
Nothing new? Why should there be anything new? The object of spiritual seeking is to find out what is eternally true, not what is new in Time.
02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And fills a little soul with the Infinite;
The Immobile leans to the magic of her call;
--
To find new bodies for the Infinite
And images of the Unimaginable;
--
All is sought out, but missed the Infinite.
A consciousness lit by a Truth above
--
Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme.
--
Action a ripple in the Infinite
And birth a gesture of Eternity.
02.08 - The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In atomic parcellings of the Infinite
Near to the dumb beginnings of lost Self,
02.10 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Little Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Her segment systems of the Infinite,
Her theodicies and cosmogonic charts
--
And see in a single glance the Infinite’s whole.
68.56
--
Our finite thoughts commune with the Infinite.
68.
02.11 - Hymn to Darkness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is said, the occultists say, that between the light of the day, that is to say, the light of the ordinary consciousness and the higher spiritual light, there is an interim world, an intermediate zone of consciousness. When one leaves the earthly day, the normal consciousness and goes within and to the heights, towards the other Light, one enters at first into a dark region (the selva oscura of Dante). Physically also, the scientists say today that when you leave the earth's atmosphere, from a certain height you no longer see the earthly light but you dive into a darkness where the sun does not shine in its glory as on earth. You see and feel the sunlight again when you approach the sun and are about to be consumed in its fires. In the same way, we are told that on the spiritual path too, the path of inner consciousness, when you leave the ordinary consciousness, when you lose that normal light and yet have not arrived at the other higher light you grope in an intermediary region of darkness. You have lost the lower knowledge and have not yet gained the higher knowledge, then you are in that uncertain world of greyness or darkness. Or it happens also that while in the comparatively faint light of the ordinary consciousness, you are suddenly confronted with the Superior Lightthrough some grace perhapsyou cannot stand the light and get blinded and see sheer darkness. Again, the Infinite sky in its fathomless depth appears to the naked eye blue, deep blue, blue-black. Light concentrated, solidified, materialised becomes a speck of darkness to the human eye. Do we not say today that a particle of matter (consolidated darkness) is only a quantum of concentrated light-energy?
Something of these supraphysical experiences must have entered into the consciousness of the modern poets who have also fallen in love with darkness and blackness -have become adorers, although they do not know, of Shyma and Shyma.
02.11 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Its wings can dare to cross the Infinite.
Arriving into his ken a wonder space
--
The largest widened into the Infinite.
But though immortal, mighty and divine,
--
A cage for the Infinite's great-eyed seraphim Thoughts
Was closed with a criss-cross of world-laws for bars
02.12 - Mysticism in Bengali Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The significance of the human personality, the role of the finite in the play of the Infinite and universal, the sanctity of the material form as an expression and objectification of the transcendent, the body as a function of Consciousness-Force Delight are some of the very cardinal and supreme experiences in Bengali mysticism from its origin down to the present day.
A mysticism that evokes the soul's delights and experiences in a language that has so transformed itself as to become the soul's native utterance is the new endeavour of the poet's Muse.
02.12 - The Heavens of the Ideal, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Heard are the flutings of the Infinite.
73.20
02.13 - In the Self of Mind, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
In the fathomless rapture of the Infinite,
The Bliss that is creation's splendid grain
02.15 - The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Here closed the finite's crawl to the Infinite.
A thousand roads leaped into Eternity
03.02 - The Adoration of the Divine Mother, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And fill the finite with the Infinite.
All that denies must be torn out and slain
03.03 - The House of the Spirit and the New Creation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And, following out these tones of the Infinite,
Recognised in himself the universe.
--
And the Ideas that crowd the Infinite.
There was no gulf between the thought and fact,
03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Man is too weak to bear the Infinite's weight.
Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.
--
His barriers cede beneath the Infinite's tread;
339
--
Earth's seeing widen into the Infinite.
Heavy unchanged weighs still the imperfect world;
03.07 - Some Thoughts on the Unthinkable, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Divine has two aspects in its manifestation, the one in which it is the All, the Infinite and equal Brahman, spread wide as to include the two extremes, Knowledge and Ignorance, Birth and Death, impartially containing or consisting of the dualitiesit is the Reality that is; the other is the reality that becomesit is not the All, but the Over-All, the Transcendent that manifests and is being embodied; it is not the duality of Knowledge and Ignorance, but Supra-knowledge; it is not the duality of Birth and Death, but Immortality; it is the Divine in its own Truth-Nature that lies on one side beyond and behind, at the origin, and on the other, involved and submerged in the play of the All and gradually emerging out of the All, transforming it and giving it a concrete form even in the likeness of the original transcendent supra-Nature.
Both the Divines are to be envisaged and established in one single undivided realisation the static and equal and impartial Brahman forming the basis, the unshakable calm and absolute freedom, and the dynamic emergent Brahman revealing more and more in the manifested creation a definite divine Purpose and Aim and Fulfilment, The one accepts and contains everything, for it is everything; the other, on the basis of that wide acceptation, chooses and selects, keeps back or dissolves and annihilates, in the progression of its increasing light, the darkness, the ignorance that form one part of the dual Nature.
03.08 - The Democracy of Tomorrow, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In India the spiritual life, it is true, was more or less the individual's free venture to the unknown. The Buddha said, Be thy own light; and the Gita too said, Raise thy self by thy own self. Yet here too, in the end, the individual did not stand, it rose but to get merged in the non-individual the universal, the Vast and the Infinite. The highest spiritual injunction is that God only existed and man has to annul his existence in Him.
The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that famous opening line of his famous book,The Social Contract, almost the Bible of an age; Man is born free. And the first considerable mass rising seeking to vindicate and realise that ideal came with the toxin of the mighty French Revolution. It was really an awakening or rebirth of the individual that was the true source and sense of that miraculous movement. It meant the advent of democracy in politics and romanticism in art. The century that followed was a period of great experiment: for the central theme of that experiment was the search for the individual. In honouring the individual and giving it full and free scope the movement went far and even too far: liberty threatened to lead towards licence, democracy towards anarchy and disintegration; the final consequence of romanticism was surrealism, the deification of individual reason culminated in solipsism or ego-centricism. Naturally there came a reaction and we are in this century, still, on the high tide of this movement of reaction. Totalitarianism in one form or another continues to be the watchword and although neither Hitler nor Mussolini is there, a very living ghost of theirs stalks the human stage. The liberty of the individual, it is said and is found to be so by experience, is another name of the individual's erraticism and can produce only division and mutual clash and strife, and, in the end, social disintegration. A strong centralised power is necessary to hold together the warring elements of a group. Indeed, it is asserted, the group is the true reality and to maintain it and make it great the component individuals must be steamrollered into a compact mass. Evidently this is a poise that cannot stand long: the repressed individual rises in revolt and again we are on the move the other way round. Thus a never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.1
03.11 - The Language Problem and India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
or this exquisite passage reverberating with the sense of awe and intimacy in the presence of the Infinite unknown:
O Conscience immobile et sereine, Tu veilles aux confins du monde comme un sphinx d' ternit. Et pourtant certains Tu livres Ton secret. IIs peuvent devenir Ton vouloir souverain, qui choisit sans prfrer, execute sans desirer.4
03.17 - The Souls Odyssey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The deep spiritual truth we are referring to is the Odyssey of the human soul. And it is also an occult phenomenon happening in the world of the inner reality. The Soul's own home is in God, is God; for it is part and parcel of the divine consciousness, it is essentially one in being and nature with the supreme Reality. It is a nucleus, a centre of individuation, a projection in a particular name and form of the Infinite and eternal Being and Consciousness and Bliss on this side of manifestation or evolutionary Nature. Being in and with the Divine, merged within it, the Soul has, at the same time, its own proper domain, exclusively its own, and its own inalienable identity. It is the domain where the Soul enjoys its swarjya, its absolute freedom, dwelling in its native light and happiness and glory. But the story changes, the curve of its destiny takes a sudden new direction when it comes down upon earth, when it inhabits a mortal body. Within the body, it no longer occupies its patent frontal position, but withdraws behind a veil, as it were: it takes its stand behind or within the depth of the heart, as spiritual practice experiences it. It hides there, as in a cavern, closed in now by the shades of the prison-house which its own body and life and mind build round it. Yet it is not wholly shut out or completely cut off; for from its secret home it exerts its influence which gradually, slowly, very slowly indeed, filters throughba thes, clarifies, illumines the encasement, makes it transparent and docile in the end. For that is the Soul's ultimate function and fulfilment.
In the meanwhile, however, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. A physical incarnation clouds the soul-consciousness and involves loss of memory, amnesia. The soul's travail therefore in a physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that that is also what Plato thought when he said that all knowledge, all true knowledge consists in reminiscence.
04.01 - The Birth and Childhood of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Across the immobile trance of the Infinite.
A vast immutable silence with her ran:
04.01 - The Divine Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But there is a still closer mystery, the mystery of mysteries. There has not been merely a general descent, the descent of a world-force on a higher plane into another world-force on a lower plane; but that there is the descent of the individual, the personal Godhead into and as an earthly human being. The Divine born as a man and leading the life of a man among us and as one of us, the secret of Divine Incarnation is the supreme secret. That is the mechanism adopted by the Divine to cure and transmute human illshimself becoming a man, taking upon himself the burden of the evil that vitiates and withers life and working it out in and through himself. Something of this truth has been caught in the Christian view of Incarnation. God sent upon earth his only begotten son to take upon himself the sins of man, suffer vicariously for him, pay the ransom and thus liberate him, so that he may reach salvation, procure his seat by the side of the Father in Heaven. Man corrupted as he is by an original sin cannot hope by his own merit to achieve salvation. He can only admit his sin and repent and wait for the Grace to save him. The Indian view of Incarnation laid more stress upon the positive aspect of the matter, viz, the role of the Incarnation as the inaugurator and establisher of a new order in lifedharmasasthpanrthya. The Avatar brings down and embodies a higher principle of human organisation, a greater consciousness which he infuses into the existing pattern, individual or collective, which has -served its purpose, has become otiose and time-barred and needs to be remodelled, has been at the most preparatory to something else. The Avatar means a new revelation and the uplift of the human consciousness into a higher mode of being. The physical form he takes signifies the physical pressure that is exerted for the corroboration and fixation of the inner illumination that he brings upon earth and in the human frame. The Indian tradition has focussed its attention upon the Goodreyasand did not consider it essential to dwell upon the Evil. For one who finds and sees the Good always and everywhere, the Evil does not exist. Sri Aurobindo lays equal emphasis on both the aspects. Naturally, however, he does not believe in an original evil, incurable upon earth and in earthly life. In conformity with the ancient Indian teaching he declares the original divinity of man: it is because man is potentially and essentially divine that he can become actually and wholly divine. The Bible speaks indeed of man becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect: but that is due exclusively to the Grace showered upon man, not because of any inherent perfection in him. But in according full divinity to man, Sri Aurobindo does not minimise the part of the undivine in him. This does not mean any kind of Manicheism: for Evil, according to Sri Aurobindo, is not coeval or coterminous with the Divine, it is a later or derivative formation under given conditions, although within the range and sphere of the Infinite Divine. Evil exists as a stern reality; even though it may be temporary and does not touch the essential reality, it is not an illusion nor can it be ignored, brushed aside or bypassed as something superficial or momentary and of no importance. It has its value, its function and implication. It is real, but it is not irremediable. It is contrary to the Divine but not contradictory. For even the Evil in its inmost substance carries or is the reality which it opposes or denies outwardly. Did not the very first of the apostles of Christ deny his master at the crucial moment? As we have said, evil is a formation necessitated by certain circumstances, the circumstances changed, the whole disposition as at present constituted changes automatically and fundamentally.
The Divine then descends into the earth-frame, not merely as an immanent and hidden essencesarvabhtntratm but as an individual person embodying that essencemnu tanumritam. Man too, however earthly and impure he maybe, is essentially the Divine himself, carries in him the spark of the supreme consciousness that he is in his true and highest reality. That is how in him is bridged the gulf that apparently exists between the mortal and the immortal, the Infinite and the Finite, the Eternal and the Momentary, and the Divine too can come into him and become, so to say, his lower self.
The individual or personal Divine leaves his home of all blissVaikunthaforgets himself and enters into this world of all misery; but this does not mean that he becomes wholly the Man of Misery: he encompasses all misery within himself, penetrates as well into the stuff and substance of all misery, but suffuses all that with the purifying and transforming pressure of his own supreme consciousness. And yet pain and suffering are real, cruelly real, even to the Divine Man. Just as the ordinary human creature suffers and agonises in spite of the divine essence in him, in spite of his other deeper truth and reality, his soul of inalienable bliss, his psychic being, the Divine too suffers in the same way in spite of his divinity. This double line of consciousness, this system of parallels running alongside each other, interacting upon each other (even intersecting each other, when viewed in a frame of infinity) gives the whole secret mechanism of creation, its purpose, its working and its fulfilment. It is nothing else than the gradual replacement or elimination, elevation or sublimation of the elements on one line that are transmuted into those of the other. The Divine enters into the Evil to root out the Evil and plant there or release and fructify the seed of Divinity lying covered over and lost in the depths of dead inconscience.
04.02 - The Growth of the Flame, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The architecture of the Infinite
04.03 - The Eternal East and West, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As I said, the East usually ignores this correspondence and posits an exclusive either-or relation between the two terms. The individual, according to it, can reach its true individuality by only dissolving itin the Infinite. Of course, I am referring to an extreme position which is general in the East and symptomatic of its fundamental character. The West does not concern itself with these higher lines of individual growth and fulfilment, it limits the individual within the social frame and his mundane or profane life; but what we learn from this outlook is the necessity of the collective growth through which only can the individual thrive and grow. It is however a growth in extension, rather than in intensity i.e. depth and height. This outlook errs in the limitation put upon individuality, precisely identifying it more or less with the "egoism" to which the spirituality of the East objects. This normal individual in its normal development cannot go very far, nor can he lead the others, the society or humanity, to a perfect and supreme fulfilment. The ego-bound normal individuality must transcend itselfexactly the thing that the East teaches; only this transcendence need not mean an abolition of all individuality, but a transformation, a higher integration in a spiritualised, a universalised and divinised individuality.
Such an individual will not be like the blind leading the blind, one ego, .in its half-light, with its small narrow mental formation imposing its ignorant and ineffective will upon others in the same state of consciousness, but, as I have said, a universalised individual, who has identified himself with all and everyone in his being and consciousness, who has also at the same time transcended himself and others and attained a supreme unitary consciousness and being. It is such a person who is called the leader of human or terrestrial evolution and they who are of the same make are the pioneers who shall build heaven upon earth.
04.04 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the idea is that the fundamental spiritual realisation remains the same always and everywhere: the name and the form only vary according to the age and the surroundings. The one reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when was the first dawn! The present dawn has followed the track of the Infinite series that has gone by and is the first of the I infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi Kanwa. For the core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness, attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God by the theist or Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One) by the Positivist (spiritual). But the essential experience of a cosmic and transcendental reality does not differ very much. So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways which one has to follow if one is to move in the right direction, advance smoothly and attain infallibly: but these have been well marked out, surveyed and charted and do not admit of serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual aspiration is a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is also a definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The spiritual is a typal domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforeseen variation or growth or evolution.
Is it so in fact? For, if one admits and accepts the evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the outlook becomes somewhat different. According to this view, human civilisation is seen as moving through progressive stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in and occupied with his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purua; then he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a prnamaya purua; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became a maomaya purua; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the lawdharmaof that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of growth and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual seekers and accordingly three types or lines of spiritual discipline: the animal (pau bhva), the heroic (vra bhva) and the godly or divine (deva bhva). The classification is not merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in character.
--
But once there is the possibility gained of a more normalised, familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the human being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner that makes it inevitable for him to overpass to a higher status and live there habitually, then it becomes an urgent matter of concern to know and find out where one goes exactly, on which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting inquiry, a good part speculative and theoretical; it had not the reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out an almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness, of the lower hemisphereof course, so far as it is possible for such a science to be exhaustive moving in the light of the partial and inferior consciousness. In the same way we need at the present hour a complete and precise science of the Divine Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the Infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
04.04 - The Quest, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Awaiting the Infinite's behest to end.
The seers attuned to the universal Will,
--
Sat mighty, visioned with the Infinite's light,
04.06 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the idea is that the fundamental spiritual realisation remains the same always and everywhere: the name and the form only vary according to the age and the surroundings. The one Reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when was the first dawn! The present dawn has followed the track of the Infinite series that has gone by and is the first of the Infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi Kanwa. For the core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness, attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God by the theist or Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One) by the Positivist (spiritual). But the essential experience, of a cosmic and transcendental reality, does not differ very much. So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways which one has to follow if one is to move in the right direction, advance smoothly and attain infallibly: but these have been well marked out, surveyed and charted and do not admit of serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual aspiration is a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is also a definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The spiritual is a type domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforeseen variation or growth or evolution.
Is it so in fact? For if one admits and accepts the evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the outlook becomes somewhat different. According to this view, human civilisation is seen as moving through progressive stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in and occupied with his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purua; then he raised himself and was centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pramaya purua ; next the climbed into the mental consciousness and became the manomaya purua; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned' according to the central character, the lawdharmaof that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of grow and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual seekers and accordingly three types or lines of spiritual discipline: the animal (pau bhva) the heroic (Vra bhva) and the godly or divine (deva bhva). The classification is not merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in character.
--
But once there is the possibility gained of a more normalised, familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the human being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner that makes it inevitable for him to overpass to a higher status and live there habitually, then it becomes an urgent matter of concern to know and find out where one goes exactly, on which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting enquiry, a good part speculative and theoretical; it had not the reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out an almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness, of the lower hemisphereof course, so far as it is possible for such a science to be exhaustive moving in the light of the partial and inferior consciousness. In the same way we need at the present hour a complete and precise science of the Divine Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the Infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
04.06 - To the Heights VI (Maheshwari), #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Vast and serene as the Infinite spaces,
Far away from our little earthly world,
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We see the movement accepted and advanced (if not even initiated) more in the West than in the East. That the world is a progressive and progressing phenomenon comes easily and naturally to the European mind. The East has been habituated to a static view of things: if there is dynamism, it is mostly considered as a movement in a circle. The spiritual East with its obsessing experience of the Infinite and Eternal and Permanent, the Transcendent, found it unnecessary to attach that importance to the impermanent and finite which would give it a meaning and purpose and direction. Therefore we see in India those who advocate this new view are considered Europeanised and not following the au thentic spiritual tradition of India.
We, of course, are not of the opinion that all possible revelations in the spiritual sphere have been made and done with even in India or that there cannot be fresh valuations of the old revelations or their applications in a new way. We believe in the words of the ancient Rishis who declared that dawns come endlessly in succession, today's dawn follows the path trod by the ancient ones and is the first of the eternal series to come in the future. Each dawn brings in a new and fresh revelation, a hope and vision looking into the future although linked in with the experiences of the Infinite past.
That is why, while we give our support to this new effort of Europe, we agree and even insist that the hoary spiritual tradition of India has still something to teach us moderns, some light to give us in our present predicament. For, although, the ideal is generally admitted in many places, the way to it is not clear. Since Nietzsche spoke of the surpassing of man, many are taken up with the ideal, but the means to effect it remains yet to be discovered: it is still under discussion, at least. As a matter of fact, the goal itself is none too clear and definite: sometimes we think of a saintly transformation of human nature, sometimes the growing power of Intuition, very vaguely and variously defined, replacing or supplementing intellect and thus adding a new asset to man's life and consciousness.
05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity sui generis and give him the value that is his. First, toil and suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the quality of earth-natureearth is always spoken of by the poets and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily, calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains, go through the Infinite details of execution, through countless repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the artisans of immortalitychildren of Mahasaraswatiwere originally men, men who have laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely, as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential capacity in human nature. The gods, who are usually described as the very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing; but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downshis path is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the staying power of the gods contains something of the nature of indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape, possesses a mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and humane that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic feeling of closeness and oneness. The gods are, after all, egoistic; unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no mixture in their workingsna me thate, as the Vedas say; the conflict of the later gods, the apple of discord that drove each to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism of the gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a saintit is sttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient rjasicpride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thwarted at every stepfrom outside, by, the force of circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for there is there the thin little voice that always cuts across egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer fulfilment is being elaborated.
Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shademore shade perhaps than lightof knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.
05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The eager prisoner from the Infinite,
The immortal wrestler in its mortal house,
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and parcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separatesome grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness,of form and function,attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the Infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.
There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodiments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and development are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is eachthus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartmentsapart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz.,spiritual.
05.03 - Satyavan and Savitri, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Upon the freedom of the Infinite,
A hard firm skeleton of outward Truth,
--
The link of the finite with the Infinite,
The bridge between the appearance and the Truth,
--
As the finite opens to the Infinite.
Thus were they in each other lost awhile,
05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
And yet the building up of an abiding individual is the secret urge of Nature's evolution: it is the hidden spring of human aspiration and the purpose of God's creation. Not mere disparate particlesof substance or energy or consciousness breaking up constantly and scattering and finally dissolving into the void (the great law of Running Downor as the Veda figures it, tucchyena abwapihitamabsorbed by the Infinitesimal)but a gathering of elements, integrating them into organic wholes, moulding definite forces into definite formssuch is the secret plan behind. Indeed, ego is the first formation, the original instrument which Nature fashioned to carry out this object of hers.
Ego means a hardened core that is not easily broken by the impact of forces. It delimits, ,cuts out, endeavours to maintain its formation by a strong violent self-assertion. Ego is a helper, but also it is a bar. It assists the first formation but delays and obstructs the true and final formation. For the ego is a formation, an individual formation, but on the level of universal Nature: it is of a piece with the normal cosmic movement, only bounded by a peripheral line. In the general expanse it puts up enclosures and preserves and fencings; the constituting elements remaining the same in substance and quality. Even the delimitation is illusory in reality, it is something like the membrane in the body separating the different functional organs, rigid yet allowing interaction and interpenetration. That is why, when death removes the outward fencing, the individuality also cannot long maintain itself and merges into the general. We may look upon egoism as a kind of artificial or experimental individuality, a laboratory formation, as it were, tried and developed under given conditions. In fact, however, egoism is a shadow or an echo upon this side of our nature of the true individuality which lies and comes from elsewhere.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first point then we seek to make out is that even from a rigid positivist stand a form of knowledge that is not strictly positivist has to be accepted. Next, if we come to the content of the knowledge that is being gained, it is found one is being slowly and inevitably led into a world which is also hardly positivistic. We have in our study of the physical world come in close contact with two disconcerting facts or two ends of one fact the Infinitely small and the Infinitely large. They have disturbed considerably the normal view of things, the view that dominated Science till yesterday. The laws that hold good for the ordinary sensible magnitudes fail totally, in the case of the Infinite magnitudes (whether big or small). In the Infinite we begin squaring the circle.
Take for instance, the romantic story of the massof a body. Mass, at one time, was considered as one of the fundamental constants of nature: it meant a fixed quantity of substance inherent in a body, it was an absolute quality. Now we have discovered that this is not so; the mass of a body varies with its speed and an object with infinite speed has an infinite masstheoretically at least it should be so. A particle of matter moving with the speed of light must be terribly massive. Butmirabile dictue!a photon has no mass (practically none). In other words, a material particle when it is to be most materialexactly at the critical temperature, as it wereis dematerialised. How does the miracle happen?
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.
05.05 - Of Some Supreme Mysteries, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To be finite is one of the Infinite aspects of the Infinite.
Creation is the de-finition of the Infinite.
All creation is fundamentally an act of self-division.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
The principle of indeterminacy carries two revolutionary implications. First, that it is not possible to determine the movement of the ultimate particles of matter individually and severally, it is not possible even theoretically to follow up the chain of modulations of an electron from its birth to its dissolution (if such is the curve of its destiny), as Laplace considered it quite possible for his super-mathematician. One cannot trace the complete evolution of each and every or even one particular particle, not because of a limitation in the human capacity, but because of an inherent impossibility in the nature of things. In radioactive substances, for example, there is no ground or data from which one can determine which particle will go off or not, whether it will go off the chance that seems to reign here. In radiation too, there is no formula, and no formula can be framed for determining the course of a photon in relation to a half-reflecting surface, whether it will pass through or be reflected. In this field of infinitesimals what we know is the total behaviour of an assemblage of particles, and the laws of nature are only laws of average computation. Statistics has ousted the more exact and rigid arithmetics. And statistics, we know, is a precarious science: the knowledge it gives is contingent, contingent upon the particular way of arranging and classifying the data. However, the certainty of classical mechanistic knowledge is gone, gone too the principle of uniformity of nature.
05.06 - The Birth of Maya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
All possibilities are manifested in the Infinite and this line of descent too had to be followed to its uttermost, the entire range of its possibility to be exhausted, negated in its own realisation and brought back to the nature and substance of its Source.
The beginning of creation is self-objectivisation.
05.06 - The Role of Evil, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Evil is evil, no doubt; it is not divine and it is not an illusion. It is a real blot on the fair face of creation. Its existence cannot be justified in the sense that it is the right thing and has to be welcomed and maintained, since it forms part of the universal symphony. Not even in the sense that it is a test and a trial set by the Divine for the righteous to prove their merit. It has not been put there with a set purpose, but that once given, it has been the occasion of a miracle, it offered the opportunity for the manifestation of something unique, great and grandiose, marvellous and beautiful. The presence of evil moved the DivineGiustizia masse il mio alto Fattorel1and Grace was born. He descended, the Aloof and the Transcendent, in all his love and compassion down into this vale of tears: he descended straight into our midst without halting anywhere in the Infinite gradation that marks the distance between the highest and the lowest, he descended from the very highest into the very lowest, demanding nothing, asking for no condition whatsoever from the soul in Ignorance, from the earth under the grip of evil. Thus it was that Life lodged itself in the home of death, Light found its way into the far cavern of obscurity and inconscience, and Delight bloomed in the core of misery. Hope was lit, a flame rising from the nether gloom towards the Dawn. But for the spirit of denial we would not have seen this close and intimate figure of the gracious Mother.
Justice moved my great maker
05.07 - Man and Superman, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When we speak of the superman we refer to a new racealmost a new species that will appear on earth as the inevitable result of Nature's evolution. The new race will be developed out of the present humanity, there seems to be no doubt about that; it does not mean however that the whole of humanity will be so changed. As a matter of fact, humanity in general does not ask for such a catastrophic change in itself or for itself. But Supermanhood does mean a very radical change: it means giving up altogether many and some very basic human qualities and attributes. It does not aim merely at a moral uplift, that is to say, a shedding of the bad qualities, what are considered, for example, as predominantly animal and brutish in man; it signifies also a shedding of some at least of the good qualities or what are considered as such. The superman is not a purified moralised man, even as he is not a magnified glorified animal man; he is a man of a different type, qualitatively different. Let us take an analogy. What was the situation at the crisis when man was about to come out of (or be superimposed upon) an ape race? We can imagine a good part of that old race quite unwilling to go in for the new type that would appear to them queer, outlandish, even if not inferior on the whole or in some respects at least. They would not envisage with equanimity the disappearance of many of their cherished characteristics and powers: the glory of the tail, for example, the Infinite capacity to swing and jump, the strength to crack a nut with the sheer force of the jaws. And who knows whether they would not consider their intelligence sharper and more efficacious than the type of reason, dull and slow, displayed before them by man! They would lose much to gain little. That would most probably be the general verdict.
Even so mankind, at the crucial parting of the ways, would very naturally look askance at the diminished value of many of its qualities and attri butes in the new status to come. First of all, as it has been pointed out, the intellect and reasoning power will have to surrender and abdicate. The very power by which man has attained his present high status and maintains it in the world has to be sacrificed for something else called intuition or revelation whose value and efficacy are unknown and have to be rigorously tested. Anyhow, is not the known devil by far and large preferable to the unknown entity? And then the zest of life, peculiar to man, that works through contradictionsdelight and suffering, victory and defeat, war and peace, doubt and knowledge, all the play of light and shade, the spirit of adventure, of combat and struggle and heroic effort, will have to go and give place to something, peaceful and harmonious perhaps but monotonous, insipid, unprogressive. The very character of human life is its passion to battle through, even if it is not always through. For it is often said that the end or goal does not matter, the goal is always something uncertain; it is the way, the means, the immediate action that is of supreme consequence: for it is that that tests man's manhood, gives him the value he may have. And above all man is asked to give up the very thing which he has laboured to build up through millenniums of his terrestrial life, his individuality, his personality, for the demand is that he must lose his ego in order to attain the superhuman status.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is still something more. The matter of calculating and measuring objectively was comparatively easy when the object in view was of medium size, neither too big nor too small. But in the field of the Infinite and the Infinitesimal, when from the domain of mechanical forces we enter into the region of electric and radiant energy, we find our normal measuring apparatus almost breaks down. Here accurate observation cannot be made because of the very presence of the observer, because of the very fact of observation. The ultimates that are observed are trails of light particles: now when the observer directs his eye (or the beam oflight replacing the eye) upon the light particle, its direction and velocity are interfered with: the photon is such a tiny infinitesimal that a ray from the observer's eye is sufficient to deflect and modify its movement. And there is no way of determining or eliminating this element of deflection or interference. The old Science knew certainly that a thermometer dipped in the water whose temperature it is to measure itself changes the initial temperature. But that was something calculable and objective. Here the position of the observer is something like a "possession", imbedded, ingrained, involved in the observed itself.
The crux of the difficulty is this. We say the observing eye or whatever mechanism is made to function for it, disturbs the process of observation. Now to calculate that degree or measure of disturbance one has to fall back upon another observing eye, and this again has to depend upon yet another behind. Thus there is an infinite regress and no final solution. So, it has been declared, in the ultimate analysis, scientific calculation gives us only the average result, and it is only average calculations that are possible.
05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The higher Gods, like those, for example, envisaged in the Veda, may be considered each as an emanation of one or other of these Divine Aspects. They are dwellers of Swar or the Overmind. Varuna seems to be an emanation of Mahavira, a son of Maheshwari: for he is pre-eminently the god of the pure and vast consciousness who releases us from the triple bonds and shows us the winding way into the embrace of the Infinite Mother. His associate, Mitra, is the lord of love and harmony, evidently an emanation of Pradyumna (or Mahalakshmi). Other gods of the same category are Bhaga and Soma. The Balarama or Mahakali aspect is manifested in Aryaman: Rudra being another form of the same. And Mahasaraswati (or Aniruddha) must have given birth to and inspired the Ribhus, who are artisans of divinity. The Puranic trinityBrahma, Vishnu and Shivawith lndra as the fourth member forms a parallel system embodying a similar conception.
Another tradition gives the Four Supernals as (1) Light or Consciousness, (2) Truth or Knowledge, (3) Life and (4) Love. The tradition also says that the beings representing these four fundamental principles of creation were the first and earliest gods that emanated from the Supreme Divine, and that as they separated themselves from their source and from each other, each followed his own independent line of fulfilment, they lost their divinity and turned into their oppositesLight became obscurity, Consciousness unconsciousness or the inconscient, Truth became falsehood and Knowledge ignorance, Life became death and finally Love and Delight became suffering and hatred. These are the fallen angels, the Asuras that deny their divine essence and now rule the world. They have possessed mankind and are controlling earthly existence. They too have their emanations, forces and beings that are born out of them and serve them in their various degrees of power. Men talk and act inspired and impelled by these beings and when they do so, they lose their humanity and become worse than animals.
05.13 - Darshana and Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is another concept in Whitehead which seems to be moulded after a parallel concept in Sri Aurobindo: it is with regard to the working out of the process of creation, the mechanism of its dynamism. It is almost a glimpse into the occult functioning of the world forces. Whitehead speaks of two principles that guide the world process, first, the principle of limitation, and second, the principle of ingress. The first one Sri Aurobindo calls the principle of concentration (and of exclusive concentration) by which the Infinite and the eternal limits himself, makes himself finite and temporal and infinitesimal, the universal transforms itself into the individual and the particular. The second is the principle of descent, which is almost the corner-stone in Sri Aurobindo's system. There are layers of reality: the higher forces and formulations enter into the lower, work upon it and bring about a change and transformation, purification and redemption. All progress and evolution is due to this influx of the higher, the deeper into , the lower and superficial plane of existence.
There is one concept in Whitehead which seems rather strange to us; it is surely a product of the brain-mind. God, according to him, is not the creator: he is only the Redeemer, he is a shaper but not the source and origin of things. That is because he thinks that if God is made the creator of the world, he would be held responsible for the evil there. This difficulty comes when one thinks of God too much in the popular anthropomorphic way, like someone seated above the world and passing judgment upon a world which is not his doing. God is perhaps a lover of the world, but not its Mastera certain Christian outlook says. According to Sri Aurobindo, God is a triple reality in his transcendental, cosmic and individual aspect. In creating the world, God creates, that is to say, manifests himself. And Evil is an evolute in the process of God's self-creation through self-limitation: it proceeds to self-annihilation and even self-transmutation in a farther process of God's self-unfoldment in world and Nature.
05.14 - The Sanctity of the Individual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The truth of the personality is not to be found in its horizontal, but vertical dimension. The Existentialist speaks of the existence (standing out) of the human person as a transcendence. But real transcendence is not so much in coming out as in going up and beyond. To be outside oneself is not always to transcend oneself: to be above oneself is the real transcendence. Man is a true and free person only when he is lord of Prakriti, dominating and commanding Nature, when he is identified with Ishwara, the supreme Person, the Master, and becomes an incarnate will and consciousness of His. The soul in ignorance and in ignorant relation with others must rise and envisage its archetype in the Supreme Divine, as a free formulation of an Idea-Force of the Infinite.
If we do not keep in view this vertical transcendence and confuse it with immanence, we are likely to arrive at queer conclusions, as for example, one Existentialist says: polarity being an essential truth of the reality, the law of day and night is an eternal and immutable law and therefore, God cannot subsist as pure love; there must be also anger in him. In fact, God too is a becoming God as the human being. The limitation of such a view, characteristically Germanic and intellectual, is evident.
05.20 - The Urge for Progression, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the process of the expression and embodiment of this innermost truth, the first necessary condition is, as we have said, sincerity, that is to say, a constant reference to the demand of that truth, putting everything and judging everything in the light of that truth, a vigilant wakefulness to it. The second condition is progression. It is the law of the Truth that it is expressing itself, seeking to express itself continually and continuously in the march of life; it is always unfolding new norms and forms of its light and power, ever new degrees of realisation. The individual human consciousness has to recognise that progressive flux and march along with it. Human consciousness, the complex of external mind and life and body consciousness, has the habit of halting, clinging to the forms, experiences and gains of the past, storing them in memory, agreeing to a minimum change only just to be able to pour the new into the old. But this conservatism, which is another name for tamasis fatal to the living truth within. Even like the lan vitalso gloriously hymned by Bergson, the inmost consciousness, the central truth of being, the soul lanhas always a forward-looking reference. And it is precisely because the normal instrument of the body and life and mind has always a backward reference, because it slings ,back and cannot keep pace with the march of the soul-consciousness that these members stagnate, wear away, decay and death ends it all. The past has its utility: it marks the stages of progress. It means assimilation, but must not mean stagnation. It may supply the present basis but must always open out to what is coming or may come. If one arrives at a striking realisation, a light is revealed, a Voice, a mantra heard, a norm disclosed, it is simply to be noted, taken in the stuff of the being, made part and parcel of the consciousness; you leave it at that and pass and press on. You must not linger at wayside illuminations however beautiful or even useful some may be. The ideal of the paryataka the wanderermay be taken as a concrete symbol of this principle. The Brahmanas described it graphically in the famous phrase, caraivete, "move on". The Vedic Rishi sang of it in the memorable hymn to Dawn, the goddess who comes today the last of a succession of countless dawns in the immemorial past and the first of a never-ending series of the future. The soul is strung with a golden chain to the Great Fulfilment that moves ahead: even when fulfilled the soul does not rest or come to the end of its mission, it continues to be an ever new expression or instrumentation of the Infinite.
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06.01 - The Word of Fate, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It flames out symbols of the Infinite
And lives in a great light of inner suns.
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Stretching his small self to cope with the Infinite.
Obstructing the gods' open ways he makes
--
It saw the Eternal, lived in the Infinite.
Then, curious of a shadow thrown by Truth,
--
When the soul fronts nude of garbs the Infinite,
Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will
--
But still a cry was heard in the Infinite,
And still to the listening soul on mortal earth
06.15 - Ever Green, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Whenever you go inside and seek your poise, do not look for your old acquaintances, the familiar experiences, do not carry upon your back the load of the past, but go ahead, as if through a virgin tract, making quite new discoveries, and opening unexpected vistas at each step. You can make an experiment even on your physical body, i.e. take the physical consciousness too to share in your adventure of ever new discovery. Thus you may, for example, forget your habit of eating or even walking, truly forget and try to learn over again, even as you did for the first time as a child. You have to acquire consciously a capacity of the body that has become an almost unconscious reflex action. It is a wonderful and exhilarating experience. Naturally you cannot repeat too often or carry too far an experiment of this kind on the physical plane. But you can freely deal with your inner life and consciousness. You can make your mind and your vital a clean slate, as much as you like: not once in your life, but every moment of your life. And then see how the world impinges upon your consciousness, what fresh discoveries and awakenings come to you endlessly! You can always rid yourself of the accustomed vibrations on the normal levels of your existence, the physical, vital and mental; and even you can go beyond your psychic formation and be the wide, the vast, the limitless, the Infinite itself, void of all name and form. And then with that virgin consciousness drop straight into the world of material life and form, into your body and bodily reactions. The world will give itself up to you in its pristine purity, its original beauty and truth, always luminous and glorious. This experience has to be the normal mode of your living, not simply the culmination or acme of your being, a fixed and stagnant status, even if considered the highest, the summum bonum. That is how you can keep yourself and the world around you ever fresh and young and new.
The preacher who speaks of the truth and delivers it to his hearers is usually effective for the first time or for a first few occasions only, when he feels the truth of his truth and is sincere while delivering. But as time wears on, his truth too wears out, for it becomes stereotyped, a matter of mere habit. The experience is no longer lived, but mechanically doled out. You are sincere only when the experience is new and fresh and living, it should be made so every moment, otherwise it is dead letter, letter that killeth.
06.29 - Towards Redemption, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The origin of creation is an individualisation the manifestation or emanation of many, as units, out of the undivided and indivisible Single. It meant freedom for each unit to choose: the individual became, so to say, a unit of freedom. The immediate result, however, was not very successful, apparently, that is to say. For the individual unit chose to follow a path exactly opposite to its origin: the individualisation happened as if an element shot out of the Infinite unity and flung itself in its momentum, as far away as possible, to the other pole. That is how the one spirit became the Infinite particles of inconscient matter. The purpose and problem then set was to bring back the straying elements to their source and origin. The work was long travail. It took and it is taking even now ages for the one Being who could do the thing to prepare slowly, mount the steps gradually along which creation slid down, recover the ground painfully and achieve the hidden purpose, vindicating amply the deviation and the fall. Through devious ways, long, winding, arduous marches the spirit of evolution laboured through millenniums; it was the instrument utilised by the Divine Grace.
The original individual was a hard concentrated point of ego, concerned wholly and absolutely with itself. So a situation of give and take was brought about so that even to exist meant to exist through others. Human society began in this way. The solitary human animal for its own sake had to come out of its solitariness, take to a mate and thus gradually bring up a family. The wall of egoism was broken to that extent, its scope extended. The enlargement of the ego continuedstill continuesincreasing the content of the unity. From the family the human ego enlarged into the tribe, and the tribal ego has now enlarged into the nation. Larger and larger aggregates are being formed in place of the original individual unities. The nations too are now approaching and interpenetrating each other and in many ways the whole of humanity has been moving as an aggregate. The individual has thus learnt to find himself in the life of humanity as a whole. He has to look upor will soon have to look upto the whole creation as one existence in and through which he has to exist. Thus the universe is recovering its original indivisible unity, but having gained something in the process; for it is now no longer the featureless unity at the source but an enriched and multiple unity in expression. Furthermore the individual can proceed yet beyond. He has to and now is able to, not only in his individual but in his collective consciousness turn back and move straight to its original unity: he can establish direct contact, commune and unite with the Divine Himself from whom it I came and drifted away. The ranges of ascent are within him I and are in line with those outside which the universe is traversing in the path of evolution. Such is the process the Divine I Grace has undertaken to fulfil the Divine's purpose in creation.
07.03 - The Entry into the Inner Countries, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Fearing to lose its soul in the Infinite.
Even the Idea's ample sweep was cut
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
A laugh peals from the Infinite's finite mask.
Perhaps the world is an error of our sight,
--
Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.
In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate
07.06 - Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Thy mind's selection from the Infinite,
Thy senses' gloss on the Infinitesimal's dance,
Then shalt thou know how the great bondage came.
--
Or peered through the finite at the Infinite.
A sight opened upon the invisible
07.07 - The Discovery of the Cosmic Spirit and the Cosmic Consciousness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
There all was conscious, made of the Infinite,
All had a substance of Eternity.
--
Slipped out of space and became the Infinite;
Her being rose into unreachable heights
07.11 - The Problem of Evil, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The universe and its creator are not separate things, they are one and identical in their origin. The universe is God himself projected into Space (and Time). So the universe is the Divine in one aspect or another. You cannot divide the two, making one the creator and the other, his work, the watch-maker and his watch. You put your idea of the Divine upon him and ask, why he has created such a nasty world. If the Divine were to answer, It is not I, it is yourself. Become myself again, you will no longer feel and see as you do now you are not yourself, therefore your question and your problem! Indeed, when you unite your consciousness with the divine consciousness there is no longer any problem. Everything appears then natural and simple, and correct and as it should be. It is when you cut yourself from your origin and stand outside, in front of him and against him that all the trouble begins. Of course you may ask, how is it that the Divine has tolerated a part of himself going out and separating itself and creating all this disorder? I would reply on behalf of the Divine, If you want to know, you had better unite yourself with the Divine, for that is the only way of knowing why he has done so. It is not by questioning him by your mind that you will get the answer. The mind cannot know. And repeat, when you come to this identification, all problems are solved. The feeling, one can explain, that things are not all right, that they should be otherwise comes precisely from the fact that there is a divine will unfolding itself in a continuous progression, that things that were and are have to give place to things that shall be and shall be better and better than they have been. The world that was good yesterday will no longer be so tomorrow. The universe might have appeared quite harmonious in some other age but now appears quite discordant: it is because we see the possibility of a better universe. If we found it as it should be, we would not do what we have to do, we would not try to make it better. Even so, we would conceive the Divine in a very human way; for we remain imprisoned within ourselves, confined to this consciousness of ours which is like a grain of sand in the Infinite immensity. You want to understand the immensity? That is not possible. It is possible only under one condition; be one with the immensity. The drop of water cannot very well ask how the ocean is: it has to lose itself into the ocean.
***
07.14 - The Divine Suffering, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Divine's compassion, translated in the individual physical consciousness, becomes a sorrow that is not egoistic, a sorrow that is an expression of one's identification with the universal sorrow through sympathy. I have described the experience at some length in one of the Prayers and Meditations. I spoke there of the sweetest tears that I shed in life; for those tears were not for my sake, I was not weeping for myself. In almost every case man grieves for egoistic reasons, in the human way. Whenever anyone loses a person he loves, he suffers and weeps, not over the condition of the person: in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred or even more, people do not know in what condition the person gone may be, do not and cannot know if the person is happy or unhappy, if he is suffering or is in peace. It is the sense of separation that causes the grief, the feeling that he will not be with them anymore which they so much wish. At the root of all human sorrow, there lies this return upon one's own self, more or less conscious, more or less admitted. But when you feel unhappy for the unhappiness of others, there comes in a mixture. That is to say, to your personal grief is added a psychic element which I described as the reversed image of the Divine Compassion. Now, if you can distinguish between the two, the personal anguish and the disinterested sorrow, come out of what is egoistic and concentrate upon the divine element, make yourself one with it, then you can in that way come in contact with the great universal compassion, which is something immense, vast, calm, mighty, pro-found, which is perfect peace and infinite Bliss. If you know then how to enter into your suffering, go down to the very bottom of it, pass beyond the portion that is egoistic and personal, go farther on, then you arrive at the door of a wonderful revelation. Not that you should seek suffering for the sake of the suffering and in order to have the experience; but when it is there, when it has come upon you, then try what I have suggested, cross the border, the barrier of egoism in your suffering: note first where is the egoistic part, what is it that makes you suffer, what is the egoistic reason of your suffering, then step across and beyond, towards something universal, towards a greater principle. You enter then into the vast, the Infinite compassion, the door of the Psychic opens for you. If, in that domain, you see me in tears, as you say you did in your dream, then you can identify yourself with me at the moment, enter into those tears as it were, melt into them. That will open the door and it will bring you an experience, a very unique experience that leaves always a deep mark upon the consciousness. It is never blotted out altogether even if the door closes again and you become once more what you are in your ordinary movements. That experience, that mark remains behind and you can recall it, go back to it, refer to it in your moments of concentration. You feel then the immensity of an infinite sweetness, a great peace, pervading all your being, it is not in your thought only; it goes out and sympathises with everything and can cure everything.
Only you must sincerely wish, you must have the will, to be cured. Everything lies there. Now I always come back to the same theme. You must be sincere. If you want an experience for the sake of the experience and, once you have it, to go back to your ordinary ways, that will not do. You must sincerely will to be curedcured precisely of the ordinary waysyou must have the aspiration, the true aspiration to overcome the obstacle, to mount up and up, above and beyond yourself, so that you may drop all that pulls you back, drags you down, to break all limits, clarify and purify yourself, rid yourself of all that lies in your way. If you have this will, the true intense will not to fall back into past errors, to rise out of obscurity and ignorance towards the light, shorn of all that is human, too humantoo small, too ignorant then that will and that aspiration shall act, act gradually, strongly and effectively bringing you a complete and definitive result. But beware, there must be nothing that clings to the old movements, that does not declare itself but hides its head and when the occasion is opportune puts up its snout.
08.31 - Personal Effort and Surrender, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now as regards the result, in one case, I may say, it is linear, it ends at a point, as it were; in the other case, the path is spherical and ends in a totality. Each one individually can reach his origin and the optimum of his being; the origin and the optimum of one's being is the same as the Eternal, the Infinite, the Supreme. If you reach your origin, you reach the Supreme, but you reach along a single linedo not take the image literally, it is only a description to make the thing easy to understand. So it is, I say, a linear realisation terminating at a point and this point is one with the Supreme, your maximum possibility. By the other way, you arrive at, what I call, a spherical realisation; for it gives you the idea of something that contains all, it is not a point but a totality that excludes nothing.
The relation of the whole and its part does not hold good here; for there is no longer any division. The very quality of the approach is different. Can you say that a perfect identification with one drop of water would give you the knowledge of what the sea is? And here the perfect identification in question is not merely with the ocean but with all possible oceans. And yet the perfect identification with one drop of water does give you the knowledge of the ocean in its essence; but in the other way you know the ocean not merely in its essence but in its totality. It is however very difficult to express the reality of the truth. What can be said to put it as clearly as possible is this: in the line of personal effort, when one depends solely upon one's personal strength, all that has been individualised maintains the virtues of individuality and hence also, in a certain sense, all the limitations necessary for this individuality. In the other case, when you have surrendered your individuality, you not only enjoy the virtues of individuality but also you are not subject to its limitations. It is almost high philosophy, I am afraid. It is not clear therefore. But that is all I can say.
08.35 - Love Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To begin, then, you must be able to come out of your ego. You will have to enter, as the first step, into something like a state of inexistence. Thereafter only will you begin to see things as they are, that is to say, from a height. If you want to see things as they truly are, you must become absolutely like a mirrorsilent, peaceful, immobile, impartial, with no preference, in a state of total receptivity. You will begin to see many things that did not seem to be there before, but only now becoming active. Well, you may very well have gone inside one of these things instead of being shut up into a minute spot in the Infinite universe, which you call yourself. There are many ways by which you can come out of yourself. Anyhow that is the one thing to be done, if you wish to see the world as it is, not as it seems to be, a function of yourself.
Now to come out of the ego, you must have naturally, first of all, the will to do so. The surest way to do it is to give yourself to the Divine, not to pull the Divine towards you but to abandon yourself to Him. That is how you start forgetting yourself. Usually when people think of the Divine, the immediate impulse in them is to pull Him (or whatever they represent Him to be) towards themselves, within themselves. The result generally is that they receive nothing; and they grumble: "Oh, I called and called, I prayed and prayed, but there was no answer, I received nothing, nothing came." But before grumbling, ask yourself if you had offered yourself. You would find that instead of offering yourself you had pulled. Instead of being generous, open-handed and open-hearted, you were a miser, a beggar. When you pull you remain wholly within yourself, shut up, sealed within your ego. You raise a wall of separation between you and the thing that is around you and wants to come in, which is thus not admitted, almost deliberately refused entrance. You enclose yourself within a prison and grumble that you have nothing, feel nothing. At least if you had opened a window you would have had something of the light and air about you.
08.36 - Buddha and Shankara, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Both of them came in contact with something true and real. Buddha had surely an inner contact with something which, in relation to the outer life, appeared to him as non-existence and in this non-existence all the consequences of existence disappeared. There is indeed such a state. And it is said that if you remain in that state for more than twenty days, you are sure to lose your body. I believe it is so, if the condition becomes exclusive. But also it can be an experience that remains behind, exists in a conscious way and yet not exclusively. In other words, the contact with the world and the outer consciousness is maintained and supported by something which is independent of them and free. It is a state in which you can make truly a great progress in your external consciousness; for then you can detach yourself from everything and act without attachment, without preference, in an inner freedom that expresses itself in the outer life. Once you have attained the inner freedom, this conscious contact with the eternal and the Infinite, you must return to action without losing that consciousness and allow it to influence the whole of the consciousness turned to action.
That is what Sri Aurobindo calls bringing down the Force from above. That way lies the only chance of changing the world; for you seek there a new Force, a new domain, a new consciousness and you put that in contact with the external world. Its presence and its action will bring changes inevitably, a total transformation, we hope, in the external world.
09.02 - The Journey in Eternal Night and the Voice of the Darkness, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Troubling his transience with the Infinite's breath,
They gave him hungers which no food can fill;
--
Scourged like a beast by the Infinite desire,
Bound to the chariot of the dreadful gods.
10.04 - Lord of Time, #Writings In Bengali and Sanskrit, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yujhi prayan to do towards the Infinite
Slowly advancing in the exhausted land
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I live in the glory of the Infinite,
I am near to the Nameless and Unknowable,
--
He glimpses eternity, touches the Infinite,
He meets the gods in great and sudden hours,
--
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
--
Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite.
O Void that makest room for all to be,
10.06 - Beyond the Dualities, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What the mind forgets or ignores is that the law of self-contradiction belongs exclusively to the finite. It does not hold good in infinity. the Infinite is infinite because it has transcended the laws and categories of the finite, even as Eternity has transcended the temporal. In the transcendental consciousness the reality is single and multiple at the same time, simultaneously (although the conception of time is not there at all); also God is both with form and without form at the same time. The mind may not be able to conceive it but the fact is that, for one can rise above the mind and see and experience the reality.
There are other dualities that are confusing to the mind. It is said two objects cannot occupy together the same spot or position. One object must drive out another to occupy its position. Obviously this is a truth belonging to the material world for it is said matter is impenetrable. But this law, however valid in the material plane, becomes less and less applicable in regions subtler and less and less material. Two movements or two vibrations of consciousness, may exist together without annihilating each other's identity, being a total identity.
1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The eternal, the Infinite, the boundless, and the uncreated have been expressed symbolically by the word AUM and the dark purple to black colour.
Initiation I
1.00c - INTRODUCTION, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
is but a little stage on the way, that the Infinite is beyond. In
the second place, they not only say so, but lay it open to
1.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
There are many ways to set out to work; each of us has, in fact, his or her own particular approach: for one it may be a well-crafted object or a job well done; for another a beautiful idea, an encompassing philosophical system; for still another a piece of music, the flowing of a river, a burst of sunlight on the sea; all are ways of breathing the Infinite. But these are brief moments, and we seek permanence. These are moments subject to many uncontrollable conditions, and we seek something inalienable, independent of conditions and circumstances
a window within us that will never close again.
--
but just men, tired of dogmas, who believe in the earth and who are suspicious of big words. We also may be somewhat weary of too much intelligent thinking; all we want is our own little river flowing into the Infinite. There was a great saint in India who, for many years before he found peace, used to ask whomever he met: "Have you seen God? Have you seen God?" He would always go away frustrated and angry because people told him stories. He wanted to see. He wasn't wrong, considering all the deception men have heaped onto this world,
as onto many others. Once we have seen, we can talk about it; or,
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Sheshet in the twelfth century, the latter composing a treatise in rhymed prose and a series of eight essays dealing with the doctrines of the Infinite ( En Soph), Reincarnation
(Gilgolim), the doctrine of Divine Retri bution ( Sod ha Gimol), or, to use a more preferable Oriental term, Karma, and a peculiar type of Christology.
1.01 - Introduction, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
What we see is not the universe. What we see is our personal universe, the world which we fashion for the use of our needs, in the measure of our means, by the play of our faculties, a symbolic, schematic universe which our sense-perceptions cut out upon the Infinite, profound, moving and living reality.
That which we call phenomenon is only the relation between the veritable reality and our modes of subjective perception.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
knowledge (belief). Belief is disruptible, because finite which is to say that the Infinite mystery
surrounding human understanding may break through into our provisional models of how to act, at any
1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Our intention has been to show you that man is a great world, and that you might know what a multitude of servants his body has to minister to him : so that you might realize while in your enjoyments, in walking, in sleeping or at rest in your world, that by God's appointment, these numerous servants in your employ never suffer their functions to cease for a minute. Listen now for a moment candidly. If you had a servant who had been faithful to you during his whole life, with whose services you were not able to dispense, while he could at any time find a better master-yet if he should only for a single day disobey your orders, you would get angry, beat him, and wish to get rid of him. But God has been abundant in kindness to you, and has given you so many servants, and has in no wise any need of you. How then can it be just that you should become enslaved to yourself, and follow your own passions, and that forgetful of pleasing the Infinite God, you should rebel against your Creator and Benefactor, and that you should render obedience to Satan, who is your enemy and the enemy of God ?
Many and even innumerable books, O student of the divine mysteries, have been written in explanation of the organization of the body and the uses of is parts: but they have no more made the subject clear and exhausted it, than a drop can illustrate the ocean, or an atom illustrate the sun. [38] It is impossible for the thing formed to understand the knowledge of him that formed it. And how is it possible, that he who is of yesterday, should comprehend the secrets of the operations of the Ancient of days ?
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
gravitation or repulsion. It is absorbed from the Infinite
storehouse of force in nature; the instrument called Chitta
--
this world of ours; it is only the Infinite Existence projected
into the plane of consciousness. A little of the Infinite is
projected into consciousness, and that we call our world. So
--
with th elittle lump we call our world, and with the Infinite
beyond. Any religion which deals alone with either one of
--
of religion which deals with this part of the Infinite which has
come into this plane of consciousness, got itself caught, as it
--
un-obstructed from the atomic to the Infinite.
The mind, by this practice, easily contemplates the most
1.01 - Seeing, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
dimension, the atom from the nebula, the Infinitesimal from
the immense;
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every thinking and living being. The lotus of the eternal knowledge and the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart, no longer compressed and confined by attachment to finite appearances, becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite. All life, all thought, all energising of the faculties, all experiences passive or active, become thenceforward so many shocks which disintegrate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the inevitable efflorescence. He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite. He has received the divine touch without which there is no awakening, no opening of the spirit; but once it is received, attainment is sure, whether conquered swiftly in the course of one human life or pursued patiently through many stadia of the cycle of existence in the manifested universe.
3:Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the unfolding soul of the creature. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within him. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process.
--
7:For the Sadhaka of the Integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal Knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one Scripture or by several successively, -- if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be a good part of his development to include in its material a richly varied experience of the truths of many Scriptures and make the future opulent with all that is best in the past. But in the end he must take his station, or better still, if he can, always and from the beginning he must live in his own soul beyond the written Truth, -- sabdabrahmativartate -- beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear, -- srotaryasya srutasya ca. For he is not the Sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a Sadhaka of the Infinite.
8:Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture, but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and way of working of the path of Yoga which the Sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its Shastra, either written or traditional, passing from mouth to mouth through a long line of Teachers. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional teaching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher who has received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of a new formula, "It is not according to the Shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity of an iron door shut against new truth, fresh revelation, widened experience. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility are therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths, trimarga 51, breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary, for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm and constant.
--
10:By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man. Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion, when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each mall 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.
11:Meanwhile certain general lines have to be formed which may help to guide the thought and practice of the Sadhaka. But these must take, as much as possible, forms of general truths, general statements of principle, the most powerful broad directions of effort and development rather than a fixed system which has to be followed as a routine. All Shastra is the outcome of past experience and a help to future experience. It is an aid and a partial guide. It puts up signposts, gives the names of the main roads and the already explored directions, so that the traveller may know whither and by what paths he is proceeding.
1.01 - The Human Aspiration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
0:Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling. . . . That which is immortal in mortals and possessed of the truth, is a god and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers. . . . Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead. Vamadeva - Rig Veda.2
1:THE EARLIEST preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
1.01 - THE STUFF OF THE UNIVERSE, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
and indivisible. And the Infinitesimal worlds of Pascal could still
possess their animalcules. Today we have gone far beyond such
--
this progressive approach to the Infinitely small the whole
configuration of the world is for a moment blurred and then
--
the Infinitely small to the Infinitely big : Pascal's two abysses
44
--
tesimal to the Infinite, a circle of stars and galaxies. These multiple
zones of the cosmos envelop without imitating each other in such
--
imagined to ourselves. It is the Infinitesimal centre of the world
itself.
--
entirety of the Infinitesimal centres which share the universal
sphere among themselves. Indefinite though their number may
--
stars. From having considered the Infinitely small elements we
are abruptly compelled to raise our eyes to infinitely great
10.21 - Short Notes - 4- Ego, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is the ego, the personal shift that cuts the Infinite, obscures the consciousness which otherwise in its natural condition is always the supreme bliss and beatitude.
It is the ego that turns reality into unreality, light into darkness, immortality into death.
1.02.2.2 - Self-Realisation, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
In the consciousness proper to the Infinite divine selfawareness which is also the Infinite all-effective Will (ChitTapas), Atman is the all-conscious Soul that is source and lord
of the universe, caitanya purus.a.
--
There is no possibility of sorrow; for all is seen as Sachchidananda and therefore in the terms of the Infinite conscious
existence, the Infinite will, the Infinite felicity. Even pain and grief
are seen to be perverse terms of Ananda, and that Ananda which
10.22 - Short Notes - 5- Consciousness and Dimensions of View, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As we rise we find that the dimensions increase in number. Our consciousness, our being becomes more and more multiple. In the physical and material, our perception is limited to the four dimensions because of two factorsone, things are spaced out that is to say, they are separate and discrete from one another. We know the law of material space that two things cannot occupy the same space. Secondly, things or events are separated in time, that is to say, there is the law of succession. But in the higher regions, higher or subtler regions, this separation due to time and space loses much of its exclusive force. Things tend to coalesce, even to get identified with each other. The obstructions that time and space offer to intercommunication are minimised more and more as our consciousness or being soars up or dives down into deeper and deeper and higher and higher regions. The dimensions increase in number; that means we begin to apprehend things from many angles and sides at the same time, we have more and more a simultaneous view of the total or global reality of an object. So instead of a four-fold view of things we may have a fivefold, sixfold, tenfold, hundredfold view of things depending on our status of consciousness. In the highest status,we call it Sachchidananda, the Infinite and eternal consciousness things attain infinite dimensions, all merged in the Ultimate's unitary consciousness.
***
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
aspect of the Infinite existence, we say, "That"; when we consider
the Existent self-aware and self-blissful, we say, "He". Neither
--
To express the Infinite Immutability the Upanishad uses
a series of neuter adjectives, "Bright, bodiless, without scar,
--
behind him the freedom of the Infinite and brings it in as a
background for the determination of the finite. Therefore every
1.02.3.3 - Birth and Non-Birth, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
the soul beyond the dualities of birth and death in the Infinite
and transcendent existence are the conditions of a free and divine
1.02.4.1 - The Worlds - Surya, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
or organisation of consciousness of which the Infinite Truth
of things is the foundation. There dominant individualisation
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thou grandiose Darkness of the Infinite. .||147.16||
I have given thee thy awful shape of dread
--
It is true his survey of the universe, his knowledge of boundless Nature and the inexhaustible multiplicities of creation have given him a sense of the endless and the Infinite but he has not the necessary light or capacity to follow those lines of infinity, on the contrary, there is a shrinking in him at the touch of such vastnesses; his small humanity makes him desperately earth-bound, his aspiration follows the lines of least resistance:
Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.||124.60||
In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate
--
In view of the necessity of the age, for the crucial, critical and, in a way, final consummation of Nature's evolutionary urge, the Divine Himself has to come down in the fullness of His divinity; for only then can the earth be radically changed and wholly transformed. In the beginning the Divine once came down, but by sacrificing Himself, being pulverised, scattered and lost in the Infinitesimals of a universal, material, unconsciousness. Once again He has to come down, but this time in the supreme glory of His victorious Luminosity.
This then is the occult, the symbolic sense of the Mother's gesture turning away from man with her gifts and returning to the Divine Himself, and inviting Him as the chief guest of honour upon this earth. Or, in the Vedic image, He is to come as the flaming front and leader of the journeying sacrifice that is this universal existence.
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
The enjoyment of the Infinite delight of existence free from ego,
founded on oneness of all in the Lord, is what is meant by the
1.02 - Groups and Statistical Mechanics, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
If the original group is the translation group on the Infinite
line, so that the operator T changes x into x + T, Eq. 2.03 becomes
--
and the result for translations along the Infinite line is closely
related to the fact that if in an appropriate sense
1.02 - Karmayoga, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yoga is communion with God for knowledge, for love or for work. The Yogin puts himself into direct relation with that which is omniscient and omnipotent within man and without him. He is in tune with the Infinite, he becomes a channel for the strength of God to pour itself out upon the world whether through calm benevolence or active beneficence. When a man rises by putting from him the slough of self and lives for others and in the joys and sorrows of others; - when he works perfectly and with love and zeal, but casts away the anxiety for results and is neither eager for victory nor afraid of defeat; - when he devotes all his works to God and lays every thought, word and deed as an offering on the divine altar; - when he gets rid of fear and hatred, repulsion and disgust and attachment, and works like the forces of Nature, unhasting, unresting, inevitably, perfectly; - when he rises above the thought that he is the body or the heart or the mind or the sum of these and finds his own and true self; - when he becomes aware of his immortality and the unreality of death; - when he experiences the advent of knowledge and feels himself passive and the divine force working unresisted through his mind, his speech, his senses and all his organs; - when having thus abandoned whatever he is, does or has to the Lord of all, the Lover and Helper of mankind, he dwells permanently in
Him and becomes incapable of grief, disquiet or false excitement,
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
usable) object, from the Infinite domain of potential possible futures. I use this definite image to evaluate
the events and processes that constitute the interpreted present, as it unfolds around me, as I walk towards
--
Myths of the origin metaphorically portray the nature of the Infinite potential that characterized being,
prior to the dawn of experience. This general symbolic construction takes many particular forms, each of
--
potential, in the experience of the limited subject; is the Infinite possibility for sudden dramatic
unpredictability that still resides in the most thoroughly explored and familiar of objects (things, other
--
maturation. The Great Father takes the Infinite possibility of spirit that the infant represents and forges it
into something limited but actual. He is manner incarnate, ruling all social interactions.
1.02 - Prana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
By what power is this Akasha manufactured into this universe? By the power of Prana. Just as Akasha is the Infinite, omnipresent material of this universe, so is this Prana the Infinite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe. At the beginning and at the end of a cycle everything becomes Akasha, and all the forces that are in the universe resolve back into the Prana; in the next cycle, out of this Prana is evolved everything that we call energy, everything that we call force. It is the Prana that is manifesting as motion; it is the Prana that is manifesting as gravitation, as magnetism. It is the Prana that is manifesting as the actions of the body, as the nerve currents, as thought force. From thought down to the lowest force, everything is but the manifestation of Prana. The sum total of all forces in the universe, mental or physical, when resolved back to their original state, is called Prana. "When there was neither aught nor naught, when darkness was covering darkness, what existed then? That Akasha existed without motion." The physical motion of the Prana was stopped, but it existed all the same.
At the end of a cycle the energies now displayed in the universe quiet down and become potential. At the beginning of the next cycle they start up, strike upon the Akasha, and out of the Akasha evolve these various forms, and as the Akasha changes, this Prana changes also into all these manifestations of energy. The knowledge and control of this Prana is really what is meant by Pranayama.
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How to control the Prana is the one idea of Pranayama. All the trainings and exercises in this regard are for that one end. Each man must begin where he stands, must learn how to control the things that are nearest to him. This body is very near to us, nearer than anything in the external universe, and this mind is the nearest of all. The Prana which is working this mind and body is the nearest to us of all the Prana in this universe. This little wave of the Prana which represents our own energies, mental and physical, is the nearest to us of all the waves of the Infinite ocean of Prana. If we can succeed in controlling that little wave, then alone we can hope to control the whole of Prana. The Yogi who has done this gains perfection; no longer is he under any power. He becomes almost almighty, almost all-knowing. We see sects in every country who have attempted this control of Prana. In this country there are Mind-healers, Faith-healers, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, Hypnotists, etc., and if we examine these different bodies, we shall find at the back of each this control of the Prana, whether they know it or not. If you boil all their theories down, the residuum will be that. It is the one and the same force they are manipulating, only unknowingly. They have stumbled on the discovery of a force and are using it unconsciously without knowing its nature, but it is the same as the Yogi uses, and which comes from Prana.
The Prana is the vital force in every being. Thought is the finest and highest action of Prana. Thought, again, as we see, is not all. There is also what we call instinct or unconscious thought, the lowest plane of action. If a mosquito stings us, our hand will strike it automatically, instinctively. This is one expression of thought. All reflex actions of the body belong to this plane of thought. There is again the other plane of thought, the conscious. I reason, I judge, I think, I see the pros and cons of certain things, yet that is not all. We know that reason is limited. Reason can go only to a certain extent, beyond that it cannot reach. The circle within which it runs is very very limited indeed. Yet at the same time, we find facts rush into this circle. Like the coming of comets certain things come into this circle; it is certain they come from outside the limit, although our reason cannot go beyond. The causes of the phenomena intruding themselves in this small limit are outside of this limit. The mind can exist on a still higher plane, the superconscious. When the mind has attained to that state, which is called Samdhi perfect concentration, superconsciousness it goes beyond the limits of reason, and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. All manipulations of the subtle forces of the body, the different manifestations of Prana, if trained, give a push to the mind, help it to go up higher, and become superconscious, from where it acts.
In this universe there is one continuous substance on every plane of existence. Physically this universe is one: there is no difference between the sun and you. The scientist will tell you it is only a fiction to say the contrary. There is no real difference between the table and me; the table is one point in the mass of matter, and I another point. Each form represents, as it were, one whirlpool in the Infinite ocean of matter, of which not one is constant. Just as in a rushing stream there may be millions of whirlpools, the water in each of which is different every moment, turning round and round for a few seconds, and then passing out, replaced by a fresh quantity, so the whole universe is one constantly changing mass of matter, in which all forms of existence are so many whirlpools. A mass of matter enters into one whirlpool, say a human body, stays there for a period, becomes changed, and goes out into another, say an animal body this time, from which again after a few years, it enters into another whirlpool, called a lump of mineral. It is a constant change. Not one body is constant. There is no such thing as my body, or your body, except in words. Of the one huge mass of matter, one point is called a moon, another a sun, another a man, another the earth, another a plant, another a mineral. Not one is constant, but everything is changing, matter eternally concreting and disintegrating. So it is with the mind. Matter is represented by the ether; when the action of Prana is most subtle, this very ether, in the finer state of vibration, will represent the mind and there it will be still one unbroken mass. If you can simply get to that subtle vibration, you will see and feel that the whole universe is composed of subtle vibrations. Sometimes certain drugs have the power to take us, while as yet in the senses, to that condition. Many of you may remember the celebrated experiment of Sir Humphrey Davy, when the laughing gas overpowered him how, during the lecture, he remained motionless, stupefied and after that, he said that the whole universe was made up of ideas. For, the time being, as it were, the gross vibrations had ceased, and only the subtle vibrations which he called ideas, were present to him. He could only see the subtle vibrations round him; everything had become thought; the whole universe was an ocean of thought, he and everyone else had become little thought whirlpools.
Thus, even in the universe of thought we find unity, and at last, when we get to the Self, we know that that Self can only be One. Beyond the vibrations of matter in its gross and subtle aspects, beyond motion there is but One. Even in manifested motion there is only unity. These facts can no more be denied. Modern physics also has demonstrated that the sum total of the energies in the universe is the same throughout. It has also been proved that this sum total of energy exists in two forms. It becomes potential, toned down, and calmed, and next it comes out manifested as all these various forces; again it goes back to the quiet state, and again it manifests. Thus it goes on evolving and involving through eternity. The control of this Prana, as before stated, is what is called Pranayama.
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In an ocean there are huge waves, like mountains, then smaller waves, and still smaller, down to little bubbles, but back of all these is the Infinite ocean. The bubble is connected with the Infinite ocean at one end, and the huge wave at the other end. So, one may be a gigantic man, and another a little bubble, but each is connected with that infinite ocean of energy, which is the common birthright of every animal that exists. Wherever there is life, the storehouse of infinite energy is behind it. Starting as some fungus, some very minute, microscopic bubble, and all the time drawing from that infinite store-house of energy, a form is changed slowly and steadily until in course of time it becomes a plant, then an animal, then man, ultimately God. This is attained through millions of aeons, but what is time? An increase of speed, an increase of struggle, is able to bridge the gulf of time. That which naturally takes a long time to accomplish can be shortened by the intensity of the action, says the Yogi. A man may go on slowly drawing in this energy from the Infinite mass that exists in the universe, and, perhaps, he will require a hundred thousand years to become a Deva, and then, perhaps, five hundred thousand years to become still higher, and, perhaps, five millions of years to become perfect. Given rapid growth, the time will be lessened. Why is it not possible, with sufficient effort, to reach this very perfection in six months or six years? There is no limit. Reason shows that. If an engine, with a certain amount of coal, runs two miles an hour, it will run the distance in less time with a greater supply of coal. Similarly, why shall not the soul, by intensifying its action, attain perfection in this very life? All beings will at last attain to that goal, we know. But who cares to wait all these millions of aeons? Why not reach it immediately, in this body even, in this human form? Why shall I not get that infinite knowledge, infinite power, now?
The ideal of the Yogi, the whole science of Yoga, is directed to the end of teaching men how, by intensifying the power of assimilation, to shorten the time for reaching perfection, instead of slowly advancing from point to point and waiting until the whole human race has become perfect. All the great prophets, saints, and seers of the world what did they do? In one span of life they lived the whole life of humanity, traversed the whole length of time that it takes ordinary humanity to come to perfection. In one life they perfect themselves; they have no thought for anything else, never live a moment for any other idea, and thus the way is shortened for them. This is what is meant by concentration, intensifying the power of assimilation, thus shortening the time. Raja-Yoga is the science which teaches us how to gain the power of concentration.
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.
prayatnashaithilyanantasamapattibhyam
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
17:The higher mind in man is something other, loftier, purer, vaster, more powerful than the reason or logical intelligence. The animal is a vital and sensational being; man, it is said, is distinguished from the animal by the possession of reason. But that is a very summary, a very imperfect and misleading account of the matter. For reason is only a particular and limited utilitarian and instrumental activity that proceeds from something much greater than itself, from a power that dwells in an ether more luminous, wider, illimitable. The true and ultimate, as distinguished from the immediate or intermediate, importance of our observing, reasoning, inquiring, judging intelligence is that it prepares the human being for the right reception and right action of a Light from above which must progressively replace in him the obscure light from below that guides the animal. The latter also has a rudimentary reason, a kind of thought, a soul, a will and keen emotions; even though less developed, its psychology is yet the same in kind as man's. But all these capacities in the animal are automatically moved and strictly limited, almost even constituted by the lower nervous being. All animal perceptions, sensibilities, activities are ruled by nervous and vital instincts, cravings, needs, satisfactions, of which the nexus is the life-impulse and vital desire. Man too is bound, but less bound, to this automatism of the vital nature. Man can bring an enlightened will, an enlightened thought and enlightened emotions to the difficult work of his self-development; he can more and more subject to these more conscious and reflecting guides the inferior function of desire. In proportion as he can thus master and enlighten his lower self, he is mall and no longer an animal. When he can begin to replace desire altogether by a still greater enlightened thought and sight and will in touch with the Infinite, consciously subject to a diviner will than his own, linked to a more universal and transcendent knowledge, he has commenced the ascent towards tile superman; he is on his upward march towards the Divine.
18:It is, then, in the highest mind of thought and light and will or it is in the inner heart of deepest feeling and emotion that we must first centre our consciousness, -- in either of them or, if we are capable, in both together, -- and use that as our leverage to lift the nature wholly towards the Divine. The concentration of an enlightened thought, will and heart turned in unison towards one vast goal of our knowledge, one luminous and infinite source of our action, one imperishable object of our emotion is the starting-point of the Yoga. And the object of our seeking must be the very fount of the Light which is growing in us, the very origin of the Force which we are calling to move our members. Our one objective must be the Divine himself to whom, knowingly or unknowingly, something always aspires in our secret nature. There must be a large, many-sided yet single concentration of the thought on the idea, the perception, the vision, the awakening touch, the soul's realisation of the one Divine. There must be a flaming concentration of the heart on the All and Eternal and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful. There must be a strong and immovable concentration of the will on the attainment and fulfilment of all that the Divine is and a free and plastic opening of it to all that he intends to manifest in us. This is the triple way of the Yoga.
19:But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. A concentration which culminates in a living realisation and the constant sense of the presence of the One in ourselves and in all of which we are aware, is what we mean in Yoga by knowledge and the effort after knowledge. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga, but it is not indispensable : it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary. All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. This support can be reached through an insistent idea of the Divine in the thought, a corresponding will in the dynamic parts, an aspiration, a faith, a need in the heart. Any one of these may lead or predominate, if all cannot move in unison or in an equal rhythm. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, easily diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self-consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul's call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose. Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man's avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.
20:But still the greater and wider the moving idea-force behind the consecration, the better for the seeker; his attainment is likely to be fuller and more ample. If we are to attempt an integral Yoga, it will be as well to start with an idea of the Divine that is itself integral. There should be an aspiration in the heart wide enough for a realisation without any narrow limits. Not only should we avoid a sectarian religious outlook, but also all onesided philosophical conceptions which try to shut up the Ineffable in a restricting mental formula. The dynamic conception or impelling sense with which our Yoga can best set out would be naturally the idea, the sense of a conscious all-embracing but all-exceeding Infinite. Our uplook must be to a free, all-powerful, perfect and blissful One and Oneness in which all beings move and live and through which all can meet and become one. This Eternal will be at once personal and impersonal in his self-revelation and touch upon the soul. He is personal because he is the conscious Divine, the Infinite Person who casts some broken reflection of himself in the myriad divine and undivine personalities of the universe. He is impersonal because he appears to us as an infinite Existence, Consciousness and Ananda and because he is the fount, base and constituent of all existences and all energies, -the very material of our being and mind and life and body, our spirit and our matter. The thought, concentrating on him, must not merely understand in an intellectual form that he exists, or conceive of him as an abstraction, a logical necessity; it must become a seeing thought able to meet him here as the Inhabitant in all, realise him in ourselves, watch and take hold on the movement of his forces. He is the one Existence: he is the original and universal Delight that constitutes all things and exceeds them: he is the one infinite Consciousness that composes all consciousnesses and informs all their movements; he is the one illimitable Being who sustains all action and experience; his will guides the evolution of things towards their yet unrealised but inevitable aim and plenitude. To him the heart can consecrate itself, approach him as the supreme Beloved, beat and move in him as in a universal sweetness of Love and a living sea of Delight. For his is the secret Joy that supports the soul in all its experiences and maintains even the errant ego in its ordeals and struggles till all sorrow and suffering shall cease. His is the Love and the Bliss of the Infinite divine Lover who is drawing all things by their own path towards his happy oneness. On him the Will can unalterably fix as the invisible Power that guides and fulfils it and as the source of its strength. In the impersonality this actuating Power is a self-illumined Force that contains all results and calmly works until it accomplishes, in the personality an all wise and omnipotent Master of the Yoga whom nothing can prevent from leading it to its goal. This is the faith with which the seeker has to begin his seeking and endeavour; for in all his effort here, but most of all in his effort towards the Unseen, mental man must perforce proceed by faith. When the realisation comes, the faith divinely fulfilled and completed will be transformed into an eternal flame of knowledge.
21:Into all our endeavour upward the lower element of desire will at first naturally enter. For what the enlightened will sees as the thing to be done and pursues as the crown to be conquered, what the heart embraces as the one thing delightful, that in us which feels itself limited and opposed and, because it is limited, craves and struggles, will seek with the troubled passion of an egoistic desire. This craving life-force or desire-soul in us has to be accepted at first, but only in order that it may be transformed. Even from the very beginning it has to be taught to renounce all other desires and concentrate itself on the passion for the Divine. This capital point gained, it has to be taught to desire, not for its own separate sake, but for God in the world and for the Divine in ourselves; it has to fix itself upon no personal spiritual gain, though of all possible spiritual gains we are sure, but on the great work to be done in us and others, on the high coming manifestation which is to be the glorious fulfilment of the Divine in the world, on the Truth that has to be sought and lived and enthroned for ever. But last, most difficult for it, more difficult than to seek with the right object, it has to be taught to seek in the right manner; for it must learn to desire, not in its own egoistic way, but in the way of the Divine. It must insist no longer, as the strong separative will always insists, on its own manner of fulfilment, its own dream of possession, its own idea of the right and desirable; it must yearn to fulfil a larger and greater Will and consent to wait upon a less interested and ignorant guidance. Thus trained, Desire, that great unquiet harasser and troubler of man and cause of every kind of stumbling, will become fit to be transformed into its divine counterpart. For desire and passion too have their divine forms; there is a pure ecstasy of the soul's seeking beyond all craving and grief, there is a Will of Ananda that sits glorified in the possession of the supreme beatitudes.
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
India has from ancient times held strongly a belief in the reality of the Avatara, the descent into form, the revelation of the Godhead in humanity. In the West this belief has never really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root in the consciousness of the race. All existence is a manifestation of God because He is the only existence and nothing can be except as either a real figuring or else a figment of that one reality. Therefore every conscious being is in part or in some way a descent of the Infinite into the apparent finiteness of
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But all this, though of considerable historical importance, has none whatever for our present purpose. We are concerned only with the figure of the divine Teacher as it is presented to us in the Gita and with the Power for which it there stands in the spiritual illumination of the human being. The Gita accepts the human Avatarhood; for the Lord speaks of the repeated, the constant5 manifestation of the Divine in humanity, when He the eternal Unborn assumes by his Maya, by the power of the Infinite Consciousness to clo the itself apparently in finite forms, the conditions of becoming which we call birth. But it is not this upon which stress is laid, but on the transcendent, the cosmic and the internal Divine; it is on the Source of all things and the
Master of all and on the Godhead secret in man. It is this internal divinity who is meant when the Gita speaks of the doer of violent
1.02 - The Doctrine of the Mystics, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal Godhead and they represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being. They manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of Light, Sons of the Infinite, they recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world with their light, strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division. Man in return calls the Gods to his sacrifice, offers to them his swiftnesses and his strengths, his clarities and his sweetnesses, - milk and butter of the shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horse of the Sacrifice, the cake and the wine, the grain for the GodMind's radiant coursers. He receives them into his being and their gifts into his life, increases them by the hymns and the wine and forms perfectly - as a smith forges iron, says the Veda - their great and luminous godheads.
All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, but it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted.
1.02 - The Magic Circle, #The Practice of Magical Evocation, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
A true magic circle represents the symbolic lay-out of the macrocosm and the microcosm, that is, of the perfect man. It stands for the Beginning and the Ending for the Alpha and the Omega, as well as for Eternity, which has no beginning and no end. The magic circle, therefore, is a symbolic diagram of the Infinite, of Divinity in all its aspects, as can be comprehended by the microcosm, i. e. by the true adept, the perfect magician. To draw a magic circle means to symbolize the Divine in His perfection, to get into contact with Him. This happens, above all, at the moment the magician is standing in the centre of the magic circle, for it is by this act that the contact with the Divinity is demonstrated graphically. It is the magician's contact with the macrocosm in his highest step of consciousness. Therefore, from the point of view of true magic, it is quite logical that standing in the centre of the magic circle is equivalent to being, in one's consciousness, a unity with the Universal Divinity. From this one can see clearly that a magic circle is not only a diagram for protection from unwanted negative influences, but security and inviolability are brought about by this conscious and spiritual contact with the Highest. The magician who stands in the centre of the magic circle is protected from any influence, no matter, whether good or evil, for himself is, in fact, symbolizing the Divine in the universe. Furthermore, by standing in the centre of the magic circle, the magician also represents the Divinity in the microcosm and controls and rules the beings of the universe in a totalitarian manner.
The esoteric essence of the magician's standing in the centre of the magic circle is, therefore, quite different from that which the books on evocations usually maintain. If a magician standing in the centre of the magic circle were not conscious of the fact that he is, at that moment, symbolizing God the Divine and Infinite, he would not be able to practise any influence on any being whatsoever. The magician is, at that instant, a perfect magic authority whom all powers and beings must absolutely obey. His will and the orders he gives to beings or powers are equivalent to the will and orders of the Infinite, the Divine, and must therefore be unconditionally respected by the beings and powers the magician has conjured up. If the magician, during such an operation, has not the right attitude towards his doings, he degrades himself to a sorcerer, a charlatan, who simply mimics and has no true contact with the Highest. The magician's authority would, in such a case, be rather doubtful. Moreover, he would be in danger of losing his control over such beings and powers, or, what would even be worse, he could be mocked by them, not to speak of other unwanted and unforeseen surprises and accompanying phenomena that he would be exposed, especially if negative forces were involved.
The way in which a magic circle has to be formed depends on the grade of maturity and the individual attitude of the magician.
The diagram, that is the drawing by which the Divinity is expressed within the circle, is subject to the religious concepts of the magician. The procedure followed by an oriental magician when forming a magic circle is of no use to an occidental magician, because his ideas of the Divine and the Infinite are quite different from those of the magician from the East. If an occidental initiate drew a magic circle according to oriental instructions, with all divine names appertaining to it, it would be ineffective and completely fall short of its purpose. A Christian magician must therefore never draw a magic circle according to an Indian or any other religion if he wants to save himself from an unnecessary effort. The construction of the magic circle depends, from the beginning, on one's individual ideas and beliefs and one's individual conception of the qualities of the Divine, who is to be symbolized graphically by this circle. This is the reason why a genuine magician will never draw a circle, carry out rituals, or follow instructions concerning ceremonial magic to which he himself is not identified in his individual practice. For this would be similar to wearing oriental clothes in the occident.
Bearing these facts in mind, it comes natural that the magic circle has to be drawn in complete accordance with the views of life and maturity of the magician. The initiate who is conscious about the Harmony of the Universe and its exact hierarchy will, of course, make use of his knowledge when drawing the magic circle. Such a magician may, if he likes, and if the circumstances permit it, draw into his magic circle diagrams representing the whole hierarchy of the universe and thus come into contact with, and awake his consciousness of, the universe much more rapidly. He is free to draw, if necessary, several circles at a certain distance from each other in order to use them for representing the hierarchy of the universe in the form of divine names, genii, princes, angels and other powers. One must, of course, meditate appropriately and take the concept of the divine aspects in question into consideration when drawing the circle. The true magician must know that divine names are symbolic designations of divine qualities and powers. It stands to reason that while drawing the circle and entering the divine names the magician must also consider the analogies corresponding to the power in question, such as colour, number and direction, if he does not want to allow a breach in his consciousness to come into existance because he has not presented the universe in its complete analogy.
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When working in the open air, a magic weapon, dagger or sword has to be used for drawing the circle on the ground. When working in a room, the circle may be drawn on the floor with a piece of chalk. A large sheet of paper can also be used for the circle. The most ideal circle, however, is the one sewn or embroidered into a piece of cloth, flannel or silk, for such a circle can be laid out in a room as well as outside of the house. The circles drawn on paper have the disadvantage that the paper will soon wear out and fall to pieces. In any case, the circle must be large enough to enable the magician to move about in it freely. When drawing the circle, the appropriate state of mind and full concentration are most essential. If a circle were drawn without the necessary concentration, a circle would undoubtedly be the result, but it would not be a magic one. The magic circle that has been worked into a piece of cloth or silk has to be re-drawn symbolically with one's finger or magic wand, or with some other magic weapon; not to forget the necessary concentration, meditation and state of mind. The magician must, in such a case, be fully aware of the fact that it is not the magical weapon in use that draws the circle, but the divine faculties symbolized by that magical instrument. Furthermore, he must realize that it is not he that is drawing the magic circle at the moment of concentration, but that the Divine Spirit is actually guiding his hand and instrument to draw the circle. Therefore, before drawing the magic circle, a conscious contact with the Almighty, with the Infinite, has to be brought about by the help of meditation and identification.
The trained magician, having a thorough comm and of the practical exercises of the first tarot-card, as explained in my first work "Initiation into Hermetics" , has learned during one of the steps of that book how to become fully conscious of the spirit and how to act consciously as a spirit. It is not difficult for him to imagine that not he, but the Divine Spirit in all its high aspects is actually drawing the magic circle he wishes to have. The magician has thus learned also that in the world of the Invisible it is not the same although two persons might physically be doing the same, for a sorcerer, who does not possess the necessary maturity, will never be able to draw a true magic circle.
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
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.
In explaining this aphorism the commentator Rmnuja says, "This doubt being raised, whether among the powers of the liberated souls is included that unique power of the Supreme One, that is, of creation etc. of the universe and even the Lordship of all, or whether, without that, the glory of the liberated consists only in the direct perception of the Supreme One, we get as an argument the following: It is reasonable that the liberated get the Lordship of the universe, because the scriptures say,
1.02 - The Two Negations 1 - The Materialist Denial, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
19:What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some mighty possibility in the universe which it has created? And what is its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge, to unfettered Power? Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a superconscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the Infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana,7 the visvamanava8 as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine? "That which is immortal in mortals is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers."9 It is this vast cosmic impulse which the modern world, without quite knowing its own aim, yet serves in all its activities and labours subconsciously to fulfil.
20:But there is always a limit and an encumbrance, - the limit of the material field in the Knowledge, the encumbrance of the material machinery in the Power. But here also the latest trend is highly significant of a freer future. As the outposts of scientific Knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial, so also the highest achievements of practical Science are those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the machinery by which the greatest effects are produced. Wireless telegraphy is Nature's exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and reception. Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future.
Wikipedia - Dold-Thom theorem -- On the homotopy groups of the infinite symmetric product of a connected CW complex
Wikipedia - Fibonacci number -- Integer in the infinite Fibonacci sequence
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Wikipedia - The Infinite Moment -- science fiction short story
Wikipedia - The Infinite Monkey Cage -- BBC Radio 4 comedy and popular science series, hosted by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince
Wikipedia - The Infinite Quest -- British animated serial
Wikipedia - The Infinites
Wikipedia - The Infinite Way
Wikipedia - The Infinite Worlds of H. G. Wells -- 2001 film
Wikipedia - The Nostalgia of the Infinite -- Painting by Giorgio de Chirico
Wikipedia - The Paradoxes of the Infinite
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Fate/Extra: Last Encore - Illustrias Tendousetsu -- -- Shaft -- 3 eps -- Game -- Action Fantasy Magic -- Fate/Extra: Last Encore - Illustrias Tendousetsu Fate/Extra: Last Encore - Illustrias Tendousetsu -- After defeating the various Floor Masters of the six prior levels, Hakuno Kishinami and Saber arrive at the top floor of the Moon Cell. Their opponent will be Leonardo B. Harwey—the strongest Master in the history of the Holy Grail War and the current fan favorite, following his previous victory. -- -- As they reach a field of flowers among floating isles, Hakuno, Saber, and Rin Toosaka come across a hooded man tending to the blossoms. Saber immediately draws her blade before the cloaked figure, who reveals himself as Prince Gawain: the Platinum Saber and Knight of the Round Table. However, when Gawain insists that he has no interest in fighting, the four discuss the infinite possibilities for the Holy Grail, with Hakuno determined to return the Moon Cell to its original form. -- -- Their discussion ends with a clangor from afar, ringing through the skies. The threadbare Gawain, knowing its significance, informs the three that not much time remains for their lives. He beckons them towards the final battleground, where the two Sabers shall duel once more to determine the future of mankind. -- -- TV - Jul 29, 2018 -- 48,706 6.54
IS: Infinite Stratos -- -- 8bit -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Sci-Fi Harem Comedy Ecchi Mecha -- IS: Infinite Stratos IS: Infinite Stratos -- An exoskeleton weapon engineered by Japan, Infinite Stratos (IS) can be piloted only by women. Its power and combat prowess are so immense that an international treaty has been signed banning its use as a military asset. -- -- When it is discovered that 15-year-old Ichika Orimura is the only male capable of steering an IS, he is forcibly enrolled in the Infinite Stratos Academy: an all-female boarding school, the students of which graduate to become IS pilots. At this training school, Ichika is reunited with two of his childhood friends, Houki Shinonono and Lingyin Huang, and befriends Cecilia Alcott, an IS representative from the United Kingdom. -- -- Guided by the legendary pilot Chifuyu Orimura—their strict homeroom teacher and Ichika's older sister—Ichika and the girls will need to use everything at their disposal to defend themselves and their academy against the dangers that will arise during the course of their thrilling school life. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 520,948 6.72
Musekinin Kanchou Tylor -- -- Tatsunoko Production -- 26 eps -- Light novel -- Military Sci-Fi Space Comedy Parody -- Musekinin Kanchou Tylor Musekinin Kanchou Tylor -- Justy Ueki Tylor is an average 20-year-old man: lazy, greedy, and a passionate womanizer. He plans to land an easy job with the United Planets Space Force that pays decently and is also far away from the rigorous combat raging throughout the galaxy. -- -- However, Tylor's dreams of living a simple life are brought to a sudden halt when he stumbles into a dangerous hostage situation. Through one strange mishap after another, Tylor miraculously manages to save the hostages and is awarded command of the decrepit space-cruiser Soyokaze! -- -- Now Tylor finds himself in charge of sending mad mercenaries, proud pilots, skeptical colleagues, and harsh commanders through the infinite expanse of the universe, all the while avoiding the looming threat of the Holy Raalgon Empire. What misadventures await the irresponsible Captain Tylor? -- -- -- Licensor: -- Nozomi Entertainment -- 39,113 7.87
Anna to the Infinite Power
Beyond the Infinite
Explorers of the Infinite
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Sex, Death & the Infinite Void
The Infinite Monkey Cage
The Infinite Quest
The Infinite Sea
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