TERMS STARTING WITH
The objection to the terms dimensions and dimensional arises merely because they apply with strict accuracy only to the three standard manners of measuring physical objects, and likewise to the time element or points of duration; but when applied to the higher modes or qualities of the cosmic continuum, these words can be strictly used only by distorting the idea of mensuration they involve. We cannot easily say that consciousness is capable of mensuration in the manner in which we mensurate off particles or bodies of physical substance, for such mensuration does not apply. But to speak of space as containing in itself a quality which we humans cognize as intelligence, consciousness, love, or hate is to speak with accuracy, for all these qualities exist.
The objective idealism which the theosophic philosophy teaches when considering the noumena and phenomena of existence shows a fundamental reality behind these, above and beyond all manifestations whatsoever, as the root and basis of all entities and things, which although relatively unreal in themselves because products merely, or because based on the various prakritis, nevertheless because so based have a relative reality derivative from this basic root. See also PLEROMA
The objective of the Yoga school is attaining union or at-one-ness with the divine-spiritual essence within which is virtually identical with the spiritual essence or Logos of the universe. True yoga is genuine psychology based on a complete philosophical understanding of the entire inner human constitution.
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. A joke. 2. The object of laughter, sport, or mockery; laughing-stock.
1. Usual (strict) sense: consciousness of an intended object as itself (more or less fully) given; experience in the broadest sense. Contrasted with empty intending. Perfect evidence is a regulative idea: In any particular evidence the object is also emptily intended as the object of further, confirmative, evidence. Evidence is either original ("perceptual" in the broadest sense) or directly reproductive ("memorial" in the broadest sense); again, it is either impressional or retentional evidence. Empirical evidence, in general, is the category of evidence of real individual objects; within this category, sensuous perceiving is original evidence of sensible real individuals and their sensible real individual determinations. For every other category of objects there is a corresponding category of evidence in general and original evidence in particular.
(2) If compared with an object, its correlative will be objectively: e.g. God is said to be the hope of a just man not formally but objectively i.e. God is not the hope of man, but the object of that hope.
7. Calm indifference for, but a just appreciation of everything that constitutes the objective and transitory world, in its relation with, and to, the invisible regions.
9PAC "tool" 709 PACkage. A {report generator} for the {IBM 7090}, developed in 1959. [Sammet 1969, p.314. "IBM 7090 Prog Sys, SHARE 7090 9PAC Part I: Intro and Gen Princs", IBM J28-6166, White Plains, 1961]. (1995-02-07):-) {emoticon}; {semicolon}" {less than}"g" "chat" grin. An alternative to {smiley}. [{Jargon File}] (1998-01-18)"gr&d" "chat" Grinning, running and ducking. See {emoticon}. (1995-03-17)= {equals}" {greater than}? {question mark}?? "programming" A {Perl} quote-like {operator} used to delimit a {regular expression} (RE) like "?FOO?" that matches FOO at most once. The normal "/FOO/" form of regular expression will match FOO any number of times. The "??" operator will match again after a call to the "reset" operator. The operator is usually referred to as "??" but, taken literally, an empty RE like this (or "//") actually means to re-use the last successfully matched regular expression or, if there was none, empty string (which will always match). {Unix manual page}: perlop(1). (2009-05-28)@ {commercial at}@-party "event, history" /at'par-tee/ (Or "@-sign party") An antiquated term for a gathering of {hackers} at a science-fiction convention (especially the annual Worldcon) to which only people who had an {electronic mail address} were admitted. The term refers to the {commercial at} symbol, "@", in an e-mail address and dates back to the era when having an e-mail address was a distinguishing characteristic of the select few who worked with computers. Compare {boink}. [{Jargon File}] (2012-11-17)@Begin "text" The {Scribe} equivalent of {\begin}. [{Jargon File}] (2014-11-06)@stake "security, software" A computer security development group and consultancy dedicated to researching and documenting security flaws that exist in {operating systems}, {network} {protocols}, or software. @stake publishes information about security flaws through advisories, research reports, and tools. They release the information and tools to help system administrators, users, and software and hardware vendors better secure their systems. L0pht merged with @stake in January 2000. {@stake home (http://atstake.com/research/redirect.html)}. (2003-06-12)@XX "programming" 1. Part of the syntax of a {decorated name}, as used internally by {Microsoft}'s {Visual C} or {Visual C++} {compilers}. 2. The name of an example {instance variable} in the {Ruby} {programming language}. (2018-08-24)[incr Tcl] "language" An extension of {Tcl} that adds {classes} and {inheritence}. The name is a pun on {C++} - an {object-oriented} extension of {C} - [incr variable] is the Tcl {syntax} for adding one to a variable. [Origin? Availability?] (1998-11-27)\ {backslash}\begin "text, chat" The {LaTeX} command used with \end to delimit an environment within which the text is formatted in a certain way. E.g. \begin{table}...\end{table}. Used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. For example: \begin{flame} Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else is an idiot. Also, all computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. \end{flame} {Scribe} users at {CMU} and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On {Usenet}, this construct would more frequently be rendered as ""FLAME ON"" and ""FLAME OFF"" (a la {HTML}), or "
able ::: superl. --> Fit; adapted; suitable.
Having sufficient power, strength, force, skill, means, or resources of any kind to accomplish the object; possessed of qualifications rendering competent for some end; competent; qualified; capable; as, an able workman, soldier, seaman, a man able to work; a mind able to reason; a person able to be generous; able to endure pain; able to play on a piano.
Specially: Having intellectual qualifications, or strong
abstract interpretation "theory" A partial execution of a program which gains information about its {semantics} (e.g. control structure, flow of information) without performing all the calculations. Abstract interpretation is typically used by compilers to analyse programs in order to decide whether certain optimisations or transformations are applicable. The objects manipulated by the program (typically values and functions) are represented by points in some {domain}. Each abstract domain point represents some set of real ("{concrete}") values. For example, we may take the abstract points "+", "0" and "-" to represent positive, zero and negative numbers and then define an abstract version of the multiplication operator, *
According to the Old Testament, the building of the temple was completed, but it was used for its high purposes only briefly. Allegorically this was during the Golden Age of the childhood of the human race — the building was complete only as regards childhood when the gods walked among mankind and were their divine instructors; but humanity was not yet truly human, for manas (mind) had not yet been awakened by the manasaputras of whom Hiram Abif was a type. It is here that Masonic tradition should be studied together with the Biblical account. Then with the awakening of manas, and the eating from the Tree of Knowledge and hence the power to choose between good and evil — in other words, with the beginning of self-directed evolution, the temple was desecrated again and again. “The building of the Temple of Solomon is the symbolical representation of the gradual acquirement of the secret wisdom, or magic; the erection and development of the spiritual from the earthly; the manifestation of the power and splendor of the spirit in the physical world, through the wisdom and genius of the builder. The latter, when he has become an adept, is a mightier king than Solomon himself, the emblem of the sun or Light himself — the light of the real subjective world, shining in the darkness of the objective universe. This is the ‘Temple’ which can be reared without the sound of the hammer, or any tool of iron being heard in the house while it is ‘in building’ ” (IU 2:391).
accusative ::: a. --> Producing accusations; accusatory.
Applied to the case (as the fourth case of Latin and Greek nouns) which expresses the immediate object on which the action or influence of a transitive verb terminates, or the immediate object of motion or tendency to, expressed by a preposition. It corresponds to the objective case in English. ::: n.
"A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements — the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent; it is only owing to the sustaining Divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution in progress — that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.” Letters on Yoga
“A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But as there are musical harmonies which are built out of discords partly or even predominantly, so this universe (the material) is disharmonious in its separate elements—the individual elements are at discord with each other to a large extent; it is only owing to the sustaining Divine Will behind that the whole is still a harmony to those who look at it with the cosmic vision. But it is a harmony in evolution in progress—that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of our yoga is to hasten the arrival to this goal. When it is reached, there will be a harmony of harmonies substituted for the present harmony built up on discords. This is the explanation of the present appearance of things.” Letters on Yoga
A cosmos or universe is always a harmony, otherwise it could not exist, it would fly to pieces. But it is a harmony in evolu- tion in progress — that is, all is combined to strive towards a goal which is not yet reached, and the object of your yoga is to hasten (he arrival to this goal.
acrophony ::: n. --> The use of a picture symbol of an object to represent phonetically the initial sound of the name of the object.
active object "programming" An {object} each {instance} of which has its own {thread} running as well as its own copies of the object's {instance variables}. (1998-03-08)
Actual: In Husserl: see Actuality. Actual: (Lat. actus, act) 1. real or factual (opposed to unreal and apparent) 2. quality which anything possesses of having realized its potentialities or possibilities (opposed to possible and potential). In Aristotle: see Energeia. Actuality: In Husserl: 1. (Ger. Wirklichkeit) Effective individual existence in space and time, as contrasted with mere possibility. 2. (Ger. Aktualität) The character of a conscious process as lived in by the ego, as contrasted with the "inactuality" of conscious processes more or less far from the ego. To say the ego lives in a particular conscious process is to say the ego is busied with the object intended in that process. Attending is a special form of being busied. -- D.C.
adequate ::: (vak) having the qualities of the lowest level of style, which "has the power to make us . . . see the object or idea in a certain temperate lucidity of vision"; most often combined with a higher level, as in the effective-adequate style or the inevitable form of the adequate.
adhibhuta ::: the elemental; the objective phenomenon of being.
All these nidhis are the objects of special worship by the Tantrikas. They differ from the nava-nidhi, or nine treasuries or jewels of wisdom referring to a consummation of spiritual development in occult training, occult life, or mysticism generally. In theosophy the “seven jewels of wisdom” are seven of the nine nava-nidhi.
Although advancing steadily in spirituality and upwards towards a lower nirvana, and therefore evolving on a path which is not only not harmful to humanity and others, but in a sense is even passively beneficial, the Pratyeka Buddha, precisely because his thoughts are involved in spiritual freedom and benefits for himself, is really enwrapped in a spiritual selfishness; and hence in the intuitive, albeit popular, consideration of Northern Buddhism is called by such names as the Solitary or the Rhinoceros — applied in contrast to the Buddhas of Compassion, whose entire effort is to merge the individual into the universal, to expand their sympathies to include all that is, to follow the path of immortality (amrita), which is self-identification without loss of individuality with all that is. When the sacrifice of the lower personal and inferior self, with all its hoard of selfish thought and impulses, for the sake of bringing into full and unfettered activity the ineffable glorious faculties and powers and functions of the higher nature — not for the purpose of selfish personal advancement, but in order to become a helper of all that is — the consequence is that as time passes, the disciple so living and dedicating himself finds himself becoming the very incarnation of his inner divinity. He becomes, as it were, a man-god on earth. This, however, is not the objective, for holding such an objective as the goal to be attained would be in itself a proof that selfishness still abides in the nature.
ana ::: a lower kind of vijñana, which "puts the knowledge by identity more into the background and stresses more the objectivity of the thing known", becoming a form of prajñana, whose "characteristic movement, descending into the mind, becomes the source of the peculiar nature of our mental knowledge".
ana (sanjnana) ::: sense-knowledge; "the essential sense" (see indriya) which "in itself can operate without bodily organs" and is "the original capacity of consciousness to feel in itself all that consciousness has formed and to feel it in all the essential properties and operations of that which has form, whether represented materially by vibration of sound or images of light or any other physical symbol". Saṁjñana, like prajñana, is one of the "subordinate operations involved in the action of the comprehensive consciousness" (vijñana); "if prajñana can be described as the outgoing of apprehensive consciousness to possess its object in conscious energy, to know it, saṁjñana can be described as the inbringing movement of apprehensive consciousness which draws the object placed before it back to itself so as to possess it in conscious substance, to feel it"...
Anima Mundi (Latin) World-soul, world-mother; the divine-spiritual-astral-physical source of emanations, the cosmic generative and animating principle of all beings, the creative Third Logos in its female aspect. In its highest and intermediate portions, it corresponds to the alaya of Northern Buddhism and hence to akasa. Identified variously with Isis, Sephira, Sophia, the Holy Ghost, mahat, mulaprakriti, etc., but used in a hazy and often materializing sense, so that it cannot be accurately regarded as a synonym for any one of these. “It is in a sense the ‘seven-skinned mother’ of the stanzas in the Secret Doctrine, the essence of seven planes of sentience, consciousness and differentiation, moral and physical. In its highest aspect it is Nirvana, in its lowest Astral Light. It was feminine with the Gnostics, the early Christians and the Nazarenes; bisexual with other sects, who considered it only in its four lower planes. Of igneous, ethereal nature in the objective world of form (and then ether), and divine and spiritual in its three higher planes. When it is said that every human soul was born by detaching itself form the Anima Mundi, it means, esoterically, that our higher Egos are of an essence identical with It, which is a radiation of the ever unknown Universal Absolute” (TG 22-3).
aperture ::: n. --> The act of opening.
An opening; an open space; a gap, cleft, or chasm; a passage perforated; a hole; as, an aperture in a wall.
The diameter of the exposed part of the object glass of a telescope or other optical instrument; as, a telescope of four-inch aperture.
Apperception Perception involving self-consciousness; cognition through the relating of new ideas to familiar ideas. Used by Leibniz to denote a stage higher or more subtle than perception. The impressions received through perception are apprehended by the mind and are related to other impressions which the memory holds, so that complex ideas are formed. Apperception may be called perception accompanied by awareness and an interpretative power. In contrast to the theory that the higher faculties of mind are built up synthetically from the lower, Leibniz’s views support the theory that the intuitive or original inner powers are primary. “Nascent apperception, which is the Mahat of the lower kingdoms, especially developed in the third order of Elementals . . . [is] succeeded by the objective kingdom of minerals, in which latter that apperception is entirely latent, to re-develop only in the plants”; and “that which is meant by ‘animals,’ in primary Creation, is the germ of awakening consciousness or of apperception, that which is faintly traceable in some sensitive plants on Earth and more distinctly in the protistic monera. . . . Neither plant nor animal, but an existence between the two” (SD 1:454-5&n; cf ET 505 3rd & rev ed ).
appetible ::: a. --> Desirable; capable or worthy of being the object of desire.
Apport: The arrival of an object through solid matter; also, the object so appearing.
Asana is used by the Rajayoga only in its easiest and most natural position, that naturally taken by the body when seated and gathered together, but wth the back and head strictly erect and in a straight line, so that there may be no deflection of the spinal chord. The object of the fatter rule I's obviously con- nected with the theory of the six Chakras and the circulation of the vital energy between the mul&dhara and^he brahmarandhra.
astonishment ::: n. --> The condition of one who is stunned. Hence: Numbness; loss of sensation; stupor; loss of sense.
Dismay; consternation.
The overpowering emotion excited when something unaccountable, wonderful, or dreadful is presented to the mind; an intense degree of surprise; amazement.
The object causing such an emotion.
Atmanam Atmana Pasya (Sanskrit) Ātmānam ātmanā paśya [from ātman self + the verbal root paś to see] See the self by the self; a favorite phrase used in Vedanta philosophy, especially by Sankaracharya. In its highest interpretation it refers to Avalokitesvara which is “in one sense ‘the divine Self perceived or seen by Self,’ the Atman or seventh principle ridded of its mayavic distinction from its Universal Source — which becomes the object of perception for, and by the individuality centred in Buddhi, the sixth principle, — something that happens only in the highest state of Samadhi. This is applying it to the microcosm” (ML 343).
* attachment must draw away altogether from the object of its love. The vital can be as absolute in its unquestioning self-giving as any other part or the nature ; nothing can be more generous than its movement when it forgets self for the Beloved. The vital and physical should both give themselves in the true way — the way of true love, not of ego-desire.
attainable ::: a. --> Capable of being attained or reached by efforts of the mind or body; capable of being compassed or accomplished by efforts directed to the object.
Obtainable.
available ::: a. --> Having sufficient power, force, or efficacy, for the object; effectual; valid; as, an available plea.
Such as one may avail one&
aversion ::: n. --> A turning away.
Opposition or repugnance of mind; fixed dislike; antipathy; disinclination; reluctance.
The object of dislike or repugnance.
. aya-nirananda (vishaya-nirananda) ::: undelight in the objects of sense.
Background: (Ger. Hintergrund) In Husserl: The nexus of objects and objective sense explicitly posited along with any object; the objective horizon. The perceptual background is part of the entire background in this broad sense. See Horizon. -- D.C . Bacon, Francis: (1561-1626) Inspired by the Renaissance, and in revolt against Aristotelianism and Scholastic Logic, proposed an inductive method of discovering truth, founded upon empirical observation, analysis of observed data, inference resulting in hypotheses, and verification of hypotheses through continued observation and experiment. The impediments to the use of this method are preconceptions and prejudices, grouped by Bacon under four headings, or Idols: The Idols of the Tribe, or racially "wishful," anthropocentric ways of thinking, e.g. explanation by final causes The Idols of the Cave or personal prejudices The Idols of the Market Place, or failure to define terms The Idol of the Theatre, or blind acceptance of tradition and authority. The use of the inductive method prescribes the extraction of the essential from the non-essential and the discovery of the underlying structure or form of the phenomena under investigation, through (a) comparison of instances, (b) study of concomitant variations, and (c) exclusion of negative instances.
Behaviorism: The contemporary American School of psychology which abandons the concepts of mind and consciousness, and restricts both animal and human psychology to the study of behavior. The impetus to behaviorism was given by the Russian physiologist, Pavlov, who through his investigation of the salivary reflex in dogs, developed the concept of the conditioned reflex. See Conditioned Reflex. The founder of American behaviorism is J.B. Watson, who formulated a program for psychology excluding all reference to consciousness and confining itself to behavioral responses. (Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 1914.) Thinking and emotion are interpreted as implicit behavior: the former is implicit or subvocal speech; the latter implicit visceral reactions. A distinction has been drawn between methodological and dogmatic behaviorism: the former ignores "consciousness" and advocates, in psychology, the objective study of behaviour; the latter denies consciousness entirely, and is, therefore, a form of metaphysical materialism. See Automatism. -- L.W.
belief ::: n. --> Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact, opinion, or assertion as real or true, without immediate personal knowledge; reliance upon word or testimony; partial or full assurance without positive knowledge or absolute certainty; persuasion; conviction; confidence; as, belief of a witness; the belief of our senses.
A persuasion of the truths of religion; faith.
The thing believed; the object of belief.
Bhakti: (Skr. division, share) Fervent, loving devotion to the object of contemplation or the divine being itself, the almost universally recognized feeling approach to the highest reality, in contrast to vidya (s.v.) or jnana (s.v.), sanctioned by Indian philosophy and productive of a voluminous literature in which the names of Ramamanda, Vallabha, Nanak, Caitanya, and Tulsi Das are outstanding. It is distinguished as apara (lower) and para (higher) bhakti, the former theistic piety, the latter philosophic meditation on the unmanifest brahman (cf. avyakta). -- K.F.L.
(b) In epistemology: A variety of ''critical realism." The view which holds that in the knowledge-relation the subject or percipient is at one (monism) with the object or the thing objectively existent and perceived, and that the subject contributes qualities not inherent in the object (hence, critical) and the object contains qualities not perceived. -- V.F.
(b) In epistemology: Epistemological dualism is the theory that in perception, memory and other types of non-inferential cognition, there is a numerical duality of the content or dntum immediately present to the knowing mind and (sense datum, memory image, etc.) and the real object known (the thing perceived or remembered) (cf. A. O. Lovejoy, The Revolt Against Dualism, pp. 15-6). Epistemological monism, on the contrary identifies the immediate datum and the cognitive object either by assimilating the content to the object (epistemological realism) or the object to the content (epistemological idealism). -- L.W.
Borderline state: With respect to human consciousness and perception, that mental and psychological state in which the objective consciousness blends into the subjective. This state can be self-induced or produced under hypnosis. Many occult authorities maintain that this state is the first stage of man’s transition from the material plane of existence to the next one when the physical body dies.
bridge ::: n. --> A structure, usually of wood, stone, brick, or iron, erected over a river or other water course, or over a chasm, railroad, etc., to make a passageway from one bank to the other.
Anything supported at the ends, which serves to keep some other thing from resting upon the object spanned, as in engraving, watchmaking, etc., or which forms a platform or staging over which something passes or is conveyed.
The small arch or bar at right angles to the strings of a
b) The usual meaning of the term the doctrine of the Trinitarians who hold that the nature of God is one in substance and three in embodiment (Latin: persona). Upon the basis of Platonic realism (q.v.) which makes the universal fundamental and the particulars real in terms of the universal, the Christian Trinitarians made philosophically clear their doctrine of one Godhead and three embodiments, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: three and yet one. The doctrine was formulated to make religiously valid the belief in the complete Deity of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit (referred to in the New and the Old Testaments) and to avoid the pitfalls of polytheism. Jesus had become the object of Christian worship and the revealer of God and thus it was felt necessary to establish (together with the H.S.) his real Deity along with monotheistic belief. A long controversy over the relationship of the three led to the formulation by the Council of Nicea in 325, and after further disputes, by the Council of Constantinople in 381 of the orthodox Trinitarian creed (the Niceno-Constantinopolitan). Roman and Greek Catholicism split on the doctrine of the status of the H.S. The Western church added the expression "filioque" (the H.S. proceeding "and from the Son") making more explicit the complete equality of the three; the Eastern church maintained the original text which speaks of the H.S. as "proceeding from thet Father." Orthodox Protestantism maintains the Trinitarian conception. -- V.F.
butt ::: a person or thing that is the object of wit, ridicule, sarcasm, contempt.
byword ::: n. --> A common saying; a proverb; a saying that has a general currency.
The object of a contemptuous saying.
c2man "tool" An automatic {documentation} extraction tool by Graham Stoney. c2man extracts comments from {C} source code to generate functional interface documentation in the same format as sections 2 and 3 of the {Unix} Programmer's Manual. It looks for comments near the objects they document, rather than imposing a rigid {syntax} or requiring the programmer to use a typesetting language. Acceptable documentation can often be generated from existing code with no modifications. c2man supports both {K&R} and {ISO}/{ANSI C} coding styles. Output can be in {nroff} -man, {Texinfo} or {LaTeX} format. It {automagically} documents {enum} parameter and return values, it handles both {C} (/* */) and {C++} (//) style comments, but not C++ grammar (yet). It requires {yacc}, {byacc} or {bison} for syntax analysis; {lex} or {flex} for {lexical analysis} and {nroff}, {groff}, {texinfo} or {LaTeX} to format the output. It runs under {Unix}, {OS/2} and {MS-DOS}. Version 2.0 patchlevel 25 (1995-10-25). {Washington FTP (ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/usenet/comp.sources.reviewed/volume03/)}. {Stuttgart FTP (ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/archive/comp.sources/reviewed/)}. {Patches (ftp://lth.se/pub/netnews/sources.bugs/volume93/sep/)}. Patches posted to {Usenet} newsgroups {news:comp.sources.bugs} and {news:comp.sources.reviewed}. (2003-05-02)
care ::: n. --> A burdensome sense of responsibility; trouble caused by onerous duties; anxiety; concern; solicitude.
Charge, oversight, or management, implying responsibility for safety and prosperity.
Attention or heed; caution; regard; heedfulness; watchfulness; as, take care; have a care.
The object of watchful attention or anxiety.
To be anxious or solicitous; to be concerned; to have regard
carronade ::: n. --> A kind of short cannon, formerly in use, designed to throw a large projectile with small velocity, used for the purpose of breaking or smashing in, rather than piercing, the object aimed at, as the side of a ship. It has no trunnions, but is supported on its carriage by a bolt passing through a loop on its under side.
cascade 1. "compiler" A huge volume of spurious error-messages output by a {compiler} with poor {error recovery}. Too frequently, one trivial {syntax} error (such as a missing ")" or "}") throws the {parser} out of synch so that much of the remaining program text, whether correct or not, is interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed. 2. "messaging" A chain of {Usenet} followups, each adding some trivial variation or riposte to the text of the previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new message; an {include war} in which the object is to create a sort of communal graffito. 3. "networking" A collection of interconneced networking devices, typically {hubs}, that allows those devices to act together as a {logical} {repeater}. [{Jargon File}] (1997-07-17)
(c) A special school called "Critical Realists" arose as a reactionary movement against the alleged extravagant views of another school of realists called the "New Realists" (q.v.). According to the "Critical Realists" the objective world, existing independently of the subject, is separated in the knowledge-relation by media or vehicles or essences. These intermediaries are not objects but conveyances of knowledge. The mind knows the objective world not directly (epistemological monism) but by means of a vehicle through which we perceive and think (epistemological dualism). For some, this vehicle is an immediate mental essence referring to existences, for some a datum, for some a subsistent realm mediating knowledge, and for one there is not so much a vehicle as there is a peculiar transcendental giasping of objects in cognition. In 1920 Essays in Critical Realism was published as the manifesto, the platform of this school. Its collaborators were D. Drake, A. O. Lovejoy, J. B. Pratt, A. K. Rogers, G. Santayana, R. W. Sellars, and C A. Strong. -- V.F.
category ::: n. --> One of the highest classes to which the objects of knowledge or thought can be reduced, and by which they can be arranged in a system; an ultimate or undecomposable conception; a predicament.
Class; also, state, condition, or predicament; as, we are both in the same category.
Category of Unity: Kant: The first of three a priori, quantitative (so-called "mathematical") categories (the others being "plurality" and "totality") from which is derived the synthetic principle, "All intuitions (appearances) are extensive magnitudes." By means of this principle Kant seeks to define the object of experience a priori with reference to its spatial features. See Crit. of pure Reason, B106, B202ff. -- O.F.K Catharsis: (Gr. katharsis) Purification; purgation; specifically the purging of the emotions of pity and fear effected by tragedy (Aristotle). -- G.R.M.
category "theory" A category K is a collection of objects, obj(K), and a collection of {morphisms} (or "{arrows}"), mor(K) such that 1. Each morphism f has a "typing" on a pair of objects A, B written f:A-"B. This is read 'f is a morphism from A to B'. A is the "source" or "{domain}" of f and B is its "target" or "{co-domain}". 2. There is a {partial function} on morphisms called {composition} and denoted by an {infix} ring symbol, o. We may form the "composite" g o f : A -" C if we have g:B-"C and f:A-"B. 3. This composition is associative: h o (g o f) = (h o g) o f. 4. Each object A has an identity morphism id_A:A-"A associated with it. This is the identity under composition, shown by the equations id__B o f = f = f o id__A. In general, the morphisms between two objects need not form a {set} (to avoid problems with {Russell's paradox}). An example of a category is the collection of sets where the objects are sets and the morphisms are functions. Sometimes the composition ring is omitted. The use of capitals for objects and lower case letters for morphisms is widespread but not universal. Variables which refer to categories themselves are usually written in a script font. (1997-10-06)
cathetometer ::: n. --> An instrument for the accurate measurement of small differences of height; esp. of the differences in the height of the upper surfaces of two columns of mercury or other fluid, or of the same column at different times. It consists of a telescopic leveling apparatus (d), which slides up or down a perpendicular metallic standard very finely graduated (bb). The telescope is raised or depressed in order to sight the objects or surfaces, and the differences in vertical height are thus shown on the graduated
chess-play ::: the game of chess; a board game for two players, each beginning with 16 pieces of six kinds that are moved according to individual rules, with the objective of checkmating the opposing king. chess-player.
Ch'in: Personal experience, or knowledge obtained through the contact of one's knowing faculty and the object to be known. (Neo-Mohists.) Parents. Kinship, as distinguished from the more remote relatives and strangers, such distinction being upheld by Confucians as essential to the social structure but severely attacked by the Mohists and Legalists as untenable in the face of the equality of men. Affection, love, which it is important for a ruler to have toward his people and for children toward parents. (Confucianism.)
chosen ::: p. p. --> of Choose
Selected from a number; picked out; choice. ::: n. --> One who, or that which is the object of choice or special favor.
Chung: Being true to the principle of the self; being true to the originally good nature of the self; being one's true self; the Confucian "central thread or principle" (i kuan) with respect to the self, as reciprocity (shu) is that principle with respect to others. See i kuan. Exerting one's pure heart to the utmost, to the extent of "not a single thought not having been exhausted", honesty, sincerity; devotion of soul, conscientiousness. (Confucianism.) "Honesty (chung) is complete realization of one's nature" whereas truthfulness (hsin) is "complete realization of the nature of things." "Honesty (chung) is the subjective side of truthfulness (hsin) whereas truthfulness is the objective side of honesty." (Ch'eng Ming-tao, 1032-1086.) "Honesty is exerting one's heart to the utmost whereas truthfulness is the observance of the Reason of things." (Chu Hsi, 1230-1300.) Impartiality, especially in love and profit, Loyalty, especially to one's superiors, faithfulness.
C/ia/JSc of vital ::: It is not coerdon that is the way, but an inner change in which he lower vital is led, enlightened and transformed by a higher consciousness which is detached from the objects of vital desire. But in order to let this grow an atti- tude has to be tahen in which a decreasing Importance has to be attached to the satisfaction of the claims of the lower vital, a certain mastery, saniyama, being above any clamour of these things, limiting such things as food to their proper place. The lower vital has its place, it is not to be crushed or killed, but it has to be changed.
Circumambulation: Ceremonial walking around an object or a person. This ritual has been and is used in many religions, mystery ceremonies, etc., and occult philosophy attributes a mystic power and significance to it. It is usually done keeping one’s right side toward the object or person encircled, to show respect, to secure protection or good fortune, etc.; walking in the reverse direction shows disrespect and is held to have evil effects.
Claims: See prima facie duties. Clarification: (Ger. Klärung, Aufklärung) In Husserl: Synthesis of identification, in which the noematic sense is given less clearly in an earlier than in a later intending. The course of potential clarification is predelineated horizonally for every element of sense that is either intended emptily or experienced with less than optimal clarity. The horizonal experiencings in which "the same" would be given more clearly are explicable in phantasy. Thus, the essential dimensions and the range of indeterminacy of the object (and its essential possibility or impossibility) as intended can be grasped in evidence. This is clarification in the usual sense. On the other hand, potential experiencings of "the same" may be made actual rather than fictively actual (phantasied) -- in which case, the synthesis of clarification is a synthesis of fulfilment. See Fulfilment. -- D.C.
class hierarchy "programming" In {object-oriented programming}, a set of {classes} related by {inheritance}. Each class is a "subclass" of another class - its "superclass". The subclass contains all the features of its superclass, but may add new features or redefine existing features. The features of a class are the set of {attributes} (or "properties") that an object of that class has and the {methods} that can be invoked on it. If each class has a just one superclass, this is called {single inheritance}. The opposite is {multiple inheritance}, under which a class may have multiple superclasses. Single inheritance gives the class hierarchy a {tree} structure whereas multiple inheritance gives a {directed graph}. Typically there is one class at the top of the hierarchy which is the "object" class, the most general class that is an ancestor of all others and which has no superclass. In computing, as in genealogy, trees grow downwards, which is why subclasses are considered to be "below" their superclasses. When {invoking a method} on an {object}, the method is first looked for in the object's class, then the superclass of that class, and so on up the hierarchy until it is found. Thus a class need only define those methods which are specific to it and it will inherit all other methods from all its superclasses. An object of the subclass can do everything that an object of the superclass can and possible more. {C++} calls the superclass the "base class" and the subclass the "derived class" (not to be confused with a {derived type}). (2014-09-06)
COALA "language" ["COALA: The Object Code of the Compiler Producing System", S. Kruszewski et al, MERA, Warsaw 1974]. (1994-12-22)
Cognitive Meaning, Cognitive Sentence: See Meaning, Kinds of, 1. Cognoscendum: (pl. cognoscenda) (Lat. cognoscere, to know) The object of a cognition. Cognoscenda may be real and existent e.g. in veridical perception and memory; abstract and ideal e.g. in conception and valuation; fictitious, e.g. in imagination and hallucination. See Object, Objective. -- L.W.
Cohen, Hermann: (1842-1918) and Paul Natorp (1854-1924) were the chief leaders of the "Marburg School" which formed a definite branch of the Neo-Kantian movement. Whereas the original founders of this movement, O. Liebmann and Fr. A. Lange, had reacted to scientific empiricism by again calling attention to the a priori elements of cognition, the Marburg school contended that all cognition was exclusively a priori. They definitely rejected not only the notion of "things-in-themselves" but even that of anything immediately "given" in experience. There is no other reality than one posited by thought and this holds good equally for the object, the subject and God. Nor is thought in its effort to "determine the object = x" limited by any empirical data but solely by the laws of thought. Since in Ethics Kant himself had already endeavored to eliminate all empirical elements, the Marburg school was perhaps closer to him in this field than in epistemology. The sole goal of conduct is fulfillment of duty, i.e., the achievement of a society organized according to moral principles and satisfying the postulates of personal dignity. The Marburg school was probably the most influential philosophic trend in Germany in the last 25 years before the First World War. The most outstanding present-day champion of their tradition is Ernst Cassirer (born 1874). Cohen and Natorp tried to re-interpret Plato as well as Kant. Following up a suggestion first made by Lotze they contended that the Ideas ought to be understood as laws or methods of thought and that the current view ascribing any kind of existence to them was based on a misunderstanding of Aristotle's. -- H.G.
competition ::: n. --> The act of seeking, or endeavoring to gain, what another is endeavoring to gain at the same time; common strife for the same objects; strife for superiority; emulous contest; rivalry, as for approbation, for a prize, or as where two or more persons are engaged in the same business and each seeking patronage; -- followed by for before the object sought, and with before the person or thing competed with.
Comprehensive: Strictly speaking, that which is adequate to or fully commensurate with the object, -- a knowledge in which the whole object is known completely and in every way in which it can be known -- even to all the effects and consequences with which it has an intrinsic connection. This knowledge must be clear, certain, evident, and quidditative, because it is the most perfect type of knowledge corresponding to the object. E.g., God's complete knowledge of Himself.
computer vision "application" A branch of {artificial intelligence} and {image processing} concerned with computer processing of images from the real world. Computer vision typically requires a combination of low level {image processing} to enhance the image quality (e.g. remove noise, increase contrast), {pattern recognition} to recognise features such as lines, areas and colours and {image understanding} to translate these features into knowledge about the objects in the scene. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.ai.vision}. (2012-12-25)
CONCENTRATION ::: Fixing the consciousness in one place or on one object and in a single condition.
A gathering together of the consciousness and either centralising at one point or turning on a single object, e.g. the Divine; there can also be a gathered condition throughout the whole being, not at a point.
Concentration is necessary, first to turn the whole will and mind from the discursive divagation natural to them, following a dispersed movement of the thoughts, running after many-branching desires, led away in the track of the senses and the outward mental response to phenomena; we have to fix the will and the thought on the eternal and real behind all, and this demands an immense effort, a one-pointed concentration. Secondly, it is necessary in order to break down the veil which is erected by our ordinary mentality between ourselves and the truth; for outer knowledge can be picked up by the way, by ordinary attention and reception, but the inner, hidden and higher truth can only be seized by an absolute concentration of the mind on its object, an absolute concentration of the will to attain it and, once attained, to hold it habitually and securely unite oneself with it.
Centre of Concentration: The two main places where one can centre the consciousness for yoga are in the head and in the heart - the mind-centre and the soul-centre.
Brain concentration is always a tapasyā and necessarily brings a strain. It is only if one is lifted out of the brain mind altogether that the strain of mental concentration disappears.
At the top of the head or above it is the right place for yogic concentration in reading or thinking.
In whatever centre the concentration takes place, the yoga force generated extends to the others and produces concentration or workings there.
Modes of Concentration: There is no harm in concentrating sometimes in the heart and sometimes above the head. But concentration in either place does not mean keeping the attention fixed on a particular spot; you have to take your station of consciousness in either place and concentrate there not on the place, but on the Divine. This can be done with eyes shut or with eyes open, according as it best suits.
If one concentrates on a thought or a word, one has to dwell on the essential idea contained in the word with the aspiration to feel the thing which it expresses.
There is no method in this yoga except 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 to 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 a beginning of experience. The more the faith, the more rapid the result is likely to be.
Powers (three) of Concentration ::: By concentration on anything whatsoever we are able to know that thing, to make it deliver up its concealed secrets; we must use this power to know not things, but the one Thing-in-itself. By concentration again the whole will can be gathered up for the acquisition of that which is still ungrasped, still beyond us; this power, if it is sufficiently trained, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently sincere, sure of itself, faithful to itself alone, absolute in faith, we can use for the acquisition of any object whatsoever; but we ought to use it not for the acquisition of the many objects which the world offers to us, but to grasp spiritually that one object worthy of pursuit which is also the one subject worthy of knowledge. By concentration of our whole being on one status of itself we can become whatever we choose ; we can become, for instance, even if we were before a mass of weaknesses and fears, a mass instead of strength and courage, or we can become all a great purity, holiness and peace or a single universal soul of Love ; but we ought, it is said, to use this power to become not even these things, high as they may be in comparison with what we now are, but rather to become that which is above all things and free from all action and attributes, the pure and absolute Being. All else, all other concentration can only be valuable for preparation, for previous steps, for a gradual training of the dissolute and self-dissipating thought, will and being towards their grand and unique object.
Stages in Concentration (Rajayogic) ::: that in which the object is seized, that in which it is held, that in which the mind is lost in the status which the object represents or to which the concentration leads.
Concentration and Meditation ::: Concentration means fixing the consciousness in one place or one object and in a single condition Meditation can be diffusive,e.g. thinking about the Divine, receiving impressions and discriminating, watching what goes on in the nature and acting upon it etc. Meditation is when the inner mind is looking at things to get the right knowledge.
vide Dhyāna.
Concentration With meditation, an equivalent for certain parts of yoga, as found in samadhi, dharana; the removal or surmounting of distractions originating in the mind and centering the latter on the spiritual and intellectual objective to be attained, which in the best sense is union with the inner god, the divine monad — a conscious identification of oneself with the universal through the individual’s innate divinity. The method of meditative concentration prescribed in the Bhagavad-Gita is to perform all the duties of life without either attachment or avoidance. The hindrances to concentration which are to be removed are those arising from anger, lust, vanity, fear, sloth, etc. Such obstacles are removed by lifting the mind above them or by deliberately ignoring them, since directly fighting with them serves to concentrate the mind on them, thus defeating the object aimed at; and by cultivating the spirit of impersonal love and the light of wisdom which it evokes. Thus the blending of the personal self with the impersonal self is achieved by an orderly process of self-directed evolution, first by unselfish work in the cause of humanity, continued in the various degrees of chelaship, culminating in initiation.
Conceptualism: A solution of the problem of universals which seeks a compromise between extreme nominalism (generic concepts are signs which apply indifferently to a number of particulars) and extreme realism (generic concepts refer to subsistent universals). Conceptualism offers various interpretations of conceptual objectivity: the generic concept refers to a class of resembling particulars, the object of a concept is a universal essence pervading the particulars, but having; no reality apart from them, concepts refer to abstracta, that is to say, to ideal objects envisaged by the mind but having no metaphysical status. -- L.W.
Conjunction: See Logic, formal, § 1. Connexity: A dyadic relation R is cilled connected if, for every two different members x, y of its field, at least one of xRy, yRx holds. Connotation: The sum of the constitutive notes of the essence of a concept as it is in itself and not as it is for us. This logical property is thus measured by the sum of the notes of the concept, of the higher genera it implies, of the various essential attributes of its nature as such. This term is synonymous with intension and comprehension; yet, the distinctions between them have been the object of controversies. J. S. Mill identifies connotation with signification and meaning, and includes in it much less than under comprehension or intension. The connotation of a general term (singular terms except descriptions are non-connotative) is the aggregate of all the other general terms necessarily implied by it is an abstract possibility and apart from exemplification in the actual world. It cannot be determined by denotation because necessity does not always refer to singular facts. Logicians who adopt this view distinguish connotation from comprehension by including in the latter contingent characters which do not enter in the former. Comprehension is thus the intensional reference of the concept, or the reference to universals of both general and singular terms. The determination of the comprehension of a concept is helped by its denotation, considering that reference is made also to singular, contingent, or particular objects exhibiting certain characteristics. In short, the connotation of a concept is its intensional reference determined intensionally; while its comprehension is its intensional reference extensionally determined. It may be observed that such a distinction and the view that the connotation of a concept contains only the notes which serve to define it, involves the nominalist principle that a concept may be reduced to what we are actually and explicitely thinking about the several notes we use to define it. Thus the connotation of a concept is much poorer than its actual content. Though the value of the concept seems to be saved by the recognition of its comprehension, it may be argued that the artificial introduction into the comprehension of both necessary and contingent notes, that is of actual and potential characteristics, confuses and perverts the notion of connotation as a logical property of our ideas. See Intension. -- T.G.
conscious ::: a. --> Possessing the faculty of knowing one&
Consequently, the dialectical method means basically that all things must be investigated in terms of their histories; the important consideration is not the state in which the object appears at the moment, but the rate, direction and probable outcome of the changes which are taking place as a result of the conflict of forces, internal and external. The necessity of observation and prediction in every field is thus ontologically grounded, according to dialectical materialism, which not only rejects a priorism, holding that "nature is the test of dialectics" (Engels: Anti-Dühring), but claims to express with much more fidelity than formal logic, with its emphasis on unmoving form rather than changing content, the basis of the method modern science actually uses. There is an equal rejection of theory without practice and practice without theory.
constructor "programming" 1. In {object-oriented languages}, a {function} provided by a {class} to initialise a newly created {object}. The constructor function typically has the same name as the class. It may take arguments, e.g. to set various attributes of the object or it may just leave everything undefined to be set elsewhere. A class may also have a {destructor} function that is called when objects of the class are destroyed. 2. In {functional programming} and {type theory}, one of the symbols used to create an object with an {algebraic data type}. (2014-10-04)
Contemplation ::: Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 36, Page: 293
Contemplation: Knowledge consisting in the partial or complete identification of the knower with the object of knowledge, with the consequent loss of his own personality.
Contemplation: (Lat. contemplare, to gaze at tentively) (a) In the mystical sense: Knowledge consisting in the partial or complete identification of the knower with the object of knowledge with the consequent loss of his own individuality. In Hugo of St. Victor (1096-1141), Contemplatio is the third and highest stage of knowledge of which cogitatio and meditatio are the two earlier levels.
Contrast: In aesthetics: the term may refer either to the presence in the object contemplated of contrasting elements (colors, sounds, characters, etc.), or to the principle that the presence of such contrasting elements is a common feature of beautiful objects which, within limits, enhances their beauty. -- W.K.F.
Core War "games" (Or more recently, "Core Wars") A game played between {assembly code} programs running in the {core} of a simulated machine (and vicariously by their authors). The objective is to kill your opponents' programs by overwriting them. The programs are written using an {instruction set} called "{Redcode}" and run on a {virtual machine} called "{MARS}" (Memory Array Redcode Simulator). Core War was devised by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., and {Dennis Ritchie} in the early 1960s (their original game was called "{Darwin}" and ran on a {PDP-1} at {Bell Labs}). It was first described in the "Core War Guidelines" of March, 1984 by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario (Canada). Dewdney wrote several "Computer Recreations" articles in "Scientific American" which discussed Core War, starting with the May 1984 article. Those articles are contained in the two anthologies cited below. A.K. Dewdney's articles are still the most readable introduction to Core War, even though the {Redcode} dialect described in there is no longer current. The International Core War Society (ICWS) creates and maintains Core War standards and the runs Core War tournaments. There have been six annual tournaments and two standards (ICWS'86 and ICWS'88). ["The Armchair Universe: An Exploration of Computer Worlds", A. K. Dewdney, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-7167-1939-8, LCCN QA76.6 .D517 1988] ["The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery", A. K. Dewdney, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1990, ISBN 0-7167-2125-2 (Hardcover), 0-7167-2144-9 (Paperback), LCCN QA76.6 .D5173 1990]. (1998-10-30)
Cosmogenesis [from Greek kosmos world + genesis birth] The genesis of worlds, as distinguished from anthropogensis or the genesis of mankind; as defined by Blavatsky: “At the commencement of a great Manvantara, Parabrahm manifests as Mulaprakriti and then as the Logos. This Logos is equivalent to the ‘Unconscious Universal Mind,’ etc., of Western Pantheists. It constitutes the Basis of the subject-side of manifested Being, and is the source of all manifestations of individual consciousness. Mulaprakriti or Primordial Cosmic Substance, is the foundation of the object-side of things — the basis of all objective evolution and Cosmogenesis” (SD 2:24). The word is not restricted to earth, but includes innumerable globes; nor is it confined to those worlds which happen to be visible to our eye, but includes worlds on all the various planes of manifested substance. It does not mean that the worlds were created ex nihilo by divine fiat, nor that they were merely the productions from dead, unconscious, albeit eternal and uncreate matter. Again, cosmogenesis is not a process which has occurred only once and for all, but a process which is repeated indefinitely during manvantaras and after great pralayas. Thus worlds are evolved from the state of latency or pralaya into which they passed at the close of the preceding manvantara, and both primordial matter and primordial spirit come from the same source — parabrahman — and are resolved again into it. The process is one of evolution or progressive manifestation on various planes of objectivity of the potentialities latent in the spiritual germ. World must be understood, not with regard to any standards of size, but as including a universe of stars on the one hand and an atomic speck on the other.
Cosmology: A branch of philosophy which treats of the origin and structure of the universe. It is to be contrasted with ontology or metaphysics, the study of the most general features of reality, natural and supernatural, and with the philosophy of nature, which investigates the basic laws, processes and divisions of the objects in nature. It is perhaps impossible to draw or maintain a sharp distinction between these different subjects, and treatises which profess to deal with one of them usually contain considerable material on the others. Encyclopedia, section 35), are the contingency, necessity, eternity, limitations and formal laws of the world, the freedom of man and the origin of evil. Most philosophers would add to the foregoing the question of the nature and interrelationship of space and time, and would perhaps exclude the question of the nature of freedom and the origin of evil as outside the province of cosmology. The method of investigation has usually been to accept the principles of science or the results of metaphysics and develop the consequences. The test of a cosmology most often used is perhaps that of exhibiting the degree of accordance it has with respect to both empirical fact and metaphysical truth. The value of a cosmology seems to consist primarily in its capacity to provide an ultimate frame for occurrences in nature, and to offer a demonstration of where the limits of the spatio-temporal world are, and how they might be transcended.
Cyc "artificial intelligence" A large {knowledge-based system}. Cyc is a very large, multi-contextual {knowledge base} and {inference engine}, the development of which started at the {Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation} (MCC) in Austin, Texas during the early 1980s. Over the past eleven years the members of the Cyc team, lead by {Doug Lenat}, have added to the knowledge base a huge amount of fundamental human knowledge: {facts}, rules of thumb, and {heuristics} for reasoning about the objects and events of modern everyday life. Cyc is an attempt to do symbolic {AI} on a massive scale. It is not based on numerical methods such as statistical probabilities, nor is it based on {neural networks} or {fuzzy logic}. All of the knowledge in Cyc is represented {declaratively} in the form of logical {assertions}. Cyc presently contains approximately 400,000 significant assertions, which include simple statements of fact, rules about what conclusions to draw if certain statements of fact are satisfied, and rules about how to reason with certain types of facts and rules. The {inference engine} derives new conclusions using {deductive reasoning}. To date, Cyc has made possible ground-breaking pilot applications in the areas of {heterogeneous} database browsing and integration, {captioned image retrieval}, and {natural language processing}. In January of 1995, a new independent company named Cycorp was created to continue the Cyc project. Cycorp is still in Austin, Texas. The president of Cycorp is {Doug Lenat}. The development of Cyc has been supported by several organisations, including {Apple}, {Bellcore}, {DEC}, {DoD}, {Interval}, {Kodak}, and {Microsoft}. {(http://cyc.com/)}. {Unofficial FAQ (http://robotwisdom.com/ai/cycfaq.html)}. (1999-09-07)
Dache-Dachus (Chaldean) “The dual emanation of Moymis, the progeny of the dual or androgynous World-Principle, the male Apason and female Tauthe. Like all theocratic nations possessing Temple mysteries, the Babylonians never mentioned the ‘One’ Principle of the Universe, nor did they give it a name. This made Damascius (Theogonies) remark that like the rest of ‘barbarians’ the Babylonians passed it over in silence. Tauthe was the mother of the gods, while Apason was her self-generating male power, Moymis, the ideal universe, being her only-begotten son, and emanating in his turn Dache-Dachus, and at last Belus, the Demiurge of the objective Universe” (TG 93).
Dand, Danda (Sanskrit) Daṇḍa “The three and seven-knotted bamboo of Sannyasis given to them as a sign of power, after their initiation” (BCW 2:119). Used by raja yogis to store the essence of the yogi’s power: “recognizing this power in himself, he endows the given object with it and concentrates it in the object, . . . Then, when occasion arises, using his own will and discretion, he aims, in one direction or another, this power, the twofold quality of which is attraction and repulsion. . . . By such means he transforms also the wand or danda into a vahana, filling it with his own power and spirit and giving it for the time being his own properties” (Caves and Jungles 594; also 596-8)
dative ::: a. --> Noting the case of a noun which expresses the remoter object, and is generally indicated in English by to or for with the objective.
In one&
Desire ::: Desire is only a mode of the emotional mind which by ignorance seeks its delight in the object of desire and not in the Brahman who expresses Himself in the object.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 17, Page: 20
Devasarga (Sanskrit) Devasarga [from deva divine + sarga emanation, emission, creation] Divine emanation or emission; the creation of the gods, the last of the first series of creations enumerated in the Vishnu-Purana. It “has a universal reference; namely, the Evolutions in general, not specifically to our Manvantara; but the latter begins with the same over and over again, showing that it refers to several distinct Kalpas. For it is said ‘at the close of the past (Padma) Kalpa the divine Brahma awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the universe void.’ Then Brahma is shown going once more over the ‘seven creations’ in the secondary stage of evolution, repeating the first three on the objective plane” (SD 1:454).
Dharana(Sanskrit) ::: A state in the practice of yoga as taught in Hindustan when the mind or percipient intelligenceis held with inflexible firmness, with fortitude of soul, and with indomitable resolution upon the object ofinvestigation to be attained through this form of yoga practice. (See also Samadhi)
DHYAI^A . Meditation ; contemplation ; inner concentration of the consciousness ; going inside in samadhi ; prolonged absorp- tion of the mind in the object of concentration.
dhyana. ::: deep meditation; a state of pure thought and absorption in the object of meditation
Dhyana ::: There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of Dhyana, "meditation" and "contemplation". Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana; for the principle of dhyana is mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge. There are other forms of dhyana. There is a passage in which Vivekananda advises you to stand back from your thoughts, let them occur in your mind as they will and simply observe them & see what they are. This may be called concentration in self-observation. This form leads to another, the emptying of all thought out of the mind so as to leave it a sort of pure vigilant blank on which the divine knowledge may come and imprint itself, undisturbed by the inferior thoughts of the ordinary human mind and with the clearness of a writing in white chalk on a blackboard. You will find that the Gita speaks of this rejection of all mental thought as one of the methods of Yoga and even the method it seems to prefer. This may be called the dhyana of liberation, as it frees the mind from slavery to the mechanical process of thinking and allows it to think or not think as it pleases and when it pleases, or to choose its own thoughts or else to go beyond thought to the pure perception of Truth called in our philosophy Vijnana. Meditation is the easiest process for the human mind, but the narrowest in its results; contemplation more difficult, but greater; self-observation and liberation from the chains of Thought the most difficult of all, but the widest and greatest in its fruits. One can choose any of them according to one’s bent and capacity. The perfect method is to use them all, each in its own place and for its own object.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 36, Page: 293-294
distal self ::: One of the three major aspects of the overall self, along with the anterior and proximate self. The distal self is the objective self, which is experienced as “me” or “mine,” in contrast to the proximate self (“I” or “I/me”) and the anterior self (“I-I”). See proximate self and anterior self.
DIVINE AND FORM. ::: The personal realisation of the Divine may be sometimes with Form, sometimes without Form. Without Form, it is the Presence of the living Divine Person, felt in everything. With Form, it comes with the image of the One to whom worship is offered. The Divine can always manifest himself in a form to the Bhakta or seeker. One sees him in the form in which one worships or seeks him or in a form suitable to the Divine Personality who is the object of the adoration. How it manifests depends upon many things and it is too various to be reduced to a single rule. Sometimes it is in the heart that the Presence with the form is seen, sometimes in any of the other centres, sometimes above and guiding from there, sometimes it is seen outside and in front as if an embodied person. Its advantages are an intimate relation and constant guidance or if felt or seen within, a very strong and concrete realisation of the constant Presence. But one must be very sure of the purity of one’s adoration and seekings for the disadvantage of this kind of embodied relation is that other Forces can imitate the Form or counterfeit the voice and the guidance and this gets more force if it is associated with a constructed image which is not the true thing. Several have been misled in this way because pride, vanity or desire was strong in them and robbed them of the fine psychic perception that is not mental.
drishyam. ::: the seen; the object seen; the seeable; visible; perceptible; object of consciousness; nature
dynameter ::: n. --> A dynamometer.
An instrument for determining the magnifying power of telescopes, consisting usually of a doubleimage micrometer applied to the eye end of a telescope for measuring accurately the diameter of the image of the object glass there formed; which measurement, compared with the actual diameter of the glass, gives the magnifying power.
elect ::: a. --> Chosen; taken by preference from among two or more.
Chosen as the object of mercy or divine favor; set apart to eternal life.
Chosen to an office, but not yet actually inducted into it; as, bishop elect; governor or mayor elect. ::: n.
Embryo In general, the vitalized germ of an organism in its earlier stages, and sometimes applied to it until it leaves the egg or womb covering. The fertilization of the germ-cell in plant or animal is an everyday working of the universal law by which spirit incubates matter for the purpose of differentiating on the objective planes, in order to manifest the subjective monadic life. Thus the reincarnating ego, in beginning to make a new body for itself, with the division of the fertilized microscopic egg cell, is analogous to the world-germ awakening in a laya-center to begin another galactic, solar, or planetary existence. “This desire for a sentient life shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun, and is a reflection of the Divine Thought propelled into objective existence” (SD 1:44).
Empathy: (Gr. en + pathein, to suffer) The projection by the mind into an object of the subjective feeling of bodily posture and attitude which result from the tendency of the body to conform to the spatial organization of the object (e.g. the tendency to imitate the outstretched hands of a statue). The phenomenon is of particular significance for aesthetics. See H. S. Langfeld, The Aesthetic Attitude. The term was introduced to translate the German Einfühlung. See Lipps, Raumaesthetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen. See Eject. -- L.W.
Empathy: The projection by the mind into an object of the subjective feeling of bodily posture and attitude which result from the tendency of the body to conform to the spatial organization of the object (e.g., the tendency to imitate the outstretched hands of a statue).
empiricism ::: Empiricism typically means knowledge based on sensory experience. In Integral Theory, it generally means the study of the objective appearance and behavior of an organism. A third-person approach to a third-person singular reality. An outside view of the exterior of an individual (i.e., the outside view of a holon in the Upper-Right quadrant). Exemplary of a zone-
Ennoia (Greek) [from en + nous mind, as contrasted with the object or act without] The divine mind spoken of by Simon Magus as coequal with the supreme (the Father), and as being the mother of all the archangels and angels (aeons or emanations). Ennoia had descended through the lower worlds and finally become imprisoned in gross matter, where she was subjected to abuse; but the Father manifests himself as the Son and rescues Ennoia to reinstate her on her original throne. Simon used the first person in giving out this teaching, and in the same symbolic way called Ennoia his wife Helena, and speaks of her degradation as prostitution; this has been the occasion of misunderstanding on the part of scholars, ancient and modern. Ennoia is paired with Ophis (the serpent of divine wisdom) to constitute the creative Logos.
Epigenesis [from Greek epi upon + genesis production] A biological theory of generation which holds that the embryo is created from the original germinal elements by a process of gradual evolution, i.e., by a passage from a relatively homogeneous condition to a specialized condition through a process of differentiation. This replaced the older idea of encasement according to which the future organism existed entire, but of microscopic dimensions, within the ovum, and was afterwards merely enlarged; and it also replaced the idea that the organism was formed by a relatively sudden accretion of parts derived from the corresponding organs in the parents. It thus accommodated embryology to the modern theory of evolution. It is open to the objections that by attempting to view growth as a purely physical process, development is made to appear as a process of accretion or adding together, instead of as a process of unfolding; and suggests the notion that something entirely new can be formed by such an additive process. But nothing can be formed unless it has previously existed in entirety, though on a subtler plane of materiality; and the coming together of physical elements is merely the filling in of a plan that has already been sketched. The astral prototype of the physical organism, seeking incarnation, draws together the physical elements required, using the procreative processes as a means. The older theory of encasement contains as much truth as the epigenesis theory, though distorted by a too physical and theological view of the process. See also EMBRYO
Epistemological Dualism: See Dualism, Epistemological. Epistemological Idealism: The form of epistemological monism which identifies the content and the object of knowledge by assimilating the object to the content. Berkeleyeyan idealism by its rejection of a physical object independent of ideas directly present to the mind is an example of epistemological monism. See Epistemological Monism. -- L.W.
Epistemological Monism: Theory that non-inferential knowledge, (perception, memory, etc.) the object of knowledge, (the thing perceived or remembered) is numerically identical with the data of knowledge (sense data, memory images, etc.). Epistemological monism may be either (a) epistemologically realistic, when it asserts that the data exist independently of the knowing mind, or (b) epistemologically idealistic when it asserts the data to be mind constituted and to exist only when apprehended by the mind. See Epistemological Dualism, Epistemological Idealism and Epistemological Realism. -- L.W.
Epistemological Object: The object envisaged by an act of knowledge whether the knowledge be veridical, illusory or even hallucinatory in contrast to ontological object, which is a real thing corresponding to the epistemological object when knowledge is veridical. See C. D. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature, pp. 141 ff. -- L.W.
Epistemological Realism: Theory that the object of knowledge enjoys an existence independent of and external to the knowing mind. The theory, though applied most commonlv to perception where it is designated perceptual realism, may be extended to other types of knowledge (for example memory and knowledge of other minds). Epistemological realism may be combined either with Epistemological Monism or Epistemological Dualism. See Epistemological Monism, Epistemological Dualism. -- L.W.
eriometer ::: n. --> An instrument for measuring the diameters of minute particles or fibers, from the size of the colored rings produced by the diffraction of the light in which the objects are viewed.
Essential Coordination: Term employed bv R. Avenarius (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, 1888) to designate the essential solidarity existing between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. The theory of "essential coordination" is contrasted by Avenarius with the allegedly false theory of introjection (q.v.). -- L.W.
Evident: (Ger. evident) In Husserl: Both evidence and the object of evidence are called "evident". -- D.C.
evolution strategy (ES) A kind of {evolutionary algorithm} where individuals (potential solutions) are encoded by a set of real-valued "object variables" (the individual's "genome"). For each object variable an individual also has a "strategy variable" which determines the degree of mutation to be applied to the corresponding object variable. The strategy variables also mutate, allowing the rate of mutation of the object variables to vary. An ES is characterised by the population size, the number of offspring produced in each generation and whether the new population is selected from parents and offspring or only from the offspring. ES were invented in 1963 by Ingo Rechenberg, Hans-Paul Schwefel at the {Technical University of Berlin} (TUB) while searching for the optimal shapes of bodies in a flow. (1995-02-03)
expectancy ::: n. --> The act of expecting ; expectation.
That which is expected, or looked or waited for with interest; the object of expectation or hope.
extensional Extensional properties, e.g. extensional equality, relate to the "black-box" behaviour of an object, i.e. how its output depends on its input. The opposite is intensional which concerns how the object is implemented.
external world ::: the totality of objects existing outside the conscious subject; the objective world.
factitive ::: a. --> Causing; causative.
Pertaining to that relation which is proper when the act, as of a transitive verb, is not merely received by an object, but produces some change in the object, as when we say, He made the water wine.
::: **"Fear is always a feeling to be rejected, because what you fear is just the thing that is likely to come to you: fear attracts the object of fear.” Letters on Yoga*
“Fear is always a feeling to be rejected, because what you fear is just the thing that is likely to come to you: fear attracts the object of fear.” Letters on Yoga
fear ::: n. --> A variant of Fere, a mate, a companion.
A painful emotion or passion excited by the expectation of evil, or the apprehension of impending danger; apprehension; anxiety; solicitude; alarm; dread.
Apprehension of incurring, or solicitude to avoid, God&
Fetish ::: A condition in which arousal and/or sexual gratification is attained through inanimate objects (shoes, pantyhose) or non-sexual body parts (feet, hair). Is considered a problem when the object is needed in order to obtain arousal or gratification and the individual can not can not complete a sexual act without this object present.
For Spinoza: Knowledge "of the second kind" (Ethica, II, 40, Schol. 2, cf. also De Em. Int., passim), to be distinguished from opinio or imaginatio and from scientia intuitiva (q.v.). This second type of knowledge is knowledge in the strict sense of the word since, as opposed to opinio, it is certain and true (Ethica, II, 41), and since by means of it, we perceive "under a certain form of eternity" (sub quadam aeternitatis specie, Ibid, II, 42, Cor. 2). Likewise, by means of reason (ratio), we are enabled to distinguish truth from falsity (Ibid, 42), and to master the emotions (Ibid, IV, passim). The objects cognized by reason are (primarily) "common notions" and their derivatives, reason cannot, however, accomplish or bring about the highest virtue of the mind, as can scientia intuitiva by which blessedness and true liberty are conferred (Ibid, V, 36, Schol.). -- W.S.W.
gleam ::: “That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies’] might be all right for mental poetry—it won’t do for what I am trying to create—in that, one word won’t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam’ and ‘glow’ are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri
govern ::: v. t. --> To direct and control, as the actions or conduct of men, either by established laws or by arbitrary will; to regulate by authority.
To regulate; to influence; to direct; to restrain; to manage; as, to govern the life; to govern a horse.
To require to be in a particular case; as, a transitive verb governs a noun in the objective case; or to require (a particular case); as, a transitive verb governs the objective case.
grabber pointer "operating system" A {mouse pointer} {sprite} in the shape of a small hand that closes when a {mouse button} is clicked, indicating that the object on the screen under the pointer has been selected. (2012-07-08)
(g) The problem of the structure of the knowledge-situation is to determine with respect to each of the major kinds of knowledge just enumerated -- but particularly with respect to perception -- the constituents of the knowledge-situation in their relation to one another. The structural problem stated in general but rather vague terms is: What is the relation between the subjective and objective components of the knowledge-situation? In contemporary epistemology, the structural problem has assumed a position of such preeminence as frequently to eclipse other issues of epistemology. The problem has even been incorporated by some into the definition of philosophy. (See A. Lalande, Vocabulaire de la Philosophie, art. Theorie de la Connaissance. I. and G.D. Hicks, Encycl. Brit. 5th ed. art. Theory of Knowledge.) The principal cleavage in epistemology, according to this formulation of its problem, is between a subjectivism which telescopes the object of knowledge into the knowing subject (see Subjectivism; Idealism, Epistemological) and pan-objectivism which ascribes to the object all qualities perceived or otherwise cognized. See Pan-obiectivism. A compromise between the extrernes of subjectivism and objectivism is achieved by the theory of representative perception, which, distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, considers the former objective, the latter subjective. See Representative Perception, Theory of; Primary Qualities; Secondary Qualities.
handwave [possibly from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave (alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said is wrong. Failing that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand. The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty. [{Jargon File}]
handyy-dandy ::: n. --> A child&
hazard ::: n. --> A game of chance played with dice.
The uncertain result of throwing a die; hence, a fortuitous event; chance; accident; casualty.
Risk; danger; peril; as, he encountered the enemy at the hazard of his reputation and life.
Holing a ball, whether the object ball (winning hazard) or the player&
Hedonistic Paradox: A paradox or apparent inconsistency in hedonistic theory arising from (1) the doctrine that since pleasure is the only good, one ought always to seek pleasure, and (2) the fact that whenever pleasure itself is the object sought it cannot be found. Human nature is such that pleasure normally arises as an accompaniment of satisfaction of desire for any end except when that end is pleasure itself. The way to attain pleasure is not to seek for it, but for something else which when found will have yielded pleasure through the finding. Likewise, one should not seek to avoid pain, but only actions which produce pain. -- A.J.B.
Heidegger, Martin: (1889-) Trained in Husserl's radical structural analysis of pure consciousness, Heidegger shares with phenomenology the effort to methodically analyze and describe the conceptual meanings of single phenomena. He aimed at a phenomenological analysis of human existence in respect to its temporal and historical character. Concentrating on the Greek tradition, and endeavoring to open a totally different approach from that of the Greek thinkers to the problem of being, he seeks to find his way back to an inner independence of philosophy from the special sciences. Before a start can be made in the radical analysis of human existence, the road has to be cleared of the objections of philosophical tradition, science, logic and common sense. As the moderns have forgotten the truths the great thinkers discovered, have lost the ability to penetrate to the real origins, the recovery of the hard-won, original, uncorrupted insights of man into metaphysical reality, is only possible through a "destructive" analysis of the traditional philosophies. By this recovery of the hidden sources, Heidegger aims to revive the genuine philosophizing which, not withstanding appearances, has vanished from us in the Western world because of autonomous science serious disputing of the position of philosophy. As human reality is so structured that it discloses itself immediately, he writes really an idealistic philosophy of homo faber. But instead of being a rationalistic idealist reading reason into the structure of the really real, he takes a more avowedly emotional phenomenon as the center of a new solution of the Seinsfrage.
“He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.” The Synthesis of Yoga
her ::: pron. & a. --> The form of the objective and the possessive case of the personal pronoun she; as, I saw her with her purse out. ::: pron. pl. --> Alt. of Here
hieroglyphic ::: a. --> A sacred character; a character in picture writing, as of the ancient Egyptians, Mexicans, etc. Specifically, in the plural, the picture writing of the ancient Egyptian priests. It is made up of three, or, as some say, four classes of characters: first, the hieroglyphic proper, or figurative, in which the representation of the object conveys the idea of the object itself; second, the ideographic, consisting of symbols representing ideas, not sounds, as an ostrich feather is a symbol of truth; third, the phonetic, consisting of
hieromancy ::: n. --> Divination by observing the objects offered in sacrifice.
him ::: pron. --> Them. See Hem.
The objective case of he. See He.
hissing ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Hiss ::: n. --> The act of emitting a hiss or hisses.
The occasion of contempt; the object of scorn and derision.
however, others which are equally of a Rajayogic character, since they use the mental and psychical being as key. Some of them are directed rather to the quiescence of the mind than to its immediate absorption, as the discipline by which the mind is simply watched and allowed to exhaust its habit of vagrant thought in a purposeless running from which it feels all sanction, purpose and interest withdrawn, and that, more strenuous and rapidly effective, by which all outward-going thought is excluded and the mind forced to sink into itself where in its absolute quietude it can only reflect the pure Being or pass away into its superconscient existence. The method differs, the object and the result are the same.
Hyperscript Informix. The object-based programming language for Wingz, used for creating charts, graphs, graphics, and customised data entry.
Idealists regard such an equalization of physical laws and psychological, historical laws as untenable. The "tvpical case" with which physics or chemistry analyzes is a result of logical abstraction; the object of history, however, is not a unit with universal traits but something individual, in a singular space and at a particular time, never repeatable under the same circumstances. Therefore no physical laws can be formed about it. What makes it a fact worthy of historical interest, is iust the fullness of live activity in it; it is a "value", not a "thing". Granted that historical events are exposed to influences from biological, geological, racial and traditional sources, they aie always carried by a human being whose singularity of character has assimilated the forces of his environment and surmounted them There is a reciprocal action between man and society, but it is always personal initiative and free productivity of the individual which account for history. Denying, therefore, the logical primacy of physical laws in history, does not mean lawlessness, and that is the standpoint of the logic of history in more recent times. Windelband and H. Rickert established another kind of historical order of laws. On their view, to understand history one must see the facts in their relation to a universally applicable and transcendental system of values. Values "are" not, they "hold"; they are not facts but realities of our reason, they are not developed but discovered. According to Max Weber historical facts form an ideally typical, transcendental whole which, although seen, can never be fully explained. G, Simmel went further into metaphysics: "life" is declared an historical category, it is the indefinable, last reality ascending to central values which shaped cultural epochs, such as the medieval idea of God, or the Renaissance-idea of Nature, only to be tragically disappointed, whereupon other values rise up, as humanity, liberty, technique, evolution and others.
Ideal Utilitarianism: See Utilitarianism. Idealization: In art, the process of generalizing and abstracting from specifically similar individuals, in order to depict the perfect type of which they are examples, the search for real character or structural form, to the neglect of external qualities and aspects. Also, any work of art in which such form or character is exhibited; i.e. any adequate expression of the perfected essence inadequately manifested by the physical particular. In classical theory, the object so discovered and described is a Form or Idea; in modern theory, it is a product of imagination. -- I.J.
Ideatum: Noun denoting the object of an idea or that which is represented in the mind by the idea. Also applied to really existing things outside the mind corresponding to the concepts in consciousness. -- J.J.R.
Identity-philosophy: In general the term has been applied to any theory which failed to distinguish between spirit and matter, subject and object, regarding them as an undifferentiated unity; hence such a philosophy is a species of monism. In the history of philosophy it usually signifies the system which has been called Identitätsphilosophie by Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling who held that spirit and nature are fundamentally the same, namely, the Absolute. Neither the ego nor the non-ego are the ultimate principles of being; they are both relative concepts which are contained in something absolute. This is the supreme principle of Absolute Identity of the ideal and the real. Reasoning does not lead us to the Absolute which can only be attained by immediate intellectual intuition. In it we find the eternal concepts of things and from it we can derive everything else. We are obliged to conceive the Absolute Identity as the indifference of the ideal and the real. Of course, this is God in Whom all opposites are united. He is the unity of thought and being, the subjective and the objective, form and essence, the general and infinite, and the particular and finite. This teaching is similar to that of Spinoza. -- J.J.R.
"If we take this fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjective status of being and the objective come into emergence, then we get according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.” The Life Divine
“If we take this fourfold status as a figure of the Self passing from its superconscient state, where there is no subject or object, into a luminous trance in which superconscience becomes a massed consciousness out of which the subjective status of being and the objective come into emergence, then we get according to our view of things either a possible process of illusionary creation or a process of creative Self-knowledge and All-knowledge.” The Life Divine
I get the supramental knowledge best by becoming one with the truth, one with the object of knowledge; the supramental satisfaction and integral light is most there when there is no further division between the knower, knowledge and the known, jnata, jnanam, jneyam. I see the thing known not as an object outside myself, but as myself or a part of my universal self contained in my most direct consciousness.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 831-32
Ilus (Greek) [from ilue mud] Primordial slime or mud; used by Berosus, the Chaldean, for the rude material out of which the cosmos was built; and by Sanchoniathon, the Phoenician writer, for the offspring of Chaos after the embrace of the spirit. The lotus flower or manifested universe grows out of the cosmic ilus or primordial substance. The elements differentiate or unfold into activity from their primeval ilus resting in laya. “Esoterically the homogeneous sediment of Chaos or the Great Deep. The first principle out of which the objective Universe was formed” (TG 146). The same as hyle.
Immanence philosophy: In Germany an idealistic type of philosophy represented by Wilhelm Schuppe (1836-1913), which combines elements of British empiricism, Kant, and Fichte. It rejects any non-conscious thing-in-itself, and identifies the Real with consciousness considered as an inseparable union of the "I" and its objects. The categories are restricted to identity-difference and causality. To the extent that the content of finite consciousness is common to all or "trans-subjective" it is posited as the object of a World Consciousness or Bewusstsein Ueberhaupt. Consequently the World is "immanent" in each finite consciousness rather than essentially transcendent. -- W.L.
Immanent and Transient Activity: In logic, the activity of the mind which produces no effect upon the object of knowledge is called immanent, that which does have such an effect is called transient (or transitive). According to Kant, the immanent use of the understanding is valid, since it deals only with subject-matter furnished by the senses, while the transcendent effort to conceive of things as they are in themselves is illegitimate. In Christian theology, Jesus was created by an immanent act, and the world by a transient, act. -- J.K.F.
Immediacy: (Lat. in + medius, middle) Immediacy is used in two senses: Contrasted with representation, immediacy is the direct presence to the mind of the object of knowledge. See Presentational immediacy. Contrasted with mediation, immediacy consists in the absence or minimal and submerged presence of inference, interpretation and construction in any process of knowledge. In this sense perception and memory are relatively immediate whereas scientific and philosophical theories are mediate. -- L.W.
imparlance ::: n. --> Mutual discourse; conference.
Time given to a party to talk or converse with his opponent, originally with the object of effecting, if possible, an amicable adjustment of the suit. The actual object, however, has long been merely to obtain further time to plead, or answer to the allegations of the opposite party.
Hence, the delay or continuance of a suit.
Impressionism: As a general artistic movement, the theory that art should strive only to reveal the felt quality of an object, scene, or event; i.e. the total effect that it creates in the artist. Specifically in painting, the general idea underling practice is to render the immediate visual appearance of the object, independently of its physical structure and its meaning for the mind. Emphasis is placed on capturing ephemeral surface aspects of things as disclosed by changes in light, neglecting any supposed real thing which undergoes these changes and underlies these aspects. -- I.J. In
In aesthetics: The general doctrine that the proper study of art is nature. In this broad sense, artistic naturalism is simply the thesis that the artist's sole concern and function should be to observe closely and report clearly the character and behavior of his physical environment. Similarly to philosophical naturalism, aesthetic naturalism derives much of its importance from its denials and from the manner in which it consequently restricts and directs art. The artist should not seek any "hidden" reality or essence; he should not attempt to correct or complete nature by either idealizing or generalizing; he should not impose value judgments upon nature; and he should not concern himself with the selection of "beautiful" subjects that will yield "aesthetic pleasure". He is simply to dissect and describe what he finds around him. Here, it is important to notice explicitly a distinction between naturalism and romanticism (q.v.): romanticism emphasizes the felt quality of things, and the romanticist is primarily interested in the experiences that nature will yield, naturalism emphasizes the objective character of things, and is interested in nature as an independent entity. Thus, romanticism stresses the intervention of the artist upon nature, while naturalism seeks to reduce this to a minimum.
Indifferents: (Gr. adiaphora) In Stoic ethics those things which are in themselves neither good nor bad, as producing neither virtue nor vice; such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, wealth, noble birth, and their contraries. The Stoics further distinguished between indifferents that are to be preferred (proegmena) and those that are not to be preferred (apoproegmena). The former, though not goods, have a certain value and are the objects of natural inclination. -- G.R.M.
indriya (indriya; indriyam) ::: sense-organ, especially any of "the five perceptive senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the five properties of things their respective objects" (see vis.aya); the sense-faculty in general, "fundamentally not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact of consciousness with its objects" (saṁjñana). Each of the physical senses has two elements, "the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it"; the mind (manas) is sometimes regarded as a "sixth sense", though "in fact it is the only true sense organ and the rest are no more than its outer conveniences and secondary instruments". indriyaindriya-ananda
In relation to men, the lotus is the symbol of the self-producing soul which, during manifestation immersed in material life as the lotus seed is embedded in the mud of lake or pond, is wakened by the warm rays of the spiritual sun, and grows upward through the world of illusion (symbolized by water) to blossom in the free air and sunlight of truth. Cosmically the lotus symbolizes the emanation of the objective from the subjective, the manifested effect or production of the eternal plan on which the invisible worlds are built by the formative logoi. This lies buried, until the time for its svabhava or production comes, in the bosom of eternal ideation — as the lotus plant of visible nature exists in miniature in the seed.
In Scholasticism: In logic: the subdivision of genus, comprising several individuals, constituted by the differentia specifica. In ontology: the common nature or essence, individualized by some agent. This agent is in Thomism conceived as matter, in Scotism as a form of "thisness" (haecceitas). No agreement has been reached on the number of ontological species; some hold that there is an indefinite number, others that the number is limited. In psychology of cognition: regarding sensory cognition: The senses are affected by the object through the medium; this affection results in the species impressa which, however, is not merely the immutation of the sense otgan or the nervous apparatus belonging thereto, but implies a "psychic immutation". As conscious percept the ultimate effect of sense affection in the mind becomes the species expressa. regarding intellectual cognition: the active intellect, by "illuminating" the phantasm disengages therefrom the species intellegibilis impressa which in turn actuates, through informing it, the passive intellect and becomes theory, as the known concept, the species intelligibilis expressa, also called verbum mentis. This "word" is not of the "inner language", but belongs to preverbal thought and becomes, when given verbal form, the "meaning" of the spoken word, which refers primarily to the mental concept and, by this, secondarily to the object.
In Scholasticism: Whatever is known is, as known, an accident of the knowing soul and therefore caused by an informing agent. All knowledge ultimately is due to an affection of the senses which are informed by the agency of the objects through a medium. The immutation of the sense organ and the corresponding accidental change of the soul are called species sensibilis impressa. The conscious percept is the species expressa. Intellectual knowledge stems from the phantasm out of which the active intellect disengages the universal nature which as species intelligibilis impressa informs the passive intellect and there becomes, as conscious concept. the species expressa or verbum mentis. Sensory cognition is a material process, but it is not the matter of the particular thing which enters into the sensory faculties; rather they supply the material foundation for the sensible form to become existent within the mind. Cognition is, therefore, "assimilation" of the mind to its object. The cognitive mental state as well as the species by which it originates are "images" of the object, in a metaphorical or analogical sense, not to be taken as anything like a copy or a reduplication of the thing. The senses, depending directly on the physical influence exercised by the object, cannot err; error is of the judging reason which may be misled by imagination and neglects to use the necessary critique. -- R.A.
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.
Intelligent Input/Output "architecture" /i:-too-oh/ (I2O) A specification which aims to provide an {I/O} {device driver} architecture that is independent of both the specific device being controlled and the host {operating system}. The Hardware Device Module (HDM) manages the device and the OS Services Module (OSM) interfaces to the host operating system. The HDM is portable across multiple operating systems, processors and busses. The HDM and OSM communicate via a two layer {message passing} {protocol}. A Message Layer sets up a communications session and runs on top of a Transport Layer which defines how the two parties share information. I2O is also designed to facilitate intelligent I/O subsystems, with support for {message passing} between multiple independent processors. By relieving the host of {interrupt} intensive I/O tasks required by the various layers of a driver architecture, the I2O intelligent I/O architecture greatly improves I/O performance. I2O systems will be able to more efficiently deliver the I/O throughput required by a wide range of high bandwidth applications, such as networked {video}, {groupware} and {client-server} processing. I2O does not restrict where the layered modules execute, providing support for single processor, {multiprocessor}, and {clustered} systems. I2O is not intended to replace the driver architectures currently in existence. Rather, the objective is to provide an open, standards-based approach, which is complementary to existing drivers, and provides a framework for the rapid development of a new generation of portable, intelligent I/O. {(http://i2osig.org/)}. (1997-11-04)
intention ::: n. --> A stretching or bending of the mind toward of the mind toward an object; closeness of application; fixedness of attention; earnestness.
A determination to act in a certain way or to do a certain thing; purpose; design; as, an intention to go to New York.
The object toward which the thoughts are directed; end; aim.
The state of being strained. See Intension.
Intermediate between these doctrines is that of the Conceptualists, identified with the name of Abelard, who held that universals, while they exist only in the mind, yet correspond to real similarities in things, which previous to creation existed in the mind of God. These notions are well illustrated by the question as to the meaning of such words as motion, force, heat, or light. Are the things studied by science under those names generalizing terms, existing only in the mind and posterior to the objects which manifest them; or are they realities in themselves, prior to the objects, and of which the objects are manifestations? Science often unconsciously uses such words in both senses at once; force, for example, is treated as though it were at the same time a result of motion in matter and a cause of that motion.
In the Bhagavad-Gita (7:4), prakriti manifests in eight portions — “earth, water, fire, air, ether [space: kham-akasa], mind [manas], understanding [buddhi] and egoity, self-sense [ahamkara]” — all of which relate to the object side, which gives an erroneous sense of identity or egoity.
In the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen phenomenology was defined (much as it had been by Hamilton and Lazarus) as descriptive analysis of subjective processes Erlebnisse. Thus its theme was unqualifiedly identified with what was commonly taken to be the central theme of psychology; the two disciplines were said to differ only in that psychology sets up causal or genetic laws to explain what phenomenology merely describes. Phenomenology was called "pure" so far as the phenomenologist distinguishes the subjective from the objective and refrains from looking into either the genesis of subjective phenomena or their relations to somatic and environmental circumstances. Husserl's "Prolegomena zur reinen Logik" published as the first part of the Logische Untersuchungen, had elaborated the concept of pure logic, a theoretical science independent of empirical knowledge and having a distinctive theme: the universal categorial forms exemplified in possible truths, possible facts, and their respective components. The fundamental concepts and laws of this science, Husserl maintained, are genuine only if they can be established by observing the matters to which they apply. Accordingly, to test the genuineness of logical theory, "wir wollen auf die 'Sachen selbst' zurückgehen": we will go, from our habitual empty understanding of this alleged science, back to a seeing of the logical forms themselves. But it is then the task of pure phenomenology to test the genuineness and range of this "seeing," to distinguish it from other ways of being conscious of the same or other matters. Thus, although pure phenomenology and pure logic are mutually independent disciplines with separate themes, phenomenological analysis is indispensible to the critical justification of logic. In like manner, Husserl maintained, it is necessary to the criticism of other alleged knowledge; while, in another way, its descriptions are prerequisite to explanatory psychology. However, when Husserl wrote the Logische Untersuchungen, he did not yet conceive phenomenological analysis as a method for dealing with metaphysical problems.
In the Ideen and in later works, Husserl applied the epithet "transcendental" to consciousness as it is aside from its (valid and necessary) self-apperception as in a world. At the same time, he restricted the term "psychic" to subjectivity (personal subjects, their streams of consciousness, etc.) in its status as worldly, animal, human subjectivity. The contrast between transcendental subjectivity and worldly being is fundamental to Husserl's mature concept of pure phenomenology and to his concept of a universal phenomenological philosophy. In the Ideen, this pure phenomenology, defined as the eidetic science of transcendental subjectivity, was contrasted with psychology, defined as the empirical science of actual subjectivity in the world. Two antitheses are involved, however eidetic versus factual, and transcendental versus psychic. Rightly, they yield a four-fold classification, which Husserl subsequently made explicit, in his Formale und Transzendentale Logik (1929), Nachwort zu meinen Ideen (1930), and Meditations Cartesiennes (1931). In these works, he spoke of psychology as including all knowledge of worldly subjectivity while, within this science, he distinguished an empirical or matter-of-fact pure psychology and an eidetic pure psychology. The former is "pure" only in the way phenomenology, as explicitly conceived in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen, is pure: actual psychic subjectivity is abstracted as its exclusive theme, objects intended in the investigated psychic processes are taken only as the latter's noematic-intentional objects. Such an abstractive and self-restraining attitude, Husserl believed, is necessary, if one is to isohte the psychic in its purity and yet preserve it in its full intentionality. The instituting and maintaining of such an attitude is called "psychological epoche"; its effect on the objects of psychic consciousness is called "psychological reduction." As empiricism, this pure psychology describes the experienced typical structures of psychic processes and of the typical noematic objects belonging inseparably to the latter by virtue of their intrinsic intentionality. Description of typical personalities and of their habitually intended worlds also lies within its province. Having acquired empirical knowledge of the purely psychic, one may relax one's psychological epoche and inquire into the extrapsychic circumstances under which, e.g., psychic processes of a particulai type actually occur in the world. Thus an empirical pure intentional psychology would become part of a concrete empirical science of actual psychophysical organisms.
In the Qabbalah 13 is used in several passages, e.g., in cosmogenesis, “Thirteen depend on thirteen (forms) of the most worthy Dignity” (Siphra’ Di-tseni‘utha’ 1:16), “refers to the thirteen periods personified by the thirteen Manus, with Swayambhuva the fourteenth (13, instead of 14, being an additional veil): those fourteen Manus who reign within the term of a Mahayuga, a ‘Day’ of Brahma. These (thirteen-fourteen) of the objective Universe depend on the thirteen (fourteen) paradigmatic, ideal forms” (SD 1:375); the fourteenth is supplied by the synthesis under the inflow of the coordinating and stimulating spirit. In the same way a group of six is counted as a septenate.
In the Vedantic fourfold classification of the human constitution, it is the second division — the others being 1) sthula-sarira, 3) karana-sarira, and 4) atman. The sukshma-sarira “bears to the physical body the same relationship which the astral world bears to the objective plane of the solar system. It is sometimes called kama-rupa in our theosophical dissertations. This unfortunate expressive has given rise also to a misconception that the principle called kama represents this astral body itself, and is transformed into it. But it is not so. It is composed of elements of quite a different nature. Its senses are not so differentiated and localized as in the physical body, and, being composed of finer materials, its powers of action and thought are considerably greater than those found in the physical organism” (Notes on BG 30-1).
Introspective Method: The method in psychology, which, in opposition to the objective method of Behaviorism (See Behaviorism) relies largely upon introspective observation. See Introspection. -- L.W.
intuition ::: direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process. intuition"s, intuitions, half-intuition.
Sri Aurobindo: "Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.” *The Life Divine
"Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ``stable lightnings"". When this original or native Intuition begins to descend into us in answer to an ascension of our consciousness to its level or as a result of our finding of a clear way of communication with it, it may continue to come as a play of lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant action; but at this stage the judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it can only act as an observer or registrar understanding or recording the more luminous intimations, judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of putting all in place. For once the process of the change has begun, a complete transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form and power of Intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or using the intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in its parts of Knowledge.” *The Life Divine
"I use the word ‘intuition" for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the word ‘consciousness" and many others which our poverty compels us to extend illegitimately in their significance.” *The Life Divine - Sri Aurobindo"s footnote.
"For intuition is an edge of light thrust out by the secret Supermind. . . .” The Life Divine
". . . intuition is born of a direct awareness while intellect is an indirect action of a knowledge which constructs itself with difficulty out of the unknown from signs and indications and gathered data.” The Life Divine
"Intuition is above illumined Mind which is simply higher Mind raised to a great luminosity and more open to modified forms of intuition and inspiration.” Letters on Yoga
"Intuition sees the truth of things by a direct inner contact, not like the ordinary mental intelligence by seeking and reaching out for indirect contacts through the senses etc. But the limitation of the Intuition as compared with the supermind is that it sees things by flashes, point by point, not as a whole. Also in coming into the mind it gets mixed with the mental movement and forms a kind of intuitive mind activity which is not the pure truth, but something in between the higher Truth and the mental seeking. It can lead the consciousness through a sort of transitional stage and that is practically its function.” Letters on Yoga
intuition ::: “Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the
Intuition The working of the inner vision, instant and direct cognition of truth. This spiritual faculty, though not yet in any sense fully developed in the human race, yet occasionally shows itself as hunches. Every human being is born with at least the rudiment of this inner sense. Plotinus taught that the secret gnosis has three degrees — opinion, science or knowledge, and illumination — and that the instrument of the third is intuition. To this, reason is subordinate, for intuition is absolute knowledge, founded on the identification of the mind with the object. Iamblichus wrote of intuition: “There is a faculty of the human mind, which is superior to all which is born or begotten. Through it we are enabled to attain union with the superior intelligences, to be transported beyond the scenes of this world, and to partake of the higher life and peculiar powers of the heavenly ones.” From another point of view, intuition may be described as spiritual wisdom, gathered into the storehouse of the spirit-soul through experiences in past lives; but this form may be described as automatic intuition. The higher intuition is a filling of the functional human mind with a ray from the divinity within, furnishing the mind with illumination, perfect wisdom and, in its most developed form, virtual omniscience for our solar system. This is the full functioning of the buddhic faculty in the human being; and when this faculty is thus aroused and working, it produces the manushya or human buddha.
Intuitive: Requires two things: (1) that it result from the proper species, or the proper image of the object itself, impressed upon the mind by the object or by God, and (2) that it bear upon an object that is really present with the greatest clearness and certitude. Our knowledge of the sun is intuitive while we are looking at the sun, and that knowledge which the blessed have of God is intuitive.
isomorphism class "mathematics" A collection of all the objects {isomorphic} to a given object. Talking about the isomorphism class (of a {poset}, say) ensures that we will only consider its properties as a poset, and will not consider other incidental properties it happens to have. (1995-03-25)
It is here, when this foundation has been secured, that the practice of Asana and Pranayama come in and can then bear their perfect fruits. By itself the control of the mind and moral being only puts our normal consciousness into the right preliminary condition; it cannot bring about that evolution or manifestation of the higher psychic being which is necessary for the greater aims of Yoga. In order to bring about this manifestation the present nodus of the vital and physical body with the mental being has to be loosened and the way made clear for the ascent through the greater psychic being to the union with the superconscient Purusha. This can be done by Pranayama. Asana is used by the Rajayoga only in its easiest and most natural position, that naturally taken by the body when seated and gathered together, but with the back and head strictly erect and in a straight line, so that there may be no deflection of the spinal cord. The object of the latter rule is obviously connected with the theory of the six chakras and the circulation of the vital energy between the muladhara and the brahmarandhra. The Rajayogic Pranayama purifies and clears the nervous system; it enables us to circulate the vital energy equally through the body and direct it also where we will according to need, and thus maintain a perfect health and soundness of the body and the vital being; it gives us control of all the five habitual operations of the vital energy in the system and at the same time breaks down the habitual divisions by which only the ordinary mechanical processes of the vitality are possible to the normal life. It opens entirely the six centres of the psycho-physical system and brings into the waking consciousness the power of the awakened Shakti and the light of the unveiled Purusha on each of the ascending planes. Coupled with the use of the mantra it brings the divine energy into the body and prepares for and facilitates that concentration in Samadhi which is the crown of the Rajayogic method. Rajayogic concentration is divided into four stages; it commences with the drawing both of the mind and senses from outward things, proceeds to the holding of the one object of concentration to the exclusion of all other ideas and mental activities, then to the prolonged absorption of the mind in this object, finally, to the complete ingoing of the consciousness by which it is lost to all outward mental activity in the oneness of Samadhi. The real object of this mental discipline is to draw away the mind from the outward and the mental world into union with the divine Being. Th
refore in the first three stages use has to be made of some mental means or support by which the mind, accustomed to run about from object to object, shall fix on one alone, and that one must be something which represents the idea of the Divine. It is usually a name or a form or a mantra by which the thought can be fixed in the sole knowledge or adoration of the Lord. By this concentration on the idea the mind enters from the idea into its reality, into which it sinks silent, absorbed, unified. This is the traditional method. There are, however, others which are equally of a Rajayogic character, since they use the mental and psychical being as key. Some of them are directed rather to the quiescence of the mind than to its immediate absorption, as the discipline by which the mind is simply watched and allowed to exhaust its habit of vagrant thought in a purposeless running from which it feels all sanction, purpose and interest withdrawn, and that, more strenuous and rapidly effective, by which all outward-going thought is excluded and the mind forced to sink into itself where in its absolute quietude it can only
reflect the pure Being or pass away into its superconscient existence. The method differs, the object and the result are the same. Here, it might be supposed, the whole action and aim of Rajayoga must end. For its action is the stilling of the waves of consciousness, its manifold activities, cittavrtti, first, through a habitual replacing of the turbid rajasic activities by the quiet and luminous sattwic, then, by the stilling of all activities; and its object is to enter into silent communion of soul and unity with the Divine. As a matter of fact we find that the system of Rajayoga includes other objects,—such as the practice and use of occult powers,—some of which seem to be unconnected with and even inconsistent with its main purpose. These powers or siddhis are indeed frequently condemned as dangers and distractions which draw away the Yogin from his sole legitimate aim of divine union. On the way, th
refore, it would naturally seem as if they ought to be avoided; and once the goal is reached, it would seem that they are then frivolous and superfluous. But Rajayoga is a psychic science and it includes the attainment of all the higher states of consciousness and their powers by which the mental being rises towards the superconscient as well as its ultimate and supreme possibility of union with the Highest. Moreover, the Yogin, while in the body, is not always mentally inactive and sunk in Samadhi, and an account of the powers and states which are possible to him on the higher planes of his being is necessary to the completeness of the science. These powers and experiences belong, first, to the vital and mental planes above this physical in which we live, and are natural to the soul in the subtle body; as the dependence on the physical body decreases, these abnormal activities become possible and even manifest themselves without being sought for. They can be acquired and fixed by processes which the science gives, and their use then becomes subject to the will; or they can be allowed to develop of themselves and used only when they come, or when the Divine within moves us to use them; or else, even though thus naturally developing and acting, they may be rejected in a single-minded devotion to the one supreme goal of the Yoga. Secondly, there are fuller, greater powers belonging to the supramental planes which are the very powers of the Divine in his spiritual and supramentally ideative being. These cannot be acquired at all securely or integrally by personal effort, but can only come from above, or else can become natural to the man if and when he ascends beyond mind and lives in the spiritual being, power, consciousness and ideation. They then become, not abnormal and laboriously acquired siddhis, but simply the very nature and method of his action, if he still continues to be active in the world-existence.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 539-40-41-42
Its thoughts or run about among the objects it pursues, remaining at the back of the mind quiet and separate ; (2) to practise quietude and concentration in this separateness, until the habit of quiet takes hold of the physical mind and replaces the habit of these activities.
It will be seen that the scope we give to the idea of renunciation is different from the meaning currently attached to it. Currently its meaning is self-denial, inhibition of pleasure, rejection of the objects of pleasure. Self-denial is a necessary discipline for the soul of man, because his heart is ignorantly attached; inhibition of pleasure is necessary because his sense is caught and clogged in the mud-honey of sensuous satisfactions; rejection of the objects of pleasure is imposed because the mind fixes on the object and will not leave it to go beyond it and within itself. If the mind of man were not thus ignorant, attached, bound even in its restless inconstancy, deluded by the forms of things, renunciation would not have been needed; the soul could have travelled on the path of delight, from the lesser to the greater, from joy to diviner joy. At present that is not practicable. It must give up from within everything to which it is attached in order that it may gain that which they are in their reality. The external renunciation is not the essential, but even that is necessary for a time, indispensable in many things and sometimes useful in all; we may even say that a complete external renunciation is a stage through which the soul must pass at some period of its progress,—though always it should be without those self-willed violences and fierce self-torturings which are an offence to the Divine seated within us. But in the end this renunciation or self-denial is always an instrument and the period for its use passes. The rejection of the object ceases to be necessary when the object can no longer ensnare us because what the soul enjoys is no longer the object as an object but the Divine which it expresses; the inhibition of pleasure is no longer needed when the soul no longer seeks pleasure but possesses the delight of the Divine in all things equally without the need of a personal or physical possession of the thing itself; self-denial loses its field when the soul no longer claims anything, but obeys consciously the will of the one Self in all beings.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 333
jagrat svapna. ::: "the waking dream"; the state where the mind is totally occupied by the objects of perception, whether they are gross or subtle, and when this mind is constantly busy creating images in itself, which it believes to be real
JNaNA, Knowledge direct without the use of a medium ; supreme self-knowledge ; -a spiritual seizing by a kind of identifi- cation with the object of knowledge.
Jnana ::: Not a mere thinking and considering by the intelligence, the pursuit and grasping of a mental form of truth by the intellectual mind, but a seeing of it with the soul and a total living in it with the power of the inner being, a spiritual seizing by a kind of identification with the object of knowledge is Jnana.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 20, Page: 332
Judgment of Taste: The assertion that an object is beautiful, or aesthetically pleasing. Such propositions are traditionally classified as judgments of value, as distinguished from judgments of fact, and are regarded as making assertions about the subjective reaction and interest that the object has aroused, and not about any intrinsic property of the object. Hence, generally interpreted as having no claim to universality. Kant, and others, have sought to establish their universality on the ground that they assert a necessary subjective reaction. -- I.J.
Karma Yoga ::: Aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 39-40
KARMA YOGA. ::: It alms at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Wilt. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an inter- ested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renuncia- tion it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre^ of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To that our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoislic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the
Knower, The: The subject of knowledge, conceived either as a mental act, an empirical self or a pure ego. See Subject. The knower in contrast to the object known. See Epistemological object. -- L.W.
knowledge "artificial intelligence, information science" The objects, concepts and relationships that are assumed to exist in some area of interest. A collection of {knowledge}, represented using some {knowledge representation} language is known as a {knowledge base} and a program for extending and/or querying a knowledge base is a {knowledge-based system}. Knowledge differs from {data} or {information} in that new knowledge may be created from existing knowledge using logical {inference}. If information is data plus meaning then knowledge is information plus processing. A common form of knowledge, e.g. in a {Prolog} program, is a collection of {facts} and {rules} about some subject. For example, a {knowledge base} about a family might contain the facts that John is David's son and Tom is John's son and the rule that the son of someone's son is their grandson. From this knowledge it could infer the new fact that Tom is David's grandson. See also {Knowledge Level}. (1994-10-19)
Knowledge by Identity ::: When the subject draws a little back from itself as object, then certain tertiary powers of spiritual knowledge, of knowledge by identity, take their first origin, which are the sources of our own normal modes of knowledge. There is a spiritual intimate vision, a spiritual pervasive entry and penetration, a spiritual feeling in which one sees all as oneself, feels all as oneself, contacts all as oneself. There is a power of spiritual perception of the object and all that it contains or is, perceived in an enveloping and pervading identity, the identity itself constituting the perception.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 566
knowledge ::: v. i. --> The act or state of knowing; clear perception of fact, truth, or duty; certain apprehension; familiar cognizance; cognition.
That which is or may be known; the object of an act of knowing; a cognition; -- chiefly used in the plural.
That which is gained and preserved by knowing; instruction; acquaintance; enlightenment; learning; scholarship; erudition.
Korn's philosophy represents an attack against naive and dogmatic positivism, but admits and even assimilates an element of Positivism which Korn calls Native Argentinian Positivism. Alejandro Korn may be called The Philosopher of Freedom. In fact, freedom is the keynote of his thought. He speaks of Human liberty as the indissoluble union of economic and ethical liberties. The free soul's knowledge of the world of science operates mainly on the basis of intuition. In fact, intuition is the basis of all knowledge. "Necessity of the objective world order", "Freedom of the spirit in the subjective realm", "Identity", 'Purpose", "Unity of Consciousness", and other similar concepts, are "expressions of immediate evidence and not conclusions of logical dialectics". The experience of freedom, according to Korn, leads to the problem of evaluation, which he defines as "the human response to a fact", whether the fact be an object or an event. Valuation is an experience which grows out of the struggle for liberty. Values, therefore, are relative to the fields of experience in which valuation takes place. The denial of an absolute value or values, does not signify the exclusion of personal faith. On the contrary, personal, faith is the common ground and point of departure of knowledge and action. See Latin-American Philosophy. -- J.A.F.
krpanah phalahetavah ::: poor and wretched souls are they who make the fruit of their works the object of their thoughts and activities. [Gita 2.49]
Kurma Purana (Sanskrit) Kūrma Purāṇa [from kūrma tortoise] One of the 18 principal Hindu Puranas, so named because it deals with the avataric incarnation of Vishnu in the form of a tortoise. The scripture was recited by Janardana (Vishnu) in the regions under the earth to Indradyumna and the rishis in the proximity of Sakra. It tells about the Lakshmi Kalpa, and treats of the objects of life: duty, wealth, pleasure, and liberation.
lacrosse ::: n. --> A game of ball, originating among the North American Indians, now the popular field sport of Canada, and played also in England and the United States. Each player carries a long-handled racket, called a "crosse". The ball is not handled but caught with the crosse and carried on it, or tossed from it, the object being to carry it or throw it through one of the goals placed at opposite ends of the field.
landscape ::: n. --> A portion of land or territory which the eye can comprehend in a single view, including all the objects it contains.
A picture representing a scene by land or sea, actual or fancied, the chief subject being the general aspect of nature, as fields, hills, forests, water. etc.
The pictorial aspect of a country.
legal Loosely used to mean "in accordance with all the relevant rules", especially in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of "natural laws" to achieve a desired objective. Their use of "legal" is flavoured as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}. [{Jargon File}]
lib "operating system" Library. In {Unix}, the directories /lib and /usr/lib traditionally contain files with {filename extension} ".lib" that are special {archives} containing modules of standard {object code}. In modern Unixes the same directories contain ".so" (shared object) files, which are similar except that the object code they contain is designed to be loaded once and shared by all application code that needs it, thus saving memory. (2008-11-25)
lieberkuhn ::: n. --> A concave metallic mirror attached to the object-glass end of a microscope, to throw down light on opaque objects; a reflector.
lila ::: play, game; the world as a game of the Lord or isvara, "a play of lila the divine Being with the conditions of cosmic existence in this world of an inferior Nature"; life (especially in the objective world or field of karma, as distinguished from yoga) "experienced as a play of the divine Delight".
Linga Purana (Sanskrit) Liṅga Purāṇa One of the 18 principal Puranas, in which Siva, supposed to be present in the Agni-linga (great fiery phallus) gives an account of the formation of the worlds and the objects of life. It also contains mythologic accounts of Siva’s incarnations as avataras.
LITHE Object-oriented with extensible syntax. "LITHE: A Language Combining a Flexible Syntax and Classes", D. Sandberg, Conf Rec 9th Ann ACM Sym POPL, ACM 1982, pp.142-145.
Logic, formal: Investigates the structure of propositions and of deductive reasoning by a method which abstracts from the content of propositions which come under consideration and deals only with their logical form. The distinction between form and content can be made definite with the aid of a particular language or symbolism in which propositions are expressed, and the formal method can then be characterized by the fact that it deals with the objective form of sentences which express propositions and provides in these concrete terms criteria of meaningfulness and validity of inference. This formulation of the matter presupposes the selection of a particular language which is to be regarded as logically exact and free from the ambiguities and irregularities of structure which appear in English (or other languages of everyday use) -- i.e., it makes the distinction between form and content relative to the choice of a language. Many logicians prefer to postulate an abstract form for propositions themselves, and to characterize the logical exactness of a language by the uniformity with which the concrete form of its sentences reproduces or parallels the form of the propositions which they express. At all events it is practically necessary to introduce a special logical language, or symbolic notation, more exact than ordinary English usage, if topics beyond the most elementary are to be dealt with (see logistic system, and semiotic).
LOOPN "language, simulation" A {compiler}, {simulator}, and associated {source} control for an {object-oriented} {Petri net} language developed by Charles Lakos "Charles.Lakos@adelaide.edu.au" at the {University of Tasmania}. In LOOPN, a Petri net is an extension of a {coloured timed Petri net}. The extension means firstly that token types are {class}es. In other words, they consist of both data fields and functions, they can be declared by inheriting from other token types, and they can be used {polymorphic}ally. The object-oriented extensions also mean that module or subnet types are classes. LOOPN has been developed over a period of about five years at the University of Tasmania, where it has been used in teaching computer simulation and the modelling of {network} {protocols}. {(ftp://ftp.cs.adelaide.edu.au/pub/OPN/loopn/)}. (2000-09-02)
::: "Love at its origin is a self-existent force, an absolute, a transcendent . . . which does not depend upon the objects — it depends only on itself or only on the Divine; for it is a self-existent power of the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
“Love at its origin is a self-existent force, an absolute, a transcendent . . . which does not depend upon the objects—it depends only on itself or only on the Divine; for it is a self-existent power of the Divine.” Letters on Yoga
Lycanthropy [from Greek lykanthropos wolf-man] In all times and places there has been prevalent the belief that human beings can become transformed into wolves or other animals, obsessed by the spirits of these animals, or even assume this condition at will through sorcery; the object being to gratify hatred or to satisfy voracious instincts. People thus affected are said to have appeared both to themselves and to others in the form of wolves and to have attacked animals, but especially human beings. The English name for such a person was werewolf (man-wolf). The belief was very prevalent in medieval Europe, and was the occasion for numerous legal executions. It has disappeared before the advance of our present culture, but it was a fact, depending upon little understood mysteries of psychologization, and the belief still holds among some people.
Madhyamikas (Sanskrit) Mādhyamika-s Belonging to the middle way; a sect mentioned in the Vishnu-Purana, probably at first a sect of Hindu atheists. A school of the same name was founded later in Tibet and China, and as it adopted some of the esoteric principles taught by Nagarjuna, one of the great founders of the esoteric Mahayana system, it had certain elements of esoteric truth. But because of its tendency by means of thesis and antithesis to reduce everything into contrary categories, and then to deny both, it may be called a school of Nihilists for whom everything is an illusion and an error in the world of thought, in the subjective as well as in the objective universe. This school is a good example of the danger of wandering too far in mere intellectual disquisition from the fundamental bases of the esoteric philosophy, for such merely brain-mind activity will infallibly lead to a philosophy of barren negation.
magnify ::: v. t. --> To make great, or greater; to increase the dimensions of; to amplify; to enlarge, either in fact or in appearance; as, the microscope magnifies the object by a thousand diameters.
To increase the importance of; to augment the esteem or respect in which one is held.
To praise highly; to land; to extol.
To exaggerate; as, to magnify a loss or a difficulty.
Mahabharata (Sanskrit) Mahābhārata One of the two great epic poems of ancient India, the largest poetic work known to literature, consisting of 220,000 lines. The masses of tradition and tales in this epic make it the national treasury from which bards, poets, dramatists, and artists, as from an inexhaustible source, draw their themes. It contains the history of the family of the Bharatas in addition to a great many beautiful truly mystical and occult teachings, and a few really splendid minor episodes like the Bhagavad-Gita and Anugita. Tradition makes Vyasa — a generic name of high literary authority, used by at least several archaic writers — the author of this grand poem. The main theme of the epic is the great struggle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, descendants through Bharata from Puru, the great ancestor of one branch of the Lunar race. The object of the struggle was the kingdom whose capital was Hastinapura (elephant city), the ruins of which are said to be traceable 57 miles northeast of Delhi, on an old bed of the Ganges.
Mahamaya (Sanskrit) Mahāmāyā [from mahā great + māyā illusion] The great illusion; the manifested universe in its totality. “Esoteric philosophy, teaching an objective Idealism — though it regards the objective Universe and all in it as Maya, temporary illusion — draws a practical distinction between collective illusion, Mahamaya, from the purely metaphysical stand-point, and the objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this illusion lasts” (SD 1:631). The belief in the separateness of the universe, and everything in it, from the absolute divine All is one of the greatest delusions of mahamaya.
Mastaba (Arabic) [from maṣṭaba, stone bench] A long, low oblong ancient Egyptian structure, with sloping sides and flat top, used as a mortuary chapel and place for depositing offerings; it generally covered a sepulchral pit which led to the burial chamber, where the mummy was placed. “These tombs of the ancients were symbolical like the rest of their sacred edifices, and . . . this symbology points directly to the septenary division of man. But in death the order is revered; and while the Mastaba with its scenes of daily life painted on the walls, its table of offerings, to the Larva, the ghost, or ‘Linga-Sarira,’ was a memorial raised to the two Principles and Life which has quitted that which was a lower trio on earth; the Pit, the Passage, the Burial Chambers and the mummy in the Sarcophagus, were the objective symbols raised to the two perishable ‘principles,’ the personal mind and Kama, and the three imperishable, the higher Triad, now merged into one. This ‘One’ was the Spirit of the Blessed now resting in the Happy Circle of Aanroo” (TG 209).
Master ::: “The Master and Mover of our works is the One, the Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and Infinite. He is the transcendent unknown or unknowable Absolute, the unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.” The Life Divine
Maya(Sanskrit) ::: The word comes from the root ma, meaning "to measure," and by a figure of speech it alsocomes to mean "to effect," "to form," and hence "to limit." There is an English word mete, meaning "tomeasure out," from the same IndoEuropean root. It is found in the Anglo-Saxon as the root met, in theGreek as med, and it is found in the Latin also in the same form.Ages ago in the wonderful Brahmanical philosophy maya was understood very differently from what it isnow usually understood to be. As a technical term, maya has come to mean the fabrication by man's mindof ideas derived from interior and exterior impressions, hence the illusory aspect of man's thoughts as heconsiders and tries to interpret and understand life and his surroundings; and thence was derived thesense which it technically bears, "illusion." It does not mean that the exterior world is nonexistent; if itwere, it obviously could not be illusory. It exists, but is not. It is "measured out" or is "limited," or itstands out to the human spirit as a mirage. In other words, we do not see clearly and plainly and in theirreality the vision and the visions which our mind and senses present to the inner life and eye.The familiar illustrations of maya in the Vedanta, which is the highest form that the Brahmanicalteachings have taken and which is so near to our own teaching in many respects, were such as follows: Aman at eventide sees a coiled rope on the ground, and springs aside, thinking it a serpent. The rope isthere, but no serpent. The second illustration is what is called the "horns of the hare." The animal calledthe hare has no horns, but when it also is seen at eventide, its long ears seem to project from its head insuch fashion that it appears even to the seeing eye as being a creature with horns. The hare has no horns,but there is then in the mind an illusory belief that an animal with horns exists there.That is what maya means: not that a thing seen does not exist, but that we are blinded and our mindperverted by our own thoughts and our own imperfections, and do not as yet arrive at the realinterpretation and meaning of the world or of the universe around us. By ascending inwardly, by risingup, by inner aspiration, by an elevation of soul, we can reach upwards or rather inwards towards thatplane where truth abides in fullness.H. P. Blavatsky says on page 631 of the first volume of The Secret Doctrine:Esoteric philosophy, teaching an objective Idealism -- though it regards the objectiveUniverse and all in it as Maya, temporary illusion -- draws a practical distinction betweencollective illusion, Mahamaya, from the purely metaphysical standpoint, and the objectiverelations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this illusion lasts.The teaching is that maya is thus called from the action of mulaprakriti or root-nature, the coordinateprinciple of that other line of coactive consciousness which we call parabrahman. From the momentwhen manifestation begins, it acts dualistically, that is to say that everything in nature from that pointonwards is crossed by pairs of opposites, such as long and short, high and low, night and day, good andevil, consciousness and nonconsciousness, etc., and that all these things are essentially mayic or illusory-- real while they last, but the lasting is not eternal. It is through and by these pairs of opposites that theself-conscious soul learns truth. It might be said, in conclusion, that another and very convenient way ofconsidering maya is to understand it to mean "limitation," "restriction," and therefore imperfect cognitionand recognition of reality. The imperfect mind does not see perfect truth. It labors under an illusioncorresponding with its own imperfections, under a maya, a limitation. Magical practices are frequentlycalled maya in the ancient Hindu books.
media 1. "data" Any kind of {data} including {graphics}, {images}, {audio} and {video}, though typically excluding {raw text} or {executable code}. The term {multimedia} suggests a collection of different types of media or the ability to handle such collections. 2. "storage" The physical object on which {data} is stored, as opposed to the device used to read and write it. 3. "networking" The object at the {physical layer} that carries data, typically an electrical or optical cable, though, in a {wireless network}, the term refers to the space through which radio waves propagate. Most often used in the context of {Media Access Control} (MAC). (2010-01-07)
Medieval: Image and Similitude are frequently used by the medieval scholars. Neither of them needs mean copy. Sometimes the terms are nearly synonymous with sign in general. The alteration of the sense organs when affected by some external object is an image of the latter (species sensibilis); so is the memory image or phantasm. The intelligible species resulting from the operation of the active intellect on the phantasm is not less an image of the universal nature than the concept and the word expressing the latter is. Images in the strict sense of copies or pictures are only a particular case of image or similitude in general. The idea that Scholasticism believed that the mind contains literally "copies" of the objective world is mistaken interpretation due to misunderstanding of the terms. -- R.A.
meditation ::: Sri Aurobindo: "There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of dhyana , ‘meditation" and ‘contemplation". Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana , for the principle of dhyana is mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge. *Letters on Yoga
meditation ::: “There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of dhyana , ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’. Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana , for the principle of dhyana is mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge. Letters on Yoga
Meditation ::: What meditation exactly means. There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of Dhyana, "meditation" and "contemplation". Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the knowledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana; for the principle of dhyanais mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 36, Page: 293-294
me ::: pron. --> One. See Men, pron. ::: pers. pron. --> The person speaking, regarded as an object; myself; a pronoun of the first person used as the objective and dative case of the pronoum I; as, he struck me; he gave me the money, or he gave the money to me; he got me a hat, or he got a hat for me.
merchandise ::: n. --> The objects of commerce; whatever is usually bought or sold in trade, or market, or by merchants; wares; goods; commodities.
The act or business of trading; trade; traffic. ::: v. i. --> To trade; to carry on commerce.
message In {object-oriented programming} sending a message to an {object} (to invoke a {method}) is equivalent to calling a {procedure} in traditional programming languages, except that the actual code executed may only be selected at run time depending on the {class} of the object. Thus, in response to the message "drawSelf", the method code invoked would be different if the target object were a circle or a square. (1995-02-16)
metempirical ::: a. --> Related, or belonging, to the objects of knowledge within the province of metempirics.
method invocation "programming" In {object-oriented programming}, the way the program looks up the right {code} to run when a {method} with a given name is called ("invoked") on an {object}. The method is first looked for in the object's {class}, then that class's {superclass} and so on up the {class hierarchy} until a method with the given name is found (the name is "resolved"). Generally, method lookup cannot be performed at {compile time} because the object's class is not known until {run time}. This is the case for an {object method} whereas a {class method} is just an ordinary function (that is bundled with a given class) and can be resolved at compile time (or load time in the case of a {dynamically loaded library}). (2014-09-06)
Methodology: The systematic analysis and organization of the rational and experimental principles and processes which must guide a scientific inquiry, or which constitute the structure of the special sciences more particularly. Methodology, which is also called scientific method, and more seldom methodeutic, refers not only to the whole of a constituted science, but also to individual problems or groups of problems within a science. As such it is usually considered as a branch of logic; in fact, it is the application of the principles and processes of logic to the special objects of the various sciences; while science in general is accounted for by the combination of deduction and induction as such. Thus, methodology is a generic term exemplified in the specific method of each science. Hence its full significance can be understood only by analyzing the structure of the special sciences. In determining that structure, one must consider the proper object of the special science, the manner in which it develops, the type of statements or generalizations it involves, its philosophical foundations or assumptions, and its relation with the other sciences, and eventually its applications. The last two points mentioned are particularly important: methods of education, for example, will vary considerably according to their inspiration and aim. Because of the differences between the objects of the various sciences, they reveal the following principal methodological patterns, which are not necessarily exclusive of one another, and which are used sometimes in partial combination. It may be added that their choice and combination depend also in a large degree on psychological motives. In the last resort, methodology results from the adjustment of our mental powers to the love and pursuit of truth. There are various rational methods used by the speculative sciences, including theology which adds certain qualifications to their use. More especially, philosophy has inspired the following procedures: The Soctattc method of analysis by questioning and dividing until the essences are reached; the synthetic method developed by Plato, Aristotle and the Medieval thinkers, which involves a demonstrative exposition of the causal relation between thought and being; the ascetic method of intellectual and moral purification leading to an illumination of the mind, as proposed by Plotinus, Augustine and the mystics; the psychological method of inquiry into the origin of ideas, which was used by Descartes and his followers, and also by the British empiricists; the critical or transcendental method, as used by Kant, and involving an analysis of the conditions and limits of knowledge; the dialectical method proceeding by thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which is promoted by Hegelianlsm and Dialectical Materialism; the intuitive method, as used by Bergson, which involves the immediate perception of reality, by a blending of consciousness with the process of change; the reflexive method of metaphysical introspection aiming at the development of the immanent realities and values leading man to God; the eclectic method (historical-critical) of purposive and effective selection as proposed by Cicero, Suarez and Cousin; and the positivistic method of Comte, Spencer and the logical empiricists, which attempts to apply to philosophy the strict procedures of the positive sciences. The axiomatic or hypothetico-deductive method as used by the theoretical and especially the mathematical sciences. It involves such problems as the selection, independence and simplification of primitive terms and axioms, the formalization of definitions and proofs, the consistency and completeness of the constructed theory, and the final interpretation. The nomological or inductive method as used by the experimental sciences, aims at the discovery of regularities between phenomena and their relevant laws. It involves the critical and careful application of the various steps of induction: observation and analytical classification; selection of similarities; hypothesis of cause or law; verification by the experimental canons; deduction, demonstration and explanation; systematic organization of results; statement of laws and construction of the relevant theory. The descriptive method as used by the natural and social sciences, involves observational, classificatory and statistical procedures (see art. on statistics) and their interpretation. The historical method as used by the sciences dealing with the past, involves the collation, selection, classification and interpretation of archeological facts and exhibits, records, documents, archives, reports and testimonies. The psychological method, as used by all the sciences dealing with human behaviour and development. It involves not only introspective analysis, but also experimental procedures, such as those referring to the relations between stimuli and sensations, to the accuracy of perceptions (specific measurements of intensity), to gradation (least noticeable differences), to error methods (average error in right and wrong cases), and to physiological and educational processes.
method "programming" In {object-oriented programming}, a {function} that can be called on an {object} of a given {class}. When a method is called (or {invoked (method invocation)}) on an object, the object is passed as an implicit {argument} to the method, usually referred to by the special variable "this". If the method is not defined in the object's class, it is looked for in that class's {superclass}, and so on up the {class hierarchy} until it is found. A {subclass} thus {inherits {inheritance}} all the methods of its superclasses. Different classes may define methods with the same name (i.e. methods may be {polymorphic}). Methods are sometimes called "object methods" or "instance methods". "{Class methods}" are methods that operate on objects of class "class". "Static methods" are not methods but normal {functions} packaged with the class. (2000-03-22)
MIB Variable A managed object that is defined in a {Management Information Base} (MIB). The object is defined by a textual name and a corresponding object identifier, a {syntax}, an access mode, a status, and a description of the semantics of the managed object. The MIB Variable contains pertinent management information that is accessible as defined by the access mode. (1995-03-22)
micrometer ::: n. --> An instrument, used with a telescope or microscope, for measuring minute distances, or the apparent diameters of objects which subtend minute angles. The measurement given directly is that of the image of the object formed at the focus of the object glass.
midst ::: n. --> The interior or central part or place; the middle; -- used chiefly in the objective case after in; as, in the midst of the forest.
Hence, figuratively, the condition of being surrounded or beset; the press; the burden; as, in the midst of official duties; in the midst of secular affairs. ::: prep.
mirage ::: n. --> An optical effect, sometimes seen on the ocean, but more frequently in deserts, due to total reflection of light at the surface common to two strata of air differently heated. The reflected image is seen, commonly in an inverted position, while the real object may or may not be in sight. When the surface is horizontal, and below the eye, the appearance is that of a sheet of water in which the object is seen reflected; when the reflecting surface is above the eye, the image is seen projected against the sky. The fata Morgana and looming are
misgive ::: v. t. --> To give or grant amiss.
Specifically: To give doubt and apprehension to, instead of confidence and courage; to impart fear to; to make irresolute; -- usually said of the mind or heart, and followed by the objective personal pronoun.
To suspect; to dread. ::: v. i.
mont de piete ::: --> One of certain public pawnbroking establishments which originated in Italy in the 15th century, the object of which was to lend money at a low rate of interest to poor people in need; -- called also mount of piety. The institution has been adopted in other countries, as in Spain and France. See Lombard-house.
myself ::: pron. --> I or me in person; -- used for emphasis, my own self or person; as I myself will do it; I have done it myself; -- used also instead of me, as the object of the first person of a reflexive verb, without emphasis; as, I will defend myself.
Mysticism The doctrine that the nature of reality can be known by direct apprehension, by faculties above the senses, by intuition. “Mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire — a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which therefore subject and object are one” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed. “Mysticism”). It overlaps in meaning such terms as the Neoplatonic ecstasis, and the theosophy of Iamblichus.
nama ::: name; the word designating an object, person or deity, "in its nama deeper sense . . . 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".
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: A highly ambiguous term, of which the following meanings are distinguished by A. O. Lovejoy: The objective as opposed to the subjective. An objective standard for values as opposed to custom, law, convention. The general cosmic order, usually conceived as divinely ordained, in contrast to human deviations from this. That which exists apart from and uninfluenced by man, in contrast with art. The instinctive or spontaneous behavior of man as opposed to the intellective. Various normative meanings are read into these, with the result that the "natural" is held to be better than the "artificial", the "unnatural", the "conventional" or customary, the intellectual or deliberate, the subjective. -- G.B.
Negative fulfilment: Fulfilment in which the objective senses of the fulfilled and fulfilling processes conflict. Fulfilment cannot be completely negative, since that would preclude synthesis of identification. -- D.C.
Noema: (Ger. Noema) In Husserl: The objective sense of a noesis, together with the character of the sense as posited in a certain manner, as given or emptily intended in a certain manner, etc. For every dimension of the noesis there is a corresponding dimension of the noema. See note under noesis. -- D.C.
Non-ego In European metaphysics, that which is external to or other than the ego; the object as opposed to the subject. Non-ego means both that which has risen above all lower egoities and become universal in its consciousness — in other words a jivanmukta, a monad which has attained mukti or moksha; and that which is beneath the state of egoity in its evolutionary development, in which this egoity has not yet been emanated or brought forth, such as the minerals, plants, and nearly all of the animal. Non-ego, therefore, in another sense corresponds to the term Absolute, that which is freed or above the circumscribing limitations of even egoity, which nevertheless is the abstract self or individual; or paradoxically enough the monad or ego in its jivanmukta form, where the ego becomes one with the surrounding cosmic spirit, while retaining its own individuality.
Notion: (Ger. Begriff) This is a technical term in the writings of Hegel, and as there used it has a dual reference. On one side, it refers to the essence or nature of the object of thought; on the other side, it refers to the true thought of that essence or nature. These two aspects of the Notion are emphasized at length in the third part of the Logic (The Doctrine of the Notion), where it is dialectically defined as the synthesis of Being and Essence under the form of the Idea (Die Idee). -- G.W.C.
Noumenon: (Gr. noumenon) In Kant: An object or power transcending experience whose existence is theoretically problematic but must be postulated by practical reason. In theoretical terms Kant defined the noumenon positively as "the object of a non-sensuous intuition," negatively as "not an object of the sensuous intuition;" but since he denied the existence of any but sensuous intuitions, the noumenon remained an unknowable "x". In his practical philosophy, however, the postulation of a noumenal realm is necessary in order to explain the possibility of freedom. See Kantianism. -- O.F.K.
Nyaya: (Skr.) One of the great systems of Indian philosophy (q.v.) going back to the Nyaya-sutras of Gotama (q.v.) and dealing with the logical approach to reality in a science of reasoning and epistemology designed to accomplish the practical aims of all Indian speculation. Having established perception (pratyaksa), inference (anumana), comparison (upamana), and testimony (sabdaq as sources of valid knowledge or truth, a doctrine of logical realism is arrived at in which the objective world is conceived independent of thought and mind. -- K.F.L.
Object Constraint Language "language" (OCL) A formal specification language extension to {UML}. The Object Constraint Language is a precise text language that provides {constraint} and {object query} expressions on an {object-oriented} model that cannot otherwise be expressed by diagrammatic notation. OCL supplements UML by providing expressions that have neither the ambiguities of {natural language} nor the inherent difficulty of using complex mathematics. OCL is a descendent of {Syntropy}, a second-generation object-oriented analysis and design method. The OCL 1.4 definition specified a constraint language. In OCL 2.0, the definition has been extended to include general object query language definitions. {OMG UML Home (http://uml.org/)}. {Rational UML Resource Center (http://rational.com/uml/index.jsp)}. {OCL 2.0 Submission to UML (http://omg.org/docs/ad/03-01-07.pdf)}. (2003-11-15)
Object Data Management Group "body, database" (ODMG, previously ".. Database ..") An independent consortium that specifies universal {object} storage {standards}. ODMG's members include {object-oriented database} management system (ODBMS) vendors and other interested parties. They aim to increase portability of customer software across products. On 1998-04-27 ODMG changed its name from the Object Database Management Group to reflect the expansion of its efforts beyond merely setting storage standards for object databases. {(http://odmg.org/)}. (2000-05-23)
objectist ::: n. --> One who adheres to, or is skilled in, the objective philosophy.
Objective C "language" An {object-oriented} superset of {ANSI C} by Brad Cox, Productivity Products. Its additions to {C} are few and are mostly based on {Smalltalk}. Objective C is implemented as a {preprocessor} for {C}. Its {syntax} is a superset of standard C syntax, and its {compiler} accepts both C and Objective C {source code} ({filename extension} ".m"). It has no operator {overloading}, {multiple inheritance}, or {class variables}. It does have {dynamic binding}. It is used as the system programming language on the {NeXT}. As implemented for {NEXTSTEP}, the Objective C language is fully compatible with {ANSI C}. Objective C can also be used as an extension to {C++}, which lacks some of the possibilities for {object-oriented design} that {dynamic typing} and {dynamic binding} bring to Objective C. C++ also has features not found in Objective C. Versions exist for {MS-DOS}, {Macintosh}, {VAX}/{VMS} and {Unix} {workstations}. Language versions by {Stepstone}, {NeXT} and {GNU} are slightly different. There is a library of ({GNU}) Objective C {objects} by R. Andrew McCallum "mccallum@cs.rochester.edu" with similar functionality to {Smalltalk}'s Collection objects. It includes: Set, {Bag}, {Array}, LinkedList, LinkList, CircularArray, {Queue}, {Stack}, {Heap}, SortedArray, MappedCollector, GapArray and DelegateList. Version: Alpha Release. {(ftp://iesd.auc.dk/pub/ObjC/)}. See also: {Objectionable-C}. ["Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", Brad Cox, A-W 1986]. (1999-07-10)
Objective idealism: A name for that philosophy which is based on the theory that both the subject and the object of knowledge are equally real and equally manifestations of the absolute or ideal. Earlier employed to describe Schelling's philosophy. Used independently by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) and A. N. Whitehead (1861-) to describe their varieties of realism. Subjective idealism supposes the world to consist of exemplifications of universals which have their being in the mind. Objective idealism supposes the world to consist of exemplifications of universals which have their being independent of the mind. -- J.K.F.
objectivity ::: n. --> The state, quality, or relation of being objective; character of the object or of the objective.
object "object-oriented" In {object-oriented programming}, an instance of the data structure and behaviour defined by the object's {class}. Each object has its own values for the {instance variables} of its class and can respond to the {methods} defined by its class. For example, an object of the "Point" class might have instance variables "x" and "y" and might respond to the "plot" method by drawing a dot on the screen at those coordinates. (2004-01-26)
object-oriented programming "programming" (OOP) The use of a class of programming languages and techniques based on the concept of an "{object}" which is a data structure ({abstract data type}) encapsulated with a set of routines, called "{methods}", which operate on the data. Operations on the data can __only__ be performed via these methods, which are common to all objects that are instances of a particular "{class}". Thus the interface to objects is well defined, and allows the code implementing the methods to be changed so long as the interface remains the same. Each class is a separate {module} and has a position in a "{class hierarchy}". Methods or code in one class can be passed down the hierarchy to a {subclass} or inherited from a {superclass}. This is called "{inheritance}". A {procedure} call is described as invoking a method on an object (which effectively becomes the procedure's first {argument}), and may optionally include other arguments. The method name is looked up in the object's class to find out how to perform that operation on the given object. If the method is not defined for the object's class, it is looked for in its superclass and so on up the class hierarchy until it is found or there is no higher superclass. OOP started with {SIMULA-67} around 1970 and became all-pervasive with the advent of {C++}, and later {Java}. Another popular object-oriented programming language (OOPL) is {Smalltalk}, a seminal example from {Xerox}'s {Palo Alto Research Center} (PARC). Others include {Ada}, {Object Pascal}, {Objective C}, {DRAGOON}, {BETA}, {Emerald}, {POOL}, {Eiffel}, {Self}, {Oblog}, {ESP}, {LOOPS}, {POLKA}, and {Python}. Other languages, such as {Perl} and {VB}, permit, but do not enforce OOP. {FAQ (http://iamwww.unibe.ch/~scg/OOinfo/FAQ/)}. {(http://zgdv.igd.fhg.de/papers/se/oop/)}. {(http://cuiwww.unige.ch/Chloe/OOinfo)}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.object}. (2001-10-11)
object ::: v. t. --> To set before or against; to bring into opposition; to oppose.
To offer in opposition as a criminal charge or by way of accusation or reproach; to adduce as an objection or adverse reason.
That which is put, or which may be regarded as put, in the way of some of the senses; something visible or tangible; as, he observed an object in the distance; all the objects in sight; he touched a strange object in the dark.
one-liner wars "games, programming" A game popular among {hackers} who code in the language {APL} (see {write-only language} and {line noise}). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of {operators} chosen from APL's exceedingly {hairy} primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among {TECO} hackers and is now popular among {Perl} aficionados. {Ken Iverson}, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this: (2 = 0 +.= T o.| T) / T "- iN where "o" is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a single character, and "i" represents the APL iota. [{Jargon File}] (2000-03-19)
ontology 1. "philosophy" A systematic account of Existence. 2. "artificial intelligence" (From philosophy) An explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them. For {AI} systems, what "exists" is that which can be represented. When the {knowledge} about a {domain} is represented in a {declarative language}, the set of objects that can be represented is called the {universe of discourse}. We can describe the ontology of a program by defining a set of representational terms. Definitions associate the names of entities in the {universe of discourse} (e.g. classes, relations, functions or other objects) with human-readable text describing what the names mean, and formal {axioms} that constrain the interpretation and well-formed use of these terms. Formally, an ontology is the statement of a {logical theory}. A set of {agents} that share the same ontology will be able to communicate about a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. We say that an agent commits to an ontology if its observable actions are consistent with the definitions in the ontology. The idea of ontological commitment is based on the {Knowledge-Level} perspective. 3. "information science" The hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things by subcategorising them according to their essential (or at least relevant and/or cognitive) qualities. See {subject index}. This is an extension of the previous senses of "ontology" (above) which has become common in discussions about the difficulty of maintaining {subject indices}. (1997-04-09)
OOSD Object-oriented structured design: a design method elaborated from structured design and incorporating the essential features of the object-oriented approach.
Open Distributed Processing "standard" (ODP) An attempt to standardise an {OSI} {application layer} communications architecture. ODP is a natural progression from {OSI}, broadening the target of standardisation from the point of interconnection to the end system behaviour. The objective of ODP is to enable the construction of {distributed systems} in a multi-vendor environment through the provision of a general architectural framework that such systems must conform to. One of the cornerstones of this framework is a model of multiple viewpoints which enables different participants to observe a system from a suitable perspective and a suitable level of {abstraction}. (1995-03-10)
OpenStep "operating system" An {object-oriented} {application programming interface} (API) derived from {NEXTSTEP} and proposed as an {open standard} by {NeXT} in 1994. OpenStep is the specification of the object kits of NEXTSTEP. OPENSTEP/Mach was an implementation of this specification. The original, OPENSTEP version 4.0, and really was NEXTSTEP 4. {Rhapsody} was the codename for {Apple}'s {Mac OS X} Server, which is really NEXTSTEP 5 (it calls itself "kernel 5.3" at boot time). OpenStep was designed to be implemented independently of the computer's operating system, hardware, and user interface. The {API} for {Rhapsody} will be a superset of {OpenStep}'s. When the OpenStep {API} is implemented for a specific platform and made into a product, it is written in uppercase, e.g. OPENSTEP Developer 4.2 for Mach, or OPENSTEP Enterprise for {Windows NT} and {Windows 95}. Versions of OPENSTEP exist for Windows 95/NT, Solaris, HP/UX, and Mach. (1999-11-25)
optigraph ::: a. --> A telescope with a diagonal eyepiece, suspended vertically in gimbals by the object end beneath a fixed diagonal plane mirror. It is used for delineating landscapes, by means of a pencil at the eye end which leaves the delineation on paper.
optography ::: n. --> The production of an optogram on the retina by the photochemical action of light on the visual purple; the fixation of an image in the eye. The object so photographed shows white on a purple or red background. See Visual purple, under Visual.
Orcus (Latin) [from Greek horcos an oath, the object by which one swears, the witness of an oath] Synonym for Hades, Dis, Pluto; Roman name for the presiding god of the Underworld, also for the Underworld itself. Horcos was the son of Eris (strife), who punishes the perjurer.
ourselves ::: pl. --> of Myself ::: pron. --> ; sing. Ourself (/). An emphasized form of the pronoun of the first person plural; -- used as a subject, usually with we; also, alone in the predicate, in the nominative or the objective case.
::: "Out of imperfection we have to construct perfection, out of limitation to discover infinity, out of death to find immortality, out of grief to recover divine bliss, out of ignorance to rescue divine self-knowledge, out of matter to reveal Spirit. To work out this end for ourselves and for humanity is the object of our Yogic practice.” *Essays Divine and Human
“Out of imperfection we have to construct perfection, out of limitation to discover infinity, out of death to find immortality, out of grief to recover divine bliss, out of ignorance to rescue divine self-knowledge, out of matter to reveal Spirit. To work out this end for ourselves and for humanity is the object of our Yogic practice.” Essays Divine and Human
parbuckle ::: n. --> A kind of purchase for hoisting or lowering a cylindrical burden, as a cask. The middle of a long rope is made fast aloft, and both parts are looped around the object, which rests in the loops, and rolls in them as the ends are hauled up or payed out.
A double sling made of a single rope, for slinging a cask, gun, etc. ::: v. t.
patra ::: vessel, plate, lid; recipient; the object or person referred to or patra acted upon by the faculties of knowledge or power. pe pempegach
Perception, pure: Is a form of action rather than a form of cognition. Involves an actual presence of external objects to the sense organs, is the reflection of the body's virtual or possible action upon these objects, or of the object's possible action upon the body. The consciousness of perception is a measure of its indetermination. (Bergson.) -- H.H.
Personal Realism: That type of Personalism which emphasizes the metaphysical nature of personality, its continuous activity in natural phenomena, and its unanalysable or realistic character as experienced fact, the ultimate real, the object of immediate knowledge. -- R.T.V.
Phantasy: (in Scholasticism) The internal sense perceptive of objects, even of absent objects, previously pciceived by the external sense. The phantasm is the species of the object perceived by an internal sense and retained in the phantasy. -- H.G.
Phenomenon (plural: phenomena). Any item of experience or reality. Kant divides the latter into: the noumenon, the thing in itself, which is utterly unknowable; and the phenomenon, which is the object of experience. In occult terminology applied to a cosmical chemical, or psychical impulse, experienced by one who is attuned to Nature’s more sensitive forces. (In astrology, the term is applied to supplementary data in the ephemeris indicating the exact times of eclipses, of the passing of the Nodes and other points in the orbit, of conjunctions, of the lunar ingresses, and similar details.)
Plotinism offers a well-developed theory of sensation. The objects of sensation are of a lower order of being than the perceiving organism. The inferior cannot act upon the superior. Hence sensation is an activity of the sensory agent upon its objects. Sensation provides a direct, realistic perception of material things, but, since they are ever-changing, such knowledge is not valuable. In internal seme perception, the imagimtion also functions actively, memory is attributed to the imaginative power and it serves not only in the recall of sensory images but also in the retention of the verbal formulae in which intellectual concepts are expressed. The human soul can look either upward or downward; up to the sphere of purer spirit, or down to the evil regions of matter. Rational knowledge is a cognition of intelligible realities, or Ideas in the realm of Mind which is often referred to as Divine. The climax of knowledge consists in an intuitive and mystical union with the One; this is experienced by few.
point 1. "unit, text" (Sometimes abbreviated "pt") The unit of length used in {typography} to specify text character height, {rule} width, and other small measurements. There are six slightly different definitions: {Truchet point}, {Didot point}, {ATA point}, {TeX point}, {Postscript point}, and {IN point}. In Europe, the most commonly used is Didot and in the US, the formerly standard ATA point has essentially been replaced by the PostScript point due to the demise of traditional typesetting systems and rise of desktop computer based systems running software such as {QuarkXPress}, {Adobe InDesign} and {Adobe Pagemaker}. There are 20 {twips} in a point and 12 points in a {pica} (known as a "Cicero" in the Didot system). {Different point systems (http://vakcer.com/oberon/dtp/fonts/point.htm)}. (2004-12-23) 2. "hardware" To move a {pointing device} so that the on-screen pointer is positioned over a certain object on the screen such as a {button} in a {graphical user interface}. In most {window systems} it is then necessary to {click} a (physical) button on the pointing device to activate or select the object. In some systems, just pointing to an object is known as "mouse-over" {event} which may cause some help text (called a "tool tip" in {Windows}) to be displayed. (2001-05-21)
POOL2 Parallel Object-Oriented Language 2. Philips Research Labs, 1987. Strongly typed, synchronous message passing, designed to run on {DOOM} (DOOM = Decentralised Object-Oriented Machine). ["POOL and DOOM: The Object- Oriented Approach", J.K. Annot, PAM den Haan, in Parallel Computers, Object-Oriented, Functional and Logic, P. Treleaven ed]. ["Issues in the Design of a Parallel Object-Oriented Language", P. America, Formal Aspects of Computing 1(4):366-411 (1989)]. (1995-02-07)
Positive fulfilment: Fulfilment in which the objective senses of the fulfilled and fulfilling processes harmonize.
Pragmatic Realism: The doctrine that knowledge comes by way of action, that to know is to act by hypotheses which result in successful adaption or resolve practical difficulties. According to pragmatic realism, the mind is not outside the realm of nature; in experience the organism and the world are at one; the theories of knowledge which follow the alleged dualism between the objective and subjective worlds are false. Ideas and knowledge are instruments for activity and not spectators of an outside realm. -- V.F.
Pragmatism: (Gr. pragma, things done) Owes its inception as a movement of philosophy to C. S. Peirce and William James, but approximations to it can be found in many earlier thinkers, including (according to Peirce and James) Socrates and Aristotle, Berkeley and Hume. Concerning a closer precursor, Shadworth Hodgson, James says that he "keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known as' ". Kant actually uses the word "pragmatic" to characterize "counsels of prudence" as distinct from "rules of skill" and "commands of morality" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 40). His principle of the primacy of practical reason is also an anticipation of pragmatism. It was reflection on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which originally led Peirce to formulate the view that the muddles of metaphysics can be cleared up if one attends to the practical consequences of ideas. The pragmatic maxim was first stated by Peirce in 1878 (Popular Science Monthly) "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". A clearer formulation by the same author reads: "In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception". This is often expressed briefly, viz.: The meaning of a proposition is its logical (or physical) consequences. The principle is not merely logical. It is also admonitory in Baconian style "Pragmatism is the principle that everv theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose onlv meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the impentive mood". (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 5.18.) Although Peirce's maxim has been an inspiration not only to later pragmatists, but to operationalists as well, Peirce felt that it might easily be misapplied, so as to eliminate important doctrines of science -- doctrines, presumably, which hive no ascertainable practical consequences.
Prameya: (Skr. to be measured, measurable) The proposition or thing to be proved; the object of knowledge. -- K.F.L.
Prana (Sanskrit) Prāṇa [from pra before + the verbal root an to breathe, live] In theosophy, the breath of life; the third principle in the ascending scale of the sevenfold human constitution. This life or prana works on, in, and around us, pulsating unceasingly during the term of physical existence. Prana is “the radiating force or Energy of Atma — as the Universal Life and the One Self, — Its lower or rather (in its effects) more physical, because manifesting, aspect. Prana or Life permeates the whole being of the objective Universe; and is called a ‘principle’ only because it is an indispensable factor and the deus ex machina of the living man” (Key 176).
Pratyahara: (Skr.) Withdrawal of the senses from external objects, one of the psycho-physical means for attaining the object of Yoga (q. v.). For the theory of the senses conceived as powers, see Indriya. -- K.F.L.
preference ::: n. --> The act of Preferring, or the state of being preferred; the setting of one thing before another; precedence; higher estimation; predilection; choice; also, the power or opportunity of choosing; as, to give him his preference.
That which is preferred; the object of choice or superior favor; as, which is your preference?
preposition ::: n. --> A word employed to connect a noun or a pronoun, in an adjectival or adverbial sense, with some other word; a particle used with a noun or pronoun (in English always in the objective case) to make a phrase limiting some other word; -- so called because usually placed before the word with which it is phrased; as, a bridge of iron; he comes from town; it is good for food; he escaped by running.
A proposition; an exposition; a discourse.
projection ::: n. --> The act of throwing or shooting forward.
A jutting out; also, a part jutting out, as of a building; an extension beyond something else.
The act of scheming or planning; also, that which is planned; contrivance; design; plan.
The representation of something; delineation; plan; especially, the representation of any object on a perspective plane, or such a delineation as would result were the chief points of the object
prosperity ::: n. --> The state of being prosperous; advance or gain in anything good or desirable; successful progress in any business or enterprise; attainment of the object desired; good fortune; success; as, commercial prosperity; national prosperity.
puja &
pumpkin "jargon" A humourous term for the {token} - the object (notional or real) that gives its possessor (the "pumpking" or the "pumpkineer") exclusive access to something, e.g. applying {patches} to a master copy of {source} (for which the pumpkin is called a "patch pumpkin"). Chip Salzenberg "chip@perl.com" wrote: David Croy once told me once that at a previous job, there was one tape drive and multiple systems that used it for backups. But instead of some high-tech exclusion software, they used a low-tech method to prevent multiple simultaneous backups: a stuffed pumpkin. No one was allowed to make backups unless they had the "backup pumpkin". (1999-02-23)
purpose ::: “Purpose means the intention, the object in view towards which the Divine is working.” The Mother
purpose ::: the object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal. Purpose, purposes. ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Purpose means the intention, the object in view towards which the Divine is working.” *The Mother
Quaestio: (Scholastic) A subdivision or chapter of some treatise. Later, the special form, imitating or actually reproducing a discussion, to which a thesis is proposed, then the arguments against it are listed, next the objections or argumenta contra are exposed, and the question is solved in the so-called corpus articuli, usually introduced by the standing phrase respondeo dicendum, finally the objections against the thesis and the response or solution are taken up one by one and answered. This is the quaestio disputata. The quaestio quodlibetalis stems from disputations in which all kind of problems were brought up and the leader had to arrange them somehow and to answer all of them. -- R.A.
quarry ::: n. --> Same as 1st Quarrel.
A part of the entrails of the beast taken, given to the hounds.
A heap of game killed.
The object of the chase; the animal hunted for; game; especially, the game hunted with hawks.
A place, cavern, or pit where stone is taken from the rock or ledge, or dug from the earth, for building or other purposes; a
quinze ::: n. --> A game at cards in which the object is to make fifteen points.
quite ::: v. t. & i. --> See Quit. ::: a. --> Completely; wholly; entirely; totally; perfectly; as, the work is not quite done; the object is quite accomplished; to be quite mistaken.
To a great extent or degree; very; very much; considerably.
quoth ::: v. t. --> Said; spoke; uttered; -- used only in the first and third persons in the past tenses, and always followed by its nominative, the word or words said being the object; as, quoth I. quoth he.
Raja yoga ::: This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in order that the soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery. But Rajayoga does not forget that the disabilities of the ordinary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions of the nervous system and the body. It adopts th
refore from the Hathayogic system its devices of asana and pranayama, but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in each case to one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic complexity and cumbrousness while it utilises the swift and powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal dynamism, full of a latent supernormal faculty, typified in Yogic terminology by the kundalinı, the coiled and sleeping serpent of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane through concentration of mental force by the successive stages which lead to the utmost inner concentration or ingathered state of the consciousness which is called Samadhi. By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double purpose. It compasses a pure mental action liberated from the confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the higher supra-mental planes on which the individual soul enters into its true spiritual existence. But also it acquires the capacity of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on its object which our philosophy asserts as the primary cosmic energy and the method of divine action upon the world. By this capacity the Yogin, already possessed of the highest supracosmic knowledge and experience in the state of trance, is able in the waking state to acquire directly whatever knowledge and exercise whatever mastery may be useful or necessary to his activities in the objective world. For the ancient system of Rajayoga aimed not only at Swarajya, self-rule or subjective empire, the entire control by the subjective consciousness of all the states and activities proper to its own domain, but included Samrajya as well, outward empire, the control by the subjective consciousness of its outer activities and environment.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 36-37
Referent: The object towards which an act of reference is directed. See Referend. -- L.W.
Referent: The object towards which an act of reference is directed. (See: referend.)
Relativity Associated with Einsteinian physics; the first postulate of the theory of relativity is the relativity of all motion, a return to the idea of Newton, which holds that there is no stationary ether or any fixed system of coordinates in space, with regard to which motion can be measured. The second postulate states that the velocity of light in free space appears the same to all observers regardless of the relative motion of the source of light and of the observer. A well-known feature of the theory is that by which space and time are no longer treated as independent, but as component elements of a four-dimensional continuum, space-time, and in which the objects whose position and motion are measured are called events. This is a movement in the direction of simplification, since it economizes the number of separate data which we must assume in order to build up our system of interpretation. Einstein also postulates the relativity of the force concept, thus obviating the objection that the Ptolemaic system is dynamically inadequate as compared with the Copernican.
REP "programming" A directive used in {IBM} {object code} {card decks} (and later {PTF Tapes}) to REPlace fragments of already assembled or compiled object code prior to {link edit}. Recompiling or reassembling the {source code} to produce a whole new object module was only possible if the {source code} was available, which it rarely was (if you had the object you were lucky!) It was also quicker to apply incremental changes with REP cards and they also circumvented the {checksums} and {card sequence numbers} present in the object code. (1998-07-16)
RESISTANCE. ::: When the soul draws towards the Divine, there may be a resistance in the mind and the common form of that is denial and doubt — which may create mental and vital su/Tering. There may again be a resistance in the vital nature ivhose principal characer is desire and the attachment to the objects of desire, and if in this field there is conflict between the soul and the vital nature, between the Divine Attraction and the pull of the Ignorance, then obviously there may be much suffer- ing of the mind and vital parts. The pbj-sical consciousness also may offer a resistance which is usually that of a fundamental inertia, an obscurity in the very stuff of the physical, an incom- prehension, an inability to respond to the higher consciousness, a habit of helplessly responding to the lower mechanically, even when it docs not want to do so ; both lital and physical suffer- ing may be the consequence. There is, moreover, the resistance of the Universal Nature which does not want the being to escape from the Ignorance into the Light. This may take the form of a vehement insistence in the continuation of the old movements, waves of them thrown on the mind and vital and body so that old ideas, impulses, desires, feelings, responses continue even after they are thrown out and rejected, and can return like an invading army from outside, until the whole nature, given to (he
Retinal Disparity ::: The binocular cue to distance referring to the distance between the two images sent to the brain by our eyes. The farther apart these images, the closer the object.
revenge ::: v. t. --> To inflict harm in return for, as an injury, insult, etc.; to exact satisfaction for, under a sense of injury; to avenge; -- followed either by the wrong received, or by the person or thing wronged, as the object, or by the reciprocal pronoun as direct object, and a preposition before the wrong done or the wrongdoer.
To inflict injury for, in a spiteful, wrong, or malignant spirit; to wreak vengeance for maliciously.
ringtoss ::: n. --> A game in which the object is to toss a ring so that it will catch upon an upright stick.
Sakshin (Sanskrit) Sākṣin [from sa together with + akṣa eye] That which is before the eyes; an observer, witness. In philosophy, the ego or subject, as opposed to the object or that which is external to the observing ego. Subba Row used the term as the highest of the four aspects of a parabrahman within the human constitution (Five Years of Theosophy 108).
Samadhi: Sanskrit for putting together. Profound meditation, absorption in the spirit. The final stage in the practice of Yoga, in which the individual becomes one with the object of meditation, thus attaining a condition of superconsciousness and unqualified blissfulness, which is called moksha.
Samadhi: (Skr.) The final stage in the practice of Yoga (q.v.) according to the Yogasutras (q.v.) in which individuality is given up while merging with the object of meditation; thus producing a state of unqualified blissfulness and unperturbed consciousness, which is moksa (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
samadhi. ::: transcendental awareness; the quiet state of blissful awareness; oneness; union with Brahman; the goal of all yogic practice, which is attained when the yogi constantly sees the supreme Self in his Heart; a direct but temporary absorption in the Self in which there is only the feeling "I am" and no thoughts; the state of superconsciousness where Reality is experienced attended with all-knowledge and joy &
samjnana ::: essential sense; contact of consciousness with its object; the inbringing movement of apprehensive consciousness which draws the object placed before it back to itself so as to possess it in conscious substance, to feel it.
Samsara: (Skr.) "Going about", the passage of the soul in the cycle of births and deaths, the round of existence, transmigration, a universally accepted dogma in India, early justified philosophically on the basis of karma (q.v.). and the nature of atman (q.v.), but its modus operandi variously explained. It is the object of practically every Indian philosophy to find a way to escape from samsara and attain moksa (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
saṁyama (sanyama; samyama) ::: self-control; concentration; identisamyama fication; dwelling of the consciousness on an object until the mind of the observer becomes one with the observed and the contents of the object, including its past, present and future, are known from within.
SANNYASA. ::: Outward renunciation. Sannyma does not take away attachment ; it amounts only to running away from the object of attachment which may help but cannot by itself alone be the radical cure.
satirize ::: v. t. --> To make the object of satire; to attack with satire; to censure with keenness or severe sarcasm.
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.
Schopenhauer, Arthur: (1738-1860) Brilliant, manysided philosopher, at times caustic, who attained posthumously even popular acclaim. His principal work, The World as Will and Idea starts with the thesis that the world is my idea, a primary fact of consciousness implying the inseparableness of subject and object (refutation of materialism and subjectivism). The object underlies the principle of sufficient reason whose fourfold root Schopenhauer had investigated previously in his doctoral dissertation as that of becoming (causality), knowing, being, and acting (motivation). But the world is also obstinate, blind, impetuous will (the word taken in a larger than the dictionary meaning) which objectifies itself in progressive stages in the world of ideas beginning with the forces of nature (gravity, etc.) and terminating in the will to live and the products of its urges. As thing-in-itself, the will is one, though many in its phenomenal forms, space and time serving as principia individuationis. The closer to archetypal forms the ideas (Platonic influence) and the less revealing the will, the greater the possibility of pure contemplation in art in which Schopenhauer found greatest personal satisfaction. Propounding a determinism and a consequential pessimism (q.v.), Schopenhauer concurs with Kant in the intelligible character of freedom, makes compassion (Mitleid; see Pity) the foundation of ethics, and upholds the Buddhist ideal of desirelessness as a means for allaying the will. Having produced intelligence, the will has created the possibility of its own negation in a calm, ascetic, abstinent life.
scorn ::: n. --> Extreme and lofty contempt; haughty disregard; that disdain which springs from the opinion of the utter meanness and unworthiness of an object.
An act or expression of extreme contempt.
An object of extreme disdain, contempt, or derision.
To hold in extreme contempt; to reject as unworthy of regard; to despise; to contemn; to disdain.
To treat with extreme contempt; to make the object of
Secondary Qualities: Those sensible qualities which are "nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities." This is the definition of John Locke. Such qualities (colors, sounds, tastes, smells) are distinguishable from primary in that they are highly variable, less constant. They appear in human consciousness in various forms, whereas the primary ones remain the same. See Primary Qualities. -- V.F.
seemly ::: v. i. --> Suited to the object, occasion, purpose, or character; suitable; fit; becoming; comely; decorous. ::: superl. --> In a decent or suitable manner; becomingly.
Self: 1. Ego, subject, I, me, as opposed to the object or to the totality of objects; may be distinguished from "not-me," as in W. James' statement (Principles of Psychology, I, 289) "One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us, and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean."
self ::: a. --> Same; particular; very; identical. ::: n. --> The individual as the object of his own reflective consciousness; the man viewed by his own cognition as the subject of all his mental phenomena, the agent in his own activities, the subject of his own feelings, and the possessor of capacities and character; a
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 concentration. 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 con- centration in the heart opens within and by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes aware of the soul or psy- chic 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 conscious- ness of the Presence, the dedication of the being to the Highest and invites the descent into our nature of a greater Force and
Semantics: (1) "The studv of the relation of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable" (C. W. Morris). A department of semiotic.
"Sense is in fact the mental contact of the embodied consciousness with its surroundings. This contact is always essentially a mental phenomenon; but in fact it depends chiefly upon the development of certain physical organs of contact with objects and with their properties to whose images it is able by habit to give their mental values. What we call the physical senses have a double element, the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it, and the two together make up our seeing, hearing, smell, taste, touch with all those varieties of sensation of which they, and the touch chiefly, are the starting-point or first transmitting agency.” The Synthesis of Yoga
“Sense is in fact the mental contact of the embodied consciousness with its surroundings. This contact is always essentially a mental phenomenon; but in fact it depends chiefly upon the development of certain physical organs of contact with objects and with their properties to whose images it is able by habit to give their mental values. What we call the physical senses have a double element, the physical-nervous impression of the object and the mental-nervous value we give to it, and the two together make up our seeing, hearing, smell, taste, touch with all those varieties of sensation of which they, and the touch chiefly, are the starting-point or first transmitting agency.” The Synthesis of Yoga
separate compilation "programming" A feature of most modern programming languages that allows each program {module} to be compiled on its own to produce an {object file} which the {linker} can later combine with other object files and {libraries} to produce the final {executable}. Separate compilation avoids processing all the source code every time the program is built, thus saving development time. The object files are designed to require minimal processing at {link time}. They can also be collected together into {libraries} and distributed commercially without giving away source code (though they can be disassembled). Examples of the output of separate compilation are {C} object files (extension ".o") and {Java} ".class" files. (2005-02-19)
show ::: v. t. --> To exhibit or present to view; to place in sight; to display; -- the thing exhibited being the object, and often with an indirect object denoting the person or thing seeing or beholding; as, to show a house; show your colors; shopkeepers show customers goods (show goods to customers).
To exhibit to the mental view; to tell; to disclose; to reveal; to make known; as, to show one&
Siddhartha (Sanskrit) Siddhārtha [from siddha attained from the verbal root sidh to accomplish, attain, succeed + artha object, aim] One who has attained or accomplished his object, one who has fulfilled the object of his coming on earth; a name given to Gautama Buddha. See also GAUTAMA
SINA ["An Implementation of the Object-Oriented Concurrent Programming Language SINA", A. Tripathi et al, Soft Prac & Exp 19(3):235-256 (1989)].
Sleep cannot be replaced, bm it can be changed ,* /or you can become conscious in sleep. If you are thus conscious, then the night can be utilised for a higher working — provided the body gets its due rest ; for the object of sleep is the body's rest and the renewal of the vital-physical force.
solitaire ::: n. --> A person who lives in solitude; a recluse; a hermit.
A single diamond in a setting; also, sometimes, a precious stone of any kind set alone.
A game which one person can play alone; -- applied to many games of cards, etc.; also, to a game played on a board with pegs or balls, in which the object is, beginning with all the places filled except one, to remove all but one of the pieces by "jumping," as in draughts.
Sortilegium (Latin) [from sors lot + lego choose] Divination by drawing lots; a practice of wide diffusion in antiquity, and constantly mentioned in literature of classical Greek and Latin as well as of other countries, and still practiced in some places. One form of it consisted in picking at random in the pages of a book, after due concentration of the mind on the object to be obtained. This was done by the Romans in their sortes Virgilianae, and the early Christians practiced it with the Bible, as a means of ascertaining the divine will or obtaining guidance. Augustine even sanctioned this practice, provided it was not done for worldly ends, and indulged in it himself. The word sorcery is also derived from sors through late Latin and French, and sortilege was often regarded as a form of sorcery — as indeed it was when the knowledge sought was desired for the purposes of evil. It is the motive in these matters which distinguishes the good from the bad. See also DIVINATION
Space, homogeneous: A form of sensibility, an intuition peculiar to man which enables him to externalize his concepts in relation to one another, reveals the objectivity of things; foreshadows and prepares the way for social life. (Bergson). -- H.H.
spectrum ::: n. --> An apparition; a specter.
The several colored and other rays of which light is composed, separated by the refraction of a prism or other means, and observed or studied either as spread out on a screen, by direct vision, by photography, or otherwise. See Illust. of Light, and Spectroscope.
A luminous appearance, or an image seen after the eye has been exposed to an intense light or a strongly illuminated object. When the object is colored, the image appears of the complementary color, as
..[Spiritual planes above the normal range of Mind, the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind] of the ascent enjoy their authority and can get their own united completeness only by a
reference to a third level; for it is from the higher summits where dwells the intuitional being that they derive the knowledge which they turn into thought or sight and bring down to us for the mind’s transmutation. Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrateswith the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 981-982
Sri Aurobindo: "He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.” *The Synthesis of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "Science started on the assumption that the ultimate truth must be physical and objective — and the objective Ultimate (or even less than that) would explain all subjective phenomena. Yoga proceeds on the opposite view that the ultimate Truth is spiritual and subjective and it is in that ultimate Light that we must view objective phenomena.” *Letters on Yoga
Sri Aurobindo: "That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies"] might be all right for mental poetry — it won"t do for what I am trying to create — in that, one word won"t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam" and ‘glow" are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri *
Sri Aurobindo: "The Master and Mover of our works is the One, the Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and Infinite. He is the transcendent unknown or unknowable Absolute, the unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.” *The Life Divine
Sri Aurobindo: ". . . thought in itself, in its origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or of some truth of things which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result of spiritual vision, a comparatively external and superficial regard of the self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something of itself as object.” *The Life Divine
stack "programming" (See below for synonyms) A data structure for storing items which are to be accessed in last-in first-out order. The operations on a stack are to create a new stack, to "push" a new item onto the top of a stack and to "pop" the top item off. Error conditions are raised by attempts to pop an empty stack or to push an item onto a stack which has no room for further items (because of its implementation). Most processors include support for stacks in their {instruction set architectures}. Perhaps the most common use of stacks is to store {subroutine} arguments and return addresses. This is usually supported at the {machine code} level either directly by "jump to subroutine" and "return from subroutine" instructions or by {auto-increment} and auto-decrement {addressing modes}, or both. These allow a contiguous area of memory to be set aside for use as a stack and use either a special-purpose {register} or a general purpose register, chosen by the user, as a {stack pointer}. The use of a stack allows subroutines to be {recursive} since each call can have its own calling context, represented by a stack frame or {activation record}. There are many other uses. The programming language {Forth} uses a data stack in place of variables when possible. Although a stack may be considered an {object} by users, implementations of the object and its access details differ. For example, a stack may be either ascending (top of stack is at highest address) or descending. It may also be "full" (the stack pointer points at the top of stack) or "empty" (the stack pointer points just past the top of stack, where the next element would be pushed). The full/empty terminology is used in the {Acorn Risc Machine} and possibly elsewhere. In a list-based or {functional language}, a stack might be implemented as a {linked list} where a new stack is an empty list, push adds a new element to the head of the list and pop splits the list into its head (the popped element) and tail (the stack in its modified form). At {MIT}, {pdl} used to be a more common synonym for stack, and this may still be true. {Knuth} ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says: Many people who realised the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, dumps, nesting stores, piles, last-in first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists! [{Jargon File}] (1995-04-10)
Standard Generalized Markup Language "language, text" (SGML) A generic {markup} language for representing documents. SGML is an International Standard that describes the relationship between a document's content and its structure. SGML allows document-based information to be shared and re-used across applications and computer {platforms} in an open, vendor-neutral format. SGML is sometimes compared to {SQL}, in that it enables companies to structure information in documents in an open fashion, so that it can be accessed or re-used by any SGML-aware application across multiple platforms. SGML is defined in "ISO 8879:1986 Information processing -- Text and office systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)", an {ISO} standard produced by {JTC} 1/SC 18 and amended by "Amendment 1:1988". Unlike other common document file formats that represent both content and presentation, SGML represents a document's content {data} and structure (interrelationships among the data). Removing the presentation from content establishes a neutral format. SGML documents and the information in them can easily be re-used by publishing and non-publishing {applications}. SGML identifies document elements such as titles, paragraphs, tables, and chapters as distinct objects, allowing users to define the relationships between the objects for structuring data in documents. The relationships between document elements are defined in a {Document Type Definition} (DTD). This is roughly analogous to a collection of {field} definitions in a {database}. Once a document is converted into SGML and the information has been 'tagged', it becomes a database-like document. It can be searched, printed or even programmatically manipulated by SGML-aware applications. Companies are moving their documents into SGML for several reasons: Reuse - separation of content from presentation facilitates multiple delivery formats like {CD-ROM} and {electronic publishing}. Portability - SGML is an international, platform-independent, standard based on {ASCII} text, so companies can safely store their documents in SGML without being tied to any one vendor. Interchange - SGML is a core data standard that enables SGML-aware applications to inter-operate and share data seamlessly. A central SGML document store can feed multiple processes in a company, so managing and updating information is greatly simplified. For example, when an aeroplane is delivered to a customer, it comes with thousands of pages of documentation. Distributing these on paper is expensive, so companies are investigating publishing on CD-ROM. If a maintenance person needs a guide for adjusting a plane's flight surfaces, a viewing tool automatically assembles the relevant information from the document {repository} as a complete document. SGML can be used to define attributes to information stored in documents such as security levels. There are few clear leaders in the SGML industry which, in 1993, was estimated to be worth US $520 million and is projected to grow to over US $1.46 billion by 1998. A wide variety tools can be used to create SGML systems. The SGML industry can be separated into the following categories: Mainstream Authoring consists of the key {word processing} vendors like {Lotus}, {WordPerfect} and {Microsoft}. SGML Editing and Publishing includes traditional SGML authoring tools like {ArborText}, {Interleaf}, {FrameBuilder} and {SoftQuad Author}/Editor. SGML Conversions is one of the largest sectors in the market today because many companies are converting legacy data from mainframes, or documents created with mainstream word processors, into SGML. Electronic Delivery is widely regarded as the most compelling reason companies are moving to SGML. Electronic delivery enables users to retrieve information on-line using an intelligent document viewer. Document Management may one day drive a major part of the overall SGML industry. SGML Document Repositories is one of the cornerstone technologies that will affect the progress of SGML as a data standard. Since 1998, almost all development in SGML has been focussed on {XML} - a simple (and therefore easier to understand and implement) subset of SGML. {"ISO 8879:1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN" (http://ucc.ie/info/net/isolat1.html)} defines some characters. [How are these related to {ISO 8859}-1?]. {ISO catalogue entry (http://iso.ch/cate/d16387.html)}. SGML parsers are available from {VU, NL (ftp://star.cs.vu.nl/Sgml)}, {FSU (ftp://mailer.cc.fsu.edu/pub/sgml)}, {UIO, Norway (ftp://ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/SGMLS)}. See also {sgmls}. {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:comp.text.sgml}. ["The SGML Handbook", Charles F. Goldfarb, Clarendon Press, 1991, ISBN 0198537379. (Full text of the ISO standard plus extensive commentary and cross-referencing. Somewhat cheaper than the ISO document)]. ["SGML - The User's Guide to ISO 8879", J.M. Smith et al, Ellis Harwood, 1988]. [Example of some SGML?] (2000-05-31)
static method "programming" In {object-oriented programming}, a {function} packaged along with a given {class}; not really a {method} at all. For example, a String class might include a static method, concatenate(), which returns its arguments joined into one string. It might be called like this: print String.concatenate("FOL", "DOC"); which would print "FOLDOC". The same result might be achieved with a real {object method}, append(), which returns its argument string appended to the object it is invoked on, e.g.: String s = "FOL"; print s.append("DOC"); While the {syntax} looks similar, the two are completely different. The static method is just a function called "String.concatenate" which can be resolved to the address of some code at compile time (or load time if the String class is dynamically loaded). When invoking an object method, the class of the object is not generally known until {run time} so method lookup is a run-time process. (2014-09-06)
stereopticon ::: n. --> An instrument, consisting essentially of a magic lantern in which photographic pictures are used, by which the image of a landscape, or any object, may be thrown upon a screen in such a manner as to seem to stand out in relief, so as to form a striking and accurate representation of the object itself; also, a pair of magic lanterns for producing the effect of dissolving views.
sthūla ::: gross, physical; concrete, objective; pertaining to the physical sthula being or the material world; (sensations, etc.) objectivised from a subtle plane so as to be perceptible to the physical senses (see sthūlatva); the objective world or material plane of existence; same as sthūla akasa or sthūla deha. sthula sth ūla ak akasa
structuralism ::: Traditionally refers to the study of the structures of the mind that underlie human behavior. In Integral Theory, structuralism typically refers to the objective study of interior realities over time in search of regularities and patterns. It is most often used as a third-person approach to first-person singular realities. The outside view of the interior of an individual (i.e., the outside view of a holon in the Upper-Left quadrant). Exemplary of a zone-
Structure of Management Information (SMI) The rules used to define the objects that can be accessed via a {network management protocol}. This {protocol} is defined in {STD} 16, {RFC} 1155. See also {Management Information Base}. (1994-11-14)
subjective ::: 1. Existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought (opposed to objective). 2. Relating to or of the nature of an object as it is known in the mind as distinct from a thing in itself.
Subjective idealism denies the existence of objective reality altogether, except perhaps as illusory, as for instance in the views of Berkeley. Objective idealism, such as the system of Schelling, recognizes the existence of objective worlds while regarding the ideal world as the primary production and paramount: the external world has a relative and temporary or mayavi reality. This latter view is the only strictly logical one; for if we annihilate the object, we must thereby annihilate the subject also, these two terms having no meaning except relatively to each other. In any theory of knowledge, there must be knower and thing known; and the latter is objective to the former. Absolute idealism logically is as unthinkable as is absolute materialism. See also MAYA
Subjectivity Subjective and objective are interdependent, having meaning only in relation to each other. Subjective is said to apply to whatever is referred to the thinking subject, the ego; objective to whatever belongs to the object of thought, the non-ego. Subjective and objective express a relation between the act of perception and the object perceived. To some extent the two words correspond to mind and matter, but parts of mind itself may become objects of some higher perceptive subject. Modern idealists say that the cooperation of subject and object results in the sense object or phenomenon, but this does not hold good on all other planes than that of the physical senses. Subject and object, however, are contrasted on every plane, and this contrast represents the experience of the perceiving ego. But the peak of omniscience, or knowledge of things in themselves, is not reached until the duality or contrast of subject and object vanishes into unity (SD 1:329, 320).
Sunya; sunyata: Sanskrit for void, nothingness. In occult terminology, the objective universe seen as an illusion. (See: sunya-vada).
SUPPRESSION. ::: In our path the altitude is not one of force- ful suppression, but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire. Forreful suppression (lasting comes under the head) stands on the same level as free indulgence ; in both cases, the desire remains ; in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital.
Suppression ::: In our path the attitude is not one of forceful suppression but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire. Forceful suppression stands on the same level as free indulgence; in both cases, the desire remains; in the one it is fed by indulgence, in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It is only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital,
refusing to regard its desires and clamours as one’s own, and cultivates an entire equality and equanimity in the consciousness with respect to them that the lower vital itself becomes gradually purified and itself also calm and equal. Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, rejected from the consciousness, and the true movement, the true consciousness steadily put in its place.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 22-23-24, Page: 1465
SUPRAMENTAUSATION. ::: If the redemption of the soul from the physical vesture be the object, then there is no need of supramcntalisation. Spiritual Mukti and Nirvana arc suflicicnt-
systems theory ::: The objective study of networks of organisms, things, and processes. A third-person approach to third-person plural realities. The outside view of the exterior of the collective (i.e., the outside view of a holon in the Lower-Right quadrant). Exemplary of a zone-
Tao Teh Ching or Tao Te King (Chinese) [from tao path, way + te virtue + ching book] The canon of tao and virtue, or the Book of Taoistic virtue; the principal work on tao, attributed to Lao Tzu, consisting of 81 short chapters written in a terse, pithy style which makes its translation and explanation most difficult. When Lao Tsu was departing through the pass, it is said that at the request of its keeper, Yin Hsi (a famous Taoist), he wrote a book in regard to his ideas on tao and te running to somewhat over five thousand characters. Its teaching is principally imparted by means of paradoxes, the object being that by startling the mind one may perceive truth without ratiocinations.
tasimer ::: n. --> An instrument for detecting or measuring minute extension or movements of solid bodies. It consists essentially of a small rod, disk, or button of carbon, forming part of an electrical circuit, the resistance of which, being varied by the changes of pressure produced by the movements of the object to be measured, causes variations in the strength of the current, which variations are indicated by a sensitive galvanometer. It is also used for measuring minute changes of temperature.
Termmism: See Nominalism. Tertiary Qualities: Those qualities which are said to be imparted to objects by the mind. In contrast to primary and secondary qualities which are directed toward the objects (primary being thought of distinctly a part of objects) tertiary qualities are the subject's reactions to them. A thing, for example, is said to be good: The good points to the subject's reaction rather than to the object itself. -- V.F.
than ::: conj. --> A particle expressing comparison, used after certain adjectives and adverbs which express comparison or diversity, as more, better, other, otherwise, and the like. It is usually followed by the object compared in the nominative case. Sometimes, however, the object compared is placed in the objective case, and than is then considered by some grammarians as a preposition. Sometimes the object is expressed in a sentence, usually introduced by that; as, I would rather suffer than that you should want.
“That (‘to blend and blur shades owing to technical exigencies’] might be all right for mental poetry—it won’t do for what I am trying to create—in that, one word won’t do for the other. Even in mental poetry I consider it an inferior method. ‘Gleam’ and ‘glow’ are two quite different things and the poet who uses them indifferently has constantly got his eye upon words rather than upon the object.” Letters on Savitri
The astral light is nature’s storehouse of the images of events, and contact with the object puts the psychometer in rapport with the impressions concerned. The psychometer brings his inner self in contact with the “soul” of the object. But as the phenomena involve the properties of planes other than the physical, any attempt to explain them in terms of the physical plane must necessarily be lame. The physical plane limits both the powers of nature and our own faculties, and the psychometer rises to a plane where some of these barriers are removed, for nothing is destroyed and there is unity and intercommunication throughout all nature.
The causes which it is the aim of scientific inquiry to discover are of four sorts: the material cause (that of which a thing is made), the efficient cause (that by which it comes into being), the formal cause (its essence or nature, i.e. what it is), and the final cause (its end, or that for which it exists). In natural objects, as distinct from the products of art, the last three causes coincide; for the end of a natural object is the realization of its essence, and likewise it is this identical essence embodied in another individual that is the efficient cause in its production. Thus for Aristotle every object in the sense world is a union of two ultimate principles: the material constituents, or matter (hyle), and the form, structure, or essence which makes of these constituents the determinate kind of being it is. Nor is this union an external or arbitrary one; for the matter is in every case to be regarded as possessing the capacity for the form, as being potentially the formed matter. Likewise the form has being only in the succession of its material embodiments. Thus Aristotle opposes what he considers to be the Platonic doctrine that real being belongs only to the forms or universals, whose existence is independent of the objects that imperfectly manifest them. On the other hand, against the earlier nature-philosophies that found their explanatory principles in matter, to the neglect of form, Aristotle affirms that matter must be conceived as a locus of determinate potentialities that become actualized only through the activity of forms.
The differences begin when the questions of the mode of creation and mediators between God and the world are dealt with. In these matters there are to be noted three variations. Saadia rejected entirely the theory of the emanation of separate intelligences, and teaches God's creation from nothing of all beings in the sublunar and upper worlds. He posits that God created first a substratum or the first air which was composed of the hyle and form and out of this element all beings were created, not only the four elements, the components of bodies in the lower world, but also the angels, stars, and the spheres. Bahya's conception is similar to that of Saadia. The Aristotelians, Ibn Daud, Maimonides, and Gersonides accepted the theory of the separate intelligences which was current in Arabic philosophy. This theory teaches that out of the First Cause there emanated an intelligence, and out of this intelligence another one up to nine, corresponding to the number of spheres. Each of these intelligences acts as the object of the mind of a sphere and is the cause of its movement. The tenth intelligence is the universal intellect, an emanation of all intelligences which has in its care the sublunar world. This theory is a combination of Aristotelian and neo-PIatonic teachings; Ibn Daud posits, however, in addition to the intelligences also the existence of angels, created spiritual beings, while Maimonides seems to identify the angels with the intelligences, and also says that natural forces are also called angels in the Bible. As for creation, Ibn Daud asserts that God created the hyle or primal matter and endowed it with general form from which the specific forms later developed. Maimonides seems to believe that God first created a substance consisting of primal matter and primal form, and that He determined by His will that parts of it should form the matter of the spheres which is imperishable, while other parts should form the matter of the four elements. These views, however, are subject to various interpretations by historians. Gabirol and Gersonides posit the eternal existence of the hyle and limit creation to endowing it with form and organization -- a view close to the Platonic.
thee ::: a. --> To thrive; to prosper. ::: pron. --> The objective case of thou. See Thou.
thee ::: the objective form of thou.
The great Eleusinian divinities, as far as is known, were three: Demeter-Thesmophoros as goddess of law and order; Persephone-Kore the divine maid; and Iacchos the divine son (the divine man whom it was the object of the Mysteries to bring forth from the “tomb” of the human man). Probably because of her association with Persephone, Demeter was in one of her aspects a divinity of the underworld and was worshiped as such in Sparta and at Hermione at Argolis.
The human soul is considered by Plato to be an immaterial agent, superior in nature to the body and somewhat hindered by the body in the performance of the higher, psychic functions of human life. The tripartite division of the soul becomes an essential teaching of Platonic psychology from the Republic onward. The rational part is highest and is pictured as the ruler of the psychological organism in the well-regulated man. Next in importance is the "spirited" element of the soul, which is the source of action and the seat of the virtue of courage. The lowest part is the concupiscent or acquisitive element, which may be brought under control by the virtue of temperancc The latter two are often combined and called irrational in contrast to the highest part. Sensation is an active function of the soul, by which the soul "feels" the objects of sense through the instrumentality of the body. Particularly in the young, sensation is a necessary prelude to the knowledge of Ideas, but the mature and developed soul must learn to rise above sense perception and must strive for a more direct intuition of intelligible essences. That the soul exists before the body (related to the Pythagorean and, possibly, Orphic doctrine of transmigration) and knows the world of Ideas immediately in this anterior condition, is the foundation of the Platonic theory of reminiscence (Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus). Thus the soul is born with true knowledge in it, but the soul, due to the encrustation of bodily cares and interests, cannot easily recall the truths innately, and we might say now, subconsciously present in it. Sometimes sense perceptions aid the soul in the process of reminiscence, and again, as in the famous demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem by the slave boy of the Meno, the questions and suggestions of a teacher provide the necessary stimuli for recollection. The personal immortality of the soul is very clearly taught by Plato in the tale of Er (Repub. X) and, with various attempts at logical demonstration, in the Phaedo. Empirical and physiological psychology is not stressed in Platonism, but there is an approach to it in the descriptions of sense organs and their media in the Timaeus 42 ff.
"The illumining Godhead is himself the Veda and that which is made known by the Veda. He is both the knowledge and the object of the knowledge.” Essays on the Gita
“The illumining Godhead is himself the Veda and that which is made known by the Veda. He is both the knowledge and the object of the knowledge.” Essays on the Gita
The inner vision can sec the vibration of the forces which act through the object.
"The inner vision can see objects, but it can see instead the vibration of the forces which act through the object.” Letters on Yoga
“The inner vision can see objects, but it can see instead the vibration of the forces which act through the object.” Letters on Yoga
them ::: pron. --> The objective case of they. See They.
“The name given to the Hermetists and Alchemists of the Middle Ages, and also to the Rosicrucians. The latter, the successors of the Theurgists, regarded fire as the symbol of Deity. It was the source, not only of material atoms, but the container of the spiritual and psychic Forces energizing them. Broadly analyzed, fire is a triple principle; esoterically, a septenary, as are all the rest of the Elements. As man is composed of Spirit, Soul and Body, plus a fourfold aspect: so is Fire. As in the works of Robert Fludd (de Fluctibus) one of the famous Rosicrucians, Fire contains (1) a visible flame (Body); (2) an invisible, astral fire (Soul); and (3) Spirit. The four aspects are heat (life), light (mind), electricity (Kamic, or molecular powers) and the Synthetic Essence, beyond Spirit, or the radical cause of its existence and manifestation. For the Hermetist or Rosicrucian, when a flame is extinct on the objective plane it has only passed from the seen world unto the unseen, from the knowable into the unknowable” (TG 119-20).
The objection to the terms dimensions and dimensional arises merely because they apply with strict accuracy only to the three standard manners of measuring physical objects, and likewise to the time element or points of duration; but when applied to the higher modes or qualities of the cosmic continuum, these words can be strictly used only by distorting the idea of mensuration they involve. We cannot easily say that consciousness is capable of mensuration in the manner in which we mensurate off particles or bodies of physical substance, for such mensuration does not apply. But to speak of space as containing in itself a quality which we humans cognize as intelligence, consciousness, love, or hate is to speak with accuracy, for all these qualities exist.
The objective idealism which the theosophic philosophy teaches when considering the noumena and phenomena of existence shows a fundamental reality behind these, above and beyond all manifestations whatsoever, as the root and basis of all entities and things, which although relatively unreal in themselves because products merely, or because based on the various prakritis, nevertheless because so based have a relative reality derivative from this basic root. See also PLEROMA
There are two words used in English to express the Indian idea of dhyana, * meditation ’ and ‘ contemplation ’. Meditation means properly the concentration of the mind on a single train of ideas which work out a single subject. Contemplation means regarding mentally a single object, image, idea so that the know- ledge about the object, image or idea may arise naturally in the mind by force of the concentration. Both these things are forms of dhyana, for the principle of dh)ona is mental concentration whether in thought, vision or knowledge. There are other forms of dhyana. You stand back from your thoughts, let them occur in your mind as they will and simply observe them and see what they are. This may be called concentration in self-observation.
There is also the way -of the psychic, — when the psychic being comes out in its inherent power, its consecration, adoration, love of the Divine, self-^ving, surrendei and imposes these on the mind, vital and physical consciousness and compels them to turn all their movements Godward. If the psychic is strong and master throughout, then there is no or little subjective suffering and the objective cannot affect either the sou! or the other parts of the consciousness the way is sunlit and a great joy and sweetness are the note of the whole sadhana.
thermotype ::: n. --> A picture (as of a slice of wood) obtained by first wetting the object slightly with hydrochloric or dilute sulphuric acid, then taking an impression with a press, and next strongly heating this impression.
The structural problem stated in terms of the antithesis between subjective and objective is rather too vague for the purposes of epistemology and a more precise analysis of the knowledge-situation and statement of the issues involved is required. The perceptual situation -- and this analysis may presumably be extended with appropriate modifications to memory, imagination and other modes of cognition -- consists of a subject (the self, or pure act of perceiving), the content (sense data) and the object (the physical thing perceived). In terms of this analysis, two issues may be formulated Are content and object identical (epistemological monism), or are they numerically distinct (epistemological dualism)? and Does the object exist independently of the knowing subject (epistemological idealism) or is it dependent upon the subject (epistemological realism)? (h) The problem of truth is perhaps the culmination of epistemological enquiry -- in any case it is the problem which brings the enquiry to the threshold of metaphysics. The traditional theories of the nature of truth are: the correspondence theory which conceives truth as a relation between an "idea" or a proposition and its object --the relation has commonly been regarded as one of resemblance but it need not be so considered (see Correspondence theory of truth); the Coherence theory which adopts as the criterion of truth, the logical consistency of a proposition with a wider system of propositions (see Coherence theory of truth), and the intrinsic theory which views truth as an intrinsic property of the true proposition. See Intrinsic theory of truth. --L-W. Bibliography:
The temple then is the shrine of the divine presence, and as such plays a predominant role in all cults, appearing as a Holy of Holies, a tabernacle, etc., and with many elaborations and accessories, such as special chambers, images, sacred vessels, and the like. The word becomes equivalent to all those signifying the receptive side of universal nature, such as moon, ark, and womb. The object of making inner understanding and inner vision seem more real to the mere man, by constructing edifices consecrated to divine worship and designed to draw down divine presences, is one that can readily be understood, and which may be either an assistance or a drawback according to whether the spirit of the worshiper is less or more materialistic.
This is the transcendental, universal and individual Brahman, Lord, Continent and Indwelling Spirit, which is the object of all knowledge. Its realisation is the condition of perfection and the way of Immortality.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 17, Page: 30
. thivi (prithivi) ::: earth; the objective world, same as bhū; Matter,"the earth-principle creating habitations of physical form for the soul"; the lowest of the pañcabhūta, material energy in the state "of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state"; the physical consciousness.2Pr Prthivi
Thoughts ::: Thought in itself, in its origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or of some truth of things which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result of spiritual vision, a comparatively external and superficial regard of the self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something of itself as object.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 979-80
thought ::: “… thought in itself, in its origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or of some truth of things which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result of spiritual vision, a comparatively external and superficial regard of the self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something of itself as object.” The Life Divine
Three senses of "Ockhamism" may be distinguished: Logical, indicating usage of the terminology and technique of logical analysis developed by Ockham in his Summa totius logicae; in particular, use of the concept of supposition (suppositio) in the significative analysis of terms. Epistemological, indicating the thesis that universality is attributable only to terms and propositions, and not to things as existing apart from discourse. Theological, indicating the thesis that no tneological doctrines, such as those of God's existence or of the immortality of the soul, are evident or demonstrable philosophically, so that religious doctrine rests solely on faith, without metaphysical or scientific support. It is in this sense that Luther is often called an Ockhamist. Bibliography: B. Geyer, Ueberwegs Grundriss d. Gesch. d. Phil., Bd. II (11th ed., Berlin 1928), pp. 571-612 and 781-786; N. Abbagnano, Guglielmo di Ockham (Lanciano, Italy, 1931); E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham (N. Y. & London, 1935); F. Ehrle, Peter von Candia (Muenster, 1925); G. Ritter, Studien zur Spaetscholastik, I-II (Heidelberg, 1921-1922). --E.A.M. Om, aum: (Skr.) Mystic, holy syllable as a symbol for the indefinable Absolute. See Aksara, Vac, Sabda. --K.F.L. Omniscience: In philosophy and theology it means the complete and perfect knowledge of God, of Himself and of all other beings, past, present, and future, or merely possible, as well as all their activities, real or possible, including the future free actions of human beings. --J.J.R. One: Philosophically, not a number but equivalent to unit, unity, individuality, in contradistinction from multiplicity and the mani-foldness of sensory experience. In metaphysics, the Supreme Idea (Plato), the absolute first principle (Neo-platonism), the universe (Parmenides), Being as such and divine in nature (Plotinus), God (Nicolaus Cusanus), the soul (Lotze). Religious philosophy and mysticism, beginning with Indian philosophy (s.v.), has favored the designation of the One for the metaphysical world-ground, the ultimate icility, the world-soul, the principle of the world conceived as reason, nous, or more personally. The One may be conceived as an independent whole or as a sum, as analytic or synthetic, as principle or ontologically. Except by mysticism, it is rarely declared a fact of sensory experience, while its transcendent or transcendental, abstract nature is stressed, e.g., in epistemology where the "I" or self is considered the unitary background of personal experience, the identity of self-consciousness, or the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifoldness of ideas (Kant). --K.F.L. One-one: A relation R is one-many if for every y in the converse domain there is a unique x such that xRy. A relation R is many-one if for every x in the domain there is a unique y such that xRy. (See the article relation.) A relation is one-one, or one-to-one, if it is at the same time one-many and many-one. A one-one relation is said to be, or to determine, a one-to-one correspondence between its domain and its converse domain. --A.C. On-handedness: (Ger. Vorhandenheit) Things exist in the mode of thereness, lying- passively in a neutral space. A "deficient" form of a more basic relationship, termed at-handedness (Zuhandenheit). (Heidegger.) --H.H. Ontological argument: Name by which later authors, especially Kant, designate the alleged proof for God's existence devised by Anselm of Canterbury. Under the name of God, so the argument runs, everyone understands that greater than which nothing can be thought. Since anything being the greatest and lacking existence is less then the greatest having also existence, the former is not really the greater. The greatest, therefore, has to exist. Anselm has been reproached, already by his contemporary Gaunilo, for unduly passing from the field of logical to the field of ontological or existential reasoning. This criticism has been repeated by many authors, among them Aquinas. The argument has, however, been used, if in a somewhat modified form, by Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Leibniz. --R.A. Ontological Object: (Gr. onta, existing things + logos, science) The real or existing object of an act of knowledge as distinguished from the epistemological object. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ontologism: (Gr. on, being) In contrast to psychologism, is called any speculative system which starts philosophizing by positing absolute being, or deriving the existence of entities independently of experience merely on the basis of their being thought, or assuming that we have immediate and certain knowledge of the ground of being or God. Generally speaking any rationalistic, a priori metaphysical doctrine, specifically the philosophies of Rosmini-Serbati and Vincenzo Gioberti. As a philosophic method censored by skeptics and criticists alike, as a scholastic doctrine formerly strongly supported, revived in Italy and Belgium in the 19th century, but no longer countenanced. --K.F.L. Ontology: (Gr. on, being + logos, logic) The theory of being qua being. For Aristotle, the First Philosophy, the science of the essence of things. Introduced as a term into philosophy by Wolff. The science of fundamental principles, the doctrine of the categories. Ultimate philosophy; rational cosmology. Syn. with metaphysics. See Cosmology, First Principles, Metaphysics, Theology. --J.K.F. Operation: "(Lit. operari, to work) Any act, mental or physical, constituting a phase of the reflective process, and performed with a view to acquiring1 knowledge or information about a certain subject-nntter. --A.C.B. In logic, see Operationism. In philosophy of science, see Pragmatism, Scientific Empiricism. Operationism: The doctrine that the meaning of a concept is given by a set of operations. 1. The operational meaning of a term (word or symbol) is given by a semantical rule relating the term to some concrete process, object or event, or to a class of such processes, objectj or events. 2. Sentences formed by combining operationally defined terms into propositions are operationally meaningful when the assertions are testable by means of performable operations. Thus, under operational rules, terms have semantical significance, propositions have empirical significance. Operationism makes explicit the distinction between formal (q.v.) and empirical sentences. Formal propositions are signs arranged according to syntactical rules but lacking operational reference. Such propositions, common in mathematics, logic and syntax, derive their sanction from convention, whereas an empirical proposition is acceptable (1) when its structure obeys syntactical rules and (2) when there exists a concrete procedure (a set of operations) for determining its truth or falsity (cf. Verification). Propositions purporting to be empirical are sometimes amenable to no operational test because they contain terms obeying no definite semantical rules. These sentences are sometimes called pseudo-propositions and are said to be operationally meaningless. They may, however, be 'meaningful" in other ways, e.g. emotionally or aesthetically (cf. Meaning). Unlike a formal statement, the "truth" of an empirical sentence is never absolute and its operational confirmation serves only to increase the degree of its validity. Similarly, the semantical rule comprising the operational definition of a term has never absolute precision. Ordinarily a term denotes a class of operations and the precision of its definition depends upon how definite are the rules governing inclusion in the class. The difference between Operationism and Logical Positivism (q.v.) is one of emphasis. Operationism's stress of empirical matters derives from the fact that it was first employed to purge physics of such concepts as absolute space and absolute time, when the theory of relativity had forced upon physicists the view that space and time are most profitably defined in terms of the operations by which they are measured. Although different methods of measuring length at first give rise to different concepts of length, wherever the equivalence of certain of these measures can be established by other operations, the concepts may legitimately be combined. In psychology the operational criterion of meaningfulness is commonly associated with a behavioristic point of view. See Behaviorism. Since only those propositions which are testable by public and repeatable operations are admissible in science, the definition of such concepti as mind and sensation must rest upon observable aspects of the organism or its behavior. Operational psychology deals with experience only as it is indicated by the operation of differential behavior, including verbal report. Discriminations, or the concrete differential reactions of organisms to internal or external environmental states, are by some authors regarded as the most basic of all operations. For a discussion of the role of operational definition in phvsics. see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, (New York, 1928) and The Nature of Physical Theory (Princeton, 1936). "The extension of operationism to psychology is discussed by C. C. Pratt in The Logic of Modem Psychology (New York. 1939.) For a discussion and annotated bibliography relating to Operationism and Logical Positivism, see S. S. Stevens, Psychology and the Science of Science, Psychol. Bull., 36, 1939, 221-263. --S.S.S. Ophelimity: Noun derived from the Greek, ophelimos useful, employed by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) in economics as the equivalent of utility, or the capacity to provide satisfaction. --J.J.R. Opinion: (Lat. opinio, from opinor, to think) An hypothesis or proposition entertained on rational grounds but concerning which doubt can reasonably exist. A belief. See Hypothesis, Certainty, Knowledge. --J.K.F- Opposition: (Lat. oppositus, pp. of oppono, to oppose) Positive actual contradiction. One of Aristotle's Post-predicaments. In logic any contrariety or contradiction, illustrated by the "Square of Opposition". Syn. with: conflict. See Logic, formal, § 4. --J.K.F. Optimism: (Lat. optimus, the best) The view inspired by wishful thinking, success, faith, or philosophic reflection, that the world as it exists is not so bad or even the best possible, life is good, and man's destiny is bright. Philosophically most persuasively propounded by Leibniz in his Theodicee, according to which God in his wisdom would have created a better world had he known or willed such a one to exist. Not even he could remove moral wrong and evil unless he destroyed the power of self-determination and hence the basis of morality. All systems of ethics that recognize a supreme good (Plato and many idealists), subscribe to the doctrines of progressivism (Turgot, Herder, Comte, and others), regard evil as a fragmentary view (Josiah Royce et al.) or illusory, or believe in indemnification (Henry David Thoreau) or melioration (Emerson), are inclined optimistically. Practically all theologies advocating a plan of creation and salvation, are optimistic though they make the good or the better dependent on moral effort, right thinking, or belief, promising it in a future existence. Metaphysical speculation is optimistic if it provides for perfection, evolution to something higher, more valuable, or makes room for harmonies or a teleology. See Pessimism. --K.F.L. Order: A class is said to be partially ordered by a dyadic relation R if it coincides with the field of R, and R is transitive and reflexive, and xRy and yRx never both hold when x and y are different. If in addition R is connected, the class is said to be ordered (or simply ordered) by R, and R is called an ordering relation. Whitehcid and Russell apply the term serial relation to relations which are transitive, irreflexive, and connected (and, in consequence, also asymmetric). However, the use of serial relations in this sense, instead ordering relations as just defined, is awkward in connection with the notion of order for unit classes. Examples: The relation not greater than among leal numbers is an ordering relation. The relation less than among real numbers is a serial relation. The real numbers are simply ordered by the former relation. In the algebra of classes (logic formal, § 7), the classes are partially ordered by the relation of class inclusion. For explanation of the terminology used in making the above definitions, see the articles connexity, reflexivity, relation, symmetry, transitivity. --A.C. Order type: See relation-number. Ordinal number: A class b is well-ordered by a dyadic relation R if it is ordered by R (see order) and, for every class a such that a ⊂ b, there is a member x of a, such that xRy holds for every member y of a; and R is then called a well-ordering relation. The ordinal number of a class b well-ordered by a relation R, or of a well-ordering relation R, is defined to be the relation-number (q. v.) of R. The ordinal numbers of finite classes (well-ordered by appropriate relations) are called finite ordinal numbers. These are 0, 1, 2, ... (to be distinguished, of course, from the finite cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, . . .). The first non-finite (transfinite or infinite) ordinal number is the ordinal number of the class of finite ordinal numbers, well-ordered in their natural order, 0, 1, 2, . . .; it is usually denoted by the small Greek letter omega. --A.C. G. Cantor, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, translated and with an introduction by P. E. B. Jourdain, Chicago and London, 1915. (new ed. 1941); Whitehead and Russell, Princtpia Mathematica. vol. 3. Orexis: (Gr. orexis) Striving; desire; the conative aspect of mind, as distinguished from the cognitive and emotional (Aristotle). --G.R.M.. Organicism: A theory of biology that life consists in the organization or dynamic system of the organism. Opposed to mechanism and vitalism. --J.K.F. Organism: An individual animal or plant, biologically interpreted. A. N. Whitehead uses the term to include also physical bodies and to signify anything material spreading through space and enduring in time. --R.B.W. Organismic Psychology: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, an instrument) A system of theoretical psychology which construes the structure of the mind in organic rather than atomistic terms. See Gestalt Psychology; Psychological Atomism. --L.W. Organization: (Lat. organum, from Gr. organon, work) A structured whole. The systematic unity of parts in a purposive whole. A dynamic system. Order in something actual. --J.K.F. Organon: (Gr. organon) The title traditionally given to the body of Aristotle's logical treatises. The designation appears to have originated among the Peripatetics after Aristotle's time, and expresses their view that logic is not a part of philosophy (as the Stoics maintained) but rather the instrument (organon) of philosophical inquiry. See Aristotelianism. --G.R.M. In Kant. A system of principles by which pure knowledge may be acquired and established. Cf. Fr. Bacon's Novum Organum. --O.F.K. Oriental Philosophy: A general designation used loosely to cover philosophic tradition exclusive of that grown on Greek soil and including the beginnings of philosophical speculation in Egypt, Arabia, Iran, India, and China, the elaborate systems of India, Greater India, China, and Japan, and sometimes also the religion-bound thought of all these countries with that of the complex cultures of Asia Minor, extending far into antiquity. Oriental philosophy, though by no means presenting a homogeneous picture, nevertheless shares one characteristic, i.e., the practical outlook on life (ethics linked with metaphysics) and the absence of clear-cut distinctions between pure speculation and religious motivation, and on lower levels between folklore, folk-etymology, practical wisdom, pre-scientiiic speculation, even magic, and flashes of philosophic insight. Bonds with Western, particularly Greek philosophy have no doubt existed even in ancient times. Mutual influences have often been conjectured on the basis of striking similarities, but their scientific establishment is often difficult or even impossible. Comparative philosophy (see especially the work of Masson-Oursel) provides a useful method. Yet a thorough treatment of Oriental Philosophy is possible only when the many languages in which it is deposited have been more thoroughly studied, the psychological and historical elements involved in the various cultures better investigated, and translations of the relevant documents prepared not merely from a philological point of view or out of missionary zeal, but by competent philosophers who also have some linguistic training. Much has been accomplished in this direction in Indian and Chinese Philosophy (q.v.). A great deal remains to be done however before a definitive history of Oriental Philosophy may be written. See also Arabian, and Persian Philosophy. --K.F.L. Origen: (185-254) The principal founder of Christian theology who tried to enrich the ecclesiastic thought of his day by reconciling it with the treasures of Greek philosophy. Cf. Migne PL. --R.B.W. Ormazd: (New Persian) Same as Ahura Mazdah (q.v.), the good principle in Zoroastrianism, and opposed to Ahriman (q.v.). --K.F.L. Orphic Literature: The mystic writings, extant only in fragments, of a Greek religious-philosophical movement of the 6th century B.C., allegedly started by the mythical Orpheus. In their mysteries, in which mythology and rational thinking mingled, the Orphics concerned themselves with cosmogony, theogony, man's original creation and his destiny after death which they sought to influence to the better by pure living and austerity. They taught a symbolism in which, e.g., the relationship of the One to the many was clearly enunciated, and believed in the soul as involved in reincarnation. Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato were influenced by them. --K.F.L. Ortega y Gasset, Jose: Born in Madrid, May 9, 1883. At present in Buenos Aires, Argentine. Son of Ortega y Munillo, the famous Spanish journalist. Studied at the College of Jesuits in Miraflores and at the Central University of Madrid. In the latter he presented his Doctor's dissertation, El Milenario, in 1904, thereby obtaining his Ph.D. degree. After studies in Leipzig, Berlin, Marburg, under the special influence of Hermann Cohen, the great exponent of Kant, who taught him the love for the scientific method and awoke in him the interest in educational philosophy, Ortega came to Spain where, after the death of Nicolas Salmeron, he occupied the professorship of metaphysics at the Central University of Madrid. The following may be considered the most important works of Ortega y Gasset: Meditaciones del Quijote, 1914; El Espectador, I-VIII, 1916-1935; El Tema de Nuestro Tiempo, 1921; España Invertebrada, 1922; Kant, 1924; La Deshumanizacion del Arte, 1925; Espiritu de la Letra, 1927; La Rebelion de las Masas, 1929; Goethe desde Adentio, 1934; Estudios sobre el Amor, 1939; Ensimismamiento y Alteracion, 1939; El Libro de las Misiones, 1940; Ideas y Creencias, 1940; and others. Although brought up in the Marburg school of thought, Ortega is not exactly a neo-Kantian. At the basis of his Weltanschauung one finds a denial of the fundamental presuppositions which characterized European Rationalism. It is life and not thought which is primary. Things have a sense and a value which must be affirmed independently. Things, however, are to be conceived as the totality of situations which constitute the circumstances of a man's life. Hence, Ortega's first philosophical principle: "I am myself plus my circumstances". Life as a problem, however, is but one of the poles of his formula. Reason is the other. The two together function, not by dialectical opposition, but by necessary coexistence. Life, according to Ortega, does not consist in being, but rather, in coming to be, and as such it is of the nature of direction, program building, purpose to be achieved, value to be realized. In this sense the future as a time dimension acquires new dignity, and even the present and the past become articulate and meaning-full only in relation to the future. Even History demands a new point of departure and becomes militant with new visions. --J.A.F. Orthodoxy: Beliefs which are declared by a group to be true and normative. Heresy is a departure from and relative to a given orthodoxy. --V.S. Orthos Logos: See Right Reason. Ostensible Object: (Lat. ostendere, to show) The object envisaged by cognitive act irrespective of its actual existence. See Epistemological Object. --L.W. Ostensive: (Lat. ostendere, to show) Property of a concept or predicate by virtue of which it refers to and is clarified by reference to its instances. --A.C.B. Ostwald, Wilhelm: (1853-1932) German chemist. Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1909. In Die Uberwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialistmus and in Naturphilosophie, his two best known works in the field of philosophy, he advocates a dynamic theory in opposition to materialism and mechanism. All properties of matter, and the psychic as well, are special forms of energy. --L.E.D. Oupnekhat: Anquetil Duperron's Latin translation of the Persian translation of 50 Upanishads (q.v.), a work praised by Schopenhauer as giving him complete consolation. --K.F.L. Outness: A term employed by Berkeley to express the experience of externality, that is the ideas of space and things placed at a distance. Hume used it in the sense of distance Hamilton understood it as the state of being outside of consciousness in a really existing world of material things. --J.J.R. Overindividual: Term used by H. Münsterberg to translate the German überindividuell. The term is applied to any cognitive or value object which transcends the individual subject. --L.W. P
“Thus in the Esotericism of the Vedantins, Daiviprakriti, the Light manifested through Eswara, the Logos, is at one and the same time the Mother and also the Daughter of the Logos or Verbum of Parabrahmam; while in that of the trans-Himalayan teachings it is — in the hierarchy of allegorical and metaphysical theogony — ‘the Mother’ or abstract, ideal matter, Mulaprakriti, the Root of Nature; — from the metaphysical standpoint, a correlation of Adi-Bhuta, manifested in the Logos, Avalokiteshwara; — and from the purely occult and Cosmical, Fohat, the ‘Son of the Son,’ the androgynous energy resulting from this ‘Light of the Logos,’ and which manifests in the plane of the objective Universe as the hidden, as much as the revealed, Electricity — which is Life” (SD 1:136).
Thus nature begins as a four-dimensional matrix in which it is the moving principle. Materiality, secondary qualities, life, mentality are all emergent modifications of proto-space-time. Mind is the nervous system blossoming out into the capacity of awareness. Contemplative knowledge, where the object is set over against the mind, and the actual being, or experiencing, or enjoying of reality, where there is no inner duplicity of subject and object, constitute the two forms of knowledge. Alexander conceives the deity as the next highest level to be emerged out of any given level. Thus for beings on the level of life mind is deity, but for beings possessing minds there is a nisus or urge toward a still higher quality. To such beings that dimly felt quality is deity. The quality next above any given level is deity to the beings on that level. For men deity has not yet emerged, but there is a nisus towards its emergence. S. Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (1920). -- H.H.
Thus when an adept for some noble object purposes to use his inner powers, it is rare indeed that a single one of these saktis is employed alone. First there may be an evocation from his constitution of the sakti of ideation or high mentation giving the picture of what must be done, thus directing the flow of the will; then follows the evocation of ichchha-sakti or desire to perform the object in view. This combines with kriya-sakti or mental power guiding the desire and the will along the proper path to the end desired. Other saktis may or may not be called into function as needed. The saktis most commonly having a phenomenal effect or repercussion on the physical plane are ichchha-sakti, combining with kriya-sakti, guided by jnana-sakti.
thyself ::: pron. --> An emphasized form of the personal pronoun of the second person; -- used as a subject commonly with thou; as, thou thyself shalt go; that is, thou shalt go, and no other. It is sometimes used, especially in the predicate, without thou, and in the nominative as well as in the objective case.
Traditionally given by the oracular phrase: "The science of being as such." To be distinguished from the study of being under some particular aspect; hence opposed to such sciences as are concerned with ens mobile, ens quantum, etc. The term, "science", is here used in its classic sense of "knowledge by causes", where "knowledge" is contrasted with "opinion" and the term cause has the full signification of the Greek aitia. The "causes" which are the objects of metaphysical cognition are said to be "first" in the natural order (first principles), as being founded in no higher or more complete generalizations available to the human intellect by means of its own natural powers.
trailer ::: n. --> One who, or that which, trails.
A part of an object which extends some distance beyond the main body of the object; as, the trailer of a plant.
Transcendental method: (In Kant) The analysis of the conditions (a priori forms of intuition, categories of the understanding, ideals of reason) that make possible human experience and knowledge. See Kantianism. Transcendental Object: (Kant, Ger. transzendentale Objekt) The pure rational 'x' which Kant defines as the general form of object or the object as such. It is not a particular concrete object, but the ideal objective correlate of pure consciousness as such. It is the object which the mind seeks to know in each empirical cognition. See Kantianism. -- O.F.K.
truth ::: “Science started on the assumption that the ultimate truth must be physical and objective—and the objective Ultimate (or even less than that) would explain all subjective phenomena. Yoga proceeds on the opposite view that the ultimate Truth is spiritual and subjective and it is in that ultimate Light that we must view objective phenomena.” Letters on Yoga
T'ung: Mere identity, or sameness, especially in social institutions and standards, which is inferior to harmony (ho) in which social distinctions and differences are in complete concord. (Confucianism). Agreement, as in "agreement with the superiors" (shang t'ung). The method of agreement, which includes identity, generic relationship, co-existence, and partial resemblance. "Identity means two substances having one name. Generic relationship means inclusion in the same whole. Both being in the same room is a case of co-existence. Partial resemblance means having some points of resemblance." See Mo chi. (Neo-Mohism). --W.T.C. T'ung i: The joint method of similarities and differences, by which what is present and what is absent can be distinguished. See Mo chi. --W.T.C. Tung Chung-shu: (177-104 B.C.) was the leading Confucian of his time, premier to two feudal princes, and consultant to the Han emperor in framing national policies. Firmly believing in retribution, he strongly advocated the "science of catastrophic and anomalies," and became the founder and leader of medieval Confucianism which was extensively confused with the Yin Yang philosophy. Extremely antagonistic towards rival schools, he established Confucianism as basis of state religion and education. His best known work, Ch-un-ch'iu Fan-lu, awaits English translation. --W.T.C. Turro y Darder, Ramon: Spanish Biologist and Philosopher. Born in Malgrat, Dec. 8 1854. Died in Barcelona, June 5, 1926. As a Biologist, his conclusions about the circulation of the blood, more than half a century ago, were accepted and verified by later researchers and theorists. Among other things, he showed the insufficiency and unsatisfactoriness of the mechanistic and neomechanistic explanations of the circulatory process. He was also the first to busy himself with endocrinology and bacteriological immunity. As a philosopher Turro combated the subjectivistic and metaphysical type of psychology, and circumscribed scientific investigation to the determination of the conditions that precede the occurrence of phenomena, considering useless all attempt to reach final essences. Turro does not admit, however, that the psychical series or conscious states may be causally linked to the organic series. His formula was: Physiology and Consciousness are phenomena that occur, not in connection, but in conjunction. His most important work is Filosofia Critica, in which he has put side by side two antagonistic conceptions of the universe, the objective and the subjectne conceptions. In it he holds that, at the present crisis of science and philosophy, the business of intelligence is to realize that science works on philosophical presuppositions, but that philosophy is no better off with its chaos of endless contradictions and countless systems of thought. The task to be realized is one of coming together, to undo what has been done and get as far as the original primordial concepts with which philosophical inquiry began. --J.A.F. Tychism: A term derived from the Greek, tyche, fortune, chance, and employed by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) to express any theory which regards chance as an objective reality, operative in the cosmos. Also the hypothesis that evolution occurs owing to fortuitous variations. --J.J.R. Types, theory of: See Logic, formal, § 6; Paradoxes, logical; Ramified theory of types. Type-token ambiguity: The words token and type are used to distinguish between two senses of the word word. Individual marks, more or less resembling each other (as "cat" resembles "cat" and "CAT") may (1) be said to be "the same word" or (2) so many "different words". The apparent contradiction therby involved is removed by speaking of the individual marks as tokens, in contrast with the one type of which they are instances. And word may then be said to be subject to type-token ambiguity. The terminology can easily be extended to apply to any kind of symbol, e.g. as in speaking of token- and type-sentences. Reference: C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, 4.517. --M.B. Tz'u: (a) Parental love, kindness, or affection, the ideal Confucian virtue of parents. (b) Love, kindness in general. --W.T.C. Tzu hua: Self-transformation or spontaneous transformation without depending on any divine guidance or eternal agency, but following the thing's own principle of being, which is Tao. (Taoism). --W.T.C. Tzu jan: The natural, the natural state, the state of Tao, spontaneity as against artificiality. (Lao Tzu; Huai-nan Tzu, d. 122 B.C.). --W.T.C. U
U. Cassina, L'oeuvre philosophique de G. Peano, Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 40 (1933), pp. 481-491. Peirce, Charles Sanders: American Philosopher. Born in Cambridge, Mass, on September 10th, 1839. Harvard M.A. in 1862 and Sc. B. in 1863. Except for a brief cireer as lectuier in philosophy at Harvard, 1864-65 and 1869-70 and in logic at Johns Hopkins, 1879-84, he did no formal teaching. Longest tenure was with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey for thirty years beginning in 1861. Died at Milford, Pa. in 1914 He had completed only one work, The Grand Logic, published posthumously (Coll. Papers). Edited Studies in Logic (1883). No volumes published during his lifetime but author of many lectures, essays and reviews in periodicals, particularly in the Popular Science Monthly, 1877-78, and in The Monist, 1891-93, some of which have been reprinted in Chance, Love and Logic (1923), edited by Morris R. Cohen, and. together with the best of his other work both published and unpublished, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-35), edited by Charles Hartshorne ¦ind Paul Weiss. He was most influenced by Kant, who had he thought, raised all the relevant philosophical problems but from whom he differed on almost every solution. He was excited by Darwin, whose doctrine of evolution coincided with his own thought, and disciplined by laboratory experience in the physical sciences which inspired his search for rigor and demonstration throughout his work. Felt himself deeply opposed to Descartes, whom he accused of being responsible for the modern form of the nominalistic error. Favorably inclined toward Duns Scotus, from whom he derived his realism. Philosophy is a sub-class of the science of discovery, in turn a branch of theoretical science. The function of philosophy is to expliin and hence show unity in the variety of the universe. All philosophy takes its start in logic, or the relations of signs to their objects, and phenomenology, or the brute experience of the objective actual world. The conclusions from these two studies meet in the three basic metaphysical categories: quality, reaction, and representation. Quality is firstness or spontaneity; reaction is secondness or actuality; and representation is thirdness or possibility. Realism (q.v.) is explicit in the distinction of the modes of being actuality as the field of reactions, possibility as the field of quality (or values) and representation (or relations). He was much concerned to establish the realism of scientific method: that the postulates, implications and conclusions of science are the results of inquiry yet presupposed by it. He was responsible for pragmatism as a method of philosophy that the sum of the practical consequences which result by necessity from the truth of an intellectual conception constitutes the entire meaning of that conception. Author of the ethical principle that the limited duration of all finite things logically demands the identification of one's interests with those of an unlimited community of persons and things. In his cosmology the flux of actuality left to itself develops those systematic characteristics which are usually associated with the realm of possibility. There is a logical continuity to chance events which through indefinite repetition beget order, as illustrated in the tendency of all things to acquire habits. The desire of all things to come together in this certain order renders love a kind of evolutionary force. Exerted a strong influence both on the American pragmatist, William James (1842-1910), the instrumentalist, John Dewey (1859-), as well as on the idealist, Jociah Royce (1855-1916), and many others. -- J.K.F.
Ulom (Phoenician) The intelligible deity, the intellectual reflection of the ever-concealed divine; and in the theogony of Mochus also the intellectual universe expressing itself in the objective or material universe. Equivalent to the pleroma of the Gnostics. In the theogony of Mochus, aether or cosmic space is manifested first, followed by air (cosmic spirit) from which Ulom is born out of the mundane egg. Identical with the Hebrew ‘olam, meaning both hid or occult, the duration or perpetuity of cosmic time, and the universe or world in general. Thus ‘olam and ulom both are connected with the physical and metaphysical cosmos and all that is in these. See also ‘OLAM
Under Kierkegaard's influence, he pursues an "existential" analysis of human existence in order to discuss the original philosophical question of being in a new way. He explores many hitherto unexplored phenomena which ontology disregarded. Sorge (concern), being par excellence the structure of consciousness, is elevated to the ultimate. Concern has a wholly special horizon of being. Dread (Angst), the feeling of being on the verge of nothing, represents an eminently transcendental instrument of knowledge. Heidegger gives dread a content directed upon the objective world. He unfolds the essence of dread to be Sorge (concern). As concern tends to become obscured to itself by the distracted losing of one's selfhood in the cares of daily life, its remedy is in the consideration of such experiences as conscience, forboding of death and the existential consciousness of time. By elevating Sorge to the basis of all being, he raised something universally human to the fundamental principle of the world. It is only after an elementary analysis of the basic constitution of human existence that Heidegger approaches his ultimate problem of Being and Time, in which more complicated structures such as the existential significance of death, conscience, and the power of resolute choice explain the phenomena of man's position in daily life and history.
Understanding: (Kant. Ger. Verstand) The faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition; or the faculty of concepts, judgments and principles. The understanding is the source of concepts, categories and principles by means of which the manifold of sense is brought into the unity of apperception. Kant suggests that understanding has a common root with sensibility. See Kantianism. -- O.F.K.
us ::: pl. --> of I ::: pron. --> The persons speaking, regarded as an object; ourselves; -- the objective case of we. See We.
varyam ::: the desirable good, the object of our desire. [Ved.]
vasita (Vashita) ::: [one of the astasiddhis]: the power of exacting obedience to the spoken or written word; the control of the object in its nature so that it is submissive to the spoken word, receptive of the thought conveyed or sensitive and effective of the action suggested.
vis.ayananda (vishayananda) ::: ananda in the objects of sense (vis.avisayananda yas), a form of sarirananda or physical ananda by which all "sense and sensation becomes full of . . . a divine joy, the delight of the Brahman"; the experience of vis.ayananda in relation to a particular sense (indriya) and its objects. vis visaya-nirananda
visayan indriyaiscaran ::: ranging over the objects with the senses. [Gita 2.64]
visaya vinivartante ::: [the objects of sense cease to affect]. [Gita 2.59]
vishaya chaitanya. ::: consciousness as objects; the object known; the consciousness determined by the object cognised
visitation ::: n. --> The act of visiting, or the state of being visited; access for inspection or examination.
Specifically: The act of a superior or superintending officer who, in the discharge of his office, visits a corporation, college, etc., to examine into the manner in which it is conducted, and see that its laws and regulations are duly observed and executed; as, the visitation of a diocese by a bishop.
The object of a visit.
VML VODAK Model Language. Language for an extensible {object-oriented database}. ["Object-Oriented Modeling for Hypermedia Systems Using the Object-Oriented VODAK Model Language (VML)" Wolfgang Klas et al, in Object-Oriented Database Management Systems, NATO ASI Series, Springer 1993]. E-mail: "aberer@darmstadt.gmd.de".
Voluntarism: (Lat. voluntas, will) In ontology, the theory that the will is the ultimate constituent of reality. Doctrine that the human will, or some force analogous to it, is the primary stuff of the universe; that blind, purposive impulse is the real in nature. (a) In psychology, theory that the will is the most elemental psychic factor, that striving, impulse, desire, and even action, with their concomitant emotions, are alone dependable. (b) In ethics, the doctrine that the human will is central to all moral questions, and superior to all other moral criteria, such as the conscience, or reasoning power. The subjective theory that the choice made by the will determines the good. Stands for indeterminism and freedom. (c) In theology, the will as the source of all religion, that blessedness is a state of activity. Augustine (353-430) held that God is absolute will, a will independent of the Logos, and that the good will of man is free. For Avicebron (1020-1070), will is indefinable and stands above mature and soul, matter and form, as the pnmary category. Despite the metaphysical opposition of Duns Scotus (1265-1308) the realist, and William of Occam (1280-1347) the nominalist, both considered the will superior to the intellect. Hume (1711-1776) maintained that the will is the determining factor in human conduct, and Kant (1724-1804) believed the will to be the source of all moral judgment, and the good to be based on the human will. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) posited the objectified will as the world-substance, force, or value. James (1842-1910) followed up Wundt's notion of the will as the purpose of the good with the notion that it is the essence of faith, also manifest in the will to believe. See Will, Conation. Opposed to Rationalism, Materialism, Intellectualism. -- J.K.F.
Watson, John Broadus: (1878-1958) American psychologist and leading exponent of Behaviorism (see Behaviorism), studied and served as Instructor at the University of Chicago, and was appointed Professor of Experimental Psychology at Johns Hopkins University 1908 where he served until 1920. Since then he engaged in the advertising business in New York City. The program for a behavioristic psychology employed the objective methods of the biological sciences and excluded the introspective method of earlier psychology; it is formulated by Watson in "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," Psychological Review XX (1913), and Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, 1914. -- L.W.
“What was the object of their long journey? . . . The archaic records show the Initiates of the Second Sub-race of the Aryan family moving from one land to the other for the purpose of supervising the building of menhirs and dolmens, of colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of sepulchre to serve as receptacles for the ashes of generations to come” (SD 2:750).
whom ::: pron. --> The objective case of who. See Who.
whomsoever ::: pron. --> The objective of whosoever. See Whosoever.
Will (Scholastic): Will is one of the two rational faculties of the human soul. Only man, as a rational animal, possesses will. Animals are prompted to action by the sensory appetites and in this obey the law of their nature, whereas human will is called free insofar as it determines itself towards the line of action it chooses. Though the objects of will are presented by the intellect, this faculty does not determine will which may still act against the intellect's judgment. The proper object of rational will is good in its universal aspect. Goodness is one of the original ("transcendental") aspects of being, envisioned under this aspect, it becomes a possible end of will. As such, it is apprehended by reason, arousing a simple volitive movement. Follow the approval of "synderesis" (v. there), striving, deliberation, consent, final approval by reason, choice of means and execution. Thus, there is a complicated interplay of intellectual and volitive performances which finally end with action. Action being necessarily about particulars and these being material, will, an "immaterial" faculty cannot get directly in touch with reality and needs, as does on its part intellect, an intermediary; the sensory appetites are the ultimate executors, while the vis cogitativa or practical reason supplies the link on the side of intellectual performance. True choice exists only in rational beings, animals appearing to deliberate are, in truth, only passively subjected to the interference of images and appetites, and their actions are automatically determined by the relative strength of these factors. While man's will is essentially free, it is restricted in the exercise of its fi eedom by imagination, emotion, habit. Whatever an end will aims at, it is always a good, be it one of a low degree. -- R.A.
With these principles of matter and form, and the parallel distinction between potential and actual existence, Aristotle claims to have solved the difficulties that earlier thinkers had found in the fact of change. The changes in nature are to be interpreted not as the passage from non-being to being, which would make them unintelligible, but as the process by which what is merely potential being passes over, through form, into actual being, or entelechy. The philosophy of nature which results from these basic concepts views nature as a dynamic realm in which change is real, spontaneous, continuous, and in the main directed. Matter, though indeed capable of form, possesses a residual inertia which on occasion produces accidental effects; so that alongside the teological causation of the forms Aristotle recognizes what he calls "necessity" in nature; but the products of the latter, since they are aberrations from form, cannot be made the object of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the system of nature as developed by Aristotle is a graded series of existences, in which the simpler beings, though in themselves formed matter, function also as matter for higher forms. At the base of the series is prime matter, which as wholly unformed is mere potentiality, not actual being. The simplest formed matter is the so-called primary bodies -- earth, water, air and fire. From these as matter arise by the intervention of successively more complex forms the composite inorganic bodies, organic tissues, and the world of organisms, characterized by varying degrees of complexity in structure and function. In this realization of form in matter Aristotle distinguishes three sorts of change: qualitative change, or alteration; quantitative change, or growth and diminution; and change, of place, or locomotion, the last being primary, since it is presupposed in all the others. But Aristotle is far from suggesting a mechanical explanation of change, for not even locomotion can be explained by impact alone. The motion of the primary bodies is due to the fact that each has its natural place to which it moves when not opposed; earth to the center, then water, air, and fire to successive spheres about the center. The ceaseless motion of these primary bodies results from their ceaseless transformation into one another through the interaction of the forms of hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus qualitative differences of form underlie even the most elemental changes in the world of nature.
worthy ::: n. --> Having worth or excellence; possessing merit; valuable; deserving; estimable; excellent; virtuous.
Having suitable, adapted, or equivalent qualities or value; -- usually with of before the thing compared or the object; more rarely, with a following infinitive instead of of, or with that; as, worthy of, equal in excellence, value, or dignity to; entitled to; meriting; -- usually in a good sense, but sometimes in a bad one.
Of high station; of high social position.
Yama: (Skr.) Restraint, particularly moral restraint as the first condition for attaining the object of Yoga (q.v.), including ahimsa (q.v.) and brahmacarya (q.v.), relinguishing theft and desire for gratuities. -- K.F.L.
Yoga and Inmanify ::: Yoga is diiected towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought dowTi and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including humanity and its life. But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the chauge ; it cannot be the object of the sadhana. The object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.
Yoga(Sanskrit) ::: Literally "union," "conjunction," etc. In India it is the technical name for one of the sixDarsanas or schools of philosophy, and its foundation is ascribed to the sage Patanjali. The name Yogaitself describes the objective of this school, the attaining of union or at-one-ness with the divine-spiritualessence within a man. The yoga practices when properly understood through the instructions of genuineteachers -- who, by the way, never announce themselves as public lecturers or through books oradvertisements -- are supposed to induce certain ecstatic states leading to a clear perception of universaltruths, and the highest of these states is called samadhi.There are a number of minor forms of yoga practice and training such as the karma yoga, hatha yoga,bhakti yoga, raja yoga, jnana yoga, etc. Similar religious aspirations or practices likewise exist inOccidental countries, as, for instance, what is called salvation by works, somewhat equivalent to theHindu karma yoga or, again, salvation by faith -- or love, somewhat similar to the Hindu bhakti yoga;while both Orient and Occident have, each one, its various forms of ascetic practices which may begrouped under the term hatha yoga.No system of yoga should ever be practiced unless under the direct teaching of one who knows thedangers of meddling with the psychomental apparatus of the human constitution, for dangers lurk atevery step, and the meddler in these things is likely to bring disaster upon himself, both in matters ofhealth and as regards sane mental equilibrium. The higher branches of yoga, however, such as the rajayoga and jnana yoga, implying strict spiritual and intellectual discipline combined with a fervid love forall beings, are perfectly safe. It is, however, the ascetic practices, etc., and the teachings that go withthem, wherein lies the danger to the unwary, and they should be carefully avoided.
Yoga: (Skr. "yoking") Restraining of the mind (see Manas), or, in Patanjali's (q.v.) phrase: citta vrtti nirodha, disciplining the activity of consciousness. The object of this universally recommended practice in India is the gaining of peace of mind and a deeper insight into the nature of reality. On psycho-physical assumptions, several aids are outlined in all works on Yoga, including moral preparation, breath-control, posture, and general toning up of the system. Karma or kriya Yoga is the attainment of Yoga ends primarily by doing, bhakti Yoga by devotion, jnana Yoga by mental or spiritual means. The Yogasutras (q.v.) teach eight paths: Moral restraint (see yama), self-culture (see niyama), posture (see asana), breath-control (see prandyama), control of the senses (see pratyahara), concentration (see dharana), meditation or complete surrender to the object of meditation (see samadhi). See Hathayoga. -- K.F.L.
YOGIC ATTITUDE. ::: Not one of forceful suppression, but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire.
You must neither turn with an ascetic shrinking from the money power, the means it gives and the objects it brings, nor cherish a rHjasic attachment to them or a spirit of enslaving self-indulgence in their gratifications. Regard wealth simply as a power to be won back for the Mother and placed at her service.
KEYS (10k)
36 Sri Aurobindo
6 Sri Ramana Maharshi
4 Saint Thomas Aquinas
2 To-shu-hing-tsan-king
2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
2 Swami Vivekananda
2 Sri Ramakrishna
1 Thomas Keating
1 "The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi
1 Tertullian of Carthage
1 Swami Saradananda
1 Swami Adbhutananda
1 Sri Sankaracharya
1 Seneca
1 Saint John of the Ladder
1 Saint Ignatius of Loyola
1 Rabindranath Tagore
1 Patanjali
1 Pascal
1 Oliver Wendell Holmes
1 Marcus Aurelius
1 Mage the Ascension
1 Longchenpa
1 Lao- Tse
1 Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche
1 Ken Wilber
1 Joseph Goldstein
1 Joseph Campbell
1 John of the Ladder
1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 Jatakamala
1 Israel Regardie
1 H P Lovecraft
1 Hans Urs von Balthasar
1 Gurdjieff
1 Evagrius of Pontus
1 Ernest Holmes
1 Dhammapada
1 Carl Jung
1 Bhagavad Gita XVIII. 51-53
1 Bhagavad Gita II. 666-68
1 Bhagavad Gita. II. 63
1 Bhagavad Gita
1 Bertrand Russell
1 Benjamin Disraeli
1 Baruch Spinoza
1 Averroes
1 Ashtavakra Gita
1 Anonymous
1 Alfred Korzybski
1 Albert Einstein
1 Saint Augustine of Hippo
1 Meister Eckhart
1 Epictetus
1 Aleister Crowley
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
36 Sri Aurobindo
24 Anonymous
11 Thomas Jefferson
10 Sri Ramana Maharshi
10 Ralph Waldo Emerson
9 Immanuel Kant
9 Carl Jung
8 Mahatma Gandhi
8 James Madison
7 Thomas Paine
7 Rush Limbaugh
7 Marcus Aurelius
7 Leonardo da Vinci
7 G K Chesterton
7 Friedrich Nietzsche
6 Thich Nhat Hanh
6 Stephen King
6 Plato
6 Ludwig von Mises
6 Jane Austen
1:Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect ~ Averroes, #KEYS
2:The object of the intellect is being.
~ Meister Eckhart,#KEYS
3:The subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage.
~ Ken Wilber,#KEYS
4:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
5:Since the object of our love is infinite, we can always love more and more perfectly. ~ Saint Ignatius of Loyola, #KEYS
6:All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
~ Baruch Spinoza,#KEYS
7:One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, [T4],#KEYS
8:The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
9:In relation to the universe the Supreme is Brahman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
10:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #KEYS
11:The materialist idea mistakes a creation for the creative Power. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
12:Seek to make your work a prayer, your believing an act, your living an art. It is then the object of your faith will be made visible to you." ~ Ernest Holmes, #KEYS
13:Life-force is the dynamisation of a consciousness which exceeds it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
14:The intellect does not grasp the object to which it gives assent in the act of believing ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ScG 3.40)., #KEYS
15:One Brahman, one reality in Self and Nature is the object of all knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Field and its Knower, #KEYS
16:It is God-realisation and God-expression which is the object of our Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #KEYS
17:The rejection of the object ceases to be necessary when the object can no longer ensnare us ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #KEYS
18:Thought is only a scout and pioneer; it can guide but not command or effectuate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
19:Faith is more noble than science on the part of the object because its object is the First Truth ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2.67.3ad1)., #KEYS
20:Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort. ~ Epictetus, #KEYS
21:In the hierarchy of our psychological functions the Thought is in a way nearest to this Self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
22:Our present limited consciousness can only be a field of preparation, it can consummate nothing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
23:Some make riches the object of their desires, others glory. For me, I desire nothing save to cling to God and put in Him alone the hope of my soul stripped of passion. ~ John of the Ladder, #KEYS
24:The object of existence is not the practice of virtue for its own sake but ānanda, delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #KEYS
25:Mind is an expression not of Life, but of that of which Life itself is a less luminous expression. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
26:Closeness of the human soul to the Divine is the object, and fear sets always a barrier and a distance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Godward Emotions, #KEYS
27:Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
28:Some make riches the object of their desires, others glory. For me, I desire nothing save to cling to God and put in Him alone the hope of my soul stripped of passion. ~ Saint John of the Ladder, #KEYS
29:The manifestation of the Lord in life and works is the law of our being and the object of our world-existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #KEYS
30:renunciation of life cannot be the goal of life nor rejection of the world the object for which the world was created. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #KEYS
31:Loving oneself for the sake of God as the object of supernatural happiness and the author of grace is an act of charity ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (On Evil, a. 4 ad 15)., #KEYS
32:Mind is the dubious outer penumbra of a conscious existence which is not limited by mentality but exceeds it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
33:The object of life is the growth of the soul, not outward success of the hour or even of the near future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Fate, Free Will and Prediction, #KEYS
34:the only thing that is to be eliminated is our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
35:The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
36:See how people live, what constitutes the aim of their existence, the object of their desires, passions and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship. ~ Gurdjieff, #KEYS
37:A perfect self-expression of the spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #KEYS
38:The Self, the Divine, the Supreme Reality, the All, the Transcendent, - the One in all aspects is then the object of Yogic knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5],#KEYS
39:The object of meditation is to open to the Mother and grow through many progressive experiences into a higher consciousness in union with the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
40:The height of love is the rapturous immersion of ourselves in unity of ecstatic delight with the object of our love and adoration. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Modes of the Self, #KEYS
41:The object or matter of generosity ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (liberalitatis) is money and whatever has a money value ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 2-2.117.3)., #KEYS
42:True worship does not consist in off: ring incense, flowers and other material objects, but in striving to follow the same path as the object of our veneration. ~ Jatakamala, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
43:A man my fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, (1809-1894), poet, physician, and essayist, father of the judge, Wikipedia., #KEYS
44:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
45:The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
46:The space of being that is opened and illuminated in the subject makes available to the object an opportunity to be itself in a way that the inferior space of inanimate elements does not…. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, TheoLogic I, #KEYS
47:An abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
48:The object of food is to build a strong body & a fine intellect. Unless the body & the mind are pure it is not possible to go thro spiritual practices. It is the food offered to God that builds a pure body & mind. ~ Swami Saradananda, #KEYS
49:When contemplating nature, whether in great things or small, I have constantly asked myself the question: is it the object which is here declaring itself, or is it you yourself? ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections §593, #KEYS
50:Our dynamic self-fulfilment cannot be worked out so long as we remain in the egoistic consciousness, in the mind's candle-lit darkness, in the bondage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
51: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. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #KEYS
52:We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, 532,#KEYS
53:The pleasant is not always the right thing, the object to be preferred and selected, nor the unpleasant the wrong thing, the object to be shunned and rejected. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Purification - The Lower Mentality, #KEYS
54:Bhakti-Yoga is the science of higher love. Bhakti-Yoga does not say: "Give up"; it only says: "Love; love the Highest!" — and everything low naturally falls off from him, the object of whose love is the Highest. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
55:A man attains everything when he discovers his true Self in himself. The object of sādhanā is to realize that. That also is the purpose of assuming a human body. The body may be given up after the realization of God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
56:It is ridiculous to say either 'I have not realized the Self'; or 'I have realized the Self'; are there two selves, for one to be the object of the other's realization?" ~ "The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi,", (1972, 1997). An Indian sage, (1879 - 1950), Wikipedia., #KEYS
57:The object of our worship is the one God, who by the word of his command, by the reason of his plan, and by the strength of his power has brought forth from nothing this whole construction of elements, bodies, and spirits for the glory of his majesty. ~ Tertullian of Carthage, #KEYS
58:It is the one Savior of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us and in us and is himself the object of our prayers.... Let us then recognize both our voice in his, and his voice in ours. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 85:1, #KEYS
59:There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God. ~ Aleister Crowley, #KEYS
60:If anger be the basis of our political activities, the excitement tends to become an end in itself, at the expense of the object to be achieved. Side issues then assume an exaggerated importance, and all gravity of thought and action is lost; such excitement is not an exercise of strength, but a display of weakness.
~ Rabindranath Tagore,#KEYS
61:The object of a Yoga of spiritual knowledge can be nothing else than this eternal Reality, this Self, this Brahman, this Transcendent that dwells over all and in all and is manifest yet concealed in the individual, manifest yet disguised in the universe.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,#KEYS
62:With writing as an ability to catch and manipulate names, the scribe was able to imprison the object and manipulate its very nature. The catching of names was considered a magical act in ancient societies so the ability to write was reserved for the clergy under the direct influence of gods of wisdom and magic such as Thoth. ~ Mage the Ascension, Order of Hermes, #KEYS
63:Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness. ~ Anonymous, The Upanishads, #KEYS
64:D.: how to meditate?
M.: Concentrate on that one whom you like best. If a single thought prevails, all other thoughts are put off and finally eradicated. So long as diversity prevails there are bad thoughts. When the object of love prevails only good thoughts hold the field. Therefore hold on to one thought only. Dhyana is the chief practice. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks,#KEYS
65: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
66:These ideas have to be understood in studying dhyana, or meditation. We hear a sound. First there is the external vibration; second, the nerve motion that carries it to the mind; third, the reaction from the mind, along with which flashes the knowledgeof the object which was the external cause of these different changes, from the ethereal vibrations to the mental reaction.
~ Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga, 84,#KEYS
67:The object of the theoretical (as separate from the practical) Qabalah, insofar as this thesis is concerned, is to enable the student to do three main things: First, to analyze every idea in terms of the Tree of Life. Second, to trace a necessary connection and relation between every and any class of ideas by referring them to this standard of comparison. Third, to translate any unknown system of symbolism into terms of any known one by its means.
~ Israel Regardie, A Garden Of Pomegranates: Skrying On The Tree Of Life,#KEYS
68:The Dzogchen of the basis is to determine the nature of the mind.
The Dzogchen of the path is to strike the target of freedom from the extremes.
The Dzogchen of the result is to send hopes and doubts into extinction.
The Dzogchen of the object is to let appearances go free by not grasping at them.
The Dzogchen of the mind is to let thoughts arise as friends.
The Dzogchen of the meaning is to let flickering thoughts dissolve naturally.
Whoever realizes these points is a great king of yogis. ~ Longchenpa,#KEYS
69:Who is the object of homage?
You, whose face is very white, lovely and beautiful, glowing with light like an array of a hundred full autumn moons, all together, without the dust from earth and water, You are adorned with completely open, immeasurable twofold knowledge like the hosts of a thousand stars, The brilliant light of your clear wisdom manifesting the four correct analytical knowledges shines forth, Noble Lady Tara, Goddess Vajra Sarasvati, I pay homage to you. ~ Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche, Smile Of Sun And Moon,#KEYS
70:Savitri", the poem, the word of Sri Aurobindo is the cosmic Answer to the cosmic Question. And Savitri, the person, the Godhead, the Divine Woman is the Divine's response to the human aspiration.
The world is a great question mark. It is a riddle, eternal and ever-recurring. Man has faced the riddle and sought to arrive at a solution since he was given a mind to seek and interrogate.
What is this universe? From where has it come? Whither is it going? What is the purpose of it all? Why is man here? What is the object of his existence? ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, Savitri,#KEYS
71:The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,-that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles. However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly,-therein lies the marvel of genius. When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness. ~ Victor Hugo, #KEYS
72:2. What should be the object or ideas for meditation?
Whatever is most consonant with your nature and highest aspirations. But if you ask me for an absolute answer, then I must say that Brahman is always the best object for meditation or contemplation and the idea on which the mind should fix is that of God in all, all in God and all as God. It does not matter essentially whether it is the Impersonal or the Personal God, or subjectively, the One Self. But this is the idea I have found the best, because it is the highest and embraces all other truths, whether truths of this world or of the other worlds or beyond all phenomenal existence, - 'All this is the Brahman.'
~ Sri Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes,#KEYS
73: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
74:The consciousness of the transcendent Absolute with its consequence in individual and universal is the last, the eternal knowledge. Our minds may deal with it on various lines, may build upon it conflicting philosophies, may limit, modify, overstress, understress sides of the knowledge, deduce from it truth or error; but our intellectual variations and imperfect statements make no difference to the ultimate fact that if we push thought and experience to their end, this is the knowledge in which they terminate. The object of a Yoga of spiritual knowledge can be nothing else than this eternal Reality, this Self, this Brahman, this Transcendent that dwells over all and in all and is manifest yet concealed in the individual, manifest yet disguised in the universe.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge.,#KEYS
75:Jnanaprakasha:: Jnana includes both the Para and the Apara Vidya, the knowledge of Brahman in Himself and the knowledge of the world; but the Yogin, reversing the order of the worldly mind, seeks to know Brahman first and through Brahman the world. Scientific knowledge, worldly information & instruction are to him secondary objects, not as it is with the ordinary scholar & scientist, his primary aim. Nevertheless these too we must take into our scope and give room to God's full joy in the world. The methods of the Yogin are also different for he tends more and more to the use of direct vision and the faculties of the vijnana and less and less to intellectual means. The ordinary man studies the object from outside and infers its inner nature from the results of his external study. The Yogin seeks to get inside his object, know it from within & use external study only as a means of confirming his view of the outward action resulting from an already known inner nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Record Of Yoga - I,#KEYS
76:Embracing a different vocabulary, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described a highly sought-after affective state called the flow state or flow experience. In such intrinsically motivating experiences, which can occur in any domain of activity, people report themselves as fully engaged with and absorbed by the object of their attention. In one sense, those "in flow" are not conscious of the experience at the moment; on reflection, however, such people feel that they have been fully alive, totally realized, and involved in a "peak experience." Individuals who regularly engage in creative activities often report that they seek such states; the prospect of such "periods of flow" can be so intense that individuals will exert considerable practice and effort, and even tolerate physical or psychological pain, in pursuit thereof. Committed writers may claim that they hate the time spent chained to their desks, but the thought that they would not have the opportunity to attain occasional periods of flow while writing proves devastating. ~ Howard Gardner, #KEYS
77:THE MASTER and Mover of our works is the One, the Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and Infinite. He is the transcendent unknown or unknowable Absolute, the unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and all-creating Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the object of all Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T1],#KEYS
78:The object of this course of reading is to familiarize the student with all that has been said by the Great Masters in every time and country. He should make a critical examination of them; not so much with the idea of discovering where truth lies, for he cannot do this except by virtue of his own spiritual experience, but rather to discover the essential harmony in those varied works. He should be on his guard against partisanship with a favourite author. He should familiarize himself thoroughly with the method of mental equilibrium, endeavouring to contradict any statement soever, although it may be apparently axiomatic.
The general object of this course, besides that already stated, is to assure sound education in occult matters, so that when spiritual illumination comes it may find a well-built temple. Where the mind is strongly biased towards any special theory, the result of an illumination is often to inflame that portion of the mind which is thus overdeveloped, with the result that the aspirant, instead of becoming an Adept, becomes a bigot and fanatic. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A.#KEYS
79:In your early struggles you may have found it difficult to conquer sleep; and you may have wandered so far from the object of your meditations without noticing it, that the meditation has really been broken; but much later on, when you feel that you are "getting quite good," you will be shocked to find a complete oblivion of yourself and your surroundings. You will say: "Good heavens! I must have been to sleep!" or else "What on earth was I meditating upon?" or even "What was I doing?" "Where am I?" "Who am I?" or a mere wordless bewilderment may daze you. This may alarm you, and your alarm will not be lessened when you come to full consciousness, and reflect that you have actually forgotten who you are and what you are doing! This is only one of many adventures that may come to you; but it is one of the most typical. By this time your hours of meditation will fill most of the day, and you will probably be constantly having presentiments that something is about to happen. You may also be terrified with the idea that your brain may be giving way; but you will have learnt the real symptoms of mental fatigue, and you will be careful to avoid them. They must be very carefully distinguished from idleness! ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, #KEYS
80:The Self, the Divine, the Supreme Reality, the All, the Transcendent, - the One in all these aspects is then the object of Yogic knowledge. Ordinary objects, the external appearances of life and matter, the psychology of out thoughts and actions, the perception of the forces of the apparent world can be part of this knowledge, but only in so far as it is part of the manifestation of the One. It becomes at once evident that the knowledge for which Yoga strives must be different from what men ordinarily understand by the word. For we mean ordinarily by knowledge an intellectual appreciation of the facts of life, mind and matter and the laws that govern them. This is a knowledge founded upon our sense-perception and upon reasoning from our sense-perceptions and it is undertaken partly for the pure satisfaction of the intellect, partly for practical efficiency and the added power which knowledge gives in managing our lives and the lives of others, in utilising for human ends the overt or secret forces of Nature and in helping or hurting, in saving and ennobling or in oppressing and destroying our fellow-men. Yoga, indeed, is commensurate with all life and can include these subjects and objects.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge,#KEYS
81:About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn't help writing the screen-play, but I think it's an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people's imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn't, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what's going to happen, and there's a great satisfaction when it's all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled. ~ Stanley Kubrick, #KEYS
82:understanding fails when pulled down by lower movements ::: By the understanding we mean that which at once perceives, judges and discriminates, the true reason of the human beingnot subservient to the senses, to desire or to the blind force of habit, but working in its own right for mastery, for knowledge. Certainly, the reason of man as he is at present does not even at its best act entirely in this free and sovereign fashion; but so far as it fails, it fails because it is still mixed with the lower half-animal action, because it is impure and constantly hampered and pulled down from its characteristic action. In its purity it should not be involved in these lower movements, but stand back from the object, and observe disinterestedly, put it in its right place in the whole by force of comparison, contrast, analogy, reason from its rightly observed data by deduction, induction, inference and holding all its gains in memory and supplementing them by a chastened and rightly-guided imagination view all in the light of a trained and disciplined judgment. Such is the pure intellectual understanding of which disinterested observation, judgment and reasoning are the law and characterising action.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Knowledge, The Purified Understanding,#KEYS
83:CHAPTER V
The Actual Practice:The Yoga of Meditative Equipoise
Part II
The Yoga of the Speech Recitation
The next section explains the yoga of vajra recitation in seven parts:
(1) general understanding, (2) the particular necessity for practice, (3) the actual nature of the recitation, (4) different types of recitation, (5) the manner of reciting the mantra, (6) number of recitations and (7) activity upon completion.
General Understanding
A general understanding of the yoga of vajra recitation is approached by considering the object that needs to be purified by the yoga, the means of purification and the result. The object that needs to be purified through the yoga of speech is the habit of perceiving all sounds-names, words, syllables and anything that is spoken-as merely ordinary sounds with ordinary meanings.
Simply stated, the object to purify is your present, obscured experience of speech and the habitual instincts that accompany it.
The practice of mantra recitation purifies this impure experience and results in pure, vajra-like speech. One achieves the Sambhogakaya and becomes imbued with the sixty qualities of the Buddha's speech. All of one's words become pleasing, meaningful and helpful. The means of purification is to recite the mantra, the pure sounds which the buddhas have given to us, over and over until they are like a spinning wheel of sound. ~ Gyatrul Rinpoche, Generating the DeityZ,#KEYS
84:The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. ""Lost in oneself"" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are. ~ Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #KEYS
85:Behind the traditional way of Knowledge, justifying its thought-process of elimination and withdrawal, stands an over-mastering spiritual experience. Deep, intense, convincing, common to all who have overstepped a certain limit of the active mind-belt into the horizonless inner space, this is the great experience of liberation, the consciousness of something within us that is behind and outside of the universe and all its forms, interests, aims, events and happenings, calm, untouched, unconcerned, illimitable, immobile, free, the uplook to something above us indescribable and unseizable into which by abolition of our personality we can enter, the presence of an omnipresent eternal witness Purusha, the sense of an Infinity or a Timelessness that looks down on us from an august negation of all our existence and is alone the one thing Real. This experience is the highest sublimation of spiritualised mind looking resolutely beyond its own existence. No one who has not passed through this liberation can be entirely free from the mind and its meshes, but one is not compelled to linger in this experience for ever. Great as it is, it is only the Mind's overwhelming experience of what is beyond itself and all it can conceive. It is a supreme negative experience, but beyond it is all the tremendous light of an infinite consciousness, an illimitable Knowledge, an affirmative absolute Presence.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, 278-279,#KEYS
86:
If one is too serious in yoga, doesn't one become obsessed by the difficulty of the task?
There is a limit to be kept!... But if one chooses one's obsession well, it may be very useful because it is no longer quite an obsession. For example, one has decided to find the Divine within oneself, and constantly, in every circumstance, whatever happens or whatever one may do, one concentrates in order to enter into contact with the inner Divine. Naturally, first one must have that little thing Sri Aurobindo speaks about, that "lesser truth" which consists in knowing that there is a Divine within one (this is a very good example of the "lesser truth") and once one is sure of it and has the aspiration to find it, if that aspiration becomes constant and the effort to realise it becomes constant, in the eyes of others it looks like an obsession, but this kind of obsession is not bad. It becomes bad only if one loses one's balance. But it must be made quite clear that those who lose their balance with that obsession are only those who were quite ready to lose their balance; any circumstance whatever would have produced the same result and made them lose their balance - it is a defect in the mental structure, it is not the fault of the obsession. And naturally, he who changes a desire into an obsession would be sure to go straight towards imbalance. That is why I say it is important to know the object of the obsession. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1950-1951,#KEYS
87: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 souls 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, The Yoga of Divine Works, Self-Consecration, 80 [where to concentrate?],#KEYS
88:Karma Yoga, the Path of Works; :::
The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will. It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga, 39,#KEYS
89:What your reasoning ignores is that which is absolute or tends towards the absolute in man and his seeking as well as in the Divine - something not to be explained by mental reasoning or vital motive. A motive, but a motive of the soul, not of vital desire; a reason not of the mind, but of the self and spirit. An asking too, but the asking that is the soul's inherent aspiration, not a vital longing. That is what comes up when there is the sheer self-giving, when "I seek you for this, I seek you for that" changes to a sheer "I seek you for you." It is that marvellous and ineffable absolute in the Divine that Krishnaprem means when he says, "Not knowledge nor this nor that, but Krishna."
The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and He is He. That is all about it.
I have written all that only to explain what we mean whenwe speak of seeking the Divine for himself and not for anything else - so far as it is explicable. Explicable or not, it is one of the most dominant facts of spiritual experience. The call to selfgiving is only an expression of this fact. But this does not mean that I object to your asking for Ananda. Ask for that by all means, so long as to ask for it is a need of any part of your being - for these are the things that lead on towards the Divine so long as the absolute inner call that is there all the time does not push itself to the surface. But it is really that that has drawn from the beginning and is there behind - it is the categorical spiritual imperative, the absolute need of the soul for the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II, Seeking the Divine,#KEYS
90: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
91: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
92: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
93: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
94: There is also the consecration of the thoughts to the Divine. In its inception this is the attempt to fix the mind on the object of adoration, -for naturally the restless human mind is occupied with other objects and, even when it is directed upwards, constantly drawn away by the world, -- so that in the end it habitually thinks of him and all else is only secondary and thought of only in relation to him. This is done often with the aid of a physical image or, more intimately and characteristically, of a Mantra or a divine name through which the divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise, to be three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling and fixing of the mind on the object; and by this comes the full realisation. And by these, too, there comes when the accompanying feeling or the concentration is very intense, the Samadhi, the ecstatic trance in which the consciousness passes away from outer objects. But all this is really incidental; the one thing essential is the intense devotion of the thought in the mind to the object of adoration. Although it seems akin to the contemplation of the way of knowledge, it differs from that in its spirit. It is in its real nature not a still, but an ecstatic contemplation; it seeks not to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring the Divine into ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his presence or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but the ecstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self-consecration, which ends in the giving up of all other thought of life for the possession of this ecstasy, eternal afterwards in planes beyond, or the comprehensive consecration in which all the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations of life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so in this, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation of the Divine in all ones inner activities and outward actions. But all is supported here by the primary force of the emotional union: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the divine love which possesses the spirit and its members.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion [T2],#KEYS
95:they are acting all the while in the spirit of rajasic ahaṅkara, persuade themselves that God is working through them and they have no part in the action. This is because they are satisfied with the mere intellectual assent to the idea without waiting for the whole system and life to be full of it. A continual remembrance of God in others and renunciation of individual eagerness (spr.ha) are needed and a careful watching of our inner activities until God by the full light of self-knowledge, jñanadı̄pena bhasvata, dispels all further chance of self-delusion. The danger of tamogun.a is twofold, first, when the Purusha thinks, identifying himself with the tamas in him, "I am weak, sinful, miserable, ignorant, good-for-nothing, inferior to this man and inferior to that man, adhama, what will God do through me?" - as if God were limited by the temporary capacities or incapacities of his instruments and it were not true that he can make the dumb to talk and the lame to cross the hills, mūkaṁ karoti vacalaṁ paṅguṁ laṅghayate girim, - and again when the sadhak tastes the relief, the tremendous relief of a negative santi and, feeling himself delivered from all troubles and in possession of peace, turns away from life and action and becomes attached to the peace and ease of inaction. Remember always that you too are Brahman and the divine Shakti is working in you; reach out always to the realisation of God's omnipotence and his delight in the Lila. He bids Arjuna work lokasaṅgraharthaya, for keeping the world together, for he does not wish the world to sink back into Prakriti, but insists on your acting as he acts, "These worlds would be overpowered by tamas and sink into Prakriti if I did not do actions." To be attached to inaction is to give up our action not to God but to our tamasic ahaṅkara. The danger of the sattvagun.a is when the sadhak becomes attached to any one-sided conclusion of his reason, to some particular kriya or movement of the sadhana, to the joy of any particular siddhi of the yoga, perhaps the sense of purity or the possession of some particular power or the Ananda of the contact with God or the sense of freedom and hungers after it, becomes attached to that only and would have nothing else. Remember that the yoga is not for yourself; for these things, though they are part of the siddhi, are not the object of the siddhi, for you have decided at the beginning to make no claim upon God but take what he gives you freely and, as for the Ananda, the selfless soul will even forego the joy of God's presence, ... ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #KEYS
96:PROTECTION
Going to sleep is a little like dying, a journey taken alone into the unknown. Ordinarily we are not troubled about sleep because we are familiar with it, but think about what it entails. We completely lose ourselves in a void for some period of time, until we arise again in a dream. When we do so, we may have a different identity and a different body. We may be in a strange place, with people we do not know, involved in baffling activities that may seem quite risky.
Just trying to sleep in an unfamiliar place may occasion anxiety. The place may be perfectly secure and comfortable, but we do not sleep as well as we do at home in familiar surroundings. Maybe the energy of the place feels wrong. Or maybe it is only our own insecurity that disturbs us,and even in familiar places we may feel anxious while waiting for sleep to come, or be frightenedby what we dream. When we fall asleep with anxiety, our dreams are mingled with fear and tension, sleep is less restful, and the practice harder to do. So it is a good idea to create a sense of protection before we sleep and to turn our sleeping area into a sacred space.
This is done by imagining protective dakinis all around the sleeping area. Visualize the dakinis as beautiful goddesses, enlightened female beings who are loving, green in color, and powerfully protective. They remain near as you fall asleep and throughout the night, like mothers watching over their child, or guardians surrounding a king or queen. Imagine them everywhere, guarding the doors and the windows, sitting next to you on the bed, walking in the garden or the yard, and so on, until you feel completely protected.
Again, this practice is more than just trying to visualize something: see the dakinis with your mind but also use your imagination to feel their presence. Creating a protective, sacred environment in this way is calming and relaxing and promotes restful sleep. This is how the mystic lives: seeing the magic, changing the environment with the mind, and allowing actions, even actions of the imagination, to have significance.
You can enhance the sense of peace in your sleeping environment by keeping objects of a sacred nature in the bedroom: peaceful, loving images, sacred and religious symbols, and other objects that direct your mind toward the path.
The Mother Tantra tells us that as we prepare for sleep we should maintain awareness of the causes of dream, the object to focus upon, the protectors, and of ourselves. Hold these together inawareness, not as many things, but as a single environment, and this will have a great effect in dream and sleep.
~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep,#KEYS
97:[desire and its divine form:]
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 aught 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 the 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.
When once the object of concentration has possessed and is possessed by the three master instruments, the thought, the heart and the will,-a consummation fully possible only when the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law,-the perfection of mind and life and body can be effectively fulfilled in our transmuted nature. This will be done, not for the personal satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the divine work. For that work can be truly performed only when the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for a selfless action,-and that will be when personal desire and egoism are abolished, but not the liberated individual. Even when the little ego has been abolished, the true spiritual Person can still remain and God's will and work and delight in him and the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will then be divine and done divinely; our mind and life and will, devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves,- all that we can manifest of the embodied Unity, Love, Freedom, Strength, Power, Splendour, immortal Joy which is the goal of the Spirit's terrestrial adventure.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration [83] [T1],#KEYS
98:DHARANA
NOW that we have learnt to observe the mind, so that we know how it works to some extent, and have begun to understand the elements of control, we may try the result of gathering together all the powers of the mind, and attempting to focus them on a single point.
We know that it is fairly easy for the ordinary educated mind to think without much distraction on a subject in which it is much interested. We have the popular phrase, "revolving a thing in the mind"; and as long as the subject is sufficiently complex, as long as thoughts pass freely, there is no great difficulty. So long as a gyroscope is in motion, it remains motionless relatively to its support, and even resists attempts to distract it; when it stops it falls from that position. If the earth ceased to spin round the sun, it would at once fall into the sun. The moment then that the student takes a simple subject - or rather a simple object - and imagines it or visualizes it, he will find that it is not so much his creature as he supposed. Other thoughts will invade the mind, so that the object is altogether forgotten, perhaps for whole minutes at a time; and at other times the object itself will begin to play all sorts of tricks.
Suppose you have chosen a white cross. It will move its bar up and down, elongate the bar, turn the bar oblique, get its arms unequal, turn upside down, grow branches, get a crack around it or a figure upon it, change its shape altogether like an Amoeba, change its size and distance as a whole, change the degree of its illumination, and at the same time change its colour. It will get splotchy and blotchy, grow patterns, rise, fall, twist and turn; clouds will pass over its face. There is no conceivable change of which it is incapable. Not to mention its total disappearance, and replacement by something altogether different!
Any one to whom this experience does not occur need not imagine that he is meditating. It shows merely that he is incapable of concentrating his mind in the very smallest degree. Perhaps a student may go for several days before discovering that he is not meditating. When he does, the obstinacy of the object will infuriate him; and it is only now that his real troubles will begin, only now that Will comes really into play, only now that his manhood is tested. If it were not for the Will-development which he got in the conquest of Asana, he would probably give up. As it is, the mere physical agony which he underwent is the veriest trifle compared with the horrible tedium of Dharana.
For the first week it may seem rather amusing, and you may even imagine you are progressing; but as the practice teaches you what you are doing, you will apparently get worse and worse. Please understand that in doing this practice you are supposed to be seated in Asana, and to have note-book and pencil by your side, and a watch in front of you. You are not to practise at first for more than ten minutes at a time, so as to avoid risk of overtiring the brain. In fact you will probably find that the whole of your willpower is not equal to keeping to a subject at all for so long as three minutes, or even apparently concentrating on it for so long as three seconds, or three-fifths of one second. By "keeping to it at all" is meant the mere attempt to keep to it. The mind becomes so fatigued, and the object so incredibly loathsome, that it is useless to continue for the time being. In Frater P.'s record we find that after daily practice for six months, meditations of four minutes and less are still being recorded.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA,#KEYS
99:This greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil daylight, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit: a play of lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge. A downpour of inwardly visible Light very usually envelops this action; for it must be noted that, contrary to our ordinary conceptions, light is not primarily a material creation and the sense or vision of light accompanying the inner illumination is not merely a subjective visual image or a symbolic phenomenon: light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative and creative; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy. There is also in this descent the arrival of a greater dynamic, a golden drive, a luminous enthousiasmos of inner force and power which replaces the comparatively slow and deliberate process of the Higher Mind by a swift, sometimes a vehement, almost a violent impetus of rapid transformation.
But these two stages of the ascent enjoy their authority and can get their own united completeness only by a reference to a third level; for it is from the higher summits where dwells the intuitional being that they derive the knowledge which they turn into thought or sight and bring down to us for the mind's transmutation. Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude. ... Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of stable lightnings.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,#KEYS
100:To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single subject and this it must do undistracted by all lures and alien calls on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to keep the mind; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker of knowledge must effect. Nor must it be merely the consecutive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted so much as a dwelling so far as possible on the fruitful essence of the idea which by the insistence of the soul's will upon it must yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestation of the divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the Sadhaka. The thought may come first and the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held till it becomes a constant experience and finally the Dharma or law of the being.
This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation of the object or by a merging into it m an inner Samadhi. If this be the process followed, then subsequently the state into which we rise must still be called down to take possession of the lower being, to shed its light, power and bliss on our ordinary consciousness. For otherwise we may possess it, as many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi, but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into the contacts of the world; and this truncated possession is not the aim of an integral Yoga.
A third process is neither at first to concentrate in a strenuous meditation on the one subject nor in a strenuous contemplation of the one object of thought-vision, but first to still the mind altogether. This may be done by various ways; one is to stand back from the mental action altogether not participating in but simply watching it until, tired of its unsanctioned leaping and running, it falls into an increasing and finally an absolute quiet. Another is to reject the thought-suggestions, to cast them away from the mind whenever they come and firmly hold to the peace of the being which really and always exists behind the trouble and riot of the mind. When this secret peace is unveiled, a great calm settles on the being and there comes usually with it the perception and experience of the all-pervading silent Brahman, everything else at first seeming to be mere form and eidolon. On the basis of this calm everything else may be built up in the knowledge and experience no longer of the external phenomena of things but of the deeper truth of the divine manifestation.
Ordinarily, once this state is obtained, strenuous concentration will be found no longer necessary. A free concentration of will using thought merely for suggestion and the giving of light to the lower members will take its place. This Will will then insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman. By swifter or slower degrees according to the previous preparation and purification of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that eventually the knowledge of the Divine takes possession of our consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is formed in our human existence even as it was done by the old Vedic Sadhakas. For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and powerful discipline.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, Concentration,#KEYS
101:What are these operations? They are not mere psychological self-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such observation are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and practically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead to a right thought of considerable power and effectivity. Like intellectual discrimination by the process of meditative thought they will have an effect of purification; they will lead to self-knowledge of a certain kind and to the setting right of the disorders of the soul and the heart and even of the disorders of the understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight path to the knowledge of the real Self. The Upanishad tells us that the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances of things; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought and steady wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to immortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self-observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction.We can look into the inward of ourselves more easily than we can look into the inward of things external to us because there, in things outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the form and secondly we have no natural previous experience of that in them which is other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. (2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs us towards the knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the realisation of the Self in its pure being.
The status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is not merely an intellectual conception or clear discrimination of the truth, nor is it an enlightened psychological experience of the modes of our being. It is a "realisation", in the full sense of the word; it is the making real to ourselves and in ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and it is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its flux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity.
This internal vision, dr.s.t.i, the power so highly valued by the ancient sages, the power which made a man a Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it-to the soul and not merely to the intellect-as do things seen to the physical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaks.a, of that which is present to the eyes, and paroks.a, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision, we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who have seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes,-for no other sense is adequate,-we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge. Precisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of he Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from philosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and exclusive concentration;3 but we have not yet realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality, jyotirmaya brahman, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever fadings of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held. The experience is inevitably renewed and must become more frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity.
(2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the 2 In one respect, however, it is easier, because in external things we are not so much hampered by the sense of the limited ego as in ourselves; one obstacle to the realisation of God is therefore removed.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge,#KEYS
102: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
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:The object of power is power. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 2:The object of powder is powder. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 3:The object of the superior man is truth. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 4:Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 5:The object of living is work, experience, happiness. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 6:It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 7:The object is to win fairly, by the rules - but to win. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 8:Become yourself the object of your meditation. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 9:One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 10:The object of government is the welfare of the people. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 11:Pure Christian love is not derived from the merit of the object. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 12:The object is to win fairly, squarely, by the rules, but to win. ~ vince-lombardi, @wisdomtrove 13:The object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 14:The object of (Christian) faith is not the teaching but the Teacher. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 15:The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 16:The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 17:Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules. ~ ashleigh-brilliant, @wisdomtrove 18:The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher. ~ elbert-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 19:Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 20:But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 21:Crave for a thing, you will get it. Renounce the craving, the object will follow you by itself. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 22:The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 23:As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 24:The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 25:... the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 26:Faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 27:Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 28:But from the good health of the mind comes that which is dear to all and the object of prayer-happiness. ~ aeschylus, @wisdomtrove 29:Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 30:It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 31:the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 32:He who requires much from himself and little from others, will keep himself from being the object of resentment. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 33:Man's best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it. ~ aristotle, @wisdomtrove 34:The object of war is victory, the object of victory is conquest, and the object of conquest is occupation. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 35:Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 36:The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 37:Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen and you will find yourself everywhere. ~ rupert-spira, @wisdomtrove 38:If you wish to find Love, don't look for the object of love but rather for the source of love. There you will find the Beloved. ~ mooji, @wisdomtrove 39:I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 40:Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement ‚Äî meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 41:Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price. ~ napoleon-hill, @wisdomtrove 42:If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove 43:Happy is it to place a daughter; yet it pains a father's heart when he delivers to another's house a child, the object of his tender care. ~ euripedes, @wisdomtrove 44:A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-sr, @wisdomtrove 45:The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 46:Two qualities are at the root of all meditation development: right effort and right aim‚îarousing effort to aim the mind toward the object. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 47:Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort. ~ epictetus, @wisdomtrove 48:The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 49:It sometimes is a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection from the object of it, she may loose the opportunity of fixing him. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 50:At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 51:There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 52:Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 53:No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 54:Truth is the object of our understanding, as good is of our will; and the understanding can no more be delighted with a lie than the will can choose an apparent evil. ~ john-dryden, @wisdomtrove 55:But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 56:It is the subjective world that rules the objective. Change the subject, and the object is bound to change; purify youreslf, and the world is bound to be purified. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 57:Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 58:Friendship is but a name, faith is an empty name. Alas, it is not safe to praise to a friend the object of your love; as soon as he believes your praises, he slips into your place. ~ ovid, @wisdomtrove 59:[In that vision] nothing is seen other than Thyself, [for Thou] art Thyself the object of Thyself (for Thou seest, and art That which is seen, and art the sight as well) ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove 60:Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 61:They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 62:Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 63:His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. ~ robert-louis-stevenson, @wisdomtrove 64:The principal agent is the object itself and not the instruction given by the teacher. It is the child who uses the objects; it is the child who is active, and not the teacher. ~ maria-montessori, @wisdomtrove 65:Reason does not need thinking. If you observe yourself making a plan you will notice that having fixed the object, the facts just keep coming, linking up into a chain of proposed action. ~ barry-long, @wisdomtrove 66:I do not think I should care to go on worshipping a Madonna even if she did wink. One cannot make much out of a wink. We want something more than that from the object of our adoration. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 67:..bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the cause of truth." Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 68:Before God closed in on me, I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 69:The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it. ~ leonardo-da-vinci, @wisdomtrove 70:The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 71:Awareness becomes consciousness when it has an object. The object changes all the time. In consciousness, there is movement; awareness by itself is motionless and timeless, here and now. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 72:Q: Why do you insist on awareness as the only real? Is not the object of awareness as real, while it lasts? M: But it does not last! Momentary reality is secondary; it depends on the timeless. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 73:The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 74:Have you not noticed how, when you find it impossible to get the object of your love, you either wish to kill it or to die yourself? Whereas, the love of God, takes you to the death of death, to Immortality. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 75:The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 76:The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 77:This does not mean that the enemy is to be allowed to escape. The object is to make him believe that there is a road to safety, and thus prevent his fighting with the courage of despair. After that, you may crush him. ~ sun-tzu, @wisdomtrove 78:When one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed& 79:Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 80:It has frequently been said that we never desire what we think absolutely inapprehensible: it is however true that some of our sharpest agonies are those in which the object of desire is regarded as both possible and imaginary. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 81:It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 82:Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over. ~ bette-davis, @wisdomtrove 83:I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me? ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 84:Q: Does awareness evolve? M: What is seen may undergo many changes when the light of awareness is focussed on it, but itis the object that changes, not the light. Plants grow in sunlight, but the sun does not grow. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 85:The reason we might lose love is because we are always looking outside of us, thinking that the object or action of love is out there. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 86:Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 87:Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility! Or why not my fortune adapted to its impulses! Tenderness without a capacity of relieving only makes the man who feels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 88:To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 89:Nothing more powerfully excites any affection than to conceal some part of its object, by throwing it into a kind of shade, whichat the same time that it shows enough to prepossess us in favour of the object, leaves still some work for the imagination. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 90:Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 91:Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it. ~ nathaniel-hawthorne, @wisdomtrove 92:The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction. ~ henri-matisse, @wisdomtrove 93:For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 94:Knowledge has three degrees - opinion, science, illumination. THe means or instrument of the first s sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge found on the identity of the mind knowing with the object know ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 95:The fate of a battle is the result of a moment, of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 96:In advancing stages of contemplation, rising from contemplation of Nature, to that in the soul, and thence again to that in the divine Mind, the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the contemplating being, more and more one with them. ~ plotinus, @wisdomtrove 97:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 98:When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 99:You will find your way to the object you love, so be very cautious about your object of love because that is going to decide your destiny. Your love is your destiny. Love something superb; love something of the supra-existence; love something of the divine, and you will find your way. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 100:People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ... People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 101:The object isn't to be perfect. The goal isn't to hold back until you've created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all. ~ seth-godin, @wisdomtrove 102:The establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field - the object is attained - and it now remains to be my earnest wish & prayer, that the Citizens of the United States could make a wise and virtuous use of the blessings placed before them. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 103:All knowledge resolves itself into probability. ... In every judgment, which we can form concerning probability, as well as concerning knowledge, we ought always to correct the first judgment deriv'd from the nature of the object, by another judgment, deriv'd from the nature of the understanding. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 104:I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 105:You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 106:the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on. We must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 107:The tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment. ~ anthony-de-mello, @wisdomtrove 108:First of all, let us try to know what love is. If love means to possess someone or something, then that is not real love, not pure love. If loves means to give oneself, to become one with everything and everyone, then that is real love. Real love is total oneness with the object loved and with the Possessor of love. ~ sri-chinmoy, @wisdomtrove 109:What you want will pull like a magnet. Here's the other part. What for? Purpose is stronger than object. It's the & 110:The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 111:But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 112:The person is of little use. It is deeply involved in its own affairs and is completely ignorant of its true being. Unless the witnessing consciousness begins to play on the person and it becomes the object of observation rather than the subject, realisation is not feasible. It is the witness that makes realisation desirable and attainable. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 113:When the pangs shoot through our body, and ghastly death appears in view, people see the patience of the dying Christian. Our infirmities become the black velvet on which the diamond of God's love glitters all the more brightly. Thank God I can suffer ! Thank God I can be made the object of shame and contempt, for in this way God shall be glorified. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 114:As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 115:Mindful consumption is the object of this precept. We are what we consume. If we look deeply into the items that we consume every day, we will come to know our own nature very well. We have to eat, drink, consume, but if we do it unmindfully, we may destroy our bodies and our consciousness, showing ingratitude toward our ancestors, our parents, and future generations. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 116:When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 117:Well, think of what I’m doing to you right now. For me I’m the self, and you’re the object. For you, of course, it’s the exact opposite you’re the self to you and I’m the object. And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness. Volitionally.I still don’t get it, but it sure feels good.That’s the whole idea,the girl said. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 118:If you are in the right state, whatever you see will put you into samadhi. After all, samadhi is nothing unusual. When the mind is intensely interested, it becomes one with the object of interest - the seer and the seen become one in seeing, the hearer and the heard become one in hearing, the lover and the loved become one in loving. Every experience can be the ground for samadhi. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 119:Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature... in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 120:I have known men who thought the object of conversion was to cleanse them as a garment is cleansed, and that when they are converted they were to be hung up in the Lord's wardrobe, the door of which was to be shut, so that no dust could get at them. A coat that is not used the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted, the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 121:Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 122:The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle. The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 123:One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 124:If in the state of witnessing you ask yourself: & 125:Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 126:To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 127:Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 128:All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity... ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 129:Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 130:If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 131:As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 132:Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 133:Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings, for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 134:I behold Thee, 0 Lord my God, in a kind of mental trance, ... Thus, while I am borne to loftiest heights, I behold Thee as Infinity... And when I behold Thee as absolute Infinity, to whom is befitting neither the name of creating Creator nor of creatable Creator-then indeed I begin to behold Thee unveiled, and to enter into the garden of delights! ... [In that vision] nothing is seen other than Thyself, [for Thou] art Thyself the object of Thyself (for Thou seest, and art That which is seen, and art the sight as well) . ~ nicholas-of-cusa, @wisdomtrove 135:Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? The sun, the moon, and the stars have been worshiped. Shall we then pluck them out of the sky? ... see how much he [God] has been able to accomplish through me, though I did no more than pray and preach. The Word did it all. Had I wished I might have started a conflagration at Worms. But while I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 136:For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 137:God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty ‚Äì of want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goal in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence, and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense , His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give, and nothing to receive. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 138:Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated building blocks, but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. ~ fritjof-capra, @wisdomtrove 139:There is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like “being” in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activity—“at rest, without parts or activity,” according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is “without a second” and is not the object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One “before whom words recoil.” Shankara” ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:The object of power is power. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
2:The object of powder is powder. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
3:The object of war is to survive it. ~ John Irving, #NFDB
4:He hated being the object of scrutiny. ~ Maya Banks, #NFDB
5:The art is in the idea, not the object. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
6:The object of the superior man is truth. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
7:The object of art is to give life a shape, ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
8:The object of art is to give life shape. ~ Jean Anouilh, #NFDB
9:Beauty is the object of all my efforts. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
10:Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object. ~ Plotinus, #NFDB
11:The idea is more important than the object. ~ Damien Hirst, #NFDB
12:The object of the intellect is being.
~ Meister Eckhart,#NFDB
13:Morality is the object of government. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
14:That's the object of going to a gym, having fun. ~ Joe Gold, #NFDB
15:The object of love is to serve, not to win ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
16:The creative mind plays with the object it loves. ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
17:I want women to be the subject, not the object. ~ Jill Soloway, #NFDB
18:The dowry, not the wife, is the object of attraction. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
19:The object is that which is objected against me. ~ Julien Torma, #NFDB
20:The object of Art is to give life a shape. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
21:The object of living is work, experience, happiness. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
22:The object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
23:God lives between a human being and the object of his desire ~ Rumi, #NFDB
24:To be the object of someone's obsession is horrible. ~ Tippi Hedren, #NFDB
25:Between the subject and the object lies the value. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
26:It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
27:...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty. ~ Plato, #NFDB
28:Kindness isn't so difficult, when the object is worthy. ~ Brenda Hiatt, #NFDB
29:Go not to the object; let the object come to you. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
30:Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect. ~ Averroes, #NFDB
31:Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect ~ Averroes, #NFDB
32:love always desires to bless the object of its affection. ~ Jim Cymbala, #NFDB
33:What makes worship amazing is the object of our worship. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
34:You can say no. You can not be the object of ridicule. ~ Peter Dinklage, #NFDB
35:Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect ~ Averroes, #NFDB
36:see the object not as it really is, but as they would like it ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
37:The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful. ~ Plato, #NFDB
38:One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
39:Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not. ~ Alfred Korzybski, #NFDB
40:The object of government is the welfare of the people. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
41:the object of our attention becomes the reality of our world. ~ Gregg Braden, #NFDB
42:Therefore hold this fact of not being the object of your own ~ Thupten Jinpa, #NFDB
43:Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object's loss— ~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
44:The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
45:Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul. ~ Margaret Thatcher, #NFDB
46:The education of the will is the object of our existence. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
47:The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
48:All the basic information should be in the object itself. ~ Michael Craig Martin, #NFDB
49:It depends little on the object, much on the mood, in art. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
50:Pure Christian love is not derived from the merit of the object. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
51:The object of all education is to make folks fit to live. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder, #NFDB
52:The object is to win fairly, squarely, by the rules, but to win. ~ Vince Lombardi, #NFDB
53:And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
54:The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic Law. ~ Bernard Lewis, #NFDB
55:The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
56:The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
57:Curious, a man's affection for the object that he manipulates. ~ Joris Karl Huysmans, #NFDB
58:Beauty is nonconceptual. Nothing in the object directly explains it. ~ Timothy Morton, #NFDB
59:Did you know we know we are all the object of another's imagination? ~ Carlos Fuentes, #NFDB
60:Distinction is the consequence, never the object of a great mind. ~ Washington Allston, #NFDB
61:For love concentrates on the object, sex concentrates on the subject. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
62:Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
63:The object of knowledge is what exists and its function to know about reality. ~ Plato, #NFDB
64:The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
65:The object of mathematics is the honor of the human spirit. ~ Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, #NFDB
66:The object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
67:Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponents mind. ~ Bobby Fischer, #NFDB
68:Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
69:The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thought. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
70:Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent's mind. ~ Bobby Fischer, #NFDB
71:Self-realization is the object of the Gita, as it is of all scriptures. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
72:The object of (Christian) faith is not the teaching but the Teacher. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
73:Therefore hold this fact of not being the object of your own disapproval ~ Thupten Jinpa, #NFDB
74:The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it. ~ John Steinbeck, #NFDB
75:Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers. ~ John Churton Collins, #NFDB
76:a typical male who would find a way to blame his lust on the object of it. ~ Maggie Shayne, #NFDB
77:The devil take me, if I think anything but love to be the object of love. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
78:"The extravert, on the contrary, maintains a positive relation to the object." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
79:The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment. ~ Tennessee Williams, #NFDB
80:He had always known that he was the lover and she was the object of love. ~ Fran oise Sagan, #NFDB
81:In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
82:The object of battle was the destruction of the enemy’s capacity to resist. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
83:Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
84:Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity. ~ George Meredith, #NFDB
85:The object of golf is to beat someone. Make sure that someone is not yourself. ~ Bobby Jones, #NFDB
86:What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy? ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
87:In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
88:The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
89:The object of all good literature is to purge the soul of its petty troubles. ~ P G Wodehouse, #NFDB
90:The subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage.
~ Ken Wilber,#NFDB
91:Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. ~ Minor White, #NFDB
92:If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
93:I love you. You are the object of my affection and the object of my sentence. ~ Mignon Fogarty, #NFDB
94:It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
95:Jesus is the author of faith, the provider of faith, and the object of faith. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
96:Remember, your memories are not stored in the object; the memories are in you. ~ Joshua Becker, #NFDB
97:The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself. ~ Sherwood Anderson, #NFDB
98:The thing or person you trust in is actually the object of your worship. Look ~ Edward T Welch, #NFDB
99:To say this, however, is not to claim that it was the object of theoretical study. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
100:It is not the amount of our faith but the object of our faith that saves us. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
101:Life is growth and the object of right thinking is to promote that growth. ~ Christian D Larson, #NFDB
102:I conceived at least one great love in my life, of which I was always the object. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
103:Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
104:The object of our serch is the fire of grace which enters into the heart. ~ Theophan the Recluse, #NFDB
105:The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
106:The only way to understand fully is to become the object of our understanding. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
107:Are you under the impression that the object of everyone else’s love actually exists? ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
108:Let temporal things serve thy use, but the eternal be the object of thy desire. ~ Thomas a Kempis, #NFDB
109:Marcus fucks Henry. In the grammar of our relationship, I am the object. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson, #NFDB
110:A devotee has no agenda of his own. For him, the object of devotion is everything. ~ Jaggi Vasudev, #NFDB
111:No one is the object of another man's contempt, unless he is first the object of his own. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
112:The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power. ~ Douglas MacArthur, #NFDB
113:The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher. ~ Elbert Hubbard, #NFDB
114:Eve was saturated in the object of her desire. Jesus was saturated in God’s truth. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
115:It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions. ~ Paul Klee, #NFDB
116:Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
117:the object of her most trivial thoughts, and the goal of her most important actions ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
118:The world cannot satisfy the heart, because the heart is too large for the object. ~ J Vernon McGee, #NFDB
119:Whatever is the object of a saint's hope is the subject of his prayer. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
120:In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home! ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
121:One who loves God finds the object of his love everywhere.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, [T4],#NFDB
122:The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other peoples. ~ William Ralph Inge, #NFDB
123:the object of Buddha's meditation and his teachings was to free humanity from sufferings. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
124:I'm a boxer who believes that the object of the sport is to hit and not get hit. ~ Floyd Mayweather Jr, #NFDB
125:The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then fix it in form. ~ Francois Delsarte, #NFDB
126:God will not be God, if He allowed Himself to be the object of proof by His creatures. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
127:Our willingness to wait reveals the value we place on the object we're waiting for. ~ Charles F Stanley, #NFDB
128:It is not the class of the object that’s important, it’s the message you plan to send to it. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
129:polymorphism means that the meaning of an operation depends on the object being operated on. ~ Mark Lutz, #NFDB
130:The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
131:The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
132:They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
133:But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
134:For the first time, the object of what I want is more important than fulfilling my desires. ~ Abbi Glines, #NFDB
135:The object of music is a Sound. The end; to delight, and move various Affections in us. ~ Rene Descartes, #NFDB
136:In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action, ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
137:I think I've always had the abilities, but the object has been to perform as well as I can. ~ Steve McNair, #NFDB
138:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
139:The object isn’t to die for your country, it’s to make the other poor slob die for his. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon, #NFDB
140:The object of the Bible is not to tell how good men are, but how bad men can become good. ~ Dwight L Moody, #NFDB
141:The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
142:Crave for a thing, you will get it. Renounce the craving, the object will follow you by itself. ~ Sivananda, #NFDB
143:It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
144:The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access ~ Adam Phillips, #NFDB
145:The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
146:The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. ~ Dorothea Lange, #NFDB
147:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell, #NFDB
148:The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
149:The object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy them ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
150:To be the object of somebody's obsession is a really awful feeling when you can't return it. ~ Tippi Hedren, #NFDB
151:When the gift replaces the giver as the object of our worship, something surprising happens. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
152:A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
153:... the object of learning was not to build a better mousetrap but to ask a better question. ~ Julius Lester, #NFDB
154:It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
155:One truth doesn't refute another. Truth doesn't lie in the object, but in how we see it. ~ Michael J Sullivan, #NFDB
156:One truth doesn’t refute another. Truth doesn’t lie in the object, but in how we see it. ~ Michael J Sullivan, #NFDB
157:The object of pure Mathematic (is) that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence. ~ James Joseph Sylvester, #NFDB
158:The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. ~ George S Patton, #NFDB
159:Admiral Spartan thinks that the object must be exposed and penetrated with all possible speed. ~ Lincoln Child, #NFDB
160:The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
161:The perceptive act is a reaction of the mind upon the object of which it is the perception. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
162:We must distinguish the act of faith from the object of faith, believing from what is believed. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
163:And in that moment I knew—I was losing my heart to the object of my family’s deepest hatred. Zaal ~ Tillie Cole, #NFDB
164:As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
165:I am the King. I tell. I am not told. I am the verb, sir. I am not the object. (King George III) ~ Alan Bennett, #NFDB
166:To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships. ~ Paul Cezanne, #NFDB
167:Death, in any case,' [...] 'is the object of life. Our only lesson is this: to learn how to die. ~ Richard Mason, #NFDB
168:The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
169:...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
170:What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
171:Holding the object of my addiction in my hands compromised everything I had sworn to fight against. ~ Tillie Cole, #NFDB
172:Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
173:the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
174:The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~ Robert M Hutchins, #NFDB
175:The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
176:When I hate I rob myself of something; but when I love I become richer by the object I love. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
177:Whether the object of your faith be real or false, you will nevertheless obtain the same effects. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
178:without disbelieving the object of this misconception it is impossible to abandon misconceiving it. ~ Dharmakirti, #NFDB
179:His affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
180:One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater. ~ Marquis de Sade, #NFDB
181:Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder. ~ Eberhard Arnold, #NFDB
182:The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity. ~ Alberto Giacometti, #NFDB
183:Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
184:The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
185:Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
186:But from the good health of the mind comes that which is dear to all and the object of prayer-happiness. ~ Aeschylus, #NFDB
187:In relation to the universe the Supreme is Brahman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
188:It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
189:The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes its object not to exist. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
190:The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
191:The worker puts his life into the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, it belongs to the object. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
192:Were we perfectly acquainted with the object, we should never passionately desire it. ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld, #NFDB
193:When a person gives, he loves the object of his giving more -- and so love is planted and grows. ~ David J Lieberman, #NFDB
194:Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
195:Crave for a thing, you will get it. Renounce the craving, the object will follow you by itself. ~ Sivananda Saraswati, #NFDB
196:#283 "Develop your curiosity, not caring whether the object of you inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet." ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
197:He wasn't constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
198:Holiness is the object of our new creation. We are born again so that we may grow up into Christlikeness. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
199:I am going to have to stick to the script. If I muck around with the words it will defeat the object. ~ Clive Anderson, #NFDB
200:It is the food of my hopes, the object of my wishes, the only enjoyment of my life" - Alexander Hamilton ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
201:[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
202:The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
203:The salvation of birds and beasts, oneself included - this is the object of Shakyamuni's religious austerities. ~ Ikkyu, #NFDB
204:I didn't want to feel such love for someone else. I still wanted to be the object of that tidal wave. ~ Michelle Huneven, #NFDB
205:Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
206:The object of a Constitution is to restrain the Government, as that of laws is to restrain individuals. ~ John C Calhoun, #NFDB
207:It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
208:The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to. ~ Barbara W Tuchman, #NFDB
209:The object is for everyone to do their own thing, but the thing is to make one's thing the Revolution. ~ Eldridge Cleaver, #NFDB
210:Everywhere I am the object of an unbelievable esteem, the interest in me is, quite simply, tremendous. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
211:Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains. ~ Coco Chanel, #NFDB
212:We have a name for those who try to praise when they have no pleasure in the object. We call them hypocrites. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
213:A capacity for hating the object of desire is, perhaps, the best cure for love in cases of disappointment. ~ Norm MacDonald, #NFDB
214:But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent? ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
215:I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
216:It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
217:No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended. ~ Adrian Forty, #NFDB
218:all duties depend as regards the kind of obligation (not the object of their action) upon the one principle. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
219:He who requires much from himself and little from others, will keep himself from being the object of resentment. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
220:Moral: Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
221:Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal. ~ Kazimir Malevich, #NFDB
222:The object of war is not to die for your country, but make the other bastard die for his. -George S. Patton ~ Lani Lynn Vale, #NFDB
223:All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
224:Hate is a destructive emotion, but it does not destroy the object of hatred. It destroys the one who hates ~ Elizabeth Peters, #NFDB
225:Man's best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
226:The object in life is not to have as few commitments as possible, but to have the right kinds of commitments. ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
227:"The object of Buddhism is to perfect the person, the body-mind. There is no Buddha outside of the human being." ~ Kozan Kato, #NFDB
228:Calm, quiet and uniting all the loose ends of your existence. You become the object of your perception. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
229:Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
230:enforce obedience thereto. The object, on either side, doth not justify the means; for the lives of men are too ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
231:The object of the Gita appears to me to be that of showing the most excellent way to attain self-realization. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
232:In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
233:Moral: Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire. “A ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
234:The duty of "saving" became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
235:The experience does not depend on the object. The experience depends on the experiencer, on the quality of experiencing. ~ Osho, #NFDB
236:The object of love is not getting something you want but doing something for the well-being of the one you love. ~ Gary Chapman, #NFDB
237:The object of war is victory, the object of victory is conquest, and the object of conquest is occupation. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
238:You all know watching, so there is no question of learning it. It is just a question of changing the object of watching. ~ Osho, #NFDB
239:a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person’s study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
240:All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
~ Baruch Spinoza,#NFDB
241:Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
242:The object is to eat as many raw vegetables as possible, with a goal of one pound (sixteen ounces) daily. Meeting ~ Joel Fuhrman, #NFDB
243:The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
244:The object of Sufi preparatory study, however, being to illustrate, expose and out-manoeuvre superficial ambition. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
245:In football the object is to march into enemy territory and cross his goal. In baseball the object is to go home. ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
246:Love itself cannot be divorced from the suffering which comes from being separated from the object of love. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
247:The materialist idea mistakes a creation for the creative Power. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
248:the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
249:The object of convalescence ought to be to turn our attention to life: at other times, simply to our tasks! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
250:When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it. ~ Idries Shah, #NFDB
251:At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
252:At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
253:I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you. ~ Jacques Lacan, #NFDB
254:Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine, #NFDB
255:when we generate anger, ninety percent of the ugliness of the object of our anger is due to our own exaggeration. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
256:There is a Beatrice who exists beyond the obligations of a daughter, outside the object of man's affections. ~ Lisa Mantchev, #NFDB
257:Satyagraha thrives on repression till at last the repressor is tired of it and the object of satyagraha is gained. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
258:We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
259:Eventually you will notice when your mind is about to stray from the object, and you will be able to keep it there. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
260:Give your attention to the experience of seeing rather than to the object seen and you will find yourself everywhere. ~ Rupert Spira, #NFDB
261:Life-force is the dynamisation of a consciousness which exceeds it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
262:Modern philosophy from Descartes onward has asked itself the question: How can the subject really know the object? ~ William Barrett, #NFDB
263:The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
264:The object of all education should be to increase the usefulness of man - usefulness to himself and others. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
265:The problem with obsession is absence. When the object of your obsession disappears, what are you? Do you even exist ~ Stylo Fantome, #NFDB
266:You must act in your friends' interests whether it pleases them or not; the object of love is to serve, not to win. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
267:Love is an optical illusion that makes you believe the object of your affection is the most beautiful person in the world. ~ Tom Holt, #NFDB
268:She fleetingly wished this handsome stranger could be the object of her desires, instead of his black-hearted companion. ~ Kat Martin, #NFDB
269:that the object of writing is to write to yourself, to let your self know what you have been trying to avoid. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
270:The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
271:The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him. ~ Max Stirner, #NFDB
272:The problem with obsession is absence. When the object of your obsession disappears, what are you? Do you even exist? ~ Stylo Fantome, #NFDB
273:If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
274:If he is a half-decent human being, he will find himself the object of crushes. If he is a cocky bastard, even more so. ~ Piper Kerman, #NFDB
275:More important than having a romance with the object that I'm drawing, is to have a romance with the mark that I am making. ~ Jim Dine, #NFDB
276:She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel. ~ Florence Nightingale, #NFDB
277:She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther. ~ Richard Ford, #NFDB
278:I am the object of criticism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track. ~ Kim Jong Il, #NFDB
279:If you wish to find Love, don't look for the object of love but rather for the source of love. There you will find the Beloved. ~ Mooji, #NFDB
280:My decision (for Christ) was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
281:Rarely is the object of your attentions innately dull or compelling. Nothing is interesting if you are not interested. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
282:The chains of habit. We work to attain an object, and the object gained, we find that what we miss is the daily toil. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
283:I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
284:I'm a big believer in the negligee, that nearly invisible screen standing between you and the object of your desire. ~ Marcus Samuelsson, #NFDB
285:The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
286:Those who search for happiness do not find it because they do not understand that the object of the search is the seeker. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
287:Being the object of Alfred Hitchcock's obsession was horrific, but while he ruined my career, he could never ruin my life. ~ Tippi Hedren, #NFDB
288:I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it. ~ Roy Lichtenstein, #NFDB
289:Photography... has lived under the tyranny of its subject matter: the object has exercised an almost total domination. ~ Joan Fontcuberta, #NFDB
290:The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
291:Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object. ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
292:Inordinate love creates inordinate, uncontrollable anguish if anything goes wrong with the object of our greatest hope. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
293:legislators have almost always been ignorant of the object of society, which is to unite families by a common interest. ~ Fr d ric Bastiat, #NFDB
294:Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it. ~ Louis de Berni res, #NFDB
295:One Brahman, one reality in Self and Nature is the object of all knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Field and its Knower, #NFDB
296:The ugliness at the heart of beauty. Is there always ugliness, do you suppose? Even when the object is very, very beautiful? ~ Mary Balogh, #NFDB
297:We know the man by the object[.] Even the moon, the sun, stars, … [t]hat he sees them is an evidence of his own nature. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
298:Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would rather destroy himself though he had bread in abundance. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
299:The reader will pardon us another little digression; foreign to the object of this book but characteristic and useful . . . . ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
300:You obey not to get God’s attention, but because you have been the object of his attention since before the world began. ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
301:if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
302:The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection. ~ Konstantin Stanislavski, #NFDB
303:The object of my worship lies beyond perceptions reach; For men who see, the Ka'ba is a compass, nothing more. ~ Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, #NFDB
304:The object of the patrol method is not so much saving the Scoutmaster trouble as to give responsibility to the boy. ~ Baden Powell de Aquino, #NFDB
305:A flash of lightning illuminated the object ... it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life." Frankenstein ~ DK Publishing, #NFDB
306:Beauty may be the object of liking--great qualities of admiration--good ones of esteem--but love only is the object of love. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
307:Duty is seldom liked either by the doer or the object ... And why should it be? It is not often of advantage to either. ~ Ivy Compton Burnett, #NFDB
308:It is such a heady rush to be the object of someone’s attention in a good way, not as a freak, that I keep forgetting to hide. ~ Jodi Picoult, #NFDB
309:Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
310:Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor; the object was discredited as an indispensable element of the picture. ~ Wassily Kandinsky, #NFDB
311:That we’re both right. One truth doesn’t refute another. Truth doesn’t lie in the object, but in how we see it.” Hadrian ~ Michael J Sullivan, #NFDB
312:It is God-realisation and God-expression which is the object of our Yoga. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Nature of the Supermind, #NFDB
313:People are most similar to God when he is the object of their affection. People should delight in God, as he does in himself. ~ Edward T Welch, #NFDB
314:The object of my worship lies beyond perceptions reach. For those who see, the Ka'ba is a compass, nothing more. ~ Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, #NFDB
315:The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
316:Agreeable then to my present inclination, I formed the object of my own worship, which was no other than my own understanding. ~ Sarah Fielding, #NFDB
317:By catering our worship to the worshippers and not to the Object of our worship, I fear we have created human-centered churches. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
318:The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel - the object. ~ Claes Oldenburg, #NFDB
319:The problem with fame is you no longer belong to you. You lose your persona and become the object of other people's obsession. ~ Dionne Warwick, #NFDB
320:The saving of labour of the individual should be the object and honest humanitarian considerations, and not greed, the motive. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
321:This is what Aristotle meant when he said that the object of science is the necessary and the universal; man and not this man. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
322:You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
323:From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
324:Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object? ~ Rainbow Rowell, #NFDB
325:If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
326:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #NFDB
327:The object of basic education is the physical, intellectual and moral development of children through the medium of handicraft. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
328:An election is just a romance writ large, with an entire community, rather than a single woman, as the object of one's pursuit. ~ Bill Willingham, #NFDB
329:In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will. ~ Thomas Keating, #NFDB
330:The object is to make beautiful music for people to have forever. Music that stays - not just becomes a ringtone. Longevity. ~ Aaron Dontez Yates, #NFDB
331:The rejection of the object ceases to be necessary when the object can no longer ensnare us ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #NFDB
332:Thought is only a scout and pioneer; it can guide but not command or effectuate. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
333:Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
334:The mind is like an object that picks up dust. The object doesn’t know, any more than the mind does, why what clings to it clings. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
335:There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one's own greed. ~ Aga Khan IV, #NFDB
336:They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
337:"True understanding happens when we dismantle the barrier between the object of understanding and the subject of understanding." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
338:All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
339:A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lillies of the swamp. ~ Carson McCullers, #NFDB
340:To live by faith is to rest in the object of our faith, the God of the Bible, and to come to terms with all of our “I don’t knows. ~ Barnabas Piper, #NFDB
341:The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the picture. ~ Piet Mondrian, #NFDB
342:it’s hard to play the enigmatic prince of romance when the object of your affections gets to watch you shit into the sea twice a day. ~ Mark Lawrence, #NFDB
343:Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
344:Happy is it to place a daughter; yet it pains a father's heart when he delivers to another's house a child, the object of his tender care. ~ Euripides, #NFDB
345:In photography one should surely proceed from essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone. ~ Albert Renger Patzsch, #NFDB
346:Marcus Aurelius. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
347:The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
348:Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
349:Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
350:Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
351:The object of your worship will determine your future and define your life. It’s the one choice that all other choices are motivated by. ~ Kyle Idleman, #NFDB
352:The paintings have a lot to do with the idea of seeing and doing, and the relationship between your hand and your eye, and the object. ~ Malcolm Morley, #NFDB
353:A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, #NFDB
354:does no good to be angry or carry grudges.” He made a fist. “It churns you up inside. It does you more harm than the object of your anger. ~ Mitch Albom, #NFDB
355:In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
356:Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
357:“My soul cannot be the object of my judgement and knowledge; much more are my judgement and knowledge the objects of my soul.” ~ Carl Jung, The Red Book, #NFDB
358:The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
359:Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one. ~ A J P Taylor, #NFDB
360:We should wish for few things with eagerness, if we perfectly knew the nature of that which was the object of our desire. ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld, #NFDB
361:God's Love is a Love that keeps on loving even when the object of that Love ceases to please or even tries to stop that Love from coming. ~ Nancy Missler, #NFDB
362:I don't know if you have ever been the object of someone's obsession - but if it's not of your desire, it is horrible. It is really awful. ~ Tippi Hedren, #NFDB
363:The object of any tyrant would be to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives. ~ Patrick Devlin Baron Devlin, #NFDB
364:The object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desires. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
365:The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
366:The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
367:Great compassion is the root of altruistic action, the object of amazement to the world;there is no greater source of help and happiness. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
368:I would advise you to buy it, because if you read too long without handing over money you will find yourself the object of the Thief's Curse ~ J K Rowling, #NFDB
369:Rather than trying to immediately focus on the object of meditation, give your mind time to settle, to relax a little. What’s the hurry? ~ Andy Puddicombe, #NFDB
370:The object of mathematical rigor is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there was never any other object for it. ~ Jacques Hadamard, #NFDB
371:The object of this competition is not to be mean to the losers but to find a winner. The process makes you mean because you get frustrated. ~ Simon Cowell, #NFDB
372:The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
373:We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at. ~ Guy de Maupassant, #NFDB
374:At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth. ~ Padma Lakshmi, #NFDB
375:If you open your heart, then the object of your love becomes so precious because you are so open. And that philosophy, that caring, spreads. ~ Jeff Bridges, #NFDB
376:It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization. ~ Woodrow Wilson, #NFDB
377:Two qualities are at the root of all meditation development: right effort and right aim—arousing effort to aim the mind toward the object. ~ Jack Kornfield, #NFDB
378:I never liked photography. Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand. ~ Robert Mapplethorpe, #NFDB
379:Laurel wondered fleetingly if anyone in the history of hookups had ever actually gotten laid by “Ma’am-ing” the object of his affection, ~ Alexandra Sokoloff, #NFDB
380:The object in being on the spiritual path is not to have just a little influx of energy, but to be the energy itself - consciously. ~ Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, #NFDB
381:In the hierarchy of our psychological functions the Thought is in a way nearest to this Self. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
382:The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well-sustained attention, firmly and repeatedly focused on the object to be accomplished. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
383:A downed animal is most certainly the object of a hunting trip, but it becomes an anticlimax when compared to the many other pleasures of the hunt. ~ Fred Bear, #NFDB
384:Not every difficult and dangerous thing is suitable for training, but only that which is conducive to success in achieving the object of our effort. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
385:The chain is only as strong as its weakest link, for if that fails the chain fails and the object that it has been holding up falls to the ground. ~ Thomas Reid, #NFDB
386:The desire to be the object of public attention is weak, but the excessive dread of it is but a form of vanity and over-self-contemplativeness. ~ Sara Coleridge, #NFDB
387:The liberty, prosperity, and the happiness of our country will always be the object of my most fervent prayers to the Supreme Author of All Good. ~ James Monroe, #NFDB
388:The object of existence is not the practice of virtue for its own sake but ānanda, delight. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, The National Value of Art, #NFDB
389:The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
390:The perceiver and the object, whatever the object is, or thing is, and wherever it may be, is always in coresonance with the one that perceives it. ~ Paul Selig, #NFDB
391:An angel exists and works as an intelligence, and its state is one of beholding God ceaselessly, who is the object of its intellectual essence. ~ Meister Eckhart, #NFDB
392:In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
393:Our present limited consciousness can only be a field of preparation, it can consummate nothing. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
394:Perseverance in object, though not by the most direct way, is often more laudable than perpetual changes, as often as the object shifts light. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
395:The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book. ~ Ford Madox Ford, #NFDB
396:A wave is never found alone, but is mingled with as many other waves as there are uneven places in the object where the said wave is produced. ~ Leonardo da Vinci, #NFDB
397:Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth. ~ Jean Anouilh, #NFDB
398:A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him. ~ Ben Hecht, #NFDB
399:Mind is an expression not of Life, but of that of which Life itself is a less luminous expression. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
400:The chain is only as strong as its weakest
link, for if that fails the chain fails and the object that it has been holding up falls to the ground. ~ Thomas Reid,#NFDB
401:The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
402:The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
403:The opposite of a glance... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second. ~ James Elkins, #NFDB
404:Closeness of the human soul to the Divine is the object, and fear sets always a barrier and a distance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Godward Emotions, #NFDB
405:Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
406:I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
407:The object is to try to get the (movie) system to work for you, instead of against you. And the only way you can do it is through success, I'm afraid. ~ George Lucas, #NFDB
408:The object of education ought not to be to make all men think alike, but to make each think in the way which is the fullest expression of his own. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
409:It's one of those magical acts that is so poly-sensorial and culturally enriching that as a designer one is naturally drawn to the cult of the object ~ Ross Lovegrove, #NFDB
410:The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted. ~ Edouard Manet, #NFDB
411:In sciences that are based on supposition and opinion…the object is to command assent, not to master the thing itself. FRANCIS BACON, Novum Organum, 1620 ~ Gary Taubes, #NFDB
412:People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything. ~ Jonathan Haidt, #NFDB
413:The manifestation of the Lord in life and works is the law of our being and the object of our world-existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Conclusion and Summary, #NFDB
414:The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. ~ Huston Smith, #NFDB
415:Whatsoever is the object of any man's Appetite or Desire; that is it which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate and Aversion, evil. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
416:For anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is. ~ Erasmus, #NFDB
417:It sometimes is a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection from the object of it, she may loose the opportunity of fixing him. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
418:Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
419:The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
420:There's a difference between broken and ruined. With one, you can hope to piece the object back together, but the other- there's just no coming back. ~ Alexandra Bracken, #NFDB
421:The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas. ~ A A Gill, #NFDB
422:They crashed into each other as if propelled by gravity, and he didn't know which of them was the object and which the earth, only that they were colliding. ~ V E Schwab, #NFDB
423:They crashed into each other as if propelled by gravity, and he didn’t know which of them was the object and which the earth, only that they were colliding. ~ V E Schwab, #NFDB
424:Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them? ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
425:It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
426:Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
427:If we do not want to be a plaything in the hands of every rogue and the object of every fool’s ridicule, the first rule is to be reserved and inaccessible. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
428:nothing is too good for the object of their adoration as long as he maintains his position by repeated examples of his skill, strength, and courage. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs, #NFDB
429:'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
430:Focus your energy on the positive moments, because wherever you focus your energy, you feed. Focusing energy is a tremendous nourishment to the object you focus upon ~ Osho, #NFDB
431:Knowing belongs to man's intellect or reason; loving belongs to his will. The object of the intellect is truth; the object of the will is goodness or love. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
432:renunciation of life cannot be the goal of life nor rejection of the world the object for which the world was created. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Renunciation, #NFDB
433:The object of China's strategy is inexorably to supplant the United States as the world's premier economic power, and if necessary, to defeat us militarily. ~ Frank Gaffney, #NFDB
434:The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity. ~ Reginald Horace Blyth, #NFDB
435:He could be happy, if surrounded by the right people, if allowed to be Will, instead of The Man in the Wheelchair, the list of symptoms, the object of pity. And ~ Jojo Moyes, #NFDB
436:I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing. ~ Andrew Wyeth, #NFDB
437:Objectivity is the subject subjugating the object. That is how you assert yourself. You make yourself the active voice and the object is the passive no-voice. ~ Emily Levine, #NFDB
438:Theoretical considerations require that what is to-day the object of a phobia must at one time in the past have been the source of a high degree of pleasure. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
439:True worship does not consist in off: ring incense, flowers and other material objects, but in striving to follow the same path as the object of our veneration. ~ Jatakamala, #NFDB
440:Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
441:Mind is the dubious outer penumbra of a conscious existence which is not limited by mentality but exceeds it. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
442:Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies. And by virtue of separation--by separating man from his pain or from the object of his pain--time cures. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
443:I imagined that if the surface of the package imitated the colour and texture of the fruit skin, then the object would reproduce the feeling of the real skin. ~ Naoto Fukasawa, #NFDB
444:The object of life is the growth of the soul, not outward success of the hour or even of the near future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Fate, Free Will and Prediction, #NFDB
445:The object of love should feel honoured or flattered, responsible in some way. Instead he felt insulted, degraded and revolted. More than that, he felt put upon. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
446:There is something in corruption which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees everything stained and impure. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
447:The subjective experience of wonder is a message to the rational mind that the object of wonder is being perceived and understood in ways other than the rational. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
448:Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
449:She left them before Bagwy Llydiart, in midsentence. Geoffery and Sally got the subject and verb, and the girl who opened the farm door to her got the object. ~ Peter Dickinson, #NFDB
450:the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
451:The object of trial is just to draw you away from what is earthly, in order that you may turn to God and give Him time to unite your will with His perfect will. ~ Andrew Murray, #NFDB
452:the subject described himself as a pacifist who can’t tolerate conflict. He claims to be an outsider in the family, ignored unless he is the object of criticism. ~ Jere Krakoff, #NFDB
453:...fine love poetry tends to be written when the object of one's affection is at a safe distance; also, it often reflects a love of words more than a love of women... ~ Kate Fox, #NFDB
454:He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one. ~ Michael Wolff, #NFDB
455:The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
456:We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
457:An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
458:I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God's creation, woman, the object of our lust. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
459:Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
460:the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
461:Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind. ~ William James, #NFDB
462:Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
463:God should be the object of all our desires, the end of all our actions, the principle of all our affections, and the governing power of our whole souls. ~ Jean Baptiste Massillon, #NFDB
464:IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS CHECKPOINT (‘THE OBJECT’). BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT. ~ Gary Shteyngart, #NFDB
465:No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
466:The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
467:the only thing that is to be eliminated is our own unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
468:Truth is the object of our understanding, as good is of our will; and the understanding can no more be delighted with a lie than the will can choose an apparent evil. ~ John Dryden, #NFDB
469:At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
470:Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil. ~ Marquis de Sade, #NFDB
471:He would be the object lesson, the walking warning to the cadets. What happened when you gave in to temptation. When you listened to the fallen angels of your nature. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
472:[The camera] may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees, the object glass is the eye of the instrument - the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina. ~ Henry Fox Talbot, #NFDB
473:The leader of the journey, the captain of the march, the first and most ancient priest of our sacrifice is the Will. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
474:But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
475:Design is not about decorating functional forms - it is about creating forms that accord with the character of the object and that show new technologies to advantage. ~ Peter Behrens, #NFDB
476:In painting, three things must be considered - the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object. ~ Lynn Cullen, #NFDB
477:I value devotion and fidelity, and doubt if it matters whether the object falls short. What you do and what you are is what matters. Your loyalty is as sacred as mine. ~ Ellis Peters, #NFDB
478:The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
479:We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is self-inflicted! Why should others be the object of our anger? ~ ntideva, #NFDB
480:It is the subjective world that rules the objective. Change the subject, and the object is bound to change; purify yourself, and the world is bound to be purified. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
481:That said, your values will not always be the object of public admiration. In fact, the more you live by your beliefs, the more you will endure the censure of the world. ~ Mitt Romney, #NFDB
482:The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
483:There is no allurement or enticement, actual or imaginary, which a well-disciplined mind may not surmount. The wish to resist more than half accomplishes the object. ~ Charlotte Dacre, #NFDB
484:It is the subjective world that rules the objective. Change the subject, and the object is bound to change; purify youreslf, and the world is bound to be purified. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
485:The pleasure or the benefit that the object of our deed derives from it is every now and then greater or even more important than the one we derive from the deed. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
486:Bend color names which should be made of neon or copper tubing. Place an object on a surface - trace the object - then bend the object - leaving some part of it attached. ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
487:A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question. Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery. ~ Gabriel Marcel, #NFDB
488:A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object. ~ Francis Bacon, #NFDB
489:The object . . . is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion. ~ Francis Galton, #NFDB
490:But almost everyone I have spoken to has said that being the object of a Control Connection leaves them feeling disintegrated, as if they were being dismantled within. By ~ Patricia Evans, #NFDB
491:Revelation does not mean man finding God, but God finding man, God sharing His secrets with us, God showing us Himself. In revelation, God is the agent as well as the object. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
492:The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas undertaken by the command of his present majesty, has been the advancement of science and the increase of knowledge. ~ William Bligh, #NFDB
493:[The photograph] is the object itself... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. ~ Andre Bazin, #NFDB
494:The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object--the joy of living--is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up. ~ Eiji Yoshikawa, #NFDB
495:Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice. ~ Jean Anouilh, #NFDB
496:There is something to be said about being the object of one’s desire, that you have all the control, but being craved by a blood thirsty vampire is the doom of any soul. ~ Mayandree Michel, #NFDB
497:This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom--the very fashion of which "passeth away. ~ Francois Fenelon, #NFDB
498:A perfect self-expression of the spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #NFDB
499:I fell under the illusion that storage was some form of intellectual contest, the object of which was to see how much I could fit into a storage space by rational organization. ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
500:Knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knower are the three factors which motivate action; the senses, the work and the doer comprise the threefold basis of action. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
501:She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves. ~ Angela Carter, #NFDB
502:The Self, the Divine, the Supreme Reality, the All, the Transcendent, - the One in all aspects is then the object of Yogic knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, [T5], #index,#NFDB
503:They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us. ~ Horace, #NFDB
504:Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
505:It is imperative that the Christian, at the beginning of his pursuit to understand what true worship is, gets it clear that the object of our worship is to be God and God alone. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
506:The object of meditation is to open to the Mother and grow through many progressive experiences into a higher consciousness in union with the Divine.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#NFDB
507:The “other world,” which is the object of this world’s disdain and the subject of the drunkard’s mocking song, is our carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
508:An object of art creates a public capable of finding pleasure in its beauty. Production, therefore, not only produces an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
509:Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was—no better and no worse. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
510:Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings. ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
511:Gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
512:The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
513:the springs of human joy are almost always poisoned by possessiveness; and the joy of possession is restricted by the object possessed and by the fear of losing it. ~ Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, #NFDB
514:This perception of division between the seer and the object that is seen, is situated in the mind. For those remaining in the heart, the seer becomes one with the sight. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
515:To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
516:It has been one of my difficulties, in arguing this question out of doors with friends or strangers, that I rarely find any intelligible agreement as to the object of the war. ~ Richard Cobden, #NFDB
517:Oh, this thing of keeping in constant touch with God, of making him the object of my thought and the companion of my conversations, is the most amazing thing I ever ran across. ~ Frank Laubach, #NFDB
518:That's why he hates him so much. He disappointed him. Passion does not take disappointment well.
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy? ~ Jeanette Winterson,#NFDB
519:The object of pure Physic[s] is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure Mathematic[s] that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence. ~ James Joseph Sylvester, #NFDB
520:What, after all, is the object of education? To train the body in health, vigor and grace, so that it may express the emotions in beauty and the mind with accuracy and strength. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
521:A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiviness is bitter or sweet. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
522:It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
523:Jem: Come in.
Jace: Where's Brother Zachariah?
Jem: I'm right here. Jace Herondale. And once more a Herondale is the object of my deliverance. I should have anticipated. ~ Cassandra Clare,#NFDB
524:Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
525:The height of love is the rapturous immersion of ourselves in unity of ecstatic delight with the object of our love and adoration. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Modes of the Self, #NFDB
526:Thought and plot are not so important as some would make them out to be. The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion; talent is the gift of conveying that emotion ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
527:What the object of senile avarice may be I cannot conceive. For can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less there remains of the journey? ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
528:Beauty is life; beautiful is that being in which we see life as it should be according to our conceptions; beautiful is the object which expresses, or reminds us of life. ~ Nikolai Chernyshevsky, #NFDB
529:His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
530:Since the object of our worship is the glorious and majestic God of heaven, when worship becomes empty, the problem lies somewhere with the subject (us), not the object (God). ~ Donald S Whitney, #NFDB
531:Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
532:First love is an astounding experience and if the object happens to be totally unworthy and love not really love at all, it makes little difference to the intensity of the pain. ~ Angela Thirkell, #NFDB
533:In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
534:The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge. ~ Plato, #NFDB
535:The principal agent is the object itself and not the instruction given by the teacher. It is the child who uses the objects; it is the child who is active, and not the teacher. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
536:There is neither father, nor mother, nor son, nor any other person whatsoever who can embrace the object beloved with so great a love as that wherewith God embraceth the soul. ~ Angela of Foligno, #NFDB
537:You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship. ~ N T Wright, #NFDB
538:A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm. ~ E B White, #NFDB
539:I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it... I always want to see the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object. ~ Andrew Wyeth, #NFDB
540:"The contemplation on nonattainment is very important. The object we wish to attain is already attained. We don't need to attain anything. We already have it. We already are it." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
541:Various polls have indicated that approximately 10% of Americans (25 million people) have seen them at close range so that details of the structure of the object can be discerned. ~ Steven M Greer, #NFDB
542:You must match your energy, your vibration, with that of the universe, bringing it to a higher frequency where it synchronizes with the object, person, or situation you require. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
543:A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
544:The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality. ~ Mircea Eliade, #NFDB
545:The object of my researches is the brain. The cranium is only a faithful cast of the external surface of the brain, and is consequently but a minor part of the principal object. ~ Franz Joseph Gall, #NFDB
546:Being the object of a woman-hunt, exiled to Simpson, being terrorized by school kids trick-or-treating, lusting after an aroused non-talker with superb thighs. It was all too much. ~ Lisa Marie Rice, #NFDB
547:Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it. ~ William Hazlitt, #NFDB
548:The object of your training in drawing should be to develop to the uttermost the observation of form and all that it signifies, and your powers of accurately portraying this on paper. ~ Harold Speed, #NFDB
549:When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
550:any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
551:For psychological purposes the most important differences in conation are those in virtue of which the object is revealed as sensed or perceived or imaged or remembered or thought. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
552:The Absolute is beyond personality and beyond impersonality, and yet it is both the Impersonal and the supreme Person and all persons. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
553:The Absolute is beyond the distinction of unity and multiplicity, and yet it is the One and the innumerable Many in all the universes. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
554:I wanted to make a concrete impression; the idea of a woman that is free, moody, never the object, one that has a complete control of her finances and knows how it is to be independent. ~ Paco Rabanne, #NFDB
555:Just as our taste in lovers is far more revealing than our choice of friends, the object of an artist's obsession can open up doors to their soul that might otherwise remain shut tight. ~ Vince Aletti, #NFDB
556:Love is a risk. To admit your love puts you in the power of another. That imbalance can cut you in half. But if the object of your affection loves you back, your power is doubled. ~ Robert Chazz Chute, #NFDB
557:When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence. ~ Minor White, #NFDB
558:He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
559:No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to be a victim. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
560:We often say 'love' when we really mean, and are acting out, an addiction-a sterile, ingrown dependency relationship, with another person serving as the object of our need for security. ~ Stanton Peele, #NFDB
561:The deeper we penetrate into the working of these parties, the more do we perceive that the object of the one is to limit, and that of the other to extend, the popular authority. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
562:There never was an assembly of men, charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
563:Already twenty magnificent skins ornamented the dining-room of Granite House, and if this continued, the jaguar race would soon be extinct in the island, the object aimed at by the hunters. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
564:An abstract logic must always arrive, as the old systems arrived, at an infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
565:I do not think I should care to go on worshipping a Madonna even if she did wink. One cannot make much out of a wink. We want something more than that from the object of our adoration. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
566:Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
567:..bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the cause of truth." Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
568:Before God closed in on me, I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
569:For any practice to work, the mind which is meditating on the object must merge. Often they are facing each other. One has to become completely absorbed, then the transformation will occur. ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB
570:If your purpose is to make someone happy, you’re more apt to succeed if you make yourself the object. You’ll never know another person more than a fraction as well as you can know yourself. ~ Harry Browne, #NFDB
571:It's not that kind of game, Han," she said, her voice sounding like she wished he would grow up and face reality already.
"The object isn't to win. It's to stay in it as long as you can. ~ Mur Lafferty,#NFDB
572:Don’t let the simplicity of the love story numb you to the implications of this unlikely romance. We are the object of His desire. We, who are dust, and He, who is everything and needs nothing. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
573:I know that, in hockey, the object of the game is simple in that you have to get the puck into the net. With figure skating, it's not as simple, and there is a ton of work that goes into it. ~ Patrick Chan, #NFDB
574:Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted. ~ William James, #NFDB
575:Unless the object of the singer’s affection is a vampire, surely what Hart means is unphotogenic. Only vampires are unphotographable, but affectionate ‘-enic’ rhymes are hard to come by. ~ Stephen Sondheim, #NFDB
576:What a bore for you,” I said, and I smiled to myself. Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one’s interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
577:When the object perishes, the pneuma that animated it is reabsorbed into the logos as a whole. This process of destruction and reintegration happens to individual objects at every moment. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
578:In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
579:I spent the months following my grandfather's death cycling through a purgatory of beige waiting rooms and anonymous offices (...), the object of a thousand pitying glances and knitted brows. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
580:Just as the pure crystal takes color from the object which is nearest to it, so the mind, when it is cleared of thought-waves, achieves sameness or identity with the object of its concentration. ~ Patanjali, #NFDB
581:The delights of lust terminate in languishment and dejection; the object thou burnest for nauseates with satiety, and no sooner hadst thou possessed it, but thou wert weary of its presence. ~ Robert Dodsley, #NFDB
582:Ayn Rand defines “value” as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.”3 “Value” denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity’s action is directed to acquiring or preserving ~ Leonard Peikoff, #NFDB
583:No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
584:O Blessed Mary, whoever loves you honors God; whoever serves you pleases God; whoever invokes your holy name with a pure heart will infallibly receive the object of his petition. ~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, #NFDB
585:Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
586:impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium (“to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman”). ~ David Graeber, #NFDB
587:My golf career was blessedly short. It lasted all of one class. "Hit that tiny ball? Really?" I shook my head as I studied the object on the tee. "And I'm supposed to put it over where? ~ Joanna Campbell Slan, #NFDB
588:That's why I preach today. Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you're the one who pays for it. ~ Isabel Wilkerson, #NFDB
589:That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite,” he said. “Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it. ~ Isabel Wilkerson, #NFDB
590:The background events in the soul are projected outwards and are experienced through the object, as a synthetic unity compounded of external reality and the psychic activation of this reality. ~ Erich Neumann, #NFDB
591:The principal difference between love and hate is that love is a irradiation, and hate is a concentration. Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred. ~ Sydney J Harris, #NFDB
592:It would seem as if there never was a book written, or a story told, expressly with the object of keeping boys on shore, which did not lure and charm them to the ocean, as a matter of course. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
593:Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it). ~ Alberto Giacometti, #NFDB
594:The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
595:Experience is that wherein our previous sense of reality is undone, refuted, and shows itself as needing to be reconstituted. It occurs precisely in those moments where the object 'talks back'. ~ Charles Taylor, #NFDB
596:It is a principle of our nature that feelings once excited turn readily from the object by which they are excited to some other object which may for the time being take possession of the mind. ~ Matthew Simpson, #NFDB
597:It is natural to man to regard himself as the object of the creation, and to think of all things in relation to himself, and the degree in which they can serve and be useful to him. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
598:There’s the object of perception, which is the truth, and there’s our interpretation of the truth, which is just a point of view. The truth is objective, and we call it science. Our interpretation ~ Miguel Ruiz, #NFDB
599:What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment. ~ Henri Lefebvre, #NFDB
600:America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history. ~ Michael Parenti, #NFDB
601:The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
602:A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. ~ Philip Roth, #NFDB
603:It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions. ~ Samuel Adams, #NFDB
604:It may perhaps be pleasant, but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity. ~ Seth Grahame Smith, #NFDB
605:It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself. ~ Clarence John Laughlin, #NFDB
606:The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens. ~ Jeff Koons, #NFDB
607:A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
608:When objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909, this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
609:When the object that is produced...the photographic image...has the ability to make tears come to your eyes; to inspire you to the point where you have to catch your breath, then nothing else matters. ~ John Sexton, #NFDB
610:Whether the object of your faith is real or false, you will get results. Your subconscious mind responds to the thought in your mind. Look upon faith as a thought in your mind and that will suffice. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
611:An object is not a data structure. In fact, if you are the consumer of an object, you aren't allowed to see any data that might be inside it. And, in fact, the object might have no data inside it at all. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
612:For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from. ~ Allen Tate, #NFDB
613:The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics! ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
614:"Interpretation then demands a knowledge of certain things which have less to do with zoology and mineralogy than with the existence of an historical consensus omnium in regard to the object in question." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
615:Our dynamic self-fulfilment cannot be worked out so long as we remain in the egoistic consciousness, in the mind’s candle-lit darkness, in the bondage. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
616:Serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness. ~ Jonathan Franzen, #NFDB
617:As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true. ~ Michel de Certeau, #NFDB
618:For love concentrates on the object, sex concentrates on the subject. Love is directed to someone else for the sake of the other’s perfection; sex is directed to self for the sake of self-satisfaction. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
619:Love tends to union with the object loved. Now Jesus Christ loves a soul that is in a state of grace with immense love; He ardently desires to unite Himself with it. That is what Holy Communion does ~ Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
620:for any practice to work, the mind which is meditating and the object of meditation must merge. Often they are facing each other. One has to become completely absorbed, then the transformation will occur. ~ Tenzin Palmo, #NFDB
621:Merely to see... is not enough. It is necessary to have a fresh, vivid, physical contact with the object you draw through as many of the senses as possible - and especially through the sense of touch. ~ Kimon Nicolaides, #NFDB
622:Seek to make your work a prayer, your believing an act, your living an art. It is then that the object of your faith will be made visible to you. It is then that you shall 'kiss the lips of your desire.' ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
623:The object is for the defense team to convince the jury of two things: that the shooter did what he or she was trained to do, and that what they were trained to do was in fact the appropriate thing to do. ~ Massad Ayoob, #NFDB
624:the object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what the pope calls a ‘universal desire for redemption. ~ Ian Morgan Cron, #NFDB
625:Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind. William James, The Principles of Psychology ~ Caleb Carr, #NFDB
626:The object that was pinning me haplessly to the ground, like a butterfly on a collector's tray, was of twentieth-century origin and of very specific function.
Oh, all right, it was a public lavatory. ~ Jonathan Stroud,#NFDB
627:The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain. ~ William Stanley Jevons, #NFDB
628:The wealthy members of the community [in America] entertain a hearty distaste to the democratic institutions of their country. The populace is at once the object of their scorn and of their fears. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville, #NFDB
629:Just as there is an archetype of woman as the object of man's eternal love, so there must be an archetype of her as the object of his eternal fear, representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions. ~ Fumiko Enchi, #NFDB
630:[My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other - but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult. ~ Vito Acconci, #NFDB
631:Regardless of what the object of design is, humans need design. For anything humans use in their day to day life, they need design and it is a clear and concrete proof of the fundamental human right to live. ~ Kenji Ekuan, #NFDB
632:The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be. ~ Dorothea Lange, #NFDB
633:A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. ~ Pema Chodron, The Pocket Pema Chodron, #NFDB
634:Each eye can have its vision separately; but when we are looking at anything our vision, which in itself is divided, joins up and unites in order to give itself as a whole to the object that is put before it. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
635:The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. In the case of some men, compassion for a woman exceeds all measure and transports her to an unreal, entirely imaginary world. ~ Boris Pasternak, #NFDB
636:The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
637:We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit. ~ Paul Goodman, #NFDB
638:When one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed--as actually contemplated, as within one. ~ Plotinus, #NFDB
639:... Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity. ~ Zadie Smith, #NFDB
640:Everyone has their first date and the object is to hide your flaws. And then you're in a relationship, and it's all about hiding your disappointment. And then, once you're married, it's about hiding your sins. ~ Joss Whedon, #NFDB
641:...it was born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice... ~ Peter Carey, #NFDB
642:Nothing had been poured out of its container or wantonly vandalized, but the contents had been moved as though the cabinet itself were the object of the search, not possible loot that could be taken away. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
643:The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
644:Airline food is not intended for human consumption. It's intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as "mineral" and "linoleum." ~ Dave Barry, #NFDB
645:Love tends to union with the object loved. Now Jesus Christ loves a soul that is in a state of grace with immense love; He ardently desires to unite Himself with it. That is what Holy Communion does ~ Saint Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
646:People only have true understanding when they look at everything from God's perspective. Authentic wisdom begins when we understand that God is to be the object of our devotion, our adoration, and our reverence. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
647:The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
648:Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
649:At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
650:The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
651:When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness . ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
652:One of the reasons lust is bad (not the only reason) is that it makes you stupid. Like any addiction, it blinds your vision to everything else and focuses it on the one thing that is the object of your addiction. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
653:The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
654:This does not mean that the enemy is to be allowed to escape. The object is to make him believe that there is a road to safety, and thus prevent his fighting with the courage of despair. After that, you may crush him. ~ Sun Tzu, #NFDB
655:Yearning is inseparable from love, and since once doesn't have the object of love immediately, one has not fallen in the embrace of the beloved immediately, they are suffering. That's how they are related. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
656:Although Salinger had long since cut me out of his life completely and made it plain that he had nothing but contempt for me, the thought of becoming the object of his wrath was more than I felt ready to take on. ~ Joyce Maynard, #NFDB
657:If we are lucky, we love what we love in part because the object is worth the effort. But sometimes the love itself-the elixir of desire-is enough to bestow the object with the transformative glitter it requires. ~ Gail Caldwell, #NFDB
658:She at least was broad-minded, and moreover she understood the workings of the human heart. It was creditable for a man to ruin himself for the object of his affections. But this at least she found exaggerated. ~ Ford Madox Ford, #NFDB
659:Alas! it is too true that our souls always contract themselves on the approach of a blessing, and seem as if their powers, exhausted in the effort to obtain it, had no longer energy to embrace the object. ~ Charles Robert Maturin, #NFDB
660:Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
661:Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows. ~ Claude Monet, #NFDB
662:The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Logic, Chapter 1, #NFDB
663:The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
664:This is invariable. It would seem as if there never was a book written, or a story told, expressly with the object of keeping boys on shore, which did not lure and charm them to the ocean, as a matter of course. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
665:The only foundation for . . . a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. ~ Benjamin Rush, #NFDB
666:We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder. ~ Kallistos Ware, #NFDB
667:When you start meditating on your ego, on your thoughts, on your mind, you are suddenly separate, because whatsoever you meditate on, you are separate from it. That has become the object and you have become the subject. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
668:Cravings. Are they a curse or a blessing? The answer to that depends on what we’re craving. And what we’re craving will always depend on whatever we’re consuming . . . the object of our desire or God and His truth. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
669:People who are pierced should not be snickered at, should not become the object of ridicule, should not be singled out for special and uneven and unequal treatment. They should be respected just like everybody else. ~ Gloria Allred, #NFDB
670:The object attained by both good and bad methods is the same, but the way one tries to attain it turns the object into right or wrong. It is not the object which is wrong, it is the way one adopts to attain it. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
671:To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman. ~ Angela Carter,#NFDB
672:We know not the matter of the things for which we should pray, neither the object to whom we pray, nor the medium by or through whom we pray; none of these things know we, but by the help and assistance of the Spirit. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
673:Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
674:Hence, in desiring, the more the enjoyment is delayed, the more fancy begins to weave about the object images of future fruition, and to clothe the desired object with properties calculated to inflame the impulse. ~ Samuel Alexander, #NFDB
675: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. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge, #NFDB
676:The object of the engine is in fact to give the utmost practical efficiency to the resources of numerical interpretations of the higher science of analysis, while it uses the processes and combinations of this latter. ~ Ada Lovelace, #NFDB
677:We have in all functionings of the mentality four elements, the object of mental consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the subject.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, 532,#NFDB
678:Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean? The object drawn doesn't matter so much. It's what you feel about it, what it means to you. A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips. ~ Sherwood Anderson, #NFDB
679:Go to the object. Leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Do not impose yourself on the object. Become one with the object. Plunge deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
680:I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my Definite Purpose in life, therefore, I demand of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment, and I here and now promise to render such action. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
681:Maybe its a case of one guitar feeling a certain way to the hands that makes one subsequently move differently over the strings, but my intent is always to wring the maximum emotional resonance out of the object in hand. ~ Gary Lucas, #NFDB
682:Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
683:The object of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
684:What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti. ~ Tom Robbins, #NFDB
685:Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread. ~ William Barrett, #NFDB
686:For happiness, he told himself, isn’t being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one’s love. ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
687:However, because the object raising events has a strong reference to each event listener, this can cause a memory leak when the lifetime of the object raising events exceeds what would be the lifetime of an event listener. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
688:When a religion does not designate you a sinner from birth, when a religion assumes you’re already in decent standing with your god (or gods), leaving no reason for penance, then the object of its rituals is left wide open. ~ Alex Mar, #NFDB
689:Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object. ~ Northrop Frye, #NFDB
690:Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
691:I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis when I spotted this object. I was at about 10,000 feet on a nice, bright, sunny afternoon. I thought the object was a kite, then I realized that no kite is gonna fly that high. ~ Deke Slayton, #NFDB
692:The Christian ought not to say anything behind his brother's back with the object of calumniating him, for this is slander, even if what is said is true. He ought to turn away from the brother who speaks evil against him? ~ Saint Basil, #NFDB
693:The pleasant is not always the right thing, the object to be preferred and selected, nor the unpleasant the wrong thing, the object to be shunned and rejected. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Purification - The Lower Mentality, #NFDB
694:As he presses me against the car and his fingers tangle in my hair, I find myself hoping-and fearing-that I'll never be the object of such a love, one that could bring a man to his knees and never let him stand again. ~ Jeri Smith Ready, #NFDB
695:God does not decide to love, therefore, and God’s love can never be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of the object. But God is Love itself.4 God cannot not love, because love is the nature of God’s very being. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
696:He is the source of light in all luminous objects. He is beyond the darkness of matter and is unmanifested. He is knowledge, He is the object of knowledge, and He is the goal of knowledge. He is situated in everyone's heart. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
697:If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of a glass, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
698:that "THE OBJECT OF MANKIND SHOULD LIE IN ITS HIGHEST INDIVIDUALS" (or, as he writes in "Schopenhauer as Educator": "Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce great men—this and nothing else is its duty.") ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
699:As a rule, the more difficult things are, the more they can help us. It is worth less if the difficulties arise from your struggle with yourself. But when they come from the increasing resistance of the object, it’s splendid! ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
700:Was the unease he felt, the danger that he sensed, actual danger, or was it only love acknowledged? The object of his love made tender, appearing softer than she really was, appearing vulnerable in having made him vulnerable. ~ Julia Fine, #NFDB
701:And was Mr Rochester now ugly in my eyes?No,reader:gratitude and many associations, all pleasurable and genial,made his face the object I best liked to see;his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
702:In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded. ~ Willa Cather, #NFDB
703:It has frequently been said that we never desire what we think absolutely inapprehensible: it is however true that some of our sharpest agonies are those in which the object of desire is regarded as both possible and imaginary. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
704:It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
705:The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman ; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
706:Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold. ~ Jonathan Lethem, #NFDB
707:Love is a risk. To admit your love puts you in the power of another. That imbalance can cut you in half. But if the object of your affection loves you back, your power is doubled. Mathematically, love is worth the risk. ~ Robert Chazz Chute, #NFDB
708:Bottles of wine aren't like paintings. At some point you have to consume them. The object in life is to die with no bottles of wine in your cellar. To drink your last bottle of wine and go to sleep that night and not wake up. ~ Jay McInerney, #NFDB
709:He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature (1841), #NFDB
710:Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over. ~ Bette Davis, #NFDB
711:To me, hip-hop's been dead for years. We all should know that. With that being said, then, the object of the game now is to make money off of exploiting it. That's what it's all about - get this money. That's basically what I'm saying. ~ Nas, #NFDB
712:Ultimately, your every desire—the desire for material things, relationships, career success, sexual gratification—is really the desire for the peace you experience for brief moments when you attain the object of your desire. ~ Stephan Bodian, #NFDB
713:Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God. ~ Joseph Smith Jr, #NFDB
714:I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me? ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
715:Stop being astounded by the realization that sex is the object of such misunderstanding and of such automatic clumsiness that it implies either a universal loathing or a universal veneration (which are much the same thing). ~ Philippe Sollers, #NFDB
716:At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
717:Concentration is the lens. It produces the burning intensity necessary to see into the deeper reaches of the mind. Mindfulness selects the object hat the lens will focus on and looks through the lens to see what is there. ~ Henepola Gunaratana, #NFDB
718:It is a mistake, to think the same thing affects both sight and touch. If the same angle or square, which is the object of touch,be also the object of vision, what should hinder the blind man, at first sight, from knowing it? ~ George Berkeley, #NFDB
719:Jefferson reflected, "I think of her (a college infatuation) perhaps too much for my peace of mind. " Nevertheless, he was robbed of his considerable verbal powers when he got the chance to speak to the object of his affections. ~ John Ferling, #NFDB
720:My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent. ~ Rene Magritte, #NFDB
721:Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish. ~ Hermann von Helmholtz, #NFDB
722:The object of man's worship, whatever it be, will naturally be his standard of perfection. He clothes it with every attribute, belonging, in his view, to a perfect character; and this character he himself endeavors to attain. ~ Simon Greenleaf, #NFDB
723:They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
724:What I wouldn’t give to be the object of someone’s desire, just for one moment. What I wouldn’t give to taste that fruit, that heady sweetness, of being wanted. I wanted. I wanted what Käthe took for granted. I wanted wantonness. ~ S Jae Jones, #NFDB
725:The act of staring is a thing which one does not ordinarily do to another human being; it seems to put the object stared at in a class apart. One does not talk to a monkey in a zoo, or to a freak in a sideshow— one only stares. ~ Erving Goffman, #NFDB
726:Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, #NFDB
727:The reason we might lose love is because we are always looking outside of us, thinking that the object or action of love is out there. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
728:And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
729:All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
730:All that Christ did and suffered would have been necessary had only one human soul been the object of redemption; and nothing different and nothing more would have been required had every child of Adam been saved through his blood. ~ Charles Hodge, #NFDB
731:As long as I remember that the glory is His and not my own. When I confuse that, I get in trouble. We think that we glorify ourselves, and the object is to glorify God first, and in doing that you become glorified, you get glorified. ~ Lauryn Hill, #NFDB
732:Even the largest of my dreams and ambitions, I realize with increasing dismay, were puny, measly, compared to the object of my dreaming. I would not say my life to date has been built overmuch of compromise, but still, it surrounds me. ~ Rick Bass, #NFDB
733:I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness. ~ Hugh Laurie, #NFDB
734:One interesting thing about greed is that although the underlying motive is to seek satisfaction, the irony is that even after obtaining the object of your desire you are still not satisfied. The true antidote of greed is contentment. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
735:We know, from ordinary life, that we are not able to direct our attention perfectly steadily and uniformly to one and the same object... At times the attention turns towards the object most intensely, and at times the energy flags. ~ Wilhelm Wundt, #NFDB
736:What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
737:All knowledge is oriented toward some object and is influenced in its approach by the nature of the object with which it is pre-occupied. But the mode of approach to the object to be known is dependent upon the nature of the knower. ~ Karl Mannheim, #NFDB
738:Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
739:In fact, type itself derives from object, and object derives from type, even though the two are different objects — a circular relationship that caps the object model and stems from the fact that types are classes that generate classes: ~ Mark Lutz, #NFDB
740:Let believers on earth imitate the saints in heaven in their nearness to Christ. Let us on earth be as the elders are in heaven, sitting around the throne. May Christ be the object of our thoughts, the centre of our lives. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
741:The Greeks say it's a sin against the gods to love something beyond all reason. And do you remember that they say when someone is loved so, the gods become jealous, and strike the object down in the very fullness of its flower? ~ Colleen McCullough, #NFDB
742:As to your being worthy, I don’t think falling in love has much to do with the worth of the object of love. But I’d dispute your assessment. I think you’re a fine woman, and I think you always try to be the best person you can be. ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
743:I held out my sisters' letters for him to read. Tears appeared in his eyes, and he kissed the letters and declared, "I love your sisters! It shall be the object of my life to justify the trust shown in these letters. May God bless them. ~ Nancy Moser, #NFDB
744:Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
745:When I draw something, I try to build some kind of history into it. Drawing an object that has a certain amount of wear and tear or rust; or a tree that is damaged. I love trying to render not just the object, but what it has been through. ~ Alan Lee, #NFDB
746:All achievements, whether in the business, intellectual,
or spiritual world, are the result of definitely directed thought, are governed by the same law and are of the same method; the only difference lies in the object of attainment. ~ James Allen,#NFDB
747:Childhood romances always seem so real, so enduring, when we are separated from the object of our affection. But usually, when we return, we find that our dreams and memories quiet surpassed reality.
-Lady Anne, Whitney's aunt ~ Judith McNaught,#NFDB
748:Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
749:The object of terrorism is to use violence or the threat of violence to create fear and alarm,” says Jenkins. “And so terrorism has worked. Certainly, we have been the major contributors to that. We have scared the hell out of ourselves. ~ James Risen, #NFDB
750:How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
751:I’d had all kinds of sex. Quick sex, painful sex, humiliating sex, but this was the least sex-like sex I’d ever had. It wasn’t about lust, it was about power. Not even ownership, which implies a certain regard for the object, even pride. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
752:Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, #NFDB
753:...in repairing the object you really ended up loving it more, because you now knew its eagerness to be reassembled, and in running a fingertip over its surface you alone could feel its many cracks - a bond stronger than mere possession. ~ Nicholson Baker, #NFDB
754:Most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit that remains the object of their long relentless quest. The obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending, the pursuit you see and never the arrest" - Tom Waits "Foreign Affairs ~ Tom Waits, #NFDB
755:Action triggers reaction.
An object somehow responds when we observe it.
We just assume that we do objective.
In fact, unconsciously we only want to see some parts
of the object which do not evoke the bitter memories of our past. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
756:Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life. ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
757:In either case, before you jump through hoops providing this information, make sure a partner-level person (usually a managing director or general partner) is involved and that you aren’t just the object of a fishing expedition by an associate. ~ Brad Feld, #NFDB
758:The object of our forest policy is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful-or because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness-but the making of prosperous homes-every other consideration becomes secondary. ~ Gifford Pinchot, #NFDB
759:The exploitation and superficiality of mainstream America is the object not of [Bob] Dylan's hipster scorn, but of an apocalyptic parable of holy fools and righteous thieves - the kind of imagery that Dylan's later work would explore more fully. ~ Bob Dylan, #NFDB
760:We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
761:We must speak and yet we must maintain our silence, we must maintain distance amidst the proximity of God, and we must worship while being careful not to make God into the object of our worship: for God is the subject before whom we worship. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
762:Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility! Or why not my fortune adapted to its impulses! Tenderness without a capacity of relieving only makes the man who feels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance. ~ Oliver Goldsmith, #NFDB
763:And Dil was realizing that there are few things that so shake belief as seeing, clearly and precisely, the object of that belief. Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn’t believing. It’s where belief stops, because it isn’t needed anymore. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
764:Bible-reading and prayer are not wrong, and God forbid that we should suggest that they are. But it is wrong to trust even in them for victory. Our help is in Him who is the object of that reading and prayer. Our trust must be in Christ alone. ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB
765:No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties. ~ Paul Goodman, #NFDB
766:That’s the philosophy behind trigger objects. The ball at the Houghton Mansion was an inanimate trigger object. It’s a simple tool that can be used to elicit paranormal activity through the emotional attachment that the spirit had to the object. ~ Zak Bagans, #NFDB
767:the object of war was not to win battles or destroy the enemy, but to provide a field for the performance of heroic deeds, which were subsequently immortalized in poetry. For the early Arabs to fight honorably was more important than to win. T ~ Tahir Shah, #NFDB
768:For the Suprematist, the proper means is the one that provides the fullest expression of pure feeling and ignores the habitually accepted object. The object in itself is meaningless to him, and the ideas of the conscious mind are worthless. ~ Kazimir Malevich, #NFDB
769:What I feel for Lizzie, goes far beyond love.
It's control, infatuation, and need.
It's obsession...and I intend to always have the object of my obsession at my full disposal for the rest of my life...and then some.
- Matt ~ Ashley Jade,#NFDB
770:Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish. ~ Emile M Cioran, #NFDB
771:To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish. ~ Alain de Botton, #NFDB
772:A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle,
a darkness—the object or concept holding the visible together. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg,#NFDB
773:Once I'm performing the show, I think that hour show has a certain intimacy with our audience. And that intimacy is through the lens and the live audience is a witness to that, whereas the audience at home is actually the object of my efforts. ~ Stephen Colbert, #NFDB
774:The task is not to find the lovable object, but to find the object before you lovable – whether given or chosen – and to be able to continue finding this one lovable, no matter how that person changes. To love is to love the person one sees. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
775:When it is recognized that there is nothing beyond what is seen of the mind itself, the discrimination of being and non-being ceases and, as there is thus no external world as the object of perception, nothing remains but the solitude of Reality. ~ Jack Kerouac, #NFDB
776:Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
777:He’d often thought that life would be much easier if women’s nipples swelled in the same proportions as penises when their dander was up. Even he wouldn’t be able to miss the signal of long nipple fingers pointing him out as the object of desire. ~ Michael Logan, #NFDB
778:The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
779:The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
780:What was this curious, syntactically repetitive emotion?
It expressed a certain reflexivity about the amorous state, it meant deriving more pleasure from one's own emotional enthusiasm than from the object of affection which had elicited it. ~ Alain de Botton,#NFDB
781:Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend and step off before it is discredited. ~ George Soros, #NFDB
782:In his opinion, it was possible to appease certain desires reputed to be the most difficult to satisfy under normal conditions – and that, what’s more, by a subtle subterfuge, by an approximate simulation of the object of those very desires. ~ Joris Karl Huysmans, #NFDB
783:The string returned by repr should be unambiguous and, if possible, match the source code necessary to recreate the object being represented. That is why our chosen representation looks like calling the constructor of the class, e.g. Vector(3, 4). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
784:Violence never settles anything right: apart from injuring your own soul, it injures the best cause. It lingers on long after the object of hate has disappeared from the scene to plague the lives of those who have employed it against their foes. ~ Obafemi Awolowo, #NFDB
785:The object is to keep busy being something...as opposed to doing something. We are all sent here to bring more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness and more love into this world. That is too big a job to be accomplished by just a few. ~ Richard Nelson Bolles, #NFDB
786:The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
787:Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and you do not learn. ~ Matsuo Basho, #NFDB
788:In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance. ~ B H Liddell Hart, #NFDB
789:Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
790:Love's cruel notion. - Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing
the object of that love, so that he may be removed once and for all from
the wicked game of change: for love dreads change more than it does
destruction. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,#NFDB
791:Nothing more powerfully excites any affection than to conceal some part of its object, by throwing it into a kind of shade, whichat the same time that it shows enough to prepossess us in favour of the object, leaves still some work for the imagination. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
792:We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
793:Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
794:So judgments of experience get their objective validity not from immediate knowledge of the object but from how perceptions are connected with one another; and these connections come not from anything empirical but from pure concepts of the understanding ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
795:Truly transformational knowledge is always personal, never merely objective. It involves knowing of, not merely knowing about. And it is always relational. It grows out of a relationship to the object that is known—whether this is God or one’s self. ~ David G Benner, #NFDB
796:You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed - and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn't to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists. ~ Ted Cruz, #NFDB
797:A Queen, or a Prime Minister's secretary may be shot at in London, as we know; and probably there is no person eminent in literature or otherwise who has not been the object of some infirm brain or another. But in America the evil is sadly common. ~ Harriet Martineau, #NFDB
798:Concentration is not wholesome in itself. A thief needs concentration to break into a house.
The object of our concentration is what makes it beneficial or not. If you use meditative concentration to run away from reality, that is not beneficial. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh,#NFDB
799:If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy ~ Milan Kundera, #NFDB
800:Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
801:Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
802:Clarent and Excalibur. Together. Yesterday, he had held them in his hands and watched as the two swords had fused together to create a single stone sword. Even from across the room, Dee could feel the power radiating from the object in long slow waves. ~ Michael Scott, #NFDB
803:creative forces comes only when there is a completely rounded-out thought, when there is a fully developed mental picture, or when the imagination can visualize the fulfillment of our ambition and see in our mind a picture of the object we desire... ~ Claude M Bristol, #NFDB
804:“Human passion has only one object in this forlorn world of ours. The paths we take towards it may vary. The object itself has a great variety of aspects, but we can only make out their significance by seeing how closely they are knit at the deepest level.” ~ Bataille, #NFDB
805:IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS VEHICLE ("THE OBJECT") UNTIL YOU ARE .5 MILES FROM THE SECURITY PERIMETER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT. ~ Gary Shteyngart, #NFDB
806:IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS VEHICLE (“THE OBJECT”) UNTIL YOU ARE .5 MILES FROM THE SECURITY PERIMETER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT. ~ Gary Shteyngart, #NFDB
807:Love is never passive. It is the very nature of love to give the best and not hold back. And the gift is unique, “the only begotten.” The greater the object of love, the more costly the gift. “Any old thing” is not good enough. That would not be love. ~ Stuart Briscoe, #NFDB
808:When the image is identical to reality, the imagination is compelled to be neutral. Therefore let the image of the object lie to the object so we can see what lies beyond the object, and in the light of that vision see what saves us from nothingness. ~ Mahmoud Darwish, #NFDB
809:An image that is unseen can't sell anything. It is pure, therefore true, beautiful, in one word: innocent. As long as no eye contaminates it, it is in perfect unison with the world. If it is not seen, the image and the object it represents belong together. ~ Wim Wenders, #NFDB
810:If you spin around and stretch your arm while holding a hammer, you’re exerting centripetal force to make the object follow a curved path. But you’ll feel the hammer pulling your hand from your body. That is centrifugal—a coercion in the opposite direction. ~ A G Howard, #NFDB
811:Okay, so, you know that photo shoot Parker did a while back?” “The one where he wore the earth’s luckiest pair of jeans?” “Are you lusting after the object of my affections? Because that’s going to make this conversation even more incredibly uncomfortable. ~ Ashlyn Kane, #NFDB
812:Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product. ~ Douglas Rushkoff, #NFDB
813:PROPERTY, n. Any material thing, having no particular value, that may be held by A against the cupidity of B. Whatever gratifies the passion for possession in one and disappoints it in all others. The object of man's brief rapacity and long indifference. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
814:To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject. ~ Edmund Husserl, #NFDB
815:First loves are not necessarily more foolish than others; but the chances are certainly against them. Proximity of time or place, a variety of accidental circumstances more than the essential merits of the object, often produce what is called first love. ~ Maria Edgeworth, #NFDB
816:She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
817:The object therefore of this mixed passion, which we call love, is the beauty of the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
818:Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story . . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
819:Once you've fallen in love, it's turned around your whole life. You keep thinking about this girl all the time instead of thinking about other things. Since the object of love is that particular person, being separated brings about a longing and pain. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
820:You mean that between desiring good and desiring evil there is a brief step, because it is always a matter of directing the will. This is true. But the difference lies in the object, and the object is clearly recognizable. God on this side, the Devil on that. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
821:Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
822:I don't pretend to any exemption from the general lot of parental delusion-I mean that like most other parents I see my child through an atmosphere which illuminates, magnifies, and at the same time refines the object to a degree that amounts to a delusion. ~ Sara Coleridge, #NFDB
823:The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well. ~ Andre Bazin, #NFDB
824:Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
825:If you truly desire money so keenly that your desire is an obsession, you will have no difficulty in convincing yourself that you will acquire it. The object is to want money, and to be so determined to have it that you convince yourself that you will have it. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
826:Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep's clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
827:Riches and abundance come hypocritically clad in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be security against anxieties, and they become then the object of anxiety. They secure a man against anxieties just about as well as the wolf that is put to tending the sheep. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
828:The object of my relationship with Vietnam has been to heal the wounds that exist, particularly among our veterans, and to move forward with a positive relationship,... Apparently some in the Vietnamese government don't want to do that and that's their decision. ~ Ho Chi Minh, #NFDB
829:When the mind has attained to that state when it identifies itself with the internal impression of the object, leaving the external, and when, by long practice, that is retained by the mind and the mind can get into that state in a moment, that is Samyama. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
830:For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. ~ Joseph Conrad, #NFDB
831:In the 20th century philosophy of time for a great many theorists became part of science because it was time as is studied in physics that became the object of philosophical speculation. That's very different from the way time has normally been understood. ~ William Lane Craig, #NFDB
832:Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
833:We don't agree with the depiction of buildings in the '20s and 1930s. Things were seen either from above or below which tended to monumentalize the object. This was exploited in terms of a socialistic view - a fresh view of the world, a new man, a new beginning. ~ Bernd Becher, #NFDB
834:You need not hurry when the object is only to prevent my saying a bon mot, for there is not the least wit in my nature. I am a very matter-of-fact, plain-spoken being, and may blunder on the borders of a repartee for half an hour together without striking it out. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
835:Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Elly Kleinman's Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
836:The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed. ~ tienne Gilson, #NFDB
837:But some parents are conflict-phobic — they are uncomfortable and afraid of being the object of their teen’s wrath, and so they avoid setting the limits their teen needs. However, this teaches adolescents that if they throw a tantrum, they can get out of a limit. ~ John Townsend, #NFDB
838:Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
839:My anger with him had grown as the hours had passed. I'd convinced myself when he came to get me i would really give him a piece of my mind. Of course - it's easy to be brave when the object of your fear isn't holding your sore nipples hostage. ~ C J Roberts Livvie ~ C J Roberts, #NFDB
840:For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
841:I’m in difficulty, lord, and pitiable: no one cares about me, no one helps me; I’m the object of universal scorn.’ [49] Is that the witness you are going to bear, making a mockery of God’s summons, when he honoured you and judged you worthy to be his public spokesman? ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
842:The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account--that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
843:Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
844:Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object. ~ Werner Heisenberg, #NFDB
845:The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction. ~ Henri Matisse, #NFDB
846:It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
847:The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account - that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart. ~ Stefan Zweig, #NFDB
848:There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
849:For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
850:If a painting contains no abstraction nor impressionistic elements, it is a kite that will never fly. But if the painting completely breaks the connection between human feeling and the object portrayed, the kite string has been broken. I try to keep the line unbroken. ~ Wu Guanzhong, #NFDB
851:I think it’s even worse when you’re in a situation where the object of your desire is being nice to you and liking you, but that’s not enough, they’ve got to hate you or love you; anything in between is really upsetting and Arthur finds that very, very difficult. And ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
852:Now an extraordinary and helpful fact is that by making Mind the object of our attention, not only does the serenity which is its nature begin to well up of its own accord but its steady unchanging character itself helps spontaneously to repel all disturbing thoughts. ~ Paul Brunton, #NFDB
853:There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God. ~ Aleister Crowley, #NFDB
854:Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
855:For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
856:There are two kinds of photographs: mine and other people's. I never think of what I might do myself when I look at someone else's pictures... there is no subject in the world I have ever wanted to photograph. It's the picture, not the object, that is important to me. ~ John Loengard, #NFDB
857: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
858:If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
859:Man is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing hierarchies of the universe. ~ Annie Besant, #NFDB
860:There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others — this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy, that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence … ~ Andr Breton, #NFDB
861:A man's face is the surface of a pond, reflecting the sky, reflecting the trees, reflecting whatever is the object of his gaze and his love, the reflection hiding his depths. But when the wave passes, in the swell, for an instant, you can see what lies beneath the waters. ~ Brent Weeks, #NFDB
862:In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations. New objects should be depicted from different sides in order to provide a complete impression of the object. ~ Alexander Rodchenko, #NFDB
863:There's nothing sweeter than a real friend: Not only is he prompt to lend— An angler delicate, he fishes The very deepest of your wishes, And spares your modesty the task His friendly aid to ask. A dream, a shadow, wakes his fear, When pointing at the object dear. ~ Jean de La Fontaine, #NFDB
864:He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako's life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself. ~ Yasunari Kawabata, #NFDB
865:He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself. ~ Yasunari Kawabata, #NFDB
866:I don't get a big charge out of being the leading scorer. The object of competing is winning. I just try to do what has to be done for us to win. That might be anything at the time - defense, rebounding, passing. I get great satisfaction out of being a team player. ~ Kareem Abdul Jabbar, #NFDB
867:Love makes you helpless,” Daniela said. “You think about the object of your affection all the time. Your happiness or misery depends on another person’s mood. You give up all power over yourself, hand it to the person you love, and trust that they will be gentle with it. ~ Ilona Andrews, #NFDB
868:Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
869:As long as human labor power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains. ~ Leon Trotsky, #NFDB
870:We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. ~ Ivan Chtcheglov, #NFDB
871:Knowledge has three degrees - opinion, science, illumination. THe means or instrument of the first s sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge found on the identity of the mind knowing with the object know ~ Plotinus, #NFDB
872:The fate of a battle is the result of a moment, of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
873:The message of biblical Christianity is 'God loves me so that I might make him- his ways, his salvation, his glory, and his greatness- known among all nations.' Now God is the object of our faith, and Christianity centers around him. We are not the end of the gospel; God is' ~ David Platt, #NFDB
874:The object Rusty found on Black Ridge looked so much like his Apple TV addon that he at first thought it actually was one . . . only modified, of course, so it could hold an entire town prisoner as well as broadcast The Little Mermaid to your television via Wi-Fi and in HD. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
875:The object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandizement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit. ~ Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, #NFDB
876:The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail. All of the Grail quests are to serve God. If one understands this and drops his idiotic notion that the meaning of life is personal happiness, then one will find that elusive quality immediately at hand. ~ Robert A Johnson, #NFDB
877:The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
878:All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known. ~ Max Weber, #NFDB
879:If the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects, I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. If, on the other hand, the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition, I can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
880:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
881:Pneuma is the power—the vital breath—that animates animals and humans. It is, in Dylan Thomas’s phrase, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” and is present even in lifeless materials like stone or metal as the energy that holds the object together—the ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
882:right. For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
883:To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of "languages," styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin, #NFDB
884:To-day the majority of the great men who have swayed men's minds no longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers, and the cult of which they are the object is not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors. ~ Gustave Le Bon, #NFDB
885:God only has one Son whom He gave for all—so He and He alone must be the object of worship and the means of forgiveness from sin. The new, twisted, Emergent theology is not only heresy; it is false! Jesus could say He is the (only) way to eternal life—because He is the only way! ~ Tim LaHaye, #NFDB
886:Holmes knows better than anyone else how important engagement is for proper observation and thought. Your mind needs to be active, to be involved in what it’s doing. Otherwise, it will get sloppy—and let pass a crucial detail that almost gets the object of your observation killed ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
887:I believe God made us to crave. Now before you think this is some sort of cruel joke by God, let me assure you that the object of our craving was never supposed to be food or other things people find themselves consumed by, such as sex or money or chasing after significance. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
888:It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
889:The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices. ... But the garden's greatest benefit, I feel, as not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes sees our neighbors. ~ Paul Fleischman, #NFDB
890:Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be be labeled as something unusual. ~ Bertolt Brecht, #NFDB
891:I do not conceive that power is given to the President and Senate to dismember the empire, or to alienate any great, essential right. I do not think the whole legislative authority have this power. The exercise of the power must be consistent with the object of the delegation. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
892:It didn't seem fair that you could not prevent being the object of other people's emotions, you were not safe from their hate--or from their love, for that matter. You were never safe from being invaded by their feelings when you wanted only to be rid of them, free, off, away. ~ Diane Johnson, #NFDB
893:meekness and lowliness of heart are to be the distinguishing feature of the disciple, just as they were of the Master. And further, that this humility is not something that will come of itself, but that it must be made the object of special desire, prayer, faith, and practice. ~ Andrew Murray, #NFDB
894:When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
895:Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
896:Civilisation consists in giving something a name that doesn't belong to it and then dreaming over the result. And the false name joined to the true dream does create a new reality. The object does change into something else, because we make it change. We manufacture realities. ~ Fernando Pessoa, #NFDB
897:My foes have missed their mark in this shooting at me: I am not the man: I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would be still alive and well. ~ John Bunyan, #NFDB
898:To someone like Zurbaran, who paints still lifes, lemons and pears are the objects of art. But to the electronics engineer who works on the technologies of virtual reality, the whole reality has become the object of art, with a possibility to substitute the virtual with the real. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
899:Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration. ~ Octavio Paz, #NFDB
900:The glory of His Father which our Lord sought above all else on earth is still the object of all His desires in the Blessed Sacrament. It is safe to say that Jesus Christ has clothed Himself with the sacramental state in order to continue honoring and glorifying His Father. ~ Peter Julian Eymard, #NFDB
901:People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. ...People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
902:Learning to forgive is much more useful than merely picking up a stone and throwing it at the object of one's anger, the more so when the provocation is extreme. For it is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others. ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
903:[T]hat which is the object of another being is dependent. … Thus the plant is dependent on air and light, that is, it is an object for air and light, not for itself. Physical life in general is nothing else than this perpetual interchange of the objective and subjective relation. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
904:The object isn't to be perfect. The goal isn't to hold back until you've created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all. ~ Seth Godin, #NFDB
905:As Baudoin explained: A very simple way of securing this (impregnation of the subconscious mind) is to condense the idea which is to be the object of suggestion, to sum it up in a brief phrase which can be readily graven on the memory, and to repeat it over and over again as a lullaby. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
906:The establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field - the object is attained - and it now remains to be my earnest wish & prayer, that the Citizens of the United States could make a wise and virtuous use of the blessings placed before them. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
907:The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
908:When your heart becomes the grave of your secrets, that desire of yours will be gained more quickly. The prophet said that anyone who keeps secret his inmost thought will soon attain the object of his desire. When seeds are buried in the earth, their inward secrets become the flourishing garden. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
909:Caregiving also is the object of a more realistic critique, as some have noted the psychological toll of the profession. Scholar Arlie Hochschid...worries about the potential harm to workers who must sell the most intimate parts of themselves, manufacturing smiles and cuddles for low pay. ~ Alissa Quart, #NFDB
910:Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved. ~ Bernd Becher, #NFDB
911:Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales. ~ Benjamin Barber, #NFDB
912:It was quite a different sort of thing, a sentiment distinct and independent. Mrs. Weston was the object of a regard which had its basis in gratitude and esteem. Harriet would be loved as one to whom she could be useful. For Mrs. Weston there was nothing to be done; for Harriet every thing. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
913:As Peyton got to his feet, he thought it was a sad commentary on your life when an interruption requiring you to justify an unjustifiable action was a step up from your other option—which happened to be a lively discussion about unrequited love with the object of your unreciprocated affections. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
914:Be like water making its way through crack.
Do not be assertive but adjust to the object and you shall find a way round it or through it.
If nothing within you stays rigid outward thigs will disclose themselves.
Moving be like water.
Still be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo. ~ Bruce Lee,#NFDB
915:In industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. Soon a conflict of strategic and political interpretation would ensue, with radio and then radar completing the picture. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
916:We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires. ~ William B Irvine, #NFDB
917:Best mapping: Controls are mounted directly on the item to be controlled. • Second-best mapping: Controls are as close as possible to the object to be controlled. • Third-best mapping: Controls are arranged in the same spatial configuration as the objects to be controlled. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
918:Don’t make me hunt you, Princess,” Ryodan warns softly. “You’ll become my sole target, my obsession, my compulsion, my undying homicidal fantasy, the object of my every fucking thought and inclination, and the more time I have to contemplate what I’m going to do to you when I find you— ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
919:I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself. ~ Alice Munro, #NFDB
920:I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships. ~ Esther Perel, #NFDB
921:The object of education is not merely to enable our children to gain their daily bread and to acquire pleasant means of recreation, but that they should know God and serve Him with earnestness and devotion. ~ Hermann Adler, quoted in Joseph H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (One-volume edition)p. 78-9, #NFDB
922:There's nothing sweeter than a real friend:
Not only is he prompt to lend—
An angler delicate, he fishes
The very deepest of your wishes,
And spares your modesty the task
His friendly aid to ask.
A dream, a shadow, wakes his fear,
When pointing at the object dear. ~ Jean de La Fontaine,#NFDB
923:When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment. ~ Samuel Beckett, #NFDB
924:2. Evolve and Be God: As we invoke the presence of Source, holding the focus through our mantras, we are drawing more and more proximity to the object of worship and gradually, we attain all the attributes we are invoking, i.e., we slowly evolve to be Angelic, invoking the presence of God/Source. ~ Nandhiji, #NFDB
925:Most men will not ignore the present world that they can see in order to make the world they cannot see the object of their desires. Therefore, there is an
immediate friendship between this world and a man's fleshly desires and a corresponding distance between carnal man and eternal things. ~ John Bunyan,#NFDB
926:So far as the object of taxation is to raise a revenue for discharging the debts and defraying the expenses of the community, its operation should be adapted as much as possible to suit the burden with equal hand upon all in proportion with their ability of bearing it without oppression. ~ John Quincy Adams, #NFDB
927:War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home; the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditure. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
928:If the fucker tried to touch her, he’d find her pen – which she’d infused with hellfire – lodged up his rectum. He cast the object a wary look as he said, “Come on, luv, there’s no call for rudeness. Let’s start again. Hello Miss Wallis, I’m Silas.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m bored. You can go now. ~ Suzanne Wright,#NFDB
929:I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence in my life. In fourteenth century philosophy, the word patient simply meant "the object of an action," and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened ~ Paul Kalanithi, #NFDB
930:All knowledge resolves itself into probability. ... In every judgment, which we can form concerning probability, as well as concerning knowledge, we ought always to correct the first judgment deriv'd from the nature of the object, by another judgment, deriv'd from the nature of the understanding. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
931:Power is not a means, Vinston; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” I ~ Gary Shteyngart, #NFDB
932:I can use the camera to make a place or landscape; the camera to a greater extent projects rather than takes in or reproduces. The camera, or, rather, the eye, produces the impression of the place: I as a photographer am not passively taking in; I am active as a subject generating the object. ~ Olafur Eliasson, #NFDB
933:It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs. ... The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in work, in action and in law. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
934:Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
935:To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of ~ Emma Cline, #NFDB
936:Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance. ~ Bruno Schulz, #NFDB
937:In meditation there must be a staying of the thoughts upon the object. A man who rides quickly through a town or village: he minds nothing. But an artist who is looking on a curious piece views the whole portraiture of it, he observes the symmetry and proportion, he minds every shadow and color. ~ Thomas Watson, #NFDB
938:My brothers and sister and I were brought up in an atmosphere which I would describe as 'Puritan decadence'. Puritanism names the behaviour which is condemned; Puritan decadence regards the name itself as indecent, and pretends that the object behind that name does not exist until it is named. ~ Stephen Spender, #NFDB
939:Next to the ministry I know of no more noble profession than the law. The object aimed at is justice, equal and exact, and if it does not reach that end at once it is because the stream is diverted by selfishness or checked by ignorance. Its principles ennoble and its practice elevates. ~ William Jennings Bryan, #NFDB
940:the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (which is the object of Christian faith) is something very different from religion.”5 Religion has many critics, but Jesus very few. He is a self-authenticating reality beyond the myriad social cocoons. He belongs to humanity. He called himself “Son of Man. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
941:All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be. ~ Freya Stark, #NFDB
942:I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love. ~ Osho, #NFDB
943:Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it. ~ Chris Hedges, #NFDB
944:A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy. ~ Jean Baptiste Say, #NFDB
945:Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes. ~ Joris Karl Huysmans, #NFDB
946:We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
947:By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that theartist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
948:Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, #NFDB
949:Oh, fine.' Rochelle sprinkled some water over one of the glowstones and laid the object down in the center of their tiny camp. 'I didn't know you were afraid of the dark.'
'It isn't the dark I'm afraid of. It's the things hiding in the dark that I can't see.' Laura closed her eyes. 'Like ninjas. ~ J S Bailey,#NFDB
950:Second among the crimina carnis contra naturam is intercourse sexus homogenii/ where the object of sexual inclination continues, indeed, to be human, but is changed since the sexual congress is not heterogeneous but homogeneous, i.e., when a woman satisfies her impulse on a woman, or a man on a man. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
951:And before you know it, the object disappears, arguments evaporate; no culprit is discovered, the offense ceases to be an offense and becomes a matter of fate, like the toothache which cannot be blamed on anyone, and the only thing that's left is, once again, to bang the wall as hard as you can. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
952:I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
953:In Co-Masonry the term “lore” is employed as describing all these scriptures, since in the use of them we are in pursuit of wisdom. The term “law” is used in many other Lodges, but even then it is explained in the ritual that the object of the Volume of the Sacred Law is to illumine our minds. ~ Charles W Leadbeater, #NFDB
954:My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
955:Public values are not only under attack in the United States and elsewhere but appear to have become irrelevant just as those spaces that enable an experience of the common good are now the object of disdain by right-wing and liberal politicians, anti-public intellectuals and an army of media pundits. ~ Henry Giroux, #NFDB
956:We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
957:To have a caring and committed heart toward someone—a heart so firm in its devotion as to sooner stop beating than neglect the object of its desire despite the person's state of health, appearance, reputation, finances, troubles, or challenges—that, dear world, is love. It is a rare find. ~ Richelle E Goodrich, #NFDB
958:You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
959:But there is a kind of poem you can call a Hawkins poem as there is a kind of chair you can call a Hawkins chair, and the object of both is to get praise, which is the confidence in yourself that you get from people whom you have succeeded in pleasing when you haven't any confidence in yourself. ~ Laura Riding Jackson, #NFDB
960:Specht says, "It meant I know you think I'm worth it , because that's what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I'll fight you. Don't you tell me what I am. You've been telling me what I am for generations. ~ Malcolm Gladwell, #NFDB
961:This is partly my own ego, of course. I want to be visible as tough enough to possess and defend a femme who is entrancing enough to become the object of someone else’s desire, but it is equally a measure of protection for the femme in question. What if the same person sees her walking alone tomorrow? ~ S Bear Bergman, #NFDB
962:The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up. ~ Michelangelo Antonioni, #NFDB
963:The object of a Yoga of spiritual knowledge can be nothing else than this eternal Reality, this Self, this Brahman, this Transcendent that dwells over all and in all and is manifest yet concealed in the individual, manifest yet disguised in the universe.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Object of Knowledge,#NFDB
964:The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
965:All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere. ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
966:The truth is that we don't want to be saved by in the way God has chosen; we want to keep absolute control over our every step, to be fully conscious of our decisions, to be capable of choosing the object of our devotion. It isn't like that with love - it arrives, moves in, and starts directing everything. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
967:Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State's pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police's violations of privacy and private property were the object of their anger and activism. ~ Ilana Mercer, #NFDB
968:the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on. We must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
969:They call it football, but the object of the game is to bash the other guy so hard that he's eventually carried off the field on a stretcher. I can't watch football anymore. My psychiatrist said it's better that way. I used to watch a game, see the players in a huddle - and think they were talking about me. ~ Jackie Mason, #NFDB
970:All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
971:Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century. ~ Yasumasa Morimura, #NFDB
972:The brooks flow to their lover, the sea, and the flowers smile at the object of their passion, the light. The mist rolls down to its beloved, the valley. And I? In me is what brooks do not know, what flowers do not hear, what the mist does not apprehend. You see me alone in my love, solitary in my yearning. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
973:What is wine? It is the grape present in another form; its essence is there, though the fruit which produced it grew thousands of miles away, and perished years ago. So the object of many a tender thought may be spiritually present, in defiance of space - and fond recollections cherished in defiance of time. ~ Samuel Lover, #NFDB
974:Who the Author of this Production is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the DOCTRINE ITSELF, not the MAN. Yet it may not be unnecessary to say, That he is unconnected with any Party, and under no sort of Influence public or private, but the influence of reason and principle. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
975:When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured. ~ Edsger Dijkstra, #NFDB
976:People, when they are frustrated with worldly desires, start changing the object: they start making otherworldly objects of desire - heaven, paradise, and all the joys of heaven. But it is the same trick, the mind is again befooling you. This is not the way of the intelligent person, this is the way of the stupid. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
977:the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
978:In the cab of the locomotive it was the swaggering hotshot known as the engineer who was boss. This “engine runner” (also called a “hoghead” or “hogger” or even “throttle jockey”) was the object of the most intense popular fascination—it’s been said that even Sigmund Freud dreamed of becoming a railroad engineer. ~ Gary Krist, #NFDB
979:Stalking is not sexy, Alexis, no matter how hot you think the stalker is. It denotes an unbalanced, possessive personality, the kind of person who will manipulate the object of desire into isolation so that they’ll fall into dependency and subservience. The object loses themselves and becomes property, basically. ~ K F Breene, #NFDB
980:In contrast we let go of existence, meaning, and the sublime as categories to describe the object “God.” Instead these become ways in which we engage with the world. Yet, as we affirm the world in love, we indirectly sense that in letting go of God we have, in fact, found ourselves at the very threshold of God. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
981:It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer's way. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, #NFDB
982:Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object ... of that experience. ~ Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1944), p.45, #NFDB
983:What you want will pull like a magnet. Here's the other part. What for? Purpose is stronger than object. It's the 'What for?' that's even more powerful than the object. And the more you can describe in detail to stir the emotion and the intellect and the spirit and the soul, then the more powerful the 'what for' is. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
984:So if we want to get rid of our suffering, what we have to do is eliminate this conception of a self or “I.” Now, we are very fortunate because it is possible to get rid of this concept of “I.” The reason it is quite possible to eliminate this concept is that the object we conceive of as a self doesn’t exist. ~ Khenchen Thrangu, #NFDB
985:The Struggle is in your name, Samori - you were named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates, #NFDB
986:...to be able to impose on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
987:Falling in love was a solo act. I knew that, had learned that the hard way. You just jumped and hoped your parachute opened. Sometimes you looked up and saw you were falling by yourself, the object of your desire still on the plane, not interested in jumping, watching you descend into that scary place alone. ~ Eric Jerome Dickey, #NFDB
988:Another early memory is my wish for an ugly dog belonging to a neighbour. I kept my household in turmoil for weeks to get that dog. My ears were deaf to offers of pets with more prepossessing appearance. Moral: Attachment is blinding; it lends an imaginary halo of attractiveness to the object of desire. “A ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
989:Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
990:First of all, let us try to know what love is. If love means to possess someone or something, then that is not real love, not pure love. If loves means to give oneself, to become one with everything and everyone, then that is real love. Real love is total oneness with the object loved and with the Possessor of love. ~ Sri Chinmoy, #NFDB
991:Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
992:Stories change. Just like people change. We change when we suffer, when we take, when we give, when we love. When you lose the object of your love, your normal will be perennially changed; there’s no returning to the old anymore. You have to rebuild stronger walls, change your expectations, and wait for the sunlight. ~ Katy Evans, #NFDB
993:I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart. My songs bring images to the listener's mind. The object is to transport my listeners to another place, some place sacred and spiritual that will make them glad they took the ride. ~ Bradley Joseph, #NFDB
994:Then, class by class, he studied
mankind. He saw “every faction delighted with its own.”²⁶⁴ They had made
their passions their god,²⁶⁵ and desire the object of their worship. They de-
stroyed each other to collect the trash of this world, “distracted by greed
’til they went down to their graves. ~ Lenn Evan Goodman,#NFDB
995:Deconstruction seeks neither to reframe art with some perfect, apt and truthful new frame, nor simply to maintain the illusion of some pure and simple absence of a frame. Rather it shows that the frame is, in a sense, also inside the painting. For the frame is what "produces" the object of art, is what sets it off , #NFDB
996:Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature. … [T]he essence of religion … is evident to the thinker … . [T]he antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory; … it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
997:Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrated year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would “proceed at once” to simply “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.” Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
998:So I'm cruising down the road and the object of my thoughts is racing down the street, screaming that her father is a cop. A public servant, very flattering"
" I like a man in uniform"
He laughed. 'Do you like pizza?'
'What a ridiculous question. I suppose you're going to ask me if I like pasta next? ~ Melina Marchetta,#NFDB
999:The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church's teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultural anthropology, or psychology. God is the object of this discipline. ~ Michael Horton, #NFDB
1000:Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once. ~ Simon Critchley, #NFDB
1001:Most of our difficulties in our daily lives come from being unable to hold our minds in this way. For instance, if a man does evil to us, instantly we want to react evil, and every reaction of evil shows that we are not able to hold the Chitta down; it comes out in waves towards the object, and we lose our power. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
1002:There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev, #NFDB
1003:The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life. Except in this case, the presence on ~ James Lee Burke, #NFDB
1004:A kind and generous man by nature, he had stumbled, by chance, over that common Philosopher`s stone (much more easily discovered than the object of the alchemist`s researches), which sometimes trips up kind and generous men, and has the fatal property of turning gold to dross and every precious thing to poor account. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1005:One day I would like to produce a book that would deliberately hurt people. The words would wound their feelings and the object would cut their fingers so that they could not turn a page without bleeding on it. A very small number of people would be willing to take this experience on themselves and I would love them for it. ~ Supervert, #NFDB
1006:I couldn't take much more of this. Being the object two men competed for wasn't as glamorous as it sounded in the movies. The two men who both wanted one hundred percent of my time weren't dashing, international playboys. They were undead and surprisingly immature, considering the youngest was just over a hundred years old. ~ Jenny Trout, #NFDB
1007:I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order to continuously impress the other. I do not want to "hold" you, I want you to "stay" out of your own need for me. ~ Eldridge Cleaver, #NFDB
1008:You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, as surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look. ~ W H Auden,#NFDB
1009:All things a wizard makes are flawed in some way. A Good Wizard, like myself, will do this intentionally. A Bad Wizard's works will have some accidental flaw, derived from their nature. All our work has some weakness.
But why?
To limit the object's power, said the Good Wizard softly. Power is always best limited. ~ Garth Nix,#NFDB
1010:Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. ~ Charles Lamb, #NFDB
1011:It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford, #NFDB
1012:Wonder — the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge — promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, #NFDB
1013:But I believe also the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always a sense of the sacredness of the person who is the object... When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself. ~ Marilynne Robinson, #NFDB
1014:If anger be the basis of our political activities, the excitement tends to become an end in itself, at the expense of the object to be achieved. Side issues then assume an exaggerated importance, and all gravity of thought and action is lost; such excitement is not an exercise of strength, but a display of weakness.
~ Rabindranath Tagore,#NFDB
1015:My child, put heaven in your soul, purgatory in your heart, and earth in your hands . . . That is to say: Heaven should be the object of your contemplation, purgatory should be the privileged object of your prayer, earth should be the place where you sanctify yourself by your works and the accomplishment of your duties of state. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1016:The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
1017:To us all, life is a gift, liberty is a right, and the pursuit of happiness is the object supreme. But our conduct in the pursuit differs in accordance with the measure of justice we uphold. A common measure is only possible when we begin to understand and learn to appreciate each other's point of view and point of direction. ~ Ameen Rihani, #NFDB
1018:The idea that the object of constitutions is not to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent it; to preserve with equal care the independence of labour and the security of property; to make the rich safe against envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest level attained by the statesmanship of Greece. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
1019:In the first place, sensation (aisthesis) is a corporeal process which we have in common with animals, and in which the impression of an exterior object is transmitted to the soul. By means of this process, an image (phantasia) of the object is produced in the soul, or more precisely in the guiding part (hegemonikon) of the soul ~ Pierre Hadot, #NFDB
1020:Just to the extent that the Bible was appealed to in matters of science, science was retarded; and just to the extent that science has been appealed to in matters of religion, religion has advanced - so that now the object of intelligent religionists is to adopt a creed that will bear the test and criticism of science. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
1021:The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
1022:Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1023:Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like “his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,” and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
1024:Non-violence is backed by the theory of soul-force in which suffering is courted in the hope of ultimately winning over the opponent. But what happens when such an attempt fail to achieve the object? It is here that soul-force has to be combined with physical force so as not to remain at the mercy of tyrannical and ruthless enemy. ~ Bhagat Singh, #NFDB
1025:And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you’d do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It’s just as eloquent as speech. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1026:But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1027:Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it's been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks. ~ Leah Raeder, #NFDB
1028:The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
1029:The object of this competition is not to be mean to the losers but to find a winner. The process makes you mean because you get frustrated. Kids turn up unrehearsed, wearing the wrong clothes, singing out of tune and you can either say, "Good job" and patronize them or tell them the truth, and sometimes the truth is perceived as mean. ~ Simon Cowell, #NFDB
1030:True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret gem to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
1031:With writing as an ability to catch and manipulate names, the scribe was able to imprison the object and manipulate its very nature. The catching of names was considered a magical act in ancient societies so the ability to write was reserved for the clergy under the direct influence of gods of wisdom and magic such as Thoth. ~ Mage, Order of Hermes, #NFDB
1032:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul. ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
1033:Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein, #NFDB
1034:When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defense) may there possibly be? ~ George Saunders, #NFDB
1035:Whoever wants to receive the body of our Lord does not need to scrutinize what they are feeling at the time or how great their piety or devotion is, but rather they should note the state of their will and attitude of mind. You should not place too much weight on your feelings but emphasize rather the object of your love and striving. ~ Meister Eckhart, #NFDB
1036:First ourselves, then the others: this is Nature's order of progression. Consequently, we must show no respect, no quarter for others as soon as they have shown that our misfortune or our ruin is the object of their desires. To act differently, my daughter, would be show preference for others above ourselves, and that would be absurd. ~ Marquis de Sade, #NFDB
1037:Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects... instantaneously. The impression of these evanescent visions is what we make desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at hand. At such moments I am unconscious of materials, of style, of rules, of everything that intervenes between my perception and the object or idea perceived. ~ Joaquin Sorolla, #NFDB
1038:There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season to give a mark of enmity and ill-will: a word--a look, which at one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have reached the object aimed at. ~ Laurence Sterne, #NFDB
1039:If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
1040:I keep trying to find ways to shift the viewer's attention away from the object they are looking at and toward their own perceptual process in relation to that object. The question for me always is: how can I make you aware of your own activity of looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at? ~ Uta Barth, #NFDB
1041:And there on the piss-soaked cobbles, his back to the alley and his face to the wall, lay the object of their diplomatic mission: A sleeping drunk. Colt lay out his hand in a flourish.
“Mr. Billings, may I introduce to you His Imperial Majesty Joshua Norton the First, Emperor of the United States of America and Protector of Mexico. ~ Jordan Stratford,#NFDB
1042:Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which “collapses” the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes
a definite reality. ~ Michio Kaku,#NFDB
1043:Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “Love follows knowledge.”3 Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
1044:You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look. —W. H. Auden ~ Daniel H Pink, #NFDB
1045:I can remember years ago, when Kate Moss first came around and there were so many articles. Everyone was saying that it was heroin chic - that she was a waif, that she was anorexic. But Kate would eat just as much as anybody I knew - the media had just turned her into this thing. It must be really, really hard when you're the object of that. ~ Marc Jacobs, #NFDB
1046:The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous falacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty... ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1047:Don't follow after the object of hatred, look at the angry mind. Anger liberated by itself as it arises is mirrorlike wisdom.
Don't chase after the object of pride, look at the grasping mind. Self-importance liberated as it arises is the wisdom of equanimity.
Don't hanker after the object of desire, look at the craving mind. ~ Dilgo Khyentse,#NFDB
1048:If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. ... [J]ust a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
1049:The seeing of objects involves many sources of information beyond those meeting the eye when we look at an object. It generally involves knowledge of the object derived from previous experience, and this experience is not limited to vision but may include the other senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and perhaps also temperature or pain. ~ Richard Gregory, #NFDB
1050:When someone is searching then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. Searching means: having a goal. Finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1051:And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
1052:Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk – which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person – of an impossibility. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1053:When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object. ~ Frederick C Beiser, #NFDB
1054:All virtue that is saving, or distinguishing of true Christians, is summed up in Christian love. It is love that disposes us to honor God as God, to adore and worship Him. Love recognizes God's right to govern us and His worthiness to be the object of our obedience. At the same time, love disposes us to treat our neighbors with honor and respect. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
1055:Desire often creates paradoxical effects. The more you want something, the more you chase after it, the more it eludes you. The more interest you show, the more you repel the object of your desire. This is because your interest is too strong — it makes people awkward, even fearful. Uncontrollable desire makes you seem weak, unworthy, pathetic. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
1056:It is never on account of its formal nature as a psychic act that faith is conceived in Scripture to be saving. It is not, strictly speaking, even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith. The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or nature of faith, but in the object of faith. ~ B B Warfield, #NFDB
1057:She bent her head over the flowers. He knew she was not beautiful. He knew she did not see herself as the object of a man’s lust. He knew if he told her he found her desirable, she’d not understand his meaning. She’d think he meant something other than marriage. In that, she would be right, but a man could want both things from the same woman. ~ Carolyn Jewel, #NFDB
1058:And it was kind of funny to see all these professional fighters unwilling to get within a mile of the female. Then again, if you wanted to survive doing the work they did, accurate risk assessment was something you developed early -- and even Qhuinn, who was the object of the protective instinct the Chosen was rocking, wouldn't have dared touch her. ~ J R Ward, #NFDB
1059:With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution. ~ Steve Jobs, #NFDB
1060:ABHORRING (ABHO'RRING) The object of abhorrence. This seems not to be the proper use of the participial noun. And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.BibleIsaiah,lxvi. 44. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1061:And so well was she able to answer her own expectations, that when she joined them at dinner only two hours after she had first suffered the extinction of all her dearest hopes, no one would have supposed from the appearance of the sisters, that Elinor was mourning in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object of her love ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1062:The Buddha said this: "The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself." If you are not able to take care of yourself, if you are not able to accept yourself, how could you accept another person and how could you love him or her? ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1063:The Word is so central and so instrumental because the Word of the Lord holds out the object of our faith to us. It presents God’s promise to us—from all kinds of individual promises (throughout the Bible) all the way to the great promise, the great hope, the great object of our faith, Christ himself. The Word presents that which we are to believe. ~ Mark Dever, #NFDB
1064:But I do not recommend taking it out of the house, as it can get easily lost. Also, you want your baby to be able to access the object when he needs it. But for now, you will have to bring it to him (from a location where he can get to it when he is older and crawling, etc.). Once your baby has chosen his security object, it should be used to replace ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1065:In any conceivable method ever invented by man, an automaton which produces an object by copying a pattern, will go first from the pattern to a description to the object. It first abstracts what the thing is like, and then carries it out. It's therefore simpler not to extract from a real object its definition, but to start from the definition. ~ John von Neumann, #NFDB
1066:It taught me that the process was more important than the result, just as the performance means more to me than the object. I saw the process of making it and then the process of its unmaking. There was no duration or stability to it. It was pure process. Later on I read—and loved—the Yves Klein quote: “My paintings are but the ashes of my art. ~ Marina Abramovi, #NFDB
1067:The idea of, say, the compressed space between the floor and the object hanging over it and then the long space between the object and the ceiling was a kind of interesting idea for me - the idea of compressing and expanding. That was an idea that I worked with, which you could only do sculpturally. You can't really do with a painting on the wall. ~ Robert Barry, #NFDB
1068:The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state. ~ Robert Henri, #NFDB
1069:Somehow she knew he would take a love affair very seriously indeed. Once that pinpoint focus was engaged, he would throw himself body and soul into the liaison. In the the woman he decided to take as a lover.
A shiver ran through her at the thought. To be the object of such ferocious regard was an alluring prospect, but it also gave her pause. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,#NFDB
1070:Sometimes I would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting to it… The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that… ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1071:Hunt looked positively swarthy in the gathering dusk, big and potently masculine, with the eyes of a pirate and the casually ruthless air of a pagan king. He was no less arrogant than he had ever been... no tamer, no more refined... and yet somehow he had become the object of such all-consuming desire that Annabelle was certain she had lost her mind. ~ Lisa Kleypas, #NFDB
1072:My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,
Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.
- A Carcass ~ Charles Baudelaire,#NFDB
1073:The facts which our senses present to us are socially performed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception. ~ Max Horkheimer, #NFDB
1074:What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1075:And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
1076:When the pangs shoot through our body, and ghastly death appears in view, people see the patience of the dying Christian. Our infirmities become the black velvet on which the diamond of God's love glitters all the more brightly. Thank God I can suffer ! Thank God I can be made the object of shame and contempt, for in this way God shall be glorified. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
1077:From incoherent barkings of desire, man can advance to distinct speech now that, labelling the object with a name, he is able to make an implicit connection between the material it is made of and the work required to get it from the old state to the new in which it is ready for use. Thenceforth language firmly anchors the object in the stream of time. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
1078:Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
1079:The soul of the philosopher achieves a calm from such emotions; it follows reason and ever stays with it contemplating the true, the divine, which is not the object of opinion. Nurtured by this, it believes that one should live in this manner as long b as one is alive and, after death, arrive at what is akin and of the same kind, and escape from human evils. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1080:The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own. The wisdom of God created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the eye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth? ~ John Milton, #NFDB
1081:But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, #NFDB
1082:If you want something, my dearest love, the duke had once told her, you will never get it. Want is a timid, abject word. It implies that you know you will be left wanting, that you know you do not deserve the object of your desire but can only hope for a miracle. You must expect that object instead, and it will be yours. There is no such thing as a miracle. ~ Mary Balogh, #NFDB
1083:Self-painting is a further development of painting. The pictorial surface has lost its function as sole expressive support. It was led back to its origins, the wall, the object, the living being, the human body. By incorporating my body as expressive support, occurrences arise as a result, the course of which the camera records and the viewer can experience ~ Gunter Brus, #NFDB
1084:Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken
by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics?—"Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio
simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be
suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. ~ Viktor E Frankl,#NFDB
1085:Had it been the object or the intention of Jesus Christ to establish a new religion, he would undoubtedly have written the system himself, or procured it to be written in his life time. But there is no publication extant authenticated with his name. All the books called the New Testament were written after his death. He was a Jew by birth and by profession. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1086:The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
1087:We know that if we eat a certain food, it will upset our digestion, but we still eat it. The way out is to beware of the superficial appearance. From outside, something may look very pleasant. But we have to look deeper and use that deep understanding to see the superficial aspects of the object of our desire. Our understanding can overcome our cravings. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1088:ELEVATE Lord, thank You for a fresh view of Your exalted holy nature. Great God of the universe, holy and high, lifted up. I exalt You, Lord. You are the object of my greatest thoughts, the end of my deepest affections. I give myself wholly to You and to You alone. Revive me according to Your Word even as I bow. I ask in Jesus' strong name. Amen. REPLICATE ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
1089:The heart, with all its potential, loses its balance too easily when it loves a creature. It throws itself upon the creature loved and wants to possess it; and possessiveness kills. It holds on to the creature so passionately that it loses sight of the creator. Moreover it ruins the object of its love by its obsession with it. It ruins it, makes it a slave. ~ Carlo Carretto, #NFDB
1090:It is not, perhaps, an entirely happy situation after all, to gain something that has been wanted for long years. The object itself, once achieved, is often found not to be exactly as anticipated. It has perhaps become tired and worn over time; flaws that had been overlooked for years are now all too apparent. One finds one does not know what to do with it at all. ~ Jo Baker, #NFDB
1091:So She had to satisfy herself with the idea of love-loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
1092:That slit was the object of every man's lust - the heterosexual ones, at least - but it was frequently an object of their inexplicable scorn, distrust, and hate. You didn't hear that dark anger in all their jokes, but it was present in enough of them, and in some it was right out front, raw as a sore: What's a woman? A life-support system for a cunt . ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1093:The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
1094:Now the object of the will, i.e., of man's appetite, is the universal good...Hence it is evident that nothing can lull the human will but the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Thus God alone can satisfy the will of a human being. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265–1274), #NFDB
1095:Striking an average of observations taken at different times— rejecting those timid estimates that gave the object a length of 200 feet, and ignoring those exaggerated views that saw it as a mile wide and three long—you could still assert that this phenomenal creature greatly exceeded the dimensions of anything then known to ichthyologists, if it existed at all. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1096:The important thing isn't that we're freakazoidal about the same things--it's that she's as freakazoidal about her stuff as I am about mine, and that enthusiasm can't help but unite us, even if the object thereof doesn't. If two people are twisted enough to connect on a deep level, it's only natural there will be lots of angles where they don't connect at all. ~ Rob Sheffield, #NFDB
1097:As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
1098:So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
1099:D.: how to meditate?
M.: Concentrate on that one whom you like best. If a single thought prevails, all other thoughts are put off and finally eradicated. So long as diversity prevails there are bad thoughts. When the object of love prevails only good thoughts hold the field. Therefore hold on to one thought only. Dhyana is the chief practice. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks,#NFDB
1100:Even more remarkable—and a key reason Bob invited me to Hasanlu—was the object cradled in the arms of the front runner. The object was a bowl (or a vase, or a beaker): a metal vessel measuring about eight inches high, seven inches across the top, and six inches across the base. The falling walls had flattened the bowl, of course, along with the guy carrying it. ~ William M Bass, #NFDB
1101:I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake. ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
1102:Life is like a piece of string with a lot of knots tied in it. The knots are the karma you're born with from all your past lives, and the object of human life is to try and undo all those knots. That's what chanting and meditation in God consciousness can do. Otherwise you simply tie another ten knots each time you try to undo one knot. That's how karma works. ~ George Harrison, #NFDB
1103:Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1104:Personally, I didn't take a single photograph while I was there, but that's not all that unusual for me. I suppose my aversion to snapping pictures may have something to do with shaky hands and blurry results, but there's another reason: The act of lifting up the camera and positioning it between me and the object of my interest separates me from the experience. ~ Michael J Fox, #NFDB
1105:An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique andconsequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known. ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
1106:An action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according with which it is decided upon; it depends therefore, not on the realization of the object of action, but solely on the principle of volition in accordance with which, irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire, the action has been performed. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1107:Pfft,” a male said. “I can kiss on a single breath for at least three minutes.” “Yeah? How about you show us?” “Or are you all words and no action?” The heavily built bear spread his arms. “Which lovely lady wants to volunteer to be the object of my lusty affections?” His gaze landed on Silver. “Ms. Mercant? I could show you— Never mind, I like my head on my neck. ~ Nalini Singh, #NFDB
1108:We are all part of a universal game. Returning to our essence while living in the world is the object of the game. The earth is the game board, and we are the pieces on the board. We move around and around until we remember who we really are, and then we can be taken off the board. At that point, we are no longer the game-piece, but the player; we've won the game. ~ Kenny Werner, #NFDB
1109:Mindful consumption is the object of this precept. We are what we consume. If we look deeply into the items that we consume every day, we will come to know our own nature very well. We have to eat, drink, consume, but if we do it unmindfully, we may destroy our bodies and our consciousness, showing ingratitude toward our ancestors, our parents, and future generations. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1110:Our slightest desire, though unique as a chord, nevertheless includes the fundamental notes on which the whole of our life is built. And sometimes, if we were to eliminate one of them, even one that we do not hear, that we are not aware of, one that has no connexion with the object of our quest, we would nevertheless see our whole desire for that object disappear. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1111:They crashed into each other as if propelled by gravity, and he didn't know which one of them was the object and which the earth, only that they were colliding. The kiss was Lila pressed into a single gesture. Her brazen pride and her stubborn resolve, her recklessness and her daring and her hunger for freedom. It was all those things, and it took Kell's breath away. ~ V E Schwab, #NFDB
1112:When objects are presented within the context of art (and until recently objects always have been used) they are as eligible for aesthetic consideration as are any objects in the world, and an aesthetic consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object's existence or functioning in an art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment. ~ Joseph Kosuth, #NFDB
1113:When we do it, it is for art. When they [animals] do it, it is for competition. Both may be true. What is disturbing and irrational is the decision to explain human behavior in spiritual terms of a sense of beauty, and animal behavior in mechanistic terms of demonstrating fitness. The object, yet again, seems to be to define humans as higher and unique. ~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, #NFDB
1114:Evolution is gaining the psychic zones of the world... life, being and ascent of consciousness, could not continue to advance indefinitely along its line without transforming itself in depth. The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence, of that very doubling back upon himself becomes in a flash able to raise himself to a new sphere. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #NFDB
1115:See how the wings, striking against the air, sustain the heavy eagle in the thin air on high,” he noted, then added, “As much force is exerted by the object against the air as by the air against the object.”16 Two hundred years later, Newton would state a refined version of this as his third law of motion: “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1116:The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. Greater labor leads to greater love. Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
1117:The raillery which is consistent with good-breeding is a gentle animadversion of some foible, which, while it raises the laugh in the rest of the company, doth not put the person rallied out of countenance, or expose him to shame or contempt. On the contrary, the jest should be so delicate that the object of it should be capable of joining in the mirth it occasions. ~ Henry Fielding, #NFDB
1118:Let the errors and deceits of our very senses be set before us; the insuperable difficulties which attend first principles in all systems; the contradictions which adhere to the very ideas of matter, cause and effect, extension, space, time, motion; and, in a word, quantity of all kinds, the object of the only science that can fairly pretend to any certainty or evidence. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
1119:The true test is, whether the object be of a local character, and local use; or, whether it be of general benefit to the states. If it be purely local, congress cannot constitutionally appropriate money for the object. But, if the benefit be general, it matters not, whether in point of locality it be in one state, or several; whether it be of large, or of small extent. ~ Joseph Story, #NFDB
1120:At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away. ~ Henry Adams, #NFDB
1121:What it does remind us is that 'God' is not to be separated from the quest for the Kingdom of God and is not and cannot be the object of any detached 'scientific' contemplation. Heidegger's critique of onto-theology is also driving a wedge between speaking of God and the aims of science - not so as to get rid of God but rather to free God from a false objectification. ~ George Pattison, #NFDB
1122:God and God alone is the final, ultimate goal of our quest. All that God is for us in Jesus is the Object of our quest for joy. When I speak of fighting for joy, I mean joy in God, not joy without reference to God. When I speak of longing for happiness, I mean happiness in all that God is for us in Jesus, not happiness as physical or psychological experience apart from God. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1123:METHOD PARAMETERS: Method parameters are variables, which are used to pass the value inside a method when the method is called. Method parameters are only accessible from inside the method but the objects passed in may be accessible from the outside, if you have a reference to the object from outside the method. Method parameters are always mutable and defined by val keyword. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1124: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
1125:It would be much more constructive if people tried to understand their supposed enemies. Learning to forgive is much more useful than merely picking up a stone and throwing it at the object of one’s anger, the more so when the provocation is extreme. For it is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1126:Object in/ and space - the first impulse may be to give the object - a position - to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with.) Next - to change the position of the object. - Rauschenberg's early sculptures - A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden - The rocks can be anywhere (within the garden). ~ Jasper Johns, #NFDB
1127:Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor ~ Rex Harrison, #NFDB
1128:Of course, pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them. Every object, being part of an ultimately incomprehensible world, also embodies that world; when represented in a picture, the object conveys this mystery all the more powerfully, the less of a 'function' the picture has. Hence, for instance, the growing fascination of many beautiful old portraits. ~ Gerhard Richter, #NFDB
1129:As objects got closer to the center of the CM gradient, gravity would affect the Weifang more powerfully, and similarly as the object moved away from the gradient the effect would be lessened. The real danger was in the difference between the two, and if the object strayed too close to a tightly compacted and powerful CM field…. Well, the scientific term was spaghettification. ~ Evan Currie, #NFDB
1130:Having spent most of my life looking at things of every description, including those in my clients’ homes, I have discovered three common elements involved in attraction: the actual beauty of the object itself (innate attraction), the amount of love that has been poured into it (acquired attraction), and the amount of history or significance it has accrued (experiential value). ~ Marie Kond, #NFDB
1131:...I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1132:In the carnival hall of mirrors which is our memory, we distort what we see. In Ernie's mirror image of me, I am magnified, elongated into a girl who led him on, the object of his great, unhappy, unfulfilled love. While he, in the equal if opposite distortion of my mind's mirror, is reduced to a squat manikin from my past, a dull stranger, remembered only for his minor quirks. ~ Brian Moore, #NFDB
1133:Mindful consumption is the object of this precept. We are what we consume. If we look deeply into the items that we consume every day, we will come to know our own nature very well. We have to eat, drink, consume, but if we do it unmindfully, we may destroy our bodies and our consciousness, showing ingratitude toward our ancestors, our parents, and future generations (66). ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1134:The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.
The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.
In such a way that they have the whole world as background. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein,#NFDB
1135:Why doesn't passionate love last? how is it possible to see a person as beautiful on Monday, and 364 days later, on another Monday, to see that beauty as bland? surely the object of your affection could not have changed that much. she still has the same shaped eyes. her voice has always had that husky sound, but now it grates on you - she sounds like she needs an antibiotic. ~ Lauren Slater, #NFDB
1136:It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura—the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1137:Man is created for a purpose; the object of his existence is to perfect himself. Man is imperfect by nature, because if nature had made him perfect he would have had no wants; and it is only by supplying his wants that utility can be developed. The development of utility is therefore the object of our being, and the attainment of this great end the cause of our existence. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
1138:When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1139:It is a way of being Christian in which beliefs are secondary, not primary. Christianity is a “way” to be followed more than it is about a set of beliefs to be believed. Practice is more important than “correct” beliefs. Beliefs are not irrelevant; they do matter. But they are not the object of faith. God is the “object” of commitment—and for Christians, God as known in Jesus. ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
1140:I gave up trying to be anyone," he said. "The object of my life was to remove myself from my surroundings, to live in a place where nothing could hurt me anymore. One by one, I tried to abandon my attachments, to let go of all the things I ever cared about. The idea was to achieve indifference, an indifference so powerful and sublime that it would protect me from further assault. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1141:Organize first for knowledge, first with the object of making us know ourselves as a nation, for we have to do that before we canbe of value to other nations of the world and then organize to accomplish the things that you decide to want. Anddon't make decisions with the interest of youth alone before you. Make your decisions because they are good for the nation as a whole. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
1142:Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness. ~ Anonymous, The Upanishads, #NFDB
1143:When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1144:Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world. ~ William Finnegan, #NFDB
1145:I want a future where women and girls get to be the subject of their own sexuality, not the object of somebody else’s. That we are the main characters in our own play, not props in somebody else’s—which is how women’s sexuality is treated now. Whatever the outside attitudes about sexuality it’s always about somebody’s agenda for us, and I want a world where we can have our own. ~ Jaclyn Friedman, #NFDB
1146:Some people say I'm saying what they wanna say. Some people don't agree. Some people are outraged. Some people want to see what the album is about. To me, hip-hop's been dead for years. We all should know that, come on. With that being said, then, the object of the game now is to make money off of exploiting it. That's what it's all about - get this money. That's basically what I'm saying. ~ Nas, #NFDB
1147:The third duty of a teacher is that he should not withhold from his students any advice. After he finishes the outward sciences, he should teach them the inward sciences. He should tell them that the object of education is to gain nearness of God, not power or richness and that God created ambition as a means of perpetuating knowledge which is essential for these sciences. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #NFDB
1148:To ABDUCE (ABDU'CE) v.a.[Lat. abduco.]To draw to a different part; to withdraw one part from another.A word chiefly used in physic or science. And if we abduce the eye unto either corner, the object will not duplicate; for, in that position, the axis of the cones remain in the same plain, as is demonstrated in the optics delivered by Galen.Brown’sVulgar Errours,b. iii. c. 20. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1149:What we know is not capable of being otherwise; of things capable of being otherwise we do not know, when they have passed outsideour observation, whether they exist or not. Therefore the object of knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal; for things that are of necessity in the unqualified sense are all eternal; and things that are eternal are ungenerated and imperishable. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1150:The compliments you are about to pay could only sadden me, because what you love in our dear peninsula is exactly the object of our hatreds. Indeed, you crisscross Italy only to meticulously sniff out the traces of our oppressive past, and you are happy, insanely happy, if you have the good fortune to carry home some miserable stone on which our ancestors have trodden. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, #NFDB
1151:It may be objected that the meaning of names can guide us at most only to the opinions, possibly the foolish and groundless opinions, which mankind have formed concerning things, and that as the object of philosophy is truth, not opinion, the philosopher should dismiss words and look into things themselves, to ascertain what questions can be asked and answered in regard to them. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1152:Cranswell led them to the left, into the Egyptian exhibit hall, and Fastitocalon remembered why he didn’t spend much time in places like this: the intense, knotted, crisscrossing trails of time and metaphysical significance that hung around collections of antiquities were exhausting to experience, and the older the object the heavier its weight on reality. The things in here were old. ~ Vivian Shaw, #NFDB
1153:The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting. Cathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us. Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a ‘love object,’ is invested with our energy as if it were a part of ourselves, and this relationship between us and the invested object is called a cathexis. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1154:The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting. Cathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us. Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a “love object,” is invested with our energy as if it were a part of ourselves, and this relationship between us and the invested object is called a cathexis. ~ M Scott Peck, #NFDB
1155:We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
1156:True happiness is always self-forgetful: it loses itself in the object of its joy. As the joy of the Holy Ghost fills us, and we rejoice in God the Holy One, through our Lord Jesus Christ. [. . .]
Love and joy ever keep company. Love, denying and forgetting itself for the brethren and the lost, living in them, finds the joy of God. ‘The kingdom of God is joy in the Holy Ghost. ~ Andrew Murray,#NFDB
1157:We dare not trim stones to make God an altar, for if we do we ruin everything. We would spend time bringing people to the altar and saying, "Look at those beautiful stones we trimmed!" We merely need to accept the work that God has done for us in Christ. The object of His restrictions is to help us see how wonderful He is and to spend the rest of our lives rendering true worship to Him. ~ Max Anders, #NFDB
1158:So we [with Kate DiCamillo] decided to give the friends an object and see what they did with it. The object was a sock and it went from there. Once we got going, once we got on a roll, it became very easy to work together and to figure out how to do it. We would meet for two-hour segments, usually from 10-12, two or three times a week. We met all one summer, and I think into the fall. ~ Alison McGhee, #NFDB
1159:Well, think of what I’m doing to you right now. For me I’m the self, and you’re the object. For you, of course, it’s the exact opposite—you’re the self to you and I’m the object. And by exchanging self and object, we can project ourselves onto the other and gain self-consciousness. Volitionally.” “I still don’t get it, but it sure feels good.” “That’s the whole idea,” the girl said. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1160:Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began. ~ Claude L vi Strauss, #NFDB
1161:the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state. —RAYMOND ARON, L’OPIUM ~ Clive James, #NFDB
1162:Just as many questions might be started for debate among people sitting up at night as to the kind of thing that sunshine is, and then the simple appearing of it in all its beauty would render any verbal description superfluous, so every calculation that tries to arrive conjecturally at the future state will be reduced to nothingness by the object of our hopes, when it comes upon us. ~ Gregory of Nyssa, #NFDB
1163:When our mistress is alive, a great part of the thoughts which form what we call our loves come to us during the hours when she is not by our side. Thus we acquire the habit of having as the object of our meditation an absent person, and one who, even if she remains absent for a few hours only, during those hours is no more than a memory. And so death does not make any great difference. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1164:Never make the negative the object of your study, because the negative is not there. You can go on and you will never arrive anywhere. Try to understand what light is, not darkness. Try to understand what life is, not death. Try to understand what love is, not hate.
If you go into hate you will never understand it, because hate is only the absence of love. So is darkness the absence of light. ~ Osho,#NFDB
1165:Object Repository When you record a test, QuickTest adds each object on which you perform an operation to the object repository. You can also add objects to the object repository while editing your test. There are various ways to add an object to the object repository while editing a test: ³ Use the Add New Object option in the Object Repository dialog box. You can add any object as a single ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1166:Raising the minimum wage and lowering the barriers to union organization would carry a trade-off - higher unemployment. A better idea is to have the government subsidize low-wage employment. The earned-income tax credit for low-income workers - which has been the object of proposed cuts by both President Clinton and congressional Republicans - has been a positive step in this direction. ~ Paul Krugman, #NFDB
1167:God is ‘the Light’, and this Name is partly equivalent to his Names ‘the Truth’ and ‘the Knower’. Truth is the object of Knowledge, and both are Light as opposed to the darkness of error and ignorance. The Light is One, but it is manifested with different degrees of intensity throughout creation, degrees of guidance which radiate from Truth, and degrees of faith which radiate from Knowledge. ~ Martin Lings, #NFDB
1168:[According to Peirce] ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ … nominalism denies the social altogether … ‘the community is to be considered as an end in itself’… knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals … Logic is rooted in the social principle. ~ Louis Menand, #NFDB
1169:In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value. ~ Jean Baudrillard, #NFDB
1170:So is blurred
so is blurred
in me
what white-haired gentleman
separated once and for all
and said
this is the subject
this is the object
we fall asleep
with one hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets
our feet abandon us
and taste the earth
with their tiny roots
which next morning
we tear out painfully ~ Zbigniew Herbert,#NFDB
1171:That this gentleman [President John Adams] ought not to be the object of the federal wish, is, with me, reduced to demonstration. His administration has already very materially disgraced and sunk the government. There are defects in his character which must inevitably continue to do this more and more. And if he is supported by the federal party, his party must in the issue fall with him. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
1172:Aaron opened his hand and looked at the object that his grandfather had given him with his last breaths. It was a silver medallion, a white pearl in the center, and a carved relief of a dragon holding a rose curling around the front. There was a slight shimmer to it as it caught the light. After studying it for a few moments, he stuffed the medallion in his pocket and walked stiffly from the room. ~ Ken Lozito, #NFDB
1173:In the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to - obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been - is that not - immoral? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1174:There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires. ~ Harry Frankfurt, #NFDB
1175:These ideas have to be understood in studying dhyana, or meditation. We hear a sound. First there is the external vibration; second, the nerve motion that carries it to the mind; third, the reaction from the mind, along with which flashes the knowledgeof the object which was the external cause of these different changes, from the ethereal vibrations to the mental reaction.
~ Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga, 84,#NFDB
1176:Wearing dead animals takes place in modern civilization as well and without having the meaning of enthroning celebrities as crowns on their heads. Nekhbet, Wadjet, the Sun or whatever other symbol which were put on the head in ancient Egypt by Pharaohs shouldn't be looked at as if it were an act of veneration to the animal or the object without inspecting first the context in which it exists. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim, #NFDB
1177:I’ve always wanted to be liked. It grieved me that I was treated with indifference. Left an orphan by Fortune, I wanted—like all orphans—to be the object of someone’s affection. This need has always been a hunger that went unsatisfied, and so thoroughly have I adapted to this inevitable hunger that I sometimes wonder if I really feel the need to eat.
Whatever be the case, life pains me. ~ Fernando Pessoa,#NFDB
1178:World of matter, World of life, World of thought, World of justice: four orders, of which three have already appeared, with the fourth able to take place and existing already as an object of hope, of the desire of every human qua rational being. The World of justice ought to be viewed as the object of desire traversed by reason, or as the place where life is transfi xed by the thought of the eternal ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1179:Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, #NFDB
1180:There are significant relationships, of course, between wanting things and caring about them..The notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire. Caring about something may be, in the end, nothing more than a certain complex mode of wanting it. However, simply attributing desire to a person does not in itself convey that the person cares about the object he desires. ~ Harry G Frankfurt, #NFDB
1181:Describing men, of course, I run into the same problems—aquiline nose, chiseled features, bullish neck, leonine hair, steely gaze, bronze tan—but somehow the arsenal of clichés and materials for describing men seems smaller. Many feminists are right to claim that the male is on the whole less objectified than the female; the male is treated more frequently as the subject rather than the object. ~ Josip Novakovich, #NFDB
1182:Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1183:Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1184:Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now, and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection, that you can truly love them. Otherwise, it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire, not as he or she is in themselves. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
1185:It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened : was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care - just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated? ~ Amitav Ghosh, #NFDB
1186:The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
1187:The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black—so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
1188:The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
1189:She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, where it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity. To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death. The nineteenth century was closer that most women thought. ~ Ian McEwan, #NFDB
1190:There is neither you, nor I; neither the object of meditation, nor the process of meditation; The Father of all action forgot Himself there. The blind did not see any relationship and support there, The devout merged with Him, the moment they saw the Lord! [bk1sm.gif] -- from The Ascent of Self: A Reinterpretation of the Mystical Poetry of Lalla-Ded, by B. N. Paramoo
~ Lalla, There is neither you, nor I
,#NFDB
1191:But you have no religious faith." Richard had said, smiling, "you're not even a believer." Jennifer hadn't tried to explain to him that religious belief was not the point. The will to believe created its own power, its own faith, and, ultimately, its own will. Through the practice of faith, whatever its specific rituals, one brought into existence the object of that faith. The believer became the Creator. ~ Nancy Kress, #NFDB
1192:In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religion counts for so much - except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - i believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl, or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey. ~ Jim Corbett, #NFDB
1193:The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1194:The Soviet Union and something called communism per se had not been the object of Washington's global attacks. There had never been an International Communist Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in the way of the expansion of the American Empire; by whatever name the US gives to the enemy - communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist. ~ William Blum, #NFDB
1195:Faith is not a subjective exercise of positive thinking that tries to convince that something is true contrary to fact. On the contrary, faith is based on objective truth, and it has value only in proportion to the worth of the object of that faith. This is why faith must always supersede and subdue experience. Experience is entirely subjective and can never be the final and sole judge of anything. ~ Michael P V Barrett, #NFDB
1196:In India, where there are no passports or identity discs, and where religions counts for so much- except among those few who have crossed the 'black water' - I believe that a man wearing a saffron robe, or carrying a beggar's bowl , or with silver crosses on his headgear and chest, could walk from Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin without once being questioned about his destination, or the object of his journey, ~ Jim Corbett, #NFDB
1197:It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Magie said of her game in a 1902 issue of The Single Tax Review. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1198:Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was alone. Why should he have let himself feel any other way? ~ Theodore Sturgeon, #NFDB
1199:I have known men who thought the object of conversion was to cleanse them as a garment is cleansed, and that when they are converted they were to be hung up in the Lord's wardrobe, the door of which was to be shut, so that no dust could get at them. A coat that is not used the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted, the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
1200:Besides, to be fair to him, his viciousness was perhaps not innate. From his earliest steps among men he had felt, then seen himself the object of jeers, condemnation, rejection. Human speech for him always meant mockery and curses. As he grew older he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught it. He had acquired the general viciousness. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1201:Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1202:The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1203:four principles of human endeavor: • The effort that we put into something does not just change the object. It changes us and the way we evaluate that object. • Greater labor leads to greater love. • Our overvaluation of the things we make runs so deep that we assume that others share our biased perspective. • When we cannot complete something into which we have put great effort, we don’t feel so attached to it. ~ Dan Ariely, #NFDB
1204:To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
1205:A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside. To experience complete freedom in seeking his purposes he would have to be alone, and that’s impossible, since a person who isn’t brought up among people cannot become a person. ~ Stanis aw Lem, #NFDB
1206:I was never the sort of child who believed in "monsters under the bed" or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father...once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called "antiparanoia," in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it. ~ David Foster Wallace, #NFDB
1207:the leader releases energy, unites energies, and all with the object not only of carrying out a purpose, but of creating further and larger purposes. And I do not mean here by larger purposes mergers or more branches; I speak of larger in the qualitative rather than the quantitative sense. I mean purposes which will include more of those fundamental values for which most of us agree we are really living. ~ Mary Parker Follett, #NFDB
1208:The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle. The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
1209:What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other. ~ Jonas Salk, #NFDB
1210:When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world. ~ Harold S Kushner, #NFDB
1211:emblem. The meditator would place his head between his knees and whisper hymns and repeat the name of a magic emblem. Repetition of the magic emblem was used as the object to dwell upon and would chase away distractions and cause the “demons and hostile angels to flight.” A state of ecstasy was reached, which Gershom G. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, has described as “an attitude of deep self-oblivion. ~ Herbert Benson, #NFDB
1212:In reality,” said Democritus, “there are only atoms and the void.” Perception is due to the expulsion of atoms from the object upon the sense organ. There is or have been or will be an infinite number of worlds; at every moment planets are colliding and dying, and new worlds are rising out of chaos by the selective aggregation of atoms of similar size and shape. There is no design; the universe is a machine. This, ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1213:It is not how long you work at some task that determines what you’ll receive for it in exchange. It is the value someone else places upon the product or service that determines what it is worth in exchange.
Your “costs” are not important to the other person. He only cares about the value of the product to himself. What he’ll pay to get your service is based solely on the value he places upon the object ~ Harry Browne,#NFDB
1214:What is beauty? why do we admire it? why do we endeavor to create it? [...]
[B]eauty is any quality by which an object or a form pleases a beholder. Primarily and originally the object does not please the beholder because it is beautiful, but rather he calls it beautiful because it pleases him. Any object that satisfies desire will seem beautiful: food is beautiful - Thai's is not beautiful - to a starving man. ~ Will Durant,#NFDB
1215:At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1216:Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles. ~ Yukio Mishima, #NFDB
1217:Surrendering completely to love, be it human or divine, means giving up everything, including our own well-being or our ability to make decisions. It means loving in the deepest sense of the word. The truth is that we don't want to be saved in the way God has chosen; we want to keep absolute control over our every step, to be fully conscious of our decisions, to be capable of choosing the object of our devotion. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1218:The advent of the rubber ball was instrumental in creating an entirely different method of striking the object. The solid ball required to be hit for carry, whereas it was quickly apparent that the Haskell lent itself to an enormous run. I hold the firm opinion that from this date the essential attitude towards accuracy was completely lost sight of. This was the start of the craze for length and still more length. ~ Harry Vardon, #NFDB
1219:I wanted to make a site where I wasn't mailing physical things to people, but I was still giving people things, and I would have this relationship with that person, and if that person was interested in the object, they would have to email me and I would send that object digitally to them. So, I wanted the relationship with that person, however brief, and I wanted to spread the digital record of the things I have. ~ Mary Mattingly, #NFDB
1220:I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life. ~ Richard Fortey, #NFDB
1221:Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise. ~ Stanley Fish, #NFDB
1222:Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. ~ Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1223:See, sexuality is less about the actual act of having pretty good sex for seventeen minutes twice a week and much more about surrounding yourself with an ever simmering sensual energy, pulsing just underneath your daily life and infusing almost everything you do. It's like you're always just a little bit horny, just a little turned on, but the object of your gentle lust isn't just your lover, it's divine life itself. ~ Sera J Beak, #NFDB
1224:The more obvious features of the speculative episode are manifestly clear to anyone open to understanding. Some artifact or some development, seemingly new and desirable—tulips in Holland, gold in Louisiana, real estate in Florida, the superb economic designs of Ronald Reagan—captures the financial mind or perhaps, more accurately, what so passes. The price of the object of speculation goes up. Securities, ~ John Kenneth Galbraith, #NFDB
1225:My passions, when roused, are intense, and, so long as I am activated by them, nothing equals my impetuosity. I no longer know moderation, respect, fear, propriety; I am cynical, brazen, violent, fearless; no sense of shame deters me, no danger alarms me. Except for the object of my passion, the whole world is as nothing to me; but this only lasts for a moment, and the next I am plunged into utter dejection. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
1226:The creative force in man recognizes and records these rhythms with the medium most suitable to him, the object, or the moment, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. Recording unfelt facts, acquired by rule, results in sterile inventory. To see the Thing Itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism - the casual noting of the superficial phase, a transitory mood. ~ Edward Weston, #NFDB
1227:So fully am I impressed with the vast importance and necessity of attaining what will be the object of my motion this night, that if, during the almost forty years that I have had the honour of a seat in parliament, I had been so fortunate as to accomplish that, and that only, I should think I had done enough, and could retire from public life with comfort, and the conscious satisfaction, that I had done my duty. ~ Charles James Fox, #NFDB
1228:Whatever may be the judgement pronounced on the competency of the architects of the Constitution, or whatever may be the destiny of the edifice prepared by them, I feel it a duty to express my profound and solemn conviction . . . that there never was an assembly of men, charged with a great and arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them. ~ James Madison, #NFDB
1229:Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
1230:That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1231:To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery(the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
1232:Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. ~ Pope Benedict XVI, #NFDB
1233:Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; the object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. ~ Edward W Said, #NFDB
1234:One big strain on the family that I’ve already talked about was this whole richest man in America business. I don’t know if Helen ever really forgave me for putting us in the position to be dragged into that. HELEN WALTON: “What I hate is being the object of curiosity. People are so curious about everything, and so we are just public conversation. The whole thing still makes me mad when I think about it. I mean, I hate it. ~ Sam Walton, #NFDB
1235:That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something, you yearn for it without cease. If only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
1236:The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1237:The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Emerson on Education', #NFDB
1238:When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1239:One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? ~ Virginia Woolf, #NFDB
1240:Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal. No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, #NFDB
1241:Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representations of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish glow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
1242:He who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1243:The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure. ~ Rachel Cusk, #NFDB
1244:...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle.
And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me. ~ M T Anderson,#NFDB
1245:When you really concentrate, you will get a sense of expansion. You will feel that you are larger person than you are physically, as if you become a person two or three sizes bigger than your ordinary physical self, and that you are flowing with all your being toward the object of your concentration. Whether it is a physical thing or an image that you are concentrating on, your whole invisible person will be in movement. ~ Michael Chekhov, #NFDB
1246:Now, it so happens that our culture—or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis—places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture’s emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself. ~ Neel Burton, #NFDB
1247:These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers’ revolt and contempt. ~ Ry nosuke Akutagawa, #NFDB
1248:Hesitantly she took the object from his open palm.
It was a small, exquisite black cameo rimmed with pearls. A woman on a horse.
“The woman is Athena,” Devon said. “According to myth, she invented the bridle and was the first ever to tame a horse.”
Kathleen looked down at the gift in wonder. First the shawl…now this. Personal, beautiful, thoughtful things. No one had ever understood her taste so acutely.
Damn him. ~ Lisa Kleypas,#NFDB
1249:From what has been said we can clearly understand the nature of Love and Hate. Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: Hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. We further see, that he who loves necessarily endeavors to have, and to keep present to him, the object of his love; while he who hates endeavors to remove and destroy the object of his hatred. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
1250:Government is nothing more than a national association; and the object of this association is the good of all, as well individually as collectively. Every man wishes to pursue his occupation, and to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety, and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the objects for which government ought to be established are anwered. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1251:...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me. ~ Matthew Tobin Anderson, #NFDB
1252:What are you to do? You are always to remember that you are the child of a Great Father. You must not think that you are a sinner, that you are a degraded person. If you think that you are a sinner, it means you are meditating on sin! When sin has become the object of your meditation, you will become a sinner, because a person becomes just like the object of his or her ideation. We become the object of our meditation. ~ Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, #NFDB
1253:And, for one– ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead. ~ Rick Yancey, #NFDB
1254:But the knowledge and love of our Divine Redeemer, of which we were the object from the first moment of His Incarnation, exceed all that the human intellect can hope to grasp. For hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love ~ Pope Pius XII, #NFDB
1255:To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods. They need but common sense. They have only to look within themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their obvious interests, to consider the object of society and of each of the members who compose it, and they will easily understand that virtue is an advantage, and that vice is an injury to beings of the species. ~ Jean Meslier, #NFDB
1256:All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce, #NFDB
1257:The object of defense is preservation; and since it is easier to hold ground than to take it, defense is easier than attack. But defense has a passive purpose: preservation; and attack a positive one: conquest.... If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object. ~ Carl von Clausewitz, #NFDB
1258:And then, while she was making them some orangeade, suddenly, just as when the reflector of a lamp that is badly fitted begins by casting all round an object, on the wall beyond it, huge and fantastic shadows which, in time, contract and are lost in the shadow of the object itself, all the terrible and disturbing ideas which he had formed of Odette melted away and vanished in the charming creature who stood there before his eyes. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1259:Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1260:Here in the U.S. we do have a problem with a president Donald Trump who uses language in two distinctly destructive ways. One is to lie, and to use words to mean their opposite. Like, when he calls the Russian investigation a "witch hunt." He can't call it a "witch hunt" because a witch hunt is something that a powerful person does against a powerless person. The most powerful man in the world cannot be the object of a witch hunt. ~ Masha Gessen, #NFDB
1261:...Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears--would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
1262:The whole point of government, Spinoza maintained, is liberty: “the object of government is … to enable [men] to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice.” The state authorities may interfere in religion—indeed, they must do so, since religion is too dangerous to be left in the hands of priests. ~ Anthony Gottlieb, #NFDB
1263:When people pose the question about the noble men and women who have sacrificed their lives for my freedom and yours, they almost inevitably leave out the fact that many of these very same men and women participated in killing other human beings. Yet, as the famous American general George Patton clearly and profoundly articulated, “The object of war is not to die for your country. It is to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his. ~ Tripp York, #NFDB
1264:I sprinted the last few metres and, with bated breath, peered over Oscar’s shoulder. The object of his despair lay on the ground. It wasn’t Caicus. In fact, I didn’t know what it was. “How could he do this?” Oscar murmured. “Have you ever seen anything so horrible?” “No,” I agreed sympathetically. “What is it?” Oscar collapsed onto the ground and slung his arm over a deformed lump of metal. “The engine,” he grieved, wretchedly. It ~ Gabriella Lepore, #NFDB
1265:I often used to think myself in the case of the fox-hunter, who, when he had toiled and sweated all day in the chase as if some unheard-of blessing was to crown his success, finds at last all he has got by his labor is a stinking nauseous animal. But my condition was yet worse than his; for he leaves the loathsome wretch to be torn by his hounds, whilst I was obliged to fondle mine, and meanly pretend him to be the object of my love. ~ Sarah Fielding, #NFDB
1266:Leonardo, with his profound knowledge of art, commenced various undertakings, many of which he never completed, because it appeared to him that the hand could never give due perfection to the object or purpose which he had in his thoughts, or beheld in his imagination - since in his mind he frequently formed some difficult conception, so subtle and so wonderful that no hands, however excellent or able, could ever give it expression ~ Sherwin B Nuland, #NFDB
1267:Planck knew that the spectrum had a very particular shape, with lots of light emitted at low frequencies and very little at high frequencies, and that the peak of the spectrum—the frequency at which the light emitted is brightest—depends only on the object’s temperature. He had even discovered a formula to describe the characteristic shape of the spectrum, but was stymied when he tried to find a theoretical justification for the formula. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
1268:Cole shrugged. "Maybe. But if Forrice had been in charge of the Quentin the way I planned it originally, there's a fifty-fifty chance it would have made it back."
"And a fifty-fifty chance the Kermit wouldn't have."
"True," he admitted. "But Mount Fuji sacrificed himself. It was a noble thing to do, but I was taught that it's never a good idea to die for your side. The object of the exercise is to make your enemy die for his side. ~ Mike Resnick,#NFDB
1269:Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
1270:There are certain truths which stand out so openly on the roadsides of life, as it were, that every passer-by may see them. Yet, because of their obviousness, the general run of people disregard such truths or at least they do not make them the object of any concious knowledge. People are so bliend to some of the simplest facts in everyday life that they are highly surprised when somebody calls attention to what everybody ought to know. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
1271:Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically "modern" conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity. ~ Erwin Panofsky, #NFDB
1272:Perché Pensa? Pensando S'Invecchia
To spend uncounted years of pain,
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near,
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one's latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw-Is this the object, end and law,
And purpose of our being here?
~ Arthur Hugh Clough,#NFDB
1273:The object of a comedy is not to correct morals or ridicule the vices of society; no, a comedy should depict the discrepancies between life and purpose, should be the fruit of bitter indignation aroused by the degradation of human dignity, should be sarcasm, and not an epigram, convulsive laughter and not an amused grin, should be written with bile and not diluted salt, in a word, it should embrace life in its highest significance. ~ Vissarion Belinsky, #NFDB
1274:If the object of meditation were something concrete, something solid and graspable - an image or a statue or a dot on the floor or a candle - it would be much more of a concentration exercise. But the breath is very elusive; even if you wanted to give it one hundred percent attention, it would be difficult because it is so ephemeral, so light, so airy and spacious. As the object of meditation, it brings a sense of softness and gentleness. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
1275:Thought is made up of accumulated knowledge in the form of images and associations, and it seizes an experience only to make it fit into categories of the known. Although it can entertain the new when it is quiet, the thinking immediately transforms it into something old, with an image that has already been the object of an experience. The image awakens an immediate reaction. This always repeats, so that there is never anything new. ~ Jeanne De Salzmann, #NFDB
1276:I thanked Dr. Inferno for his help and reached out to shake his hand. I suppose I should have expected to find something palmed in his hand. The object was transferred over to me. The box of matches displayed a picture of Dr. Inferno tossing a fireball; on the back of the box were his telephone number, his Facebook page, and his website. “I perform at just about every kind of occasion.” “You do funerals?” “I’m especially good at cremations. ~ Alan Russell, #NFDB
1277:Ah." He set down his backpack and pulled out their notebook. "You're working on your final project?" "Indirectly," Cath said. "What does that mean?" "Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don't actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn't the object?" "No." He sat down. "Well, I'm writing everything that isn't my final project, so that when I actually sit down to write it, that's all that will be left in my mind. ~ Rainbow Rowell, #NFDB
1278:Discipleship means adherence to Christ, and, because Christ is the object of that adherence, it must take the form of discipleship. An abstract Christology, a doctrinal system, a general religious knowledge on the subject of grace or on the forgiveness of sins, render discipleship superfluous, and in fact they positively exclude any idea of discipleship whatever, and are essentially inimical to the whole conception of following Christ. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
1279:In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance the system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
1280:In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin, #NFDB
1281:Rude wasn’t so much a heel who happened to be attractive as he was a 100 percent pure concentrate of machismo and self-absorption, a Lothario for his own sake. He could have any woman he wanted, but his objective was never love or even lust; it was heterosexual avidity purely for show. And he seemed not so much to objectify women as to coolly demean them. The object of his affection was solely himself. It was hardcore pornography minus the sex.* ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1282:The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.3 ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
1283:For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
1284:For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. ~ Roland Barthes, #NFDB
1285:Individuals start to see themselves reflected in their work and to understand their full status as human beings through the object created, through the work accomplished. Work no longer entails surrendering a part of one's being in the form of labor power sold, which no longer belongs to the individual, but becomes an expression of oneself, a contribution to the common life in which one is reflected, the fulfillment of one's social duty. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara, #NFDB
1286:The fact is that really no comedian sets out to offend you. Some comics enjoy the challenge of taking a subject that is likely to be found offensive and trying to make it funny‚ but the object is still to make you laugh. Offense is only a calculated risk. It's highly unlikely that a comedian whose only goal was to repulse you would ever make it past an open-mic stage, far less build a long career of touring theatres and television appearances. ~ Doug Stanhope, #NFDB
1287:Uncle Tom is, for example, if he is called uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the countryside. When he is Uncle Tom he has no sex—when he is Tom, he does—and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object of it. ~ James Baldwin, #NFDB
1288:We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
1289:The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love neither himself nor his own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another. ~ Plato, #NFDB
1290:The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke. ~ Andrea Dworkin, #NFDB
1291:When they smile, I see blood trickling down their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of all their cajoling is—blood! I now warn my countrymen to beware of these execrable philosophers, whose only object it is to destroy every thing that is good here, and to establish immorality and murder by precept and example—'Hic niger est hunc tu Romane caveto' ['Such a man is evil; beware of him, Roman'. Horace, Satires I. 4. 85.]. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1292:ABDOMEN, n. [1.] The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient faith commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at the altar in a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence for the one deity that men really adore they know not. If woman had a free hand in the world's marketing the race would become graminivorous. [2.] A shrine enclosing the object. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
1293:Sure. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1294:Of Cooking. This is an art of various forms, the object of which is to give ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy. One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select only those which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unhappy if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up. ~ Charles Babbage, #NFDB
1295:The presence of an affordance is jointly determined by the qualities of the object and the abilities of the agent that is interacting. This relational definition of affordance gives considerable difficulty to many people. We are used to thinking that properties are associated with objects. But affordance is not a property. An affordance is a relationship. Whether an affordance exists depends upon the properties of both the object and the agent. ~ Donald A Norman, #NFDB
1296:Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. -Darwi Odrade ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1297:So long, therefore, as the object of the mystic's contemplation is amenable to thought, is something which he can "know," he may be quite sure that it is not the Absolute; but only a partial image or symbol of the Absolute. To find that final Reality, he must enter into the "cloud of unknowing"--must pass beyond the plane on which the intellect can work. "When I say darkness," says the same great mystic, "I mean thereby a lack of knowing. . . . ~ Evelyn Underhill, #NFDB
1298:When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object’s actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1299:I blinked and looked again—but it was still out there, a shiny chrome disc zigzagging around in the sky. My eyes struggled to track the object through a series of increasingly fast, impossibly sharp turns that would have juiced a human being, had there been any aboard. The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an instantaneous stop just above it. It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line for a few seconds, as if scanning ~ Ernest Cline, #NFDB
1300:Malachi had warned her that a Breed, once certain that the woman he wanted was drawn to him, could only be turned away if he knew the object of his lust, his affection, or whatever they called it, if her objections were stronger than her need.
Breeds didn’t force the sexual aspects, they didn’t stalk, nor did they harass. They charmed, cajoled and teased. They built the hunger and the need until their potential lovers fell willingly into their arms. ~ Lora Leigh,#NFDB
1301:The object of the theoretical (as separate from the practical) Qabalah, insofar as this thesis is concerned, is to enable the student to do three main things: First, to analyze every idea in terms of the Tree of Life. Second, to trace a necessary connection and relation between every and any class of ideas by referring them to this standard of comparison. Third, to translate any unknown system of symbolism into terms of any known one by its means. ~ Israel Regardie, #NFDB
1302:Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1303:technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
1304:The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use
because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he
is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke. ~ Andrea Dworkin,#NFDB
1305:we must make it so there is no longer a population. The population has never been the object of government without first being its product. It ceases to exist once it ceases to be governable. This is what’s involved in the muffled battle that rages after every uprising: dissolving the power that had formed, focused, and deployed in that event. Governing has never been anything but denying the people all political capacity, that is, preventing insurrection ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1306:A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . . ~ Monique Wittig, #NFDB
1307:If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1308:To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1309:A beautiful way to practice mindfulness, which is almost guaranteed to improve your social life, is to apply mindfulness toward others for the benefit of others. The idea is very simple—give your full moment-to-moment attention to another person with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time your attention wanders away, just gently bring it back. It is just like the meditation we have been practicing, except the object of meditation is the other person. You ~ Chade Meng Tan, #NFDB
1310:If you are going to judge others it is wisest to do so individually not collectively and on your own direct experience of them personally. But first - and throughout - examine yourself closely. Blurred vision can often occur due to the lens, perspective and perceptions of the viewer projected onto the object that it sees. Be wary of taking to the judges seat. Above all meet at treat yourself and everyone else mindfully, compassionately with humanity. ~ Rasheed Ogunlaru, #NFDB
1311:In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building short-hand, which has been carried to such a perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
1312:Sight, he says, differs from the other senses, since it requires not only the eye and the object, but also light. We see clearly objects on which the sun shines: in twilight we see confusedly, and in pitch-darkness not at all. Now the world of ideas is what we see when the object is illumined by the sun, while the world of passing things is a confused twilight world. The eye is compared to the soul, and the sun, as the source of light, to truth or goodness. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1313:In the perception of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; … in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. … The object of the sense is … indifferent … ; … the object of religion is a selected object; … it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
1314:the toledoth or genealogy, ‘These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. The sons of Ham were Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan.’ Now by careful exegesis of the tablet text, I noticed that there was an unusual repetitive reference to ‘Ham, the father of Canaan.’ Hermeneutics, or the art of textual interpretation, would tell us that such repetition points toward an unusual identity of the object. ~ Brian Godawa, #NFDB
1315:His principal amusement was shooting with a pistol. The walls of his room were riddled with bullets, and were as full of holes as a honeycomb. A rich collection of pistols was the only luxury in the humble cottage where he lived. The skill which he had acquired with his favorite weapon was simply incredible: and if he had offered to shoot a pear off somebody’s forage-cap, not a man in our regiment would have hesitated to place the object upon his head. ~ Alexander Pushkin, #NFDB
1316:Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1317:To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1318:For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela vs Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn't the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child. ~ Pam Houston, #NFDB
1319:At the start of a new love as its ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but rather the desire to love from which it will presently arise (and, later on, the memory it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously through a zone of interchangeable charms -- simply natural charms, it may be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one's surroundings -- which are harmonious enough for it not to feel at a loss in the presence of any one of them. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1320:Skeptics, who flatly deny the existence of any unexplained phenomenon in the name of 'rationalism,' are among the primary contributors to the rejection of science by the public. People are not stupid and they know very well when they have seen something out of the ordinary. When a so-called expert tells them the object must have been the moon or a mirage, he is really teaching the public that science is impotent or unwilling to pursue the study of the unknown. ~ Jacques Vallee, #NFDB
1321:The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But he does not stand in a religious relation to Jesus. Jesus for him is an example for faith, not the object of faith. The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus. ~ J Gresham Machen, #NFDB
1322:That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren't hiding anything. ~ Emma Cline, #NFDB
1323:The primary vice of a bad person is precisely that he is more preoccupied with others than himself. Rousseau is describing a precise libidinal mechanism: the inversion which generates the shift of the libidinal investment from the object to the obstacle itself. This could well be applied to fundamentalist violence - be it Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Twin Towers - was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society. ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
1324:For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1325:All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity... ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
1326:Performance wasnt something that I intended to do. I was doing work that was about process, about the meaning of the making, trying to have a love-hate relationship with the object. I always feel safer if I can bring the viewer back to the making of it. I try to do that in a lot of different ways, by residue, by touch, by these processes that are basic to all of our lives...that people might relate to in terms of process, everyday activities- bathing, eating, etc. ~ Janine Antoni, #NFDB
1327:Among the authorities it is generally agreed that the Earth is at rest in the middle of the universe, and they regard it as inconceivable and even ridiculous to hold the opposite opinion. However, if we consider it more closely the question will be seen to be still unsettled, and so decidedly not to be despised. For every apparent change in respect of position is due to motion of the object observed, or of the observer, or indeed to an unequal change of both. ~ Nicolaus Copernicus, #NFDB
1328:Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1329:I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1330:...she feels a desire to go to the bridge, alone, to throw something over the rail, into the current—a photograph, a hat, anything; she thinks of the pure pleasure of seeing the object lost in the flow, and maybe she thinks, as well, of closing a circle, though she doesn't believe in that myth of closing circles, of the culmination of a process. She believes, instead, that processes don't exist, that the circles we are capable of seeing are never the right ones. ~ Alejandro Zambra, #NFDB
1331:I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1332:The object is not so much to get you to keep a journal while you are young, as it is to get you to continue it after you become men and women, even through your whole lives. This is especially needed in the generation in which you live, for you live in as important a generation as the children of men ever saw, and it is far more important that you should begin early to keep a journal and follow the practice while you live, than that other generations should do so. ~ Wilford Woodruff, #NFDB
1333:All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
1334:Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune ~ Frank Herbert,#NFDB
1335:He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
1336:That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything. Peter ~ Emma Cline, #NFDB
1337:Hate is a conscious emotion, but we rarely express it openly. Identifying hate in oneself is probably even more difficult than identifying love. Hate must not be confused with anger. It is very different. Hate has no reasons. Often, it just sits deep in our body, rarely expending itself in a way that we can identify. Hate must be dispensed with periodically, when the object of hate is no longer there, hate cannot thrive, and the mind becomes hollow and without purpose. ~ Nilesh Rathod, #NFDB
1338:If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1339:Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend. ~ Bruce Lee,#NFDB
1340:The face of our beloved can thus be described as an icon. Just as with an idol, it is the way we interact with an object, rather than a property in the object itself, that renders it an icon. But in the look of love, objects are exposed as icons. The face of our beloved is not a signpost, for a signpost is not the place where it points; yet neither is the face a pure manifestation of our beloved. Rather, the face is the place where the beloved is both revealed and hidden. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
1341:There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1342:These suckling-pigs were really delicious, and Pencroft was devouring his share with great gusto, when all at once a cry and an oath escaped him. "What's the matter?" asked Cyrus Harding. "The matter? the matter is that I have just broken a tooth!" replied the sailor. "What, are there pebbles in your peccaries?" said Gideon Spilett. "I suppose so," replied Pencroft, drawing from his lips the object which had cost him a grinder!-- It was not a pebble--it was a leaden bullet. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1343:They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. ~ Tim O Brien, #NFDB
1344:When we are with people and feeling bored, can we listen a little more carefully, stepping off the train of our own inner commenting? If we are sitting in meditation and feeling uninterested, can we come in closer to the object, not with force but with gentleness and care? What is this experience we call the breath? If someone were holding your head under water, would the breath be boring? Each breath is actually sustaining our life. Can we be with it fully, just once? ~ Joseph Goldstein, #NFDB
1345:Listen to them again: ‘I love you.’ Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the vowel. The object, like the subject, has no consonants, and is attained by pushing the lips forward as if for a kiss. ‘I love you.’ How serious, how weighted, how freighted it sounds. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1346:Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives. ~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, #NFDB
1347:I could start this review by stating that Dumb and Dumberer lives up to its name, or by calling it stupid, moronic, and idiotic, but I believe that approach is a trap, since a movie like this might relish being the object of such bland invectives. Instead, let me try a few that can't possibly be misconstrued as twisted praise: unfunny, boring, torturous, and unwatchable. ... [N]o movie could be more aptly compared to raw sewage than this film - Directed By Troy Miller. ~ James Berardinelli, #NFDB
1348:If the principle of identity is at best only an incomplete truth, the principles of contradiction and of the excluded middle are complete untruths. Far from making a thought nonsense, contradiction is the very thing which unfolds and develops the thought, and hence, too, the object which it expresses. It is precisely opposition, or antithesis, which sets things in motion, which is the mainspring of evolution, which calls forth and develops the latent forces and powers of being. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1349:The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1350:Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake. ~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, #NFDB
1351:depopulates it. Nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices. And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1352:Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. ~ Bruce Lee,#NFDB
1353:The cross which is the object of faith, is also, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the cause of it. Sit down and watch the dying Savior till faith springs up spontaneously in your heart. There is no place like Calvary for creating confidence. The air of that sacred hill brings health to trembling faith. Many a watcher there has said: 'While I view Thee, wounded, grieving, Breathless on the cursed tree, Lord, I feel my heart believing That Thou suffer'dst thus for me. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1354:The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.
Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?
Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration? ~ Adam Phillips,#NFDB
1355:As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1356:He was a jerk; he didn’t deserve to be the object of my lust. But he’d smelled so fucking good, like spice and musk and man. We don’t have control over what we fantasize about. The fact that he was mean and unattainable made him that much more likely to be an object of my forbidden thoughts. Just like I learned in psychology class back in college, thought suppression often leads to obsession. If you tell yourself not to think about something, then you’ll think about it even more. ~ Penelope Ward, #NFDB
1357:Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain. A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, to cultivate it. It is a duty. —John Adams ~ Stacy Schiff, #NFDB
1358:It is strange,' pursued he, 'that while I love Rosomond Oliver so wildly-with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, and fascinating--I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness, that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1359:We have to keep in mind the fact that love and action are the only intermediaries through which perfect knowledge can be obtained; for the object of knowledge is not pedantry but wisdom. The primary object of an institution should not be merely to educate one’s limbs and mind to be in efficient readiness for all emergencies, but to be in perfect tune in the symphony of response between life and world, to find the balance of their harmony which is wisdom. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man, #NFDB
1360:For Aristotle, time was “the number of movement, ”but he was already wondering: “It is difficult to know if, in the soul, time exists or not.” In the fourth century, Saint Augustine rejected Aristotle's ideas: “Time is not the movement of a body.” He affirmed the existential (or psychological) aspect of time: time flows only in the soul, given that the object of expectation (the future) becomes the object of attention (the present) before becoming the object of memory (the past). ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
1361:It is strange,' pursued he, 'that while I love Rosomond Oliver so wildly-with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, and fascinating--I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness, that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know. ~ Charlotte Bronte, #NFDB
1362:Light waves, on the other hand, have a very short wave-length—less than a thousandth of a millimeter. A hundred wavelengths of visible light will fit in the thickness of a hair. When light waves encounter everyday obstacles, they hardly bend at all, so solid objects cast dark shadows. A tiny bit of diffraction occurs right at the edge of the object, which is why the edges of shadows are always fuzzy, but for the most part, light travels in a straight line, with no visible diffraction. ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
1363:The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman. These things do not come near it - the experience of beauty, the event of beauty. The anxiety about it is what makes it such a central concern of culture and makes us so interested in it. ~ Jonathan Santlofer, #NFDB
1364:They do not exist in their own right, but only have an existence dependent upon many factors, including a consciousness that conceptualizes them. Once they exist but do not exist on their own, they necessarily exist in dependence upon conceptualization. However, when phenomena appear to us, they do not at all appear as if they exist this way. Rather, they seem to be established in their own right, from the object’s side, without depending upon a conceptualizing consciousness. When ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1365:Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
1366:One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science. ~ Ivan Pavlov, #NFDB
1367:Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set. This is true of earthly as of heavenly things. Even the man whose object is to acquire wealth must be prepared to make great personal sacrifices before he can accomplish his object; and how much more so he who would realize a strong and well-poised life. ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1368:Nature, at once intrinsic characteristic and external environment, constituted both the given facts of the world and the world as context for facts . . . Although it could be made into a metaphor or seen to be the object of human activity, it also had the status of a prior fact, a condition for existence. Nature was thus a condition for knowledge. It crucially controlled, we might say, a relational view between whatever was taken as internal (nature) and as external (nature). (1992a: 194) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1369:One may take on some qualities of a loved one following her death; the five-year-old identifies with his father’s moral code in response to the oedipal frustration of being denied mother as a sexual partner. As long as gratification is available via objects in the real world, identification is irrelevant. When gratification is interrupted, when the object is lost or becomes unavailable because of conflict, the object is internalized to permit fantasy gratification. Identification ~ Stephen A Mitchell, #NFDB
1370:The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the constitution that no man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
1371:So now I bid you and my story adieu and finish with the words: if you love someone who lights up your world, do all in your power to make yourself worthy of that person’s love. Do not make the mistake I constantly made: do not keep doubting yourself, or the object of your heart. If you find yourself focusing on your shortcomings, find a remedy to overcome them. Be brave and do the thing you fear the most. Take as many risks as you can, let yourself be happy – and believe in the impossible. ~ Erica James, #NFDB
1372:Wouldst like to con a glimmer with me this early black?’, which he [Cab Calloway] helpfully explains as ‘the proper way to ask a young lady to go to the movies’. It should be noted here, that if the object of your affections replies ‘Kill me’, they are not requesting to be euthanatised and you should not actually murder them. Kill me is merely the Cab Calloway way of saying ‘Show me a good time’ and is the best response you could have hoped for. Jive was rather confusing in this way. ~ Mark Forsyth, #NFDB
1373:The being who is the object of its own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon itself, becomes in a flash able to raise itself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love—all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed centre as it explodes onto itself. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, #NFDB
1374:The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise. ~ Raoul Vaneigem, #NFDB
1375:If we can model the ability to embody nonfear and nonattachment, it is more precious than any money or material wealth. Fear spoils our lives and makes us miserable. We cling to objects and people, like a drowning person clings to any object that floats by. By practicing nonattachment and sharing this wisdom with others, we give the gift of nonfear. Everything is impermanent. This moment passes. The object of our craving walks away, but we can know happiness is always possible. Intoxicants ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1376:The object of art is to give life a shape,’ said Shakespeare. And my life –and my mess of a mind –needed shape. I had ‘lost the plot’. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1377:We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills in the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation in its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1378:In the spacious love of God, our souls can lie down and rest. This love from him is not something we must struggle for, earn, or fear to lose. It is bestowed. He has bestowed it upon us. He has chosen us. And nothing can separate us from his love. Not even we, ourselves. We are made for such a love. Our hearts yearn to be loved intimately, personally, and yes, romantically. We are created to be the object of desire and affection of one who is totally and completely in love with us. And we are. ~ John Eldredge, #NFDB
1379:Every inanimate object—every home, building, piece of furniture, and article of clothing—carries traces of the “energy” of the animate beings to which it has been exposed. The “energies” of those who made the object, who sold it, and those who previously owned it are impregnated into the spiritual fabric (spiritual body) of everything that exists. The spiritual body of the incarnate human being interacts with the spiritual energy field of its surroundings, both in terms of people and places. ~ Draja Mickaharic, #NFDB
1380:WORSHIP IS NOT ABOUT US—IT’S ABOUT HIM First, worship is not about us; it’s about Him. Do you really believe that? Perhaps we say, “Yes, I do believe that.” But what, then, happens when the worship leader announces a hymn that’s new to you or a song you don’t like? What happens when some element of Sunday’s worship service isn’t exactly to your preference? I want to tell you humbly and sincerely that if we focus more on the Object of our worship, we’ll be less agitated by the style of worship. ~ David Jeremiah, #NFDB
1381:Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work. ~ Max Beckmann, #NFDB
1382:Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance. ~ William James, #NFDB
1383:Similar teaching, training, and guidance must be given with reference to the other aspects of the disciples’ lives: body, love and sexuality, marriage and children, success with work and jobs. The object in each case is to enable the disciple to be thankful for who they are and what they have. And much the same progression will be required: from honesty to acceptance to compassion and forgiveness and then on to thankfulness to God and the honoring of our lives in all of the aspects indicated. And ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
1384:I always try to create equal power between the subject and the object, so as not to end up creating a relationship where the camera is here and the object out there. This is for me a very difficult and sensitive balance. When I produce a work, cut and frame images, I realize that spectators can identify with the images and almost forget that someone else actually made them. This would be the optimal situation. I don't know whether I succeed in doing so, but that's what I would like to have happen. ~ Pipilotti Rist, #NFDB
1385:When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch, #NFDB
1386:Faith is a quiet certainty that there is both a higher purpose to life and a higher power that oversees that purpose. Faith is knowing that we do not have to go it alone during our darkest hours and, even when we feel utterly victimized and weak, there is still something brighter, purer, and more potent than anything we can imagine that cares enough to reach out and offer a shoulder for us to lean upon. The object of faith takes many forms and many names, but the universal truth is faith itself. ~ Michelle Belanger, #NFDB
1387:Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity. ~ Michel de Certeau, #NFDB
1388:In other words, Birkhoff proposed a formula for the feeling of aesthetic value: M = O / C. The meaning of this formula is: For a given degree of complexity, the aesthetic measure is higher the more order the object possesses. Alternatively, if the amount of order is specified, the aesthetic measure is higher the less complex the object. Since for most practical purposes, the order is determined primarily by the symmetries of the object, Birkhoff's theory heralds symmetry as a crucial aesthetic element. ~ Mario Livio, #NFDB
1389:Mind is dual, it always divides things into polar opposites: the conqueror and the conquered, the observer and the observed, the object and the subject, the day and the night. It goes on dividing things which are not divided. Neither is the day divided from the night, nor is birth divided from death. They are one energy. But mind goes on dividing everything into polarities, opposites. Nothing is opposite in existence; every contradiction is only apparent. Deep down all contradictions are meeting together. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1390:Whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the great deception of sense, which also is by sense to be corrected. For as sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so also sense telleth me, when I see by reflection, that colour is not in the object. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
1391:When, on the contrary, the people is invested with the supreme authority, the perpetual sense of their own miseries impels the rulers of society to seek for perpetual ameliorations. A thousand different objects are subjected to improvement; the most trivial details are sought out as susceptible of amendment; and those changes which are accompanied with considerable expense are more especially advocated, since the object is to render the condition of the poor more tolerable, who cannot pay for themselves. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1392:Imagine playing football where there are four quarters, and you have to score in each quarter to win. Imagine placing more importance on scoring in each quarter than winning the game. Now a great trend trader says, “I might score 28 points in any of the four quarters. I might score at any point in the game, but the object, at the end of the game, is to win.” If a trend following trader scores 28 points in the first quarter and no points in the next three quarters, and wins, who cares when he scored? ~ Michael W Covel, #NFDB
1393:Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment. ~ Fulke Greville 1st Baron Brooke, #NFDB
1394:There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
1395:This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated
deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. ~ David Hume,#NFDB
1396:In 1967, psychiatrist Leonard Stein described the nurse’s role in an essay entitled “The Doctor–Nurse Game.” The object of the game, he said, was for a nurse to “make her recommendations appear to be initiated by the physician. . . . The nurse who does see herself as a consultant but refuses to follow the rules of the game in making her recommendations, has hell to pay. The outspoken nurse is labeled a ‘bitch’ by the surgeon. The psychiatrist describes her as unconsciously suffering from penis envy. ~ Alexandra Robbins, #NFDB
1397:Thus far I am a standing mark of the weakness of great men in their vice, that value not squandering away immense wealth upon the most worthless creatures; or, to sum it up in a word, they raise the value of the object which they pretend to pitch upon by their fancy; I say, raise the value of it at their own expense; give vast presents for a ruinous favour, which is so far from being equal to the price that nothing will at last prove more absurd than the cost men are at to purchase their own destruction. ~ Daniel Defoe, #NFDB
1398:Faith, then, generically, is confidence in a personal being. Specifically, religious faith is confidence in God, in every respect and office in which He reveals Himself. As that love of which God is the object is religious love, so that confidence in Him as a Father, a Moral Governor, a Redeemer, a Sanctifier, in all the modes of His manifestation, by which we believe whatever He says because He says it, and commit ourselves and all our interests cheerfully and entirely into His hands, is religious faith. ~ Mark Hopkins, #NFDB
1399:However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. Whatever cannot become the object of discourse - the truly sublime, the truly horrible or the uncanny - may find human voice through which to sound into the world, but it is not exactly human. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human. ~ Hannah Arendt, #NFDB
1400:choice, Lydia reflected, was not a simple act. It depended not only on what you thought and felt, but on things you were quite unconscious of thinking and feeling, and to which only an outside agency could alert you. Choice implied a clear view of the object before the chooser: but whose view was not impeded, not smeared a little by the careless accretions of self? Surely to polish up that glass to perfect transparency was not to interfere with choice: really it was doing a service both to the chooser and to ~ Jude Morgan, #NFDB
1401:Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
1402:The object of the theoretical (as separate from the practical) Qabalah, insofar as this thesis is concerned, is to enable the student to do three main things: First, to analyze every idea in terms of the Tree of Life. Second, to trace a necessary connection and relation between every and any class of ideas by referring them to this standard of comparison. Third, to translate any unknown system of symbolism into terms of any known one by its means.
~ Israel Regardie, A Garden Of Pomegranates: Skrying On The Tree Of Life,#NFDB
1403:This belief in incarnation is a testimony of man’s lofty spiritual ambition. Man is not at peace with himself till he has become like unto God. The endeavour to reach this state is the supreme, the only ambition worth having. And this is self-realization. This self-realization is the subject of the Gita, as it is of all scriptures. But its author surely did not write it to establish that doctrine. The object of the Gita appears to me to be that of showing the most excellent way to attain self-realization. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
1404:Levi," Maria called. "Come back. We're not finished yet."
He paused
"What, Maria?"
"You asked me what I believe in? I believed in you."
He nodded his head sadly. "Yes, you did. And before you met me, you believed in nothing. But that's the thing with belief, Maria. It's easy to believe in something when it doesn't require anything from you. It's much harder, though, when the object of your belief requires something of you or asks for something you don't want to give. That's when real belief occurs. ~ Brian Keene,#NFDB
1405:The Dzogchen of the basis is to determine the nature of the mind.
The Dzogchen of the path is to strike the target of freedom from the extremes.
The Dzogchen of the result is to send hopes and doubts into extinction.
The Dzogchen of the object is to let appearances go free by not grasping at them.
The Dzogchen of the mind is to let thoughts arise as friends.
The Dzogchen of the meaning is to let flickering thoughts dissolve naturally.
Whoever realizes these points is a great king of yogis. ~ Longchenpa,#NFDB
1406:nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. ~ Edmund Burke, #NFDB
1407:From the moment they had left the Earth, their own weight, and that of the Projectile and the objects therein contained, had been undergoing a progressive diminution. . . . Of course, it is quite clear, that this decrease could not be indicated by an ordinary scales, as the weight to balance the object would have lost precisely as much as the object itself. But a spring balance, for instance, in which the tension of the coil is independent of attraction, would have readily given the exact equivalent of the loss. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
1408:[The church] is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
1409:How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer's purpose. ~ William A Dembski, #NFDB
1410:Most people do not realize that as they continue to find things to complain about, they disallow their own physical well-being. Many do not realize that before they were complaining about an aching body or a chronic disease, they were complaining about many other things first. It does not matter if the object of your complaint is about someone you are angry with, behavior in others that you believe is wrong, or something wrong with your own physical body. Complaining is complaining, and it disallows improvement. ~ Esther Hicks, #NFDB
1411:The speed of an object is not a property of the object alone: it is a property of the object in relation to another object. The speed of a child on a moving train has a value relative to the train (a few steps per second) and a different value relative to the ground (a hundred kilometers per hour). If his mother tells the child to 'Keep still!', she does not mean that they have to throw themselves out of the window to stop in relation to the ground. She means that the child should stop with regard to the train. ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
1412:One should think in terms of whether one is loving or not. The question of the object of love does not arise. With your wife, you love your wife; with your children, you love your children; with your servants, you love your servants; with your friends, you love your friends; with the trees, you love the trees; with the ocean, you love the ocean. You are love. Love is not dependent on the object, but is a radiation of your subjectivity - a radiation of your soul. And the vaster the radiation, the greater is your soul. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1413:Who is the object of homage?
You, whose face is very white, lovely and beautiful, glowing with light like an array of a hundred full autumn moons, all together, without the dust from earth and water, You are adorned with completely open, immeasurable twofold knowledge like the hosts of a thousand stars, The brilliant light of your clear wisdom manifesting the four correct analytical knowledges shines forth, Noble Lady Tara, Goddess Vajra Sarasvati, I pay homage to you. ~ Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche, Smile Of Sun And Moon,#NFDB
1414:Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
1415:This idea is confirmed in Scripture; it is distinctly stated that one sole thing, fear of God, is the object of the whole Law with its affirmative and negative precepts, its promises and its historical examples, for it is said, "If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this Law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord thy God" (Deut. xxviii. 58) This is one of the two purposes of the Akedah (sacrifice or binding of Isaac). ~ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), #NFDB
1416:Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of "criteria" for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no "object" that has not stood the test of criticism ~ Max Scheler, #NFDB
1417:Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings, for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
1418:Socrates dies with honor, surrounded by his disciples listening to the most tender words -the easiest death that one could wish to die. Jesus dies in pain, dishonor, mockery, the object of universal cursing - the most horrible death that one could fear. At the receipt of the cup of poison, Socrates blesses him who could not give it to him without tears; Jesus, while suffering the sharpest pains, prays for His most bitter enemies. If Socrates lived and died like a philosopher, Jesus lived and died like a god. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, #NFDB
1419:What's she like?' Archie repeated softly. He put his hand on the trooper's shoulder and leaned forward, so his face was inched from his. Gretchen was a beautiful, sensual, charismatic, manipulative bitch, the object of Archie's sexual obsession, his torturer, and the person who knew him best in the world. 'She's a serial killer,' Archie said. He smiled and gave the trooper's shoulder an avuncular pat. 'If you ever lay eyes on her, shoot her.'
Archie turned to Henry. 'I'm ready to go back to the loony bin,' he said ~ Chelsea Cain,#NFDB
1420:To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1421:It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentarie to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases, the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgement as a similar lack of perspective toward men. ~ Max Weber, #NFDB
1422:The object of a dialogical-liberterian action is not to 'dislodge' the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to 'bind' them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality." "In order for the oppressed to unite they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
1423:Religious thinking, believing, feeling are among the most deceptive activities of the human spirit. We often assume it is God we believe in, but in reality it may be a symbol of personal interests that we dwell upon. We may assume that we feel drawn to God, but in reality it may be a power within the world that is the object of our adoration. We may assume it is God we care for, but it may be our own ego we are concerned with. To examine our religious existence is, therefore, a task to be performed constantly. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel, #NFDB
1424:the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voices the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1425:A first attempt to recover the right of self government may fail, so may a second, a third, etc. But as a younger and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive, and a fourth, a fifth, or some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation. For what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity? ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1426:assignment in addition to the copy constructor: Click here to view code image Vector& Vector::operator=(const Vector& a) // copy assignment { double* p = new double[a.sz]; for (int i=0; i!=a.sz; ++i) p[i] = a.elem[i]; delete[] elem; // delete old elements elem = p; sz = a.sz; return *this; } The name this is predefined in a member function and points to the object for which the member function is called. 4.6.2. Moving Containers We can control copying by defining ~ Bjarne Stroustrup, #NFDB
1427:At man's core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear... when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better. ~ Georges Bataille, #NFDB
1428:The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
1429:7502Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely through memory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this really memory? Isn’t imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? In point of face, daydreaming, from the very first second, is an entirely constituted state. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. ~ Gaston Bachelard, #NFDB
1430:On the other hand, dogs eat with gusto, play with exuberance, work happily when given the opportunity, surrender themselves to the wonder and the mystery of their world, and love extravagantly. Envy infects the human heart; if we envy, next we covet, and what we covet becomes the object of our all-consuming avarice. If we live without envy, with the humility and the joyful gratitude of dogs—nachos! ball! cuddle time!—we will be ready even for Death when he comes for us, content that we have made good use of the gift of life. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
1431:My relationship with the Internet was like the one I had with the :). I hated the :) and hated to be the object of other people’s :), their :-) and their :>. I hated :-)) the most because it reminded me of my double chin. Then there was :( and :-( and ;-) as well as ;) and *-), which I didn’t even understand, although it was not as mystifying as D:< or >:O or :-&. These simplifications of speech, designed by idiots, resulted in hieroglyphics of such compounded complexity that they flew far above my intelligence. ~ Joshua Ferris, #NFDB
1432:According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention. ~ Matthew B Crawford, #NFDB
1433:Since beginners can only remain in contact with the object of observation for short periods, initially one should meditate in brief sessions even eighteen times a day; in due course stability will be achieved of its own accord, at which time the session can be lengthened. It is important not to try at first to meditate for long periods; otherwise, upon sight of the meditation cushion, one will feel nausea and laziness. The session should be left while it is going well, when one still feels that it would go well if continued. ~ Jeffrey Hopkins, #NFDB
1434:[Speed] ostensibly perverts the illusory order of normal perception, the order of arrival of information. What could have seemed simultaneous is diversified and decomposes. With speed, the world keeps on coming at us, to the detriment of the object, which is itself now assimilated to the sending of information. It is this intervention that destroys the world as we know it, technique now reproducing permanently the violence of the accident; the mystery of speed remains a secret of light and heat from which even sound is missing. ~ Paul Virilio, #NFDB
1435:The chief object of the Law, as has been shown by us, is the teaching of truths; to which the truth of the creatio ex nihilo belongs. It is known that the object of the law of Sabbath is to confirm and to establish this principle, as we have shown in this treatise (Part II. chap. xxxi.) In addition to the teaching of truths the Law aims at the removal of injustice from mankind. We have thus proved that the first laws do not refer to burnt-offering and sacrifice, which are of secondary importance. ~ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), #NFDB
1436:Now these two questions Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics. Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics. ~ Pierre Duhem, #NFDB
1437:The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message. ~ Peter Sloterdijk, #NFDB
1438:I shall possess this woman; I shall steal her from the husband who profanes her: I will even dare ravish her from the God whom she adores. What delight, to be in turns the object and the victor of her remorse! Far be it from me to destroy the prejudices which sway her mind! They will add to my happiness and my triumph. Let her believe in virtue, and sacrifice it to me; let the idea of falling terrify her, without preventing her fall; and may she, shaken by a thousand terrors, forget them, vanquish them only in my arms. ~ Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, #NFDB
1439:For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. You differ from the majority in one respect: You didn’t need a template. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
1440:Happy Thirty-Third Birthday On your 33rd birthday, go to your local gas station and pick up the newspaper. The classified ads will have a small segment commemorating your birth and asking you to turn around. Upon looking behind you, a man dressed in a black cloak will be advancing in your direction. If you choose to run away, he will hunt you for the rest of your life, eventually killing you. However, if you await his arrival and show no intent of fleeing, he will give you a small package. Inside, you shall find the object you most desire. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1441:I am often filled with wonder when I see some men demanding the time of others and those from whom they ask it most indulgent. Both of them fix their eyes on the object of the request for time, neither of them on the time itself; just as if what is asked were nothing, what is given, nothing. Men trifle with the most precious thing in the world; but they are blind to it because it is an incorporeal thing, because it does not come beneath the sight of the eyes, and for this reason it is counted a very cheap thing—nay, of almost no value at all. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1442:Thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
1443:He wasn’t stupid. He’d watched enough of his friends drop like flies when the fatal illness struck.
Now he was himself stricken; he showed all the Six Deadly Symptoms of a Man in Love:
1) Inability to think straight.
2) An alarming propensity to smile at the oddest moments.
3) Constant thoughts of the object of one’s desire.
4) Absolutely no interest in other members of the opposite sex.
5) A startling sense of goodwill toward the world in general.
6) A perpetual state of sexual arousal. ~ Jillian Hunter,#NFDB
1444:The effects of heat are subject to constant laws which cannot be discovered without the aid of mathematical analysis. The object of the theory is to demonstrate these laws; it reduces all physical researches on the propagation of heat, to problems of the integral calculus, whose elements are given by experiment. No subject has more extensive relations with the progress of industry and the natural sciences; for the action of heat is always present, it influences the processes of the arts, and occurs in all the phenomena of the universe. ~ Joseph Fourier, #NFDB
1445:In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line. In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! I hope I'll be safe at home! ~ George Carlin, #NFDB
1446:Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? The sun, the moon, and the stars have been worshiped. Shall we then pluck them out of the sky? ...see how much he [God] has been able to accomplish through me, though I did no more than pray and preach. The Word did it all. Had I wished I might have started a conflagration at Worms. But while I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
1447:The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have
mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the
enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty
of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful
improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in which these
qualities existed in the greatest possible state of perfection. However
beautiful his flower may be, other care, other soil, or other suns, might
produce one still more beautiful. ~ Thomas Robert Malthus,#NFDB
1448:There are several differences between a football game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also, there are usually more casualties in a football game. The object of the game is to move a ball past the other team's goal line. This counts as six points. No points are given for lacerations, contusions, or abrasions, but then no points are deducted, either. Kicking is very important in football. In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally. ~ Alfred Hitchcock, #NFDB
1449:Do not arrive as an interruption or disruption, attempting to divert your reader's attention from the object it is focused on, fighting to interest him in something different from what he is already, at this moment, interested in. Instead, align yourself with the subjects already possessing his attention, the matters already garnering his interest, the self-talk conversation already occurring in his mind, and the conversations he is already having around the water-cooler at work or at the kitchen table at home with peers, friends, and family. ~ Dan S Kennedy, #NFDB
1450:I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some ... being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1451:It is no longer a mere critique of taste in the sense that taste is the object of critical judgment by an observer. It is a critique of critique; that is, it is concerned with the legitimacy of such a critique in matters of taste. The issue is no longer merely empirical principles which are supposed to justify a widespread and dominant taste—such as, for example, in the old chestnut concerning the origin of differences in taste—but it is concerned with a genuine a priori that, in itself, would totally justify the possibility of critique. ~ Hans Georg Gadamer, #NFDB
1452:There is yet another kind of matrimonial dialect (which naturally succeeds this of talking at each other), which may very properlybe styled The Language Contradictory.... In the former, however plain the object of satire may be exhibited to the whole company, yet there always remains some little covering.... But in this last method, the defiance becomes more open and the impetuosity with which these contradictions are uttered (although the subjects of them are often of the most indifferent nature) evidently prove that they arise from passion. ~ Sarah Fielding, #NFDB
1453:The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.) But what at? What is the object? Is there an object?” (p. 355). Nevertheless, we can’t quite shake our feeling that “there must be an object.” And so, Taylor suggests, even this disembedded art “trades on resonances of the cosmic in us” (p. 356). And conveniently, art is never going to ask of you anything you wouldn’t want to do. So we get significance without any ascetic moral burden. But ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
1454:Every Christian who struggles with depression struggles to keep their hope clear. There is nothing wrong with the object of their hope - Jesus Christ is not defective in any way whatsoever. But the view from the struggling Christian's heart of their objective hope could be obscured by disease and pain, the pressures of life, and by Satanic fiery darts shot against them... All discouragement and depression is related to the obscuring of our hope, and we need to get those clouds out of the way and fight like crazy to see clearly how precious Christ is. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
1455:if you really want to know spirituality, don’t look for anything. People think spirituality is about looking for God or truth or the ultimate. The problem is you have already defined what you are looking for. It is not the object of your search that is important; it is the faculty of looking. The ability to simply look without motive is missing in the world today. Everybody is a psychological creature, wanting to assign meaning to everything. Seeking is not about looking for something. It is about enhancing your perception, your very faculty of seeing. ~ Sadhguru, #NFDB
1456:I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says "I am everything". Wisdom says "I am nothing". Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
1457:The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces.
There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.
You won't arrive. It is an endless search. ~ Sherwood Anderson,#NFDB
1458:best questions. “The world of the designer changes,” explains Bass, “from the form maker to the person that creates the goals and the constraints of the object to be designed—[and that person] then no longer creates the designs, but selects the design from a landscape of possibilities. We’re going from what was once a point solution to more of a collaboration [between man and machine], because with the computer’s help, the designer is now able to understand the whole range [of any system] beyond what any human mind can comprehend on its own.” The ~ Thomas L Friedman, #NFDB
1459:It is one step, and a giant one, to see clearly and participate in the love that flows between the persons of the Trinity, but even here, God is seen as the object of his own love. It is yet another step to realize that God is beyond all subject and object and is Himself love without subject or object. This is the step beyond our highest experiences of love and union, a step in which self is not around to divide, separate, objectify or claim anything for itself. Self does not know God; it cannot love him, and from the beginning has never done so. ~ Bernadette Roberts, #NFDB
1460:The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges : the pox and Christianity.
Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine.
Yet Rome to-day allows itself to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the Christian churches! As if Christianity hadn't behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
1461:Paying attention is being open and awake - ready to be seized by whatever is present to us in the present moment. This is why it is a foundation of prayer. Attentiveness is prayer because attention paid to anything is a doorway to the self-transcendent. It moves us beyond our self-preoccupations and opens us to that which is beyond our self. Regardless of how insignificant the object may seem, being truly aware of anything has enormous potential to aid our spiritual awakening. Prayerful attentiveness is not, therefore, reducible to thinking about God. ~ David G Benner, #NFDB
1462:psychoanalysis is the study of failure, the specific failure of the individual form. The object of its discourse is nothing but this failure. Hence, the scandal of Lacan is to place nothing at all at the heart of the subject, to recognize that 'subject' names nothing but a gap or lack. Every component of the psychic apparatus, evey arrangement of the economies of desire and drive, every discourse that constitutes a social link works around, over, and through this emptiness, investing it with a charge or intensity such that it always seems more than itself. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1463:Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with
thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging 66
in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who, using pure thought
alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself
as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body,
because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth
and wisdom whenever it is associated with it. Will not that man reach
reality, Simmias, if anyone does? ~ Plato,#NFDB
1464:Attachment resembles a flood; we are powerlessly swept along by its current. When our mind is attached to something, it has no space for anything else. We are obsessed with the object of our attachment; we worry about not getting it and fear losing it once we do. Drowning in the flood of attachment, we cannot breathe the fresh air of satisfaction and peace. We may want to get to dry land, but not seeing a life raft, we continue to be swept along uncontrollably. The Dharma is our life raft. Let’s make sure we hold on to it and not let it float past us. ~ Thubten Chodron, #NFDB
1465:I learned that money was the object of life, and I wanted money. I wanted the servants, the fine clothes, the respect in the street, and a horse of my own. I wanted to ride into Stratford and spit on Thomas Butler and his sour wife, to spit on all those who had told me to work harder, work harder, work harder. To wok harder for what? To become a carpenter? a cobbler? A glove maker or a ditch-digger? To be someone who was forever pulling my forelock? To be always bowing, snivelling and flattering? And so I began to thieve, and I found I was good at it. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
1466:I like poor materials. I couldn't see myself making a bronze sculpture - it's not me. I like neon, because it's moving constantly and like drawing. The chemicals going through the neon turns me on really - it's sexy. I like fabrics, but one of the main things with objects is that I really have to love them before I can use them. I have to have the object around me a long time. The little chairs I used in my last White Cube show are ones that my dad bought for me. A sort of a psychometry with objects and things. It's like the pieces I've made are my things. ~ Tracey Emin, #NFDB
1467:You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you'll expand the limits of what you're able to do. Almost imperceptibly you'll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner's physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee the results will come. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
1468:The aim to which I have aspired for so many years, my nightly dream, the object of my prayers in heaven, Security- I have gained it. It is God's will. I must do nothing contrary to the will of God. And why is it God's will? That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example, that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to which I have returned! It is decided, let the matter alone! Let us not interfere with God! ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1469:The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to grasp You in his own justice, and he has gone astray.
But the sinner, suddenly struck by the lightning of mercy that ought to have been justice, falls down in adoration of Your holiness: for he had seen what kings desired to see and never saw, what prophets foretold and never gazed upon, what the men of ancient times grew weary of expecting when they died. He has seen that Your love is so infinitely good that it cannot be the object of a human bargain. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1470:I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
1471:Some people think that cultivating compassion is good for others but not necessarily for themselves, but this is wrong. You are the one who benefits most directly since compassion immediately instills in you a sense of calm (nowadays medical researchers have shown in scientific studies that a calm mind is essential for good health), inner strength, and a deep confidence and satisfaction, whereas it is not certain that the object of your feeling of compassion will benefit. Love and compassion open our own inner life, reducing stress, distrust, and loneliness. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
1472:There must be a union between the spirit in wood and the spirit in man. The grain of the wood must relate closely to its function. The abutment of the edge of one board to an adjoining board can mean the success or failure of a piece. () Gradually a form evolves, much as nature produces the tree in the first place. The object created can live forever. The tree lives on in its new form. The object cannot follow a transitory “style”, here for a moment, discarded the next. Its appeal must be universal. Cordial and receptive, it should invite a meeting with man ~ George Nakashima, #NFDB
1473:was electrified. I had never really thought the queen could have truly loved Hadley, but I saw now that she had, as much as she was able. We watched Hadley glance at the television from time to time while she painted her toenails, drank a phantom glass of blood, and made a phone call. We couldn’t hear her. We could only see, and that within a limited range. The object she reached for would appear the minute her hand touched it, but not before, so you could be sure of what she had only when she began to use it. When she leaned forward to replace the glass of ~ Charlaine Harris, #NFDB
1474:A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
1475:Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was—no better and no worse. This applies, I think, even to “beautiful” things in ordinary life—physical objects, artworks. Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does—or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes? ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1476:But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
1477:When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it can easily happen that the only thing his eyes see is that for which he is searching. He is then unable to find anything or let any thought enter his mind because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. He is obsessed by a goal; searching means having a goal. But finding means: being free, open, and having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, because, in striving for your goal, there are many things that you don’t see, even though they are right in front of your eyes. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
1478:Dharma has several connotations in South Asian religions, but in Buddhism it has two basic, interrelated meanings: dharma as 'teaching' as found in the expression Buddha Dharma, and dharma as 'reality-as-is' (abhigama-dharma). The teaching is a verbal expression of reality-as-is that consists of two aspects-the subject that realizes and the object that is realized. Together they constitute 'reality-as-is;' if either aspect is lacking, it is not reality-as-is. This sense of dharma or reality-as-is is also called suchness (tathata) or thatness (tattva) in Buddhism. ~ Taitetsu Unno, #NFDB
1479:For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, #NFDB
1480:God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty – of want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed goal in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence, and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense , His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give, and nothing to receive. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1481:The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?", contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté. ~ Donald Barthelme, #NFDB
1482:"Savitri", the poem, the word of Sri Aurobindo is the cosmic Answer to the cosmic Question. And Savitri, the person, the Godhead, the Divine Woman is the Divine's response to the human aspiration.
The world is a great question mark. It is a riddle, eternal and ever-recurring. Man has faced the riddle and sought to arrive at a solution since he was given a mind to seek and interrogate.
What is this universe? From where has it come? Whither is it going? What is the purpose of it all? Why is man here? What is the object of his existence? ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta, Savitri, #index,#NFDB
1483: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
1484:But prior to about the year 1600, the verb “believe” had a very different meaning within Christianity as well as in popular usage. It did not mean believing statements to be true; the object of the verb “believe” was always a person, not a statement. This is the difference between believing that and believing in. To believe in a person is quite different from believing that a series of statements about the person are true. In premodern English, believing meant believing in and thus a relationship of trust, loyalty, and love. Most simply, to believe meant to belove.11 ~ Marcus J Borg, #NFDB
1485:Meditation is the intense dwelling, in thought, upon an idea or theme, with the object of thoroughly comprehending it, and whatsoever you constantly meditate upon you will not only come to understand, but will grow more and more into its likeness, for it will become incorporated into your very being, will become, in fact, your very self. If, therefore, you constantly dwell upon that which is selfish and debasing, you will ultimately become selfish and debased; if you ceaselessly think upon that which is pure and unselfish you will surely become pure and unselfish. Tell ~ James Allen, #NFDB
1486:So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love – loving the loving of things whose existence she didn’t care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
1487:So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
1488:We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence. ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
1489:Do you know that feeling? When you meet someone and you know? The sudden hollowing out of your torso, as if your lungs, heart, viscera have gone and the ribs seem to creak like barrel staves under too much pressure. Glimmerings, intimations of the way I felt now had occurred before with Faye Hobhouse, Dagmar - even Huguette. It is, I think, to do with fear: a fear of impotence - not sexual, but of lacking the power or ability to capture the object of your vital passion. A haunting dread that you will never have the chance again, that the moment has passed you by for ever. ~ William Boyd, #NFDB
1490:We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence." ~ Joan Didion, #NFDB
1491:The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same. ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
1492:WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them. ~ Maim nides, #NFDB
1493:WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them. ~ Maimonides, #NFDB
1494:Enlightened enquiry alone leads to liberation. Supernatural powers are all illusory appearances created by the power of maya (mayashakti). Self-realization which is permanent is the only true accomplishment (siddhi). Accomplishments which appear and disappear, being the effect of maya, cannot be real. They are accomplished with the object of enjoying fame, pleasures, etc. They come unsought to some persons through their karma. Know that union with Brahman is the real aim of all accomplishments. This is also the state of liberation (aikya mukti) known as union (sayujya). ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
1495:If you vent anger with the object of spreading your toxic feelings, the result will have nothing to do with healing. Your anger is your weapon. On the other hand, if you release anger the way you'd expel a rock from your shoe, your intention clearly has healing behind it. Once the anger starts flowing, both of these alternatives might feel the same. Anger is anger. But if you have a healing intention, two things will happen: you will feel more peaceful after your anger has been released, and you will feel like an old, fixed belief in enemies and injustice has started to move. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1496:The way of the unconscious is different. Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted. The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides. Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning. Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to express. ~ Erich Neumann, #NFDB
1497:Second, we resist love because it jams the rational mindset. The mortal mind cannot understand how miracles work, and for our entire lives we are taught to mistrust what cannot be rationally explained. Yet the fact that we cannot understand how miracles work does not mean that miracles don’t happen. And while Western science argued for ages that the state of our inner being has little effect on the state of our world, even science today argues otherwise. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle reveals that as our perception of an object changes, the object itself will change. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1498:Sometimes a photographer is a passenger, sometimes a person who stays in one place. What he watches changes constantly, but his watching never changes. He doesn't examine like a doctor, defend like a lawyer, analyze like a scholar, support like a priest, make people laugh like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. He only watches. This is enough. No, this is all I can do. All a photographer can do is watch. Therefore, a photographer has to watch all the time. He must face the object and make his entire body an eye. A photographer is someone who wagers everything on seeing. ~ Shomei Tomatsu, #NFDB
1499:If you are a Muslim, go and live as a Christian; if you are a Christian live as a Jew; if you are Catholic, live as an Orthodox—whatever religion you have, hold the same respect for people of different religions. If your speech together does not arouse or excite you to indignation and if you can freely communicate with them, you have achieved peace. It is said that the object of every religion is the same: all people look for love, and all the world is a place of love. Then why should we speak about the difference between the Muslim church and the Christian church? —ISLAMIC WISDOM ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1500:In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. The world will allow itself to be subdued only by success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds. Success alone justifies wrongs done With a frankness and off-handedness which no other earthly power could permit itself, history appeals in its own cause to the dictum that the end justifies the means The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
315 Integral Yoga
102 Occultism
75 Philosophy
72 Christianity
67 Yoga
36 Psychology
31 Fiction
26 Poetry
18 Hinduism
12 Theosophy
7 Integral Theory
6 Science
6 Baha i Faith
5 Sufism
4 Cybernetics
1 Thelema
1 Buddhism
1 Alchemy
322 Sri Aurobindo
76 The Mother
70 Nolini Kanta Gupta
46 Satprem
42 Plotinus
36 Carl Jung
34 Aleister Crowley
33 Swami Krishnananda
31 James George Frazer
27 H P Lovecraft
18 Sri Ramakrishna
17 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
16 Swami Vivekananda
14 A B Purani
13 Saint Augustine of Hippo
12 Vyasa
12 Rudolf Steiner
10 Plato
8 Aristotle
8 Aldous Huxley
7 Sri Ramana Maharshi
6 William Wordsworth
6 Paul Richard
6 Baha u llah
5 Peter J Carroll
5 Jordan Peterson
5 Alice Bailey
4 Walt Whitman
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley
4 Norbert Wiener
4 George Van Vrekhem
4 Friedrich Nietzsche
4 Al-Ghazali
3 Thubten Chodron
3 Robert Browning
3 Ken Wilber
2 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
2 Saint Teresa of Avila
2 Patanjali
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 John Keats
2 Henry David Thoreau
2 Franz Bardon
2 Edgar Allan Poe
100 Record of Yoga
71 The Synthesis Of Yoga
33 The Study and Practice of Yoga
31 The Golden Bough
27 Lovecraft - Poems
25 The Life Divine
18 Liber ABA
18 Essays On The Gita
17 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
16 Magick Without Tears
14 Mysterium Coniunctionis
14 Letters On Yoga II
14 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
14 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
13 Letters On Yoga IV
12 Vishnu Purana
12 Talks
12 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
11 City of God
10 The Practice of Psycho therapy
10 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
10 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
10 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
9 Isha Upanishad
9 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
8 The Perennial Philosophy
8 The Human Cycle
8 Poetics
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
8 Bhakti-Yoga
7 The Problems of Philosophy
7 Theosophy
7 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
7 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
7 Essays Divine And Human
7 Agenda Vol 04
7 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
6 Wordsworth - Poems
6 Vedic and Philological Studies
6 The Phenomenon of Man
6 The Integral Yoga
6 Raja-Yoga
6 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
5 The Secret Doctrine
5 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
5 Maps of Meaning
5 Liber Null
5 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
5 Hymn of the Universe
5 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
5 Aion
5 Agenda Vol 10
5 Agenda Vol 03
4 Twilight of the Idols
4 The Mother With Letters On The Mother
4 The Alchemy of Happiness
4 Shelley - Poems
4 Questions And Answers 1955
4 Preparing for the Miraculous
4 Letters On Yoga I
4 Kena and Other Upanishads
4 Cybernetics
4 Agenda Vol 01
3 Whitman - Poems
3 The Future of Man
3 The Book of Certitude
3 Some Answers From The Mother
3 Sex Ecology Spirituality
3 Questions And Answers 1956
3 Questions And Answers 1954
3 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
3 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
3 Letters On Yoga III
3 Let Me Explain
3 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
3 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
3 Browning - Poems
3 Agenda Vol 11
3 Agenda Vol 07
3 Agenda Vol 06
3 Agenda Vol 02
2 Words Of The Mother III
2 Words Of Long Ago
2 Walden
2 The Secret Of The Veda
2 The Practice of Magical Evocation
2 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
2 Symposium
2 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
2 Letters On Poetry And Art
2 Keats - Poems
2 Agenda Vol 13
2 Agenda Vol 08
2 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E
00.01 - The Approach to Mysticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For true knowledge comes of, and means, identity of being. All other knowledge may be an apprehension of things but not comprehension. In the former, the knower stands apart from the Object and so can envisage only the outskirts, the contour, the surface nature; the mind is capable of this alone. But comprehension means an embracing and penetration which is possible when the knower identifies himself with the Object. And when we are so identified we not merely know the Object, but becoming it in our consciousness, we love it and live it.
The mystic's knowledge is a part and a formation of his life. That is why it is a knowledge not abstract and remote but living and intimate and concrete. It is a knowledge that pulsates with delight: indeed it is the radiance that is shed by the purest and intensest joy. For this reason it may be that in approaching through the heart there is a chance of one's getting arrested there and not caring for the still higher, the solar lights; but this need not be so. In the heart there is a golden door leading to the deepest delights, but there is also a diamond door opening up into the skies of the brightest luminosities.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Totapuri asked the disciple to withdraw his mind from all objects of the relative world, including the gods and goddesses, and to concentrate on the Absolute. But the task was not easy even for Sri Ramakrishna. He found it impossible to take his mind beyond Kali, the Divine Mother of the Universe. "After the initiation", Sri Ramakrishna once said, describing the event, "Nangta began to teach me the various conclusions of the Advaita Vedanta and asked me to withdraw the mind completely from all objects and dive deep into the Atman. But in spite of all my attempts I could not altogether cross the realm of name and form and bring my mind to the unconditioned state. I had no difficulty in taking the mind from all the Objects of the world. But the radiant and too familiar figure of the Blissful Mother, the Embodiment of the essence of Pure Consciousness, appeared before me as a living reality. Her bewitching smile prevented me from passing into the Great Beyond. Again and again I tried, but She stood in my way every time. In despair I said to Nangta: 'It is hopeless. I cannot raise my mind to the unconditioned state and come face to face with Atman.' He grew excited and sharply said: 'What? You can't do it? But you have to.' He cast his eyes around. Finding a piece of glass he took it up and stuck it between my eyebrows. 'Concentrate the mind on this point!' he thundered. Then with stern determination I again sat to meditate. As soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it clove Her in two. The last barrier fell. My spirit at once soared beyond the relative plane and I lost myself in samadhi."
Sri Ramakrishna remained completely absorbed in samadhi for three days. "Is it really true?" Totapuri cried out in astonishment. "Is it possible that he has attained in a single day what it took me forty years of strenuous practice to achieve? Great God! It is nothing short of a miracle!" With the help of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna's mind finally came down to the relative plane.
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In the beginning of September 1885 Sri Ramakrishna was moved to Syampukur. Here Narendra organized the young disciples to attend the Master day and night. At first they concealed the Master's illness from their guardians; but when it became more serious they remained with him almost constantly, sweeping aside the Objections of their relatives and devoting themselves whole-heartedly to the nursing of their beloved guru. These young men, under the watchful eyes of the Master and the leadership of Narendra, became the antaranga bhaktas, the devotees of Sri Ramakrishna's inner circle. They were privileged to witness many manifestations of the Master's divine powers. Narendra received instructions regarding the propagation of his message after his death.
The Holy Mother — so Sarada Devi had come to be affectionately known by Sri Ramakrishna's devotees — was brought from Dakshineswar to look after the general cooking and to prepare the special diet of the patient. The dwelling space being extremely limited, she had to adapt herself to cramped conditions. At three o'clock in the morning she would finish her bath in the Ganges and then enter a small covered place on the roof, where she spent the whole day cooking and praying. After eleven at night, when the visitors went away, she would come down to her small bedroom on the first floor to enjoy a few hours' sleep. Thus she spent three months, working hard, sleeping little, and praying constantly for the Master's recovery.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Pratyhara gets rid of the Objective.
Dharana gets rid of the Subjective.
--
the Object of finding water or minerals, by means of the
vibrations of a hazel twig.
0.01f - FOREWARD, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the orbits of the Objects which press round us ;
A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through endless
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
concentrate on the Object to be known (in this case the roof)
until all the rest of the world disappears and the Object alone
exists; then, by a slight movement of will, one can succeed at
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It follows that the Object of the material life must be to fulfil, above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live.
He can subordinate this aim, but only to physical Nature's other instincts, the reproduction of the individual and the conservation of the type in the family, class or community. Self, domesticity, the accustomed order of the society and of the nation are the constituents of the material existence. Its immense importance in the economy of Nature is self-evident, and commensurate is the importance of the human type which represents it. He assures her of the safety of the framework she has made and of the orderly continuance and conservation of her past gains.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The results of Hathayoga are thus striking to the eye and impose easily on the vulgar or physical mind. And yet at the end we may ask what we have gained at the end of all this stupendous labour. the Object of physical Nature, the preservation of the mere physical life, its highest perfection, even in a certain sense the capacity of a greater enjoyment of physical living have been carried out on an abnormal scale. But the weakness of Hathayoga is that its laborious and difficult processes make so great a demand on the time and energy and impose so complete a severance from the ordinary life of men that the utilisation of its results for the life of the world becomes either impracticable or is extraordinarily restricted. If in return for this loss we gain another life in another world within, the mental, the dynamic, these results could have been acquired through other systems, through Rajayoga, through Tantra, by much less laborious methods and held on much less exacting terms. On the other hand the physical results, increased vitality, prolonged youth, health, longevity are of small avail if they must be held by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for their own sake, not utilised, not thrown into the common sum of the world's activities. Hathayoga attains large results, but at an exorbitant price and to very little purpose.
Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the citta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers, the faculties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection.
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its object which our philosophy asserts as the primary cosmic energy and the method of divine action upon the world. By this capacity the Yogin, already possessed of the highest supracosmic knowledge and experience in the state of trance, is able in the waking state to acquire directly whatever knowledge and exercise whatever mastery may be useful or necessary to his activities in the Objective world. For the ancient system of
Rajayoga aimed not only at Swarajya, self-rule or subjective empire, the entire control by the subjective consciousness of all the states and activities proper to its own domain, but included
--
To That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. the Object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities.
Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme.
0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
Cross as a consummate spiritual master. And this not only for the Objective value of
his observations, but because, even in spite of himself, he betrays the sublimity of
0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
expression, the Objective projection of what we ourselves are,
within and without. So we may say with certainty that what we
0.09 - Letters to a Young Teacher, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
imperative need to give ourselves and who is the Object
of all our love and adoration. This Presence I have called
01.01 - The One Thing Needful, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yoga is directed towards God, not towards man. If a divine supramental consciousness and power can be brought down and established in the material world, that obviously would mean an immense change for the earth including humanity and its life. But the effect on humanity would only be one result of the change; it cannot be the Object of the sadhana. the Object of the sadhana can only be to live in the divine consciousness and to manifest it in life.
Sadhana must be the main thing and sadhana means the purification of the nature, the consecration of the being, the opening of the psychic and the inner mind and vital, the contact and presence of the Divine, the realisation of the Divine in all things, surrender, devotion, the widening of the consciousness into the cosmic Consciousness, the Self one in all, the psychic and the spiritual transformation of the nature.
01.02 - The Object of the Integral Yoga, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:01.02 - the Object of the Integral Yoga
class:chapter
... the Object of the 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 turned in our nature into nature of the Divine and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine. Its object is not to be a great Yogi or a superman (although that may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the ego's power, pride or pleasure.
It is not for salvation though liberation comes by it and all else may come; but these must not be our objects. The Divine alone is our object.
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the Object but show up its mechanism alsoexplain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality the rationale the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into an increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.
01.03 - Rationalism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It might be said, however, that the guarantee or sanction of Reason does not lie in the extent of its application, nor can its subjective nature (or ego-centric predication, as philosophers would term it) vitiate the validity of its conclusions. There is, in fact, an inherent unity and harmony between Reason and Reality. If we know a little of Reality, we know the whole; if we know the subjective, we know also the Objective. As in the part, so in the whole; as it is within, so it is without. If you say that I will die, you need not wait for my actual death to have the proof of your statement. The generalising power inherent in Reason is the guarantee of the certitude to which it leads. Reason is valid, as it does not betray us. If it were such as anti-intellectuals make it out to be, we would be making nothing but false steps, would always remain entangled in contradictions. The very success of Reason is proof of its being a reliable and perfect instrument for the knowledge of Truth and Reality. It is beside the mark to prove otherwise, simply by analysing the nature of Reason and showing the fundamental deficiencies of that nature. It is rather to the credit of Reason that being as it is, it is none the less a successful and trustworthy agent.
Now the question is, does Reason never fail? Is it such a perfect instrument as intellectualists think it to be? There is ground for serious misgivings. Reason says, for example, that the earth revolves round the sun: and reason, it is argued, is right, for we see that all the facts are conformableto it, even facts that were hitherto unknown and are now coming into our ken. But the difficulty is that Reason did not say that always in the past and may not say that always in the future. The old astronomers could explain the universe by holding quite a contrary theory and could fit into it all their astronomical data. A future scientist may come and explain the matter in quite a different way from either. It is only a choice of workable theories that Reason seems to offer; we do not know the fact itself, apart perhaps from exactly the amount that immediate sense-perception gives to each of us. Or again, if we take an example of another category, we may ask, does God exist? A candid Rationalist would say that he does not know although he has his own opinion about the matter. Evidently, Reason cannot solve all the problems that it meets; it can judge only truths that are of a certain type.
It may be answered that Reason is a faculty which gives us progressive knowledge of the reality, but as a knowing instrument it is perfect, at least it is the only instrument at our disposal; even if it gives a false, incomplete or blurred image of the reality, it has the means and capacity of correcting and completing itself. It offers theories, no doubt; but what are theories? They are simply the gradually increasing adaptation of the knowing subject to the Object to be known, the evolving revelation of reality to our perception of it. Reason is the power which carries on that process of adaptation and revelation; we can safely rely upon Reason and trust It to carry on its work with increasing success.
But in knowledge it is precisely finality that we seek for and no mere progressive, asymptotic, rapprochement ad infinitum. No less than the Practical Reason, the Theoretical Reason also demands a categorical imperative, a clean affirmation or denial. If Reason cannot do that, it must be regarded as inefficient. It is poor consolation to man that Reason is gradually finding out the truth or that it is trying to grapple with the problems of God, Soul and Immortality and will one day pronounce its verdict. Whether we have or have not any other instrument of knowledge is a different question altogether. But in the meanwhile Reason stands condemned by the evidence of its own limitation.
01.03 - Yoga and the Ordinary Life, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I must say in view of something you seem to have said to your father that it is not the Object of the one to be a great man or the Object of the other to be a great Yogin. The ideal of human life is to establish over the whole being the control of a clear, strong and rational mind and a right and rational will, to master the emotional, vital and physical being, create a harmony of the whole and develop the capacities whatever they are and fulfil them in life. In the terms of Hindu thought, it is to enthrone the rule of the purified and sattwic buddhi, follow the dharma, fulfilling one's own svadharma and doing the work proper to one's capacities, and satisfy kama and artha under the control of the buddhi and the dharma. the Object of the divine life, on the other hand, is to realise one's highest self or to realise
God and to put the whole being into harmony with the truth of the highest self or the law of the divine nature, to find one's own divine capacities great or small and fulfil them in life as a sacrifice to the highest or as a true instrument of the divine
01.04 - Motives for Seeking the Divine, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the Object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and
He is He. That is all about it.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher. The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the Object of inquiry and investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the artist. The external sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the scientist are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:
Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in youth they pursued the Objects of life; when old they took to spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the higher consciousness.
Only this process of integration was not done in a day, it took some centuries and had to pass through some unpleasant intermediary stages.
0 1958-02-03b - The Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
The supramental world exists in a permanent way, and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I had proof of this today when my earthly consciousness went there and consciously remained there between two and three oclock in the afternoon: I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the Objective world, and it is being built. When formerly I used to speak of the new world that is being created, I was speaking of this intermediate zone. And similarly, when I am on this side that is, in the realm of the physical consciousness and I see the supramental power, the supramental light and substance constantly permeating matter, I am seeing and participating in the construction of this zone.
I found myself upon an immense ship, which is the symbolic representation of the place where this work is being carried out. This ship, as big as a city, is thoroughly organized, and it had certainly already been functioning for quite some time, for its organization was fully developed. It is the place where people destined for the supramental life are being trained. These people (or at least a part of their being) had already undergone a supramental transformation because the ship itself and all that was aboard was neither material nor subtle-physical, neither vital nor mental: it was a supramental substance. This substance itself was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a blend of red and gold, forming a uniform substance of luminous orange. Everything was like that the light was like that, the people were like thateverything had this color, in varying shades, however, which enabled things to be distinguished from one another. The overall impression was of a shadowless world: there were shades, but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything worked smoothly and silently. At the same time, I could see all the details of the education, the training in all domains by which the people on board were being prepared.
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
As for the latest experience,1 I cant say for sure that no one has ever had it, because someone like Ramakrishna, individuals like that, could have had it. But I am not sure, for when I had this experience (not of the divine Presence, which I had already felt in the cells for a long time, but the experience that the Divine ALONE is acting in the body, that He has BECOME the body, yet all the while retaining his character of divine omniscience and omnipotence) well, the whole time it remained actively like that, it was absolutely impossible to have the LEAST disorder in the body, and not only in the body, but IN ALL THE SURROUNDING MATTER. It was as if every object obeyed without even needing to decide to obey: it was automatic. There was a divine harmony in EVERYTHING (it took place in my bathroom upstairs, certainly to demonstrate that it exists in the most trivial things), in everything, constantly. So if that is established in a permanent way, there CAN NO LONGER be illness it is impossible. There can no longer be accidents, there can no longer be illness, there can no longer be disorders, and everything should harmonize (probably in a progressive way) just as that was harmonized: all the Objects in the bathroom were full of a joyful enthusiasmeverything obeyed, everything!
As it was the first experience, it started to fade slightly when I began having contact with people; but I really had the feeling that it was a first experience, new upon earth. For I have experienced an absolute identity of the will with the divine Will ever since 1910, it has never left me. It isnt that, its SOMETHING ELSE. It is MATTER BECOMING THE DIVINE. And it really came with the feeling that this thing was happening for the first time upon earth. It is difficult to say for sure, but Ramakrishna died of cancer, and now that I have had the experience, I know in an ABSOLUTE way that this is impossible. If he had decided to go because the Divine wanted him to go, it would have been an orderly departure, in total harmony and with a total will, whereas this illness is a means of disorder.
0 1958-11-11, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
the Objectification of the experience came progressively, as always happens to me. When I have the experience, I am absolutely blank, like a newborn baby to whom things come just like that. I dont know what is happening, and I expect nothing. How much time it has taken me to learn this!
There is no preliminary thought, preliminary knowledge, preliminary will: all those things do not exist. I am only like a mirror receiving the experience, the simplicity of a little child learning life. It is like that. And it is the gift of the Grace, truly the Grace: in the face of the experience, the simplicity of a little child just born. And it is spontaneously so, but deliberately too; in other words, during the experience I am very careful not to watch myself having the experience so that no previous knowledge intervenes. Only afterwards do I see. It is not a mental construction, nor does it come from something higher than the mind (it is not even a knowledge by identity that makes me see things); no, the body (when the experience is in the body) is like that, what in English is called blank. As if it had just been born, as if just then it were being born with the experience.
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
(After a conversation with Z, a distant 'disciple' reputed for his loose morals and the Object of numerous 'moralistic' or even so-called 'yogic' criticisms among the 'true disciples' in the Ashram)
He lives in a region which is largely a kind of vital vibration which penetrates the mind and makes use of the imagination (essentially its the same region most so-called cultured men live in). I dont mean to be severe or critical, but its a world that likes to play to itself. Its not really what we could call histrionics, not thatits rather a need to dramatize to oneself. So it can be an heroic drama, it can be a musical drama, it can be a tragic drama, or quite simply a poetic drama and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, its a romantic drama. And then, these soul states (!) come replete with certain spoken expressions (laughing) Im holding myself back from saying certain things!You know, its like a theatricals store where you rent scenery and costumes. Its all ready and waitinga little call, and there it comes, ready-made. For a particular occasion, they say, Youre the woman of my life (to be repeated as often as necessary), and for another they say Its a whole world, a whole mode of human life which I suddenly felt I was holding in my arms. Yes, like a decoration, an ornament, a nicetyan ornament of existence, to keep it from being flat and dull and the best means the human mind has found to get out of its tamas. Its a kind of artifice.
0 1961-01-22, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I simply consented to stay there. You will have all you need, stay here quietly. And what beautiful things she had, lovely things! They were unused and dusty. (It was surely the symbol of ancient realizationsrealizations of the ancient Rishis, things like that. Who knows?) They were first class, but completely neglected and thick with dust, like material objects left unusedwhich no one knew HOW to use. She put them at my disposal: Look, look, let me show you! There was a tremendous accumulation of things, piled in such great confusion that one couldnt see. Yet the marvel of it was that when she led me to a corner to show me something, everything immediately moved aside and order was restored, so that the Object she wanted to show me stood out all by itself. And oh, a thing of beauty! Made of pink marble! A pink marble bathtub of a shape I didnt recognizenot Roman, not antique (not modern, far from it!)how beautiful it was! And whenever she wanted to show me something in this untidy and cluttered room full of objects piled one on top of another, they would organize themselves, take their proper place, and all became neat. You will just have to dust them off a bit, she said. (Mother laughs)
But Im not surprised it came down on you.
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Satprem remarked that this sentence might be interpreted in an 'illusionist' sense (i.e., that the Objectification of the material world would be a falsehood), and Mother replied: 'No, it's not the Objectification that is a falsehood, but our conception of the Objectification as being something other than THAT. When we say that "He objectifies," well, we are thinking something that is not the truth-that is no longer the truth.'
Later, Mother clarified this sentence as follows:
0 1961-12-23, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was a truly stupendous experience, petty though the Object is (she is insignificant, without any great substance or powera very minor incarnation; she does have certain not quite human capacities, but they are so veiled by a tiny human personality that scarcely anyone but I can see them).
And in the experience there was no difference between my physical and my inner being (actually, its that way more and more for me); even physically, externally, there was a kind of love full of adoration, and so spontaneousnot even any sense of wonder! And there was such a formidable Power in it, formidable from the standpoint of the entire earth. It lasted one hour. After an hour, the experience slowly began to fade (it had to fade for purely practical reasons). But it left me so confident of a radical changenot a total change, for it wasnt permanent but so radical that even outwardly, way down below in me, something was saying, Ah, how will the meditations with X be now? I caught Myself not thinking, not myself: someone thought like that, somewhere way down below. This pulled me out of the experience and I wondered, Thats strange, whos thinking like that? It was one of the personalities4 (in terms of work, its the one that gives each action its proper place), someone way down below, spontaneously feeling: But thats going to change the meditations! What will they be like now? When I returned and began to look at things with the usual discernment, I told myself that perhaps there actually will be a change.
0 1962-01-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Theres a seat in my bathroom upstairs, and between the seat and the wall are two small tables (not tables, but small stools where a few things are kept), and a porcelain towel bar (luckily, everything has rounded corners). I found myself wedged in between the seat and the two small tables (a space about this wide!). And all that matter the material substance of the table and the Objects on the table and the porcelain seatit all seemed so unreceptive! It doesnt give way like it should for things to be comfortable; but it wasnt that my body was uncomfortable there was no body! The whole set-up was bizarre, everything was in a bizarre and absurd situation which I couldnt really understand, couldnt make out: Whats this big lump doing here, I seemed to be wondering, taking up so much room, getting in the way?
My elbow had ended up leaning on a little plastic tray I have there, where I keep pencils, ball-point pens, note pads and so forth. The body was leaning on this tray, evidently trying to get up, and the whole thing started cracking noisily under the weight. And in a diffuse but very clear consciousness I was saying to myself, But why? Whats all this ridiculous noise? And whats this heavy thing doing? What disorder. There shouldnt be such disorder. And it went on crack-crack-cracking. Then suddenly normal consciousness returnedto be exact, what returned was the normal RELATIONSHIP consciousness has with thingsand I said, Well, really! What a ridiculous situation! What is this elbow doing on that tray? It should realize its breaking it! And when things were all completely back to normal I told my body, What are you doing, you idiot! Come on, pick yourself up, get moving! Immediately, docile as a little child, it extricated itself, turned around, and stood up straightquite straight. I had scratched my knee, scratched my elbow, and taken three knocks on the head. Luckily there were no sharp edgesit was all hard enough, but no sharp edges. Anyway, in the end I was all right, no damage done.
0 1962-05-18, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It has gradually come back, in the sense that actively. No, I cant even say thatits not true. What has come back is the increasingly precise memory of how I had organized the life of this body, the whole formation I had made, down to the smallest details for the things I was using, how I was making use of them, how I had organized all the Objects around the body, all that. What has come back is the memoryis it memory? The awareness of all that has returned, as if I were putting the two back into contact. And so, instead of the body being left totally in the hands of those around me, the formation I had made is coming back, with certain changes, certain improvements and simplifications (but mind you, I had neither the intention nor the will to change anythingthose things are simply coming back into the consciousness like that, with certain changes made). In short, its a kind of conscious formation recrystallizing around this body.
And I have the perception a sensation, really, the sensation of something not at all me, but entrusted to me. More and more now, there is the feeling of something being entrusted to me in the universal organization for a definite purpose. Thats really the sensation I have now (the mind is very calm, so its difficult to express I dont think all these things, they are more like perceptions). And its not the usual kind of sensation: the ONLY (I insist on this), the ONLY sensation that remains in the old way is physical pain. And really, those points of pain they seem like the SYMBOLIC POINTS of what remains of the old consciousness.
0 1962-06-09, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The notion of subjective and objective STILL belongs to the old world and to the three, or at most four, dimensions. It is one and the same Power that changes the interrelations within one and the same element; to put things simply, the Power that gives the subjective experience AND the Objective realization is the same; it is only a matter of a greater or lesser totality of experience, as it were. And if the experience were total it would be the experience of the Supreme, and it would be universal.
Does what I am saying make any sense?
0 1962-07-18, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And do you know how this body is? It immediately began wondering (I was quietly watching it all from above), What if (ifs are always idiotic but its an old bodily habit), what if the Object had been sharp, would the results have been so easy to annul? (Mother laughs) Then I distinctly heard someone reply (I am putting it into words), You idiot! That wouldnt have happened in the first place! That is, the necessary protection would have been there. The protection intervenes only when necessary, not just for the fun of it. You numbskull, it said (I am translating freely), how silly can you be! It wouldnt have happened.
But what a world it isa world of experiences! And the consciousness is somewhere way up high but seeing very clearly, watching with interest.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now let me discuss some particular points of your letter. I do not want to say much in this letter about what you have written as regards your yoga. We shall have better occasion when we meet. To look upon the body as a corpse is a sign of Sannyasa, of the path of Nirvana. You cannot be of the world with this idea. You must have delight in all thingsin the Spirit as well as in the body. The body has consciousness, it is Gods form. When you see God in everything that is in the world, when you have this vision that all this is Brahman, Sarvamidam Brahma, that Vasudeva is all thisVasudevah sarvamiti then you have the universal delight. The flow of that delight precipitates and courses even through the body. When you are in such a state, full of the spiritual consciousness, you can lead a married life, a life in the world. In all your works you find the expression of Gods delight. So far I have been transforming all the Objects and perceptions of the mind and the senses into delight on the mental level. Now they are taking the form of the supramental delight. In this condition is the perfect vision and perception of Sachchidananda.
You write about the Deva Samgha and say, I am not a god, I am only a piece of much hammered and tempered iron. No one is a God but in each man there is a God and to make Him manifest is the aim of divine life. That we can all do. I recognize that there are great and small adharas [vessels]. I do not accept, however, your description of yourself as accurate. Still whatever the nature of the vessel, once the touch of God is upon it, once the spirit is awake, great and small and all that does not make much difference. There may be more difficulties, more time may be taken, there may be a difference in the manifestation, but even about that there is no certainty. The God within takes no account of these hindrances and deficiencies. He breaks his way out. Was the amount of my failings a small one? Were there less obstacles in my mind and heart and vital being and body? Did it not take time? Has God hammered me less? Day after day, minute after minute, I have been fashioned into I know not whether a god or what. But I have become or am becoming something. That is sufficient, since God wanted to build it. It is the same as regards everyone. Not our strength but the Shakti of God is the sadhaka [worker] of this yoga.
0 1963-01-09, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some panic. Some have already had a few experiences, they know better and see clearer, they work to adapt to the new vibration. But others have yet to understand, and they feel so stupid, so stupid! And from above, something watches it all and finds it both (both at once) very funny, because really its exceedingly ridiculous, and at the same time so sad! Its so sad to see that EVERYTHING is like this: the WHOLE earth, the WHOLE earth! That this body is the Object of a special concentration, a special effort, a special CHARGE, a special concern, a special carethis minuscule fragment, minuscule and theres the whole earth, the whole earth. And they all think themselves so wonderful, so smart!
I could keep talking for hours.
0 1963-01-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It has become quite an entertaining little field of experiences, by the way. Because nowadays I send people cards, and I have lots of cards, innumerable kinds of cards2 (C. spends his time preparing them), and automatically, whenever I have to write a card for someone, it isnt as I decided beforeh and (because sometimes I decide beforehand), the choice is made at the last minute: THIS is the card I must send and THIS is what I must say. I neednt worry about it, it comes just in time. Then I only have to get up, go find the card, write, and its all over. People will tell me (precisely those who lead a spiritual life), What! You make such a trifle the Object of a spiritual experience! And its the same with ALL small things: what object to be used, what perfume to put on, what bath salts, all manner of futile, frivolous, unimportant thingsHow shocking! I dont even make an effort to find out or to (think, thank God I dont think!), it just comes: this, that, that. Not saidKNOWN. It isnt even said, I am not told, Do this, never. Its KNOWN: Ah, here we are, thats it! And I choose and do itvery comfortable!
It was actually my experience (for a long, long time, many years) but, these last few days, concrete, in the bodys cells. There arent things in which the Lord is and things in which He isntthere are only fools who think so! He is ALWAYS there. He takes nothing seriously and has fun with everything. And He plays with you, if you know how to play but you dont, people dont know how to play. But how well He knows! How He plays with everything, with the smallest things: you have objects to put on your table? Dont think you have to ponder over how to arrange themno, well play: lets put this here, lets put that there, lets put this like that. Then some other day (because people think, Now she has decided on this arrangement, so thats the way its going to bewell, not so!), some other day (they want to help you! They want to help you put things in order, so it just becomes a mess!), I stay still and quiet, and then we start playing: So! Lets put this here, and that there, and this there ah! (Mother laughs) Since I saw you last time it has been that way constantly, probably to prepare me for this aphorism!
0 1963-03-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Here we come to the great problem of the road we travel, the eternal Road Sri Aurobindo refers to in Savitri. It is easy to imagine, of course, that what was first objectified had an inclination to objectification. The first point to accept, a logical point considering the principle of evolution, is that the Objectification is progressive, it is not complete for all eternity. (silence) Its very hard to express, because we cannot free ourselves from our habit of seeing it as a finite quantity unfolding indefinitely and of thinking that only with a finite quantity can there be a beginning. We always have an idea (at least in our way of speaking) of a moment (laughing) when the Lord decides to objectify Himself. And put that way, the explanation is easy: He objectifies Himself gradually, progressively, with, as a result, a progressive evolution. But thats just a manner of speaking. Because there is no beginning, no end, yet there is a progression. The sense of sequence, the sense of evolution and progress comes only with the Manifestation. And only when we speak of the earth can we explain things truthfully and rationally, because the earth had a beginningnot in its soul, but in its material reality.
A material universe probably has a beginning, too.
0 1963-03-09, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Take the example of someone ill, even feeling pain. When Sri Aurobindo was in possession of this supramental Power (at certain times he said it was totally under his control, he could do whatever he wanted with it and apply it wherever he wanted), then he would put this Will on some disorder or other, physical or vital, say (or mental, of course), he would put this Force of a superior harmony, a superior, supramental order, keep it there, and it would act instantly. And it was an orderit created an order and harmony superior to natural harmony. Which means that if the Object was to cure, for example, the cure was more perfect and total than a cure brought about by the ordinary physical and mental methods.
There were hosts of instances. But people are so blind, you know, so bogged down in their ordinary consciousness, that they always have ready explanations. They can always explain it away. Only those who had faith and aspiration and something very pure in them, that is, those who really wanted to know, were aware of it.
0 1963-04-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You see, its not a question of just these cells here: its a question of cells in, well, quite a lot of people, hundreds, maybe thousandsall that clings anywhere and in any way to the higher Consciousness. And since my mind is silent (I deliberately keep the mind absolutely still, trying not to react to all that constantly comes to it from outside, or trying to react almost subconsciously), nothing is there to think, Oh, its this ones body, its that ones body its THE Body! Thats what is so difficult for people to understand. It is THE bodythis (Mother touches her body) is not my body any more than other bodies (a bit more, in the sense that it is more directly the Object of the concentration of the Force). So everything, all the sensations, the movements of consciousness, the battles, all of it is everywhere. And suddenly, with this little affair, oh, I understood a fantastic number of thingsand also the difficulty, mon petit! The difficulty because really, after this experience, the body was not ill but very tired. But then it is seized with such things all the time! All the time, all the time, all the time, you know, they spring up, brrm! pounce on it, brrm! from this side, that side, every which way. So I have to keep still (gesture of stopping, silent, in the midst of other activities), and then I start waging the battle.
(silence)
0 1963-08-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I think you should present your experience, and thats all. Because otherwise, if we cut these texts to leave only the Objective things, it becomes dry.
Yes, dry and hollow.
0 1963-11-04, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday, I had resolved to see Sujata, and they kept me standing there arranging objects, perfectly unnecessarily, under the pretext that there are showcases, that visitors are expected and that the Objects should be arranged in the showcases. After spending more than an hour on that work, I told them, Go away, Ive had enough! Anddo whatever you like. I was exasperated.
An avalanche of people, of letters, of things, of complications. But at the same time, theres an avalanche of (how can I put it?)everything, everything is becoming so new. Everything. Everything.
--
If we look at it from a psychological standpoint On the mental plane, its very easy; on the vital plane, its not too difficult; on the physical plane, its a little heavier, because desires are passed off as needs. But there too, there has been a field of experience these last few days: the study of medical and scientific conceptions on the bodys makeup, its needs, and whats good or bad for it. And all this, in its essence, again boils down to the same question of vibrations. It was quite interesting: there was an appearance (because all things as the ordinary consciousness sees them are nothing but appearances), there was an appearance of food poisoning (mushrooms that are thought to have been bad). It was the Object of a particular study to find out whether there was something absolute about the poisoning, or whether it was relative, that is, based on ignorance, a wrong reaction and the absence of the true Vibration. And the conclusion was as follows: its a question of proportion between the amount, the sum of the vibrations that belong to the Supreme, and the sum of the vibrations that still belong to darkness. Depending on the proportion, the poisoning appears as something concrete, real, or else as something that can be eliminated, in other words, that doesnt resist the influence of the Vibration of Truth. And it was very interesting, because, immediately, as soon as the consciousness became aware of the cause of the trouble in the bodys functioning (the consciousness perceived where it came from and what it was), immediately the observation began, with the idea: Lets see what happens. First set the body perfectly at rest with the certainty (which is always there) that nothing happens except by the Lords Will and that the effect too is the Lords Will, all the consequences are the Lords Will, and consequently one should be very still. So the body is very still: untroubled, not agitated, it doesnt vibrate, nothingvery still. Once this is achieved, to what extent are the effects unavoidable? Because a certain quantity of matter that contained an element unfavorable to the bodys elements and life was absorbed, what is the proportion between the favorable and the unfavorable elements, or between the favorable and the unfavorable vibrations? And I saw very clearly: the proportion varies according to the amount of cells in the body that are under the direct Influence, that respond to the supreme Vibration alone, and the amount of other cells that still belong to the ordinary way of vibrating. It was very clear, because I could see all the possibilities, from the ordinary mass [of cells], which is completely upset by that intrusion and where you have to fight with all the ordinary methods to get rid of the undesirable element, to the totality of the cellular response to the supreme Force, which renders the intrusion perfectly innocuous. But this is still a dream for tomorrowwere on the way. But the proportion has become rather favorable (I cant say all-powerful, far from it, but rather favorable), so that the consequences of the ill-being didnt last very long and the damage was, so to say, minimal.
But all the experiences nowadays, one after the otherall the PHYSICAL experiences, of the bodypoint to the same conclusion: everything depends on the proportion between the elements that respond exclusively to the Supremes Influence, the half-and-half elements, on the road to transformation, and the elements that still follow Matters old vibratory process. The latter appear to be decreasing in number, to a great extent, but there are still enough of them to bring about unpleasant effects or unpleasant reactionsthings that are untransformed, that still belong to ordinary life. But all problems, whether psychological or purely material or chemical, all problems boil down to this: they are nothing but questions of vibrations. And there is the perception of that totality of vibrations and of what we could call (in a very rough and approximative way) the difference between the constructive and the destructive vibrations. We can say (to put it very simply) that all the vibrations that come from the One and express Oneness are constructive, while all the complications of the ordinary, separative consciousness lead to destruction.
0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You see, this aphorism would eventually lead to an absolute subjectivity, and only that absolute subjectivity would be truewell, its NOT like that. Because that means pralaya, it means Nirvana. Well, there isnt only Nirvana, there is an objectivity thats real, not false but how can you say what it is! Its something I have felt several timesseveral times, not just in a flash: the reality of (How can we express ourselves? We are always deceived by our words) In the perfect sense of Oneness and in the consciousness of Oneness there is room for the Objective, for objectivityone doesnt destroy the other, not at all. You may have the sense of a differentiation; not that it isnt yourself, but its a different vision. I told you, all that we can say is nothing, its nonsense, because the purpose of words is to express the unreal world, but Yes, that may be what Sri Aurobindo calls the sense of Multiplicity in Unity (maybe that corresponds a little), just as you feel the internal multiplicity of your being, something of that sort. I dont at all have the sensation of a separate self anymore, not at all, not at all, not even in the body, yet that doesnt prevent me from having a certain sense of an objective relationshipwell, yes, it leads us back to his change in the relation of sun-consciousness and earth-consciousness. (Laughing) Maybe thats really is the best way of putting it! Its a relation of consciousness. It isnt at all the relationship between oneself and othersnot at all, thats entirely canceled but it might be like the relation of consciousness between the various parts of ones being. And it gives objectivity to those various parts, obviously.
(long silence)
0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That has been the Object of my work all these last few days: how to get at that refusal to know? It has been there for a long time. And its the sequel to what Sri Aurobindo said in one of his letters: he says that India, with its methods, has done much more for spiritual life than Europe with all her doubts and questions.4 Thats exactly the point. Its a kind of refusala refusal to accept a certain method of knowing that isnt the purely material method, and a negation of the experience, of the reality of the experiencehow can they be convinced of it? And then, there is Kalis method, which is to give a sound thrashing. But its a lot of damage for little result, if you ask me.
No, it is still a big problem.
0 1965-09-08, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Very rare and exceptional are the human beings who can understand and feel divine Love, because divine Love is free of attachment and of the need to please the Object loved.
That was a discovery.
Thats why people dont understand; for them, love is so much like this (Mother intertwines the fingers of her two hands) that they cannot even feel or believe that they love if there isnt an attachment like this (same gesture). And necessarily, the consequence of attachment is the will, the desire, the need to please the Object of ones love.
If you take away the attachment and the need to please, people scratch their heads and wonder if they love. And its only when you take away those two things that divine Love begins!
0 1965-12-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All these feelings (what can we call them?) have a vibratory mode, with something very essential at their core and kinds of layers covering it; so the most central vibration is identical, and its as it inflates to express itself that it gets distorted. For love its perfectly obvious; in the vast majority of cases it becomes outwardly something with a wholly different nature from the inner vibration, because its something turning in on itself, shriveling up and trying to pull to itself in an egoistic movement of possession. You WANT to be loved. You say, I love this person, but at the same time there is what you want, and the lived feeling is, I want to be loved. And so thats almost as great a distortion as the distortion of hatred, which consists in wanting to destroy what you love in order not to be tied down. Because you cannot obtain what you want from the Object of your love, you want to destroy it in order to be freed; and in the other case, you shrivel up almost in an inner fury because you cannot obtain, you cannot gobble up what you love. (Laughing) In actual fact, from the standpoint of the deeper truth, there isnt much difference!
Its only when the central vibration remains pure and is expressed in its original purity, which is a spreading out (what can I call it? Its something radiating out, a vibration spreading out in a glory, a vibration blossoming out, yes, a radiant blossoming out), then it remains true. And materially its expressed by self-giving, self-forgetfulness, the generosity of the soul. And thats the only true movement. But what people are used to calling love is as removed from the central vibration of true Love as hatred; only, the one turns in on itself, shrivels up and hardens, while the other strikes thats what makes the whole difference.
0 1966-03-04, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was like a justification of the creation, which made possible a certain mode of perception (which we could describe with the words precision, exactness in the Objectification), which couldnt have existed without that. Because when that Consciousness the perfect Consciousness, the true Consciousness, THE Consciousness was there, present and lived to the exclusion of any other, there was a something, like a vibratory mode, if I may say so, a vibratory mode of objective precision and exactness, which couldnt have existed without this material form of creation. You know, there was always that great Why?the great Why like this?, Why all this? which resulted in what is expressed in the human consciousness by suffering and misery and helplessness and all, all the horrors of the ordinary consciousness why? Why this? And then, the answer was like this: In the true Consciousness, there is a vibratory mode of precision, exactness, clearness in the Objectification, which couldnt have existed without that, which wouldnt have had an opportunity to manifest. Thats certain. It is the answer the all-powerful answer to the Why?
It is clearvery clear that what for us is translated as progress, as progressive manifestation, is not only a law of the material manifestation as we know it, but is the very principle of the eternal Manifestation. If we want to climb down again to the level of terrestrial thought, we may say that there is no manifestation without progress. But what WE call progress, whats progress to our consciousness, up above, is it may be anything: a necessity, anything we like. There is a sort of absolute that we dont understand, an absolute of being: thats how it is because thats how it is, thats all. But to our consciousness, its more and more, better and better (and these words are stupid), more and more perfect, better and better perceived. Its the very principle of the manifestation.
0 1966-03-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then, with vision, for instance, the Objective precision is missing (Mother makes a gesture of not seeing through her eyes). I see through and with the consciousness. With hearing, I hear in a totally different way; there is a sort of discrimination (it isnt discernment), something that chooses in the perception, something that decides (that decides, but not arbitrarilyautomatically) what is heard and what isnt heard, what is perceived and what isnt perceived. Its already there in vision, but its still stronger with hearing: with certain things, all thats heard is a continuous drone; others are heard very clearly, as clear as crystal; still others are blurred, half heard. With sight, its the same thing: everything is behind a sort of luminous fog (very luminous, but its a fog, which means there is no precision), then all at once, a particular thing will be absolutely precise and clear, seen with a most precise vision of detail. The vision is generally the expression of the consciousness in things. That is, everything seems to become more and more subjective, less and less objective. And they arent visions that impose themselves on the sight, or noises that impose themselves on the hearing: its a sort of movement of consciousness that makes certain things perceptible and keeps others as if in a very imprecise background.
The consciousness chooses what it wants to see.
0 1966-05-25, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Youll see, there comes a point when you can tolerate yourself and life only if you take the attitude that the Lord is everything. See, that Lord, how many things He possesses: He plays with all thatHe plays, He plays at changing the positions. And then, when you see it, that whole, you feel the limitless marvel, and that whatever the Object of the most marvelous aspiration, its all quite possible and will even be surpassed. Then you are consoled. Otherwise, this existence is inconsolable. But that way, it becomes charming. One day, I will tell you.
When you have the sense of the unreality of life the unreality of lifecompared with a reality thats certainly found beyond, but at the same time WITHIN life, then ah, yes, THAT is true at lastTHAT is true at last and deserves to be true. That is the realization of all possible splendors, all possible marvels, all, yes, all possible felicities, all possible beauties that, yes, otherwise
0 1967-05-24, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But when you look at itwhen you emerge from mental activity and look at the experience you have, you wonder, How to say it? How to explain it? The nearest, most accessible, is this: into that something we aspire to become, we instinctively, spontaneously put everything we want to exist, all the most marvellous things we can imagine, all the Objects of an intense (and ignorant) aspiration, all of that. And with all that, you draw near something and In fact, you dont get the contact through thought; you get the contact through something IDENTICAL in the being, which is awakened by the intensity of the aspiration. So, as soon as you have got for yourself, be it for one second, this contactthis fusion theres no more need to explain: its something that imposes itself in an absolute way, and that is outside and beyond all explanation.
But to get there, everyone puts into it all that makes it easier to lead him there.
0 1967-08-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I meet almost everyone there. I told you that you are there quite regularly, and we work. As for you, you dont remember. There are others who remember, but their memory is (Mother twists her finger slightly) just slightly off, that is, not identically what I saw. And when they tell me, my impression is, yes, its because of the transcription in their brain. the Objective reality of the material world stems from the fact that if you see the same object ten times over, ten times it looks like itself, with differences that are logical, or that may be, for instance, differences of wear and tear but there too its like that! If you study carefully, even in the physical world no two people see things in exactly the same way. There, it may be more pronounced, but it seems to be a similar phenomenon.
The explanation becomes very simple and very easy when you enter the consciousness in which its the material reality that becomes an illusionits illusory, inexact: the inner reality is truer. Then, in that case, its simple. Maybe its only our mind that is astonished?
0 1968-07-10, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It didnt have a very precise outline, because it was radiant. It had internal constitutions of varying radiances (Mother draws points or various concentrations within the cell), and the center was wholly luminous. And there was a big hand, almost a paw, you know, a big hand holding this cell very carefully: he took great care to touch it as lightly as possible (Mother draws two big fingers holding the cell). It was luminous, held up with two fingers, like this. I dont know what the scientific shape of cells is, but it was like this. And he showed me the various radiances. The periphery was the most opaque; the deeper inside, the more luminous it became; and the center was wholly luminous, it was bright, that is, radiating. Then there were different colorsnot very intense, but different colors. The hand was magnified perhaps twice, because it was this big (about ten inches), while the Object was this big (about three inches), and it was a cell.
He showed me the constitution, and how the connection was made.
0 1969-02-05, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Last night, I knew I was doing it every night, but during the night There was (but then, in the body, yesterday in the waking state) a sort of aspiration to know what the functioning would be, the action in the superman consciousness. I said, Having this consciousness around oneself [like a rampart] is very fine, but one must also know what changes there will be in the bodys functioning, in the work, in ones workings. So then, this experience [of the figures] was like an answer to make me learn a little the future way. But whats strange is that I did it exactly as they now do with those big electric machines, with all kinds of levers (gesture like a control panel in a power plant), I did it in that way, moving things and Only, I think I must have been a little taller than I am. I dont know. In any case, I would place the Objects (same gesture like a moving puzzle) They werent objects, they were something but it had a fixed formit was fixed and there was a sort of store (not a storeroom, I dont know how to put it), a store from where I drew things, which I would put and arrange like that. The arrangement was continuous in its whole, but with changes in the details.
If I remembered exactly, it would be very interesting.
0 1969-03-19, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it was it was really amusing! And the Objections of age, possibility, capacity, no longer existed. If this intermediary method is considered useful (I mean, practical), the possibility is there; this Consciousness was showing the body that the possibility is there. Foroh, for hours and hoursit insisted, it didnt want to go! It insisted until the body had completely understood. And there is no need of a material intervention: it can be done (thats known, there have been fully recognized cases), the physical intervention wasnt necessary, it was replaced by an intervention in the subtle physical, which was sufficient. All that in every detail, with every explanation and everything. Then, when it was thoroughly done, it was over, the chapter was closed. But it was really unexpected, I had never thought of such a thing! And the way it was presented! It was so concrete and so simpleso simple, so concrete and all objections were resolved.
So the body said, Very well, we shall see. (Mother laughs) Well see.
0 1969-08-23, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday I saw Y. She told me what she wanted to do: her new method of education. It was rather amusing! It seems there is in a box the miniature reproduction of as many things of the earth as can be represented: humans, animals, objects, houses, and so on. All that is mixed together in a big box, on a sort of table, and the big and small children are put there, all of them together, and given a fixed time (I think): they have to make something out of the Objects on the tableabsolutely free, they do what they like. And it seems that according to what they do, the way they use the Objects and assemble them, you can tell their character As an illustration, she told me they put someone there (she didnt tell me who), apparently a sage, a sage who knows about the existence of yoga, and the result of his work was this: a Red Indian taking aim to shoot another, the second Red Indian taking aim to shoot another, and the third Red Indian taking aim to shoot anotherfour like that, in a row. Then the last Red Indian, the fourth, taking aim to kill a lion, and the lion rushing at a deer to kill it. Theres his tableau! And he told them that was an image of life.
According to that, they are sure of knowing his character! (Mother laughs mockingly) I found it prodigiously amusing!
0 1969-09-13, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But he says, If I am expelled and get out, I lose all power, I cant do anything anymore. And that was precisely the Object of his vision: its by staying there that he can bring-light. Thats his problem. If I get out, I cant do anything anymore. And he told me that all those priests who got out to try and make the Church progress have been expelled by the Church and no longer have any power.
Naturally theyve been expelled by the Church! But the Church isnt the whole world.
0 1969-12-31, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"Mother recently commented on these two aphorisms thus: "As long as there are religions, atheism will be necessary to counterbalance them. Both must disappear to give way to a sincere and disinterested search for Truth and a total consecration to the Object of this search."
***
0 1970-01-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its a kind of tower with twelve regular facets representing the twelve months of the year, and absolutely empty. Only, it will have to hold one to two hundred people. So, to support the roof, there would be inside (not outside, inside) twelve columns; and right at the center, the Object of concentration. And with the suns concentration, all year round it will have to get in AS A BEAM (not diffused: it will have to be so arranged that it can get in as beams); then, according to the hour of the day and the month of the year, the beam will revolve (there will be some device at the top) and it will be directed onto the center. At the center, there will be the symbol [of Mother], then Sri Aurobindos symbol supporting a globe. A globe which well try to have made of a transparent substance such as crystal or A large globe. Then people will be let in in order to concentrate(laughing) to learn to concentrate! No fixed meditations, nothing of the sort, but they will have to stay there in silencesilence and concentration.
(P.:) Its very beautiful.
0 1970-03-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But there is one thing. In what he wrote, in what he told me, Sri Aurobindo seemed to take as a sign of the transformation the constant presence of Ananda [bliss]. And that was one of the things I told him about: the being manifesting in this body, and consequently the body (because even from a very young age, the body had tried to surrender to the inner being, not to remain independent), in the body itself, there had never been either the feeling or the need, or even the intent of living in Ananda. Since it was very small, the body was built with I might put it like this: the will to do what had to be doneto be what it had to be and to do it. When it was very small, the Object of the surrender was not known, but the minute it knew it, for it that was very definitive. You understand, the first contact (as I said) was the divine Presence in the psychic being, and so, the minute it became a facta patent fact, there was no arguing, the experience was perfectly conclusivefrom that minute, the body had only one idea left (not even one idea, one will), to be what THAT wanted it to be. Now, for it, its beyond any possible discussion: its like this (gesture hands open), simply attentive and anxious to do what the Divine wants it to do, and it tries more and more not to feel any difference. Thats beginningits not yet there everywhere. In many parts of the body, there is only ONE thing left: there is not the Thing that wants and the thing that obeys, its no longer like thatonly ONE Vibration. Its beginning. But it doesnt expect it to result in a sense of delight or Ananda or In fact, its quite indifferent to that. It was born and formed quite indifferent.
I said that to Sri Aurobindo. (Laughing) He looked at me and said, There arent two people like you on earth! (Mother laughs) Because, he says, people may overcome the need to be happy (not be happy, that doesnt mean anything), anyway the need of satisfaction, of Ananda, but for it to be spontaneous! Like that, effortless.
--
Its interesting. Thats precisely the change of consciousness that has taken place in the bodys cells: if they are told, Nature will find the means, it leaves them absolutely indifferent their impression is that its the Divine that DIRECTLY kneads Matter. Thats the Object of what I call the change of power: to substitute the divine, direct Power for the power of Nature. And the cells no longer have that (I cant find the word in French) that reliance at all.
Trust?
0 1970-05-02, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the Objective study of religions will be a part of the historical study of the development of human consciousness.
I place religions below, in the mental realm.
0 1971-12-22, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I spoke to Cardinal Tisserant1 about the problem you mentioned. He is writing this very day to the bishop of Pondicherry along the lines you gave mehe is indignant to learn that you are the Object of such un-Christian manifestations and feelings. I hope this letter will calm down the Mission.
Oh, theyre not stirring anymore, that must be it. I dont hear about them anymore. Precisely, I noticed yesterday or the day before that they had grown completely quiet. That must be the reason. So you can tell him that for the moment everyone is quiet, things are all right.
0 1972-07-15, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had some things for you (Mother feels the Objects on the table near her), it was in an envelope.
One must not confuse a religious teaching and a spiritual teaching. Religious teaching belongs to the past and stops all progress, spiritual teaching is the teaching of the future. It enlightens the consciousness and prepares it for the future realization.
0 1973-04-07, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Pranab:) Its perfectly all right. I have come with something, I stand by something, and if it does not come, I dont mind I am a sportsman, Mother. And I dont want to listen to any explanation. Because whatever explanation is given, if the Object for which I came does not materialize, it is the same thing to me.
No, its because there is an attempt to transform the body .
02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A mind was there that met the Objective world
As if a stranger or enemy at its door:
02.06 - The Integral Yoga and Other Yogas, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yogas go straight from Mind into some featureless condition of the cosmic Silence and through it try to disappear upward into the Highest. the Object of this Yoga is to transcend mind and enter into the Divine Truth of Sachchidananda which is not only static but dynamic and raise the whole being into that Truth.
Those who seek the self by the old Yogas separate themselves from mind, life and body and realise the self apart from these things. It is perfectly easy to separate mind, vital and physical from each other without the need of supermind. It is done by the ordinary Yogas.
--
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.
From where did you get this singular attitude towards the old Yogas and Yogis? Is the wisdom of the Vedanta and Tantra a small and trifling thing? Have then the sadhaks of this Asram attained to self-realisation and are they liberated Jivan-muktas, free from ego and ignorance? If not, why then do you say, "it is not a very difficult stage", "their goal is not high", "is it such a long process?"
--
(1) Because it aims not at a departure out of world and life into a Heaven or a Nirvana, 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 indispensable, but what is decisive, what is finally aimed at is the resulting descent. It is the descent of the new consciousness attained by the ascent that is the stamp and seal of the sadhana. Even 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 sole sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement. The thing to be gained also is the bringing in of a Power of consciousness
(the supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earthnature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
02.08 - Jules Supervielle, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
His poetry is very characteristic and adds almost a new vein to the spirit and manner of French poetry. He has bypassed the rational and emotional tradition of his adopted country, brought in a mystic way of vision characteristic of the East. This mysticism is not however the normal spiritual way but a kind of oblique sight into what is hidden behind the appearance. By the oblique way I mean the sideway to enter into the secret of things, a passage opening through the side. The mystic vision has different ways of approachone may look at the thing straight, face to face, being level with it with a penetrating gaze, piercing a direct entry into the secrets behind. This frontal gaze is also the normal human way of knowing and understanding, the scientific way. It becomes mystic when it penetrates sufficiently behind and strikes a secret source of another light and sight, that is, the inner sight of the soul. The normal vision which I said is the scientist's vision, stops short at a certain distance and so does not possess the key to the secret knowledge. But an aspiring vision can stretch itself, drill into the surface obstacle confronting it, and make its contact with the hidden ray behind. There is also another mystic way, not a gaze inward but a gaze upward. The human intelligence and the higher brain consciousness seeks a greater and intenser light, a vaster knowledge and leaps upward as it were. There develops a penetrating gaze towards heights up and above, to such a vision the mystery of the spirit slowly reveals itself. That is Vedantic mysticism. There is a look downward also below the life-formation and one enters into contact with forces and beings and creatures of another type, a portion of which is named Hell or Hades in Europe, and in India Ptl and rastal. But here we are speaking of another way, not a frontal or straight movement, but as I said, splitting the side and entering into it, something like opening the shell of a mother of pearl and finding the pearl inside. There is a descriptive mystic: the suprasensuous experience is presented in images and feeling forms. That is the romantic way. There is an explanatory mysticism: the suprasensuous is set in intellectual or mental terms, making it somewhat clear to the normal understanding. That is I suppose classical mysticism. All these are more or less direct ways, straight approaches to the mystic reality. But the oblique is differentit is a seeking of the mind and an apprehension of the senses that are allusive, indirect, that move through contraries and negations, that point to a different direction in order just to suggest the Objective aimed at. The Vedantic (and the Scientific too) is the straight, direct, rectilinear gaze the Vedantin says, May I look at the Sun with a transfixed gaze'; whether he looks upward or inward or downward. But the modem mystic is of a different mould. He has not that clear absolute vision, he has the apprehension of an aspiring consciousness. His is not religious poetry for that matter, but it is an aspiration and a yearning to perceive and seize truth and reality that eludes the senses, but seems to be still there. We shall understand better by taking a poem of his as example. Thus:
Alter Ego
03.01 - Humanism and Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow beingsmen and animals, the sentient or the insentient, the entire creation in factis one of identity in the One Self. And therefore he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantist was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi iswhat may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint that one loves the wife or the I son or anybody or anything in the world not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or thing but for the sake of the self, for the sake of oneself that is in the Object which one seems to love.
The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
03.01 - The Malady of the Century, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In old days, while we enjoyed life we were not without the taste for life. We were youthful and in full possession of the dharma of youth. And when we left the world and life we cherished no regret; we did it whole-heartedly. We were young; and our movements were whole and entire. It may be said that that was an age of unthinking innocence; but in the attempt to gain the arid richness of an old-age consciousness, we have lost the simplicity, the spontaneity and the integrality of our non-age. Yes, we have eaten of the fruit of knowledge and our youth is the price that we have paid. With our present nature we not merely enjoy, but we want to know that we enjoy; we cannot enjoy a thing, unless in the very act we weigh and dissect and scrutinize the Object and ourselves too, into the bargain.
This knowledge, or rather, this curiosity does not arise from any depth of our being; it is the product of the meddlesome superficial brain-mind. We have become self-conscious; a vigilant self-consciousness is now the invariable coefficient of all our movements, but it is a self-consciousness that has deviated into mere mental introspection and intellectual analysis. It was the soul's consciousness, although perhaps more often from behind the veil, that once inspired and enlivened human nature in its youth; and life was after all a thing of beauty and joy for the soul is the one Rasa of existence. We have deposed the Divine King; an anarchy now reigns in human nature which has become the battle-ground of qualities and forces that are, if not always more crude, at least, invariably crooked and perverse. We live and move in the cold and blighting, and withal shallow, glare of the brain-mind.
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To the moderns truth is merely relative; the absolute is an ever-receding reality and has only a theoretical existence. The true reality, whatever it is, we can never reach or possess; we may say that we are approaching it nearer and nearer, but shall never come up to itthere is no end to our pursuit. An eternally progressive rapprochement between our knowledge or realization and the Object of it is our destiny and also perhaps our privilege. It is this movement without end or finality that is life and all its zest and beauty. The ancients, on the other hand, aimed and worked at siddhi, that is to say, definite and final achievement. This did not mean, however, that there was a dead stop and they stagnated after siddhi. It means that the consciousness having undergone a change in character, takes a different kind of movement altogether: it proceeds now from truth to truth, from light to light, from siddhi to siddhi. The modern consciousness moves, on the other hand, from uncertainty to uncertainty, at best, from the more obscure to the less obscure.
Ours is an age of hungerhunger for knowledge, for power, for enjoyment. But we do not know, nor care to know, the conditions under which alone such hunger can really be appeased. First of all, we think that to satisfy our hunger we have simply to go straight and pounce upon the Object; we do not consider it at all necessary to look beforeh and to our assimilative nature and capacity. Our hunger serves only to multiply the Objects of hunger; and the Objects of hunger again multiply our hunger; this is the vicious circle in which we are entrapped. We hungered for progress, but what we have succeeded in getting is change and movement, speed and restlessness; we yearned for light, we have found only information; we looked for power, we have mastered a few tricks or clever manipulations; we aspired for happiness, we have stopped with stray pleasures and hence with dissatisfaction.
To relieve life of this mingled strain and tension, to lift it out of this ambiguity and uncertainty, to free it from this gravitational force that drives it towards what is superficial and externalto endow it with its real worth, we must find and possess life at a higher level, at its unspoilt source; we must first draw back and re-establish, this time consciously and integrally, the lost connection with our soul, the Divine in our being.
03.02 - Aspects of Modernism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Consciousness has two primary movements. In one it penetrates, enters straight into the heart of things; in the other it spreads out, goes about and round the Object. The combination of the two powers is a rarity; ordinarily man follows the one to the exclusion of the other. The modern age in its wide curiosity has neglected the penetrative and intensive movement and is therefore marred by superficiality. It is eager to go over the entire panorama of creation at one glance, if that is possible, to have a telescopic view of things; but it has been able to take in only the surface, the skin, the crust. Even the entrance into the world of atoms and cellsof protons and electrons, of chromosomes and genesis not really a penetrative or intensive movement. It is only another form of the movement of pervasion or extension: it is still a going abroad, only on another line, in a different direction, but always fundamentally on the same horizontal plane. The microscope is only an inverted telescope. Our instruments are the external mind and senses and these move laterally and have not the power to leap on to a different level of vision. The earlier ages of mankind, narrow and circumscribed in many respects, possessed nevertheless that intensive and in-gathering movement, which is a kind of movement in the fourth dimension; it was a sixth sense leading into the Behind or Beyond of things.
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03.02 - The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the face of established opinion and tradition (and in the wake of the prophetic poet) I propose to demonstrate that Philosophy has as much claim to be called an art, as any other orthodox art, painting or sculpture or music or architecture. I do not refer to the element of philosophyperhaps the very large element of philosophy that is imbedded and ingrained in every Art; I speak of Philosophy by itself as a distinct type of au thentic art. I mean that Philosophy is composed or created in the same way as any other art and the philosopher is moved and driven by the inspiration and impulsion of a genuine artist. Now, what is Art? Please do not be perturbed by the question. I am not trying to enter into the philosophy the metaphysicsof it, but only into the science the physicsof it. Whatever else it may be, the sine qua non, the minimum requisite of art is that it must be a thing of beauty, that is to say, it must possess a beautiful form. Even the Vedic Rishi says that the poet by his poetic power created a heavenly formkavi kavitva divi rpam asajat. As a matter of fact, a supreme beauty of form has often marked the very apex of artistic creation. Now, what does the Philosopher do? The sculptor hews beautiful forms out of marble, the poet fashions beautiful forms out of words, the musician shapes beautiful forms out of sounds. And the philosopher? The philosopher, I submit, builds beautiful forms out of thoughts and concepts. Thoughts and concepts are the raw materials out of which the artist philosopher creates mosaics and patterns and designs architectonic edifices. For what else are philosophic systems? A system means, above all, a form of beauty, symmetrical and harmonious, a unified whole, rounded and polished and firmly holding together. Even as in Art, truth, bare sheer truth is not the Object of philosophical inquiry either. Has it not been considered sufficient for a truth to be philosophically true, if it is consistent, if it does not involve self-contradiction? The equation runs: Truth=Self-consistency; Error=Self-contradiction. To discover the absolute truth is not the philosopher's taskit is an ambitious enterprise as futile and as much of a my as the pursuit of absolute space, absolute time or absolute motion in Science. Philosophy has nothing more to doand nothing lessthan to evolve or build up a system, in other words, a self-consistent whole (of concepts, in this case). Art also does exactly the same thing. Self-contradiction means at bottom, want of harmony, balance, symmetry, unity, and self-consistency means the contrary of these things the two terms used by philosophy are only the logical formulation of an essentially aesthetic value.
Take, for example, the philosophical system of Kant or of Hegel or of our own Shankara. What a beautiful edifice of thought each one has reared! How cogent and compact, organised and poised and finely modelled! Shankara's reminds me of a tower, strong and slender, mounting straight and tapering into a vanishing point among the clouds; it has the characteristic linear movement of Indian melody. On the otherhand, the march of the Kantian Critiques or of the Hegelian Dialectic has a broader base and involves a composite strain, a balancing of contraries, a blending of diverse notes: thereis something here of the amplitude and comprehensiveness of harmonic architecture (without perhaps a corresponding degree of altitude).
03.05 - Some Conceptions and Misconceptions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Here we come to the very heart of the mystery. As we have put it thus far, the process of Involution would appear as a series of stages in a descending order, a movement along a vertical line, as it were, one stage following another, more or less separate from each other, the lower being ever more ignorant, more separative, more exclusive. But this is not the whole picture. At each lower stage the higher is not merely high above, but also comes down and stands behind or becomes immanent in the lower. Along with the vertical movement there is also a horizontal movement. In other words, even when we are sunk in the lowest stratum of Ignorancein the domain of Matterwe have also there all the other strands behind, even the very highest, not merely as passive or neutral entities, but as dynamic agents exerting their living pressure to the full. Indeed the Ignorance is not mere Ignorance, but Knowledge itself, the very highest Knowledge, but in a particular mode of activity. What appears ignorant is full of a secret Knowledgeit is just the outer surface, the facet that appears as its opposite because of a particular manner of concentration, a total self-abandonment in the Object of Knowledge. That Knowledge stands revealed if the mask is put away, that is to say, if we get behind, If we release the exclusiveness of the concentration. This release or getting behind does not mean necessarily the dissolution of the status itself for it is the pressure from behind, the concentration of the hidden consciousness that creates the status and its truth-forms; with the exclusiveness goes away only the twist, the aberration produced by it. When the consciousness withdraws from its mode and field of exclusive concentration, it need not concentrate again on the withdrawal only, it can be an inclusive concentration also embracing both the status the frontal and the behind. Both can be held together in one single movement of consciousness possessing the double function of projection and comprehensionprajna and vijna.
Such a synthetic poise is not a mere theoretical possibility: it is an actuality and is being demonstrated by the fact of evolution. The partial release of the absolutely exclusive concentration of consciousness in Matter has given rise to Life which is a double poise: Life plays in and through Matter and has not dissolved Matter. Likewise a further release of concentration has given birth to Mind which still bases itself upon and is woven into Life and Matter. The change-over from unconsciousness to consciousness and from consciousness to super-consciousness is the movement of consciousness from a unilateral towards an ever widening multiple poise and functioning of concentration.
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The principle of exclusive concentration does not by itself really create the Objects of the material world; it creates the perception the illusory perceptionof separativeness, that objects are more or less closed systems, distinct and isolated from one another. The sense of limitation and hence actual limitation, not however real or essential limitationcomes out of the exclusive concentration. This does not mean that the limitation or discreteness of objects is merely psychological (mental), not ontological, as one may say. In Sri Aurobindo's outlook the distinction between psychological and ontological is not trenchant and absolute. For, psychological, according to him, does not mean merely mental but also relating to consciousness; and although mind does not create material objects, consciousness may do soindeed it is the force of the original consciousness, which is the force of being, that has created the physical plane of multiplicity. This creative power is the self-projecting energy of consciousness prajna. It is, in other words, the force of individuation inherent in the play of consciousness. Now, as I have already said, at a certain stage, under certain conditions, through a gradation of stages, this force of individuation originally and intrinsically existing and working in and through unity and integration, is possessed or veiled by or devolves into a force of limitation, meaning separateness and exclusion. What would otherwise be an ensemble, an organism of individualities held together and moving as various forms or lines of force of one and the same reality, is now broken up and becomes a conglomeration of isolated entities. Unity is transformed into multiplicity, solidarity is lost in plurality.
We can, however, make a distinction between limitation and delimitation or individuation. Limitation is a movement of Ignorance: it is the result of exclusive concentration. It creates separateness, forgets the unity. Delimitation, on the contrary, is a movement of knowledge, of pure consciousness dynamic. It creates diversity, multiplicity maintained in unity.
03.06 - Divine Humanism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Indian sage is not and cannot be human in the human way. For the end of his whole spiritual effort is to transcend the human way and establish himself in the divine way, in the way of the Spirit. The feeling he has towards his fellow-beingsmen and animals, the sentient and the insentient, the entire creation, in factis one of identity in the One Self. And, therefore, he does not need to embrace physically his brother, like the Christian saint, to express or justify the perfect inner union or unity. The basis of his relation with the world and its objects is not the human heart, however purified and widened, but something behind it and hidden by it, the secret soul and self. It was Vivekananda who very often stressed the point that the distinctive characteristic of the Vedantin was that he did not look upon created beings as his brethren, but as himself, as the one and the same self. The profound teaching of the Upanishadic Rishi iswhat may appear very egoistic and inadmissible to the Christian saint that one loves the wife or the son or anybody or anything in the world, not for the sake of the wife or the son or that body or that thing, but for the sake of the self, for the sake of one's own self that is in the Object which one seems to love.
The pragmatic man requires an outward gesture, an external emotion to express and demonstrate his kinship with the creation. Indeed the more concrete and tangible the expression, the more human it is considered to be and all the more worthy for it. There are not a few who think that giving alms to the poor is more nobly human than, say, to have the abstract feeling of a wide commonalty, experienced solely in imagination or contemplation in the Wordsworthian way.
03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
India art is not in truth unreal and unnatural, though it may so appear to the eye of the ordinary man or to an eye habituated to the classical tradition of European art. Indian art, too, does hold the mirror up to Nature; but it is a different kind of Nature, not altogether this outward Nature that the mere physical eye envisages. All art is human creation; it is man's review of Nature; but the particular type of art depends upon the particular 'view-point that the artist takes for his survey. The classical artist surveys his field with the physical eye, from a single point of observation and at a definite angle; it is this which gives him the sine qua non of his artistic composition, anatomy and perspective. And the genius of the artist lies very much in the selection of a vantage ground from which his survey would throw into relief all the different parts of the Objective in the order and gradation desired; to this vantage ground the entire construction is organicallyone could even say, in this case, geometricallycorrelated.
Indian art, too, possesses a perspective and an anatomy; it, too, has a focus of observation which governs and guides the composition, in the ensemble and in detail. Only, it is not the physical eye, but an inner vision, not the angle given by the retina, but the angle of a deeper perception or consciousness. To understand the difference, let us ask ourselves a simple question: when we call back to memory a landscape, how does the picture form itself in the mind? Certainly, it is not an exact photograph of the scenery observed. We cannot, even if we try, re-form in memory the Objects in the shape, colour and relative positions they had when they appeared to the physical eye. In the picture represented to the mind's eye, some objects loom large, others are thrown into the background and others again do not figure at all; the whole scenery is reshuffled and rearranged in deference to the stress of the mind's interest. Even the structure and build of each object undergoes a change; it does not faithfully re-copy Nature, but gives the mind's version of it, aggrandizing certain parts, suppressing others, reshaping and recolouring the whole aspect, metamorphosing the very contour into something that may not be "natural" or anatomical figure at all. Only we are not introspective enough to observe this phenomenon of the mind's alchemy; we think we are representing with perfect exactitude in the imagination whatever is presented to the senses, whereas in fact we do nothing of the kind; our idea that we do it is a pure illusion.
All art is based upon this peculiar virtue of the mind that naturally and spontaneously transforms or distorts the Objective world presented to its purview. The question, then, is only of the degree to which the metamorphosis has been carried. At the one end, there is the art of photography, in which the degree of metamorphosis is at its minimum; at the other, there seems to be no limit, for the mind's capacity to dissolve and recreate the world of sense-perception is infinite and many modern schools of European art have gone even beyond the limit that the "unnatural" Indian art did not consider it necessary to transgress. Now, the classical artist selects a position as close as he can to the photographer, tries to give the mind's view of Nature and creation, as far as possible, in the style and norm of the sense-perceptions. He takes his stand upon these and from there reaches out towards whatever imaginative reconstructions are justified within the bounds laid out by them. The general ground-plan is, almost rigorously, the form given by the physical eye. The art of the East, and even, to a large extent, the art of mediaeval Europe, followed a different line. Here the scheme of the sense-perceptions was rejected, the artist sought to build on other foundations. His procedure was, first, to get a focus within the mind, to discover a psychological standpoint, and from there and in accordance with the subtler laws and conventions of an inner vision create a world that is unique and stands by itself. The aim was always to build from within, at the most, from within outwards, but not from without, not even from without inwards. This inner world has its own laws and they differ from the laws of optics which govern the physical sight; but there is no reason why it should be called unnatural. It is unnatural only in the sense that it does not copy physical Nature; it is quite natural in the 1 sense that it is a faithful reproduction of another, a psychological Nature.
Indian art is pre-eminently and par excellence the art of this inner re-formation and revaluation. It has thrown down completely and clearly the rigid scaffolding of the physical vision. We take here a sudden leap, as it were, into another world, and sometimes the feeling is that everything is reversed; it is not exactly that we feel ourselves standing on our heads, but it is, as if, in the Vedic phrase, the foundations were above and all the rest branched out from them downwards. The artist sees with an eye, and constructs upon a plan that conveys the merest excuse of an actual visible world. There are other schools in the East which have also moved very far away from the naturalistic view; yet they have kept, if not the form, at least, the feeling of actuality in their composition. Thus a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Persian masterpiece cannot be said to be "natural" in the sense in which a Tintoretto, or even a Raphael is natural; yet a sense of naturalness persists, though the appearance is not naturalistic. What Indian art gives is not the feeling of actuality or this sense of naturalness, but a feeling of truth, a sense of realityof the deepest reality.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The old intellectualism generally and on the whole, was truly formal and even to a great extent verbal. In other words, it sought to find norms and categories in the mind itself and impose them upon, objects, objects of experience, external or internal. The first discovery of the pure mind, the joy of indulging in its own free formations led to an abstraction that brought about a cleavage between mind and nature, and when a harmony was again attempted between the two, it meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon another (Matter), a subsumption of the latter under the former. Such scholastic formalism, although it has the appearance of a movement of pure intellect, free from the influence of instinctive or emotive reactions, cannot but be, at bottom, a mythopoeic operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly objective in the scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find Nature's own categories the constants, as they are called and link up mind and intellect with that reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say another thing and even science itself just nowadays may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not our purpose to consider here and which does not change the fundamental position. We say then that the Objectivity of the scientific outlook, as distinguished from the abstract formalism of old-world intellectualism, has given a new degree of mental growth and is the basis of themechanistic methodology of which we have been speaking. '
Indeed, what we lay stress upon is the methodology of modern scientific knowledge the apparatus of criticism and experimentation.
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We can thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in the human cycle of Nature's evolution. The first was the period of emergence of self-consciousness and the trials and experiments it went through to establish and confirm itself. The ancient civilisations represented this character of the human spirit. The subject freeing itself more and more from its environmental tegument, still living and moving within it and dynamically reacting upon itthis was the character we speak of. Next came the period when the free and dynamic subject feeling itself no more tied down to its natural objective sphere sought lines of development and adventure on its own account. This was the age of speculation and of scholasticism in philosophy and intellectual inquiry and of alchemy in natural sciencea period roughly equated with the Middle Ages. The Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction and co-ordination between the free and dynamic self-consciousness and the mode and pattern of its objective field, involving a greater enrichment on one side the subjective consciousness and on the other, the Objective environment, a corresponding change and effective reorganisation.
The present age which ushers a fourth stagesignificantly called turiya or the transcendent, in Indian terminologyis pregnant with a fateful crisis. The stage of self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution, lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a super-consciousnessas already envisaged by Yogis and Mystics everywherewhich will give a new potential and harmony to the human consciousness.
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Value refers to the particular poise or status, the mode of being or function of a thing. In its ultimate formulation we can say it is the rhythm or force of consciousness that vibrates in an object, it is the becomingof the being:but becoming does not cancel being, it only activises, energises, formulates. The debate brings us back to the ancient quarrel between the Buddhists and the Vedantists, the latter posits sat, being or existence, while the former considers sat as only an assemblage of asat. the Object and its function, the thing-in-itself and its attribute (the fire and its burning power, as the Indian logicians used to cite familiarly as an example) are not to be separated they are not separated in fact but given together as one unified entity; it is the logical mind that separates them artificially.
III
04.11 - To the Heights-XI, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is the Eye of the eye and yet it is the Object that the eye contemplates;
It is the Sense of the senses and still the senses can apprehend it;
05.01 - Of Love and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Then shall you secure pure and perfect enjoyment -whose true name is Bliss; and then too can you become the instrumentto bring a bliss and blessing to the Object of your love.
This is the secret of the sweetest and most exquisite and intimate relation possible with persons or things, that it should be made and established in and through the Divine.
05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Positivists are those who swear by facts. Facts to them mean naturally facts attested in the end by sense-experience. To a positivist the only question that matters and that needs to be answered and can be answered is whether a thing is or is not physically: other questions are otiose, irrelevant, misleading. So problems of the Good, of the Beautiful, of God are meaningless. When one says this is good, that is bad, well, it is a proposition that cannot be related to any fact, it is a subjective personal valuation. In the Objective world a thing simply is or is not, one cannot say it is good or it is bad. The thing called good by one is called bad by another, the same thing that is good to you now will appear bad at another time. This is a region absolutely of personal and variable idiosyncrasy. The same with regard to the concept of beauty. That a thing is beautiful or ugly is a subjective judgment; it is not and cannot be an objective statement. Beauty is a formula in your mind and imagination, it is a changing mode of your apprehension. The concept of God too fares no better. God exists: it is a judgment based upon no fact or facts of sense-experience. However we may analyse it, it is found to have no direct or even indirect but inevitable rapport with the field of actual reality. There is between the two an unbridgeable hiatus. This is a position restated in a modern style, familiar to the Kantian Critique of Pure Reason.
There are two ways off acing the problem. First, the Kantian way which cuts the Gordian knot. We say here that there are two realms in which man lives, but they are incommensurables: the truths and categories of one cannot be judged and tested by those of the other. Each is sui generis, each is valid in its own right, in its own dominion. God, Soul, Immortality these are realities belonging to one section of our nature, seizable by a faculty other than the Pure Reason, viz.,the Practical Reason; while the realities given by the senses and the judgments of the logical mind are of another section. It may be said one is physical, the other metaphysical. The positivists limit their field of enquiry and knowledge to the physical: they seek to keep the other domain quite apart as something imaginary, illusory, often unnecessary and not unoften harmful to true human interest.
05.06 - Physics or philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Eddington gives us absolutely no hope for any knowledge of an objective world apart from the Objectification of mind's own constructs. This is a position which a scientist, quascientist, finds it difficult to maintain. Remedies and loop-holes have been suggested with what result we shall presently see.
Einstein's was, perhaps, the most radical and revolutionary solution ever proposed. Indeed, it meant the reversal of the whole scientific outlook, but something of the kind was an imperative need in order to save Science from inconsistencies that seemed to be inherent in it. The scientific outlook was vitiated, Einstein said, because we started from wrong premises; two assumptions mainly were responsible for the bank-ruptcy which befell latter-day Science. First, it was assumed that a push and pulla force (a gravitational or, more generally, a causal force) existed and that acted upon isolated and independent particles strewn about; and secondly, they were strewn about in an independently existing time and an independently existing space. Einstein has demonstrated, it seems, successfully that there is no Time and no Space actually, but times and spaces (this reminds one of a parallel conception in Sankhya and Patanjali) , that time is not independent of space (nor space of time) but that time is another co-ordinate or dimension necessary for all observation in addition to the three usual co-ordinates (or dimensions). This was the explanation he found of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which failed to detect any difference in the velocity of light whether it moved with or against a moving object, which is an inconsistency according to the mechanistic view. 1 The absolute dependence of time and space upon each other was further demonstrated by the fact that it was absolutely impossible to synchronise two distant clocks (moving with different speeds and thus forming different systems) with perfect accuracy, or determine exactly whether two events happened simultaneously or not. In the final account of things, this relative element that varies according to varying particulars had to be eliminated, sublated. In order to make a law applicable to all fieldsfrom the astronomical through the normal down to the microscopic or sub-atomicin an equally valid manner, the law had to divest itself of all local colour. Thus, a scientific law became a sheer 'mathematical formula; it was no longer an objective law that governed the behaviour of things, but merely a mental rule or mnemonics to string together as many diverse things as possible in order to be able to memorise them easily.
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So it is frankly admitted that what Science gives is not a faithful description of actuality, not a representation of material existence, but certain conventions or convenient signs to put together, to make a mental picture of our sensations and experiences. That does not give any clue to what the Objective reality mayor may not be like. Scientific laws are mental rules imposed upon Nature. It may be asked why does Nature yield to such imposition? There must be then some sort of parallelism or commensurability between Nature and the observing Mind, between the pattern of Nature and the Mind's scheme or replica of it. If we successfully read into Nature things of the Mind, that means that there must be something very common between the two. Mind's readings are not mere figments, hanging in the air; for they are justified by their applicability, by their factual translation. This is arguing in a circle, a thorough-going mentalist like Eddington would say. What are facts? What is life? Anything more than what the senses and the mind have built up for us?
Jeans himself is on the horns of a dilemma.2 Being a scientist, and not primarily a mathematician like Eddington, he cannot very well acquiesce in the liquidation of the material world; nor can he refute successfully the facts and arguments that Science itself has brought forward in favour of mentalism. He wishes to keep the question open for further light and surer grounds. In the meanwhile, however, he is reconciled to a modified form of mentalism. The laws of Nature, he says, are surely subjective in the sense that astronomical or geographical concepts, for example, such as the system of latitudes, longitudes, equator and axis, ellipse and quadrant and sextant, are subjective. These lines and figures are' not drawn physically upon the earth or in space: they are mental constructs, they are pointers or notations, but they note and point to the existence and the manner of existence of real objects in a real world.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The method proposed for eliminating the observer was observation, more and more observation, and experiment, testing the observation under given conditions. I observe and record a series of facts and when I have found a sufficient ,number of them I see I am able to put them all together under a general title, a law of the occurrence or pattern of the Objects observed. Further it is not I alone who can do it in any peculiar way personal to me, but that, everybody else can do the same thing and arrive at the same series of facts leading to the same conclusion. I note, for example, the sun's path from day to day in the sky; soon we find that the curves described by the sun are shifted along the curve of an ellipse (that is to say, their locus is an ellipse). The ecliptic is thus found to be an ellipse which means that the earth moves round the sun in an ellipse.
But in the end a difficulty arose in the operation of observation. It proved to be not a simple process. The scientific observer requires for his observation the yard-stick and the time-piece. Now, we have been pushed to admit a queer phenomenon (partly by observation and partly by a compelling deduction) that these two measuring units are not constant; they change with the change of system, that is to say, according to the velocity of the system. In other words, each observer has his own unit of space and time measure. So the elimination of the personal element of the observer has become a complicated mathematical problem, even if one is sure of it finally.
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.
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In any case, at the end of all our peregrinations we seem to circle back to our original Cartesian-cum-Berkeleyean position; we discover that it is not easy to extricate the observed from the observer: the observer is so deep set in the observed, part and parcel of it that there are scientists who consider their whole scientific scheme of the world as only a mental set-up, we may replace it very soon by another scheme equally cogent, subjective all the same. The subject has entered into all objects and any definition of the Object must necessarily depend upon the particular poise of the subject. That is the cosmic immanence of the Purusha spoken of in the Upanishads the one Purusha become many and installed in the heart of each and, every object. There is indeed a status of the Subject in which the subject and the Object are gathered into or form one reality. The observer and the observed are the two ends, the polarisation of a single entity: and all are reals at that level. But the scientific observer is only the mental purusha and in his observation the absolute objectivisation is not possible. The Einsteinian equations that purport to rule out all local view-points can hardly be said to have transcended the co-ordinates of the subject. That is possible only to the consciousness of the cosmic Purusha.
II
Is it then to say that science is no longer science, it has now been converted into philosophy, even into idealistic philosophy? In spite of Russell and Eddington who may be considered in this respect as counsellors of despair, the Objective reality of the scientific field stands, it is asserted, although somewhat changed.
Now, there are four positions possible with regard to the world and reality, depending on the relation between the observer and the observed, the subject and the Object. They are:(I) subjective, (2) objective, (3) subjective objective and (4) objective subjective. The first two are extreme positions, one holding the subject as the sole or absolute reality, the Object being a pure fabrication of its will and idea, an illusion, and the other considering the Object as the true reality, the subject being an outcome, an epiphenomenon of the Object itself, an illusion after all. The first leads to radical or as it is called monistic spirituality the type of which is Mayavada: the second is the highway of materialism, the various avataras of which are Marxism, Pragmatism, Behaviourism etc. In between lie the other two intermediate positions according to the stress or value given to either of the two extremes. The first of the intermediates is the position held generally by the idealists, by many schools of spirituality: it is a major Vedantic position. It says that the outside world, the Object, is not an illusion, a mere fabrication of the mind or consciousness of the subject, but that it exists and is as real as the subject: it is dovetailed into the subject which is a kind of linchpin, holding together and even energising the Object. the Object can further be considered as an expression or embodiment of the subject. Both the subject and the Object are made of the same stuff of consciousness the ultimate reality being consciousness. The subject is the consciousness turned on itself and the Object is consciousness turned outside or going abroad. This is pre-eminently the Upanishadic position. In Europe, Kant holds a key position in this line: and on the whole, idealists from Plato to Bradley and Bosanquet can be said more or less to belong to this category. The second intermediate position views the subject as imbedded into the Object, not the Object into the subject as in the first one: the subject itself is part of the Object something like its self-regarding or self-recording function. In Europe apart possibly from some of the early Greek thinkers (Anaxagoras or Democritus, for example), coming to more recent times, we can say that line runs fairly well-represented from Leibnitz to Bergson. In India the Sankhyas and the Vaisheshikas move towards and approach the position; the Tantriks make a still more near approach.
Once again, to repeat in other terms the distinction which may sometimes appear to carry no difference. First, the subjective objective in which the subject assumes the preponderant position, not denying or minimising the reality of the Object. The external world, in this view, is a movement in and of the consciousness of a universal subject. It is subjective in the sense that it is essentially a function of the subject and does not exist apart from it or outside it; it is objective in the sense that it exists really and is not a figment or imaginative construction of any individual consciousness, although it exists in and through the individual consciousness in so far as that consciousness is universalised, is one with the universal consciousness (or the transcendental, the two can be taken together in the present connection). Instead of the Kantian transcendental idealism we can name it transcendental realism.
In the other case the world exists here below in its own reality, outside all apprehending subject; even the universal subject is in a sense part of it, immanent in itit embraces the subject in its comprehending consciousness and posits it as part of itself or a function of its apprehension. The many Purushas (conscious beings or subjects) are imbedded in the universal Nature, say the Sankhyas. Kali, Divine Nature, is the manifest Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent reality holding within her the transcendent divine Purusha who supports, sanctions and inspires secretly, yet is dependent on the Mahashakti and without her is nothing, unyam. That is how the Tantriks put it. We may mention here, among European philosophers, the rather interesting conclusion of Leibnitz (to which Russell draws our attention): space is subjective to the view of each monad (subject unit) separately, it is objective when it consists of the assemblage of the view-points of all the monads.
The scientific outlook was a protest against the extreme subjective view: it started with the extreme objective standpoint and that remained the fundamental note till the other day, till the fissure of the nucleus opened new horizons to our somewhat bewildered mentality. We seem to have entered into a region where we still hold to the Objective, no doubt, but not absolutely free from an insistent presence of the subjective. It is the second of the intermediate positions we have tried to describe. Science has yet to decide the implications of that position; whether it will try to entrench itself as much as possible on this side of the subjective or whether it can yield further and go over to or link itself with the deeper subjective position.
The distinction between the two may after all be found to be a matter of stress only, involving no fundamental difference, especially as there are sure to be gradations from the one to the other. The most important landmark, however, the most revolutionary step in modern science would be the discovery of the eternal observer or some sign or image of his seated within the observed phenomena of moving thingspuruah prakritisthohi, as the Gita says.
05.10 - Knowledge by Identity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo says, knowledgetrue knowledgecomes always by identity, i.e., when you are identified with the Object, when the knower and the known are one. He further adds that even ordinary knowledge, sense-perception, comes in fact by that way, although it may look otherwise, viz., as a process of logical induction or deduction or both. When I am angry, he illustrates, I know I am angry because I become anger or when I know I am existent, it is because I am one with my existence.
Prof. Das1 seeks to controvert the position. He says, when there is complete identity there is no knowledge. If I am wholly one with the Object, I get merged and lost in it. When I become a thing, I no longer know the thing. If I know a thing, it means the thing is separate from me, in front of me; the relation of subject-object is the very essence, the sine qua non of all knowledge. Taking up the illustration, Prof. Das says: if I know I am angry, it clearly shows that I and my anger are separate entities; similarly, I know I exist, it too shows that I am separate, partially at least, from my existence, that is to say, as knower transcendent to the Object known. In knowing there cannot thus be complete identity.
Prof. Das evidently holds the orthodox, rather rigid, Sankhya position, viz.,the Purusha or witness is always separate from Prakriti, its object. But after all this is only a standpoint, there are other standpoints equally valid and more comprehensive. Sri Aurobindo holds in this respect what may be generically called the Vedantic position where the basic epistemological principle is that the knower and the known (jt and jeya) are fused together in knowledge (jna). One Vedantic line, it is true however, seems to arrive at a different conclusion, for thus it is asserted, where there is absolute identity, who is it that sees or knows or what is it that is seen or known! But this is only one aspect of the phenomenon.
When the Upanishad says, one who knows Brahman be comes Brahman, does it not mean that the very condition of knowing Brahman is to become it? Indeed, there is no contradiction or incommensurability between knowing and becoming, between (what is termed by the mystic as) Knowledge and Realisation. Consciousness has a twofold power, Sri Aurobindo says: the power of apprehension and the power of comprehensionprajna and vijna. Prajnana, the apprehending consciousness, sets the Object in front, away and separate from itself and contemplates it: Vijnana, the comprehending consciousness, on the other hand, comprehends, embraces the Object within itself, as part of its own being. The two are not distinct or incompatible movements, they go together and form one single movement of consciousness. It is the mind, the reason that makes the separation; it is not possible for the mind to view two things simultaneously. It is because of this incapacity of the mind, married to its logic of the finite, that Sri Aurobindo points out the way of correcting it by a higher supramental power which operates in a global way.
Let us go back to our illustration. I am angry means both I am anger and I know I have anger. It is true in fact and experience. Similarly I am (existent) means both I am existence and I know I am existent. The transcendence of the subject (of which Prof. Das speaks) is nothing but the poise of the consciousness as the apprehending Purusha: it does not negate or exclude identification, which is another arm of a biune process. The two are complementary to each other. Also Purusha and Prakriti are nor contradictories, not mutually exclusive; they are dual aspects or dispositions of the same consciousness or self-conscious reality. Consciousness involved and lost to itself and in itself is Prakriti, consciousness evolved and looking out at itself is Purusha. I am aware of myself and I am myself are two ways of saying the same thing. We imagine Shakespeare expressed the experience graphically and poetically when he made his character say:
05.13 - Darshana and Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is a mental approach to spiritual truths and there is a direct and immediate approach or rather contact. The mind sees as though through a mist, a darkling glass, a more or less opaque veil, and the thing envisaged presents a blurred and not unoften a deformed appearance. The mind has its own pre-dispositionsits own categories and terms, its own forms and figureswhich it has to use when it seeks to express that which is beyond it. Naturally the Object, the truth as it is, it cannot apprehend or represent; it gives as it were the reverse side of an embroidery work. It goes round about the thing, has to take recourse to all kinds of contortions and gymnastics and grimaces to ape the natural gesture of the truth. But mind acts in this way, as a veil rather than' a medium, when one is stationed in it or below it and strains to look at what is above and beyond. On the other hand, if the consciousness is stationed above the mind, that is to say, if it has direct access or contact with the truth, the spiritual reality, in that case, mind need not act as a veil, it too can be made transparent, and sufflused with the higher light, it too can translate faithfully, present and embody the reality beyond somewhat as it actually is, in its native rhythm and figure and not diffracted and diffused through a hazy atmosphere.
European thought, European philosophy particularly, moves under the aegis of the Mind. It takes its stand within the Mind and from there tries to reach out to truths and realities; and therefore, however far it goes, its highest flights of perception, its most intimate contacts with spirit-truths are 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought'. The Indian standpoint, on the contrary, is first to contact the truth by a direct realisationthrough meditation, concentration, an uplifting and a deepening of the consciousness, through Yoga, spiritual discipline, and then endeavour to express the truth thus realised, directly intuited or revealed, through mental terms, to make it familiar and communicable to the normal intelligence. Mind, so subordinated and keyed to a new rhythm, becomes, as far as it is possible for it, a channel, a vehicle and not a veil. All the main systems of Indian philosophy have this characteristic as their background. Each stands on a definite experience, a spiritual realisation, a direct contact with an aspect of truth and in and -through that seeks to give a world-view, building "up an intellectual system, marshalling rational conclusions that are natural to it or derive inevitably from it. In the Upanishads, which preceded the Darshanas, the spiritual realisations were not yet mentally systematised or logically buttressed: truths were delivered there as self-evident statements, as certitudes luminous in their own au thenticity. We accept them without question and take them into our consciousness as forming its fundamental norms, structuring its most intimate inscape. This is darana, seeing, as philosophy is named in India. One sees the truth or reality and describes it as it is seen, its limbs and gestures, its constituents and functions. Philosophy here is fundamentally a recording of one's vision and a translation or presentation of it in mental terms.
05.25 - Sweet Adversity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"So long we lived in anxiety, now at last we are going to live in hope." So said the delicious French playwright Tristan Bernard when the Germans came in, occupied Paris, arrested and imprisoned him (in the World War No. I). A noble truth nobly said by a noble soul thrown into the very midst of danger and calamity. Indeed, a danger is a danger so long as it is away and has not reached us. It is the menace, the imminence that causes more fright and upsetting than the thing itself. For it is imagination that enlarges and intensifies the Object and makes of us craven cowards. The uncertainty hangs like a pall and casts a disabling influence upon the mind and nerves: one does not know what exactly to do, since the full situation is not presented or grasped and a fearful speculation becomes the only occupation.
But once the danger is right upon us and we are inside the jaws of death, there is an end to all speculation and anxiety; there are then two issues possible. One is that of absolute helplessness and hopelessness, of an unquestioning resignation, a quiet bowing down to the inevitable and implacable destiny. Many a victim on the gallows felt like that: an incredible quietness seized them in their last moments. Very often it is the quietness of the shadow of Deatha supreme inertness, tamas, coming over and possessing. But there is another issue, a more luminous egress. When all uncertainty is set at rest as to the in vitability of the calamity, when circumstances have really besieged us in their unshakable steel-frame and we are doomed obviously, it is then that comes the chance for the hero-soul to stand out and declare its freedom and immortalitydeny and strive to reverse the obvious.
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To live in hope, to work in hope is not merely to live in illusion and to work for a chimera. On one consideration, to live otherwise, in hopelessness, cannot cure matters, even if the matter is truly and really as dark as it looks. To view a matter of fact solely and wholly in the matter of fact way does not give the right perspective of things, a proper appreciation of appearance and reality. It is well known that often we project our imagination and apprehension upon the external world and bring about or help to bring about results that were only a possibility. Our fear calls for the Object feared and makes it a reality. Apart from that, however, and on a deeper consideration, to live in hope is to react against the danger apprehended, to call in a help and power that is or can be always at our disposal, which can not only console but save. Even if death be the end and there is no escape, yet we would be freed from the wounds and scars that it inflicts upon our being with its ignorance and unconsciousness, we would learn to pass over luminously and in the full freedom of the spirit.
Hope is the image of the soul's prophetic vision. It is not just a way of escape from present sorrows, but a bridge-head leading to victory and fulfilment.
05.32 - Yoga as Pragmatic Power, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The ordinary man does works, achieves the Object he aims at, through processes and means which, however powerful and effective, can be only moderately and approximately so. The amount of time and energy wasted is not proportionate to the result obtained. Man knows to utilise only a fraction of the energy collected in a system: the best of dispositions and organisation can harness just a modicum of the total stock, the rest is frittered away or locked up, whether it is vital energy or mental energy or even physical energy. That is because the central power that drives, the consciousness that controls the whole mechanism is of an inferior quality, of a lower potential. The Yogi views all energy as various forms and gradations of consciousness. So what he proposes, as a good scientist, is to lift up the consciousness and thus raise its potential and effectivity and minimise the waste. The higher the consciousness, the greater the effectivity, that is to say, the pragmatic value. As we rise in the scale there is less and less waste and greater and greater utilisation until we reach a climax, a critical degree, where there is absolutely no waste and where there is the utmost, the total utilisation of the whole energy. This supreme peak of consciousness that is absolute energy Sri Aurobindo names the Supermind. But on lesser levels too the spiritual consciousness is dynamic and effectivepragmatic in a way that the ordinary, limited, externally pragmatic consciousness cannot hope to be.
Sometimes it is urged that in the worldly affairs we should move according to the worldly procedure, otherwise to import into mundane things spiritual values would merely confuse issues and end in failure in both the fieldsfallen from hence, lost from thence". Of course there are spiritual points of view that go ill with the mundane, as indeed there are mundane considerations that do not match with the spiritual. The two categories of view-point have been succinctly and luminously named by Sri Aurobindo as the Materialist Denial and the Ascetic Refusal.1 But there are other points of view, .other lines of approach which seek a harmony and union between Spirit and Matter, that envisage the marriage of Heaven and Earth.
06.08 - The Individual and the Collective, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
An integral sadhana cannot be confined to the individual alone; an element of collectivity must enter into it. An individual is not an isolated being in any way. There are, of course, schools of Yoga and philosophy that seek to isolate the individual, consider him as an entity hemmed in by his own consciousness; indeed they view the individuals as all distinct and separate, each a closed circle or sphere, they may barely touch each other but never interpenetrate or inter-communicate. Each stands as a solitary island, all together forming the vast archipelago of the universe. This is a position; no doubt, that can be acquired by a kind of discipline of the consciousness, though not to a great perfection; but it is not a natural or necessary poise. Normally, individuals do merge into each other and form one weft of give and take. A desire, an impulse, even a thought that rises in you, goes out of you, overflows you and spreads around even to the extreme limit of the earth, like a Hertzian wave. Again, any movement in any person anywhere in the world would come to you, penetrate you, raise a similar vibration in you, even though you may not so recognise it but consider it as something exclusively personal to you. You send out vibrations into the world and the world sends out vibrations into you. Individual life is the meeting-ground of these outgoing and incoming forces. It is precisely to avoid this circle or cycle of world-vibrations that the older Yogis used to leave the world, away from society, retire to mountain-tops, into the virgin forest where they hoped to find themselves alone and aloof, to be single with the Single Self. This is a way out, but it is not the only or the best solution. It is not the best solution, for although apparent-ly one is alone on the hill-top, in the desert crypt, or the forest womb, one always carries with oneself a whole world within, the normal nature with all its instincts and impulses, reactions, memories and hopes: you cut away the outside, run away from it, but what about the outside that is within you? The taste for a tasty thing does not drop with the removal of the Object. Secondly, such an individual solution, even if it were possible, would still be a purely personal matter and, in the ultimate analysis, egoistic. It is why the Buddha refused to enter definitely into Nirvana and withdrew from the brink to work among men. Indeed, the real solution is else-where. It is not to withdraw or go away but to find within the orbit here a centre, a focus of consciousness which is not controlled by the outside forces but can control them, which is not coloured by them but can lend them its own luminosity. That is the soul or the psychic centre.
And this centre is not an isolated entity in its nature: it is, as it were, a universal centre, that is to say, it links itself indissolubly in a secret sense of identity with all other centres. For this self is only one of the selves through which the One Self has multiplied itself for a varied self-objectification. The light that shines here, the fire that burns here and the delight that flows here illumine, purify and revitalise not only the individual in which it dwells, but move abroad and extend into the other individuals with which it lives in spiritual identity.
06.18 - Value of Gymnastics, Mental or Other, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Intellectual activity is a kind of gymnastics. What is the value of physical gymnastics? It develops the muscles, makes them strong, supple and agile. But simply to develop them, to make them grow as much as possible or to take delight in a mere muscle-bound body is not the ideal; it rather frustrates the very object of gymnastics. the Object is to develop, streng then, shape all the limbs of the body and organise and harmonise them into a beautiful and capable whole. A particular exercise is not to be indulged in for its own sake: all the energy of the body turned to that alone and the whole attention devoted to that one thing. An exclusive concentration upon a single physical feat does not bring out the full capacity of the body. It is to that end, the fullness of the body potential, that the culture of the bodily limbs is to be directed. In the same way, mental culture the power of thinking, reasoning, arguinghas its value in its relation to the total culture of the mind and consciousness. There are higher regions of consciousness beyond the reach of the intellect; and you have to stop all intellectual activity, make your mind a total blank before you can hope to reach there. And indulgence even in so-called higher or philosophical speculations can only block the way to the true consciousness and knowledge. And yet you cannot leave the intellectual faculties uncared for or undeveloped on the plea that something higher is needed. In the physical body it need not be your ideal to become a muscle man; but neither would you like to have frail, ill-grown, rickety limbs that are weak and unshapely. With regard to your mental body too it would not serve any purpose to have a mind or intellect that is unable to think powerfully, cogently, closely.
It is harmful when you take to mental gymnastics only for its own sake, to exclusive intellectual acrobaticsdiscussions, disputations, verbal quibbles, etc., etc.; in that case the result attained is a disproportionate growth. But the development of the mind, even of the logical mind, can be and must be made part of the integral development, it must attain its true form, stature and strength, as a help towards and finally as an expression in its own field of the divinity, the highest and richest consciousness in man, even as the body too is to express and make concrete the supreme beauty and vigour of the perfect being.
06.27 - To Learn and to Understand, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed it was not very much necessary for the ancient sages and occultists to try to hide their knowledge in an obscure language, in codes and symbols and ciphers for fear of misuse by the common uninitiate; even if they had expressed their knowledge in ordinary language, ordinary people would not have understood it at all. It would be like my speaking to you in Chinese-, you would not make out anything of it. One comprehends only what one already possesses, that is to say, you must have within you something at least of what you want to know and understand, something corresponding to it, similar in nature and vibration. That is what I mean when I say that you should be open, your mind and consciousness should be turned and attuned to the Object it wishes to seize; it must have some light in it in order to receive the light outside and beyond. If it is mere obscurity, the light does not light; even if it manages to come it departs soon or is engulfed in the darkness.
The human mind can seize things only in three dimensions. A three-dimensional knowledge is its normal possession. But there is a fourth and a fifth dimension (which some intellectuals in Europe have begun to guess at): indeed there are at least as many as twelve dimensions in reference to the present creation. We cannot readily picture a four-dimensional object, a fifth dimension borders on the bizarre and beyond that it is all a blank to the human consciousness. If I spoke of these multi-dimensional experiences, what would you make of them?
06.30 - Sweet Holy Tears, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The tears that the soul sheds are holy, are sweet; they come bidden by the Divine and are blessed by His Presence. They are like the dew from heaven. For they are pure, they are spontaneous, welling out of a heart of innocent freedom. The feeling is infinitely impersonal, completely egoless: there is only an intense movement of self-giving, total simple self-giving. Tears are the natural expression in one who needs help, who has the complete surrender and simplicity of a child, the abdication of all vanity. Such tears are beautiful in their nature and beneficent in character. They are therefore like dewdrops that belong to heaven as it were and come from there with a sovereign healing virtue. Such tears are not idle tears, as the English poet says in a vein of melancholy, they are instinct with a power, an effective energy which brings you relief, ease and peace. And it is not only pure but purifying, this feeling made of quiet intensity and aspiration and surrender: it is unmixed, free from any demand or need of reward or return; it is so impersonal that the aspiration is, so to say, even independent of the Object for which it exists.
At a supreme crisis of the soul when there seems to be no issue before you, if you come, in the naked simplicity of your whole being, pour yourself out in a flood of self-giving, to one who can be your refugein the end the Divine alone can be such a oneand who can respond fully to the intensity and ardent sincerity of your approach, you come holding your tearful soul as a complete self-offering, you do not know what tremendous response you call forth, the blessing divine you bring down in and around you.
06.35 - Second Sight, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Perception means contact with the Object. Now, what is it that contacts? In ordinary sense-perception, the normal human sense-perception, for example, it is the physical vibration emanating from the Object that contacts the physical organ: the distance at which the vibration can be received depending on the sensitivity of the recipient nerves. In man the sensitivity is limited, in the animal it is highly intense. This is however, only one factor of the phenomenon. We will explain.
As it is well known, there are three levels of consciousness: the physical, the vital and the mental; for the present we leave out of consideration the fourth or the spiritual (including the psychic). Not only so, in each level or plane all the others are also involved i.e. lie secreted. Thus, in the mind there is a vital mind and a physical mind, in the vital there is a mental vital and a physical vital. So, in the physical too there are these three grades: (l) physical physical, (2) vital physical and (3) mental physical.
06.36 - The Mother on Herself, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You will say if the truth I bring is supreme and omnipotent, why does it not compel the world to accept it, why can it not break the world's resistance, force man to accept the good it refuses? But that is not the way in which the world was created nor the manner in which it moves and develops. The origin of creation is freedom: it is a free choice in the consciousness that has projected itself as the Objective world. This freedom is the very character of its fundamental nature. If the world denies its supreme truth, its highest good, it does so in the delight of its free choice; and if it is to turn back and recognise that truth and that good, it must do so in the same delight of free choice. If the erring world was ordered to turn right and immediately did so, if things were done in a trice, through miracles, there would be then no point in creating a world. Creation means a play of growth: it is a journey, a movement in time and space through graded steps and stages. It is a movement awayaway from its source and a movement towards: that is the principle or plan on which it stands. In this plan there is no compulsion on any of the elements composing the world to forswear its natural movement, to obey to a dictate from outside: such compulsion would break the rhythm of creation.
And yet there is a compulsion. It is the secret pressure of one's own nature that drives it forward through all vicissitudes back again to its original source. When it is said that the Divine Grace can and should do all, it means nothing more and nothing less than that: the Divine Grace only accelerates the process of return and recognition. But on the side of the journeying element, the soul, there must be awakened a conscious collaboration, an initial consent and a constantly renewed adhesion. It is this that brings out, at least helps to establish outside on the physical level, the force that is already and has always been at work within and on the subtler and higher levels. That is the pattern of the play, the system of conditions under which the game is carried out. The Grace works and incarnates in and through a body of willing and conscious collaborators; these become themselves part and parcel of the Force that works.
07.01 - Realisation, Past and Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You think the work would have been easier? Such beings, on the contrary, would have been less manageable and malleable. For what is most difficult is to convince someone who has had already a realisation. He believes he has reached the goal and no further progress is necessary for him. It generally happens especially to men who have made effort and realised the Object of the effort that, they stop with that, because they feel they have reached their final goal. They get settled and fixed there. It was their personal goal and they have got it. Their brain gets crystallised and their consciousness fossilised. They will live there all their life and will never know how to move. So I say, those who have had an experience or a realisation in themselves are not: necessarily the most advanced. Such a person lacks an element of simplicity, modesty, plasticity that spontaneously come to one who feels that he has not grown fully and has to develop further.
A realised person, if I may say so graphically and somewhat strongly, is a finished product to be kept in a glass-case for show in a museum. He is a sample showing what has been done and what could be done. But you do not have there the stuff to do more. I would prefer for my work to have someone who may have little knowledge, but who has much goodwill, a great aspiration, who feels within him this flame, this need to go on. I say, he may know little, he may have realised even less, but here is good material with which one can go far, very far. Besides, there is another point to note. As in mountain-climbing a guide is very useful, even indispensable, who can show you the proper way and make it easy for you to climb higher and higher altitudes, so in spiritual ascension, a guide, if you have the good fortune to meet one, will help you to rise much higher than you could do yourself with your own personal strength and your own personal view of a fixed goalyou are not proud of your discovery and you do not waste time or energy in useless searches and enquiries.
07.13 - Divine Justice, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You must understand once for all that the Divine, when he acts is not moved by human notions. Possibly he does things even without what we call reason. In any case the reasons are not of the human kind; above all, the Divine has not that sense of justice which man has. For example, when you see a man full of greed for money, trying to cheat people just for the sake of getting a few rupees, your idea of justice cries out that such a man should be deprived of all money, he must be reduced to poverty. But actually you find things happening to the contrary. Although that is only the appearance of the situation; behind there is an altogether different picture. The greedy gets the Object of his greed, but he has to make an exchange, give up some other possibilities. He gets money but he loses in his consciousness. And then it also happens very often that when he does get what he desired so much, he finds himself not so happy, generally he is even less happy than before: he is tormented by the wealth he has gained. You must not judge things by apparent success or by apparent failure. One can say, on the whole, that the Divine gives what one asks for and that is the best way in which one gets his lesson. If your desire is ignorant, unconscious, obscure, selfish, you increase in yourself ignorance, unconsciousness, obscurity and selfishness, that is to say, you move away more and more from truth and consciousness and happiness, in other words, away from the Divine. For the Divine, however, there is only one thing which is true, the Divine Consciousness, the Divine Union. Each time you put material things in front of you, you become more and more material, you push behind more and more the Divine. To the eye of the ignorant you may have all the appearance of wonderful success, but this success, from the standpoint of truth, is a terrible defeat, you have bartered truth for falsehood.
To judge by appearances, by apparent success is an act of complete ignorance. Even in the case of a person hardened to the core, who has apparently the utmost success, there is a counterpart: exactly this hardening, this evil that is put up thicker and thicker between the outer consciousness and the inner truth becomes also more and more unbearable. The outer success has to be paid for very dearly. One must be very great, very pure, one must have a very high, very unselfish spiritual consciousness to be able to succeed and yet not be affected. There is nothing so difficult to bear than success. That is the true test in life. When you are not successful, you turn very naturally to yourself, go within you, seek there comfort for the outer failure. And they who have the Flame within them and the Divine helping them truly, that is to say, if they are mature enough to get the help, if they are ready to follow the path, must expect blows coming upon them one after another, because that helps. Indeed that is the most powerful, most direct and most effective help. But if you have 'Success, take care! Ask yourself, at what price you have had it? What is the thing you have paid for the success? Of course, there are people of a different kind. They who have gone beyond, who are conscious of their soul, who are entirely surrender they can succeed and success does not touch them. But one has to rise very high to be able to shoulder the burden of success. It is perhaps the last and final test that the Divine puts to anyone. He says: Now that you are noble and high and unselfish, you belong to Me alone. I shall make you triumph. We shall see if you can bear the blow!
07.15 - Divine Disgust, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Naturally, the poison will not have the same effect upon the Divine as upon man. For there is an essential difference between a state of ignorance and a state of knowledge. Something untoward happens to you in your normal state of ignorance, it has a certain character and brings mentally certain results: but the same thing happening to you in a state of knowledge will not carry the same effect. For example, take a very material thing, a blow, a right royal physical blow, well, if you are in a state of inconscience and ignorance, as you usually are, you will have to suffer the full consequence which in its turn depends wholly upon the force of the blow, who or what gave the blow and the helplessness of the Object. But the the same blow delivered in the same way by the same agent but upon a being who is conscious and full of knowledge, will produce instantly a reaction reducing the natural consequences to a minimum, even annulling the consequences altogether; for the reaction here is a reaction of knowledge, of light and not that of ignorance, of obscurity. On the moral level the action can be clearly noticed. For example, you can receive an emotional shock, not in egoistic blindness, that is to say, identifying yourself with it or drowned in it; you can hold it away from you, look at it in an objective manner, see what it is, note the nature of its vibration, etc., etc., and then you put the light of your knowledge, the ultra-violet ray, as it were, of truth upon it. As a result, there comes a new disposition, the shock loses its effectivity. Even so, the physical result of a physical blow can be obviated. If that were not possible what would be the utility of the Divine taking upon himself the evil thing. Evil would continue in the same way and the world continue suffering in the same way. Precisely because the obscure vibrations are transformed into vibrations of light in the divine consciousness that the Divine takes upon and within himself all the ills of the world.
In the case of the physical occurrence, the knowledge I speak of is the inner knowledge of the body cells, their existence, composition, distribution and the knowledge of the consequences of the blow, its natural and expected effects. Also at the same time there should be the knowledge of what the cells should be like, how they ought to react to the blow. And the procedure adopted too is quite different from that of physical Nature which takes hours, days, months to repair a damage; the inner knowledge can do the thing immediately. This inner knowledge can be brought down from its highest source. Instead of the mere psychological knowledge, one can call down the supramental knowledge and focus it upon the part of the body endangered. If the elements of the body, the cells come under the influence of the force of truth and receive it, then there can be an immediate new ordering of the elements according to the higher law. That will bring about not only the cure from the blow received, the mending of the accident, but initiate a big progress in the general consciousness. This power to comm and the consciousness has no limit. If you have committed an error, even a grave error, and if you can yet call upon the consciousness of truth, this power of the supramental and allow it to work, it will give you an occasion to make a formidable progress. In other words, never be discouraged if you have blundered, blundered even more than once. Only you must keep your will firm, and take sometimes the unshakable resolution not to repeat. Rest assured you will in the end triumph over your difficulty.
07.21 - On Occultism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It has been often said and it is very true that as soon as you enter the domain of the invisible, the very first things you meet are literally frightful. If you have no fear, then alone you are safe; but the least fear means the utmost peril. It is for this reason that in ancient days the aspirant had to pass through a severe discipline for a long time precisely with the Object of getting rid of fear and therefore of all possibility of danger before he was permitted to start on the way.
That is why till now I have not spoken to you of it. But if any of you feel you have a disposition for such things, or some special aptitude in this direction and are ready to surmount all weaknesses, well, I am at your disposal, ready to help you and initiate you into the mysteries. But I am afraid you have still to grow a little more, become more mature before I can take up the charge.
07.25 - Prayer and Aspiration, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are many kinds of prayers. There is one external and physical, that is to say, simply words learnt by rote and repeated mechanically. It does not mean much. It has usually one result, however, making you quiet. If you go on repeating a few words or sounds for some time, it puts you into a state of calmness in the end. There is another kind which is the natural expression of a wish; you want a particular thing and you express it clearly. You can pray for an, object or for a circumstance, you can pray also for a person or for yourself. There is still another kind in which the prayer borders on aspiration and the two meet: it is the spontaneous formulation of a living experience; it shoots out of the depth of your being, it is the utterance of something lived within: it wants to express gratitude for the experience, asks for its continuation or seeks an explanation. It is then, what I said, almost an aspiration. Aspiration, however, does not necessarily formulate itself in words; if it uses words at all, it makes of them a kind of invocation. Thus, you wish to be in a certain condition. You have, for example, found in you something which is not in harmony with your ideal, a movement of obscurity or ignorance or even bad will. You wish to see it changed. You do not express the thing in so many words, but it rises up in you like a flame, an ardent offering of the experience itself which seeks increase and greatening to be made more clear and precise. It is true all this is capable of being expressed in words, if one tries to recall and note down the experience. But the experience, the aspiration itself is, as I say, like a flame shooting up and contains within it the very thing it asks for. I say asks for, but the movement is not at all that of a desire; it is truly a flame, the flame of purifying will carrying at its centre the very object which it wished to be realised. The discovery of a fault in you impels you to make it an occasion for more progress, for greater self-discipline, for further ascension towards the Divine. It opens out a door upon your future, which you wish to be clearer, truer, intenser; all that gathers in you like a concentrated force and tosses you up in a movement of ascension. It needs no expression in words. It is indeed a flame that leaps up. Such is true aspiration. Prayer usually is something much more external; it is about a very precise object. It is always formulated; for the formulation itself makes what a prayer is. You may have an aspiration and you can transcribe it into a prayer, but the aspiration itself exceeds the prayer. It is something much more intimate, much more self-forgetful, living only in the Object it wishes to be or the thing to do, almost identified with it. A prayer can be of a very high quality. Instead of being a request for a fulfilment of your particular desire, it may express your thankfulness and gratefulness for what the Divine has done and is doing for you. You are not busy with your little self and its egoistic interests, you ask for the Divine's ways in you and in the world. This leads you to the border of aspiration. For aspiration too has many degrees and it is expressed on many levels. But the core of aspiration is in the psychic being, it is there at its purest, for there is its origin and source. Prayers come from the other, the lower or secondary levels of being. That is to say, there are physical or material prayers, asking for physical or material things, vital prayers, mental prayers; there are psychic prayers and spiritual prayers too. Each has its own character and its own value. I say again there is a certain type of prayer which is so spontaneous and so disinterested, more like an appeal or a call, generally not for one's own sake, but acting sometimes like an intercession with the Divine on behalf of others. Such a prayer is extremely powerful. I have seen innumerable cases where such a prayer had brought about its immediate fulfilment. It means a great faith, a great fervour, a great sincerity and also a great simplicity of heart, something which does not calculate, which does not bargain or barter, does not give with the idea of receiving. The majority of prayers are precisely made with the idea of giving so that one may receive. But I was speaking of the rarer variety which also does exist, which is a kind of thanksgiving, a canticle or a hymn.
To sum up then it can be said that a prayer is always formed of words. Words have different values, according to the state of consciousness of the person when he formulates it. But always prayer is a formulated thing. But one can aspire without formulating. And then, prayer needs a person to whom one prays. There is, of course, a certain class of people whose conception of the universe is such that there is no room in it for the Divine (the famous French scientist Laplace, for example). Such people are not likely to favour the existence of any being superior to themselves to whom they can appeal or look up for guidance and help. There is no question of prayer for them. But even they, though they may not pray, may aspire. They may not believe in God, but they may believe, for example, in progress. They may conceive of the world as a progressive movement, that it is becoming better and better, rising higher and higher, growing constantly to a nobler fulfilment. They can ask for, will for, aspire for such progress; they need not look for the Divine. Aspiration requires faith, certainly, but not faith necessarily in a personal God. But prayer is always addressed to a person, a person who hears and grants it. There lies the great difference between the two. Intellectual people admit aspiration, but prayer they consider as something inferior, fit for unintellectual persons. The mystics say, aspiration is quite all right, but if your aspiration is to be heard and fulfilled, you must also pray, know how to pray and to whomwho else but the Divine? The aspiration need not be towards any person; the aspiration is not for a person, but for a state of consciousness, a knowledge, a realisation. Prayer adds to it the relation to a person. Prayer is a personal thing addressed to a person for a thing which he alone can grant.
07.45 - Specialisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You have, for example, several subjects to learn at school. Well, learn as many as possible. If you study at home, read as many varieties as possible. I know you are usually asked and advised to follow a different way. You are to take as few subjects as possible and specialise. Yes, that is the general ideal: specialisation, to be an expert in one thing. If you wish to be a good philosopher, read philosophy only; if you wish to be a good chemist, do only chemistry; and even you should concentrate upon only one problem or thesis in philosophy or chemistry. In sports you are asked to do the same. Choose one item and fix your attention upon that alone. If you want to be a good tennis player, think of tennis alone. However, I am not of that opinion. My experience is different. I believe, there are general faculties in man which he should acquire and cultivate more than specialise himself. Of course, if it is your ambition to be a Monsieur or Madame Curie who wanted to discover one particular thing, to find out a new mystery of a definite kind, then you have to concentrate upon the one thing in view. But even then, once the Object is gained, you can turn very well to other things. Besides, it is not an impossibility in the midst of the one-pointed pursuit to find occasions and opportunities to be interested in other pursuits.
From my childhood I have been hearing of the same lesson; I am afraid it was taught also in the days of our fathers and grandfa thers and great grandfa thers, namely, that if you wish to be successful in something you must do that only and nothing else. I was rebuked very much because I was busy with many different things at the same time. I was told I would be in the end good for nothing. I was studying, I was painting, I was doing music and many other things. I was repeatedly warned that my painting would be worthless, my music would be worthless, my studies would be incomplete and defective if I had my way. Perhaps it was true; but I found that my way, too, had its advantagesprecisely the advantages I was speaking of at the outset, namely, it widens and enriches the mind and consciousness, makes it supple and flexible, gives it a spontaneous power to understand and handle anything new presented to it. If, however, I had wanted to become an executant of the first order and play in concerts, then of course I would have had to restrict myself. Or in painting if my aim had been to be one of the great artists of the age, I could have done only that and nothing else. One understands the position very well, but it is only a point of view. I do not see why I should become the greatest musician or the greatest painter. It seems to me to be nothing but vanity.
08.02 - Order and Discipline, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There are people who live in rooms apparently clean and tidy. But open a cupboard, pull out a drawer, you will find there a battlefield: all is mixed up. They have a head too that is very much like thata poor small head where ideas are in the same condition as the Objects outside in the cupboard. They have not organised them, put them in order. You may take it as an absolute rule. I have never seen a man who keeps things in a disorder and yet possesses a logical brain. In him ideas like the Objects are thrown together pell-mell, the most dissimilar and contradictory ideas form a jumble, they are not organised, harmonised into a higher synthesis.
Hence, to know a man's character you need not spend your time in talking to him, you just go and open a drawer of his or open his almirah, you will know. But I may speak of someone I shall tell you presently who it iswho used to live in the midst of heaps of books and papers. You enter into his room, you find piles of them everywhere. But if by chance, you were, to your misfortune, to displace a single sheet of paper, he would know perfectly well and would ask immediately who was it that had disturbed the papers. There were masses of things, on your entering you would not find your way. But each thing had its placenotes, letters, books, all in order and you could not mishandle them without his knowing it. Well, it was Sri Aurobindo. In other words, you must not confuse orderliness with poverty. Naturally if you have a few thingsa dozen books and a limited number of objectsit is easier to have them properly arranged. But what is to be aimed at is a logical order, a conscious intelligent order among a multiplicity of objects. That requires a capacity for organisation. It is a capacity which every one must acquire and possess, unless of course you are physically disabledwhen one is ill or sickly or maimed and has not the required strength: even then there is a limit. I know of sick people who could tell you: "Open me that drawer, you will find on the right or on the left or at the bottom such and such a thing." They could not themselves move and handle the things but knew where they were. Apart from such cases, the ideal must be one of order, organisation, like that of a library for example, where you have thousands and thousands of books that are yet all arranged, classified, docketed and you have only to name a title and in a few minutes the book is in your hand of course, it is not the work of a single person; even then, the pattern is there as an example to follow.
08.05 - Will and Desire, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Many hold this last idea all their life. When they are told to overcome their desires, they answer, "The best way of overcoming them is to satisfy them." But what is needed is not merely to change the Object of desire, but change the impulse, the movement itself. For that purpose, a good deal of knowledge and understanding and experience are required. That you cannot expect of young children. First of all, they do not possess the capacity for reasoning and you cannot explain the matter to them, they will not understand, your reasons. It is why the parents have normally no other way except to cut them short, saying: "Stop, you bother us". That is how they get out of the difficulty.
It is not a solution. The task is hard, demanding sustained effort and unshakable patience. There are people, a good many, who, although no longer children, yet continue to be so all their life: they too do not understand reason. If you tell them, they are not reasonable and that it is not possible to be continually satisfying their desires, they simply think: "These people are quite unpleasant, they are not amiable." That is all.
08.06 - A Sign and a Symbol, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It means that you must be able to formulate your aspiration during the time the star is visible, that is to say, a very short time. Now, if an aspiration can be formed and formulated in such a short time, it shows that the aspiration is there all the while quite at the front of your consciousness. Of course, the thing is true of the spiritual aspiration only: it is not applicable to matters of ordinary life. So I say that if you are capable of articulating your aspiration in a split second, it means that the Object of your aspiration lies in front and dominates your consciousness. And necessarily whatever dominates your consciousness is likely to be quickly realised.
I had the occasion to make the experiment and have had the experience. It happened exactly as you say. I saw a shooting star and as it passed, at the precise moment, leaped out of my consciousness the words: To realise for my body union with the Divine. And before the year ended, it was done.
08.13 - Thought and Imagination, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When you think of a person or a thing you are immediately I there and come into contact with the Object of your thought. But this happens in the thought world only; you know nothing of the vital or physical context of the Object. Thought is conscious of thought only in the mental world; by your thought you can be conscious of the mental atmosphere of the distant object, of the thought of the person to whom you go, but nothing else, absolutely nothing of his vital or physical.
If you want to know of the vital you must go to the Object vitally; it means an exteriorisation that leaves the body at least three-fourths in trance. And if you want to see things physically you will have to go out in your most material subtle physical; that leaves the body in an entirely cataleptic condition. These things cannot be done without there being someone by your side who has the right knowledge and who can protect you.
But the mental exteriorisation happens constantly. It puts you in relation with the mental world. If you are very conscious and the person you see in thought is also very conscious, then you can know of the ideas and opinions which the person might form at that time, but even then only indirectly, you do not know directly.
08.24 - On Food, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Originally very material in nature, much like the animal, man in he course of his progress through centuries or millenniums became more and more mental, more and more vital. And as he grew more mental and more vital, refinement became possible, the intelligence increased, but the possibility too of perversion and deformation. It is one thing to educate the senses so as to bring into them every variety of refinement, growth, knowledge, appreciation, taste and all that, meaning a progress in consciousness: it is quite another to be attached to the Objects of sense, to have greed, to be a glutton.
You can make a very thorough study of taste, for example, you can acquire a detailed knowledge of the different tastes of different things, the association of an idea or notion with taste, which means not perhaps a progress in the vital, but at least a development of this particular sense. That is permissible but there is a great difference between that and eating out of greed, thinking of food all the while, eating not because of its need but because of desire and gluttony.
09.05 - The Story of Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first step then is to cease to be egoistic. It is the same rule for all, not only for those who want to do Yoga, but even in ordinary life, if you want to love, truly, first of all you must not love yourself and particularly do not love in an egoistic way; you must give yourself to the Object of your love without asking for anything in return. This is the very elementary discipline, if you are to transcend yourself, and live a life that is not wholly commonplace.
In Yoga, you add something more. It is, as I have said, the will to pierce through this limited and human form of love and discover the principle of Divine Love that is there behind; it is there then that you are sure to arrive at a result. That is better than drying up one's heart. It is more difficult perhaps, but it is always better because, by so doing, you do not make others suffer egoistically, you leave others to their own movements, you concern yourself with your own transformation, without imposing your will upon others and that, even in ordinary life, is a step towards something that is a little higher and more harmonious.
1.001 - The Aim of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
All knowledge gathered through observations, whether through a microscope or telescope, in laboratories, etc., is ultimately invalid because it presupposes the static existence of the observer himself, the scientist's capacity to impartially observe and to unconditionally understand the conditions of what he observes very strange indeed, really. How does the scientist take for granted or imagine that he is an unconditioned observer and everything that he observes is conditioned? It is not true, because the observing scientist is as much conditioned by factors as the Object that he observes. So, who is to observe the conditions of his own observing apparatus: his body, his senses the eyes, for example, and even the mind, which is connected to the body? Inasmuch as the observing scientist the observing individual, the knowing person is as much conditioned and limited as the Object that is observed or seen, it is not possible to have ultimately valid knowledge in this world.
All our knowledge is insufficient, inadequate, temporal, empirical ultimately useless. It does not touch the core of life. Therefore, we will find that any learned person, whatever be the depth of his learning, whatever be the greatness of his scholarship, is miserable in the end. The reason is that life is different from this kind of knowledge. It is an all-comprehensive organic being in which the knowing individual is unfortunately included, a fact which misses the attention of every person. It is not possible for anyone to observe or see or know anything, inasmuch as the conditions which describe the Object of observation also condition the subject of observation. The Veda points this out in a mystical formula:tam eva viditv atimtyum eti nnya panth vidyate ayanya. Now, when it is said, by knowing 'That', every problem is solved, the Veda does not mean knowing this object or that object, or this person or that person, or this thing or that thing, or this subject or that subject it is nothing of that kind. It is a 'That' with a capital 'T', which means to say, the true object of knowledge. The true object of knowledge is to be known, and when 'That' is known, all problems are solved.
What are problems? A problem is a situation that has arisen on account of the irreconcilability of one person, or one thing, with the status and condition of another person, or another thing. I cannot reconcile my position with your position; this is a problem. You cannot reconcile your position with mine; this is a problem. Why should there be such a condition? How is it that it is not possible for me to reconcile myself with you? It is not possible because there is no clear perception of my relationship with you. I have a misconceived idea of my relationship with you and, therefore, there is a misconceived adjustment of my personality with yours, and a misconception cannot solve a problem. The problem is nothing but this misconception nothing else. The irreconcilability of one thing with another arises on account of the basic difficulty I mentioned, that the person who wishes to bring about this reconciliation, or establish a proper relationship, misses the point of one's own vital connection underline the word 'vital' with the Object or the person with which, or with whom, this reconciliation is to be effected. Inasmuch as this kind of knowledge is beyond the purview or capacity of the ordinary human intellect, the knowledge of the Veda is regarded as supernormal, superhuman: apaurusheya not created or manufactured by an individual. This is not knowledge that has come out of reading books. This is not ordinary educational knowledge. It is a knowledge which is vitally and organically related to the fact of life. I am as much connected with the fact of life as you are, and so in my observation and study and understanding of you, in my relationship with you, I cannot forget this fact. The moment I disconnect myself from this fact of life which is unanimously present in you as well as in me, I miss the point, and my effort becomes purposeless.
We are gradually led by this proclamation of the Veda into a tremendous vision of life which requires of us to have a superhuman power of will to grasp the interrelationship of things. This difficulty of grasping the meaning of the interrelationship of things is obviated systematically, stage by stage, gradually, by methods of practice. These methods are called yoga the practice of yoga. I have placed before you, perhaps, a very terrible picture of yoga; it is not as simple as one imagines. It is not a simple circus-master's feat, either of the body or the mind, but a superhuman demand of our total being. Mark this definition of mine: a superhuman demand which is made of our total being not an ordinary human demand of a part of our being, but of our total being. From that, a demand is made by the entire structure of life. The total structure of life requires of our total being to be united with it in a practical demonstration of thought, speech and action this is yoga. If this could be missed, and of course it can easily be missed as it is being done every day, then every effort, from the smallest to the biggest, becomes a failure. All our effort ends in no success, because it would be like decorating a corpse without a soul in it. The whole of life would look like a beautiful corpse with nicely dressed features, but it has no vitality, essence or living principle within it. Likewise, all our activities would look wonderful, beautiful, magnificent, but lifeless; and lifeless beauty is no beauty. There must be life in it only then has it a meaning. Life is not something dead; it is quite opposite of what is dead. We can bring vitality and life into our activity only by the introduction of the principle of yoga.
1.009 - Perception and Reality, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The worst thing for a person would be to get involved in something and not know that it has happened, because in such a case, observation, experiment, and analysis would not be possible. There should be some sort of a possibility for objective observation by a state of mind which will act as a witness of these conditions which are to be observed. But when these conditions to be observed get identified with the witnessing consciousness itself, then observation is not possible. So, self-analysis is a very difficult process. It is a difficult process because in the self which is to be analysed, the subject and the Object cannot be distinguished, and we are used to only those types and kinds of analyses where the Objects of observation stand outside the subject of investigation. Self-investigation is difficult merely for this reason. One cannot know oneself, analyse oneself, study oneself, examine oneself, or treat oneself, for obvious reasons.
Why has this situation arisen? Why this vehement affirmation of the ego, this assertion of the mind in respect of a particular condition which is passing, transitory, phenomenal? The attachment of the mind to a particular condition is the principle of egoism. Why does it happen? Why does it breed the further problems of like, dislike, love of physical life, individual life, fear of death, etc.? This happens because of a background which is still deeper than this particular psychological involvement. The very belief in the reality of externals is the cause for this calamity, because the moment we have a conviction that an object of perception is real, we have to develop a real attitude towards it. The perception of the Object as something real is the beginning of the trouble. The trouble then intensifies itself as a compulsive activity towards the development of an attitude towards that object. The precondition of this attitude is egoism.
To describe the series or the successive stages of this development there is, first, a perception of the Object, such as a tree, for example, in front. I perceive an object in front of me such as a tree, and I am convinced that it is a real tree. The tree is really there; it is not an unreal perception. The existence of the tree is real. It is really there outside me. The 'outsideness' of the tree is also real. The tree is real, its externality to me is real and, therefore, I am now compelled to develop a real attitude towards it.
Now comes the second problem. What is this real attitude that I have to develop towards it? The force that urges this real attitude towards the Object is egoism. It is the breeding ground for the impulsive power which drives the consciousness out towards that object which has been regarded as real. It is not possible to merely perceive an object and have no attitude towards it, because the very consciousness of an object is the demand of the Object to be recognised in a certain manner, and this recognition is called attitude. Therefore, we now have to find out the reason for this perception of the Object itself.
We are going from the lower stage to a higher stage, from the immediate experience of a concrete trouble to the causes thereof. We have a complex problem in the form of like and dislike for objects, and we want to maintain this condition of like and dislike. Therefore, there is love of life and fear of death, which, of course, requires the affirmation of the individual subject maintaining this attitude. We have now arrived at the stage where we understand that the reason behind all this psychological activity is the perception of an object as a real something, external to oneself. Why do we perceive the Object? We are not deliberately, or of our own accord, perceiving the Object; here also, we are forced. Ultimately we will find that everything that we do is under a compulsion. Though people parade under the notion that they are free people and they can do whatever they want, it is not so. There is no free person in this world. Everybody is a slave of an urge, a force, a compulsion that is at the back of all these psychological activities. Just as we cannot see our own back, we cannot see the existence of these forces they are behind.
The perception of an object is caused by a subtle activity that has taken place in the cosmos itself. We have to go back to the Upanishads and texts which are akin in nature. The human mind is not made in such a way as to be able to comprehend what has happened, ultimately. This is what they call the cosmological analysis of human experience. Why do we exist at all as individuals, and then are compelled to perceive objects, and then to have to undergo all this tragedy and suffering of positive and negative attitudes, etc.? This is a mystery for the human intellect. While we may be able to understand and explain what things are like in the world, we will not be able to explain ourselves why we are what we are. Can we explain why we are what we are? "I am what I am, that is all. It has no reason behind it." But there is a reason, which is the reason behind the reason itself. Here we go back to a condition beyond human intellect. Great masters like Acharya Sankara, Ramanuja, etc. tell us that here we land in a realm where intellect should not interfere. The intellect has a boundary, and beyond that boundary, it is useless.
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To put it in modern psychological terms, a kind of cosmic schizophrenia has taken place. In schizophrenia the person does not become split, but looks like a split personality. In this condition, which sometimes is compared to a dream split of consciousness, a real isolation does not take place. This is another analogy. Our personality splits itself into the observer and the observed world in dream. But are we really split? No. Otherwise, we would not wake up as a whole individual. The perception of real objects in dream, by a real subject dreaming, and a real attitude of like, dislike, etc., which that subject projects towards the Object all of this drama looking very, very real is not truly real, because if that had really taken place, there would be no waking up of the individual into a wholeness of consciousness. So this is explained only as a mystery beyond human comprehension.
This universal condition which has ramified itself, as if in dream, into the individual segments, is the cause for the affirmation of individuality and the perception of objects, and the likes and dislikes and the sorrows of this world. Our very sorrow is due to our loss of identity with the Cosmic. Otherwise, there would be no sorrow in this world. We are suffering due to an agony felt on account of our isolation from that Cosmic of which we are a part. So, the philosophical and spiritual advice in this context is that the mystery of life cannot be explained, and the sorrow of life cannot be obviated unless the original cause is discovered and it is dealt with in a manner which is requisite. This requisite manner of dealing with the ultimate question is yoga. As I mentioned earlier, yoga is a gradual process of identification of the part with the whole.
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The reason behind our feeling a solidity, concreteness, hardness, etc. of an object and a shape perceived by the eyes, is because the condition of the senses which perceive and that of the mind behind the senses are on the same level as the constitution of the Object. That is why we can see this world and not the heavens, for example. We cannot say that heavens do not exist; but why do we not see them? Because the constitution of the Objects of the heaven is subtler than, less dense than, the constitution of our present individuality the two are not commensurate with each other. Or, to give a more concrete example, why don't we hear the music when the radio is not switched on? Somebody must be singing at the radio station now, but our ears are unable to hear; they can't hear anything because the constitution, the structure, the frequency, the wavelength of the electrical message that is sent by the broadcasting station is subtler than the constitution and the structure of the eardrum. It is not possible for the eardrum to catch it because it is gross. But if you talk, I can hear, because the sound that you make by talking is of the same level or degree of density as the capacity of the eardrum. I can hear your sound, but not the sounds of radio waves, music, or the message, because of the dissimilarity of the structure of frequency, wavelength or density of structure.
So, the world need not be real merely because of the fact that we are seeing it. It only shows that we are as much fools as the things are. We are in the same level or degree of reality as the atmosphere around us. This is not a great proof for the reality of the world. If I agree with you, it does not mean that our agreement is based on any judicious judgement. Suppose you have an opinion and I agree with that opinion; it does not mean that this opinion is correct. Merely because I agree with you, it need not be correct. It shows that my way of thinking is similar to your way of thinking, that is all. But it does not mean that it is a correct opinion; a third person may not agree with it.
1.00a - DIVISION A - THE INTERNAL FIRES OF THE SHEATHS., #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
a. The Sun. Within the sun, right at its very heart, is a sea of fire or heat, but not a sea of flame. Herein may lie a distinction that perhaps will convey no meaning to some. It is the centre of the sphere, and the point of fiercest internal burning, but has little relation to the flames or burning gases (whatever terms you care [59] to use) that are generally understood to exist whenever the sun is considered. It is the point of fiercest incandescence, and the Objective sphere of fire is but the manifestation of that internal combustion. This central heat radiates its warmth to all parts of the system by means of a triple channel, or through its "Rays of Approach" which in their totality express to us the idea of "the heat of the sun."
1. The akasha, itself vitalised matter, or substance animated by latent heat.
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The fire of Spirit is the essential fire of the first Lord of Will plus the fire of the second Logos of Love. These two cosmic Entities blend, merge, and demonstrate as Soul, utilising for purposes of manifestation the aid of the third Logos. The three fires blend and merge. In this fourth round and on this fourth globe of our planetary scheme, the fires of the third Logos of intelligent matter are fusing somewhat with the fires of cosmic [64] mind, showing as will or power, and animating the Thinker on all planes. the Object of Their co-operation is the perfected manifestation of the cosmic Lord of Love. This should be pondered upon for it reveals a mystery.
The blending of the three fires, the merging of the three Rays, and the co-operation of the three Logoi have in view (at this time and within this solar system) the development of the Essence of the cosmic Lord of Love, the second Person in the logoic trinity. Earlier it was not so, later it will not be, but now it is. When viewed from the cosmic mental plane these Three constitute the PERSONALITY OF THE LOGOS, and are seen functioning as one. Hence the secret (well recognised as fact, though not understood) of the excessive heat, occultly expressed, of the astral or central body of the triple personality. It animates and controls the physical body, and its desires hold sway in the majority of cases; it demonstrates in time and space the correspondence of the temporary union of spirit and matter, the fires of cosmic love and the fires of matter blended. A similar analogy is found in the heat apparent in this second solar system.
1.00b - DIVISION B - THE PERSONALITY RAY AND FIRE BY FRICTION, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
In looking at the matter from the standpoint of fire the idea may be grasped a little through the realisation that the latent fire of matter in the atom is brought into brilliance and usefulness by the action of the personality Ray which merges with this fire and stands in the same position to the permanent atom in the microcosm as FOHAT does on the cosmic plane. The fire is there hidden within the sphere (whether the sphere systemic or the sphere atomic) and the personality Ray in the one case, and Fohat in the other, acts as the force which brings latency into activity and potentiality into demonstrated power. This correspondence should be thought out with care and judgment. Just as Fohat has to do with active manifestation or objectivity, so the personality Ray has to do with the third, or activity aspect in the microcosm. The work of the third aspect logoic was the arranging of the matter of the system so that eventually it could be built into form through the power of the second aspect. Thus the correspondence works out. By life upon the physical plane (that life wherein the physical permanent atom has its full demonstration) the matter is arranged and separated that must eventually be built into the Temple of Solomon, the egoic body, through the agency of the egoic life, the second [73] aspect. In the quarry of the personal life are the stones prepared for the great Temple. In existence upon the physical plane and in the Objective personal life is that experience gained which demonstrates as faculty in the Ego. What is here suggested would richly repay our closest attention, and open up before us reaches of ideas, which should eventuate in a wiser comprehension, a sounder judgment, and a greater encouragement to action.
III. THE PERSONALITY RAY AND KARMA
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The second stage is that in which the pranic fluids begin to blend with the fire at the base of the spine and to drive that fire slowly upwards, transferring its heat from the centres below the solar plexus to the three higher centres that of the heart, the throat and the head. This is a long and slow process when left to the unaided force of nature, but it is just here that (in a few cases) a quickening of the process is permitted in order to equip workers in the field of human service. This is the Object of all occult training. This angle of the matter we will take up in still greater detail when we handle our next point of "Kundalini and the Spine."
The third stage is that in which active radiatory matter or prana is blended ever more perfectly with the fire latent in matter; this results (as will be brought out later) in certain effects.
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a. The cessation of desire. This should be the result of all evolutionary process. True death, under the law, is brought about by the attainment of the Objective, and hence by the cessation of aspiration. This, as the perfected cycle draws to its close, will be true of the individual human being, of the Heavenly Man, and of the Logos Himself.
b. By the slowing down and gradual cessation of the cyclic rhythm, the adequate vibration is achieved, and the work accomplished. When the vibration or note is perfectly felt or sounded it causes (at the point of synthesis with other vibrations) the utter shattering of the forms.
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Second. The etheric double of a man, a planetary Logos, and a solar Logos, being shattered, becomes non-polarised as regards its indweller, and permits therefore of escape. It is (to word it otherwise) no longer a source of attraction, nor a focal magnetic point. It becomes non-magnetic, and the great Law of Attraction ceases to [131] control it; hence disintegration is the ensuing condition of the form. The Ego ceases to be attracted by its form on the physical plane, and, proceeding to inbrea the, withdraws its life from out of the sheath. The cycle draws to a close, the experiment has been made, the Objective (a relative one from life to life and from incarnation to incarnation) has been achieved, and there remains nothing more to desire; the Ego, or the thinking entity, loses interest therefore in the form, and turns his attention inward. His polarisation changes, and the physical is eventually dropped.
The planetary Logos likewise in His greater cycle (the synthesis or the aggregate of the tiny cycles of the cells of His body) pursues the same course; He ceases to be attracted downward or outward, and turns His gaze within; He gathers inward the aggregate of the smaller lives within His body, the planet, and severs connection. Outer attraction ceases and all gravitates towards the centre instead of scattering to the periphery of His body.
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
These preliminary statements have been laid down in an endeavour to show the synthesis of the whole. In the use of words comes limitation, and a clouding of the idea; words literally veil or hide thoughts, detract from their clarity, and confuse them by expression. The work of the second and third Logoi (being the production of the Objectivity of the essential Spirit) is more easy to grasp in broad outline than the more esoteric work of the first Logos, which is that of the animating will.
In terms of fire another angle of expression may perhaps elucidate.
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The second Logos is solar fire. He is the fire of matter and the electric fire of Spirit blended, producing, in time and space, that fire which we call solar. He is the quality of the flame, or the essential flame, produced by this merging. A correspondence to this may be seen in the radiatory fire of matter, and in the emanation, for instance, from the central sun, from a planet, or from a human being,which latter emanation we call magnetism. A man's emanation, or characteristic vibration, is the result of the blending of Spirit and matter, and the relative adequacy of the matter, or the form, to the life within. the Objective solar system, or the sun in manifestation, is the result of the blending of Spirit (electric fire) with matter (fire by friction), and the emanations of the Son, in time and space, are dependent upon the adequacy of the matter, and of the form to the life within.
The first Logos is electric fire, the fire of pure Spirit. Yet in manifestation He is the Son, for by union with matter (the mother) the Son is produced by Whom He is [151] known. "I and my Father are One" [lxxi]69 is the most occult statement in the Christian Bible, for it not only refers to the union of a man with his source, the monad, via the ego, but to the union of all life with its source, the will aspect, the first Logos.
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The permanent atoms are enclosed within the periphery of the causal body, yet that relatively permanent body is built and enlarged, expanded and wrought into [179] a central receiving and transmitting station (using inadequate words to convey an occult idea) by the direct action of the centres, and of the centres above all. Just as it was spiritual force, or the will aspect, that built the solar system, so it is the same force in the man that builds the causal body. By the bringing together of spirit and matter (Father-Mother) in the macrocosm, and their union through the action of the will, the Objective solar system, or the Son, was produced that Son of desire, Whose characteristic is love, and Whose nature is buddhi or spiritual wisdom. By the bringing together (in microcosm) of Spirit and matter, and their coherence by means of force (or the spiritual will) that objective system, the causal body, is being produced; it is the product of transmuted desire, whose characteristic (when fully demonstrated) will be love, the expression eventually on the physical plane of buddhi. The causal body is but the sheath of the Ego. The solar system is but the sheath of the Son. In both the greater and the lesser systems, force centres exist which are productive of objectivity. The centres in the human being are reflections in the three worlds of those higher force centres.
Before taking up the subject of kundalini and the centres, it would be well to extend the information given above, from its prime significance for man, as that which concerns himself, to the solar system, the macrocosm, and to the cosmos. What can be predicated of the microcosm is naturally true of the macrocosm and of the cosmos. It will not be possible to give the systemic triangles, for the information would have to be so blinded that, except for those who have occult knowledge and the intuition developed, it would be practically useless intellectually, but certain things may be pointed out in this connection that may be of interest.
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a. The Heavenly Men. The Heavenly Men, in Themselves, embody centres just as does a human being, and on Their Own plane these centres of force can be found. Again we need to recollect that these centres of force on cosmic levels, and in manifestation in the Objective system, demonstrate as the great force centres of which any particular group of adepts and Their pupils are the exponents. Every group of Masters and all the human beings incarnate or discarnatewho are held within the periphery of Their consciousness are centres of force of some particular kind or quality. This is a fact generally recognised, but students should be urged to link up this fact with the information imparted on the centres of the human being, and see if much is not thereby learnt. These centres of force will demonstrate on etheric levels and on the subtler planes just as they do in a man, and they will be vivified as are the human centres by planetary kundalini, progressing in the desired triangles.
Two hints can here be given for thoughtful consideration. In connection with one of the Heavenly Men (which one cannot at this juncture be pointed out) we have one triangle of force to be seen in the following three centres:
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In these three senses the present is summed up for us. The work of evolution is to recognise, utilise, co-ordinate, and dominate the whole till the Self, by means of these three, becomes actively aware of every form, of every vibration, and of every pulsation of the not-self; then, through the arranging power of mind, the Objective of the self will be to find the truth, or that centre in the circle of manifestation which is, for the Self, the centre of equilibrium, and the one point where the co-ordination is perfected; then the Self can dissociate itself from every veil, every contact, and every sense. This leads in every manifestation to three types of separation:
Involution. The separation of matter, or the one becoming the many. The senses are developed, and the apparatus is perfected by the Self for the utilisation of matter. This is under the Law of Economy.
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a. The fire at the base of the spine is definitely directed [208] to whichever centre is the Object of special attention. This varies according to the Ray, or the specialised work of the initiate.
b. The centre has its activity intensified, its rate of evolution increased, and certain of the central spokes of the wheel brought into more active radiance. These spokes which are also called by some students lotus-petals, have a close connection with the different spirillae in the permanent atoms. Through their stimulation there comes into play one or more of the corresponding spirillae in the permanent atoms on the three lower planes. After the third Initiation, a corresponding stimulation takes place in the permanent atoms of the Triad, leading to the co-ordination of the buddhic vehicle, and the transference of the lower polarisation into the higher.
1.00 - INTRODUCTORY REMARKS, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
1. Fire by friction, or internal vitalising fire. These fires animate and vitalise the Objective solar system. They are the sumtotal of logoic kundalini, when in full systemic activity.
2. Solar Fire, or cosmic mental fire. This is that portion of the cosmic mental plane which goes to the animation of the mental body of the Logos. This fire may be regarded as the sumtotal of the sparks of mind, the fires of the mental bodies and the animating principle of the evolving units of the human race in the three worlds.
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These three expressions of the divine Life may be regarded as expressing the triple mode of manifestation. First, the Objective or tangible universe; second, the subjective worlds or form; and thirdly, the spiritual aspect which is to be found at the heart of all. [viii] 8 The internal fires that animate and vitalise shew themselves in a twofold manner:
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The whole matter dealt with in this Treatise concerns the subjective essence of the solar system, not primarily either the Objective or spiritual aspect. It concerns the Entities who indwell the form, who demonstrate as animating factors through the medium of matter, and primarily through etheric matter; who are evolving a second faculty, the fire of mind, and who are essentially themselves points of fire, cast off through cosmic friction, produced by the turning of the cosmic wheel, swept into temporary limited manifestation and due eventually to return to their central cosmic centre. They will return plus the results of evolutionary growth, and through assimilation they will have intensified their fundamental nature, and be spiritual fire plus the fire manasic.
The internal fire of matter is called in the Secret Doctrine "Fire by Friction." It is an effect and not a cause. It is produced by the two fires of spirit and of mind (electric and solar fire) contacting each other through the medium of matter. This energy demonstrates in [51] matter itself as the internal fires of the sun, and of the planets and finds a reflection in the internal fires of man. Man is the Flame Divine and the fire of Mind brought into contact through the medium of substance or form. When evolution ends, the fire of matter is not cognisable. It persists only when the other two fires are associated, and it does not persist apart from substance itself.
1.00 - Main, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Thou speakest false! By God! What thou dost possess is naught but husks which We have left to thee as bones are left to dogs. By the righteousness of the one true God! Were anyone to wash the feet of all mankind, and were he to worship God in the forests, valleys, and mountains, upon high hills and lofty peaks, to leave no rock or tree, no clod of earth, but was a witness to his worship-yet, should the fragrance of My good pleasure not be inhaled from him, his works would never be acceptable unto God. Thus hath it been decreed by Him Who is the Lord of all. How many a man hath secluded himself in the climes of India, denied himself the things that God hath decreed as lawful, imposed upon himself austerities and mortifications, and hath not been remembered by God, the Revealer of Verses. Make not your deeds as snares wherewith to entrap the Object of your aspiration, and deprive not yourselves of this Ultimate Objective for which have ever yearned all such as have drawn nigh unto God. Say: The very life of all deeds is My good pleasure, and all things depend upon Mine acceptance. Read ye the Tablets that ye may know what hath been purposed in the Books of God, the All-Glorious, the Ever-Bounteous. He who attaineth to My love hath title to a throne of gold, to sit thereon in honour over all the world; he who is deprived thereof, though he sit upon the dust, that dust would seek refuge with God, the Lord of all Religions.
Whoso layeth claim to a Revelation direct from God, ere the expiration of a full thousand years, such a man is assuredly a lying impostor. We pray God that He may graciously assist him to retract and repudiate such claim. Should he repent, God will, no doubt, forgive him. If, however, he persisteth in his error, God will, assuredly, send down one who will deal mercilessly with him. Terrible, indeed, is God in punishing! Whosoever interpreteth this verse otherwise than its obvious meaning is deprived of the Spirit of God and of His mercy which encompasseth all created things. Fear God, and follow not your idle fancies. Nay, rather, follow the bidding of your Lord, the Almighty, the All-Wise. Erelong shall clamorous voices be raised in most lands. Shun them, O My people, and follow not the iniquitous and evil-hearted. This is that of which We gave you forewarning when We were dwelling in Iraq, then later while in the Land of Mystery, and now from this Resplendent Spot.
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O Emperor of Austria! He Who is the Dayspring of God's Light dwelt in the prison of Akka at the time when thou didst set forth to visit the Aqsa Mosque. Thou passed Him by, and inquired not about Him by Whom every house is exalted and every lofty gate unlocked. We, verily, made it a place whereunto the world should turn, that they might remember Me, and yet thou hast rejected Him Who is the Object of this remembrance, when He appeared with the Kingdom of God, thy Lord and the Lord of the worlds. We have been with thee at all times, and found thee clinging unto the Branch and heedless of the Root. Thy Lord, verily, is a witness unto what I say. We grieved to see thee circle round Our Name, whilst unaware of Us, though We were before thy face. Open thine eyes, that thou mayest behold this glorious Vision, and recognize Him Whom thou invokest in the daytime and in the night season, and gaze on the Light that shineth above this luminous Horizon.
Say: O King of Berlin! Give ear unto the Voice calling from this manifest Temple: "Verily, there is none other God but Me, the Everlasting, the Peerless, the Ancient of Days." Take heed lest pride debar thee from recognizing the Dayspring of Divine Revelation, lest earthly desires shut thee out, as by a veil, from the Lord of the Throne above and of the earth below. Thus counselleth thee the Pen of the Most High. He, verily, is the Most Gracious, the All-Bountiful. Do thou remember the one (Napoleon III) whose power transcended thy power, and whose station excelled thy station. Where is he? Whither are gone the things he possessed? Take warning, and be not of them that are fast asleep. He it was who cast the Tablet of God behind him when We made known unto him what the hosts of tyranny had caused Us to suffer. Wherefore, disgrace assailed him from all sides, and he went down to dust in great loss. Think deeply, O King, concerning him, and concerning them who, like unto thee, have conquered cities and ruled over men. The All-Merciful brought them down from their palaces to their graves. Be warned, be of them who reflect.
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We have decreed, O people, that the highest and last end of all learning be the recognition of Him Who is the Object of all knowledge; and yet, behold how ye have allowed your learning to shut you out, as by a veil, from Him Who is the Dayspring of this Light, through Whom every hidden thing hath been revealed. Could ye but discover the source whence the splendour of this utterance is diffused, ye would cast away the peoples of the world and all that they possess, and would draw nigh unto this most blessed Seat of glory.
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Let none, in this Day, hold fast to aught save that which hath been manifested in this Revelation. Such is the decree of God, aforetime and hereafter-a decree wherewith the Scriptures of the Messengers of old have been adorned. Such is the admonition of the Lord, aforetime and hereafter-an admonition wherewith the preamble to the Book of Life hath been embellished, did ye but perceive it. Such is the commandment of the Lord, aforetime and hereafter; beware lest ye choose instead the part of ignominy and abasement. Naught shall avail you in this Day but God, nor is there any refuge to flee to save Him, the Omniscient, the All-Wise. Whoso hath known Me hath known the Goal of all desire, and whoso hath turned unto Me hath turned unto the Object of all adoration. Thus hath it been set forth in the Book, and thus hath it been decreed by God, the Lord of all worlds. To read but one of the verses of My Revelation is better than to peruse the Scriptures of both the former and latter generations. This is the Utterance of the All-Merciful, would that ye had ears to hear! Say: This is the essence of knowledge, did ye but understand.
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1.00 - PREFACE - DESCENSUS AD INFERNOS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
domains. The domain of the former is the Objective world what is, from the perspective of
intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is the world of value what is and what should be,
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of divine characters, much as the Objective world. The fact of this adaptation implies that the
environment is in reality a forum for action, as well as a place of things.
1.00 - Preliminary Remarks, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
This is the Object of the usual monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. If you have no property, you have no care, nothing to be anxious about; with chastity no other person to be anxious about, and to distract your attention; while if you are vowed to obedience the question of what you are to do no longer frets: you simply obey.
There are a great many other obstacles which you will discover as you go on,and it is proposed to deal with each in turn. But let us pass by for the moment to the point where you are nearing success.
In your early struggles you may have found it difficult to conquer sleep; and you may have wandered so far from the Object of your meditations without noticing it, that the meditation has really been broken; but much later on, when you feel that you are getting quite good, you will be shocked to find a complete oblivion of yourself and your surroundings. You will say: Good heavens! I must have been to sleep! or else What on earth was I meditation upon? or even What was I doing Where am I? Who am I? or a mere wordless bewilderment may daze you. This may alarm you, and your alarm will not be lessened when you come to full consciousness, and reflect that you have actually forgotten who you are and what you are doing!
This is only one of many adventures that may come to you; but it is one of the most typical. By this time your hours of meditation will fill most of the day, and you will probably be constantly having presentiments that something is about to happen. You may also be terrified with the idea that your brain may be giving way; but you will have learnt the real symptoms of mental fatigue, and you will be careful to avoid them. They must be very carefully distinguished from idleness!
At certain times you will feel as if there were a contest between the will and the mind; at other times you may feel as if they were in harmony; but there is a third state, to be distinguished from the latter feeling. It is the certain sign of near success, the view-halloo. This is when the mind runs naturally towards the Object chosen, not as if in obedience to the will of the owner of the mind, but as if directed by nothing at all, or by something impersonal; as if it were falling by its own weight, and not being pushed down.
Almost always, the moment that one becomes conscious of this, it stops, and the dreary old struggle between the cowboy will and the buckjumper mind begins again.
1.00 - The Constitution of the Human Being, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The following words of Goethe's describe, in a beautiful manner, the starting point of one of the ways by which the constitution of man can be known: "When a person first becomes aware of the Objects surrounding him, he observes them in relation to himself, and rightly so, for his whole fate depends on whether they please or displease him, attract or repel, help or harm him. This quite natural way of looking at and judging things appears to be as easy as it is necessary. Nevertheless, a person is exposed through it to a thousand errors which often cause him shame and embitter his life. A far more difficult task do those undertake whose keen desire for knowledge urges them to strive to observe the Objects of nature in themselves and in their relations to each other, for they soon miss the gauge which helped them when they, as persons,
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regard the Objects in reference to themselves personally. They lack the gauge of pleasure and displeasure, attraction and repulsion, usefulness and harmfulness; this gauge they have to renounce entirely. They should, as dispassionate and, so to speak, divine beings, seek and examine what is, and not what gratifies. Thus the true botanist should not be affected either by the beauty or by the usefulness of the plants. He has to study their structure and their relation to the rest of the vegetable kingdom; and just as they are one and all enticed forth and shone upon by the sun, so should he with an equable, quiet glance look at and survey them all and obtain the gauge for this knowledge, the data for his deductions, not out of himself, but from within the circle of things which he observes."
The thought thus expressed by Goe the directs attention to three kinds of things. First, the Objects concerning which information continually flows to man through the doors of his senses, those that he touches, smells, tastes, hears, and sees. Second, the impressions which these make on him, and which record themselves as his pleasure and displeasure, his
p. 11
desire or abhorrence, according as he finds one harmonious, another inharmonious, one useful, another harmful. Third, the knowledge and the experiences which he, as a so-to-speak "divine being," gains concerning the Objects-the secrets of their activities and their being which unveil themselves to him.
These three regions are distinctly separate in human life. And man thereby becomes aware that he is interwoven with the world in a threefold way. The first way is something that he finds present and accepts as a given fact. Through the second way he makes the world into his own affair, into something that has a significance for himself. The third way he regards as a goal toward which he has unceasingly to strive.
--
existence. A year after I go again over the same meadow. Other flowers are there. New joy arises in me through them. My joy of the former year will appear as a memory. It is in me; the Object which aroused it in me is gone. But the flowers which I. now see are of the same species as those I saw the year before; they have grown in accordance with the same laws as did the others. If I have enlightened myself regarding this species and these laws, I find them again in the flowers of this year as I recognized them in those of the former year. And I shall perhaps muse as follows: "The flowers of last year are gone; my joy in them remains only in my remembrance. It is bound up with my existence alone. That, however, which I recognized in the flowers of the former year and recognize again this year, will remain as long as such flowers grow. That is something that revealed itself to me, but which is not dependent on my existence in the same way as my joy is. My feelings of joy remain in me; the laws, the being of the flowers, remain outside of me in the world."
Man continually links himself in this threefold way with the things of the world. One
--
Through his body he is related to the Objects which present themselves to his senses from without. The materials from the outer world compose this body of his; and the forces of the outer world work also in it. And just as he observes the things of the outer world with his senses, he can also observe his own bodily existence. But it is impossible to observe the soul existence in the same way. All occurrences connected with my body can be perceived with my bodily senses. My likes and dislikes, my joy and pain, neither I nor anyone else can perceive with bodily senses. The region of the soul is one which is inaccessible to bodily perception. The bodily existence of a man is manifest to all eyes; the soul existence he carries within himself as HIS world. Through the spirit, however, the outer world is revealed to him in a higher way. The mysteries of the outer world, indeed, unveil themselves in his inner being; but he steps in spirit out of himself
p. 15
1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
[2] The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself since I had not expected it then. I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew in any learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. 37 I did not consider that my soul cannot be the Object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the Objects of my soul. 38
Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.
--
Truly his soul lies in things and men, but the blind one seizes things and men, yet not his soul in things and men. He has no knowledge of his soul. How could he tell her apart from things and men? He could find his soul in desire itself but not in the Objects of desire. If he possessed his desire, and his desire did not possess him, he would lay a hand on his soul, since his desire is the image and expression of his soul. 41
If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing.
--
41. In 1912, Jung had written, "It is a common error to judge longing in terms of the quality of the Object... Nature is only beautiful on account of the longing and love accorded to it by man. The aesthetic attributes emanating therefrom apply first and foremost to the libido, which alone accounts for the beauty of nature" (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, CW B, 147).
42. In Psychological Types, Jung articulated this primacy of the image through his notion of esse in anima (CW 6, 66ff, 7IIff). In her diary notes, Cary Baynes commented on this passage: What struck me especially was what you said about the Bild [image] being half the world. That is the thing that makes humanity so dull. They have missed understanding that thing. The world, that is the thing that holds them rapt. Das Bild, they have never seriously considered unless they have been poets (February 8,1924, CFB).
1.010 - Self-Control - The Alpha and Omega of Yoga, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The whole of yoga is self-control in one word, 'self-mastery' in the sense that the rays of the mind and the senses, the projecting powers of individuality, have to be brought back to their source in order that there may be consciousness of the cause. There cannot be a consciousness of the cause as long as the cause is not the Object of consciousness, inasmuch as the latter is involved in the externalised activity of the mind and the senses. We cannot know an object unless the consciousness follows this cognitive act and enlivens the senses, activates them towards the Object which is seen, cognised or perceived by them. On account of this engagement of consciousness through the mind and the senses in respect of objects outside and in all acts of perception and cognition, it finds no time to revert to its cause. We have no time. The consciousness cannot find time to become aware of its own background, inasmuch as it is heavily engaged and is very busy throughout the day and the night in attending to the needs of the mind and the senses in their activity of projection externally to objects. So, to become aware of the cause would be to enable the consciousness to revert itself in that direction inwardly for which purpose it has to be withdrawn, tentatively at least, in an appreciable measure, from its engagement in objective perception through the mind and the senses.
All perceptions are, therefore, engagements of consciousness, which prevents it from knowing its own background and conditions of action, so that when we are busily engaged in the perceptions and cognitions through the mind and the senses, we cannot know our own background, and we look helpless. The necessity for self-control arises merely because of the fact that the Object of our quest is inherently present in the very act of our individual experience, and it cannot be observed by the ordinary means of an academic character or a scientific nature. Here we need no instruments, no types of apparatus either for observation or knowledge, because the Object here is the background of our own self. There are causes behind causes, extending one behind the other, and lying one behind the other in larger and larger expansiveness one implying the other, and one inclusive of the other. The causes that are precedent are inclusive of the causes that are succeeding, so that when we go higher up we do not lose anything that is lower, but get everything that is lower in a refined form by transcendence.
Transcendence is different from giving up. When we transcend a condition, we do not reject that condition as something necessary or unnecessary, but absorb that condition into a higher nature, include it in our higher condition and make it a part of our experience, so that nothing is lost but everything is found in a more real form. So in the practice of yoga, nothing is lost. Nehbhikramanso'sti pratyavyo na vidyate (B.G. II.40), says the Bhagavadgita. There is no loss in the practice of yoga; always there is a gain. And no question of sin arises here. If we do it well, so much the better for us. If we cannot do it well, there is no sin in it; the only thing is, we have not got what we wanted. Such is the impartiality and the genuine character of this wonderful practice called yoga.
1.012 - Sublimation - A Way to Reshuffle Thought, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The point is that the difficulty in controlling an emotion arises on account of the vehemence with which it moves towards an object. The emotion is a tendency towards an object. the Object may be physical, or it could even be psychological. Suppose we want to raise our social status. This is a psychological object that is in front of us, towards which we are working. Let us say that we want to become a chairman, or a minister, or some such thing. This object that is in front of us is psychological, not physical, because chairmanship is not a physical object, though it is as powerful an object as anything else; that is the end towards which the consciousness drives itself. It can also be a physical object towards which the consciousness rushes. Why does it rush towards an object, whether it be physical or psychological? It wants to fulfil a purpose.
Consciousness does not move in a direction without a purpose; and if the purpose is meaningful, at least from its own point of view, nobody can resist it. It sees a meaning in the way in which it moves towards the Object, and when the meaning is there, then naturally nobody can control it. "I see significance in it. There is a purpose behind it and there is a reason a very good reason for my action in that direction," says consciousness. So the question of controlling the movement of consciousness does not arise. If the movement is meaningless, we may control it; but if it is meaningful, how can we control it? So, the resisting of the vehemence of consciousness in the direction of an object is possible only if the meaning that it reads into the Object is sublimated.
As long as we see a meaning in a thing, there is no doubt about it, and nobody else can influence us. No law, no order will work against a meaning that is seen by a person with open eyes. If I tell you that it is midnight, you will not believe it. "Why are you saying it is midnight? You can see it is daylight." We have faith that it is daytime on account of our clear perception of daylight. We are seeing it directly, and why is someone saying it is something else? So when consciousness sees a peculiar and definite meaning or significance in an object in front of it which it regards as valuable, worthwhile and necessary for its happiness, then no law or order will operate against it. It breaks all laws, be they social, personal, or moral any law, whatever it is because it is the law of reality, and the law of reality is more powerful than any other law that is made by man. Why is it called the law of reality? It is called the law of reality because it is seen physically as an indubitable something about which there is no doubt in the mind, and we cannot frame a law contrary to what we see physically and palpably as something real.
We now come to a very crucial point. All of this amounts to saying that we cannot easily practise self-control. It is not so cheap an affair; it is a terrible job. It is terrible, no doubt, but there is a way out. The way out is to reshuffle the ways in which we think under given conditions. Emotions rise up under certain conditions, and under certain other conditions they may not be so forceful. The meaning that the emotion reads into its object is to be transformed. Are we correct in reading this meaning in the Object? This is a philosophical question that we have to ask ourselves. Is it correct that because we see a meaning in something we can regard it as real? This is a simple question, for which there is a simple answer. But, another question can be raised are we sure that our perception is correct?.
Perceptions need not always be correct, though perceptions may insist that as long as they are there, the Object is real. As long as the perceptions are there, their objects certainly will look real. Otherwise, it would not be a perception. But is the perception correct? This is the question. Here we raise a very fundamental question which is philosophical, and even deeper than philosophical. When the emotion, the consciousness, directs itself towards an object for the achievement of its purpose, is it being motivated by a correct perception of values, or is it blundering in its attitude towards things due to certain other factors? Perhaps it is mistaken. Yet it will not accept the mistake as long as it sees things by an identification of itself with the Object in front of it.
Here, we feel that the withdrawal of consciousness from its object would be something like tearing off our own skin from our body. How can we tear off our own skin? It would be terrible, but this is what is happening when we practise self-control. We are tearing off our flesh, and it is so painful. But the pain is lessened if the consciousness is properly educated and made to reasonably accept the background of its attitudes and the incorrectness of its perceptions, for reasons which are superior to the one that it is adopting at the present moment.
1.013 - Defence Mechanisms of the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
As discussed previously, a sense of reality harasses the mind in respect of the Objects of sense, and as long as anything appears as real, it cannot be abrogated or rejected; and we cannot close our eyes to it if it has already been declared to be real. The mind will find difficulty in withdrawing its orders to the senses in respect of their movement towards objects as long as it cognises a worthwhile reality in the Objects of sense. Why does the mind see a sense of reality in the Objects of sense? It is due to a peculiar situation that has arisen, which is the reason behind why the mind is accepting these perceptions through the senses.
What is this peculiar situation? The situation, precisely, is a misplacement of the values of life by a limitation of consciousness to a location called the individual. Therefore, yo buddhe paratastu sa there is something higher than the buddhi (the intellect) and the mind, in which we have to take refuge in order that even the mind may be directed along proper channels. Inasmuch as the mind is the general who orders the senses, if it has been instructed properly and advised well, then naturally it will give instructions to the senses accordingly. It comes finally to this: we have to take refuge in the Self not in the individual self, but in the higher self, whose principle alone can regenerate the mind and remove the miscalculated attitudes of the mind in respect of things, consequently enabling the mind to properly direct the senses in a desirable direction.
1.01 - Appearance and Reality, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
Before we go farther it will be well to consider for a moment what it is that we have discovered so far. It has appeared that, if we take any common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses _immediately_ tell us is not the truth about the Object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense-data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the Object. Thus what we directly see and feel is merely 'appearance', which we believe to be a sign of some 'reality' behind. But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like?
Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls: Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion.
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
and open to all the world. There I am the Object of every sub-
ject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I
--
that we are the Objects of unseen factors. To know this is de-
cidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the Object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits.
They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on.
--
To meet the Objections of some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this.
I learned from my two years experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain ones necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (_Portulaca oleracea_) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
boons which on the surface seem to be the Object of this ritual
worship. The Rishis would then be men with some spiritual or
--
work meant to justify a hypothesis; the Object of this publication
is only to present them in a permanent form for disciples and
1.01 - Hatha Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
1. Hatha means any tenacious practice till the Object or end is achieved. Ha and tha mean the union of the Sun and the Moon, union of Prana and Apana Vayus.
2. Hatha Yoga concerns with the body and the Prana. It helps to control the body and the Prana, through Asanas and Pranayama.
1.01 - How is Knowledge Of The Higher Worlds Attained?, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
The student must set aside a small part of his daily life in which to concern himself with something quite different from the Objects of his daily occupation. The way, also, in which he occupies himself at such a time must differ entirely from the way in which he performs the rest of his daily duties. But this does not mean that what he does in the time thus set apart has no connection with his daily work. On the contrary, he will soon find that just these secluded moments, when sought in the right way, give him full power to perform his daily task. Nor must it be supposed that the observance of this rule will really encroach upon the time needed for the performance of his duties. Should anyone really have
p. 21
--
This calm and serenity react on the whole being. They assist the growth of the inner man, and, with the inner man, those faculties also grow which lead to higher knowledge. For it is by his progress in this direction that the student gradually reaches the point where he himself determines the manner in which the impressions of the outer world shall affect him. Thus he may hear a word spoken with the Object of wounding or vexing him. Formerly it would indeed have wounded or vexed him, but now that he treads
p. 26
1.01 - 'Imitation' the common principle of the Arts of Poetry., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one: another in three respects,--the medium, the Objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.
For as there are persons who, by conscious art or mere habit, imitate and represent various objects through the medium of colour and form, or again by the voice; so in the arts above mentioned, taken as a whole, the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or 'harmony,' either singly or combined.
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[6]: Pradhānabuddhyādisū. This predicate of the Deity distinguishes most of the Purāṇas from several of the philosophical systems, which maintain, as did the earliest Grecian systems of cosmogony, the eternal and independent existence of the first principle of things, as nature, matter, or chaos. Accordingly, the commentator notices the Objection. Pradhāna being without beginning, it is said how can Viṣṇu be its parent? To which he replies, that this is not so, for in a period of worldly destruction (Pralaya), when the Creator desists from creating, nothing is generated by virtue of any other energy or parent. Or, if this be not satisfactory, then the text may be understood to imply that intellect (Buddhi) &c. are formed through the materiality of crude nature, or Pradhāna.
[7]: Viṣṇu is commonly derived in the Purāṇas from the root Vis, to enter, entering into, or pervading the universe, agreeably to the text of the Vedas, 'Having created that (world), he then afterwards enters into it;' being, as our comment observes, undistinguished by place, time, or property. According to the Mātsya P. the name alludes to his entering into the mundane egg: according to the Padma P., to his entering into or combining with Prakriti, as Puruṣa or spirit. In the Mokṣa Dharma of the Mahābhārata, s. 165, the word is derived from the root vī, signifying motion, pervasion, production, radiance; or, irregularly, from krama, to go with the particle vi, implying, variously, prefixed.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
status. The empirical object might be regarded as those sensory properties intrinsic to the Object. The
status of the Object, by contrast, consists of its meaning consists of its implication for behavior.
Everything a child encounters has this dual nature, experienced by the child as part of a unified totality.
--
undertaken in its vicinity tends naturally to become assimilated to the Object itself. the Object, after all,
is the proximal cause or the stimulus that gives rise to action conducted in its presence. For people
--
even though he or she has attributed to the Object of perception qualities that are in fact context-dependent
and subjective. It is difficult, after all, to realize the subjective nature of fear, and not to feel threat as part of
--
even believe that those stories served us well in the past. the Objects of revolutionary scientific discovery
Galileos mountains on the lunar orb; Keplers elliptical planetary orbits manifested themselves in
--
it is about a given phenomena that can be consensually validated and described. the Objects of this process
may be those of the past, the present, or the future, and may be static or dynamic in nature: a good scientific
--
subjective) must be at least eliminated from definition as a real aspect of the Object.
The painstaking empirical process of identification, communication and comparison has proved to be a
--
description of the Objective world. Myth, and the drama that is part of myth, provide answers in image to
the following question: how can the current state of experience be conceptualized in abstraction, with
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
Know also, that if the heart should not be tarnished with the rust of rebellion, and if the animal and ferocious qualities should not be dominant, that it would be capable, on account of the presence in it of angelic properties, of manifesting this same influence over other bodies. If it should look upon a lion or tiger with severity, they would become weak and submissive. If it should look with kindness upon one who is sick, his infirmity might be changed to health. If it should look upon the vigorous with majesty, they might become infirm. The realty of the existence of these influences is known both by reason and experience. Sorcery with the eyes, is of this kind of power. If for example, a man of a malicious disposition look upon some little thing with envy, and if while he is looking, the destruction of the Object should come into his mind, an influence upon it may be observed immediately, and directly or after a while that object will be destroyed: the prophet of God has said: "the eye brings man to the grave and the camel to the seething pot."
In whomsoever these influences are shown to have power, if he occasions misery in the exercise of this power, he is [29] designated a sorcerer. Although as has been seen, the power of performing signs, miracles and sorceries belongs to the heart when its faculties are in perfect operation, yet there are important destinations between these powers. And whoever is of a narrow mind will not be able to appreciate that signs and miracles are influences proceeding from the heart of man, unless he should learn it by external teaching.
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If a person possessing great knowledge of the outward world, should use his knowledge as a means of progress in the way of truth, instead of being satisfied with such disputes as of buying and selling; marrying and divorcing, and should be assiduous in gaining divine knowledge, which is the end of all other knowledge, it is all well and good. His knowledge of the outward world will give him strength in his course, and will serve as a guide to him in [32] the way to eternal truth. For if the pilgrim do not understand the grounds of the respect due to, and the law-fulness of his food and drink, his dwelling and his clothing, if he do not understand the causes which impair or render complete acts of purification and devotion, what has a tendency to give strength to the blameable affections of the soul, and what is their nature and their remedy, he can derive no advantage from the sciences of spiritual exercise, discovery and revelation. In short to an ignorant pilgrim, the least doubt may operate as a hindrance in his course for many years. If, however, he should fall into a spirit of disputation, and should say, "knowledge implies nothing else than to be able to study a book and to correct the composition, the punctuation and the declensions," he will certainly be frustrated from obtaining and discovering inward knowledge, - that is, he will not attain to the knowledge of God, which is the Object of all knowledge, which is the most sublime knowledge, and compared with which all other knowledge is but husks. Therefore, when we hear some good man, who has travelled far on the road of spiritual discovery affirm, that knowledge of the external world, in the sense which we at first alluded to, is a hindrance in the way of truth, we ought to be careful not to deny the truth of what he says.
There are, however, in our times certain weak persons and indifferent to religious truth for the most part, who in the guise of soofees,1 after learning a few of their obscure phrases and ornamenting themselves with their cap and robes, treat knowledge and the doctors of the law2 as inimical to themselves, and continually find fault with them. They are devils and deserve judicial death. They are enemies of God, and of the apostle of God. For God has extolled knowledge and the doctors of the law; and the [33] established way of salvation, with which God has inspired the prophets, has its basis in external knowledge. These miserable and weak men, since they have no acquaintance with science, and no education, and knowledge of external things, why should they indulge in such corrupt fancies, and unfounded language? They resemble, beloved, a person who having heard it said that alchemy was of more value than gold, because that whatsoever thing should be touched with the philosophers' stone would turn to gold, should be proud of the idea and should be carried away with a passion for alchemy. And when gold in full bags is offered him, he replies : "Shall I turn my attention to gold, when I am dissolving the philosophers' stone?" And he finishes with being deprived of the gold, and with only hearing the name of the philosophers' stone. He becomes forever a miserable, destitute, and naked vagabond, who wastes his life upon alchemy.
1.01 - Prayer, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
"Meditation again is a constant remembrance (of the thing meditated upon) flowing like an unbroken stream of oil poured out from one vessel to another. When this kind of remembering has been attained (in relation to God) all bandages break. Thus it is spoken of in the scriptures regarding constant remembering as a means to liberation. This remembering again is of the same form as seeing, because it is of the same meaning as in the passage, 'When He who is far and near is seen, the bonds of the heart are broken, all doubts vanish, and all effects of work disappear' He who is near can be seen, but he who is far can only be remembered. Nevertheless the scripture says that he have to see Him who is near as well as Him who, is far, thereby indicating to us that the above kind of remembering is as good as seeing. This remembrance when exalted assumes the same form as seeing. . . . Worship is constant remembering as may be seen from the essential texts of scriptures. Knowing, which is the same as repeated worship, has been described as constant remembering. . . . Thus the memory, which has attained to the height of what is as good as direct perception, is spoken of in the Shruti as a means of liberation. 'This Atman is not to be reached through various sciences, nor by intellect, nor by much study of the Vedas. Whomsoever this Atman desires, by him is the Atman attained, unto him this Atman discovers Himself.' Here, after saying that mere hearing, thinking and meditating are not the means of attaining this Atman, it is said, 'Whom this Atman desires, by him the Atman is attained.' The extremely beloved is desired; by whomsoever this Atman is extremely beloved, he becomes the most beloved of the Atman. So that this beloved may attain the Atman, the Lord Himself helps. For it has been said by the Lord: 'Those who are constantly attached to Me and worship Me with love I give that direction to their will by which they come to Me.' Therefore it is said that, to whomsoever this remembering, which is of the same form as direct perception, is very dear, because it is dear to the Object of such memory perception, he is desired by the Supreme Atman, by him the Supreme Atman is attained. This constant remembrance is denoted by the word Bhakti." So says Bhagavn Rmnuja in his commentary on the Sutra Athto Brahma-jijns (Hence follows a dissertation on Brahman.).
In commenting on the Sutra of Patanjali, Ishvara pranidhndv, i.e. "Or by the worship of the Supreme Lord" Bhoja says, "Pranidhna is that sort of Bhakti in which, without seeking results, such as sense-enjoyments etc., all works are dedicated to that Teacher of teachers." Bhagavan Vysa also, when commenting on the same, defines Pranidhana as "the form of Bhakti by which the mercy of the Supreme Lord comes to the Yogi, and blesses him by granting him his desires". According to Shndilya, "Bhakti is intense love to God." The best definition is, however, that given by the king of Bhaktas, Prahlda:
1.01 - Principles of Practical Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
The existence of valid contradictions shows that the Object of
investigation presents the inquiring mind with exceptional difficulties, as
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
which wills to control the Objects, is non-attachment.
Two motives of our actions are (1) What we see ourselves; (2)
--
where the external gross elements are the Objects is called
Savitarka. Tarka means question, Savitarka with-question.
--
are given up, either as gross or as fine, and the Object of
meditation is the interior organ, the thinking organ, and when
--
the mind as the Object of meditation, before we have reached
the state which takes us beyond the mind even, when it has
--
seems very easy. Its method is to hold the mind as the Object,
and whenever through comes, to strike it down, allowing no
--
out in waves towards the Object, and we lose our power. Every
reaction in the form of hatred or evil is so much loss to the
--
corresponding to the Soul, the Object, and the mind. There are
three objects of meditation given us. Firs the gross things, as
--
Yogis is that just as we come in direct contact with the Objects
of the senses, so religion can be directly perceived in a far
1.01 - Seeing, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
radius, the orbits of the Objects which press round us;
A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through end-
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Caste, creed, family and lineage do not exist in Brahman. Brahman has neither name nor form, transcends merit and demerit, is beyond time, space and the Objects of sense-experience. Such is Brahman, and thou art That. Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness.
Supreme, beyond the power of speech to express. Brahman may yet be apprehended by the eye of pure illumination. Pure, absolute and eternal Realitysuch is Brahman, and thou art That. Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness.
1.01 - The Corporeal Being of Man, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
plants, animals, so can one observe man also. He is related to these three forms of existence. Like the minerals he builds his body out of the materials in nature; like the plants he grows and propagates his species; he perceives the Objects around him and, like the animals, forms on the basis of the impressions they make his inner experiences. One may therefore ascribe to man a mineral, a plant, and an animal existence.
The difference in the structure of minerals, plants, and animals corresponds with these three forms of existence. And it is this structure, this shape which one perceives through the senses, and which alone one can call body. But the human body is different from that of the animal. This difference everybody must recognize whatever may be his opinion in other respects regarding the relationship of man to animals. Even the most radical materialist who denies all soul will not be able to avoid agreeing with the following sentence which Carus utters in his "Organon der Natur and des Geistes". "The finer, inner construction of the nervous system, and especially of the brain, remains as yet an unsolved problem to the
1.01 - The First Steps, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
The next step is Asana, posture. A series of exercises, physical and mental, is to be gone through every day, until certain higher states are reached. Therefore it is quite necessary that we should find a posture in which we can remain long. That posture which is the easiest for one should be the one chosen. For thinking, a certain posture may be very easy for one man, while to another it may be very difficult. We will find later on that during the study of these psychological matters a good deal of activity goes on in the body. Nerve currents will have to be displaced and given a new channel. New sorts of vibrations will begin, the whole constitution will be remodelled as it were. But the main part of the activity will lie along the spinal column, so that the one thing necessary for the posture is to hold the spinal column free, sitting erect, holding the three parts the chest, neck, and head in a straight line. Let the whole weight of the body be supported by the ribs, and then you have an easy natural postures with the spine straight. You will easily see that you cannot think very high thoughts with the chest in. This portion of the Yoga is a little similar to the Hatha-Yoga which deals entirely with the physical body, its aim being to make the physical body very strong. We have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult, and cannot be learned in a day, and, after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth. Many of these practices you will find in Delsarte and other teachers, such as placing the body in different postures, but the Object in these is physical, not psychological. There is not one muscle in the body over which a man cannot establish a perfect control. The heart can be made to stop or go on at his bidding, and each part of the organism can be similarly controlled.
The result of this branch of Yoga is to make men live long; health is the chief idea, the one goal of the Hatha-Yogi. He is determined not to fall sick, and he never does. He lives long; a hundred years is nothing to him; he is quite young and fresh when he is 150, without one hair turned grey. But that is all. A banyan tree lives sometimes 5000 years, but it is a banyan tree and nothing more. So, if a man lives long, he is only a healthy animal. One or two ordinary lessons of the Hatha-Yogis are very useful. For instance, some of you will find it a good thing for headaches to drink cold water through the nose as soon as you get up in the morning; the whole day your brain will be nice and cool, and you will never catch cold. It is very easy to do; put your nose into the water, draw it up through the nostrils and make a pump action in the throat.
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
9:An integral and synthetic Yoga needs especially not to be bound by any written or traditional Shastra; for while it embraces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organise it anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation. Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it is in the position not of a pilgrim following the highroad to his destination, but, to that extent at least, of a path-finder hewing his way through a virgin forest. For Yoga has long diverged from life and the ancient systems which sought to embrace it, such as those of our Vedic forefa thers, are far away from us, expressed in terms which are no longer accessible, thrown into forms which are no longer applicable. Since then mankind has moved forward on the current of eternal Time and the same problem has to be approached from a new starting-point.
1.01 - The Ideal of the Karmayogin, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We must know our past and recover it for the purposes of our future. Our business is to realise ourselves first and to mould everything to the law of India's eternal life and nature. It will therefore be the Object of the Karmayogin to read the heart of our religion, our society, our philosophy, politics, literature, art, jurisprudence, science, thought, everything that was and is ours, so that we may be able to say to ourselves and our nation, 'This is our dharma.' We shall review European civilisation entirely from the standpoint of Indian thought and knowledge and seek to throw off from us the dominating stamp of the Occident; what we have to take from the West we shall take as Indians.
And the dharma once discovered we shall strive our utmost not only to profess but to live, in our individual actions, in our social life, in our political endeavours."
1.01 - The King of the Wood, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. the Object of
this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly
1.01 - What is Magick?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
16. The application of any given force affects all the orders of being which exist in the Object to which it is applied, whichever of those orders is directly affected.
(Illustration: If I strike a man with a dagger, his consciousness, not his body only, is affected by my act; although the dagger, as such, has no direct relation therewith. Similarly, the power of my thought may so work on the mind of another person as to produce far- reaching physical changes in him, or in others through him.)
1.020 - The World and Our World, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The subject of our discussion is the mental cognition of objects. In the experience of an object, does the mind influence the Object, or does the Object influence the mind? This is the central issue in all philosophical schools, which has led to various divergent doctrines such as idealism, realism, materialism, subjectivism, etc. There has been very little progress towards an answer to this query because, just as we cannot know whether the beauty that we see in an object is in our own mind or if it is really in the Object, so there is the question is the mind influencing the Object, or is the Object influencing the mind? The difficulty arises on account of the position of the perceiving subject itself. To hold that the mind entirely influences the Object, that it determines it in every manner, would be another way of saying that we have created the world and everything is in our hands which does not seem to be the truth of things.
Everything does not seem to be in our hands. We cannot change the pattern of things. We cannot make the sun rise in the west merely because we think that it should be so. So there seems to be something which is outside the jurisdiction of mental operations, to which the operations of the mind should accord, and whose law the mind has to follow. We cannot suddenly imagine that a cup of milk is identical with a stone. The stone and the milk are not identical, and the mind cannot change one into the other by any amount of thought. So, the hard reality, in the form of an external something which the world presents before the mind, has led many to conclude that the mind cannot determine the Objects. On the other hand, the Objects have a reality of their own and they influence the mind, so that the mind subjects itself to the conditions of the Object, rather than conditions the Object by its own laws.
We are in a world of interrelated facts and figures, and Eastern thought has tried to solve this question by positing a Creator for the world, independent of individual percipients. We have standard expositions on this theme in such texts as the Panchadasi, Vichara Sagara, etc. on the basis of certain proclamations in the Upanishads, for instance. Nobody has seen the Creator. Nobody can imagine that a Creator can exist, or must exist, or does exist. But the necessity of thought, the conditions of thinking seem to demand the presence of such a thing as a Creator for the world; otherwise, we cannot explain perception. The very fact of the perception of things the inherent meaning that we see in objects of perception compels us to accept the existence of a prior cause behind the Objects of perception, and it seems that the world could exist even if we do not exist. We have arguments by modern scientists biologists and evolutionists who tell us that once upon a time the world was unpopulated; there were no percipients of the world. According to the astronomical theory, the world, the earth, is only a chip off the block of the sun, and was boiling and incandescent in its original state, so naturally no human being or nothing living could have existed at that time, not even a plant or a shrub. But did it exist? The earth did exist. So the earth could exist even if there is nobody to look at it or observe it.
These assumptions have led to the conclusion that the Object exists independently of its being perceived, and the universe was created much earlier than the creation of the human individual. This theory gets confirmation from the expositions in the Puranas, the Epics, etc., wherein we are told that God created the world. He did not create man first; man is perhaps the last of creation. Even in the Aittareya Upanishad, on which perhaps the Panchadasi, etc., take their stand, we are given to understand that man was not the first creation, and that perhaps nothing perceiving was ever existent. Nothing perceiving, nothing thinking, nothing willing, conscious, ever existed except that One which willed Itself to be many, and the world was so created, etc., is the doctrine.
Basing themselves on this scriptural proclamation, exponents tell us that there is a distinction between what they call Ishvara srishti and jiva srishti the creation of God and the creation of the individual. There are two kinds of creation. Ikshanadi-praveshanta srishtir ishana kalpita; jagradadi-vimokshantah samsaro jiva-kalpitah - says the Panchadasi, in a famous passage. The meaning of passage has reference to the Aittareya Upanishad and such other relevant passages in other Upanishads, and makes out that God willed to be many, and manifested Himself as this vast creation, projected individualities, and entered the individual by an immanence of His own nature. This is another way of describing the traditional process of creation through divine manifestations usually known as Ishvara, Hiranyagarbha and Virat all of which are precedent to individual manifestations, and prior to the existence of human beings. But there is also what is known as 'individual's creation'. A lot of detail about it is given in the Panchadasi, especially in its fourth chapter called Dvaita Vivek how duality-consciousness arose at all, and how perceptions can bind us, though they need not necessarily bind us.
The point is that the perception of an object need not bind us, though it can bind us. It need not bind us, because we can correctly perceive the existent object as it was created by Ishvara, merely reflecting in our minds the character of the Object as it really is in itself from the point of view of the Creator. Then, perceptions would not be binding. For instance, a human being, tentatively speaking, may be regarded as Ishvara's creation. A human being is not created by another human being by the will of creativity. the Object in front of me such as a tree, or a mountain, or the shining orb of the sun, and the moon and the stars may be regarded as parts of Ishvara's creation. We can simply perceive them as such.
But I can perceive a human being in another way altogether by which I can bind myself namely, this human being is my father; this human being is my friend; this human being is my enemy; this human being can do something for me, this way or that way. This is what is known as jiva srishti, which is an attitude of subjective appreciation and evaluation which an individual projects in respect of an external object. A woman is a human being, but the moment that woman is regarded as mother, or a wife, or a sister, that attitude becomes jiva srishti. A relationship that seems to obtain between one individual and another in a subjective manner is the projection of the mind of the jiva or the individual, which is the cause of joy and sorrow in the world and is the essence of samsara bondage.
But Ishvara srishti is pure existence of things. A lump of gold is a lump of gold; but, that it is a valuable substance, that it has great worth and, therefore, can be taken away or stolen these ideas are projections of the mind of the individual. So in the perception of any given object, two factors are supposed to be involved jiva shrishti and Ishvara srishti. This is a conclusion safely arrived at to obviate any kind of extreme position that people generally take, either from the Objective side or from the subjective side.
There are those who think that the Object alone is real and the mind is only a stupid something, which merely reflects the nature of an object as it is. This is the realistic, materialistic attitude. They do not give any place for mind in the scheme of things. It is only a kind of exudation of material existences. This is one extreme view - where the Objective world alone is the determining factor of every situation in life, and the mind has no place in the scheme of things. The other extreme is that the mind alone is the determining factor of everything and the Object has no place in the scheme of things everything is on account of our thought. This is the extreme idealistic point of view, contrary to the extreme materialistic point of view of certain others. The via-media, the middle course, would be that both contri bute a percentage of meaning in the perception of objects. And so the act of mind-control, the restraining of the modifications of the mind, would not mean an abolition of the existence of objects at least according to thinkers such as the author of the Panchadasi - but is a withdrawal of those special modifications of the mind, on account of which the mind reads particular subjective meanings in objects.
The author of the Panchadasi tells us that if an abolition of objects were a condition to liberation, then liberation would not be possible, because nobody can abolish the existence of objects. Or, if merely a non-perception of the Objects of the world is to be regarded as liberation, then sleep would be a condition of liberation because we do not perceive anything during sleep. The actual event that is taking place outside may also not be the cause of joy or sorrow, says the author of the Panchadasi, who gives the following analogy. Suppose there is someone in a foreign land whose mother is here, far away from the person, and his mother receives false news that her son is dead. One can imagine the condition of the mother. Though the son is alive, healthy and hale, and everything is all right, false news can create a real heartbreak for the mother. On the other hand, if the man has been dead for ten years but his mother has not received any news, she is happy.
So, the birth or death, the life or the extinction of a person, is not the real cause of the joy or sorrow of a person. It is the reaction that the mind sets up in respect of a particular event as it is conveyed to it subjectively which is considered as being the cause of its joy and sorrow. This is another interpretation. With all our thinking, we cannot come to a definite conclusion about the nature of things. We cannot say whether our mind is largely responsible for our joys and sorrows, or whether objects also have some say in this matter. The difficulty arises on account of a relativity of action and reaction between subject and object, and no one has answered this question properly. Similar to this is the question of the perception of beauty in things. No one can say, even today, whether the beauty is present in the Object outside, or present in the mind inside. Somehow we reconcile ourselves by saying that both factors coincide, and there is some truth in this side and some truth in that side.
The difficulty is simply because the mind cannot think both ways, and the truth lies neither on this side nor on that side. The isolation of the individual from its relationship with the pattern of things is the cause of its difficulty in understanding anything. The whole universe is an organic structure in which the percipient is included as a vital part. For instance, we cannot study the nature of the heart of a human being by removing it from the body. Though it is a fleshy substance and can be examined pathologically, medically, etc., studying it like this would be meaningless because the moment the heart is removed from the body it ceases to be a heart and becomes only a lump of flesh. The heart has to be studied in its connection with the body in its working condition, and not by isolating it from the organic relationship it has with the body.
Likewise, we should not wrest the Object from its connectedness with things in our perception, which is another way of judging it. A similar mistake has been committed by us we have wrested ourselves away from things. We have stood outside the scheme of things in our judgement of values, while we are already a part of the scheme of things. All perceptions, judgements and evaluations become inscrutable mysteries on account of this initial difficulty that has been created, namely, a separation of the percipient from the Object with which it is organically connected, basically. For instance, a finger of the hand becomes aware of another finger of the same hand. If we were to take for granted that a particular finger of a hand has a consciousness of its own, and we conclude that it can perceive the existence of another finger of the same hand what would be its attitude? What would be the real relationship between one finger and another finger, given that one finger can see another finger outside it? We know that one finger is different from another finger. But the consciousness of one finger in respect of another finger would be charged with its basic awareness of its connectedness with the whole body, which it cannot look upon as an external object, so that even the other finger which it perceives cannot be called as a real external object, though it is an object for all practical purposes because it can be seen.
This is perhaps the significance of perception from an organic point of view, while what happens in our case, at present, is that this organic connection between the seer and the seen is lost sight of, and we have only a mechanised form of perception where there is a false evaluation projected on the Object by the mind which is perceiving it, on account of its losing contact with the vital issue which is involved in perception, namely its connectedness to the Object. Whether in attachment or in aversion, the mind is not properly related to the Object. It has an improper relationship with things, both in love and hatred. The impropriety of this relationship arises on account of its false disconnectedness from the Object, and we cannot properly understand the way of controlling the mind if we cannot understand the relationship that the mind has with the Object. It has a twofold relationship. On the one side, it stands as a perceiver of the Object and is obliged to regard the Object as an outside something, which is the very meaning of perception, of course. But, on the other side, there is a basic similarity of nature between the seer and the seen, which is the reason why there is the very possibility of perception at all. A consciousness of the Object would be impossible if the seer of the Object is basically disconnected from the Object. Basic disconnection would not be permissible. An utter isolation of the subject from the Object would defeat the very purpose of all perception.
Consciousness of an object implies a basic connectedness between the subject and the Object. It is this connection that pulls the Object towards the subject, and vice versa. We have an undercurrent of unity among ourselves, on account of which we sometimes feel a necessity to sit together and work in a unanimous manner. We have the urge of unity from one side, and the urge of diversity on the other side. The diversity aspect is emphasised by the senses, and the unity aspect is emphasised by the nature of our consciousness. The essence of our consciousness is unity par excellence. It is the basic existence of a unity of consciousness behind all perceptions that is responsible for the perception itself, and is also the reason for loves and hates. But the emphasis given by the senses is the other way round. They assert diversity of things and make externalised perception possible. So in the attraction that the subject feels towards the Object, two elements work vigorously the diversity aspect and the unity aspect. The attraction is possible basically on account of the structural similarity between the subject and the Object. But the need for being pulled by the Object, or getting attracted towards the Object, arises on account of the perception of diversity, or the duality of subject and object.
If unity is the whole truth there would be no need of perception, and the question of attraction would not arise, because the subject has basically become one with the Object, and is one with it. Where there is an utter unity of the subject and the Object, neither perception would be there, nor any kind of love or hatred. If there is utter isolation, even then there would be no perception. If we are really disconnected from all things, we can neither see anything, nor can we have love and hatred towards things.
If we are really one with things, then also it is the same thing. So either way, whether we emphasise the unity aspect or the diversity aspect exclusively, we find that there is no perception, and no love and hatred. Perception and love and hatred are hybrids born out of a mixed-up attitude that has arisen on account of a transference of values, by which what is meant is, a little of the unity aspect is transferred to the diversity aspect, and a little of the diversity aspect is transferred to the unity aspect, so that we live in a very utterly false world of created counterfeit circumstances. Neither do we live in unity, nor do we live in diversity. Then, where are we living.
We have created a world of our own that is jiva srishti. Utter diversity is not possible; utter unity is also not possible. So we have created a world of our own, like trishanku svargam, and here we are ruling like masters. But inasmuch as it is not based on facts and cannot be substantiated finally on logical grounds, it shakes from the very bottom, and so we are very unhappy right from the beginning. We are unhappy when the Objects are not with us, we are unhappy when the Objects are with us, and we are unhappy when the Objects leave us. So when are we happy? Unhappiness is there because the Object has not come. Unhappiness is there because the Object is there, but the fear is that it may go. So even when it is there we have a fear, "Oh, how long will it be there? I may lose it at any moment." And when the Object has gone, of course, there is unhappiness. There is an undercurrent of joylessness in every experience of the individual, because the very existence of the so-called individual is itself an illogical something. It is an unwarranted assumption and something which cannot be finally justified, either logically or scientifically.
What is an individual, which we call the percipient? It is an abstracted group of characters, tentatively isolated from a larger set or group of characters to which these former really belong an act that has been perpetrated mysteriously for the purpose of playing a drama, we may say. We have falsely isolated ourselves. Even that isolation is not a real isolation, because a mere abstraction of a few characters from a group of larger characters cannot be regarded as real. It is only a closing of one's eyes to certain existent conditions. We can ignore the presence of things and conditions which are not conducive to our present purpose, but why this purpose itself has arisen is a very difficult thing to answer. This is maya, as they call it, a peculiar jugglery that has been projected by no one. Neither can we say that God created it, nor can we say that we created it. It is somewhere; and how it has come, neither can we say, nor can anyone else say. The inscrutability of the relationship between the individual and the cosmic, the difficulty in ascertaining the connection between appearance and reality this is called maya. To put it in more plain terms, the relationship between the subject and the Object is itself difficult to understand.
We cannot understand what our connection is with anything at all, and so we are in a helpless condition. Therefore we cannot even control the mind, because controlling the mind is an adjustment of the modifications of the mind in respect of the Object of its cognition, and the Object of its cognition is not properly understood because of its unintelligible character. Everything then becomes difficult, and our efforts become a source of failure in the end. Success does not seem to be forthcoming, because it is not clear to us what is the right direction that we have to take.
What is the mind to do, what are we to do, what is anyone to do in this prescription of yoga called 'mind-control'? Are we to subjugate the Object, destroy the Object, absorb the Object into ourselves, or abstract the mind from the Object and not cognise it? In an act of mind-control, what is to be done? Are we satisfied if we merely become unaware of the existence of the Object, which is what is usually known as abstraction of the senses and the mind from objects, or is there anything to be done in respect of the Object itself? This question arises on account of the necessity to understand the extent of influence the Object exerts upon the subject, and the extent of influence that the subject exerts upon the Object.
For all practical purposes, we can agree with the author of the Panchadasi and conclude that we need not interfere with the scheme of things from the point of view of Ishvara's creation. People can be there, and things can be there they have to be there. We have to change our attitude, which means to say we have to reorganise the method of the working of our own mind inside, in respect of existent objects outside. This is only a tentative answer, and not the final answer, because we have not yet finally given the judgement as to the nature of things. We have temporarily accepted the existence of a world outside us, just as we temporarily accept the meaning of an 'x' in an equation in algebra. Though the 'x' itself may have no meaning ultimately, it is a necessary assumption which solves the question, and afterwards it cancels itself.
So, in the end, we will find that while the acceptance of the existence of things independent of the mind by way of what is known as Ishvara srishti may be necessary for the solution of our problem, the world also will modify itself accordingly when the individual advances further, because all spiritual advance is a parallel advance both from the side of the subject and the Object. It is not only one side that is evolving. The evolution of the individual is, at the same time, a corresponding evolution of all conditions in which the individual is involved, including society and the world.
1.02.1 - The Inhabiting Godhead - Life and Action, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
the Object of habitation is enjoyment and possession; the Object of the Spirit in Cosmos is, therefore, the possession and enjoyment of the universe. Yet, being thus in his essence one, divine and free, man seems to be limited, divided from others, subject to Nature and even its creation and sport, enslaved to death, ignorance and sorrow. His object in manifestation being possession and enjoyment of his world, he is unable to enjoy because of his limitation. This contrary result comes about by Avidya, the Ignorance of oneness: and the knot of the Ignorance is egoism.
EGO
The cause of ego is that while by Its double power of Vidya and Avidya the Spirit dwells at once in the consciousness of multiplicity and relativity and in the consciousness of unity and identity and is therefore not bound by the Ignorance, yet It can, in mind, identify Itself with the Object in the movement, absorbingly, to the apparent exclusion of the Knowledge which remains behind, veiled at the back of the mentality. The movement of Mind in Nature is thus able to conceive of the Object as the reality and the Inhabitant as limited and determined by the appearances of the Object. It conceives of the Object, not as the universe in one of its frontal appearances, but as itself a separate existence standing out from the Cosmos and different in being from all the rest of it. It conceives similarly of the Inhabitant. This is the illusion of ignorance which falsifies all realities. The illusion is called ahamkara, the separative ego-sense which makes each being conceive of itself as an independent personality.
The result of the separation is the inability to enter into harmony and oneness with the universe and a consequent inability to possess and enjoy it. But the desire to possess and enjoy is the master impulse of the Ego which knows itself obscurely to be the Lord, although owing to the limitations of its relativity, it is unable to realise its true existence. The result is discord with others and oneself, mental and physical suffering, the sense of weakness and inability, the sense of obscuration, the straining of energy in passion and in desire towards self-fulfilment, the recoil of energy exhausted or disappointed towards death and disintegration.
--
Enjoyment of the universe and all it contains is the Object of world-existence, but renunciation of all in desire is the condition of the free enjoyment of all.
The renunciation demanded is not a moral constraint of self-denial or a physical rejection, but an entire liberation of the spirit from any craving after the forms of things.
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Desire is only a mode of the emotional mind which by ignorance seeks its delight in the Object of desire and not in the Brahman who expresses Himself in the Object. By destroying that ignorance one can do action without entanglement in desire.
The Energy that drives is itself subject to the Lord, who
1.02.2.1 - Brahman - Oneness of God and the World, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
Many. It asserts the simultaneous validity of Vidya and Avidya and upholds as the Object
of action and knowledge an immortality consistent with Life and Birth in this world. It
--
This is the transcendental, universal and individual Brahman, Lord, Continent and Indwelling Spirit, which is the Object
of all knowledge. Its realisation is the condition of perfection
1.02.2.2 - Self-Realisation, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
and personal opposition to other beings or to the Objectivities
that surround us. Perfect equality5 of soul is established.
1.02.3.1 - The Lord, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
of Brahman an Existent; but the Object of Brahman's delight and
consciousness and the term and stuff of Its existence are Itself. In
--
Brahman. the Object of Love is the self of the Lover; the work
is the self-figuration of the Worker; Universe is body and action
--
their inevitable evolution in the Objective Fact.
Therefore all things are arranged by Him perfectly, ya thatathyatah., as they should be in their nature. There is an imperative harmony in the All, which governs the apparent discords
--
Matter, the Thinker imprisoned and emerging from the Objective
Fact. This imprisoned Thinker is Man, the "Manu".
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self-conscious in the Objective multiplicity. He is the ego in the
cosmos vindicating himself as the All and the Transcendent.
1.02.3.2 - Knowledge and Ignorance, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
Immortality beyond the universe is not the Object of manifestation in the universe, for that the Self always possessed. Man
exists in order that through him the Self may enjoy Immortality
10.23 - Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now these prayerswho prays? And to whom? These meditationswho meditates? And who is the Object of the meditation? First of all there is the apparent obvious meaning, that is on the very surface. It is the Mother's own prayers offered to her own beloved Lord. It is her own personal aspiration, the preoccupation of the individual human being that she is. It is the secret story, the inner history of all that she desires, asks for, questions, all that she has 'experienced and realised and the farther more that she is to achieve, the revelations of a terrestrial creature of the particular name and form that she happens to possess. Thus for example, the very opening passage of these prayers:
Quoique tout mon tre Te soit thoriquement consacr, Matre Sublime, qui est la vie, la lumire et I' amour de toute chose j' ai peine encore appliquer cette conscration dans les dtails. Il m' a fallu Plusieurs semaines pour savoir que la raison de cette mditation crite, sa lgitimation, rside dans Ie fait de Te l' adresser quotidiennement. Ainsi je matrialiserai chaque jour un pen de la conversation que j' ai si frquemment avec Toi; je Te ferai de mon mieux ma corifession. .12
1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The mind moves only to realities, and never to unrealities. There is no such thing as the mind getting attracted to unreal things. Anything that it considers to be real becomes the Object of its consideration and action. The subsequent transcendence of a particular concept of reality does not in any way affect the mind from getting interested in whatever level of reality it considers valuable at a given moment in time. In every stage of life the mind is confronted only by realities, because should it be convinced that its perceptions or cognitions are unreal, it will not bother itself about them. A reality is that which can fulfil a particular need at a given time; whether or not it is is ultimately real is a different question altogether. A thing may not be ultimately real, and yet it may be real enough to satisfy a particular requisition of the mind under a given condition.
Sometimes we have false illnesses which can be set right by false remedies. The remedy and the illness should be of the same category. In dream, we may sometimes feel very hungry. It is possible that even after a heavy dinner, we may dream of hunger when we go to bed. Is this hunger in the dream real, or is it unreal? If it is unreal, we would not feel it. Why would we feel it if it is unreal? So when it is felt, it is real. We may have lunch in a dream. Is this lunch real, or is it unreal? If it is unreal, it cannot appease the hunger of the dreaming individual. We have a dream hunger, appeased by a dream lunch. The hunger in dream cannot be called real if we compare it with the waking state, nor can we regard the lunch that we have in dream as real when compared to the waking lunch. But that is a different matter; we are not asked to compare here. We have to take things as they are. The condition of the mind in dream, which makes it feel an intense hunger, is commensurate with the nature of the food that is given to it in that very same dream condition. The dream food can satisfy the dream hunger because they are in the same space-time level; they are not in different degrees of reality.
10.24 - Savitri, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is this universe? From where has it come? Whither is it going? What is the purpose of it all? Why is man here? What is the Object of his existence?
Such is the mode of human aspiration. And Ashwapati in his quest begins to explore the world and see what it is, the way it is built up. He observes it rising tier upon tier, level upon level of consciousness. He mounts these stairs, takes cognisance of the modes and functions of each and passes on enriched by the experiences that each contri butes to his developing consciousness. The ascent he finds is from ignorance to knowledge. The human being starts from the darkest bed of ignorance, the solid basis of rock as it were, the body, the material existence. Ignorance here is absolute inconscience. Out of the total absence of consciousness, the being begins to awake and rise to a gradually developingwidening, deepening and heighteningconsciousness. That is how Ashwapati advances, ascends from a purely bodily life and consciousness, to the next rung of the ladder, the first appearance and expression of life-force, the vital consciousness energies and forms of the small lower vital. He moves on, moves upward, there is a growing light in And mixed with the obscurity; ignorance begins to shed its hard and dark coatings one and gives place to directed and motivated energies. He meets beings and creatures appropriate to those levels crawling and stirring and climbing, moved by the laws governing the respective regions. In this way Ashwapati passes on into the higher vital, into the border of the mental.
1.025 - Sadhana - Intensifying a Lighted Flame, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
In the practice of one reality, ekatattva abhyasah, mentioned by Sage Patanjali in one of his sutras for the purpose of restraining the modifications of the mind, there are, again, grades of approach. The one reality is not necessarily the Absolute Reality, though that is the aim, ultimately. As was mentioned previously, a reality, for the purpose of practice, is that condition which can fulfil a particular need of a specific state of mind under a given condition. So until the Absolute Reality is reached, all other realities are relative realities. Every reality, as far as we are concerned empirically, is relative subject to transcendence. Nevertheless, it is a reality to us, which only goes to prove that we are also only relative realities. We, as individuals, are not absolute realities and, therefore, we are satisfied with what is relative. We are not in daily contact with the Absolute; what we are in contact with is a relative reality. And inasmuch as the subject experiencing and the Object experienced are on the same level or degree of reality, it goes without saying that the empirical subjects that we all are come under relative reality, and not the Absolute Reality.
In the concentration of the mind on one reality, ekatattva, what is intended is that the attention should be focused on a system or order of values which is immediately superior to, or transcendent to, the current state of affairs, the present state of experience, and the conditions through which we are passing through at this moment. Anything which can include particulars in a more organised whole can be regarded as a higher reality for this purpose. There are tentative realities created for the purpose of practical convenience by organisations, associations or systems which we have created for the purpose of subjugating the individual ego and compelling it to affiliate itself to a larger body to which also it ought to belong and is made to belong.
1.028 - Bringing About Whole-Souled Dedication, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
It is impossible to do anything wholly good on account of it being impossible for us to wholly understand the total pattern involved in the movement of any successful action. No human being can wholly succeed in life, because a wholly correct action cannot be performed. The reason is that all the contri butory factors tending towards the success of an action cannot become the Object of knowledge of any individual, because that would call for omniscience, almost, and no one can be omniscient; therefore, no one can be wholly successful. Entire success is possible only when there is omniscience, and not before. So, we have to swallow the bitter pill and then try to be satisfied with whatever we get. Nevertheless, it is up to us to see that we put forth the best of our abilities, commensurate with the extent of knowledge with which we are endowed in our life.
Practice, or abhyasa, is always streng thened, and has to be streng thened, by a corresponding practice that goes on simultaneously with abhyasa, and that parallel practice is the automatic withdrawal of the mind from all distracting factors. If we are pulled in two directions with equal force, we will not be able to move even a little bit. We have had occasion to contemplate to some extent on the details of what renunciation is, and what are the various stages of vairagya which Patanjali regards as indispensable to the practice of yoga. He tells us that the practice consists in an insistent attempt on our part to fix ourselves in a single or given attitude. Tatra sthitau yatna abhysa (I.13): Abhyasa or practice is the effort to fix one's own self in a given attitude. What is this given attitude? We have to choose a particular attitude in which to fix ourselves for a protracted period; this is called practice. The attitude in which we have to fix ourselves should be such that we would tend to greater and greater stages of freedom of the soul, and a lessening and decreasing of the intensity of bondage.
As we had occasion to observe, the practice commences with being seated in a particular posture; and sitting in a particular posture is itself a practice. Often we may be under the wrong notion that 'sitting' is not a very important part of yoga, because yoga is mental concentration. Yes, it is true, but the concentration of the mind will not be possible when we are seated in an awkward posture. We must remember that there is a vital connection obtaining among every part of our psychophysical organism. Right from the skin, which is the outermost part of our body, to the deepest level of our psychological being, there is an internal relationship. Any kind of disturbance that is felt in any part of this organic structure will be sympathetically felt to a particular degree in other parts or levels of this organic structure. The posture or asana, the steady seatedness in a particular mood not only of the mind, but also of the body, the nerves and the pranas is essential for the concentration of the mind on the Objective.
This practice becomes fixed and successful when it is continued under certain conditions. It has to be continued every day this is one thing to remember. Every day the practice should be taken up in right earnest, and it has to be done at a given time, if possible at a fixed time, at the same time, and not changing the hours of the day because this practice is not a hobby. We are not merely engaging ourselves in a sort of diversion for the sake of freedom from boredom in life. The practice of yoga is a serious undertaking and, therefore, it has to be taken up with the earnestness of a scientist who is bent upon achieving his objective by the adoption of all technical devices available.
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It is necessary to reiterate that the only obstacle in the achievement of success in the practice of yoga is the absence of wholeheartedness. We are never whole-souled in our dedication, because of our subtly feeling the presence of other desirable things in the world which we consider as equally good, or at least to some extent. We never feel that things are useless, and that this is the only useful thing. Unless the feeling that everything else has no meaning whatsoever for our personal life, that everything except this wonderful undertaking called yoga has no meaning in our life unless this attitude of complete distaste towards everything extraneous arises in the mind, there cannot be whole-souled attention of the mind on the Objective. That is why Patanjali has been crying that vairagya should be coupled with practice or abhyasa. We have practice or abhyasa without vairagya and, therefore, no result comes. Practice without vairagya is the attempt at fixing a portion of the mind, a fraction of the mind, on this objective called meditation, and sometimes allowing a major part of the mind to engage itself in other things, which also look equally good to this unfortunate attitude of the mind.
Whole-souled dedication to the practice is possible only when there is perfect understanding. Why is it that our mind is not entirely dedicated to this practice, and part of it is thinking of something else? The reason is that our understanding of the efficacy and the value and the worthwhileness of the practice is inadequate. Our faith in God, our trust in God, and our feeling that God is everything is half-baked it is not perfect. We do not have, even today, full faith that God is everything. "There is something else which is also good." Such thinking is lurking in the mind. "Though God is all alright, the scriptures say that but my subtle conscience says that there is something else also, something else that is also sweet. God is sweet, but there is something else also, equally sweet. Why should I not go there?.
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
in life and works is the law of our being and the Object of our
world-existence.
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and time, the far and the near, the subjective and the Objective, internal and external, myself and others, one and many. Brahman,
the real existence, is all these things to our consciousness, but
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attain to the Object of our existence which is to manifest in itself
whether on earth in a terrestrial body and against the resistance
1.02 - Groups and Statistical Mechanics, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
when the Objects transformed by the group are permuted by the
operators of the group. In this connection, we should cite the
1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Catholicism itself was modified for the better under the influence of the feminine Principle from the day when the Virgin Mother took her place close to the masculine Trinity, and it is the cult of Mary, more than anything else, that has saved the Faith from the fanatical aberrations of the Middle Ages and the Church from the reprisals with which she was threatened. If this feminine symbol had been the Object of interpretations less gross, the Church might have found in it the means by which she could have succeeded in wedding together the two contrary tendencies of the human mind, unifying the discoveries of Science with the intuitions of faith and transforming her ignorant spiritual dogmatism into a spirituality worthy of the name. She would then have understood that the true Mater Dolorosa is no other than this suffering Matter whose progressive evolution is indeed a perpetual Assumption.
But it is not merely in the realm of the intellect that we see today the rehabilitation of the misunderstood feminine Principle. In the social order also the emancipation of thought has for its sequel the emancipation of the peoples and after the Rights of Man have been affirmed, the Rights of Woman begin to assert themselves. And it is by a perfectly logical consequence that the feminist movement coincides everywhere with the materialistic; for they are, in sum, two corollary aspects of the same original reaction.
1.02 - IN THE COMPANY OF DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Pundit Samadhyayi was present. The Brahmo devotees introduced him to Sri Ramakrishna as a scholar well versed in the Vedas and the other scriptures. The Master said, "Yes, I can see inside him through his eyes, as one can see the Objects in a room through the glass door."
Trailokya sang. Suddenly the Master stood up and went into samdhi, repeating the Mother's name. Coming down a little to the plane of sense consciousness, he danced and sang:
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
determines what is out there, so to speak out there, from the Objective viewpoint. The Russians, by
contrast, have devoted themselves to the role of the brain in governing behavior, and in generating the
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Sokolov was concerned primarily with the modelling of the events in the Objective external world
assuming, essentially, that when we model, we model facts. Most of the scholars who have followed his
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might be the same place with regards to its strict spatial location, from the Objective perspective). We
know how to act in some places, and not in others. The plans we put into action sometimes work, and
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and equally-modified internal motivational state. It is also information about what is, from the Objective
perspective is the record of that sensory experience occurring in the course of ongoing behavior.
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We have generally presumed that the purpose of exploration is production of a picture of the Objective
qualities of the territory explored. This is evidently but only partially true. However, the reasons we
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or emotional significance, in previously unexplored territory not identification of the Objective features
that allows us to inhibit the novelty-induced terror and curiosity emergence of that territory otherwise
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It is not primarily interested in the Objective nature of the new circumstances a rat cannot actually
determine what is objective, and what is merely personal opinion. Nor does it care. It just wants to know
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situation, such as a new object placed in its cage, it first freezes, watching the Object. If nothing terrible
happens, while it is immobile nothing punishing, or additionally threatening it moves, slowly and at a
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utility and valence of the Object, conceived in relationship to its ongoing activity (and, perhaps, to possible
patterns of activity in the future). The animal builds its world of significances from the information
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It is not too much to say that the animal elicits the properties of the Object, sensory and affective, (or
even brings them into being) through its capacity for creative investigation. 132 Animals that are relatively
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elements of experience. the Object any object serves us as a source of limitless possibility (or, at least,
possibility limited only by the capacity for exploratory genius exhibited at any particular moment). Simple
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subject and the Object in question. This new sensory input constitutes grounds for the construction,
elaboration and update of a permanent but modifiable four-dimensional (spatial and temporal)
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heroes not the Objective historical figures of the past but what those heroes represented: the pattern of
action that made them heroes. That pattern is to say it once again the act of voluntary and successful
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properties of the Objects in a cognitive model means that any or all of those objects can stand for any or
all of the others. This capacity makes sense, since all of the Objects in a given category are by definition
regarded as equivalent, in some non-trivial sense (most generally, in terms of implication for action). The
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experiential field affect, imagination and all and not the Objective world constructed by the postempirical mind. This prescientific model of reality primarily consisted of narrative representations of
behavioral patterns (and of the contexts that surround them), and was concerned primarily with the
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goddess, the queen, the matrix, the matriarch, the container, the Object to be fertilized, the source of all
things, the strange, the unconscious, the sensual, the foreigner, the place of return and rest, the maw of the
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cosmological theories, and describe the generation of the Objective world. This presumption is wrong. Our
ancestors were not as simple-minded as we think they were, and their theories of the generation of the
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we are familiar with, and the valences we consider epiphenomenal; of the Objects of experience, and the
fact of the subject, who does the experiencing. The world brought into being in archaic myths of creation is
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affective power from the Object, and leave it standing in its purely sensory and consensual aspect; can
distinguish between what is us and what is world. The pre-experimental mind could not (can not) do this, at
least not consistently; could not reliably discriminate between the Object and its effect on behavior. It is that
object and effect which, in totality, comprise a god (more accurately, it is a class of objects and their effects
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well as those aspects of the Objective world that activate those intrapsychic systems. The Sumerians
considered themselves destined to clo the and feed such gods, because they viewed themselves as the
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This state the totality of all things might be regarded as the Objective world, in the absence of the
subject, although this conceptualization is too narrow, as primordial chaos also contains that which
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objectively, as the Objective is currently understood.
Ritualized, dramatic or mythic representations of the unknown the domain that emerges when error is
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The threatening aspects of the Great Mother gather metaphoric representation as chimeras of anxietyproducing places, animals, gestures, expressions and things. These elements diverse from the Objective
perspective (from the standpoint of the proper set) nonetheless unite to produce an image of the everpresent potential danger inherent in anything unpredictable. The Great Mother unexplored territory is
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observes instead that the fear-inducing character of the Object has receded (as a consequence of the
courage of the explorer, or the benevolence of the thing in question).
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of the society in the situation changes the motivational relevance of all the Objects in the situation. Two
children with one toy have to come to an agreement, which is mutual modification of behavior, before the
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The culturally determined meaning of an object apprehended, originally, as an aspect of the Object is
in fact in large part implicit information about the nature of the current dominance hierarchy, which has
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affective significance of the Object (its relevance, or lack thereof, to the attainment of a particular goal), in
combination with its scarcity or prevalence, and the power (or lack thereof) of those who judge its nature.
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satisfying in large part, independently of the Objective properties of the item in question. The sociallydetermined affective significance of the Object is naturally experienced as an aspect of the Object which
is to say that the charisma radiating from an Elvis Presley guitar is part of the guitar. This means that the
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well as part of the Object (its magic) from the mythological or narrative perspective].
Identification of the context-dependent meaning of objects in the social environment, which is
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having a superhuman origin. the Objects or weapons that were borrowed, the behavior patterns and
institutions that were imitated, the myths or beliefs that were assimilated, were believed to be charged
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(and is most certainly not cumulative description of the Objective world). That this is so can be seen, even
today, when the members of totalitarian cultures such as the modern North Korean collapse into genuine
1.02 - Prayer of Parashara to Vishnu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
kāra)[23], denominated Vaikarīka, 'pure;' Taijasa, 'passionate;' and Bhūtādi, 'rudimental,'[24] is produced; the origin of the (subtile) elements, and of the organs of sense; invested, in consequence of its three qualities, by Intellect, as Intellect is by the Chief principle. Elementary Egotism then becoming productive, as the rudiment of sound, produced from it Ether, of which sound is the characteristic, investing it with its rudiment of sound. Ether becoming productive, engendered the rudiment of touch; whence originated strong wind, the property of which is touch; and Ether, with the rudiment of sound, enveloped the rudiment of touch. Then wind becoming productive, produced the rudiment of form (colour); whence light (or fire) proceeded, of which, form (colour) is the attribute; and the rudiment of touch enveloped the wind with the rudiment of colour. Light becoming productive, produced the rudiment of taste; whence proceed all juices in which flavour resides; and the rudiment of colour invested the juices with the rudiment of taste. The waters becoming productive, engendered the rudiment of smell; whence an aggregate (earth) originates, of which smell is the property[25]. In each several element resides its peculiar rudiment; thence the property of tanmātratā,[26] (type or rudiment) is ascribed to these elements. Rudimental elements are not endowed with qualities, and therefore they are neither soothing, nor terrific, nor stupifying[27]. This is the elemental creation, proceeding from the principle of egotism affected by the property of darkness. The organs of sense are said to be the passionate products of the same principle, affected by foulness; and the ten divinities[28] proceed from egotism affected by the principle of goodness; as does Mind, which is the eleventh. The organs of sense are ten: of the ten, five are the skin, eye, nose, tongue, and ear; the Object of which, combined with Intellect, is the apprehension of sound and the rest: the organs of excretion and procreation, the hands, the feet, and the voice, form the other five; of which excretion, generation, manipulation, motion, and speaking, are the several acts.
Then, ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with the properties of sound and the rest, existed as distinguishable according to their qualities, as soothing, terrific, or stupifying; but possessing various energies, and being unconnected, they could not, without combination, create living beings, not having blended with each other. Having combined, therefore, with one another, they assumed, through their mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity; and from the direction of spirit, with the acquiescence of the indiscrete Principle[29], Intellect and the rest, to the gross elements inclusive, formed an egg[30], which gradually expanded like a bubble of water. This vast egg, O sage, compounded of the elements, and resting on the waters, was the excellent natural abode of Viṣṇu in the form of Brahmā; and there Viṣṇu, the lord of the universe, whose essence is inscrutable, assumed a perceptible form, and even he himself abided in it in the character of Brahmā[31]. Its womb, vast as the mountain Meru, was composed of the mountains; and the mighty oceans were the waters that filled its cavity. In that egg, O Brahman, were the continents and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the universe, the gods, the demons, and mankind. And this egg was externally invested by seven natural envelopes, or by water, air, fire, ether, and Aha
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Viṣṇu as creator, creates himself; as preserver, preserves himself; as destroyer, destroys himself at the end of all things. This world of earth, air, fire, water, ether, the senses, and the mind; all that is termed spirit[34], that also is the lord of all elements, the universal form, and imperishable: hence he is the cause of creation, preservation, and destruction; and the subject of the vicissitudes inherent in elementary nature[35]. He is the Object and author of creation: he preserves, destroys, and is preserved. He, Viṣṇu, as Brahmā, and as all other beings, is infinite form: he is the supreme, the giver of all good, the fountain of all happiness[36].
Footnotes and references:
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[26]: Tanmātra, 'rudiment' or 'type,' from Tad, 'that,' for Tasmin, 'in that' gross element, and mātrā, 'subtile or rudimental form'. The rudiments are also the characteristic properties of the elements: as the Bhāgavata; 'The rudiment of it (ether) is also its quality, sound; as a common designation may denote both a person who sees an object, and the Object which is to be seen: that is, according to the commentator, suppose a person behind a wall called aloud, "An elephant! an elephant!" the term would equally indicate that an elephant was visible, and that somebody saw it. Bhag. II. 5.
[27]: The properties here alluded to are not those of goodness &c., but other properties assigned to perceptible objects by the Sā
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
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22:When once the Object of concentration has possessed and is possessed by the three master instruments, the thought, the heart and the will, -- a consummation fully possible only when the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law, -- the perfection of mind and life and body can be effectively fulfilled in our transmuted nature. This will be done, not for the personal satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the divine work. For the work can be truly performed only when the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for a selfless action, -- and that will be when personal desire and egoism are abolished, but not the liberated individual. Even when the little ego has been abolished, the true Spiritual Person can still remain and God's will and work and delight in him and the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will then be divine and done divinely; our mind arid life and will, devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves, -all that we can manifest of the embodied Unity, Love, Freedom, Strength, Power, Splendour, immortal Joy which is the goal of the spirit's terrestrial adventure.
23:The Yoga must start with an effort or at least a settled turn towards this total concentration. A constant and unfailing will of consecration of all ourselves to the Supreme is demanded of us, an offering of our whole being and our many-chambered nature to the Eternal who is the All. The effective fullness of our concentration on the one thing needful to the exclusion of all else will be the measure of our self-consecration to the One who is alone desirable. But this exclusiveness will in the end exclude nothing except the falsehood of our way of seeing the world and our will's ignorance. For our concentration on the Eternal will be consummated by the mind when we see constantly the Divine in itself and the Divine in ourselves, but also the Divine in all things and beings and happenings. It will be consummated by the heart when all emotion is summed up in the love of the Divine, -- of the Divine in itself and for itself, but love too of the Divine in all its beings and powers and personalities and forms in the Universe' It will be consummated by the will when we feel and receive always the divine impulsion and accept that alone as our sole motive force; but this will mean that, having slain to the last rebellious straggler the wandering impulses of the egoistic nature, we have universalised ourselves and can accept with a constant happy acceptance the one divine working in all things. This is the first fundamental siddhi of the integral Yoga.
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Mahabharata, we may fairly conclude that they were actually contemporaries and that the epic is to a great extent dealing with historical characters and in the war of Kurukshetra with a historical occurrence imprinted firmly on the memory of the race. We know too that Krishna and Arjuna were the Object of religious worship in the pre-Christian centuries; and there is some reason to suppose that they were so in connection with a religious and philosophical tradition from which the Gita may have gathered many of its elements and even the foundation of its synthesis of knowledge, devotion and works, and perhaps also that the human Krishna was the founder, restorer or at the least one of the early teachers of this school. The Gita may well in spite of its later form represent the outcome in Indian thought of the teaching of Krishna and the connection of that teaching with the historical Krishna, with Arjuna and with the war of
Kurukshetra may be something more than a dramatic fiction. In the Mahabharata Krishna is represented both as the historical character and the Avatar; his worship and Avatarhood must therefore have been well established by the time - apparently from the fifth to the first centuries B.C. - when the old story and poem or epic tradition of the Bharatas took its present form. There is a hint also in the poem of the story or legend of the Avatar's early life in Vrindavan which, as developed by the Puranas into an intense and powerful spiritual symbol, has exercised so profound an influence on the religious mind of
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of substance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. For example cow and horse belong to the category of substance. He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. White and black belong to the category of quality. Having money or possessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like being in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activityat rest, without parts or activity, according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is without a second and is not the Object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One before whom words recoil.
Shankara
1.02 - The Objects of Imitation., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
object:1.02 - the Objects of Imitation.
Since the Objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life.
Now it is evident that each of the modes of imitation above mentioned will exhibit these differences, and become a distinct kind in imitating objects that are thus distinct. Such diversities may be found even in dancing, flute-playing, and lyre-playing. So again in language, whether prose or verse unaccompanied by music. Homer, for example, makes men better than they are; Cleophon as they are; Hegemon the Thasian, the inventor of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Deiliad, worse than they are. The same thing holds good of Dithyrambs and Nomes; here too one may portray different types, as Timotheus and Philoxenus differed in representing their Cyclopes. The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
"The way is more difficult for those whose mind is attached to the Absolute!" Bhakti has to float on smoothly with the current of our nature. True it is that we cannot have; any idea of the Brahman which is not anthropomorphic, but is it not equally true of everything we know? The greatest psychologist the world has ever known, Bhagavan Kapila, demonstrated ages ago that human consciousness is one of the elements in the make-up of all the Objects of our perception and conception, internal as well as external. Beginning with our bodies and going up to Ishvara, we may see that every object of our perception is this consciousness plus something else, whatever that may be; and this unavoidable mixture is what we ordinarily think of as reality. Indeed it is, and ever will be, all of the reality that is possible for the human mind to know. Therefore to say that Ishvara is unreal, because He is anthropomorphic, is sheer nonsense. It sounds very much like the occidentals squabble on idealism and realism, which fearful-looking quarrel has for its foundation a mere play on the word "real". The idea of Ishvara covers all the ground ever denoted and connoted by the word real, and Ishvara is as real as anything else in the universe; and after all, the word real means nothing more than what has now been pointed out. Such is our philosophical conception of Ishvara.
(Bhagavata) "Unto them appeared Krishna with a smile on His lotus face, clad in yellow robes and having garlands on, the embodied conqueror (in beauty) of the god of love."
1.02 - The Pit, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
One of the paradoxes of the intellect is that despite the fact that our knowledge is purely phenomenal, nevertheless even that knowledge is ofno real depth. For instance, the judgment a is a is a meaningless tautology. In order to be significant our thought must pass beyond the bare identity of an object with itself, but it must not pass to something which has naught in common with the Object.
Thus, if we assert a equals h, the judgment is false, since we pass from a to b, the latter having nothing in common with a.
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
such a deceptive degree that my eyes could not distinguish it from a real seed, no forces of earth or light could avail to produce from it a plant." If the student thoroughly grasps this thought so that it becomes an inward experience, he will also be able to form the following thought and couple it with the right feeling: "All that will ultimately grow out of the seed is now secretly enfolded within it as the force of the whole plant. In the artificial imitation of the seed there is no such force present. And yet both appear alike to my eyes. The real seed, therefore, contains something invisible which is not present in the imitation." It is on this invisible something that thought and feeling are to be concentrated. (Anyone objecting that a microscopical examination would reveal the difference between the real seed and the imitation would only show that he had failed to grasp the point. The intention is not to investigate the physical nature of the Object, but to use it for the development of psycho-spiritual forces.)
Let the student fully realize that this invisible something will transmute itself later on into a visible plant, which he will have before him in its
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Recall to mind some person whom you may have observed when he was filled with desire for some object. Direct your attention to this desire. It is best to recall to memory that moment when the desire was at its height, and it was still uncertain whether the Object of the desire would be attained. And now fill your mind with this recollection, and reflect on what you can thus observe. Maintain the utmost inner tranquility. Make the greatest possible effort to be blind and deaf to everything that may be going on around you, and take special heed that through the conception thus evoked a feeling should awaken in your soul. Allow this feeling to rise in your soul like a cloud on the cloudless horizon. As a rule, of course, your reflection will be interrupted, because the person whom it concerns was not observed in this particular state of soul for a sufficient length of
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The first trial consists in obtaining a truer vision than the average man has of the corporeal attributes of lifeless things, and later of plants, animals and human beings. This does not mean what at present is called scientific knowledge, for it is a question not of science but of vision. As a rule, the would-be initiate proceeds to learn how the Objects of nature and the beings gifted with life manifest themselves to the spiritual ear and the spiritual eye. In a certain way these things then lie stripped-naked-before the beholder. The qualities which can then be seen and heard are hidden from the physical eyes and ears. For physical perception they are concealed as if by a veil, and the falling away of this veil for the would-be initiate consists in a process designated as the process of Purification by Fire. The first trial is therefore known as the Fire-Trial.
For many people, ordinary life is itself a more or less unconscious process of initiation through the Fire-Trial. Such people have passed through
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be guided only by the results of his higher perception and reading of the occult script, in order to produce the changes in question in these higher regions of existence. Should he, in the course of his activity, introduce any of his own opinions and desires, or should he diverge for one moment from the laws which he has recognized to be right, in order to follow his own willful inclination, then the result produced would differ entirely from what was intended. He would lose sight of the goal to which his action tended, and confusion would result. Hence ample opportunity is given him in the course of this trial to develop self-control. This is the Object in view. Here again, this trial can be more easily passed by those whose life, before initiation, has led them to acquire self-control. Anyone having acquired the faculty of following high principles and ideals, while putting into the background all personal predilection; anyone capable of always performing his duty, even though inclinations and sympathies would like to seduce him from this duty-such a person is unconsciously an initiate in the midst of ordinary life. He will need but little to succeed in this particular trial. Indeed, a certain
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measure of initiation thus unconsciously acquired in life will, as a rule, be indispensable for success in this second trial. For even as it is difficult for those who have not learned to spell correctly in their childhood to make good this deficiency when fully grown up, so too it is difficult to develop the necessary degree of self-control at the moment of looking into the higher worlds, if this ability has not been acquired to a certain degree in ordinary life. the Objects of the physical world do not alter, whatever the nature of our wishes, desires, and inclinations. In the higher worlds, however, our wishes, desires, and inclinations are causes that produce effects. If we wish to produce a particular effect in these worlds, we must strictly follow the right rules and subdue every arbitrary impulse.
One human quality is of very special importance at this stage of initiation, namely, an unquestionably sound judgment. Attention should be paid to the training of this faculty during all the previous stages; for it now remains to be proved whether the candidate is shaping in a way that shows him to be fit for the truth path of knowledge.
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by the past. We must be prepared at every moment that every object and every being can bring to us some new revelation. If we judge the new by the standard of the old we are liable to error. The memory of past experiences will be of greatest use for the very reason that it enables us to perceive the new. Had we not gone through a definite experience we should perhaps be blind to the qualities of the Object or being that comes before us. Thus experience should serve the purpose of perceiving the new and not of judging it by the standard of the old. In this respect the initiate acquires certain definite qualities, and thereby many things are revealed to him which remain concealed from the uninitiated.
The second draught presented to the initiate is the draught of remembrance. Through its agency he acquires the faculty of retaining the knowledge of the higher truths ever present in his soul. Ordinary memory would be unequal to this task. We must unite ourselves and become as one with the higher truths. We must not only know them, but be able, quite as a matter of course, to manifest and administer them in living actions, even as we ordinarily eat and drink.
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
Besides their first suggestions of landscape painting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be known as the "still life," i.e., the Objectification of nature already expressed in the Roman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoral scenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges. It was principally by incorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing their implications that the Renaissance was able to create the three-dimensional perspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectival culture.
2. The Perspectival World
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The conception of man as subject is based an a conception of the world and the environment as an object. It is in the paintings of Giotto that we See first expressed, however tentatively, the Objectified, external world. Early Sienese art, particularly miniature painting, reveals a yet spaceless, self-contained, and depthless world significant for its symbolic content and not for what we would today call its realism. These "pictures" of an unperspectival era are, as it were, painted at night when objects are without shadow and depth. Here darkness has swallowed space to the extent that only the immaterial, psychic component could be expressed. But in the work of Giotto, the latent space hitherto dormant in the night of collective man's unconscious is visualized; the first renderings of space begin to appear in painting signalling an incipient perspectivity. A new psychic awareness of space, objectified or externalized from the psyche out into the world, begins a consciousness of space whose element of depth becomes visible in perspective.
This psychic inner-space breaks forth at the very moment that the Troubadours are writing the first lyric "I"-Poems, the first personal poetry that suddenly opens an abyss between man, as poet, and the world or nature (1250 A.D.). Concurrently at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, following the thought of his teacher Albertus Magnus, asserts the validity of Aristotle, thereby initiating the rational displacement of the predominantly psychic-bound Platonic world.
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Perspectivation, let us remember, also includes a reduction; and this reductive nature is evident, for instance, in perspectival man's predominantly visual or sight orientation in contrast to unperspectival man's audial or hearing orientation. The basis of the perspectival world view is the visual pyramid; the two lines extend from the eyes and meet at the Object viewed. The image formed by the isolated sector includes the subject, the Object, and the space in between. Pierodella Francesca clearly expresses this in his remark: "The first is the eye that sees; the second, the Object seen; the third, the distance between the one and the other." On this Panofsky comments: "It [perspective] furnished a place for the human form to unfold in a life-like manner and move mimically [which is equivalent to the discovery of space]; but it also enabled light to spread and diffuse in space [the illumination of space is the emergence of spatial awareness] and permitted considerable freedom in the treatment of the human body. Perspective provides a distance between man and objects." Such detachment is always a sign of an emergent objectifying consciousness and of the liberation of previously innate potentialities that are subsequently rediscovered and realized in the outer world.
This example again suggests to what extent perspective is the most tangible expression of an entire epoch. The basic concern of perspective, which it achieves, is to "look through" space and thereby to perceive and grasp space rationally. The very word "perspective" conveys this intent, as Drer suggests: "Besides, perspectiva is a Latin term meaning `seeing through." It is a "seeing through" of space and thus a coming to awareness of space. It is irrelevant here whether we accept Drers interpretation and translate perspicere (from which perspectiva derives) in his sense as "seeing through," or render it, with Panofsky, as "seeing clearly." Both interpretations point to the same thing. The emergent awareness of distantiating space presupposes a clear vision; and this heightening of awareness is accompanied by an increase of personal or ego-consciousness.
1.02 - THE WITHIN OF THINGS, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
no longer be evaded, because it is the Object of a direct intuition
and the substance of all knowledge.
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In that case and the Objection will come from material-
ists and upholders of spirituality alike if everything in
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the one hand the Objective reality of psychical effort and work is
so well established that the whole of ethics rests on it and, on the
1.02 - What is Psycho therapy?, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
from this view the therapy followed easily enough, the Object of which was
simply to suppress those products of imagination the imaginary
--
Much to the astonishment of the psycho therapist, the Object of his
labours has not grown simpler with deepened knowledge and experience,
1.031 - Intense Aspiration, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
This whole-souled attitude is what is meant by tivra samvegatva. If our asking is charged with an intensity of fervour, we shall get what we want. This is the secret of success, not only in spiritual life but also in material life, because the whole-souled surging of oneself towards the Objective sets in vibration the atmosphere in which the Objective is situated, and there is a sympathy or an empathy, an en rapport established between the seeker and the sought. the Object that we are seeking I am not speaking of a spiritual object, as it could even be a material object the Object that we are seeking is not located somewhere in a distant place. This is the secret of achievement of any kind. We have a wrong notion that things are situated far off in some place and, therefore, it requires a tremendous effort of travel, etc., in the direction of the Object in order that it may be acquired. This is not the fact. Any object in this world, whatever it may be, is not cast off into distant space in the manner in which we think it is, or it appears to be.
There is nothing in this world which is spatially cut off by a long distance, ultimately speaking. The distance between the seeker and the sought is an apparent one it is not a real one. If the distance is real, it would be difficult for us to achieve anything. If there is a real gap between me and somebody else, that somebody else will be outside me for ever and ever. the Object that we seek is not really cut off by a gap of distance spatial or even temporal. Even the time factor is not a bar to the achievement of the Objective, because while space and time seem to be the principle obstructions to our achievement of anything, they are ultimately nothing if we come to the truth about them. These so-called terrific factors called 'space' and 'time', which on one side make the Object appear far off in space and on the other side make it appear distant in time, are ultimately illusory vestments over the consciousness of what the truth is. The achievement of anything is a simple affair if the correct technique is known, because nothing can be simpler to understand and experience than truth. The easiest thing is truth, because it is truth after all, and what else can be as easy as truth? It will be difficult to catch untruth. But it should not be difficult to catch truth. We have said it is truth. It is real. It is a fact. It is what it is. How can we say that it is so hard to get it? To utter a truth is very easy; to tell a lie is very difficult, as we know very well, because we have to think deeply before we utter a lie. But what is the difficulty in telling the truth? It is a plain fact.
The whole-souled movement of consciousness towards the Objective is not merely, or not necessarily, a spatial movement. The great teacher Acharya Sankara was never tired of removing this misconception in the minds of people the travelling to truth does not mean travelling in a vehicle towards some distant place, as if it is a village or a town. In every commentary on every Upanishad and Brahma Sutra he mentions this point that here, 'travelling' does not mean travelling in a vehicle, nor does it mean movement in space. It is nothing of the kind. It is a different thing altogether that takes place, because the Object of our quest is ultimately connected with us I would say, even now. But even if we do not want to accept that, at least ultimately it is connected with us. Therefore, finally, it is a movement towards our own self.
The achievement of an object, temporal or spiritual, is ultimately an effort towards achievement of unity with one's own self. Though in the beginning it looks like a movement of the seeker towards the sought, due to the individuality of the seeker and the consequent isolation of the seeker from the Object that is sought, the more we advance towards the Object, the nearer we seem to come to our own self. This is very strange. One's intention is to move towards an object, but what is happening is that one is coming nearer to oneself. The reason is that the Object that we seek has some connection with us. So the nearer we go to the Object, the nearer also we come to our own self, because the self of the Object is somehow or other, at least remotely, connected with our own self. And finally, the intention is to unite oneself in the possession of the Object. The ultimate success is union of oneself with the Objective that has been sought. We are in complete possession of it; not an ordinary possession of an imaginary character, but an absolute commingling of oneself with that objective so that it is inseparable from our being we have enjoyed it perfectly, to the utter core.
So, this intensity of asking, the profundity of the soul's aspiration for the Object that is being sought, mentioned in this sutra of Patanjali, tvra savegnm sanna, is the crux of the whole matter. We are also told that mumukshutva is the most important qualification of a spiritual seeker. All other things, even viveka, vairagya, shatsampat, come afterwards. Mumukshutva intense longing swallows up every other thing. What qualification did the gopis have? They were not qualified MA's, graduates from Oxford. They had no viveka or vairagya in the sense that we describe academically, in philosophical parlance. We should not even apply these technical aspects to them. It was simply a surge of their souls. They wanted it and wanted nothing else, and there ended the matter. "You don't tell me anything else. I want it, I want it, and I don't want anything else." This kind of aspiration was in their hearts, and we should not bring any other argument here either philosophical, or academic, or logical, or scientific. We do not want to hear anything else. When these arguments were brought in an academic manner by Uddhava, they said, "You bundle up your knowledge and go from here. We want Him, that is all, and we do not want to hear anything else." This wanting is something which is inscrutable, though it is very easily said.
Well, we may say, "If it is such a simple matter, then this is what we want and we won't want anything else." But, my dear friends, this wanting is almost everything; there is nothing which it does not include because this tivra samvegatva this wanting, this intensity of asking is of a very strange character. We have never been accustomed to this kind of wanting in this world. We cannot want even our father and mother with the intensity that is expected here. What is the dearest object in this world? Perhaps it is our parents; we cannot think of a dearer thing than father and mother, for instance. We cannot like even them so much, unless certain conditions are fulfilled. Even our love for parents is conditional; unconditioned love is impossible. Certain conditions must be fulfilled only then we love. Otherwise we say, "Good bye, I don't want to look at you." But here it is not like that; this is unconditioned asking. It is not limited by space, time, causality, or any kind of qualification from outside. Whatever may happen, and whatever be the difficulties on the way - whatever be the obstacles and whatever be the temptations we shall not yield to any of these but move straight towards the Objective that is before us.
Another peculiar attribute which Patanjali uses is samvega. It is very difficult to translate it into English tivra samvega. Tivra is intense, very forceful, vehement. Samvega is impetuosity, if we would like to put it into English. We know what impetuous movement is it is turbulent, uncontrollable, vehement, powerful, revolting such is the kind of asking that is implied in this sutra. That is samvega like a violent tempest, a forceful wind that is blowing, uprooting all trees and blowing buildings. We know how forcefully the wind can blow off even the top of buildings. That kind of aspiration is called samvegatva, where we do not care for anything else. Let heaven go to hell or hell go to heaven, it makes no difference. The soul is simply revolting against any kind of limitation which has been imposed upon it by any factor whatsoever, even if it is a so-called virtuous factor of the traditional world. Everything is broken to pieces, cast to the winds, crushed under the feet, and the soul simply asks and asks and asks. This is the tivra samvegatva that Patanjali is referring to in the seeking of the great Reality, which is the Object of our quest.
Such an asking, such a kind of aspiration, this kind of longing is unknown to us. Neither can you understand it, nor can I understand it. It is impossible for any human mind to have such an aspiration for anything in this world. We have tentative longings; we have conditional desires and limited loves, but unlimited love is unknown to us. Nevertheless, this is what is needed if we want success. Unfortunately, as the mind has been tethered to conditions of various types right from its birth in this physical world, this kind of aspiration has been a strange phenomenon even to the farthest stretch of imagination. But now we have come to a field of a new type of training where such an old prejudice of thought is to be abandoned and a new understanding is to be awakened in ourselves, which has nothing to do with the factors which may condition this asking in any manner whatsoever. Bondage is of two kinds that which looks bad, and that which looks good. There are two types of bondage in this world. There are certain things which everybody appraises as valuable, considers wonderful and praiseworthy; that is one kind of bondage, and it is as powerful a bondage as the second kind that which we call 'bad' in this world. This is because the idea of bad and good is, again, conditional in respect of circumstances, conditions and stages of evolution. What is bad at one time may be good at another time, and vice versa. So in this unconditional asking of the soul for its supreme object, it gets rid of the shackles of conditional factors either in the form of virtue or in the form of vice.
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Unselfish love is unknown, because love is used as an instrument for the achievement of something else. How then can we call it unselfish? But here, love is a law unto itself in the sense that it has no object outside it it is itself the Object. We may ask how it is possible. Here the divine aspiration, or the love of the Supreme Reality, is not an emotion. It is not merely a psychological function. It is not the mind thinking of something, or feeling in respect of an external object. It is a rising up of the soul towards a higher condition of itself. This is a great differentiating factor between ordinary objects which are sought in the world, and the spiritual object which is the goal of yoga or spiritual life.
While in the acquiring of objects of a temporal nature in this world, the movement may look horizontal - a movement of one individual towards another individual, or a group of other individuals, in a spatial direction. Here, in this case, it is a kind of rise from the bottom to the top. It is like waking up from dream, where we are not moved from one place to another place. When we wake up from dream, there is no movement; and yet, there is a movement. As there is a transformation, we can call it a movement. But it is not an ordinary kind of movement, like moving from Rishikesh to Delhi; it is not that kind of movement. It is a reshuffling of the constitution of one's own mental conditioning and the whole set-up of consciousness a reorganisation of one's own individuality. It is a complete reordering of one's true being for the purpose of a reawakening into a wider order of reality, about which I have been mentioning again and again. And here, in this awakening into a higher order of reality, the Object that was originally thought to be outside in space is now visualised as something nearer to oneself than it appeared to be earlier.
The whole thing is made still more difficult by another condition which Patanjali puts in a subsequent sutra:mdu madhya adhimtravt tata api viea (I.22). Even in this tremendous aspiration, this impetuous asking, there are degrees of intensity. There can be mild asking, there can be middling asking, and there is the most intense type of asking. Firstly, it was said that our wanting, or asking, or our aspiration should be turbulently vehement unconditionally forceful. Now, here he says there can even be degrees all which make it appear that perhaps we are unfit for the practice of yoga or the attainment of God. It looks terrible better to bid goodbye and go and have lunch. Sometimes it looks as if it is not meant for us. But the difficulty of the whole matter is also the worth and value of it. It is difficult to get gold and diamonds, and yet we know the value of them. Once we get them, they will support us for our entire life.
The attainment of that higher reality is difficult merely because of its inseparability from us. Everything that is connected with us is most difficult to understand. We can understand everything connected with others. We can be masters in the psychology of others' minds, but about our own minds we are the biggest fools we cannot understand anything. Likewise, we may be very clear about all things in this world, but completely idiotic about things connected with our own self, and so the difficulty has arisen. the Object of the quest is somehow or other subtly connected with our self that is the difficulty of the whole matter. If it had been really far off, unconnected with us, that would be a different thing altogether. But it is connected with us, and so there is a necessity to reorganise our way of thinking.
I can give a certain practical suggestion as to how this can be achieved in our daily routines of sadhana. What makes it difficult for us to generate such a genuine aspiration within us is our habitual association with hackneyed factors outside. We are used to living in a certain type of atmosphere, and we are continuing to live in that atmosphere we have not changed that atmosphere. Merely because we have left Rameswaram and come to Kasi, it does not mean that the atmosphere has changed; it is the same atmosphere. We see the same people; we breath the same air; we drink the same water; we have the same hunger and thirst; we sleep in the same manner; we have anger; we have irritation, perplexity, and prejudice of the same type, and we think in the same way as we thought in Rameswaram there is absolutely no difference. So, what is the difference? What change has been brought about? What is necessary is that this change of location that we have effected becomes helpful in bringing about a change inwardly also. Otherwise, why should we move from place to place, as if we have no other work? We can stay in one place, wherever it is.
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What we should do is, together with our effort at change of physical atmosphere, also try to bring about a gradual change in our internal atmosphere by resorting to certain spiritual disciplines, such as the utilisation of the time on hand for certain definite chosen purposes. When we live in a particular place we have left our homes and have come to Uttarkashi, for instance how do we use our time? Do we go about from place to place, chatting? Then we should go back to our home and stay there. Why do we come to Uttarkashi? We have to utilise the time for a purpose which is more intimate to the Object on hand than the way in which we lived earlier. Generally, people take to mantra purascharana a disciplined type of chanting of the mantra that has been given to them by their Guru and sacred study of scriptures, such as the Srimad Bhagavata or the Ramayana, or any other holy text which is conducive to pinpointing the mind on the liberation of the soul, which is the ultimate objective.
Another great helpful factor is observing mouna or not talking, or at least talking only when it is necessary. Talking only when it is necessary means we will talk only when it is absolutely impossible to avoid talking; otherwise, we will not talk. Why do we go on talking with everyone? There is no necessity. We should regard ourselves as real seekers and not merely as jokers with truth, and try to open our mouths only when it is necessary, and otherwise not open our mouths. It is necessary to open the mouth only when it has some connection with the purpose for which we have come here. When it has no connection, why do we talk? We should keep our mouths closed. This is not only a spiritual discipline but also a very helpful method of conserving energy, because much of the energy is lost in talking. If we do not speak for three days continuously, we will see what difference it makes. We will feel that there is so much of strength in us that we can walk even long distances without any feeling of fatigue. All our energy goes in speaking unnecessarily to anyone and anything that is in front of us, on any subject whatsoever.
10.31 - The Mystery of The Five Senses, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Finally we come to the sense of touch. It is the last. But in another way, it is the first and the foremostpsychologically and chronologically It is the most primary and primitive among the senses, as the eye comes last as the final stage in the course of the sensory evolution. The eye is the manifestation of a developed consciousness; perfectly developed eyes as in man represent a perfectly developed consciousness. But touch is the organ with which an organism starts its life-course. It is the only organ a living cell is given when it begins its forward journey. Plants are endowed with that organ and faculty and that only. It is the most generalised, the least specific, and the most sensitive of the organs. Touch gives a closer, more intimate, even more direct perception of the Object, it is contact, it means identification, it means becoming and being. And it is through the touch, the sublimated and most intense physical contact, that you have the direct contact with the substance of the Supreme, his very body. For what is Sat up there is Annam here, both are the same identical thing in a dual aspect.
Continuing farther, if we go beyond the five senses, we have still another sense, it is mind, the sixth sense; it is in and through the mind that the other five senses distil their perceptions allowing a coordinated picture of the sense-experiences. Now, to attain, to realise, to possess the Truth means, first of all, to know the Truth: for, knowing as we know, is the function of the mind. It is said, however, that the mind knows only the outward form of things, its knowledge is the knowledge of an outside world, elements of which are supplied by the senses. It is a Knowledge of or in Ignorance. The true knowledge is not attained by the mind or through the mind. For the true knowledge, it is declared, the mind is to be expunged altogether or silenced at least. One must get away, one must withdraw from that play of activity and be far from it. True knowledge comes through revelations. It descends from above, it does not enter by a level side-door and it comes only when the mind is not there. But this also, as in the other cases, as in respect of the other senses, is an extreme view. Like the other senses the mind too can be turned inward or upward, made a receptive organ or instrument. When turned round, when it is the Mind of the mind, then there begins to appear the true knowledge. Then even this physical mind remains no more ignorant or obscure, it becomes transparent and luminous: it is able to bring its own gift, it can serve with its own contri bution to the real knowledge; for it is the mind that gives a form and shape, a local habitation and a name to the higher truth, to the real light, to the true knowledge. It is the surpa (beautiful and perfect form) chanted by the Vedic Rishis that the purified mind models for the Gods to inhabitit is what the poets and prophets always aspire for in their creative consciousness.
1.032 - Our Concept of God, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Here I have to take a few moments to give some sort of an idea as to what love is, so that we may have an idea as to its relationship to the Object of love. Most people have no idea of what it is and, therefore, it has been given many definitions. The most common definition of love is that it is a psychological emotion, a welling up of certain feelings in respect of an object. Love is the manner in which the mind arranges itself in respect of an object which it needs. Just as when one is on a battleground and there is a necessity to gird up one's loins for an immediate attack, one prepares oneself thoroughly, from head to foot, for the purpose of the task on hand or, a wrestler in the field prepares himself for the purpose for which he is there, and in this preparation he is worked up into a feeling of total concentration of his personality for the achievement of that purpose in a similar manner, the mind works itself up into a concentrated feeling in respect of the Object which it needs for a particular purpose, at a particular time. This working up of the mind in sympathy with the Object which it needs at a particular time is the love that the mind has for the Object. Therefore, love may be regarded as a condition of the mind. It is a state of mind not a perpetual state, but a temporary state of the mind in respect of that particular object which is necessary at that particular moment.
Ordinarily speaking, there is nothing in this world which we require always. Therefore, it is not possible for the mind to be in a condition of love for all times. If a particular thing can be needed for all time, then the love also can be there for all time; but such a thing is not present in this world. According to the conditions of body, atmosphere, age, etc., needs go on changing, and the mind arranges itself accordingly, under different conditions, in respect of the outer atmosphere in which it wants to place itself. So the condition of the mind called 'love' is subject to the necessities of the time, and there is no such thing as an eternal love for anything in this world. It is a movement of the mind towards the Object. Sometime back we were discussing the nature of the movement of the mind in regard to the Object, where it pervades the Object that pervasion being called vrittivyapti, etc. So the mind, when it loves an object, is in the form of a vritti. Love is a vritti, and Patanjali says all vrittis must be controlled, which means that even love must be controlled.
Love of God is something different from ordinary love, because God is not something which we need today and do not need tomorrow. God is not an object of a temporal necessity. He is not a requisite of a particular period of time, or of a given condition. God is a necessity of every condition, of all times, and for every person, at every place. The reason is that God is the presupposition of every condition of being, and hence the love of God cannot be conditional; it is always unconditional. While every other love can be conditioned by circumstances and needs of the time, no such condition can apply to the love of God. But our concept of God is here a very important factor, which rules the destiny of our love for God. If God is extra-cosmic, which means to say that He is outside the world, as a carpenter is outside the table or the chair, then there should be some means of communication between the table and the carpenter, or the world and God. The means of communication is, of course, the very same means that we adopt in coming in contact with anything else in this world. How do we come in contact with any person or thing in this world? We adopt the same means also in respect of God. We cry and shout loudly so that the person will hear us, if the person is far away, and yearn from within for vision and contact of that something which we love.
10.35 - The Moral and the Spiritual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The states of being or consciousness from the animal, or down from Matter itself up to the Supremebrahmastambaconstitute what is called a hierarchy. Hierarchy means a structure rising upward tier upon tier, step by step: it is a scale, as it were, of increasing values, only the values are not moral, they indicate only a measure, a neutral measure respecting position or a kind of mass content. As in a building where brick is laid upon brick, or stone upon stone, the one laid above is not superior to the one laid below; the terms inferior and superior indicate only the simple position of the Objects. Even the system of the four social orders in ancient" India was originally such a hierarchy. The higher and lower orders did not carry any moral appreciation or depreciation. The four orders placed one above the other schematically denote only the respective social functions classified according to the nature of each, even as the human body represents such a hierarchy, rising from the feet at the bottom towards the head at the top. This is to say all objects and movements in nature are right when they are confined each to its own domain, following its own dharma of that domain. Thus one can be perfectly calm and at ease witnessing the catastrophes and cataclysms in nature, for one knows it is the dharma of material nature. Man terms them disasters for he judges them according to his own convenience. Even so, one should not be perturbed at the wild behaviourman calls it wildof wild animals. Likewise the gods in their sovereign tranquillity smile at the crudeness and stupidities of human beings. One has to lift oneself up, withdraw and stand high above all that one wishes to surpass and look at it, with a benign godly smile.
The world is a gradation of developing consciousness, of growing states or status of being. There is a higher and lower level in point of the measure of consciousness but that involves no moral judgement: the moral judgement is man's; it is man's, one might almost say, idiosyncrasy, that is to say, a notion that is a prop to help him mount the ladder. Though it might be necessary at a certain stage, in certain circumstances, it is not a universal or ineluctable law, not even in his personal domain. The growing consciousness is like the growing tree rising upward first into a trunk, then spreading out into branches, into twigs and tendrils, then in flowers and finally, in fruits. These are mounting grades of growth, but the growth above is not superior to the growth below. It is a one unified whole and each portion has its own absolute value, beauty and utility.
1.035 - The Recitation of Mantra, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The adoration of God, the contemplation of God, the attunement of oneself with God, says Patanjali, can be easily achieved through the repetition of the Name of God. It is difficult to contact God, for reasons that are obvious. But we need not despair or feel that it is impossible to contact Him, because while there are most difficult techniques of the soul's merger into God, there are also very simple methods of drawing His attention to oneself. The most traditional, accepted and common sadhana, not only in India but in religious circles in almost all parts of the world, is what is known as japa or recitation of the Divine Name. the Object that we are having in our mind becomes associated with our idea of it by the invocation of its name, as it is known in common parlance. There are two aspects to the way in which there can be an invocation of anything in our mind. One is, if I want to draw the attention of a person towards myself, I call the name of that person, and the person listens. The expected effect is then produced.
There can be a reciprocal action on the part of the Object of our idea, when we summon the name of that object, if it is an object which is conscious, like a human being. But if the Object is not conscious like a human being, or it is so withdrawn into itself that it has no consciousness of itself at all, then we can generate an idea of that object by calling its name and visualising it in our mind so that we are able to remember it. Japa has something to do with the drawing up of a memory in respect of anything that we wish to maintain in our consciousness. There are objects of various kinds in this world, of which some are conscious and some are unconscious. If I summon a conscious object, there is an immediate reaction; but more effort is necessary for summoning an unconscious object. I can call a dog by making a sound with my mouth and it will come running to me. But if I call an umbrella: "You come," - it will not come, because it is not conscious of my intention in regard to it. Though, ultimately, even unconscious objects can be made to move by the power of thought, it cannot be done easily; it requires extraordinary effort.
The Name of God is a peculiar mode of invocation by which we generate in ourself forces of a peculiar character which have significance, both in our inner life as well as in our outer life. The particular symbol by which we can invoke the form of God into our mind, and which Patanjali has in mind, is pranava or omkara. Tasya vcaka praava (I.27): The Name of God is Om, says Patanjali. Now, when he says 'Om', he does not mean any kind of Hindu concept or any type of sectarian tradition. What he intends to tell us is that the symbol of God should be comprehensive enough to contain within itself almost all of the characteristics of God. A limited object, a finite thing in this world, can be designated by a finite name. But, an infinite object like God cannot be designated by any kind of finite designation or epithet. When a finite name is uttered, an idea in the mind is generated which corresponds to that finite name. The name 'tree', for instance, immediately generates in the mind the idea of a tree, which is the corresponding finite object that is related to this finite name. A particular name can summon up only a particular idea of a given object.
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The mantra, when it is chanted, generates a force which is the Object of the realisation of the sadhaka. A mantra has a chandas, or the combining feature, which is the determining factor of the particular shape that the effect takes, and so the mantra determines the deity, and vice versa. So we have a deity, or the aim or the goal of the mantra, and the chandas of the mantra, as well as another thing altogether, namely, the discoverer of the mantra has some say in this matter. The discoverer of the mantra is called the rishi of the mantra. A rishi is a seer of the mantra not merely a composer like a writer, or an author, or a poet but a seer into the truth of a mantra, to whom the mantra, in its truth, has been revealed in his meditations; and so the will of the seer also is present there. So, according to our tradition, when we chant a mantra we remember the rishi of the mantra, the chandas of the mantra, and the deity of the mantra. Rishis, chandas, devata these three are always remembered before the mantra is chanted, so that we have the grace of these divine precedents of the sacred mantra that we are going to chant, because these are the causes behind the action that the mantra takes.
The mantra that Patanjali particularly refers to in his sutra is pranava or omkara. This is something very difficult to understand and cannot easily be explained however much we may try, because these are very great secrets which are invisible to the eyes and, therefore, ordinarily incapable of explanation. It is believed that the chanting of pranava or Om, in the prescribed manner, sets up a novel type of vibration in the system, which is free from every kind of distraction or particularisation in respect of any external object. Every name in this world particularises itself in respect of an external object, such as tree, mountain, sun, moon, star, etc. they are external objects. But here, the Object of pranava or Om is not any given object in particular. It is a general being, and anything that is general is also harmonious. Hence the chanting of pranava or Om in the prescribed manner, with the required intonation, produces a generalised harmonious vibration in the entire physical and psychological system, and this is what is conducive to the concentration of the mind in meditation, because meditation is nothing but the harmonious condition of the mind.
'Samadhi' is the word used for the highest state of harmony achieved thereby. Adhi is a mental condition, and an equilibrated mental condition is samadhi - equilibrated in the utmost manner, so that every component of thought is systematically harmonised with every other component, and not one setting itself against the other or distracting the other. So harmoniously are they knitted together that there is a uniform fabric of the mind, as it were, in respect of the Object. A harmonious vibration creates a thrill in the system, which is the trick that the chanting of the mantra or pranava produces, and one can feel it when one chants pranava at least for a few minutes continuously. We will feel a subtle, creeping sensation in our system, as if ants are crawling through our nerves. We will feel a peculiar touching sensation, a titillating feeling in the beginning, which is an indication that our chanting is correct and the mind is getting concentrated.
Simultaneously with this feeling of a subtle thrill in the system when the chanting of pranava is done properly, there is a feeling that a loss of body-consciousness is gradually taking place. We will not feel that we exist at all. We will be aware of a non-objective something, and it is this non-objective awareness, which is the effect of the chanting of pranava, which also creates the feeling of levitation. We are not actually getting lifted up physically, but we will feel as if we are lifted up from the earth and moving in the air, as it were. Though we are on the ground and not moving in the air physically, the mind will feel as if it is lifted up, and this is the astral body getting stirred because of the harmonious vibration that is being produced. Though the physical body is not moving in the air, the subtle body is trying to get up, and that is why we feel as if we are moving in the air. The feeling of levitation is generated by the effect produced upon the subtle body, by the chanting of the mantra. The subtle body is ordinarily so intimately connected with the physical body that we cannot isolate one from the other. When we are intensely conscious of the physical body, the subtle body gets impregnated with the notion of the physical body, and we cannot forget that we are anything but the body.
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This has to be chanted again and again, says Patanjali tajjapa tadarthabhvanam (I.28). Here, Patanjali does not say that the chanting of the mantra alone is sufficient. He also says that we have to concentrate on the meaning of the mantra to a produce quick result. Tadarthabhvanam the meaning should be felt in the mind. We must be feeling the content of the mantra. "What does it signify? What am I chanting? What does it mean, ultimately?" When the intention behind the mantra is coupled with the chanting, there is a quickening of the process in the realisation of the Objective. There are many various other prescriptions mentioned here for the purpose of accelerating the process of realisation through the chanting of the mantra, such a proper seat, a proper direction, a proper time, a proper place and given circumstances, etc. all of which are known to us.
Also, there is a special tradition of chanting mantra, known as purascharana in India, and it is supposed to be the recitation of the mantra as many lakhs of times (a lakh is one hundred thousand) as there are letters in a mantra, so that the completion of the purascharana is supposed to be the completion of a round of sadhana, the completion of a given cycle. As many lakhs of japa as there are letters in a mantra are to be chanted, and then it produces a novel effect in oneself. There are devotees, even today, and there were many previously, who did numerous purascharanas of this kind for the purpose of the realisation of the deity of the mantra. I personally feel that for the minds of today, japa is perhaps the best sadhana, because it is a technique by which the mind can be automatically drawn towards the point of concentration by habitual recitation repetition of the mantra. It does not require much logic, study, or analysis, or anything of that sort. It requires merely a will to do that is all. There were many saints and sages who had spiritual realisation merely through this japa sadhana, because japa or recitation of the Divine Name or the mantra is virtually the same as meditation. As Patanjali mentions, japa is charged with the notion, idea or concentration of the mind on the meaning of the mantra.
1.036 - The Rise of Obstacles in Yoga Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
What is this new type of knowledge? A third eye will open. The physical eyes would not be essential at that time, because whatever knowledge is gained through the perception of the senses would be inadequate to the purpose. The knowledge that we have to acquire through yoga is not a sensory knowledge it not a psychological cognition. It is an insight into the Truth of things. This insight is pratyakcetana adhigamah, where we begin to recognise what is in front of us. Up to that time we have not been able to recognise anything. We are not able to know what is in front of us when we are looking at things with our eyes, because the eyes, the senses, do not give us the truth of things - only a camouflage is presented before us. All that we see with our eyes is a camouflage, because the essence of things is covered over by a relational form in which alone the Object is presented, and through which alone the cognition of the Object is made possible. But, this form is lifted when there is pratyakcetana adhigamah, or inner attainment. The veil that covers the Object is removed, and we see what is really there inside.
What is this veil? It is nothing but the space-time complex, which is the reason for the appearance of the individuality of things and the diversity of objects. This space-time-cause complex is the veil that covers the truth of things; and this veil covers even the perceiver himself. The individual cogniser, the perceiver, the experiencer, is a part of this involvement in the space-time-cause complex. So there is an entire relativity of perception and knowledge throughout the world, and there is no such thing as real insight into the nature of things. And so the whole universe is samsara world riddled over with error and sorrow. The veil of samsara gets lifted; it is penetrated into, and what is behind the veil is seen when there is pratyakcetana adhigamah. There is no relational knowledge at that time; it is a direct perception, aparoksha anubhava. We do not require the instrumentality of mind and senses at that time.
1.038 - Impediments in Concentration and Meditation, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Even breathing is an obstacle, says Patanjali. Though we regard breathing as natural, normal and very necessary, he regards it as an obstacle because this inhalation and exhalation process is an indication that the prana is moving towards objects. Though we may be trying our best to control the mind and withdraw it from the Objects outside, the very breathing condition itself indicates that the tendency towards objects still persists.
When this tendency comes down, then this heaving of the breath through inhalation and exhalation also becomes slower, so that in deep meditation we will find that we will not even feel the process of breathing at all; it will be so calm, quietened and slowed down that it will become imperceptible, for all practical purpose.
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
of the Object prevents its projection, there is nothing for it but
to assume that parents are also the least known of all human
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
At present what I am doing is the Supramental Yoga. Man, as constituted at present, is a very imperfect manifestation of the Divine he is very crude. It is so because man is living in an envelope of ignorance in Mind, Life and Body so that he is not conscious of the Reality that is beyond Mind. The Supramental Power is above the Mind. What I am trying to do at present is to call down the Higher Power to govern Mind, Life and Body. the Object of this Yoga is not the service of humanity, or the ordinary perfection of man but the evolution of the Supramental Power in the cyclic evolution of the Spirit in the material universe. What one has to do is to rend the veil the thick veil that divides the Mind from the Supermind. That work a man cannot do by himself.
Athavale: Then where is the place for the use of will?
1.03 - On Knowledge of the World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Do not suppose, beloved, that every thing in the world is to be despised; for there are some things that are estimable and valuable, which belong to the world: viz : knowledge, worship, war in defence of the faith, and abstinence : and also a sufficiency of food, drink and clothing, marriage, domestic shelter and other things; seeing that they are helps on the journey to the future world and in the path of [74] knowledge, they are all of them exceedingly important and necessary. Delight in knowledge, delight in worship, delight in prayer and delight in communion with God are things of this world, but still they are for the sake of the future world. It follows, therefore, that the pleasures of the world are not all of them blamable, but only those which entail punishment in the future world, or which are not in the path to paradise, and so the apostle declares, "The world is a curse and all that is in it is a curse, except the remembrance of God and that which is the Object of his love."
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The saint is one who knows that every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decisionto choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life; between interests exclusively temporal and the eternal order; between our personal will, or the will of some projection of our personality, and the will of God. In order to fit himself to deal with the emergencies of his way of life, the saint undertakes appropriate training of mind and body, just as the solther does. But whereas the Objectives of military training are limited and very simple, namely, to make men courageous, cool-headed and co-operatively efficient in the business of killing other men, with whom, personally, they have no quarrel, the Objectives of spiritual training are much less narrowly specialized. Here the aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of their own and all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all, even the most trivial circumstances of daily living without malice, greed, self-assertion or voluntary ignorance, but consistently with love and understanding. Because its objectives are not limited, because, for the lover of God, every moment is a moment of crisis, spiritual training is incomparably more difficult and searching than military training. There are many good solthers, few saints.
We have seen that, in critical emergencies, solthers specifically trained to cope with that kind of thing tend to forget the inborn and acquired idiosyncrasies with which they normally identify their being and, transcending selfness, to behave in the same, one-pointed, better-than-personal way. What is true of solthers is also true of saints, but with this important difference that the aim of spiritual training is to make people become selfless in every circumstance of life, while the aim of military training is to make them selfless only in certain very special circumstances and in relation to only certain classes of human beings. This could not be otherwise; for all that we are and will and do depends, in the last analysis, upon what we believe the Nature of Things to be. The philosophy that rationalizes power politics and justifies war and military training is always (whatever the official religion of the politicians and war makers) some wildly unrealistic doctrine of national, racial or ideological idolatry, having, as its inevitable corollaries, the notions of Herrenvolk and the lesser breeds without the Law.
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Here we may remark in passing that it is only the one-pointed, who are truly capable of worshipping one God. Monotheism as a theory can be entertained even by a person whose name is Legion. But when it comes to passing from theory to practice, from discursive knowledge about to immediate acquaintance with the one God, there cannot be monotheism except where there is singleness of heart. Knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Where the knower is poly-psychic the universe he knows by immediate experience is polytheistic. The Buddha declined to make any statement in regard to the ultimate divine Reality. All he would talk about was Nirvana, which is the name of the experience that comes to the totally selfless and one-pointed. To this same experience others have given the name of union with Brahman, with Al Haqq, with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the Object and (since in contemplation the knower, the known and the knowledge are all one) at the same time the subject and substance of that experience.
When a man lacks discrimination, his will wanders in all directions, after innumerable aims. Those who lack discrimination may quote the letter of the scripture; but they are really denying its inner truth. They are full of worldly desires and hungry for the rewards of heaven. They use beautiful figures of speech; they teach elaborate rituals, which are supposed to obtain pleasure and power for those who practice them. But, actually, they understand nothing except the law of Karma that chains men to rebirth.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
ness and in the Objective world, and it is being built ...
I was on a huge ship which was a symbolic represen-
1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
person with whom the Object was once in contact, whether it formed
part of his body or not. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may
1.03 - Tara, Liberator from the Eight Dangers, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
us to see that we are living within them. In the context of meditation, mindfulness remembers the Object of meditation so that our concentration can
remain on it and is not distracted to another object. Vigilance investigates
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else. We are obsessed with the Object of our attachment; we worry about not
getting it and fear losing it once we do. Drowning in the ood of attachment,
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attachment. Seeing that the Objects to which we cling change moment by
moment, we know that they will not last long and thus are not reliable
1.03 - The Coming of the Subjective Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The art, music and literature of the world, always a sure index of the vital tendencies of the age, have also undergone a profound revolution in the direction of an ever-deepening sub jectivism. The great objective art and literature of the past no longer commands the mind of the new age. The first tendency was, as in thought so in literature, an increasing psychological vitalism which sought to represent penetratingly the most subtle psychological impulses and tendencies of man as they started to the surface in his emotional, aesthetic and vitalistic cravings and activities. Composed with great skill and subtlety but without any real insight into the law of mans being, these creations seldom got behind the reverse side of our surface emotions, sensations and actions which they minutely analysed in their details but without any wide or profound light of knowledge; they were perhaps more immediately interesting but ordinarily inferior as art to the old literature which at least seized firmly and with a large and powerful mastery on its province. Often they described the malady of Life rather than its health and power, or the riot and revolt of its cravings, vehement and therefore impotent and unsatisfied, rather than its dynamis of self-expression and self-possession. But to this movement which reached its highest creative power in Russia, there succeeded a turn towards a more truly psychological art, music and literature, mental, intuitional, psychic rather than vitalistic, departing in fact from a superficial vitalism as much as its predecessors departed from the Objective mind of the past. This new movement aimed like the new philo sophic Intuitionalism at a real rending of the veil, the seizure by the human mind of that which does not overtly express itself, the touch and penetration into the hidden soul of things. Much of it was still infirm, unsubstantial in its grasp on what it pursued, rudimentary in its forms, but it initiated a decisive departure of the human mind from its old moorings and pointed the direction in which it is being piloted on a momentous voyage of discovery, the discovery of a new world within which must eventually bring about the creation of a new world without in life and society. Art and literature seem definitely to have taken a turn towards a subjective search into what may be called the hidden inside of things and away from the rational and objective canon or motive.
Already in the practical dealing with life there are advanced progressive tendencies which take their inspiration from this profounder subjectivism. Nothing indeed has yet been firmly accomplished, all is as yet tentative initiation and the first feeling out towards a material shape for this new spirit. The dominant activities of the world, the great recent events such as the enormous clash of nations in Europe and the stirrings and changes within the nations which preceded and followed it, were rather the result of a confused half struggle half effort at accommodation between the old intellectual and materialistic and the new still superficial subjective and vitalistic impulses in the West. The latter unenlightened by a true inner growth of the soul were necessarily impelled to seize upon the former and utilise them for their unbridled demand upon life; the world was moving towards a monstrously perfect organisation of the Will-to-live and the Will-to-power and it was this that threw itself out in the clash of War and has now found or is finding new forms of life for itself which show better its governing idea and motive. The Asuric or even Rakshasic character of the recent world-collision was due to this formidable combination of a falsely enlightened vitalistic motive-power with a great force of servile intelligence and reasoning contrivance subjected to it as instrument and the genius of an accomplished materialistic Science as its Djinn, its giant worker of huge, gross and soulless miracles. The War was the bursting of the explosive force so created and, even though it strewed the world with ruins, its after results may well have prepared the collapse, as they have certainly produced a disintegrating chaos or at least poignant disorder, of the monstrous combination which produced it, and by that salutary ruin are emptying the field of human life of the principal obstacles to a truer development towards a higher goal.
1.03 - The Manner of Imitation., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
There is still a third difference--the manner in which each of these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the Objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration--in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged--or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.
These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation,--the medium, the Objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator of the same kind as Homer--for both imitate higher types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes--for both imitate persons acting and doing. Hence, some say, the name of 'drama' is given to such poems, as representing action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the Megarians,--not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of Sicily, for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. In each case they appeal to the evidence of language. The outlying villages, they say, are by them called {kappa omega mu alpha iota}, by the Athenians {delta eta mu iota}: and they assume that Comedians were so named not from {kappa omega mu 'alpha zeta epsilon iota nu}, 'to revel,' but because they wandered from village to village (kappa alpha tau alpha / kappa omega mu alpha sigma), being excluded contemptuously from the city. They add also that the Dorian word for 'doing' is {delta rho alpha nu}, and the Athenian, {pi rho alpha tau tau epsilon iota nu}.
This may suffice as to the number and nature of the various modes of imitation.
1.03 - The Psychic Prana, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
Everything that we see, or imagine, or dream, we have to perceive in space. This is the ordinary space, called the Mahksha, or elemental space. When a Yogi reads the thoughts of other men, or perceives supersensuous objects he sees them in another sort of space called the Chittksha, the mental space. When perception has become objectless, and the soul shines in its own nature, it is called the Chidksha, or knowledge space. When the Kundalini is aroused, and enters the canal of the Sushumna, all the perceptions are in the mental space. When it has reached that end of the canal which opens out into the brain, the Objectless perception is in the knowledge space. Taking the analogy of electricity, we find that man can send a current only along a wire, (The reader should remember that this was spoken before the discovery of wireless telegraphy. Ed.) but nature requires no wires to send her tremendous currents. This proves that the wire is not really necessary, but that only our inability to dispense with it compels us to use it.
Similarly, all the sensations and motions of the body are being sent into the brain, and sent out of it, through these wires of nerve fibres. The columns of sensory and motor fibres in the spinal cord are the Ida and Pingala of the Yogis. They are the main channels through which the afferent and efferent currents travel. But why should not the mind send news without any wire, or react without any wire? We see this is done in nature. The Yogi says, if you can do that, you have got rid of the bondage of matter. How to do it? If you can make the current pass through the Sushumna, the canal in the middle of the spinal column, you have solved the problem. The mind has made this network of the nervous system, and has to break it, so that no wires will be required to work through. Then alone will all knowledge come to us no more bondage of body; that is why it is so important that we should get control of that Sushumna. If we can send the mental current through the hollow canal without any nerve fibres to act as wires, the Yogi says, the problem is solved, and he also says it can be done.
1.03 - The Sephiros, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
It would be fallacious for the student to expect a concrete definition of everything which the cabinet contains. That is a sheer impossibility for quite obvious reasons. Each student must work for himself, once given the method of putting the whole of his mental and moral constitution into these thirty-two filing jackets. The necessity for personal work becomes apparent when one realizes that in normal business procedure, for instance, one would not purchase a filing cabinet with the names of all past, present, and future correspondents already indexed. It becomes quite evident that the Qabalistic cabinet (our thirty-two Paths) has a system of letters and numbers meaningless in them- selves, but as the files are completed, ready to take on a meaning, different for each student. As experience increased, each letter and number would receive fresh accessions of meaning and significance, and by adopting this orderly arrangement we would be enabled to grasp our inner life much more comprehensively than might otherwise be the case. the Object of the theoretical (as separate from the Practical) Qabalah, insofar as this thesis is concerned, is to enable the student to do three main things :
First, to analyse every idea in terms of the Tree of Life.
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Mulaprakriti, or cosmic root substance, which as Blavatsky states must be regarded as objectivity in its purest abstrac- tion- the self-existing basis whose differentiations consti- ute the Objective reality underlying the phenomena of every phase of conscious existence. It is that subtle form of root matter which we touch, feel, and brea the without per- ceiving, look at without seeing, hear and smell without the slightest cognition of its existence. The Qabalah of Isaac
Myers lays down the principle that matter (the spiritual passive substance of Ibn Gabirol) always corresponds with the female passive principle to be influenced by the active or the male, the formative principle. In short, Binah is the substantive vehicle of every possible phenomenon, physical or mental, just as Chokmah is the essence of consciousness.
1.03 - The Syzygy - Anima and Animus, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
therefore can never become the Object of direct cognition.
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious,
1.03 - The Two Negations 2 - The Refusal of the Ascetic, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us, logically, the option between either a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence, to "live his life", as it is said, or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual Monism arrives at a Maya that is and yet is not, - is, for it is present and compelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works. At the other end, if we stress too much the unreality of the Objective world, we arrive by a different road at similar but still more trenchant conclusions, - the fictitious character of the individual ego, the unreality and purposelessness of human existence, the return into the Non-Being or the relationless Absolute as the sole rational escape from the meaningless tangle of phenomenal life.
10:And yet the question cannot be solved by logic arguing on the data of our ordinary physical existence; for in those data there is always a hiatus of experience which renders all argument inconclusive. We have, normally, neither any definitive experience of a cosmic mind or supermind not bound up with the life of the individual body, nor, on the other hand, any firm limit of experience which would justify us in supposing that our subjective self really depends upon the physical frame and can neither survive it nor enlarge itself beyond the individual body. Only by an extension of the field of our consciousness or an unhoped-for increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient quarrel be decided.
1.03 - VISIT TO VIDYASAGAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"The rishis of old attained the Knowledge of Brahman. One cannot have this so long as there is the slightest trace of worldliness. How hard the rishis laboured! Early in the morning they would go away from the hermitage, and would spend the whole day in solitude, meditating on Brahman. At night they would return to the hermitage and eat a little fruit or roots. They kept their minds aloof from the Objects of sight, hearing, touch, and other things of a worldly nature. Only thus did they realize Brahman as their own inner consciousness.
"But in the Kaliyuga, man, being totally dependent on food for life, cannot altogether shake off the idea that he is the body. In this state of mind it is not proper for him to say, 'I am He.' When a man does all sorts of worldly things, he should not say, 'I am Brahman.' Those who cannot give up attachment to worldly things, and who find no means to shake off the feeling of 'I', should rather cherish the idea 'I am God's servant; I am His devotee.' One can also realize God by following the path of devotion.
--
The Master continued: "There is nothing in mere scholarship. the Object of study is to find means of knowing God and realizing Him. A holy man had a book. When asked what it contained, he opened it and showed that on all the pages were written the words 'Om Rama', and nothing else.
"What is the significance of the Gita? It is what you find by repeating the word ten times. It is then reversed into 'tagi', which means a person who has renounced everything for God. And the lesson of. the Gita is: 'O man, renounce everything and seek God alone.' Whether a man is a monk or a householder, he has to shake off all attachment from his mind.
1.03 - YIBHOOTI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Yogi. the Object of knowledge are infinite, and they are
divided into the gross, grosser, grossest, and the fine, finer,
--
itself with the internal impression of the Object, leaving the
external, and when, by long practice, that is retained by the
--
But not its contents, that not being the Object of the
Samyama.
--
By making Sarny ama on the Objectivity, knowledge
and egoism of the organs, by gradation comes the
--
in the mind and go towards the Object; that is followed by
knowledge and egoism. When the Yogi makes Samyama on
1.040 - Re-Educating the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
In the beginning stages, for the purpose of novitiates absolutely unfamiliar with this subject, what is prescribed is a conceptual form of the ideal that one would regard as the highest possible, and this is the philosophy behind the worship of the gods of religions. It is not the worship of many gods, but the worship of any aspect of the one God, which can be taken as the means to the realisation of that all-inclusive background of these various manifestations called 'gods'. Sometimes, especially in the field of pure psychic science and occultism, any object is taken for the purpose of concentration, provided the will is strong enough. the Object of meditation or concentration need not necessarily be a deity in the sense of a divine being it can be anything. It can be even a candlestick, or even a fountain pen or a pencil; the only condition is that we should not think of anything else except that pencil in front of us.
But the nature of the mind is such, the mind is made in such a way, that it cannot go on thinking continuously of any absurd object. A leaf from a tree cannot become the Object of attraction for the mind, because the mind cannot see any value or significance in a leaf, or a pen or a pencil, though a very scientific attitude would find significance in anything. Even a pencil is as important as a deity if we understand the background of it and the way in which it is constituted. But the ordinary mind cannot understand it. It requires the foisting of certain characteristics which are regarded as beautiful, magnificent and capable of fulfilling the wishes of the person concentrating. No one concentrates without a purpose.
It is very well known why we practise yoga, or for the matter of that, why we engage ourselves in any activity at all. The purpose is to fulfil a wish, whether it is a particularised one or a larger one. This wish is supposed to be fulfilled by the practice of concentration of mind. Here, it would be advantageous to note how a wish can be fulfilled by mere concentration of mind. If that had not been the case, why should be there any attempt at all at concentration? Is it possible to fulfil a desire, or come to the attainment of any wish, for the matter of that, by concentration of mind? The answer is yes, as given by the science of yoga. Any wish can be fulfilled, whatever it be, on earth or in heaven, provided we can adjust our thoughts properly, in a prescribed manner. The absence of success in the pursuit of any objective is due to absence of sufficient concentration on the Objective. We are not fully interested in anything, as I mentioned sometime back. That is the reason why we cannot achieve anything fully. There is nothing in this world which can draw our attention wholly, and that is why nothing comes to us as we expect it. A half-hearted friendship with anything in this world cannot lead to a permanent success in the matter of union with that object, or utilisation of that object for one's purpose.
We have a wrong notion that our secret feelings are not known to others, and that we can dupe people by showing an external form of friendship, though inwardly there may not be that friendship. It is not true that we love all people, but yet we show that we are fraternal in our attitude. This is called political relationship, or social etiquette, etc., which will not succeed always, because things of the world have a peculiar sense, and this sense is ingrained even in inanimate objects. There is nothing absolutely senseless in this world. Everything has a sense, and that sense is peculiar to its own structure. The vibrations produced by things are the senses which these things possess, and any kind of disharmonious vibration that emanates from ourselves, in respect of those things or persons outside, would be an expression of an unfriendly attitude. This has nothing to do with what we speak with our mouths or the gestures that we make with our hands. We may shake hands or we may have tea on a common table, and yet all people sitting there may be enemies. It has nothing to do with common tea, etc., because the sense of internal structure and relationship with others is something deep-rooted more deep-rooted than is visible outside. Sometimes we get repelled by certain things even when nothing is happening, and sometimes we are pulled or attracted even if there is no obvious cause behind it. That is because of something else happening inside. Some people use the term 'prehension' for this peculiar sensibility present in things, to distinguish it from 'apprehension', or conscious understanding of the nature of things by means of sensation and mental cognition. Everything reacts to everything else in a subtle manner, notwithstanding the fact that it cannot be detected by ordinary observation through the waking mind or the active senses of the waking life.
--
It is not true that our inward life is the same as our outward life. They are two different things altogether, and this is perhaps the case in 99.9% of people. For various reasons, psychological as well as social, it becomes difficult for the individual to express his real nature outwardly. Whatever the reason behind it, the fact is there the outward relationships and inward characters do not coincide with each other; therefore there is irreconcilability, obviously. So, there is no friendship. Friendship is not a matter of writing a letter or speaking a word, but a matter of feeling. This feeling is impossible unless there is the capacity to appreciate the condition or circumstance of the person or the Object with whom we are related, or with which we are related, and finally, to enter into the very feeling of that very person and the being of that object which is alone, ultimately speaking, real fraternity of feeling or friendship.
We have a subtle distractedness in our mind on account of the presence of an absence of friendliness with things. This will cut at the root of all the yogic practice, because yoga is the attempt to contact Ultimate Reality. It is not a mere social contact that we are trying here, but a contact of utter being the basic reality that is in everything. So there is a requisition for a complete transformation of our personality, inwardly as well as outwardly, even on the unconscious level not merely outwardly so that we get attuned to the structure of anything and everything in the world, under every condition.
1.045 - Piercing the Structure of the Object, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
object:1.045 - Piercing the Structure of the Object
author class:Swami Krishnananda
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Chapter 45: Piercing the Structure of the Object
Skmaviayatva ca ali
ga paryavasnam (I.45). The gradation of the subtlety of the Objects of meditation consummates in the indeterminable matrix of all things; this is the meaning of the sutra. As we proceed further, we begin to come into contact with more and more of the subtle aspects of the very same object of meditation. It does not mean that the Object changes, but the intensity with which we perceive it and the subtlety of its constitution go on increasing as one advances. It is a precise prescription and advice that the Object of meditation should not be changed. Once we take to a particular object, we must pursue it right through the very given object and not change its location or character. The purpose of meditation is to go into the very root of things, and once we get into the root of any particular object, we have simultaneously entered the roots of everything else also, because everything is made up of the same substance and everything is constituted in the same manner whatever be that object, wherever it be, and whatever be the spatial or temporal location of the Object. It is enough if one persists in concentrating the mind on any one given thing until one reaches the summit of the realisation of the essence of the Object.
This sutra has reference to certain specialties of the Samkhya philosophy on which the yoga system of Patanjali, particularly, is based. Of course, it has no contradistinction from other systems of thought as far as the practical aspects are concerned, but the point made in this sutra is that the advance in meditation, or the progress one makes in meditation, is commensurate with the various stages of the manifestation of what is called prakriti in the Samkhya. The indeterminable, or alinga mentioned in this sutra, is nothing but the pradhana or the prakriti of the Samkhya.
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Any person who is absorbed in the condition of prakriti will not have world-consciousness, because there is no externalisation caused by the preponderance of rajas. The externalisation of the Objectification of consciousness by means of perception is due to the preponderance of the rajas quality of prakriti; but there is no such preponderance in the ultimate condition. They are all equally emphasised with equal intensity and, therefore, there is nothing special in the form of an individual experience. There is no individuality at all, because the individual consciousness is itself an outcome of the rajas preponderating, by which one part of prakriti is cut off from another part.
This condition of prakriti or pradhana the mulaprakriti, as it is called becomes the cause of the first manifestation in the process of evolution. This first form of manifestation, cosmologically, is called mahat in the terminology of the Samkhya. This is a Sanskrit word which practically means what is known as cosmic intellect or universal intelligence. This is, in the language of the Puranas and the Epics, the condition of the Creator or Brahma wherein all individualities are brought together into a single universal point of view. There are no various points of view there; there is only one point of view, and that is the cosmic point of view. Here, everything is directly experienced without the instrumentality of the senses. There is not even this mind as we see it in our own personal individuality. It is pure intelligence, subtly manifest in cosmic sattva, which is the first manifestation of prakriti. .
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It is now that a condition or a state supervenes where there is a sudden split of this cosmic condition into the external and the internal. This is the beginning of what they call samsara or bondage of the jiva. There is no bondage as long as a bifurcation is not introduced between the subject and the Object of knowledge. Bondage commences the moment there is a severance of the consciousness from its content, an isolation of the subject from the Object. This happens subsequent to the appearance of ahamkara. So, on the Objective side, we have what are known as the tanmatras and the mahabhutas. The tanmatras are the subtle principles behind the five gross elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether, and they are called sabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa and gandha in Sanskrit, meaning thereby the sensations of sound, touch, form, taste and smell which have connection with the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether prithivi, appu, tejo, vayu and akasa. This is the external side of the world. Generally, what we call the world is constituted of these five great elements or mahabhutas. But the experiencing side, the subject side, is what is known as the jiva, the principle of individuality you, I, and everyone included who have an extrovert vision of these five mahabhutas, all of which we regard as something outside us, notwithstanding that every one of us, including the bhutas, have come from the same principle of ahamkara. It is something like the right hand looking at the left hand as an object of its perception, though both these are emanations of a single substance, a single unifying principle - namely, the bodily organism.
The subject side is the individual, the jiva, which has a physical body made up of the five elements themselves earth, water, fire, air and ether. Then we have the five pranas prana, apana, vyana, udana and samana. There are the senses the five senses of knowledge and the five of action. And then there is the principle of mentation there is the intellect and all these complexities constituting what is known as the subtle body of the individual. This is the subject side, while the Object side is formed of the five elements mentioned.
The bondage of the jiva consists in the isolation of its experiencing unit, namely, consciousness, from the Object of its experience. This is the reason why there is desire of every kind. A desire is nothing but an attempt of consciousness to gain what is not contained within its own self. The content of consciousness is what is desired by consciousness, but that content is cut off due to a peculiar phenomenon that has arisen, and the phenomenon is the principle of isolation of the subject from the Object. The purpose of yoga is to bring about a reunion of this twofold principle known as the subject and the Object, so that it may go back to the original condition where it was not so separated. The means of action in the process of meditation, of course, is consciousness itself; we may call it mind in a grosser form.
The mind is the principle of activity in the process of meditation, and in the lowest form of mentation there is a down-to-earth, matter-of-fact conviction that the Object is completely outside the mind and it has nothing to do with the mind at all. This is the lowest form into which the mind can sink, where the desires become very vehement, very strong and uncontrollable. There is an intense tension caused by this feeling that the Object longed for is absolutely outside oneself, and there is practically no control one has over the Objects of sense which one needs. The method of meditation tries to introduce a technique which gradually thins out this conviction that the Objects of consciousness are external, and the internal relation that exists between the two is brought up to the surface of consciousness to a greater and greater degree.
So in the various methods of meditation prescribed by Patanjali, he takes us, stage by stage, from the grosser form to the subtler form, from the consciousness of the five elements, which is the lowest form of experience that we can have, higher up to the tanmatras, which are the subtler principles behind the elements, and then to the ahamkara, the mahat and the prakriti, and finally to the supreme purusha itself. The resting of the purusha in its own consciousness is called kaivalya or moksha. The aim of yoga is liberation which is another name for the non-objectification of the consciousness of the purusha by means of manifestation through the forms of prakriti, and a resting of the purusha in its own self, in its Supreme Absoluteness. .
The externalisation of the consciousness of the purusha takes place by degrees, as it was mentioned in this cosmological process. In the beginning there is only a potentiality of such manifestation, which is the condition of mulaprakriti. Then there is an actual manifestation, though not a binding form of it, which is called the mahat. Then again there is a further concretisation of it, which is a lower condition still, yet not a binding condition because of the universality of consciousness still present there, which is the state of the cosmic ahamkara. Then there is a fall, a sudden cut of consciousness into the subjective side and the Objective side, which is the problem of the jiva, the difficulty of man every form of tension and unknowing. So, in the beginning, the grossest form becomes the Object of meditation. From the gross, we go to the subtle. From the subtle, we rise to that state of awareness which is prior to the manifestation of even the subtle and the gross. And finally, we go to the ultimate cause of all things.
These stages of meditation are referred to in a sutra of Patanjali from his first chapter, and these stages are designated by him as savitarka, savichara, sananda and sasmita. These are all peculiar technical words of the yoga philosophy, which simply mean the conditions of gross consciousness, subtle consciousness, cause consciousness and reality consciousness. Though he has mentioned only four stages for the purpose of a broad division of the process of ascent, we can subdivide these into many more. As a matter of fact, when we actually come to it and begin to practise, we will find that we have to pass through various stages, just as we do in a course of education. Though we may designate a particular year of study as being the first grade, second grade, third grade, etc., even in each grade we will find there are various stages of study through the divisions of the syllabus or the curriculum of study.
Similarly, in the process of meditation the stages are many, and we may find that practically every day we are in one particular stage. The details of these stages will be known only to one who has started the practice. They cannot be described in books because they are so many, and every peculiar turn of experience will be regarded by us as one stage. Each stage is characterised by a peculiar relation of consciousness to its object and the reaction which the Object sets in respect of the consciousness that experiences it. In the beginning it looks very difficult on account of this aforementioned conviction that the Object is completely cut off from the mind and that is why there is so much anxiety and heartache in this world. We seem to be completely powerless and helpless in every matter. We are helpless because the world is outside us, and it has no connection with our principle of experience, namely consciousness. To bring into the conscious level the conviction that the Objects of experience are not as much segregated as they appear to be, requires very hard effort, philosophical analysis and deep thinking bestowed upon the subject.
But Patanjali says that mere thinking and analysis will not do it requires direct meditation. While analytical techniques are good enough for the purpose of bringing about logical convictions in the mind, direct experience of the reality behind the Objects would be possible only by meditation, which is not merely an analytical technique undertaken, but a profound attempt at piercing through the structure of the Object by repeatedly hitting upon it by the use of a single technique which is practised regularly every day, so that when the Object is bombarded in this manner by a repeated process of meditation, adopting a single technique, without remission of effort the Object gives way. The complex structure of the Object, which appeared to be a compact substance, is revealed before the mind as made up of bits of matter and little tiny processes of force which can be disintegrated by the power of meditation. the Object can be dismembered, and we will find that afterwards there is no object at all.
When we dissect an object into its components, the Object ceases to be there; we have only the components. The appearance of a single, compact object before the mind is due to a misconception that has arisen in the mind. We dealt with this subject earlier, when we discussed some aspects of Buddhist psychology and certain other relevant subjects in this connection. The belief in the solidity of an object, and the conviction that the Object is completely outside one's consciousness, almost go together. They move hand in hand, and it is this difficulty that comes as a tremendous and serious obstacle in meditation.
Whatever be our effort in meditation, the conviction that things are outside us and that they are completely out of our control will repeat itself so vehemently and forcefully that we will be unhappy. Doubts will arise in the mind. "After all, am I going to succeed? How can I control this mountain? What right have I over this mountain?" But we will realise, after repeated practise, that we have some say in the matter of the existence of even a mountain, though it may look that it is irrelevant to the question at hand. Ultimately there is nothing that is disconnected from us and, therefore, there is nothing which cannot be converted into an object of meditation. In fact there is nothing, anywhere in this world, which cannot become an avenue for the entry of consciousness into the Universal Reality. Any object, for the matter of that, can be taken as a suitable object for the purpose of meditation, because prakriti is permanently present, pervading everything in one form or the other, and so whatever be the Object that we take for meditation, it is a form of prakriti, this pradhana of the Samkhya. So, there is no need to worry oneself about the choice of the Object of meditation. It depends upon the predilection of the mind, the tendency of the mind, and the suitability of the relationship one has with the Object that has been chosen.
But once the Object has been chosen, the advice given here is that we must persist through that object, and that there should be no change of the Object. Otherwise, if we change the Object, our efforts will not bring success. Whatever be the Object that has been chosen, during the time one engages oneself in meditation upon it there should be a persistent effort to bring that object nearer and nearer to one's own self, though, in the beginning, it may appear to be far off or remote from oneself. There are various factors involved in object-consciousness. One thing is that it is far away from us. The second thing is that it is material in nature, while the meditating consciousness is not material. Another thing is that, because of the remoteness of the Object and the isolation of the Object from consciousness, one seems to have no control over the Object. With all of these factors, there is a desire for the Object. This is the essence of samsara. We desire a thing over which we have no control and which we perhaps cannot get with all of our efforts, and yet we need it and we cannot live without it. This is the essence of suffering. But all this suffering can be obviated and eliminated if, through philosophical analysis and repeated meditation, the nature of the Object is gradually made a part and parcel of the nature of one's own self.
The entire process of meditation is nothing but this peculiar technique of the absorption of the characteristics of the Object into one's own self, stage by stage, though it may take years - sometimes it takes births. But the purpose is the same, and the method is this: namely, that the spatial isolation and the temporal distance of the Object from the meditating consciousness should be diminished gradually, by repeated concentration. After repeated practise it will be realised that the Object will reveal certain characters which are sympathetic with the constitution of the meditating consciousness. In the beginning stages, however, the sympathy that exists between the subject and the Object cannot be visualised.
This impossibility of visualising the sympathy between the two arises on account of the intensity of the activity of the senses. The senses are very powerful, and the only business of the senses is to intensify the isolated condition of the Object from the subject and to emphasise excessively the distance that the Object maintains in respect of the subject the materiality of the Object, the desirability of the Object, and so on and so forth. This is the work of the senses, which is an activity that is quite opposed to the attempt that the mind proposes in its meditations.
So the mind has to become friendly with the senses, and rather than oppose the activity of the senses, may have to convert the energy spent through the activity of the senses into meditative forces. This process of the conversion of energy from sense activity into mental activity is called pratyahara, which we shall be considering later on.
1.04 - Body, Soul and Spirit, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
recognizes the revelations of the corporal world; in what is true and good, the revelations of the spiritual world. In the same sense in which the revelation of the corporal world is called sensation, let the revelation of the spiritual be called intuition. Even the most simple thought contains intuition, for one cannot touch it with the hands or see it with the eyes; one must receive its revelation from the spirit through the I. If an undeveloped and a developed man look at a plant, there lives in the I of the one something quite different from that which is in the ego of the other. And yet the sensations of both are called forth by the same object. The difference lies in this, that the one can make far more perfect thoughts about the Object than the other can. If objects revealed themselves through sensation alone, there could be no progress in spiritual development. Even the savage is affected by nature, but the laws of nature reveal themselves only to the thoughts, fructified by intuition, of the more highly developed man. The excitations from the outer world are felt even by the child as incentives to the will; but the commandments of
p. 48
1.04 - Money, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2:You must neither turn with an ascetic shrinking from the money power, the means it gives and the Objects it brings, nor cherish a rajasic attachment to them or a spirit of enslaving self-indulgence in their gratifications. Regard wealth simply as a power to be won back for the Mother and placed at her service.
3:All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it are trustees, not possessors. It is with them today, tomorrow it may be elsewhere. All depends on the way they discharge their trust while it is with them, in what spirit, with what consciousness in their use of it, to what purpose.
1.04 - Narayana appearance, in the beginning of the Kalpa, as the Varaha (boar), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Prīthivī (Earth).-Hail to thee, who art all creatures; to thee, the holder of the mace and shell: elevate me now from this place, as thou hast upraised me in days of old. From thee have I proceeded; of thee do I consist; as do the skies, and all other existing things. Hail to thee, spirit of the supreme spirit; to thee, soul of soul; to thee, who art discrete and indiscrete matter; who art one with the elements and with time. Thou art the creator of all things, their preserver, and their destroyer, in the forms, oh lord, of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Rudra, at the seasons of creation, duration, and dissolution. When thou hast devoured all things, thou reposest on the ocean that sweeps over the world, meditated upon, oh Govinda, by the wise. No one knoweth thy true nature, and the gods adore thee only in the forms it bath pleased thee to assume. They who are desirous of final liberation, worship thee as the supreme Brahmā; and who that adores not Vāsudeva, shall obtain emancipation? Whatever may be apprehended by the mind, whatever may be perceived by the senses, whatever may he discerned by the intellect, all is but a form of thee. I am of thee, upheld by thee; thou art my creator, and to thee I fly for refuge: hence, in this universe, Mādhavī (the bride of Mādhava or Viṣṇu) is my designation. Triumph to the essence of all wisdom, to the unchangeable, the imperishable: triumph to the eternal; to the indiscrete, to the essence of discrete things: to him who is both cause and effect; who is the universe; the sinless lord of sacrifice[4]; triumph. Thou art sacrifice; thou art the oblation; thou art the mystic Omkāra; thou art the sacrificial fires; thou art the Vedas, and their dependent sciences; thou art, Hari, the Object of all worship[5]. The sun, the stars, the planets, the whole world; all that is formless, or that has form; all that is visible, or invisible; all, Puruṣottama, that I have said, or left unsaid; all this, Supreme, thou art. Hail to thee, again and again! hail! all hail!
Parāśara said:-
1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
The nature of death cannot be understood, unless we are acquainted with these two kinds of spirit and with the relations of dependence between them. Know, then, O seeker, that the animal spirit belongs to the inferior world. The elements of its four humors, blood, phlegm, bile and black bile, are fire, air, water and earth. The animal spirit is a product of a delicate exhalation from these elements. The variations in the measure of a man's health depend on the variations of heat, cold, dryness and moisture. Hence it is the Object of the science of medicine to preserve these four elements in their due proportions, so that they may serve as instruments to secure perfection to the human spirit.2
The human spirit belongs to the superior world and is of an angelic substance. It has come into this world a stranger, and has descended from its original state to this temporary home, to receive its destiny from divine direction, and for the purpose of acquiring the knowledge of God. In accordance with this, God declares in his holy word, "We said to them - leave paradise all of you just as you are : a book destined for your guidance will come to you from me: fear shall never befall those who will follow it, and they shall not be afflicted."3 And that which God says in another place, points to the different degrees of worlds: "I create man of clay: and when I shall have formed man of clay and shall have breathed my spirit in him, prostrate yourselves before him in adoration."4First of all in his saying "from clay" he points to a material body. The phrase "I shall have formed" indicates the animal spirit. The phrase "shall have breathed my spirit [78] in him," means that I have given to the body of man a well balanced constitution with power and motion. I have made it capable of receiving the law, and to be a home for the knowledge of God.
1.04 - Religion and Occultism, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the final analysis, formulated knowledge is only a language that gives the power to act upon the Object of this knowledge.
(A sadhak wrote that devotees were performing ceremonies much like the worship of deities in front of the
1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
rule I am met with the Objection, But I am not a painter! To this I usually
reply that neither are modern painters, and that consequently modernpainting is free for all, and that anyhow it is not a question of beauty but
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in a new and hitherto alien sense, for his ego now appears as the Object of
that which works within him. In countless pictures he strives to catch this
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confuse it with his consciousness, else he veils from his sight the Object of
his investigation. On the contrary, to recognize it at all, he must learn to
1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
subject or the Object. But that immediate certainty, as well as absolute knowledge and the thing in
itself, involve a contradictio in adjecto, I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves
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and contains the concrete expression of the goal of a people it is the Objective and subjective realization
207
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motivational significance of the phenomena whose apprehension motivates behavior. the Objective mind
would postulate the former; the mythic mind, concerned with subjective reality, the latter. This form of
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rests. This value is the magic of the Object.
Schismatic activity, semantic, episodic, or procedural, might be considered the within-group equivalent
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representation of the Objective or shared world a logical conclusion of the interpersonal exchange of
sensory information, made possible by linguistic communication challenged belief in the reality of the
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empirical description of the Objective world.
Perhaps it was necessary for science, struggling to escape from a cognitive world dominated by religious
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proposition that the Objective material in and of itself constitutes the real, and that subjective experience,
which in fact provides source material for the concept of the Object, is merely an epiphenomenal
appendage. However, it is the case that self-referential systems (like that consisting of being as subject and
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heritable characteristic of the race, as the precondition for generation of knowledge of the Objective
boundaries of subjective existence, as the fundamental precondition of tragic self-awareness:
1.04 - The Discovery of the Nation-Soul, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This was one side of the predestination of Germany; the other is to be found in her scholars, educationists, scientists, organisers. It was the industry, the conscientious diligence, the fidelity to ideas, the honest and painstaking spirit of work for which the nation has been long famous. A people may be highly gifted in the subjective capacities, and yet if it neglects to cultivate this lower side of our complex nature, it will fail to build that bridge between the idea and imagination and the world of facts, between the vision and the force, which makes realisation possible; its higher powers may become a joy and inspiration to the world, but it will never take possession of its own world until it has learned the humbler lesson. In Germany the bridge was there, though it ran mostly through a dark tunnel with a gulf underneath; for there was no pure transmission from the subjective mind of the thinkers and singers to the Objective mind of the scholars and organisers. The misapplication by Treitschke of the teaching of Nietzsche to national and international uses which would have profoundly disgusted the philosopher himself, is an example of this obscure transmission. But still a transmission there was. For more than a half-century Germany turned a deep eye of subjective introspection on herself and things and ideas in search of the truth of her own being and of the world, and for another half-century a patient eye of scientific research on the Objective means for organising what she had or thought she had gained. And something was done, something indeed powerful and enormous, but also in certain directions, not in all, misshapen and disconcerting. Unfortunately, those directions were precisely the very central lines on which to go wrong is to miss the goal.
It may be said, indeed, that the last result of the something done the war, the collapse, the fierce reaction towards the rigid, armoured, aggressive, formidable Nazi State,is not only discouraging enough, but a clear warning to abandon that path and go back to older and safer ways. But the misuse of great powers is no argument against their right use. To go back is impossible; the attempt is always, indeed, an illusion; we have all to do the same thing which Germany has attempted, but to take care not to do it likewise. Therefore we must look beyond the red mist of blood of the War and the dark fuliginous confusion and chaos which now oppress the world to see why and where was the failure. For her failure which became evident by the turn her action took and was converted for the time being into total collapse, was clear even then to the dispassionate thinker who seeks only the truth. That befell her which sometimes befalls the seeker on the path of Yoga, the art of conscious self-finding,a path exposed to far profounder perils than beset ordinarily the average man,when he follows a false light to his spiritual ruin. She had mistaken her vital ego for herself; she had sought for her soul and found only her force. For she had said, like the Asura, I am my body, my life, my mind, my temperament, and become attached with a Titanic force to these; especially she had said, I am my life and body, and than that there can be no greater mistake for man or nation. The soul of man or nation is something more and diviner than that; it is greater than its instruments and cannot be shut up in a physical, a vital, a mental or a temperamental formula. So to confine it, even though the false formation be embodied in the armour-plated social body of a huge collective human dinosaurus, can only stifle the growth of the inner Reality and end in decay or the extinction that overtakes all that is unplastic and unadaptable.
1.04 - The Gods of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the Object of this book is to suggest a prior possibility,that the whole European theory may be from beginning to end a prodigious error. The confident presumption that religion started in fairly recent times with the terrors of the savage, passed through stages of Animism & Nature worship & resulted variously in Paganism, monotheism or the Vedanta has stood in the way of any extension of scepticism to this province of Vedic enquiry. I dispute the presumption and deny the conclusions drawn from it. Before I admit it, I must be satisfied that a system of pure Nature worship ever existed. I cannot accept as evidence Sun & Star myth theories which, as a play of ingenious scholastic fancy, may attract the imagination, but are too haphazard, too easily self-contented, too ill-combined & inconsequent to satisfy the scientific reason. No other religion of which there is any undisputed record or sure observation, can be defined as a system of pure Nature worship. Even the savage-races have had the conception of gods & spirits who are other than personified natural phenomena. At the lowest they have Animism & the worship of spirits, ghosts & devils. Ancestor-worship & the cult of snake & four-footed animal seem to have been quite as old as any Nature-gods with whom research has made us acquainted. In all probability the Python was worshipped long before Apollo. It is therefore evident that even in the lowest religious strata the impulse to personify Nature-phenomena is not the ruling cult-idea of humanity. It is exceedingly unlikely that at any time this element should have so far prevailed as to cast out all the others so as to create a type of cult confined within a pure & rigid naturalism. Man has always seen in the universe the replica of himself. Unless therefore the Vedic Rishis had no thought of their subjective being, no perception of intellectual and moral forces within themselves, it is a psychological impossibility that they should have detected divine forces behind the Objective world but none behind the subjective.
These are negative and a priori considerations, but they are supported by more positive indications. The other Aryan religions which are most akin in conception to the Vedic and seem originally to have used the same names for their deities, present themselves to us even at their earliest vaguely historic stage as moralised religions. Their gods had not only distinct moral attri butes, but represented moral & subjective functions. Apollo is not only the god of the sun or of pestilencein Homer indeed Haelios (Saurya) & not Apollo is the Sun God but the divine master of prophecy and poetry; Athene has lost any naturalistic significance she may ever have had and is a pure moral force, the goddess of strong intelligence, force guided by brain; Ares is the lord of battles, not a storm wind; Artemis, if she is the Moon, is also goddess of the free hunting life and of virginity; Aphrodite is only the goddess of Love & Beauty There is therefore a strong moral element in the cult & there are clear subjective notions attached to the divine personalities. But this is not all. There was not only a moral element in the Greek religion as known & practised by the layman, there was also a mystic element and an esoteric belief & practice practised by the initiated. The mysteries of Eleusis, the Thracian rites connected with the name of Orpheus, the Phrygian worship of Cybele, even the Bacchic rites rested on a mystic symbolism which gave a deep internal meaning to the exterior circumstances of creed & cult. Nor was this a modern excrescence; for its origins were lost to the Greeks in a legendary antiquity. Indeed, if we took the trouble to understand alien & primitive mentalities instead of judging & interpreting them by our own standards, I think we should find an element of mysticism even in savage rites & beliefs. The question at any rate may fairly be put, Were the Vedic Rishis, thinkers of a race which has shown itself otherwise the greatest & earliest mystics & moralisers in historical times, the most obstinately spiritual, theosophic & metaphysical of nations, so far behind the Orphic & Homeric Greeks as to be wholly Pagan & naturalistic in their creed, or was their religion too moralised & subjective, were their ceremonies too supported by an esoteric symbolism?
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(9) But in order that they may help, it is necessary to reinforce them in these lower worlds, which are not their own, by self-surrender, by sacrifice, by a share in all mans action, strength, being & bliss, and by this mutual help mans being physical, vital, mental, spiritual is kept in a state of perfect & ever increasing force, energy & joy favourable to the development of immortality. This is the process of Yajna, called often Yoga when applied exclusively to the subjective movements & adhwara when applied to the Objective. The Vritras, Panis etc of the Bhuvarloka who are constantly preventing mans growth & throwing back his development, have to be attacked and slain by the gods, for they are not entirely immortal. The sacrifice is largely a battle between evolutionary & reactionary powers.
(10) A symbolic system of external sacrifice in which every movement is carefully designed & coordinated to signify the subjective facts of the internal Yajna, aids the spiritual aspirant by moulding his material sheath into harmony with his internal life & by mastering his external surroundings so that there too the conditions & forces may be all favourable to his growth.
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One of the greatest deities of the Vedic Pantheon is a woman, Gna,a feminine power whether of material or moral nature,whether her functions work in the subjective or the Objective. The Hindu religion has always laid an overpowering stress on this idea of the woman in Nature. It is not only in the Purana that the Woman looms so large, not only in the Shakta cult that she becomes a supreme Name. In the Upanishads it is only when Indra, in his search for the mysterious and ill-understood Mastering Brahman, meets with the Woman in the heaven of thingstasminn evakashe striyam ajagama UmamHaimavatim, In that same sky he came to the Woman, Uma, daughter of Himavan,that he is able to learn the thing which he seeks. The Stri, the Aja or unborn Female Energy, is the executive Divinity of the universe, the womb, the mother, the bride, the mould & instrument of all joy & being. The Veda also speaks of the gnah, the Women,feminine powers without whom the masculine are not effective for work & formation; for when the gods are to be satisfied who support the sacrifice & effect it, vahnayah, yajatrah, then Medhatithi of the Kanwas calls on Agni to yoke them with female mates, patnivatas kridhi, in their activity and enjoyment. In one of his greatest hymns, the twenty-second of the first Mandala, he speaks expressly of the patnir devanam, the brides of the Strong Ones, who are to be called to extend protection, to brea the a mighty peace, to have their share the joy of the Soma wine. Indrani, Varunani, Agnayi,we can recognise these goddesses and their mastering gods; but there are threein addition to Mother Earthwho seem to stand on a different level and are mentioned without the names of their mates if they have any and seem to enjoy an independent power and activity. They are Ila,Mahi&Saraswati, the three goddesses born of Love or born of Bliss, Tisro devir mayobhuvah.
Saraswati is known to us in the Purana,the Muse with her feet on the thousand leaved lotus of the mind, the goddess of thought, learning, poetry, of all that is high in mind and its knowledge. But, so far as we can understand from the Purana, she is the goddess of mind only, of intellect & imagination and their perceptions & inspirations. Things spiritual & the mightier supra-mental energies & illuminations belong not to her, but to other powers. Well, we meet Saraswati in the Vedas;and if she is the same goddess as our Puranic & modern protectress of learning & the arts, the Personality of the Intellect, then we have a starting pointwe know that the Vedic Rishis had other than naturalistic conceptions & could call to higher powers than the thunder-flash & the storm-wind. But there is a difficultySaraswati is the name of a river, of several rivers in India, for the very name means flowing, gliding or streaming, and the Europeans identify it with a river in the Punjab. We must be careful therefore, whenever we come across the name, to be sure which of these two is mentioned or invoked, the sweet-streaming Muse or the material river.
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But by what power of Saraswatis are falsehood & error excluded and the mind and discerning reason held to truth & right-thinking? This, if I mistake not, is what the Rishi Madhuchchhanda, the drashta of Veda has seen for us in his last and culminating verse. I have said that arnas is a flowing water whether river or sea; for the word expresses either a flowing continuity or a flowing expanse. We may translate it then as the river of Mah or Mahas, and place arnas in apposition with Saraswati. This goddess will then be in our subjective being some principle to which the Vedic thinkers gave the names of Mah and Mahas for it is clear, if the rest of our interpretation is at all correct, that there can be no question of a material stream & arnas must refer to some stream or storehouse of subjective faculty. But there are strong objections to such a collocation. We shall find later that the goddess Mahi and not Saraswati is the Objectivising feminine power and divine representative of this Vedic principle Mahas; prachetayati besides demands an object and maho arnas is the only object which the structure of the sentence and the rhythm of the verse will allow. I translate therefore Saraswati awakens by the perceptive intelligence the ocean (or, flowing expanse) of Mahas and governs diversely all the movements (or, all the faculties) of the understanding.
What is Mah or Mahas?The word means great, embracing, full, comprehensive. The Earth, also, because of its wideness & containing faculty is called mahi,just as it is called prithivi, dhara, medini, dharani, etc. In various forms, the root itself, mahi, mahitwam, maha, magha, etc, it recurs with remarkable profusion and persistence throughout the Veda. Evidently it expressed some leading thought of the Rishis, was some term of the highest importance in their system of psychology. Turning to the Purana we find the term mahat applied to some comprehensive principle which is supposed itself to be near to the unmanifest, avyaktam but to supply the material of all that is manifest and always to surround, embrace and uphold it. Mahat seems here to be an objective principle; but this need not trouble us; for in the old Hindu system all that is objective had something subjective corresponding to it and constituting its real nature. We find it explicitly declared in the Vishnu Purana that all things here are manifestations of vijnana, pure ideal knowledge, sarvani vijnanavijrimbhitaniideal knowledge vibrating out into intensity of various phenomenal existences each with its subjective reason for existence and objective case & form of existence. Is ideal knowledge then the subjective principle of mahat? If so, vijnanam and the Vedic mahas are likely to be terms identical in their philosophical content and psychological significance. We turn to the Upanishads and find mention made more than once of a certain subjective state of the soul, which is called Mahan Atma, a state into which the mind and senses have to be drawn up as we rise by samadhi of the instruments of knowledge into the supreme state of Brahman and which is superior therefore to these instruments. The Mahan Atma is the state of the pure Brahman out of which the vijnana or ideal truth (sattwa or beness of things) emerges and it is higher than the vijnana but nearer us than the Unmanifest or Avyaktam (Katha: III.10, 11,13 & VI.7). If we understand by the Mahan Atma that status of soul existence (Purusha) which is the basis of the Objective mahat or mahati prakriti and which develops the vijnanam or ideal knowledge as its subjective instrument, then we shall have farther light on the nature of Mahas in the ancient conceptions. We shall see that it is ideal knowledge, vijnanam, or is connected with ideal knowledge.
But we have first one more step in our evidence to notice,the final & conclusive link. In the Taittiriya Upanishad we are told that there are three vyahritis, Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar, but the Rishi Mahachamasya insisted on a fourth, Mahas. What is this fourth vyahriti? It is evidently some old Vedic idea and can hardly fail to be our maho arnas. I have already, in my introduction, outlined briefly the Vedic, Vedantic & Puranic system of the seven worlds and the five bodies. In this system the three vyahritis constitute the lower half of existence which is in bondage to Avidya. Bhurloka is the material world, our dwelling place, in which Annam predominates, in which everything is subject to or limited by the laws of matter & material consciousness. Bhuvar are the middle worlds, antariksha, between Swar & Bhur, vital worlds in which Prana, the vital principle predominates and everything is subject to or limited by the laws of vitality & vital consciousness. Swarloka is the supreme world of the triple system, the pure mental kingdom in which manasei ther in itself or, as one goes higher, uplifted & enlightened by buddhipredominates & by the laws of mind determines the life & movements of the existences which inhabit it. The three Puranic worlds Jana, Tapas, Satya,not unknown to the Vedaconstitute the Parardha; they are the higher ranges of existence in which Sat, Chit, Ananda, the three mighty elements of the divine nature predominate respectively, creative Ananda or divine bliss in Jana, the power of Chit (Chich-chhakti) or divine Energy in Tapas, the extension [of] Sat or divine being in Satya. But these worlds are hidden from us, avyaktalost for us in the sushupti to which only great Yogins easily attain & only with the Anandaloka have we by means of the anandakosha some difficult chance of direct access. We are too joyless to bear the surging waves of that divine bliss, too weak or limited to move in those higher ranges of divine strength & being. Between the upper hemisphere & the lower is Maharloka, the seat of ideal knowledge & pure Truth, which links the free spirits to the bound, the gods who deliver to the gods who are in chains, the wide & immutable realms to these petty provinces where all shifts, all passes, all changes. We see therefore that Mahas is still vijnanam and we can no longer hesitate to identify our subjective principle of mahas, source of truth & right thinking awakened by Saraswati through the perceptive intelligence, with the Vedantic principle of vijnana or pure buddhi, instrument of pure Truth & ideal knowledge.
We do not find that the Rishi Mahachamasya succeeded in getting his fourth vyahriti accepted by the great body of Vedantic thinkers. With a little reflection we can see the reason why. The vijnana or mahat is superior to reasoning. It sees and knows, hears and knows, remembers & knows by the ideal principles of drishti, sruti and smriti; it does not reason and know.Or withdrawing into the Mahan Atma, it is what it exercises itself upon and therefore knowsas it were, by conscious identity; for that is the nature of the Mahan Atma to be everything separately and collectively & know it as an object of his Knowledge and yet as himself. Always vijnana knows things in the whole & therefore in the part, in the mass & therefore in the particular. But when ideal knowledge, vijnana, looks out on the phenomenal world in its separate details, it then acquires an ambiguous nature. So long as it is not assailed by mind, it is still the pure buddhi and free from liability to errors. The pure buddhi may assign its reasons, but it knows first & reasons afterwards,to explain, not to justify. Assailed by mind, the ideal buddhi ceases to be pure, ceases to be ideal, becomes sensational, emotional, is obliged to found itself on data, ends not in knowledge but in opinion and is obliged to hold doubt with one hand even while it tries to grasp certainty by the other. For it is the nature of mind to be shackled & frightened by its data. It looks at things as entirely outside itself, separate from itself and it approaches them one by one, groups them & thus arrives at knowledge by synthesis; or if [it] looks at things in the mass, it has to appreciate them vaguely and then take its parts and qualities one by one, arriving at knowledge by a process of analysis. But it cannot be sure that the knowledge it acquires, is pure truth; it can never be safe against mixture of truth & error, against one-sided knowledge which leads to serious misconception, against its own sensations, passions, prejudices and false associations. Such truth as it gets can only be correct even so far as it goes, if all the essential data have been collected and scrupulously weighed without any false weights or any unconscious or semi-conscious interference with the balance. A difficult undertaking! So we can form reliable conclusions, and then too always with some reserve of doubt,about the past & the present.Of the future the mind can know nothing except in eternally fixed movements, for it has no data. We try to read the future from the past & present and make the most colossal blunders. The practical man of action who follows there his will, his intuition & his instinct, is far more likely to be correct than the scientific reasoner. Moreover, the mind has to rely for its data on the outer senses or on its own inner sensations & perceptions & it can never be sure that these are informing it correctly or are, even, in their nature anything but lying instruments. Therefore we say we know the Objective world on the strength of a perpetual hypothesis. The subjective world we know only as in a dream, sure only of our own inner movements & the little we can learn from them about others, but there too sure only of this objective world & end always in conflict of transitory opinions, a doubt, a perhaps. Yet sure knowledge, indubitable Truth, the Vedic thinkers have held, is not only possible to mankind, but is the goal of our journey. Satyam eva jayate nanritam satyena pantha vitato devayanah yenakramantyrishayo hyaptakama yatra tat satyasya paramam nidhanam. Truth conquers and not falsehood, by truth the path has been extended which the gods follow, by which sages attaining all their desire arrive where is that Supreme Abode of Truth. The very eagerness of man for Truth, his untameable yearning towards an infinite reality, an infinite extension of knowledge, the fact that he has the conception of a fixed & firm truth, nay the very fact that error is possible & persistent, mare indications that pure Truth exists.We follow no chimaera as a supreme good, nor do the Powers of Darkness fight against a mere shadow. The ideal Truth is constantly coming down to us, constantly seeking to deliver us from our slavery to our senses and the magic circle of our limited data. It speaks to our hearts & creates the phenomenon of Faith, but the heart has its lawless & self-regarding emotions & disfigures the message. It speaks to the Imagination, our great intellectual instrument which liberates us from the immediate fact and opens the mind to infinite possibility; but the imagination has her pleasant fictions & her headlong creative impulse and exaggerates the truth & distorts & misplaces circumstances. It speaks to the intellect itself, bids it criticise its instruments by vichara and creates the critical reason, bids it approach the truth directly by a wide passionless & luminous use of the pure judgment, and creates shuddha buddhi or Kants pure reason; bids it divine truth & learn to hold the true divination & reject the counterfeit, and creates the intuitive reason & its guardian, intuitive discrimination or viveka. But the intellect is impatient of error, eager for immediate results and hurries to apply what it receives before it has waited & seen & understood. Therefore error maintains & even extends her reign. At last come the logician & modern rationalist thinker; disgusted with the exaggeration of these movements, seeing their errors, unable to see their indispensable utility, he sets about sweeping them away as intellectual rubbish, gets rid of faith, gets rid of flexibility of mind, gets rid of sympathy, pure reason & intuition, puts critical reason into an ill lightened dungeon & thinks now, delivered from these false issues, to compass truth by laborious observation & a rigid logic. To live on these dry & insufficient husks is the last fate of impure vijnanam or buddhi confined in the data of the mind & sensesuntil man wronged in his nature, cabined in his possibilities revolts & either prefers a luminous error or resumes his broadening & upward march.
It was this aspect of impure mahas, vijnanam working not in its own home, swe dame but in the house of a stranger, as a servant of an inferior faculty, reason as we call it, which led the Rishi Mahachamasya to include mahas among the vyahritis. But vijnana itself is an integral part of the supreme movement, it is divine thought in divine being,therefore not a vyahriti. The Veda uses to express this pure Truth &ideal knowledge another word, equivalent in meaning to mahat,the word brihat and couples with it two other significant expressions, satyam & ritam. This trinity of satyam ritam brihatSacchidananda objectivisedis the Mahan Atma. Satyam is Truth, the principle of infinite & divine Being, Sat objectivised to Knowledge as the Truth of things self-manifested; Ritam is Law, the motion of things thought out, the principle of divine self-aware energy, Chit-shakti objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things selfarranged; Brihat is full content & fullness, satisfaction, Nature, the principle of divine Bliss objectivised to knowledge as the Truth of things contented with its own manifestation in law of being & law of action. For, as the Vedanta tells us, there is no lasting satisfaction in the little, in the unillumined or half-illumined things of mind & sense, satisfaction there is only in the large, the self-true & self-existent. Nalpe sukham asti bhumaiva sukham. Bhuma, brihat, mahat, that is God. It is Ananda therefore that insists on largeness & constitutes the mahat or brihat. Ananda is the soul of Nature, its essentiality, creative power & peace. The harmony of creative power & peace, pravritti & nivritti, jana & shama, is the divine state which we feelas Wordsworth felt itwhen we go back to the brihat, the wide & infinite which, containing & contented with its works, says of it Sukritam, What I have made, is good. Whoever enters this kingdom of Mahat, this Maho Arnas or great sea of ideal knowledge, comes into possession of his true being, true knowledge, true bliss. He attains the ideal powers of drishti, sruti, smritisees truth face to face, hears her unerring voice or knows her by immediate recognising memoryjust as we say of a friend This is he and need no reasoning of observation, comparison, induction or deduction to tell us who he is or to explain our knowledge to ourselvesthough we may, already knowing the truth, use a self-evident reasoning masterfully in order to convince others. The characteristic of ideal knowledge is first that it is direct in its approach, secondly, that it is self-evident in its revelation, swayamprakasha, thirdly, that it is unerring fact of being, sat, satyam in its substance. Moreover, it is always perfectly satisfied & divinely pleasurable; it is atmarati & atmastha, confines itself to itself & does not reach out beyond itself to grasp at error or grope within itself to stumble over ignorance. It is, too, perfectly effective whether for knowledge, speech or action, satyakarma, satyapratijna, satyavadi. The man who rising beyond the state of the manu, manishi or thinker which men are now, becomes the kavi or direct seer, containing what he sees,he who draws the manomaya purusha up into the vijnanamaya,is in all things true. Truth is his characteristic, his law of being, the stamp that God has put upon him. But even for the manishi ideal Truth has its bounties. For from thence come the intuitions of the poet, the thinker, the artist, scientist, man of action, merchant, craftsman, labourer each in his sphere, the seed of the great thoughts, discoveries, faiths that help the world and save our human works & destinies from decay & dissolution. But in utilising these messages from our higher selves for the world, in giving them a form or a practical tendency, we use our intellects, feelings or imaginations and alter to their moulds or colour with their pigments the Truth. That alloy seems to be needed to make this gold from the mines above run current among men. This then is Maho Arnas.The psychological conceptions of our remote forefa thers concerning it have so long been alien to our thought & experience that they may be a little difficult to follow & more difficult to accept mentally. But we must understand & grasp them in their fullness if we have any desire to know the meaning of the Veda. For they are the very centre & keystone of Vedic psychology. Maho Arnas, the Great Ocean, is the stream of our being which at once divides & connects the human in us from the divine, & to cross over from the human to the divine, from this small & divided finite to that one, great & infinite, from this death to that immortality, leaving Diti for Aditi, alpam for bhuma, martyam for amritam is the great preoccupation & final aim of Veda & Vedanta.
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Next, it is to Indra that he turns. I have already said that in my view Indra is the master of mental force. Let us see whether there is anything here to contradict the hypothesis. Indra yahi chitrabhano suta ime tu ayavah, Anwibhis tana putasah. Indrayahi dhiyeshito viprajutah sutavatah Upa brahmani vaghatah. Indrayahi tutujana upa brahmani harivah Sute dadhishwa nas chanah. There are several important words here that are doubtful in their sense, anwi, tana, vaghatah, brahmani; but none of them are of importance for our present purpose except brahmani. For reasons I shall give in the proper place I do not accept Brahma in the Veda as meaning speech of any kind, but as either soul or a mantra of the kind afterwards called dhyana, the Object of which was meditation and formation in the soul of the divine Power meditated on whether in an image or in his qualities. It is immaterial which sense we take here. Indra, sings the Rishi, arrive, O thou of rich and varied light, here are these life-streams poured forth, purified, with vital powers, with substance. Arrive, O Indra, controlled by the understanding, impelled forward in various directions to my soul faculties, I who am now full of strength and flourishing increase. Arrive, O Indra, with protection to my soul faculties, O dweller in the brilliance, confirm our delight in the nectar poured. It seems to me that the remarkable descriptions dhiyeshito viprajutah are absolutely conclusive, that they prove the presence of a subjective Nature Power, not a god of rain & tempest, & prove especially a mind-god. What is it but mental force which comes controlled by the understanding and is impelled forward by it in various directions? What else is it that at the same time protects by its might the growing & increasing soul faculties from impairing & corrupting attack and confirms, keeps safe & continuous the delight which the Aswins have brought with them? The epithets chitrabhano, harivas become at once intelligible and appropriate; the god of mental force has indeed a rich and varied light, is indeed a dweller in the brilliance. The progress of the thought is clear. Madhuchchhanda, as a result of Yogic practice, is in a state of spiritual & physical exaltation; he has poured out the nectar of vitality; he is full of strength & ecstasy This is the sacrifice he has prepared for the gods. He wishes it to be prolonged, perhaps to be made, if it may now be, permanent. The Aswins are called to give & take the delight, Indra to supply & preserve that mental force which will sustain the delight otherwise in danger of being exhausted & sinking by its own fierceness rapidly consuming its material in the soul faculties. The state and the movement are one of which every Yogin knows.
But he is not content with the inner sacrifice. He wishes to pour out this strength & joy in action on the world, on his fellows, on the peoples, therefore he calls to the Visve Devah to come, A gata!all the gods in general who help man and busy themselves in supporting his multitudinous & manifold action. They are kindly, omasas, they are charshanidhrito, holders or supporters of all our actions, especially actions that require effort, (it is in this sense that I take charshani, again on good philological grounds), they are to distribute this nectar to all or to divide it among themselves for the action,dasvanso may have either force,for Madhuchchhanda wishes not only to possess, but to give, to distribute, he is dashush. Omasas charshanidhrito visve devasa a gata, daswanso dashushah sutam. He goes on, Visve devaso apturah sutam a ganta turnayah Usra iva swasarani. Visve devaso asridha ehimayaso adruhah, Medham jushanta vahnayah. O you all-gods who are energetic in works, come to the nectar distilled, ye swift ones, (or, come swiftly), like calves to their own stalls,(so at least we must translate this last phrase, till we can get the real meaning, for I do not believe this is the real or, at any rate, the only meaning). O you all-gods unfaltering, with wide capacity of strength, ye who harm not, attach yourselves to the offering as its supporters. And then come the lines about Saraswati. For although Indra can sustain for a moment or for a time he is at present a mental, not an ideal force; it is Saraswati full of the vijnana, of mahas, guiding by it the understanding in all its ways who can give to all these gods the supporting knowledge, light and truth which will confirm and uphold the delight, the mental strength & supply inexhaustibly from the Ocean of Mahas the beneficent & joy-giving action,Saraswati, goddess of inspiration, the flowing goddess who is the intermediary & channel by which divine truth, divine joy, divine being descend through the door of knowledge into this human receptacle. In a word, she is our inspirer, our awakener, our lurer towards Immortality. It is immortality that Madhuchchhandas prepares for himself & the people who do sacrifice to Heaven, devayantah. The Soma-streams he speaks of are evidently no intoxicating vegetable juices; he calls them ayavah, life-forces; & elsewhere amritam, nectar of immortality; somasah, wine-draughts of bliss & internal well being. It is the clear Yogic idea of the amritam, the divine nectar which flows into the system at a certain stage of Yogic practice & gives pure health, pure strength & pure physical joy to the body as a basis for a pure mental & spiritual vigour and activity.
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We see the results & the conditions of the action ofVaruna in the four remaining verses. By their protection we have safety from attack, sanema, safety for our shansa, our rayah, our radhas, by the force of Indra, by the protecting greatness of Varuna against which passion & disturbance cast themselves in vain, only to be destroyed. This safety & this settled ananda or delight, we use for deep meditation, ni dhimahi, we go deep into ourselves and the Object we have in view in our meditation is prarechanam, the Greek katharsis, the cleansing of the system mental, bodily, vital, of all that is impure, defective, disturbing, inharmonious. Syad uta prarechanam! In this work of purification we are sure to be obstructed by the powers that oppose all healthful change; but Indra & Varuna are to give us victory, jigyushas kritam. The final result of the successful purification is described in the eighth sloka. The powers of the understanding, its various faculties & movements, dhiyah, delivered from self-will & rebellion, become obedient to Indra & Varuna; obedient to Varuna, they move according to the truth & law, the ritam; obedient to Indra they fulfil with that passivity in activity, which we seek by Yoga, all the works to which mental force can apply itself when it is in harmony with Varuna & the ritam. The result is sharma, peace. Nothing is more remarkable in the Veda than the exactness with which hymn after hymn describes with a marvellous simplicity & lucidity the physical & psychological processes through which Indian Yoga proceeds. The process, the progression, the successive movements of the soul here described are exactly what the Yogin experiences today so many thousands of years after the Veda was revealed. No wonder, it is regarded as eternal truth, not the expression of any particular mind, not paurusheya but impersonal, divine & revealed.
This hymn differs greatly, interestingly & instructively, from the hymn in which Varuna first appears. There the Object is to ensure the ananda, the rayah & radhas spoken of in this hymn by the advent of the gods of Vitality & Mind-Force, Indra & Vayu, to protect from the attack of disintegrating forces the Soma or Amrita, the juice of immortality expressed in the Yogins system. Varuna & Mitra are then called for a particular & restricted purpose to perfect the discernment & to uphold it in its works by the sustaining force of a calm, wide, comprehensive self-expression full of peace & love. The Rishi of that sukta is using the amrita to feed the activity of a sattwic state of mind for acquiring added knowledge. The present hymn belongs to a more advanced state of the Yoga. It is sadhastuti, a hymn of fulfilment or for fulfilment, in which peace & a calm, assured, untroubled activity of the soul are very near. Varuna here leads. He is here for Indras purposes, but his activity predominates; it is his spirit that pervades the action and purpose of the hymn.
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1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Aspiration, and the sigil of the Sun and the gilt triangle over the heart of the Angel, all point to the Object of aspiration, representing Asar-Un-Nefer, man made perfect.
THE PATHS 85
1.04 - The Sacrifice the Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But it is only a divine love and unity that can possess in the light what the human forms of these things seek for in the darkness. For the true unity is not merely an association and agglomeration like that of physical cells joined by a life of common interests; it is not even an emotional understanding, sympathy, solidarity or close drawing together. Only then are we really unified with those separated from us by the divisions of Nature, when we annul the division and find ourselves in that which seemed to us not ourselves. Association is a vital and physical unity; its sacrifice is that of mutual aid and concessions. Nearness, sympathy, solidarity create a mental, moral and emotional unity; theirs is a sacrifice of mutual support and mutual gratifications. But the true unity is spiritual; its sacrifice is a mutual self-giving, an interfusion of our inner substance. The law of sacrifice travels in Nature towards its culmination in this complete and unreserved self-giving; it awakens the consciousness of one common self in the giver and the Object of the sacrifice. This culmination of sacrifice is the height even of human love and devotion when it tries to become divine; for there too the highest peak of love points into a heaven of complete mutual self-giving, its summit is the rapturous fusing of two souls into one.
This profounder idea of the world-wide law is at the heart of the teaching about works given in the Gita; a spiritual union with the Highest by sacrifice, an unreserved self-giving to the Eternal is the core of its doctrine. The vulgar conception of sacrifice is an act of painful self-immolation, austere self-mortification, difficult self-effacement; this kind of sacrifice may go even as far as self-mutilation and self-torture. These things may be temporarily necessary in mans hard endeavour to exceed his natural self; if the egoism in his nature is violent and obstinate, it has to be met sometimes by an answering strong internal repression and counterbalancing violence. But the Gita discourages any excess of violence done to oneself; for the self within is really the Godhead evolving, it is Krishna, it is the Divine; it has not to be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and torture it, but to be increased, fostered, cherished, luminously opened to a divine light and strength and joy and wideness. It is not ones self, but the band of the spirits inner enemies that we have to discourage, expel, slay upon the altar of the growth of the spirit; these can be ruthlessly excised, whose names are desire, wrath, inequality, greed, attachment to outward pleasures and pains, the cohort of usurping demons that are the cause of the souls errors and sufferings. These should be regarded not as part of oneself but as intruders and perverters of our selfs real and diviner nature; these have to be sacrificed in the harsher sense of the word, whatever pain in going they may throw by reflection on the consciousness of the seeker.
1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
torical consensus omnium in regard to the Object in question.
These "mythological" aspects are always present, even though
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Such criticism has as little effect on the Object as zoological criti-
cism on a duck-billed platypus. It is not the concept that mat-
1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
The Integral Yoga is also new because the Object sought
after is not an individual achievement of divine realization
1.04 - Yoga and Human Evolution, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The whole burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory, the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilised man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning, the Objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world. From kraa to skma, from skma to sthla, and back again, that is the formula. Once manifested in matter the world proceeds by laws which do not change, from age to age, by a regular succession, until it is all withdrawn back again into the source from which it came. The material goes back into the psychical and the psychical is involved in its cause or seed. It is again put out when the period of expansion recurs and runs its course on similar lines but with different details till the period of contraction is due. Hinduism regards the world as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognise the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijna-vijmbhitni, developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures and the progress of mankind. Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward.
The animal is distinguished from man by its enslavement to the body and the vital impulses. Aany mtyu, Hunger who is Death, evolved the material world from of old, and it is the physical hunger and desire and the vital sensations and primary emotions connected with the pra that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in the savage man who approximates to the condition of the beast. Out of this animal state, according to European Science, man rises working out the tiger and the ape by intellectual and moral development in the social condition. If the beast has to be worked out, it is obvious that the body and the pra must be conquered, and as that conquest is more or less complete, the man is more or less evolved. The progress of mankind has been placed by many predominatingly in the development of the human intellect, and intellectual development is no doubt essential to self-conquest. The animal and the savage are bound by the body because the ideas of the animal or the ideas of the savage are mostly limited to those sensations and associations which are connected with the body. The development of intellect enables a man to find the deeper self within and partially replace what our philosophy calls the dehtmaka-buddhi, the sum of ideas and sensations which make us think of the body as ourself, by another set of ideas which reach beyond the body, and, existing for their own delight and substituting intellectual and moral satisfaction as the chief objects of life, master, if they cannot entirely silence, the clamour of the lower sensual desires. That animal ignorance which is engrossed with the cares and the pleasures of the body and the vital impulses, emotions and sensations is tamasic, the result of the predominance of the third principle of nature which leads to ignorance and inertia. That is the state of the animal and the lower forms of humanity which are called in the Purana the first or tamasic creation. This animal ignorance the development of the intellect tends to dispel and it assumes therefore an all-important place in human evolution.
1.052 - Yoga Practice - A Series of Positive Steps, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Anything in this world can be taken as a medium for the liberation of the soul. An object of sense can cause bondage; it also can cause liberation under certain conditions. When an object becomes merely one among the many just one individual in a group and the interest in the Object may shift to another object after a period of time, then that object becomes a source of bondage, because it is not true that any single individual object can manifest the wholeness of truth in itself.
Such an apprehension that any peculiar individual feature can reveal the whole of truth is regarded as the lowest type of understanding. Yat tu ktsnavad ekasmin krye saktam ahaitukam, atattvrthavad alpa ca tat tmasam udhtam (B.G. XVIII.22), says the Bhagavadgita. The lowest type of knowledge is where a person clings to an object as if it is everything and there is nothing outside it it is all reality. But, this feeling that a peculiar object is all reality is not sincere. It is an insincere feeling which can subject itself to modifications under other circumstances.
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This philosophy of the twofold character of an object is vastly emphasised in the Tantra Shastra, where nothing in this world is to be regarded as evil, unnecessary, useless or meaningless everything has a meaning of its own. And, the seed of this philosophy is recognised in a sutra of Patanjali himself: bhogpavargrtham dyam (II.18). The drisya, or the Object, is for two purposes: for our enjoyment and bondage, and, under different conditions, also for our freedom.
Thus, a thing in this world is neither good nor bad. We cannot make any remark about any object in this world wholly, unlimitedly or unconditionally; all remarks about things are conditional. Things are useful, helpful and contri butory to the freedom of the soul under a given set of circumstances, but they are the opposite under a different set of circumstances. Not knowing this fact, the mind flitters from one thing to another thing. This is the character of what is known as rajas the principle of diversity and distraction. The remedy for this illness of distraction of the mind is austerity, or self-restraint. The great goal of yoga that has been described all this time will remain merely a will-o-the-wisp and will not be accessible to the mind if the condition necessary for the entry of consciousness into the supreme goal of yoga namely, freedom from distraction is not fulfilled.
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While indulgence in the Objects of sense is bad, overemphasis on excessive austerity beyond its limit also is bad. Moderation is to be properly understood. It is difficult to know what moderation is, because we have never been accustomed to it. We have always excesses in our behaviours in life. There is always an emphasis shifted to a particular point of view, and then that becomes an exclusive occupation of the mind. The difficulties and the problems encountered by great masters like Buddha, for example, in their austerities, are instances on hand.
Enthusiasts in yoga are mostly under the impression that to take to yoga is to mortify but it is not. The subjection of the personality to undue pain is not the intention of yoga. The intention is quite different altogether. It is a healthy growth of the personality that is intended, and the obviating of those unnecessary factors which intrude in this process of healthy growth of the personality just as eating is necessary, but overeating is bad, and not eating at all is also bad. We have to understand what it is to eat without overeating or going to the other extreme of not eating at all.
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The percentage of attachment that you have towards these things also has to be properly understood. What is the percentage of love for A, B, C, D, etc.? In a gradational order, tabulate the Objects of sense or the conceptual objects, whatever they be, and note the degree of attachment involved in every particular case. Take the least one, the simplest, as the first. If you have a desire to sleep on a Dunlop cushion well, you may think over this matter. Is a Dunlop cushion very necessary? I can have a cotton mattress instead. This is not a very serious attachment, though it is an attachment. There are well-to-do aristocrats who may like to sleep on Dunlop beds, Dunlop pillows, have air-conditioning, and so on. These are desires, but they are not so vehement. There are other desires which cannot be touched immediately, and they have to be tackled later on.
By a very dispassionate and unattached attitude, one can diminish ones relationships with things which are really not essential for ones comfortable existence. Let us assume that a comfortable existence is a necessity; even that comfortable life can be led without these luxuries. How many wristwatches have you got? How many coats? How many rooms are you occupying? How much land have you? How many acres? and so on.
1.053 - A Very Important Sadhana, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
It is the pressure of the senses towards objects that prevents the mind from taking to exclusive spiritual meditations. the Objects of sense are so real to the senses that they cannot easily be ignored or forgotten. Even the very thought of an object will draw the mind towards it, and every particularised thought in the direction of an object is a further affirmation of the falsity that Reality is only in some place, in some object, in some thing, in some person, etc., and it is not universal in its nature. The universality of Truth is denied by the senses, at every moment of time, in their activities towards sense gratification.
The very purpose of the senses is to bring about this refusal of the ultimate universality of Godhead, to affirm the diversity of objects and to push the mind forcefully towards these external things. If this undesirable activity on the part of the senses can be ended to the extent possible, this force with which the mind moves towards objects can be harnessed for a better purpose, for a more positive aim than the indulgence of the senses in objects. The very restraint of the senses from their movement towards objects is a meditation by itself, at least in some sense, because energy cannot be bottled up, unused; it always finds expression in some way or the other. If we do not utilise it in more beneficial ways for spiritual purposes, the only alternative would be for this mental energy to leak out through the senses towards objects of sense. If this leakage is blocked and prevented, the energy wells up within like the waters of a river that will rise up when a bund is constructed across it.
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There are various other methods of svadhyaya. It depends upon the state of ones mind how far it is concentrated, how far it is distracted, what these desires are that have remained frustrated inside, what the desires are that have been overcome, and so on. The quality of the mind will determine the type of svadhyaya that one has to practise. If nothing else is possible, do parayana of holy scriptures the Sundara Kanda, the Valmiki Ramayana or any other Ramayana, the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, the Srimad Bhagavadgita, the Moksha Dharma Parva of the Mahabharata, the Vishnu Purana, or any other suitable spiritual text. It has to be recited again and again, every day at a specific time, in a prescribed manner, so that this sadhana itself becomes a sort of meditation because what is meditation but hammering the mind, again and again, into a single idea? Inasmuch as abstract meditations are difficult for beginners, these more concrete forms of it are suggested. There are people who recite the Ramayana or the Srimad Bhagavata 108 times. They conduct Bhagvat Saptaha. The purpose is to bring the mind around to a circumscribed form of function and not allow it to roam about on the Objects of sense.
The mind needs variety, no doubt, and it cannot exist without variety. It always wants change. Monotonous food will not be appreciated by the mind, and so the scriptures, especially the larger ones like the Epics, the Puranas, the Agamas, the Tantras, etc., provide a large area of movement for the mind wherein it leisurely roams about to its deep satisfaction, finds variety in plenty, reads stories of great saints and sages, and feels very much thrilled by the anecdotes of Incarnations, etc. But at the same time, with all its variety, we will find that it is a variety with a unity behind it. There is a unity of pattern, structure and aim in the presentation of variety in such scriptures as the Srimad Bhagavata, for instance. There are 18,000 verses giving all kinds of detail everything about the cosmic creation and the processes of the manifestation of different things in their gross form, subtle form, causal form, etc. Every type of story is found there. It is very interesting to read it. The mind rejoices with delight when going through such a large variety of detail with beautiful comparisons, etc. But all this variety is like a medical treatment by which we may give varieties of medicine with a single aim. We may give one tablet, one capsule, one injection, and all sorts of things at different times in a day to treat a single disease. The purpose is the continued assertion that God is All, and the whole of creation is a play of the glory of God.
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But the subconscious desire for things does not cease, just as a person who is thrown out of his ministry may not cease from desiring to be a minister once again; he will stand for election another time, if possible. The subtle subconscious desire is there. He will be restless, without any peace in the mind, because the position has been uprooted. The senses are unable to move towards the Objects because we have curbed them with force by going away to distant places like Gangotri where we will not get any physical or social satisfaction. But, there is a revulsion felt inside, and there is a feeling of inadequacy of every type. This will create various doubts if not consciously, at least subconsciously.
The various types of suspicion that arise in our mind, and the diffidence we often feel in our daily practice, are due to the presence of subtle desires. The subtle desires may not look like desires at all. They will not have the character of desires, as they are only tendencies. They are tracks or roads kept open for the vehicle to move. The vehicle is not moving, but it can move if it wants; we have kept everything clear. Likewise, though the vehicle of the senses is not moving on the road towards the Objects outside, there is always a chance of it moving in that direction, in spite of the fact that it has been controlled.
Austerity, tapas, does not merely mean control of the senses in the sense of putting an end to their activity. There should be an end to even their tendency towards objects; otherwise, they will create a twofold difficulty. Firstly, they will find the least opportunity provided as an occasion for manifesting their force once again; secondly, they will shake us from the core of all the faith that we have in God and the power of spiritual practice. The powers of sense are terrible indeed. They work on one side as a subtle pressure exerted towards further enjoyment of things in many ways, and on the other side as a feeling that, after all, this practice is not going to bring anything. This is a dangerous doubt that can arise in ones mind, because it is contrary to truth.
1.056 - Lack of Knowledge is the Cause of Suffering, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
We know how fantastically and frantically we run about in dream for the purpose of fulfilment of the desires manifest in the dream mind and the avoidance of the pain that is also manifest there. The joys and sorrows, the loves and hatreds of the dream world become so real that the experiencing unit there gets involved in it, gets submerged into it and becomes one with it, which is the direct effect of the forgetfulness of what one really is in waking. This is exactly what has happened in the waking condition also. This so-called waking consciousness is similar to the dream condition as far as its structure and mode of operation is concerned. This external activity of the mind in waking life, this engagement of the mind in the Objects of sense and this pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain in life are the consequences of the obscuration of the knowledge of what we really are. That is avidya.
Avidy ketram uttare prasupta tanu vicchinna udrm (II.4). This sutra tells us that the obliteration of the knowledge of our essential nature, which is avidya, produces a false condition of individuality, asmita, which rushes forward outwardly for the purpose of contact with other individuals animate or inanimate. This is called desire. This desire is nothing but the urge of one individual to unite with another individual. This urge is what is referred to in this description of prasupta tanu vicchinna udrm. The urge for contact with other individuals is called desire, which has arisen on account of the perception of diversity born of the ignorance of the universality of things. This desire can be completely dormant in childhood, or when we are in the mothers womb, or when the body is dead, or when there is a comatose condition, or in the state of anaesthesia. In these conditions, the desire is dormant, but it is not destroyed. It is present, but not visible not manifest, not active. When it is impossible to fulfil the desire, then also it is dormant. We know that the desire cannot be manifest the conditions are not favourable at all and therefore, we push these desires inside and keep them inside as if they are not there. But, this is not the absence of desires; they remain in latent forms. This summarises the prasupta condition of a desire.
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Or, they can be in this attenuated condition when we are in places like Gangotri or Badrinath, where these desires cannot be fulfilled normally because the conditions are not favourable. Either we cannot get the Objects of desire, or there are other reasons for which the desires cannot be fulfilled. There are various causes behind the inability of the mind to fulfil the desire, though it is trying to find an avenue of escape. It is trying its best, but it cannot get an outlet. In this condition, it is attenuated in a very thin form.
Vicchinna, the third condition mentioned, is an interrupted condition where, if we have great affection for a person a member of our own family, for instance this affection may suddenly be interrupted by an anger that is manifest occasionally. We may be very angry with a member of our own family. Suppose you are the head of a family. You have, naturally, a tremendous love for all the members; you regard them as your own self. But it is well known that there are frictions in the family, and one member of the family may get so angry with another that he may threaten them with dire consequences. In this condition of anger, the affection gets interrupted. It is not absent, as it will come back afterwards. The interrupted condition is the temporary suppression of a particular mode of thinking a mood or an emotion due to the presence of another mode which has arisen for some other reason. When there is a temporary anger or a hatred manifest superficially, the affection that is there gets interrupted, and conversely, when the affection rises, the anger gets interrupted. We can manifest love or hatred either way in respect of the same person or the same thing under different conditions. It all depends upon what mood is evoked at a particular time.
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But if all the factors are favourable, then it is manifest: the war is actually taking place. The soldiers are in the battlefield and there is actually a burst of attack. When the mind is fully convinced that no obstacles are there everything is clear, the road is clean then it will pounce upon the Object at once, like a tiger jumping on a cow. This is the udara aspect.
This ignorance, or avidya, is the breeding ground for all these states of mind which undergo this fourfold stage of prasupta tanu vicchinna udrm (II.4). Avidy ketram uttare it is the ketram uttare. Uttare means anything that follows from this; all things that are the outcome of this find this as their mother. Our ignorance is the mother of all other distractions. It gives them its breast milk and supports them for all time. The desires and the activities of the mind cannot succeed if ignorance is absent, because that is the motive power behind the functions of the mind in whatever form it may function.
1.057 - The Four Manifestations of Ignorance, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
It is not true that anything is permanent in this world. So, how is it that we see everything as permanent? We see a tree, a wall or a building, and we see people living for years. All these are phenomena, no doubt. They are phenomena, not noumena not realities. This incapacity on the part of the perceiving consciousness to distinguish between the phenomenal feature in experience and the real element behind it is ignorance avidya. Inasmuch as things are interconnected, interrelated, vitally dependent upon one another there is an organic relationship of things it is not true that objects are really isolated completely and that there is a necessity for the mind to run after objects. There is no necessity for the mind to run after objects, inasmuch as the Objects are really connected with the subject. That they are not so connected, and therefore there is a need for desiring and possessing them, is ignorance.
The not-Self means the anatman that is to say, that which is not ones own Self. Inasmuch as there is something in this world which is not myself, I have naturally to face it in some proper manner. The way in which I face an object in this world is called the relationship that I establish with it. This is the cause of my likes and dislikes in respect of the Object; and where there is an intense like or a dislike for anything, that particular thing is invested with certain characteristics that do not really belong to it. Why does ones own child look so beautiful? Well, it has to look beautiful merely because it is mine. If it is not mine, then it must be ugly. It is stupid merely because it is not mine. Characters which do not really inhere in an object can be visualised due to a prejudice of emotion. The likes and dislikes are the causative factors behind this investment of characters which are false.
Thus, there is perception of beauty and ugliness, loveableness, etc. due to the peculiar emotional like and dislike caused, again, by the perception of not-Self which is the central forte of ignorance. So we can imagine how many difficulties have cropped up on account of a single mistake that we have committed originally. Then, the pain that is involved in the action of the mind desiring the Objects for their possession and enjoyment is mistaken for pleasure. What toil the householder undergoes, but he thinks it is a pleasure. He has to work hard for the maintenance of the family, but is it a pleasure? He works hard because he enjoys it; otherwise, why does he work?
So, even pain can be mistaken for pleasure where emotions are tied up. What we are serving is our own emotions not the family, not the world. Our emotions are catching hold of us by the throat, and we are pampering the emotions under the impression that we are pampering, helping, serving or doing work for somebody else. There is, again, a mistake in the very thought itself. The idea becomes concretised takes a visible shape, as it were, and becomes the working field for all the urges of the individual. We have studied this earlier, in connection with another sutra: parima tpa saskra dukai guavtti virodht ca dukham eva sarva vivekina (II.15). In this sutra, Patanjali tells us that everything is pain ultimately, if it is properly analysed. There is no joy, but everything looks like joy. If there is no joy in life, who would live in this world? We would all perish in a few minutes. But this joy is a counterfeit joy; it is not really there. It is a makeshift, a camouflage, a whitewash that is presented before us. At the background, there is a pricking pain the thorn of agony, anguish, non-possession, anxiety, fear, dispossession, bereavement, etc. But with all this, we take this agonising world for a field of joy, as if rivers of milk and honey are flowing.
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Who in this world does not believe the reality of a not-Self, or an object of sense? Is there anyone in this world who does not have the conviction that what he sees, or she sees, is real in itself? And, is there any activity which is not based on this notion? So, we can imagine what will be the outcome of all these activities. They will be only adding fuel to the fire that is already blazing due to the action of this ignorance. But, when this endeavour on the part of the perceiving consciousness in respect of the Objects of sense gets re-evaluated and takes a new turn altogether, then this binding activity can become a liberating activity. That is the subtle difference between discriminative perception of an object and emotional perception of an object. The scientific observation of a thing is different from an observation that is coupled with attachment like, dislike, etc. Gradually the mind has to be disentangled from its obsessions in respect of things, and the perceptions should become detached observations for the purpose of the complete extrication of the mind from its emotional relationships.
Anitya auci dukha antmasu nitya uci sukha tma khyti avidy (II.5). To sum up what this sutra tells us, while it is true that ignorance is the breeding ground for all the effects thereof like, dislike, and so on this ignorance has a fourfold prong with which it moves into action. These four manifestations, which have been mentioned, are: the appearing of the not-Self as the Self, the regarding of impermanent things as permanent, painful experiences as pleasures, and impure things as pure. This is a frightening disclosure, indeed, of the facts of our experiences in this world, because there is no experience which is free from these defects. We cannot humanly imagine a kind of experience which is not involved in these defects. It means to say that ignorance rules the world and, therefore, pain cannot be avoided. Where erroneous perception is present, a sort of sorrow naturally should follow.
Every one of these effects of avidya is properly being described. While the nature of ignorance is of this particular feature mentioned, its immediate progeny, which is asmita, or the self-affirming faculty which becomes egoism later on, is again a kind of mix-up of values between the perceiver and what is perceived. This is what is known in Vedanta as adhyasa the character of the Self getting transferred to the Object and, vice versa, the character of the Object getting transferred to the Self. The confirmation that one exists as an individual the rootedness of oneself in the feeling I am as a separate individual is called asmita. This feeling that you exist, or I exist, is also a mistake. It is not wisdom, because the affirmation I am is the outcome of a confusion between two types of character: the character that belongs to Pure Consciousness, and the character that belongs to what is not the Self. The conviction that one exists is due to the Being of Consciousness. The atman or the purusha that is within is responsible for this affirmation.
The existence aspect of this affirmation belongs to the nature of True Being, which is at the background of all these phenomena. But, this affirmation of Being in the feeling I am is not merely an affirmation of Being; there is some other element also which infects this feeling of Being namely, the isolatedness of a part of Being from other parts. When we say I am, or feel I am, we imply thereby that I am different from others, though we do not make that statement openly. The implication of the affirmation of oneself as an individual is that one is cut off from other individuals; otherwise, the feeling of I am itself cannot be there. How do we know that we are different from others? There is no reason behind this. We have a prejudiced notion that we are different from others, and this irrational prejudice is the basis of all our actions even the so-called altruistic actions. Even the most philanthropic of deeds is based upon this notion that we are different from others, which itself cannot be justified rationally.
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Thus, our very existence is a false existence; this is what is made out by this sutra. If our existence is itself illegal, untenable, unfounded and irrational, how can anything that we do on the basis of this individuality be right? So it is no wonder that we are suffering in this world. Ignorance has produced this peculiar sense of individuality, asmita this feeling of oneself being different from others. The subject is cut off from the Object; and each thing in this world has an asmita of its own. There is an affirming principle working in every item of creation. Because of this confirmed feeling of the sense of individual being, there is a further urge arising from this sense of individual being namely, a necessity felt to connect oneself with others. If I am different from you, what is my relationship with you? This question arises.
It is not possible to deny all relationship, because of the fact of perception. If I am completely oblivious of the existence of people outside, of things outside, of the world around me, then of course the question may not arise. But I see the world, I see people, I see things as completely different from me. So I feel a necessity to conduct myself in a particular manner in respect of these existences outside me. This manner is raga-dvesa like and dislike a peculiar, subtle relationship that we project for the purpose of stabilising this individuality and keeping it secure in the light of the presence of other individuals also. Here begins what is called social life.
1.05 - Adam Kadmon, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Spiritual Soul of Man. He is also, according to another system, the Holy Guardian Angel ; and the Object of this
96 A GARDEN OP POMEGRANATES
1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
erty of the Object. It is far easier to suppose that it is primarily
our consciousness which names and evaluates the differences be-
1.05 - Computing Machines and the Nervous System, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
statement, according to the character of the Objects with which
it concerns itself-whether these are "things," in the simplest
1.05 - Dharana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
3:The moment then that the student takes a simple subject - or rather a simple object - and imagines it or visualizes it, he will find that it is not so much his creature as he supposed. Other thoughts will invade the mind, so that the Object is altogether forgotten, perhaps for whole minutes at a time; and at other times the Object itself will begin to play all sorts of tricks.
4:Suppose you have chosen a white cross. It will move its bar up and down, elongate the bar, turn the bar oblique, get its arms unequal, turn upside down, grow branches, get a crack around it or a figure upon it, change its shape altogether like an Amoeba, change its size and distance as a whole, change the degree of its illumination, and at the same time change its colour. It will get splotchy and blotchy, grow patterns, rise, fall, twist and turn; clouds will pass over its face. There is no conceivable change of which it is incapable. Not to mention its total disappearance, and replacement by something altogether different!
5:Any one to whom this experience does not occur need not imagine that he is meditating. It shows merely that he is incapable of concentrating his mind in the very smallest degree. Perhaps a student may go for several days before discovering that he is not meditating. When he does, the obstinacy of the Object will infuriate him; and it is only now that his real troubles will begin, only now that Will comes really into play, only now that his manhood is tested. If it were not for the Will-development which he got in the conquest of Asana, he would probably give up. As it is, the mere physical agony which he underwent is the veriest trifle compared with the horrible tedium of Dharana.
6:For the first week it may seem rather amusing, and you may even imagine you are progressing; but as the practice teaches you what you are doing, you will apparently get worse and worse.
7:Please understand that in doing this practice you are supposed to be seated in Asana, and to have note-book and pencil by your side, and a watch in front of you. You are not to practise at first for more than ten minutes at a time, so as to avoid risk of overtiring the brain. In fact you will probably find that the whole of your willpower is not equal to keeping to a subject at all for so long as three minutes, or even apparently concentrating on it for so long as three seconds, or three-fifths of one second. By "keeping to it at all" is meant the mere attempt to keep to it. The mind becomes so fatigued, and the Object so incredibly loathsome, that it is useless to continue for the time being. In Frater P.'s record we find that after daily practice for six months, meditations of four minutes and less are still being recorded.
8:The student is supposed to count the number of times that his thought wanders; this he can do on his fingers or on a string of beads.
1.05 - Knowledge by Aquaintance and Knowledge by Description, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
My knowledge of the table as a physical object, on the contrary, is not direct knowledge. Such as it is, it is obtained through acquaintance with the sense-data that make up the appearance of the table. We have seen that it is possible, without absurdity, to doubt whether there is a table at all, whereas it is not possible to doubt the sense-data. My knowledge of the table is of the kind which we shall call 'knowledge by description'. The table is 'the physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data'. This describes the table by means of the sense-data. In order to know anything at all about the table, we must know truths connecting it with things with which we have acquaintance: we must know that 'such-and-such sense-data are caused by a physical object'. There is no state of mind in which we are directly aware of the table; all our knowledge of the table is really knowledge of truths, and the actual thing which is the table is not, strictly speaking, known to us at all. We know a description, and we know that there is just one object to which this description applies, though the Object itself is not directly known to us. In such a case, we say that our knowledge of the Object is knowledge by description.
All our knowledge, both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths, rests upon acquaintance as its foundation. It is therefore important to consider what kinds of things there are with which we have acquaintance.
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When I am acquainted with 'my seeing the sun', it seems plain that I am acquainted with two different things in relation to each other. On the one hand there is the sense-datum which represents the sun to me, on the other hand there is that which sees this sense-datum. All acquaintance, such as my acquaintance with the sense-datum which represents the sun, seems obviously a relation between the person acquainted and the Object with which the person is acquainted. When a case of acquaintance is one with which I can be acquainted (as I am acquainted with my acquaintance with the sense-datum representing the sun), it is plain that the person acquainted is myself. Thus, when I am acquainted with my seeing the sun, the whole fact with which I am acquainted is
'Self-acquainted-with-sense-datum'.
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It will be seen that among the Objects with which we are acquainted are not included physical objects (as opposed to sense-data), nor other people's minds. These things are known to us by what I call 'knowledge by description', which we must now consider.
By a 'description' I mean any phrase of the form 'a so-and-so' or
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We shall say that an object is 'known by description' when we know that it is 'the so-and-so', i.e. when we know that there is one object, and no more, having a certain property; and it will generally be implied that we do not have knowledge of the same object by acquaintance. We know that the man with the iron mask existed, and many propositions are known about him; but we do not know who he was. We know that the candidate who gets the most votes will be elected, and in this case we are very likely also acquainted (in the only sense in which one can be acquainted with some one else) with the man who is, in fact, the candidate who will get most votes; but we do not know which of the candidates he is, i.e. we do not know any proposition of the form 'A is the candidate who will get most votes' where A is one of the candidates by name. We shall say that we have 'merely descriptive knowledge' of the so-and-so when, although we know that the so-and-so exists, and although we may possibly be acquainted with the Object which is, in fact, the so-and-so, yet we do not know any proposition '_a_ is the so-and-so', where _a_ is something with which we are acquainted.
When we say 'the so-and-so exists', we mean that there is just one object which is the so-and-so. The proposition '_a_ is the so-and-so' means that _a_ has the property so-and-so, and nothing else has. 'Mr.
--
Common words, even proper names, are usually really descriptions. That is to say, the thought in the mind of a person using a proper name correctly can generally only be expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name by a description. Moreover, the description required to express the thought will vary for different people, or for the same person at different times. The only thing constant (so long as the name is rightly used) is the Object to which the name applies. But so long as this remains constant, the particular description involved usually makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the proposition in which the name appears.
Let us take some illustrations. Suppose some statement made about
Bismarck. Assuming that there is such a thing as direct acquaintance with oneself, Bismarck himself might have used his name directly to designate the particular person with whom he was acquainted. In this case, if he made a judgement about himself, he himself might be a constituent of the judgement. Here the proper name has the direct use which it always wishes to have, as simply standing for a certain object, and not for a description of the Object. But if a person who knew
Bismarck made a judgement about him, the case is different. What this person was acquainted with were certain sense-data which he connected
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It would seem that, when we make a statement about something only known by description, we often _intend_ to make our statement, not in the form involving the description, but about the actual thing described. That is to say, when we say anything about Bismarck, we should like, if we could, to make the judgement which Bismarck alone can make, namely, the judgement of which he himself is a constituent. In this we are necessarily defeated, since the actual Bismarck is unknown to us. But we know that there is an object B, called Bismarck, and that B was an astute diplomatist. We can thus _describe_ the proposition we should like to affirm, namely, 'B was an astute diplomatist', where B is the Object which was Bismarck. If we are describing Bismarck as 'the first
Chancellor of the German Empire', the proposition we should like to affirm may be described as 'the proposition asserting, concerning the actual object which was the first Chancellor of the German Empire, that this object was an astute diplomatist'. What enables us to communicate in spite of the varying descriptions we employ is that we know there is a true proposition concerning the actual Bismarck, and that however we may vary the description (so long as the description is correct) the proposition described is still the same. This proposition, which is described and is known to be true, is what interests us; but we are not acquainted with the proposition itself, and do not know it, though we know it is true.
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We shall not at this stage attempt to answer all the Objections which may be urged against this fundamental principle. For the present, we shall merely point out that, in some way or other, it must be possible to meet these objections, for it is scarcely conceivable that we can make a judgement or entertain a supposition without knowing what it is that we are judging or supposing about. We must attach _some_ meaning to the words we use, if we are to speak significantly and not utter mere noise; and the meaning we attach to our words must be something with which we are acquainted. Thus when, for example, we make a statement about Julius Caesar, it is plain that Julius Caesar himself is not before our minds, since we are not acquainted with him. We have in mind some description of Julius Caesar: 'the man who was assassinated on the
Ides of March', 'the founder of the Roman Empire', or, perhaps, merely
1.05 - On the Love of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
This is a somewhat dangerous topic to dwell upon, as it is beyond the understanding of common people, and even intelligent men have stumbled in treating of it, and come to believe in incarnation and union with God. Still, the affinity which does exist between man and God disposes of the Objection of those theologians mentioned above, who maintain that man cannot love a Being who is not of his own species. However great the distance between them, man can love God because of the affinity indicated in the saying, "God created man in His own likeness."
The Vision of God
1.05 - Problems of Modern Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
not only the sufferer but the doctor as well, not only the Object but also the
subject, not only a cerebral function but the absolute condition of
1.05 - Ritam, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
We must consider first whether any valid objection can be offered to this translation; and, if not, what are the precise ideas conveyed by the words & expressions which they render. The word prachetas is one of the fixed recurrent terms of the Veda; & we have corresponding to it another term vichetas. Both terms are rendered by the commentators wise or intelligent. Is prachetas then merely an ornamental or otiose word in this verse? Is it only a partially dispensable & superfluous compliment to the gods of the hymn? Our hypothesis is that the Vedic Rishis were masters of a perfectly well managed literary style founded upon a tradition of sound economy in language & coherence in thought; all of every word in Veda is in its place & is justified by its value in the significance. If so, prachetasah gives the reason why the protection of these gods is so perfectly efficacious. I suppose,as my hypothesis entitles me to suppose,that the Vedic ideas of prachetas & vichetas correspond to the Vedantic idea of prajnana & vijnana to which as words they are exactly equivalent in composition & sense. Prajnana is that knowledge which is aware of, knows & works upon the Objects placed before it. Vijnana is the knowledge which comprehends & knows thoroughly in itself all objects of knowledge. The one is the highest faculty of mind, the other is in mind the door to and beyond it the nature of the direct supra-intellectual knowledge, the Ritam & Brihat of the Veda. It is because Varuna, Mitra & Aryama protect the human being with the perfect knowledge of that through which he has to pass, his path, his dangers, his foes, that their protg , however fiercely & by whatever powers assailed, cannot be crushed. At once, it begins to become clear that the protection in that case must, in all probability, be a spiritual protection against spiritual dangers & spiritual foes.
The second verse neither confirms as yet nor contradicts this initial suggestion. These three great gods, it says, are to the mortal as a multitude of arms which bring to him his desires & fill him with an abundant fullness and protect him from any who may will to do him hurt, rishah; fed with that fullness he grows until he is sarvah, complete in every part of his being(that is to say, if we admit the sense of a spiritual protection and a spiritual activity, in knowledge, in power, in joy, in mental, vital & bodily fullness)and by the efficacy of that protection he enjoys all this fullness & completeness unhurt. No part of it is maimed by the enemies of man, whose activities do him hurt, the Vritras, Atris, Vrikas, the Coverer on the heights, the devourer in the night, the tearer on the path.We may note in passing how important [it] is to render every Vedic word by its exact value; rish & dwish both mean enemy; but if we render them by one word, we lose the fine shade of meaning to which the poet himself calls our attention by the collocation pnti rishaharishta edhate. We see also the same care of style in the collocation sarva edhate, where, as it seems to me, it is clearly suggested that the completeness is the result of the prosperous growth, we have again the fine care & balance with which the causes pipratipnti are answered by the effects arishtahedhate. There is even a good literary reason of great subtlety & yet perfect force for the order of the words & the exact place of each word in the order. In this simple, easy & yet faultless balance & symmetry a great number of the Vedic hymns represent exactly in poetry the same spirit & style as the Greek temple or the Greek design in architecture & painting. Nor can anyone who neglects to notice it & give full value to it, catch rightly, fully & with precision the sense of the Vedic writings.
1.05 - Some Results of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
When esoteric development has progressed so far that the lotus flowers begin to stir, much has already been achieved by the student which can result in the formation of certain quite definite currents and movements in his etheric body. the Object of this development is the formation of a kind of center in the region of the physical heart, from which radiate currents and movements in the greatest possible variety of colors and forms. The center is in reality not a mere point, but a most complicated structure, a most wonderful organ. It glows and shimmers with every shade of color and displays forms of great symmetry, capable of rapid transformation. Other forms and streams of color radiate from this organ to the other parts of the body, and beyond it to the astral body, completely penetrating and illuminating
p. 166
1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
considered thing we would not think of as characteristic of the Objective world; furthermore, what he
considered unitary we would think of as evidently diverse. There are two major reasons for this difference
--
Knowledge does not begin in the I, and it does not begin in the Object; it begins in the interactions....
then there is a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the Object on
the other.595
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transcending its representation. This capacity for transcendence is a property of the Object (a property of
experience, from the phenomenological viewpoint), but can be exploited by the activity of man.
The alchemists regarded the transcendent capacity of the Object that is, the capacity of the familiar
and explored in one context to become the unfamiliar and unexplored in another as a spirit, embedded
--
All through the Middle Ages [Mercurius] was the Object of much puzzled speculation on the part of the
natural philosophers: sometimes he was a ministering and helpful spirit, an [assistant, comrade or
--
The sensory properties of the block which are the relevant features of the Object, as far as the spirit of
scientific inquiry extends have no intrinsic importance for the rat, except as they signify something of
--
spatial and temporal or, it might be considered, equivalently, that the Object is something so complex
that it can manifest entirely different properties, merely in consequence of being viewed from alternative
--
before it. This transformation of the Object is temporality itself the manifestation of Tao, the flux of
being. The capacity of human beings to apprehend variable spatial-temporal spans turns the Object into
something more complex than its mere present appearance; this increase in complexity is compounded
--
finite object; of the endless utility of the Object, and its inexhaustible capacity to reveal (become) the
unknown.
--
by the Object. the Object is always capable of superseding the constraint, in some unpredictable fashion.
This infinite potential finds its symbolic expression in the self-devouring serpent, the mercurial spirit of
--
The dream scene shifted. the Object, a sphere of about eight inches in diameter, was now contained
and exhibited in a small glass display case, like that found in a museum. The case itself was in a small
--
rationality) were in the room with the Object. One of them described the features of the room. Its walls
were seven feet thick, and made of some impervious substance [titanium dioxide (?)] which sounded
impressive, in the context of the dream. These walls were designed to permanently contain the Object. I
wasnt in the room, although I was there as an observer, like the audience in a movie. the Object in the
display case appeared alive. It was moving, and distorting its shape, like a chrysalis or a cocoon in its
--
constrain the mysterious phenomenon. the Object transformed itself into a pipe in reference to the
famous painting (by Magritte) of a pipe, entitled (in translation) This is not a pipe the map is not
the territory, the representation not the phenomenon. The capacity of the Object to escape, at will
referred to the eternal transcendence of the phenomenal world, of its infinite capacity to unexpectedly
--
Furthermore, it is the subjective aspect of individuality of experience that is divine, not the Objective.
Man is an animal, from the Objective viewpoint, worthy of no more consideration than the opinion and
opportunities of the moment dictate. From the mythic viewpoint, however, every individual is unique is a
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power to terrify and, perhaps, to destroy. The a priori valence of the Object is potent, and potentially terrifying (as
terrifying, literally, as anything imaginable). Our normal circumstances, our prior learning, protects us from this
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[Wittgenstein, L. (1968)]. We tend to think of the Objects we perceive as being there, in some essential sense; but we
see the tree, before the branches. Despite this conceptual phenomenon, the tree has no objective precedence over the
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of powerful conflicting forces. This imaginative cosmos is neither the Objective environment studied by natural
science nor a subjective inner space to be studied by psychology. It is an intermediate world in which the images of
1.05 - The Magical Control of the Weather, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
Among the Objects of public utility which magic may be employed to
secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food. The
1.05 - THE NEW SPIRIT, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Life has an objective; and that the Objective is a summit; and that
this summit, toward which all our striving must be directed, can
1.05 - The Universe The 0 = 2 Equation, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
A word on this. Vulgar minds, such as are happy with a personal God, Vishnu, Jesus, Melcarth, Mithras, or another, often excite themselves call it "Energized Enthusiasm" if you want to be sarcastic! to the point of experiencing actual Visions of the Objects of their devotion. But these people have not so much as asked themselves the original question of "How come?" which is our present subject. Sweep them into the discard!
M. Beyond Vishvarupadarshana, the vision of the Form of Vishnu, beyond that yet loftier vision which corresponds in Hindu classification to our "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel", is that called Atmadarshana, the vision (or apprehension, a much better word) of the Universe as a single_phenomenon, outside all limitations, whether of time, space, causality, or what not.
1.05 - True and False Subjectivism, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But the whole root of the German error lies in its mistaking life and the body for the self. It has been said that this gospel is simply a reversion to the ancient barbarism of the religion of Odin; but this is not the truth. It is a new and a modern gospel born of the application of a metaphysical logic to the conclusions of materialistic Science, of a philosophic subjectivism to the Objective pragmatic positivism of recent thought. Just as Germany applied the individualistic position to the realisation of her communal subjective existence, so she applied the materialistic and vitalistic thought of recent times and equipped it with a subjective philosophy. Thus she arrived at a bastard creed, an objective subjectivism which is miles apart from the true goal of a subjective age. To show the error it is necessary to see wherein lies the true individuality of man and of the nation. It lies not in its physical, economic, even its cultural life which are only means and adjuncts, but in something deeper whose roots are not in the ego, but in a Self one in difference which relates the good of each, on a footing of equality and not of strife and domination, to the good of the rest of the world.
There has been a rude set-back to this development in totalitarian States whose theory is that the individual does not exist and only the life of the community matters, but this new larger view still holds its own in freer countries.
1.05 - Vishnu as Brahma creates the world, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahmā again meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the quality of goodness, termed Ūrddhasrotas[6]. The beings thus produced in the Ūrddhasrotas creation were endowed with pleasure and enjoyment, uneñcumbered internally or externally, and luminous within and without. This, termed the creation of immortals, was the third performance of Brahmā, who, although well pleased with it, still found it incompetent to fulfil his end. Continuing therefore his meditations, there sprang, in consequence of his infallible purpose, the creation termed Arvāksrotas, from indiscrete nature. The products of this are termed Arvāksrotasas[7], from the downward current (of their nutriment). They abound with the light of knowledge, but the qualities of darkness and of foulness predominate. Hence they are afflicted by evil, and are repeatedly impelled to action. They have knowledge both externally and internally, and are the instruments (of accomplishing the Object of creation, the liberation of soul). These creatures were mankind.
I have thus explained to you, excellent Muni, six[8] creations. The first creation was that of Mahat or Intellect, which is also called the creation of Brahmā[9]. The second was that of the rudimental principles (Tanmātras), thence termed the elemental creation (Bhūta serga). The third was the modified form of egotism, termed the organic creation, or creation of the senses (Aindrīyaka). These three were the Prākrita creations, the developements of indiscrete nature, preceded by the indiscrete principle[10]. The fourth or fundamental creation (of perceptible things) was that of inanimate bodies. The fifth, the Tairyag yonya creation, was that of animals. The sixth was the Ūrddhasrotas creation, or that of the divinities. The creation of the Arvāksrotas beings was the seventh, and was that of man. There is an eighth creation, termed Anugraha, which possesses both the qualities of goodness and darkness[11]. Of these creations, five are secondary, and three are primary[12]. But there is a ninth, the Kaumāra creation, which is both primary and secondary[13]. These are the nine creations of the great progenitor of all, and, both as primary and secondary, are the radical causes of the world, proceeding from the sovereign creator. What else dost thou desire to hear?
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And the creator displayed infinite variety in the Objects of sense, in the properties of living things, and in the forms of bodies: he determined in the beginning, by the authority of the Vedas, the names and forms and functions of all creatures, and of the gods; and the names and appropriate offices of the Ṛṣis, as they also are read in the Vedas. In like manner as the products of the seasons designate in periodical revolution the return of the same season, so do the same circumstances indicate the recurrence of the same Yuga, or age; and thus, in the beginning of each Kalpa, does Brahmā repeatedly create the world, possessing the power that is derived from the will to create, and assisted by the natural and essential faculty of the Object to be created.
Footnotes and references:
1.060 - Tracing the Ultimate Cause of Any Experience, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The very fact that we have an impulse inside shows that there is a chance of its fulfilment; otherwise, it will not show its head. It is very clear. The chances of the fulfilment of an impulse may be very remote. The fulfilment of an impulse may not be immediately possible, but the impulse is more intelligent than our intelligence and it can sense the presence of contri butory, helpful factors more easily than our intellect, in its gross functioning, can understand. The instincts are more powerful than our understanding. That is why the understanding goes down into the pit when the instinct comes up. The instinct is very sensitive extremely sensitive to the presence of the Objects and the instruments which will help in its fulfilment. We have to infer the proximity of these factors which are necessary for the fulfilment of an impulse when the impulse rises. Then it is that we have to go into the diagnostic action of the case. Why has this impulse arisen? Something is happening; I am in the proximity of something. When we feel the warmth of the atmosphere, we must infer that the sun is about to rise; otherwise, from where has this warmth come? and so on. The presence of an impulse in the direction of a particular form of satisfaction is the indication that we are in the midst of certain types of atmospheres which are helpful to its fulfilment.
Then, what are we supposed to do? There are two things to be done. Number one, an investigation has to be made immediately as to why this has happened. A careful probe into the psychic atmosphere will reveal what sort of factors are present in our proximity which have brought this impulse out just as a magnet, by its mere presence, can draw iron filings to itself, and when we find a restlessness of the iron filings, we can infer the presence of a magnet nearby. If we hear the chattering of monkeys in a tree, we can imagine there is either a snake nearby, or a very violent dog that they have seen, or that something which is frightening them is present; otherwise, they will not make this chattering noise. Likewise, a very dispassionate, inward analysis has to be conducted. But, this is almost an impossibility for most people because nobody would like to conduct an investigation into pleasurable circumstances. They try to conduct investigations into painful ones, because an investigation into pleasurable circumstances is an attempt at stopping the very possibility of this satisfaction. Otherwise, why do we conduct the investigation? Who would like to counteract the chances of a pleasurable experience?
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Also, there is a reason why pleasure is seen in the contact of the senses with the not-Self. The contact of the Self with the not-Self brings about a tension, and the tension is caused by a false circumstance that has been created. The transference of the Self to the not-Self is a false condition because the Self cannot be transferred to the not-Self. It cannot be what it is not but this is exactly what has happened. An impossible thing is attempted, and so a tremendous tension is created in the consciousness. Therefore, it is unhappy. This unhappiness is due to the tension created by the urge to place itself in what it is not. The loves of the world are tensions of one kind or the other. The release of this tension should be, naturally, a satisfaction. The tension is caused by the movement of the Self away from itself, in the direction of the Object. And when we have lost our Self, that is great pain indeed, because the essence of tension is an aberration of consciousness, or a movement of Consciousness away from its own Self. This is what is happening in every kind of attraction or affection.
Hence, there is tension, and the so-called satisfaction that is arrived at by the contact of senses with objects is due to the cessation of this tension. Ananda is felt in the contact of the senses with objects on account of the retrogression of the senses back to their source, under the impression that their purpose has been fulfilled. In the contact there is a notion created in the mind that the purpose of the contact has been fulfilled, and so the forces of the senses return to their cause. Then the mind ceases to function for a while, and the tension caused by the movement of the Self towards the not-Self is brought to a cessation temporarily so there is a flash of ananda. A conviction arises in the mind that the Object has brought the satisfaction required, and so there is a persistent effort to repeat the experience again and again. This has been caused, therefore, by a muddled understanding a confusion, totally. The happiness has not come from the Object, and therefore, the rise of an impulse in the direction of an object is illogical, ultimately.
Such analysis of this type would be helpful in the reversion of the effect into the cause and the sublimation of the effect in the cause, so that the vehemence or the force of the effect in the direction of its fulfilment will be mitigated to a large extent. Thus, effort has to be made. We have to be very vigilant, every day, in seeing that the force of the manifestation of an effect in the form of an impulse in the direction of an object is brought down to the minimum by such intelligent analysis.
1.06 - Agni and the Truth, #The Secret Of The Veda, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is the obvious sense of the word kavikratuh., he whose active will or power of effectivity is that of the seer, - works, that is to say, with the knowledge which comes by the truth-consciousness and in which there is no misapplication or error. The epithets that follow confirm this interpretation. Agni is satya, true in his being; perfect possession of his own truth and the essential truth of things gives him the power to apply it perfectly in all act and movement of force. He has both the satyam and the r.tam. Moreover, he is citrasravastamah.; from the Ritam there proceeds a fullness of richly luminous and varied inspirations which give the capacity for doing the perfect work. For all these are epithets of Agni as the hotr., the priest of the sacrifice, he who performs the offering. Therefore it is the power of Agni to apply the Truth in the work (karma or apas) symbolised by the sacrifice, that makes him the Object of human invocation.
The importance of the sacrificial fire in the outward ritual corresponds to the importance of this inward force of unified Light and Power in the inward rite by which there is communication and interchange between the mortal and the Immortal. Agni is elsewhere frequently described as the envoy, duta, the medium of that communication and interchange.
1.06 - Definition of Tragedy., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the Objects of imitation.
And these complete the list. These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact, every play contains Spectacular elements as well as Character, Plot, Diction, Song, and Thought.
1.06 - Dhyana and Samadhi, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
In order to reach the superconscious state in a scientific manner it is necessary to pass through the various steps of Raja-Yoga I have been teaching. After Pratyhra and Dhran, we come to Dhyna, meditation. When the mind has been trained to remain fixed on a certain internal or external location, there comes to it the power of flowing in an unbroken current, as it were, towards that point. This state is called Dhyana. When one has so intensified the power of Dhyana as to be able to reject the external part of perception and remain meditating only on the internal part, the meaning, that state is called Samadhi. The three Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi together, are called Samyama. That is, if the mind can first concentrate upon an object, and then is able to continue in that concentration for a length of time, and then, by continued concentration, to dwell only on the internal part of the perception of which the Object was the effect, everything comes under the control of such a mind.
This meditative state is the highest state of existence. So long as there is desire, no real happiness can come. It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness. The animal has its happiness in the senses, the man in his intellect, and the god in spiritual contemplation. It is only to the soul that has attained to this contemplative state that the world really becomes beautiful. To him who desires nothing, and does not mix himself up with them, the manifold changes of nature are one panorama of beauty and sublimity.
These ideas have to be understood in Dhyana, or meditation. We hear a sound. First, there is the external vibration; second, the nerve motion that carries it to the mind; third, the reaction from the mind, along with which flashes the knowledge of the Object which was the external cause of these different changes from the ethereal vibrations to the mental reactions. These three are called in Yoga, Shabda (sound), Artha (meaning), and Jnna (knowledge). In the language of physics and physiology they are called the ethereal vibration, the motion in the nerve and brain, and the mental reaction. Now these, though distinct processes, have become mixed up in such a fashion as to become quite indistinct. In fact, we cannot now perceive any of these, we only perceive their combined effect, what we call the external object. Every act of perception includes these three, and there is no reason why we should not be able to distinguish them.
When, by the previous preparations, it becomes strong and controlled, and has the power of finer perception, the mind should be employed in meditation. This meditation must begin with gross objects and slowly rise to finer and finer, until it becomes objectless. The mind should first be employed in perceiving the external causes of sensations, then the internal motions, and then its own reaction. When it has succeeded in perceiving the external causes of sensations by themselves, the mind will acquire the power of perceiving all fine material existences, all fine bodies and forms. When it can succeed in perceiving the motions inside by themselves, it will gain the control of all mental waves, in itself or in others, even before they have translated themselves into physical energy; and when he will be able to perceive the mental reaction by itself, the Yogi will acquire the knowledge of everything, as every sensible object, and every thought is the result of this reaction. Then will he have seen the very foundations of his mind, and it will be under his perfect control. Different powers will come to the Yogi, and if he yields to the temptations of any one of these, the road to his further progress will be barred. Such is the evil of running after enjoyments. But if he is strong enough to reject even these miraculous powers, he will attain to the goal of Yoga, the complete suppression of the waves in the ocean of the mind. Then the glory of the soul, undisturbed by the distractions of the mind, or motions of the body, will shine in its full effulgence; and the Yogi will find himself as he is and as he always was, the essence of knowledge, the immortal, the all-pervading.
1.06 - Dhyana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
10:In the course of our concentration we noticed that the contents of the mind at any moment consisted of two things, and no more: the Object, variable, and the Subject, invariable, or apparently so. By success in Dharana the Object has been made as invariable as the subject.
11:Now the result of this is that the two become one. This phenomenon usually comes as a tremendous shock. It is indescribable even by the masters of language; and it is therefore not surprising that semi-educated stutterers wallow in oceans of gush.
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43:Another rationalist consideration is this. The student has not been trying to excite the mind but to calm it, not to produce any one thought but to exclude all thoughts; for there is no connection between the Object of meditation and the Dhyana. Why must we suppose a breaking down of the whole process, especially as the mind bears no subsequent traces of any interference, such as pain or fatigue? Surely this once, if never again, the Hindu image expresses the simplest theory!
44:That image is that of a lake into which five glaciers move. These glaciers are the senses. While ice (the impressions) is breaking off constantly into the lake, the waters are troubled. If the glaciers are stopped the surface becomes calm; and then, and only then, can it reflect unbroken the disk of the sum. This sun is the "soul" or "God."
1.06 - Gestalt and Universals, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
to converge the two eyes so that the Object attracting attention
is in the same part of the visual field of each, and to focus the
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we bring the Object into the center of vision if this cannot be
done readily by a motion of the eyes alone, or by which we
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form and meaning of the Object, but it certainly facilitates all
later processes tending to this end. These later processes occur in
1.06 - MORTIFICATION, NON-ATTACHMENT, RIGHT LIVELIHOOD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Sufficient not only unto the day, but also unto the place, is the evil thereof. Agitation over happenings which we are powerless to modify, either because they have not yet occurred, or else are occurring at an inaccessible distance from us, achieves nothing beyond the inoculation of here and now with the remote or anticipated evil that is the Object of our distress. Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthliesnowadays, this is described as taking an intelligent interest in politics. St. John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietudes sake.
I want very little, and what I do want I have very little wish for. I have hardly any desires, but if I were to be born again, I should have none at all. We should ask nothing and refuse nothing, but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us.
1.06 - On Thought, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If you have observed yourselves even a little, you must have noticed that the contact with what is not yourselves is established first of all through the medium of your senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc. The impact felt in this way, whether slight or violent, pleasant or unpleasant, arouses a feeling in youlike or dislike, attraction or repulsionwhich very quickly turns into an idea, an opinion you form about the Object, whatever it may be, that has determined the contact.
An example: you go out and as you step out of your house you see that it is raining and at the same time you feel the damp cold seizing you; the sensation is unpleasant, you feel a dislike for the rain and inwardly, almost mechanically, you say to yourself, This rain is really a nuisance, especially as I have to go out! Not to mention that I am going to get dreadfully dirty; Paris is very dirty in rainy weather, especially now that all the streets have been dug up (and so on).
1.06 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice 2 The Works of Love - The Works of Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For it is the very nature of the supramental experience that it can perpetuate the play of difference without forfeiting or in the least diminishing either the divine union or the infinite oneness. For a supramentalised consciousness it would be utterly possible to embrace all contacts with men and the world in a purified flame-force and with a transfigured significance, because the soul would then perceive always as the Object of all emotion and all seeking for love or beauty the One Eternal and could spiritually use a wide and liberated life-urge to meet and join with that One Divine in all things and all creatures.
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Divine Nature. The prominence of this true vital being under the lead of the true inmost soul within us is the condition for the divine fulfilment of the Objects of the Life-Force. Those objects will even remain the same in essence, but transformed in their inner motive and outer character. The Divine Life-Power too will be a will for growth, a force of self-affirmation, but affirmation of the Divine within us, not of the little temporary personality on the surface, - growth into the true divine Individual, the central being, the secret imperishable Person who can emerge only by
176
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It is not a rationalisation but a supramentalisation, not a moralising but a spiritualising of life that is the Object of the Yoga. It is not a handling of externals or superficial psychological motives that is its main purpose, but a refounding of life and its action on their hidden divine element; for only such a refounding of life can bring about its direct government by the secret Divine Power above us and its transfiguration into a manifest expression of the Divinity, not as now a disguise and a disfiguring mask of the eternal Actor. It is a spiritual essential change of consciousness, not the surface manipulation which is the method of Mind and
Reason, that can alone make Life other than it now is and rescue it out of its present distressed and ambiguous figure.
1.06 - The Breaking of the Limits, #On the Way to Supermanhood, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Our look is false because it perceives everything through the distorting prism of its routine, which is multifarious and subtle, made of thousands of years of habits which are as distorting in their deviltry as they are in their wisdom. This is the residue of the anthropoid, which had to erect barriers to protect his little life, his little family, his little clan, draw a line here, a line there, boundary markers, and generally insure his precarious existence by encasing it in a shell of individual and collective self. It follows that there is good and evil, right and wrong, useful and harmful, dos and don'ts we have slowly become entangled in a huge police network in which we scarcely have the spiritual freedom to brea the and even that air is polluted by countless decalogues that are barely one step above the pollution by the carbon monoxide of our engines. In short, we are forever correcting the world. But we are beginning to realize that this correction is not all that straight. Never for a moment do we stop putting our multicolored glasses on things in order to see them in the blue of our hopes, the red of our desires, the yellow of our morals and ready-made laws, and in black, in the endless grayness of a machinery that keeps grinding and grinding forever. The look the true look that will have the power to break free from this mental spell is therefore the one that will be able to cast itself on things clearly, without immediately correcting them: to rest here, upon this face, that circumstance or object the way one gazes at the infinite sea, without trying to solidify something to let itself be carried by that tranquil and fluid infinity, to ba the in what we see, to sink into the thing, until slowly, as if from far away, from the depths of a tranquil sea, there emerges a perception of the thing seen, of the puzzling circumstance or face near us; a perception that is not a thought, not a judgment, hardly a sensation, but is like the true vibratory content of the thing, its special mode of being, its quality of being, its innermost music, its relation with the great Rhythm that flows everywhere. Then, slowly, the seeker of the new world will see a sort of little spark of pure truth in the heart of the Object, circumstance, face or accident, a little cry of true being, a true vibration beneath all the black and yellow and blue and red coatings something that is the truth of each thing, each being, each circumstance, each accident, as if the truth were everywhere, every instant, every step, only coated in black. The seeker will thus have put his finger on the second rule of the passage and the greatest of all the simple secrets: Look at the truth that is everywhere.
Armed with these two rules, firmly established in his sunlit position, that quiet clearing, the seeker of the new world moves within a greater self, perhaps infinite, which embraces this street and these beings and all the little gestures of the hour; he moves steadily on, as though carried by a great rhythm, which also carries the beings and things around him, the thousands of encounters sprung from nowhere and disappearing into the distance; he looks at this little walking shadow, which seems to have walked so long, walked for many lives perhaps, repeated the same small gestures, stumbled here and there, exchanged the same comments on the mood of the times; and it all seems so similar, so mixed with sweetness that this street and these beings and passing encounters seem to be cast from the same mold, issued from the depths of night, recalled from the same identical story, under the sky of Egypt or India or Vermont, today, yesterday or five thousand years ago and what has really changed? There is a little being walking with his fire of truth, his fire of need, so intense amid the turmoil of time a fire is perhaps the only thing that is truly he, a call of being from the depths of time, an unchanging cry amid the immense flow of things. And what is he calling for, this being; what is he crying for? Is he not in that vast and growing sunlight, in that rhythm carrying everything? He is and he is not. He has one foot in an untroubled eternity and the other stumbling and groping in the dark the other in a little self of fire yearning to fill this second of time, this empty gesture, this step among thousands of similar steps, with a fullness of true existence as complete as all the millennia put together, with as unfailing an exactness as the crisscrossing of the stars above our heads; yearning for everything to be true, true, completely true and filled with meaning, in this enormous whirlwind of vanity; yearning for this line he crosses, this street he goes down, this hand he extends, this word he utters to be linked to the great flowing of the worlds, to the rhythm of the stars, to the lines, the countless lines that furrow this universe and form a total song, a truth filled with the whole and each fragment of the whole. So he looks at all these little passing things, he fills them with his fire of entreaty, he looks and looks at that little truth everywhere as if it were going to burst out, forced into being by his fire.
1.06 - The Desire to be, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Thought and Desire are for the inner universe what extension and movement are for the universe without. And if all the phenomena of the Objective world can be reduced to the simple notion of movement, does not movement itself render sensible this first conceptual principle of the being,desire?
***
1.06 - The Literal Qabalah, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
F ohat. This love may be construed as a form of magnetism manifesting as cohesion and attraction among the Objects and particles of the phenomenal world.
After having written the above, the writer referred to that section of The Secret Doctrine dealing with Fohat, and discovered that Blavatsky gives Eros, the young God of
1.06 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"The Vedas speak of seven planes where the mind dwells. When the mind is immersed in worldliness it dwells in the three lower planes-at the naval, the organ of generation, and the organ of evacuation. In that state the mind loses all its higher visions-it broods only on 'woman and gold'. The fourth plane of the mind is at the heart. When the mind dwells there, one has the first glimpse of spiritual consciousness. One sees light all around. Such a man, perceiving the divine light, becomes speechless with wonder and says: 'Ah! What is this? What is this?' His mind does not go downward to the Objects of the world.
"The fifth plane of the mind is at the throat. When the mind reaches this, the aspirant becomes free from all ignorance and illusion. He does not enjoy talking or hearing about anything but God. If people talk about worldly things, he leaves the place at once.
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A devotee from Nandanbagan entered the room with his friends. The Master looked at him and said, "Everything inside him can be seen through his eyes, as one sees the Objects in a room through a glass door." This devotee and his brothers always celebrated the anniversary of the Brahmo Samaj at their house in Nandanbagan. Sri Ramakrishna had taken part in these festivals.
The evening worship began in the temples. The Master was seated on the small couch in his room, absorbed in meditation. He went into an ecstatic mood and said a little later: "Mother, please draw him to Thee. He is so modest and humble! He has been visiting Thee." Was the Master referring to Baburam, who later became one of his foremost disciples?
1.06 - The Objective and Subjective Views of Life, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
object:1.06 - the Objective and Subjective Views of Life
author class:Sri Aurobindo
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But still there is the question of the truth of the self, what it is, where is its real abiding-place; and here subjectivism has to deal with the same factors as the Objective view of life and existence. We may concentrate on the individual life and consciousness as the self and regard its power, freedom, increasing light and satisfaction and joy as the Object of living and thus arrive at a subjective individualism. We may, on the other hand, lay stress on the group consciousness, the collective self; we may see man only as an expression of this group-self necessarily incomplete in his individual or separate being, complete only by that larger entity, and we may wish to subordinate the life of the individual man to the growing power, efficiency, knowledge, happiness, self-fulfilment of the race or even sacrifice it and consider it as nothing except in so far as it lends itself to the life and growth of the community or the kind. We may claim to exercise a righteous oppression on the individual and teach him intellectually and practically that he has no claim to exist, no right to fulfil himself except in his relations to the collectivity. These alone then are to determine his thought, action and existence and the claim of the individual to have a law of his own being, a law of his own nature which he has a right to fulfil and his demand for freedom of thought involving necessarily the freedom to err and for freedom of action involving necessarily the freedom to stumble and sin may be regarded as an insolence and a chimera. The collective self-consciousness will then have the right to invade at every point the life of the individual, to refuse to it all privacy and apartness, all self-concentration and isolation, all independence and self-guidance and determine everything for it by what it conceives to be the best thought and highest will and rightly dominant feeling, tendency, sense of need, desire for self-satisfaction of the collectivity.
But also we may enlarge the idea of the self and, as objective Science sees a universal force of Nature which is the one reality and of which everything is the process, we may come subjectively to the realisation of a universal Being or Existence which fulfils itself in the world and the individual and the group with an impartial regard for all as equal powers of its self-manifestation. This is obviously the self-knowledge which is most likely to be right, since it most comprehensively embraces and accounts for the various aspects of the world-process and the eternal tendencies of humanity. In this view neither the separate growth of the individual nor the all-absorbing growth of the group can be the ideal, but an equal, simultaneous and, as far as may be, parallel development of both, in which each helps to fulfil the other. Each being has his own truth of independent self-realisation and his truth of self-realisation in the life of others and should feel, desire, help, participate more and more, as he grows in largeness and power, in the harmonious and natural growth of all the individual selves and all the collective selves of the one universal Being. These two, when properly viewed, would not be separate, opposite or really conflicting lines of tendency, but the same impulse of the one common existence, companion movements separating only to return upon each other in a richer and larger unity and mutual consequence.
Similarly, the subjective search for the self may, like the Objective, lean preponderantly to identification with the conscious physical life, because the body is or seems to be the frame and determinant here of the mental and vital movements and capacities. Or it may identify itself with the vital being, the life-soul in us and its emotions, desires, impulses, seekings for power and growth and egoistic fulfilment. Or it may rise to a conception of man as a mental and moral being, exalt to the first place his inner growth, power and perfection, individual and collective, and set it before us as the true aim of our existence. A sort of subjective materialism, pragmatic and outward-going, is a possible standpoint; but in this the subjective tendency cannot long linger. For its natural impulse is to go always inward and it only begins to feel itself and have satisfaction of itself when it gets to the full conscious life within and feels all its power, joy and forceful potentiality pressing for fulfilment. Man at this stage regards himself as a profound, vital Will-to-be which uses body as its instrument and to which the powers of mind are servants and ministers. This is the cast of that vitalism which in various striking forms has played recently so great a part and still exercises a considerable influence on human thought. Beyond it we get to a subjective idealism now beginning to emerge and become prominent, which seeks the fulfilment of man in the satisfaction of his inmost religious, aesthetic, intuitive, his highest intellectual and ethical, his deepest sympathetic and emotional nature and, regarding this as the fullness of our being and the whole object of our being, tries to subject to it the physical and vital existence. These come to be considered rather as a possible symbol and instrument of the subjective life flowing out into forms than as having any value in themselves. A certain tendency to mysticism, occultism and the search for a self independent of the life and the body accompanies this new movementnew to modern life after the reign of individualism and objective intellectualism and emphasises its real trend and character.
But here also it is possible for subjectivism to go beyond and to discover the true Self as something greater even than mind. Mind, life and body then become merely an instrumentation for the increasing expression of this Self in the world,instruments not equal in their hierarchy, but equal in their necessity to the whole, so that their complete perfection and harmony and unity as elements of our self-expression become essential to the true aim of our living. And yet that aim would not be to perfect life, body and mind in themselves, but to develop them so as to make a fit basis and fit instruments for the revelation in our inner and outer life of the luminous Self, the secret Godhead who is one and yet various in all of us, in every being and existence, thing and creature. The ideal of human existence personal and social would be its progressive transformation into a conscious outflowering of the joy, power, love, light, beauty of the transcendent and universal Spirit.
1.06 - The Three Schools of Magick 1, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The Tao Teh King inculcates conscious inaction, or rather unconscious inaction, with the Object of minimizing the disorder of the world. A few quotations from the text should make the essence of the doctrine clear.[10]
X 3
1.06 - The Transformation of Dream Life, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
When the student has thus raised himself to a life in the higher ego, or rather during his acquisition of the higher consciousness, he will learn how to stir to life the spiritual perceptive force in the organ of the heart and control it through the currents described in the foregoing chapter. This perceptive force is an element of higher sustainability, which proceeds from the organ in question and flows with beautiful radiance through the moving lotus flowers and the other channels of the developed etheric body. Thence it radiates outward into the surrounding spiritual world rendering it spiritually visible, just as the sunlight falling on the Objects of the physical world renders them visible.
p. 196
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It is only when this organ of perception can be sent through the etheric body and into the outer world, to illumine the Objects there, that the actual spiritual world, as composed of objects and beings, can be clearly perceived. Thus it will be seen that complete consciousness of an object in the spiritual world is only possible when man himself casts upon it the spiritual light. Now, the ego which creates this organ of perception does not dwell within, but outside the physical body, as already shown. The heart organ is only the spot where the individual man kindles, from without, this spiritual light organ. Were the latter kindled elsewhere, the spiritual perceptions produced by it would have no connection with the physical world. But all higher spiritual realities must be related to the physical world, and man himself must act as a channel through which they flow into it. It is precisely through the heart organ that the higher ego governs the physical self, making it into its instrument.
Now, the feelings of an esoterically developed
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Spiritual vision at this stage extends to the spiritual counterparts of the physical world, so far as these exist in the so-called astral world. There everything is found which in its nature is similar to human instincts, feelings, desires, and passions. For powers related to all these human characteristics are associated with all physical objects. A crystal, for instance, is cast in its form by powers which, seen from a higher standpoint, appear as an active human impulse. Similar forces drive the sap through the capillaries of the plant, cause the blossoms to unfold and the seed vessels to burst. To developed spiritual organs of perception all these forces appear gifted with form and color, just as the Objects of the physical world have form and color for physical eyes. At this
p. 199
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Furthermore, the clairvoyant can at this stage perceive things which are almost or entirely withheld from the senses. He can, for instance, tell the astral difference between a room full of low or of high-minded people. Not only the physical but also the spiritual atmosphere of a hospital differs from that of a ballroom. A commercial town has a different astral air from that of a university town. In the initial stages of clairvoyance this perceptive faculty is but slightly developed; its relation to the Objects in question is similar to the relation of dream consciousness to waking consciousness in ordinary life; it will, however, become fully awakened at this stage as well.
p. 200
The highest achievement of a clairvoyant who has attained the degree of vision described above is that in which the astral counter-effects of animal and human impulses and passions are revealed to him. A loving action is accompanied by quite a different astral concomitant from one inspired by hate. Senseless desire gives rise to an ugly astral counterpart, while a feeling evoked by a high ideal creates one that is beautiful. These astral images are but faintly perceptible during physical life, for their strength is diminished by life in the physical world. The desire for an object, for example, produces a counterpart of this sort in addition to the semblance of the desire itself in the astral world. If, however, the Object be attained and the desire satisfied, or if, at any rate, the possibility of satisfaction is forthcoming, the corresponding image will show but faintly. It only attains its full force after the death of the individual human being, when the soul in accordance with her nature still harbors such desires, but can no longer satisfy them, because the Object and the physical organ are both lacking. The gourmand, for instance, will still retain, after death, the desire to please his palate; but there is
p. 201
1.070 - The Seven Stages of Perfection, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The first stage is supposed to be the detection of the defect in the Objects or things: there is something wrong with things, and they are not as they appear to be. This is the first awareness that arises in a person. Things are not what they seem, as the poet said. Even the best things are not really what they are. They appear to be best under certain conditions. The valuable things, the worthy things, the virtuous things, the beautiful things all these are conditionally valid, and they are not valid in their essence. That the Objects of sense, the things of the world, are constituted of a nature essentially different from what they appear to the senses and the mind is an awareness that arises in the discriminating, and not in all people. Crass perception takes the world for granted, and people run after things as moths run to fire, not knowing that it is their destruction. The awareness arises, pointing out that there is some mystery behind things which is quite different from the colour and the shape of things visible to the senses that there is pain in this world, and it is not pleasure. Pain is rooted behind the so-called pleasure of the world. Sorrow is to follow all the joys of the world, one day or the other. The first step is the awareness or discovery that pain is present and it cannot be avoided under any circumstance as long as things continue to be in the present set-up.
The second stage is the discovery that there is a cause of this pain, that it has not come suddenly from the blue. How has this pain come this suffering, this sorrow? What is the reason for this defect behind everything? There is a reason. Without a cause, there is no effect. The discovery of the cause of this troublesome situation is the second stage of knowledge. That is a greater control that we gain over our situation. When we know that there is some trouble, and we do not know how the trouble has arisen, we are in a difficulty. But the difficulty is a little bit ameliorated when the cause of it is known, because we feel a confidence that, after all, this is the cause, and we shall try to tackle it. So, in the second stage of awareness there is a recognition of the causal background of the troubles of life, the pains of experience.
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Secondly, there will be a diminution of the extent of the Object world in front of us which is, at present, hanging upon us as a heavy weight. The individual subject looks upon itself as a minute content of the vast world of objects, so that we always think that the world is larger than we are. It is far bigger than we are, so we are frightened of the world. the Object is much bigger than the subject. That is why the subject is frightened always. It is always in a state of insecurity and sorrow.
As the ascent progresses, there is also a diminution in the extent of this object world, and the subject becomes wider and wider. As we go higher and higher, the extent of the jurisdiction of the subject becomes more and more, and that of the Object becomes less and less, so that the world becomes smaller and we become bigger the reverse of what is happening now. There is a diminution of the content of consciousness in the form of the Object world and a simultaneous expansion of the jurisdiction of the subject consciousness, as well as a diminution in the intensity of the feeling of externality in oneself. This is what happens, stage by stage, by the practice.
Thus, these limbs of yoga the eight limbs especially mentioned in Patanjali are the eight degrees of mastery which consciousness gains over its environment by the development of harmony with its atmosphere. We cannot have mastery over anything unless we are harmonious with that thing. The moment we are disharmonious, we become puppets in the hand of that thing with which we are disharmonious. Harmony and power are identical. The more we are harmonious with a thing, a person, an atmosphere or a condition, whatever it is, the more say we have in the matter of that thing which means control over that thing, power over that thing.
We are coming to the conclusion that the highest power is identity of oneself with that thing over which we want to have power. That is intuition. What is known as intuition is the insight which one gains into the substance of that thing which is now regarded as the Object of perception, and which is then to become the very self of the thing. So, as we approach nearer and nearer to the subjecthood of the Object, we gain greater mastery over it, and then it is that we have greater feeling for it, greater sympathy for it. This is what is known as the harmony that one has to establish with the Object.
Hence, the harmony that we are speaking of is nothing but the development of the consciousness of a selfhood in the Object, in consonance with the selfhood of ones own self. the Object ceases to be an object as the consciousness rises in its awareness of itself, because what is called an object is nothing but an aspect of the self itself, which has got separated by peculiar factors. That is called ignorance. It is this separatist tendency that has become responsible for one aspect of the self recognising another aspect of it as the Object, so that there is a fight of oneself with oneself, as it were. So, the world is nothing but a war of oneself with oneself.
This is to be obviated by the development of viveka khyati. The purpose of yoga is the enhancement of enlightenment in regard to things by the adjustment of oneself with the Object atmosphere in greater and greater harmony which is another way of saying that we have to become more and more sympathetic with the selfhood of things, rather than recognising their object nature. The equilibrium that is the essence of these stages of practice is the essence of the enlightenment that one has to attain, because the rise of enlightenment within is simultaneous with the establishment of harmony outside. Hence, there is a simultaneous change taking place internally, as well as externally.
When we change within ourselves, the world also changes for us. It is not that we change only inside our house, and outside everything remains chaotic. This is not so. There is a corresponding change in the outer atmosphere when there is an internal transformation, because the internal is commensurate with the external. The one is not really outside the other. There is a transformation of existence itself when there is a transformation of consciousness. The attainment of the perfection of consciousness becomes also, at the same time, the attainment of the perfection of all existence, which is the goal of practising the eight limbs of yoga.
1.075 - Self-Control, Study and Devotion to God, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The message that is conveyed through the senses is the character that is imbedded in the mind. Hence, when the senses receive pure food, the message that they convey, being pure, makes the mind also pure because the mind has nothing to say and nothing to do except what the senses direct. The intake of the senses means the perceptions of the senses the Objects that they perceive or contact, the way in which they evaluate things, and the reactions they set up in respect of their perceptions. All this is what is known as ahara, or the diet of the senses.
This diet of the senses should be pure, which means the feeling that arises in the mind immediately after a sense perception should be in consonance with the nature of Truth; it should not be dissonant. It means that we should not be stirred into an anxiety, a mood of unhappiness, dissatisfaction or fear as a consequence of sense perception, as that would be incommensurate with the nature of Truth, because the perception of Truth will not cause fear.
When we grasp things by the senses, our perceptions go deep into the universals that are present behind the particulars which are the sense objects. Then it is that this diet of the senses is supposed to be pure. Then perceptions make no sense; they carry no impression. Whether we look at an object or not, it will make no difference, because the perception of an object will be the same as the harmony of oneself with the Object. Then it is that sattva arises in the mind and there is concentration of mind, which is what is known as smriti lambha in this passage from the Chhandogya Upanishad. Then, there is a breaking of the knots of the heart. Sarva-granthna vipramoka there is freedom.
Sattvauddhi saumanasya aikgrye indriyajaya tmadarana yogyatvni ca (II.41) is the sutra of Patanjali which tells us that luminosity lustre of the mind, tranquillity, a serenity of mood, concentration, or the power to focus the mind, and control over the senses, indriyajaya all these are spontaneously the results of purity, which finally ends in fitness of oneself to receive the light of the Self.
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Likewise is the human being and anything in this world everything is inside it. All powers and all perfections are potentials and, therefore, what is required is not an externalised effort in the direction of contact with the Objects of sense, but an inward research which will find out ways and means of releasing this energy that is latent inside. It is a great foolishness on the part of anyone not to know this fact and to pursue ideals which are different from, or even contrary to, what is really good for oneself. The whole practice of yoga is an inwardisation of effort for the purpose of the release of the potentialities that are inside, and the realisation of their presence and capacities, which will put an end to all cravings of the senses, the mind and the ego. This removal of the dross, or the impurity of the mind, is what is known as asuddhi ksayat. When this takes place, when the impurities of the mind are removed, there is perfection of the body, the senses and the mind all of which is the effect of tapas: kya indriya siddhi auddhikayt tapasa (II.43).
Svdhyyt iadevat saprayoga (II.44): By daily holy study, we set ourselves in tune with the masters who have been responsible for the writing of the scriptures and whose great ideals and ideas are sung in the scriptures. The study of great scriptures like the Bhagavadgita, the Mahabharata or the Ramayana puts us in tune with the great thoughts, brains and minds of Vyasa, Valmiki and such other great men. Then, there is a stimulation of a corresponding idea and ideal in our own selves so that we become fit to receive their grace. Not merely receive their grace, we can even contact them, says the sutra. The idea, or the content of the scripture which is the Object of our daily study, or svadhyaya, is the medium of contact between ourselves and the ideal of the scripture the deity. It may be the rishi, or it may be a divinity that is the ishta devata. The desired object is the ishta devata, and we will come in contact with it because of the daily contemplation on it through svadhyaya.
These three methods tapas, svadhyaya and Ishvara pranidhana are really the training of the will, the intellect and the emotion. It requires tremendous will to practise tapas, great understanding or intellectual capacity to probe into the meaning of the scriptures, and emotional purity to love God. These three are emphasised in the canons of tapas, svadhyaya and Ishvara pranidhana. By svadhyaya there is ishtadevata samprayogah,says the sutra; there is union of oneself with the deity of ones worship and adoration by a daily brooding over its characters.
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The svadhyaya that is referred to here is not reading in a library. It is not going to the library and reading any book that is there on the shelf. It is a holy resort to a concentrated form of study of a chosen scripture. It may be even two or three texts it does not matter which will become the Object of ones daily concentration and meditation, because what is known as svadhyaya,or Self-study, or holy study, or sacred study is a form of meditation itself in a little diffused form.
The scriptures are supposed to contain all the knowledge that is necessary for the realisation of the Self. It is a spiritual text that we are supposed to study, which is meant by the word svadhyaya. It is not any kind of book. A holy scripture is supposed to be a moksha shastra. A scripture which expounds the nature of, as well as the means to, the liberation of the soul is called a moksha shastra. This is to be studied. All the ways and means to the liberation of the Self should be expounded in the scripture; and the glorious nature of the ideal of perfection, God-realisation that also is to be expounded in it. The means and the end should be delineated in great detail. Such is the text to be resorted to in svadhyaya. By a gradual and daily habituation of oneself to such a study, there is a purification brought about automatically. Inasmuch as it is nothing but meditation that we are practising in a different way, it is supposed to bring us in contact with the ideal.
1.078 - Kumbhaka and Concentration of Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Of course, it does not mean that this stambha is to be introduced into pranayama by shock or fear; that is not the idea. What is intended is that the absorption of the mind in the Object or ideal of yoga should be so comprehensive so deep and absorbing, and intense that there will be no time for the mind to supply the motive force to the prana to move at all. When we are deeply absorbed in a particular thought, very deeply absorbed, and we are not able to think anything other than that one particular thought due to intense affection or intense hatred, or for any reason whatsoever, the prana stops; there will be no breathing at that time. When we are overpowered with the emotion of love, or fear, or hatred, there will be a stoppage of prana. Thus, raga, bahya and krodha are the causes of the prana suddenly stopping intense raga, intense bahya and intense krodha.
Here we are not concerned with bahya or krodha, or with raga of the ordinary type; but if we want to call it raga, we may call it so. It is a great love for the great ideal of yoga; the ardour that is expected in every student of yoga. The yearning that he cherishes within, the longing that is uncontrollable for God-realisation may be regarded as a kind of superior raga that is present, which prevents the mind from thinking anything else. When the prana is suddenly withheld not accompanied either by expulsion or inhalation that type of retention which is suddenly introduced, for any reason whatsoever, is called stambha vritti. They are the three types of kumbhaka mentioned in the sutra, bhya bhyantara stambha vtti (II.50).
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When this is acquired, this mastery is gained, some sort of a control is maintained over the pranic movements. Great consequences unexpected and unforeseen will follow. We will see strange phenomena appear within us as well as outside us if we gain mastery over the prana, because this kumbhaka that we are speaking of is nothing but another form of concentration of mind, as the mind is associated with the prana always. the Object, or the ideal before oneself, is united with the meditating consciousness in a fast embrace, as it were, when the prana is withheld, and it is made to stick to ones consciousness inseparably. It becomes one with ones own self, and there is a sudden impact felt upon the Object on account of the kumbhaka that we practise. The kumbhaka, the retention of the breath that we practise, coupled with concentration of mind on the Object that is before us, will tell upon the nature of that object which we are thinking of, whatever be the distance of that object. It may be millions of miles away it makes no difference. This is because prana is omnipresent. It is like ether, and so it will produce an impact upon the Object that we are thinking of in our meditation. It will stir it up into an activity of a desired manner, according to what we are contemplating in the mind. This effect cannot be produced if the prana is allowed to move hither and thither, distractedly. If we want quick success in meditation, the retention of the breath is absolutely necessary because it is this that impresses upon the Object of meditation the necessity to commingle itself with the subject. Therefore, a combination of pranayama and dharana, concentration, is the most effective method of bringing about a union of oneself with the ideal of meditation.
1.07 - A Song of Longing for Tara, the Infallible, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
Equanimity and contentment regarding the Objects of the eight worldly
concerns make our minds calmer and our actions more considerate. We can
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heaven. the Objects were attached to and have aversion for arent the problem; theres nothing wrong with experiencing pleasure and happiness. Those
arent the issue. Rather, attachment to pleasant feelings and to the people,
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that name is the same as the Object were referring to. When I say cup, it
seems that this is a cup, doesnt it? It doesnt appear to us that cup is a label
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As a previous verse said, we confuse the name with the Object and think
that the name abides in the basis of imputation. We do this in relation to our-
1.07 - Medicine and Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
would be absolutely no possibility of knowledge, since the Object must go
through a complicated physiological and psychic process of change in
1.07 - Note on the word Go, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The next passage to which I shall turn is the eighth verse of the eighth hymn, also to Indra, in which occurs the expression , a passage which when taken in the plain and ordinary sense of the epithets sheds a great light on the nature of Mahi. Sunrita means really true and is opposed to anrita, false for in the early Aryan speech su and s would equally signify, well, good, very; and the euphonic n is of a very ancient type of sandhioriginally, it was probably no more than a strong anuswartraces of which can still be found in Tamil; in the case of su this n euphonic seems to have been dropped after the movement of the literary Aryan tongue towards the modern principle of Sandhi,a movement the imperfect progress of which we see in the Vedas; but by that time the form an, composed of privative a and the euphonic n, had become a recognised alternative form to a and the omission of the n would have left the meaning of words very ambiguous; therefore n was preserved in the negative form, omitted from the affirmative where its omission caused no inconvenience,for to write gni instead of anagni would be confusing, but to write svagni instead of sunagni would create no confusion. In the pair sunrita and anrita it is probable that the usage had become so confirmed, so much of an almost technical phraseology, that confirmed habit prevailed over new rule. The second meaning of the word is auspicious, derived from the idea good or beneficent in its regular action. The Vedic scholars give a third sense, quick, active; but this is probably due to confusion with an originally distinct word derived from the root , to move on rapidly, to be strong, swift, active from which we have to dance, & strong and a number of other derivatives, for although ri means to go, it does not appear that rita was used in the sense of motion or swiftness. In any case our choice (apart from unnecessary ingenuities) lies here between auspicious and true. If we take Mahi in the sense of earth, the first is its simplest & most natural significance.We shall have then to translate the earth auspicious (or might it mean true in the sense observing the law of the seasons), wide-watered, full of cows becomes like a ripe branch to the giver. This gives a clear connected sense, although gross and pedestrian and open to the Objection that it has no natural and inevitable connection with the preceding verses. My objection is that sunrita and gomati seem to me to have in the Veda a different and deeper sense and that the whole passage becomes not only ennobled in sense, but clearer & more connected in sense if we give them that deeper significance. Gomatir ushasah in Kutsas hymn to the Dawn is certainly the luminous dawns; Saraswati in the third hymn who as chodayitri sunritanam chetanti sumatinam shines pervading all the actions of the understanding, certainly does so because she is the impeller to high truths, the awakener to right thoughts, clear perceptions and not because she is the impeller of things auspiciousa phrase which would have no sense or appropriateness to the context. Mahi is one of the three goddesses Ila, Saraswati and Mahi who are described as tisro devir mayobhuvah, the three goddesses born of delight or Ananda, and her companions being goddesses of knowledge, children of Mahas, she also must be a goddess of knowledge, not the earth; the word mahi also bears the sense of knowledge, intellect, and Mahas undoubtedly refers in many passages to the vijnana or supra-rational level of consciousness, the fourth Vyahriti of the Taittiriya Upanishad. What then prevents us from taking Mahi, here as there, in the sense of the goddess of suprarational knowledge or, if taken objectively, the world of Mahat? Nothing, except a tradition born in classical times when mahi was the earth and the new Nature-worship theory. In this sense I shall take it. I translate the line For thus Mahi the true, manifest in action, luminous becomes like a ripe branch to the giveror, again in better English, For thus Mahi the perfect in truth, manifesting herself in action, full of illumination, becomes as a ripe branch to the giver. For the Yogin again the sense is clear. All things are contained in the Mahat, derived from the Mahat, depend on theMahat, but we here in the movement of the alpam, have not our desire, are blinded & confined, enjoy an imperfect, erroneous & usually baffled & futile activity. It is only when we regain the movement of the Mahat, the large & uncontracted consciousness that comes from rising to the infinite,it is only then that we escape from this limitation. She is perfect in truth, full of illumination; error and ignorance disappear; she manifests herself virapshi in a wide & various activity; our activities are enlarged, our desires are fulfilled. The connection with the preceding stanzas becomes clear. The Vritras, the great obstructors & upholders of limitation, are slain by the help of Indra, by the result of the yajnartham karma, by alliance with the armed gods in mighty internal battle; Indra, the god within our mental force, manifests himself as supreme and full of the nature of ideal truth from which his greatness weaponed with the vajra, vidyut or electric principle, derives (mahitwam astu vajrine). The mind, instinct with amrita, is then full of equality, samata; it drinks in the flood of activity of all kinds as the sea takes in the rivers. For the condition then results in which the ideal consciousness Mahi is like a ripe branch to the giver, when all powers & expansions of being at once (without obstacle as the Vritras are slain) become active in consciousness as masterful and effective knowledge or awareness (chit). This is the process prayed for by the poet. The whole hymn becomes a consecutive & intelligible whole, a single thought worked out logically & coherently and relating with perfect accuracy of ensemble & detail to one of the commonest experiences of Yogic fulfilment. In both these passages the faithful adherence to the intimations of language, Vedantic idea & Yogic experience have shed a flood of light, illuminating the obscurity of the Vedas, bringing coherence into the incoherence of the naturalistic explanation, close & strict logic, great depth of meaning with great simplicity of expression, and, as I shall show when I take up the final interpretation of the separate hymns, a rational meaning & reason of existence in that particular place for each word & phrase and a faultless & inevitable connection with what goes before & with what goes after. It is worth noticing that by the naturalistic interpretation one can indeed generally make out a meaning, often a clear or fluent sense for the separate verses of the Veda, but the ensemble of the hymn has almost always about it an air bizarre, artificial, incoherent, almost purposeless, frequently illogical and self-contradictoryas in Max Mullers translation of the 39th hymn, Kanwas to the Maruts,never straightforward, self-assured & easy. One would expect in these primitive writers,if they are primitive,crudeness of belief perhaps, but still plainness of expression and a simple development of thought. One finds instead everything tortuous, rugged, gnarled, obscure, great emptiness with great pretentiousness of mind, a labour of diction & development which seems to be striving towards great things & effecting a nullity. The Vedic singers, in the modern version, have nothing to say and do not know how to say it. I sacrifice, you drink, you are fine fellows, dont hurt me or let others hurt me, hurt my enemies, make me safe & comfortablethis is practically all that the ten Mandalas have to say to the gods & it is astonishing that they should be utterly at a loss how to say it intelligibly. A system which yields such results must have at its root some radical falsity, some cardinal error.
I pass now to a third passage, also instructive, also full of that depth and fine knowledge of the movements of the higher consciousness which every Yogin must find in the Veda. It is in the 9th hymn of the Mandala and forms the seventh verse of that hymn. Sam gomad Indra vajavad asme prithu sravo brihat, visvayur dhehi akshitam. The only crucial question in this verse is the signification of sravas.With our modern ideas the sentence seems to us to demand that sravas should be translated here fame. Sravas is undoubtedly the same word as the Greek xo (originally xFo); it means a thing heard, rumour, report, & thence fame. If we take it in that sense, we shall have to translate Arrange for us, O universal life, a luminous and solid, wide & great fame unimpaired. I dismiss at once the idea that go & vaja can here signify cattle and food or wealth. A herded & fooded or wealthy fame to express a fame for wealth of cattle & food is a forceful turn of expression we might expect to find in Aeschylus or in Shakespeare; but I should hesitate, except in case of clear necessity, to admit it in the Veda or in any Sanscrit style of composition; for such expressions have always been alien to the Indian intellect. Our stylistic vagaries have been of another kind. But is luminous & solid fame much better? I shall suggest another meaning for sravas which will give as usual a deeper sense to the whole passage without our needing to depart by a hairs breadth from the etymological significance of the words. Sruti in Sanscrit is a technical term, originally, for the means by which Vedic knowledge is acquired, inspiration in the suprarational mind; srutam is the knowledge of Veda. Similarly, we have in Vedic Sanscrit the forms srut and sravas. I take srut to mean inspired knowledge in the act of reception, sravas the thing acquired by the reception, inspired knowledge. Gomad immediately assumes its usual meaning illuminated, full of illumination. Vaja I take throughout the Veda as a technical Vedic expression for that substantiality of being-consciousness which is the basis of all special manifestation of being & power, all utayah & vibhutayahit means by etymology extended being in force, va or v to exist or move in extension and the vocable j which always gives the idea of force or brilliance or decisiveness in action or manifestation or contact. I shall accept no meaning which is inconsistent with this fundamental significance. Moreover the tendency of the old commentators to make all possible words, vaja, ritam etc mean sacrifice or food, must be rejected,although a justification in etymology might always be made out for the effort. Vaja means substance in being, substance, plenty, strength, solidity, steadfastness. Here it obviously means full of substance, just as gomad full of luminousness,not in the sense arthavat, but with another & psychological connotation. I translate then, O Indra, life of all, order for us an inspired knowledge full of illumination & substance, wide & great and unimpaired. Anyone acquainted with Yoga will at once be struck by the peculiar & exact appropriateness of all these epithets; they will admit him at once by sympathy into the very heart of Madhuchchhandas experience & unite him in soul with that ancient son of Visvamitra. When Mahas, the supra-rational principle, begins with some clearness to work in Yoga, not on its own level, not swe dame, but in the mind, it works at first through the principle of Srutinot Smriti or Drishti, but this Sruti is feeble & limited in its range, it is not prithu; broken & scattered in its working even when the range is wide, not unlimited in continuity, not brihat; not pouring in a flood of light, not gomat, but coming as a flash in the darkness, often with a pale glimmer like the first feebleness of dawn; not supported by a strong steady force & foundation of being, Sat, in manifestation, not vajavad, but working without foundation, in a void, like secondh and glimpses of Sat in nothingness, in vacuum, in Asat; and, therefore, easily impaired, easily lost hold of, easily stolen by the Panis or the Vritras. All these defects Madhuchchhanda has noticed in his own experience; his prayer is for an inspired knowledge which shall be full & free & perfect, not marred even in a small degree by these deficiencies.
1.07 - Past, Present and Future, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sentimental remembrance: only those circumstances which helped us in our seeking for the Divine must be the Object of this remembrance.
At certain periods, the whole terrestrial life seems to pass miraculously through stages which, at other times, it would take thousands of years to traverse.
1.07 - Samadhi, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
24:The Hindus assert that the nature of the Object determines the Samadhi; that is, the nature of those lower Samadhis which confer so-called "magic powers." For example, there are the Yogapravritti. Meditating on the tip of the nose, one obtains what may be called the "ideal smell"; that is, a smell which is not any particular smell, but is the archetypal smell, of which all actual smells are modifications. It is "the smell which is "not" a smell." This is the only reasonable description; for the experience being contrary to reason, it is only reasonable that the words describing it should be contrary to reason too. footnote: Hence the Athanasian Creed. Compare the precise parallel in the Zohar: "The Head which is above all heads; the Head which is "not" a Head.'
25:Similarly, concentration on the tip of the tongue gives the "ideal taste"; on the dorsum of the tongue, "ideal contact." "Every atom of the body comes into contact with every atom in the Universe all at once," is the description Bhikku Ananda Metteya gives of it. The root of the tongue gives the "ideal sound"; and the pharynx the "ideal sight." footnote: Similarly Patanjali tells us that by making Samyama on the strength of an elephant or a tiger, the student acquires that strength. Conquer "the nerve Udana," and you can walk on the water; "Samana," and you begin to flash with light; the "elements" fire, air, earth, and water, and you can do whatever in natural life they prevent you from doing. For instance, by conquering earth, one could take a short cut to Australia; or by conquering water, one can live at the bottom of the Ganges. They say there is a holy man at Benares who does this, coming up only once a year to comfort and instruct his disciples. But nobody need believe this unless he wants to; and you are even advised to conquer that desire should it arise. It will be interesting when science really determines the variables and constants of these equations.
1.07 - Standards of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
18:For, long after the individual has become partially free, a moral organism capable of conscious growth, aware of an inward life, eager for spiritual progress, society continues to be external in its methods, a material and economic organism, mechanical, more intent upon status and self-preservation than on growth and self-perfection. The greatest present triumph of the thinking and progressive individual over the instinctive and static society has been the power he has acquired by his thoughtwill to compel it to think also, to open itself to the idea of social justice and righteousness, communal sympathy and mutual compassion, to feel after the rule of reason rather than blind custom as the test of its institutions and to look on the mental and moral assent of its individuals as at least one essential element in the validity of its laws. Ideally at least, to consider light rather than force as its sanction, moral development and not vengeance or restraint as the Object even of its penal action, is becoming just possible to the communal mind. The greatest future triumph of the thinker will come when he can persuade the individual integer and the collective whole to rest their life-relation and its union and stability upon a free and harmonious consent and selfadaptation, and shape and govern the external by the internal truth rather than to constrain the inner spirit by the tyranny of the external form and structure.
19:But even this success that he has gained is rather a thing in potentiality than in actual accomplishment. There is always a disharmony and a discord between the moral law in the individual and the law of his needs and desires, between the moral law proposed to society and the physical and vital needs, desires, customs, prejudices, interests and passions of the caste, the clan, the religious community, the society, the nation. The moralist erects in vain his absolute ethical standard and calls upon all to be faithful to it without regard to consequences. To him the needs and desires of the individual are invalid if they are in conflict with the moral law, and the social law has no claims upon him if it is opposed to his sense of right and denied by his conscience. This is his absolute solution for the individual that he shall cherish no desires and claims that are not consistent with love, truth and justice. He demands from the community or nation that it shall hold all things cheap, even its safety and its most pressing interests, in comparison with truth, justice, humanity and the highest good of the peoples.
1.07 - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
The world is seen as a great relativistic cybernetic system, so "holistic" that it leaves no room for the actual subject in the Objective network. The self therefore hovers above reality, disengaged, disenchanted, disembodied. It is "close to a solipsistic position": hyperagency cut off from all communions. And this, as we have seen, is essentially the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm: a perfectly holistic world that leaves a perfectly atomistic self.8
A transcendental self can bond with other transcendental selves, whereas a merely empirical self disappears into the empirical web and interlocking order, never to be heard from again. (No strand in the web is ever or can ever be aware of the whole web; if it could, then it would cease to be merely a strand. This is not allowed by systems theory, which is why, as Habermas demonstrated, systems theory always ends up isolationist and egocentric, or "solipsistic.")
1.07 - The Ideal Law of Social Development, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Man, the mental being in Nature, is especially distinguished from her less developed creatures by a greater power of individuality, by the liberation of the mental consciousness which enables him finally to understand more and more himself and his law of being and his development, by the liberation of the mental will which enables him under the secret control of the universal Will to manage more and more the materials and lines of his development and by the capacity in the end to go beyond himself, beyond his mentality and open his consciousness into that from which mind, life and body proceed. He can even, however imperfectly at present, get at his highest to some consciousness of the Reality which is his true being and possess consciously also, as nothing else in terrestrial Nature can possess, the Self, the Idea, the Will which have constituted him and can become by that the master of his own nature and increasingly, not as now he is, a wrestler with dominant circumstance but the master of Nature. To do this, to arrive through mind and beyond mind at the Self, the Spirit which expresses itself in all Nature and, becoming one with it in his being, his force, his consciousness, his will, his knowledge, to possess at once humanly and divinelyaccording to the law and nature of human existence, but of human existence fulfilled in God and fulfilling God in the worldboth himself and the world is the destiny of man and the Object of his individual and social existence.1
This is done primarily through the individual man; for this end man has become an individual soul, that the One may find and manifest Himself in each human being. That end is not indeed achieved by the individual human being in his unaided mental force. He needs the help of the secret Divine above his mentality in his superconscient self; he needs the help also of the secret Divine around him in Nature and in his fellow-men. Everything in Nature is an occasion for him to develop his divine potentiality, an occasion which he has a certain relative freedom to use or to misuse, although in the end both his use and misuse of his materials are overruled in their results by the universal Will so as to assist eventually the development of his law of being and his destiny. All life around him is a help towards the divine purpose in him; every human being is his fellow worker and assists him whether by association and union or by strife and opposition. Nor does he achieve his destiny as the individual Man for the sake of the individual soul alone,a lonely salvation is not his complete ideal,but for the world also or rather for God in the world, for God in all as well as above all and not for God solely and separately in one. And he achieves it by the stress, not really of his separate individual Will, but of the universal Will in its movement towards the goal of its cycles.
1.07 - THE .IMPROVERS. OF MANKIND, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
say:--all means which have been used heretofore with the Object of
making man moral, were through and through immoral.
1.07 - The Literal Qabalah (continued), #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
In reality, however, I must add as a cautionary warning that the Qabalah does not concern itself with the rational solution of the Objectivity or subjectivity of the Universe.
It is primarily, as so frequently emphasized here, a psych- ological system for the comparison and classification of all ideas and experiences.
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This produces the Object, the opposite of Self, the non-ego (Non-Being of Hegel), which corresponds to Binah, since the latter is the root of matter, and the opposite of
Being. the Object is its first alien, which acts upon the
Self and is acted upon by it. They are then recognized in reciprocal relation, and the interaction resolves itself in the harmony of self-knowledge (the third principle), or Chok- mah, Wisdom, our second Sephirah.
1.07 - THE MASTER AND VIJAY GOSWAMI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
is retained. On the other hand, thousands of images may be reflected on a bare piece of glass, but not one of them is retained. As the Object moves away, the glass becomes the same as it was before. One cannot assimilate spiritual instruction unless one has already developed love of God."
VIJAY: "Is bhakti alone sufficient for the attainment of God, for His vision?"
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"After realizing God a man becomes like a child. One acquires the nature of the Object one meditates upon. The nature of God is like that of a child. As a child builds up his toy house and then breaks it down, so God acts while creating, preserving, and destroying the universe. Further, as the child is not under the control of any guna, so God is beyond the three gunas-sattva, rajas, and tamas. That is why paramahamsas keep five or ten children with them, that they may assume their nature."
Sitting on the floor in the room was a young man from Agarpara about twenty-two years old. Whenever he came to the temple garden, he would take the Master aside, by a sign, and whisper his thoughts to him. He was a newcomer. That day he was sitting on the floor near the Master.
1.07 - The Plot must be a Whole., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the Object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long. As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms a certain magnitude is necessary, and a magnitude which may be easily embraced in one view; so in the plot, a certain length is necessary, and a length which can be easily embraced by the memory. The limit of length in relation to dramatic competition and sensuous presentment, is no part of artistic theory. For had it been the rule for a hundred tragedies to compete together, the performance would have been regulated by the water-clock,--as indeed we are told was formerly done. But the limit as fixed by the nature of the drama itself is this: the greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous. And to define the matter roughly, we may say that the proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.
author class:Aristotle
1.07 - The Primary Data of Being, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
To these abstract modes there correspond, in the Objective world, concrete states of substance and of being, states which extend in an indefinite series from the first transcendences to our own physical domain.
In each of these states Space and Time find a real content which forms the stuff of their weaving.
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By an ever more detailed, precise and individual differentiation of its elements, it constitutes for itself one after another the successive states of an increasing materiality, that is to say, of an increasing complexity in its substance. And in each of these states the Objective forms of the being become more concrete, rich and real.
It is therefore by the simple prolongation in its effect of the desire for individual manifestation according to the sole law of a rigorously egoistic affirmation that universal being unrolls the whole process of its material evolution.
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
They take an empty fist as containing something real and the pointing finger as the Object pointed at.
Because the finger is adhered to as though it were the Moon, all their efforts are lost.
1.080 - Pratyahara - The Return of Energy, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Svaviaya asaprayoge cittasya svarpnukra iva indriy pratyhra (II.54). When this significance or value in the Object of meditation is properly recognised, there is an automatic disconnection of the senses from their objects. The vehicle of the Object is severed from its relation with the engine, which is the senses, and then the Objects will not move, because there is no movement of the senses in respect of the Objects. Vavisaya asamprayoge is the term used in the sutra defining pratyahara, which is the beginning step of the central court of yoga. It is the severance of the senses from contact with objects, which is something very strange indeed, because it is not easy to understand the meaning of contact. Contact is different from the union that is the aim of yoga. The ultimate purpose of yoga is a kind of merger of consciousness in the Object which it contemplates. That is the true union that is aspired for. But the senses, when they contemplate an object, are not supposed to be in union with the Object; this is the difference. If the senses are in union, what is it that we are trying to do by severing them from the Objects? There is no union of the senses with their object when they are contacting it.
Contact and union are two different things. When sunlight falls on a pot kept outside in the sun, the pot is illumined by the light of the sun and so we are able to visualise the presence of the pot in the sun. The pot shines on account of the light that has fallen upon it, and becomes one with it, almost. We cannot separate the light of the sun from the pot on which it has fallen and which it illumines. Nevertheless, we know that the light has never become the pot; it is quite different from the pot or the Object which it illumines. Can we say that the light of the sun has entered the pot and become one with it in union? No, not at all. There is only a contact though it may look like an inseparable contact, which is really the case. So intimately is the contact of the light with the Object that we cannot differentiate one from the other. We begin to say that the pot is shining; this is what we generally say. What is shining is the light, not the pot. But the identity is such, apparently, that it looks that the Object itself is shining, and so we are able to perceive the presence of the Object in the daylight of the sun.
Similar is the case with the contact of the senses in respect of their objects. They do not unite themselves with the Object. If there is a real union, how can there be separation? How can there be bereavement? How can there be sorrow that one is dispossessed of the Object which one liked? There has never been union there was only contact. And this contact is, really speaking, the opposite of what the senses are aiming at through that means which they adopt in the cognition of an object.
The intention of the senses is not the same as what is really happening there. The intention of the senses in respect of its object is that it wants to grab the Object, to assimilate the Object, to digest it, and to make the Object part of its own being. Though this is the intention, this will not take place for certain reasons. What actually happens is that the senses are repelled by the structure of the Object. We may call it an electrical repulsion, if we like, just as there is the repulsion felt by the tactile sense when there is contact of the sense with the physical object. What we call the touch sense of the fingers, for instance, on account of which they feel the solidity of an object, is not really a union of the tactile sense with the Object, but it is a kind of repulsion that is produced by the particles of matter which constitute the Object and are electrically charged as also are the particles which constitute the structure of the tips of the fingers, or the nerve-endings. This produces a different type of reaction altogether, like positive and negative joining. But here, positive and positive are repelling. There is a kind of electrical repulsion produced by the nature of the Object and the workings of the senses, though this repulsion itself sometimes looks like a satisfying condition due to a mistaken notion about what is really happening.
Suppose we are kicked and we fall down into a pot of honey; do we call it a great satisfaction? Well, we have fallen into a pot of honey; but we have been kicked and, therefore, we fell down into it. Likewise, these senses are being kicked by the Object. But they think they have fallen into a pot of honey; and they are licking it, not knowing that it was very undeserved, really speaking. The intention was quite different.
The union that is aspired for in yoga is not of this nature. Therefore, inasmuch as union is not achieved in the contact of senses with objects, the defect, which is the cause of this repulsion and the mistaken satisfaction that arises on account of this contact, is to be recognised. For this purpose the senses have to first be weaned back from the Objects. This process is called pratyahara.
What happens in pratyahara is mentioned in the sutra: svaviaya asaprayoge cittasya svarpnukra iva indriy pratyhra (II.54). There are two changes that take place in this action of the senses in their abstraction from the Objects. Firstly, they are disconnected from contact with the Object due to the withdrawal of the consciousness which is animating the senses. Secondly, which is more important, the senses turn back to the mind and assume the character of the mind. Cittasya svarupanukarah means the senses accompanying the mind in its essential nature. They become almost one with the mind. In the usual activity of the senses, they are not one with the mind. They drag the mind out from its own chambers and then compel it to contemplate an external object, in which case the mind is something like a slave of the senses; the master has himself come under the subjection of the servants. But in pratyahara, this is not what is happening. The master is recognised and his worth is known. The senses return. They do not return of their own accord. If the gas in the engine is completely removed, the vehicle will not move. The gas is the motive force, and that motive force is the consciousness that is attending upon the activity of the senses. If the supply of energy behind the movement of a vehicle is withdrawn, the vehicle cannot move. And, as long as the supply is there, the vehicle cannot be stopped. The vehicle may be said to be the senses which are running towards some objective. They cannot be stopped in their activities unless the energy is withdrawn. That energy is the consciousness.
Therefore, first and foremost, what is required is a severance of the attention of consciousness in respect of the movement of the senses towards objects. The attention is diverted. That is why sometimes, when we are deeply thinking over some important matter, even if we may be looking at some object, we may not see it. Our eyes may be open; it may appear that we are gazing at something, but we are seeing nothing at all on account of the fact that the energy that is necessary for the cognition of an object is withdrawn. There cannot be perception when the attention is diverted in some other way. Thus, in pratyahara there is first a diversion of attention from one place to another place. We have to find out what that place is, which is the Object of meditation.
In this withdrawal of the consciousness from its movement along the lines of the senses, what happens is, it returns to the source from where it started. It will be difficult for one to distinguish between the senses and the mind at this moment. The senses and the mind become one. Here, the mind becomes powerful because when we turn off all the lights, turn off all the fans, and all the expenditure of electric energy is cut off on account of the turning off of all the switches, we see that the power station feels the surge immediately. The energy returns to the power station because we have turned off all the switches; there is no expenditure of energy. All the sources of the external movement of energy are severed on account of the turning off of the switches; naturally, the energy has to increase at the source, and we will see the indication of the increase in kilowatts recorded in the meters of the power station. The engineer in the power station will find out that people have turned off all the switches, because consumption of energy has gone down.
1.081 - The Application of Pratyahara, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Abstraction of the mind from the Objects for attainment of the spirit is what is known as pratyahara. This is not only a most misunderstood aspect of the practice of yoga but also the most difficult one. Perhaps because of its intricacy it has been misconstrued and, therefore, it has become a painful process. Consequently, one finds oneself in a very awkward position when one reaches this stage. Firstly, there is an inadequate understanding of what is happening and what is required. Secondly, the very first attempt seems to be a very painful one and, therefore, there is a falling of the ardour of the mind with which it commenced its practice.
There is a great amount of doubt in the minds of seekers, even well-informed ones, as to what exactly is intended to be done in this stage known as pratyahara. Is it withdrawal? Many questions arise due to a mix-up of philosophical doctrines, as well as practical difficulties. Some of them are: What is it from which the mind is being abstracted? Is it from the form of the Object or from the reality of the Object, the very existence of it?
The omnipresence of the spirit should preclude any kind of withdrawal. Also, there is the doctrine of devotion which recognises the presence of God in everything, and the all-pervading characteristic of God would not demand a withdrawal of the mind from anything, inasmuch as God is present everywhere. Next, there is a doubt that the abstraction of the mind may mean a kind of psychological introversion, which is what is objected to by psychoanalysts, because the introverted attitude is the opposite of the extroverted one, and it is equally bad as bad as the extroverted attitude. Whether we are tied up inwardly or bound outwardly, it makes no difference anyhow we are bound. And, topping the list there is the painful aspect of it, because it is impossible for the mind not to think of that which it desires. If it is not to think of what it desires, then of what is it to think? What else are we to think what we dont like? We are expecting the mind to wipe out the thought of things from its memory, including even those thoughts which it wants and regards as valuable and worthwhile. What else is it to think, if everything is removed from its memory? All these are the difficulties.
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In every branch of learning there is the theory aspect and the practical aspect, whether it is in mathematics, or physics, or any other aspect of study. Here it is of a similar nature. Why is it that the mind is to be withdrawn from the Object? The answer to this question is in the theoretical aspect which is the philosophy. What is wrong with the mind in its contemplation on things? Why should we not think of an object? Why we should not think of an object cannot be answered now, at this stage, when we have actually taken up this practice. We ought to have understood it much earlier. When we have started walking, it means that we already know why we are walking and where is our destination. We cannot start walking and say, Where am I walking to? Why did we start walking without knowing the destination? Likewise, if our question as to why this is necessary at all is not properly answered within our own self, then immediately there will be repulsion from the mind and it will say, You do not know what you are doing. You are merely troubling me. Then the mind will not agree to this proposal of abstraction.
Hence, there should be a very clear notion before we set about doing things; and this is a principle to be followed in every walk of life. Without knowing what is to be done, why do we start doing anything? Even if it is cooking, we must know the theory first. What is it about? We cannot run about higgledy-piggledy without understanding it. The purpose of the withdrawal of the mind or the senses from the Objects is simple; and that simple answer to this question is that the nature of things does not permit the notion that the mind entertains when it contacts an object. The idea that we have in our mind at the time of cognising an object is not in consonance with the nature of Truth. This is why the mind is to be withdrawn from the Object. There is a peculiar definition which the mind imposes upon the Object of sense at the time of cognising it, for the purpose of contacting it, etc. This definition is contrary to the true nature of that object. If we call an ass a dog, that would not be a proper definition; it would be a misunderstanding of its real essence. the Object of sense is not related to the subject of perception in the manner in which the subject is defining it or conceiving it.
Hence, the very activity of the mind in respect of this cognising or contacting is misdirected from the very beginning itself. Yoga asks us to set right this notion first; and this setting right of the notion cannot be done unless the mind is first withdrawn from the Object. If there is a very serious illness from which someone is suffering, and the illness has come to a crisis, to an advanced stage, we first of all put the patient on a kind of semi-fast and isolate the patient completely from all contact of every kind social and personal, even psychological so that there is a proper atmosphere for the investigation and diagnosis. This is the pratyahara the complete quarantining of the patient, and not allowing any kind of intrusion from outside. Physically and in every sense of the term there should be isolation so that we can have a clear observation of the situation and also a study of the various techniques that have to be adopted for rectifying the mistaken notion that is in the mind. Pratyahara is not yoga proper. Just as the isolation of the patient in a ward is not the main treatment but is a necessary aspect of the treatment, likewise, pratyahara is an essential part of yoga though it is not yet yoga. Yoga is yet to start. For a few days the doctor may not do anything at all and will simply keep on observing what is happening. After days and days of observation, the physician may come to a conclusion as to what is the condition of the patient, and then the treatment will be started. Likewise, the mind is first of all segregated from its involvements. This segregation is pratyahara.
There is a prejudiced notion which the mind entertains in respect of its things, of its objects. This prejudice has arisen on account of a preconceived notion that is already there; and that notion has only one objective in front of it namely, the exploitation of that object for its purposes. It has got a single intent, a deeply concentrated objective. If a wild beast looks at a prey, it has a single intention, which is not very complicated. Likewise, the mental cognition of an object, especially when it is charged with a forceful emotion, is backed up by a single intent. This is the prejudice, which is very irrational, and it will not be amenable to any kind of rational analysis.
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The pratyahara process is a healthy and positive process. It is not brought about by compulsion, or due to certain impediments that present themselves in the form of those things which are other than the ones which are desired by the mind. The mind sometimes does not think of objects when it is not concerned with them. This is another kind of pratyahara, but it is different from yogic pratyahara which is a philosophical withdrawal and not a negative kick that the mind receives or a complete oblivion or ignorance of the presence of a thing. It is a conscious attitude, and nothing unconscious should be allowed to interfere with it. We are aware of everything that is happening in the process of pratyahara. We are not ignorant of any aspect, and are not unconscious of anything. Even the things that we like and the things that we do not like both these are objects of analysis. The withdrawal is not merely from the negative side of experience namely, the Objects which one does not like but also from the positive objects which one really likes. Both the likes and the dislikes of the mind are two aspects of an involvement, and what pratyahara endeavours to accomplish is precisely the relief of the mind from involvement. Involvement is a kind of illness that has taken possession of the mind, from which it has to be freed, of which it has to be cured. Whether we have a positive like for a thing or a negative dislike for a thing, we are equally involved in either case. And both these are defects very serious impediments from the point of view of yoga.
Why this involvement has taken place, and what is the defect that is there behind it, cannot be understood as long as the mind is impinging upon the Object and clinging to it. The proper direction of the mind in a requisite manner can be effected only in a higher stage, which is called dharana, or concentration. But prior to this there is the need for bringing the mind back from the wrong direction that it has taken. Before we direct it in a proper way, we have to bring it back from the improper way it has taken. This is the meaning of pratyahara the mind has taken a wrong direction of action, and so we have to bring it back from that direction. It has taken a wrong course, and after we bring it back to the point from where it started on the wrong course, we direct it on a proper course.
The bringing of the mind back from its improper course is pratyahara, and the directing of the mind in a proper course is dharana, concentration. We can now appreciate the necessity for pratyahara. When you are persistently doing something wrong, and I expect you to do the right thing, first I would enlighten you as to the mistake that has been committed, and then inform you about the way of rectifying the situation: stop doing that which is improper, and then start to do that which is proper. The cessation of doing that which is improper is pratyahara, and the actual doing of the thing which is proper is dharana. But, as I mentioned, this is a painful process. Though we may philosophically argue with the mind that it has taken a wrong direction, it will not listen to this argument because it has got involved emotionally in that particular object towards which it is moving in a wrong manner. Though it is wrong in an ultimate sense, it also has to be noted, with sympathy in respect of the mind, that it has become one with the Object due to its recognition of a peculiar twisted value in that object, for the purpose of the fulfilment of which it is moving towards it. There is a need for viveka, a proper understanding of the whole circumstance under which the mind has got involved in this manner. Then only is it possible to wean the mind from the Object and bring it to the point of right concentration, which is real yoga.
The pain involved in pratyahara is the result of a love that the mind has for that object towards which it is wrongly moving. Inasmuch as the direction which the mind has taken towards the Object is wrong, the affection that it has towards the Object is also wrong, and the pleasure that it derives from the Object is also a misconstrued, misconceived idea. There is some complete topsy-turvy effect that has taken place on account of a basic error in the total attitude of the mind towards the Object. In an earlier sutra we have studied that, to the discriminative, all is pain in this world: dukham eva sarva vivekina (II.15). It is to the understanding spirit and to the mind that the painful aspect of a thing is made clear. But to an unclear mind, this painful aspect will not become obvious. Who can ever believe that the Objects of sense are made, or constituted, in a manner quite differently from the way in which they are seen by the eyes?
The belief in the concrete structure of an object and the stability of its position is so intense that any kind of contrary philosophical analysis will not be appreciated by the mind at that moment of time. Thus, while there is a need for a rational force of mind in the bringing of the mind back from the Object, there is also a need to consider the emotional aspect, which should not be completely forgotten, because the mind is made up of various aspects. Thinking is not the only aspect of the mind. It has the aspect of feeling, and there is the aspect of will. They all work together in connivance. When the mind thinks wrongly about an object, the will also works wrongly in respect of that object and confirms that thinking, and then the feeling charges it with the requisite force. It is like dacoits coming together; though they move in a wrong direction, they have a force of their own, so it is difficult to encounter all of them at once without proper precaution. The force that is behind the wrong activity of the mind is the emotion, and unless this force is withdrawn, we cannot check that activity.
Thus, in the effecting of the pratyahara or the abstraction of the mind from the Objects, we have to consider the thinking aspect, the willing aspect and also the feeling aspect. What are we thinking about that object towards which we are moving? What is the amount of will that we have exercised in fulfilling our wish? What is the deep-seated feeling that we have got in respect of it? All these three have to be isolated threadbare, if possible. The thinking, the willing and the feeling, though they all work together almost simultaneously, are three different aspects, and they can be pulled out independently like threads from a cloth. The most difficult thing to tackle is feeling, and less difficult to encounter is the will, and still less is the aspect of thinking. Therefore, in the beginning, it would be to the advantage of the seeker to analyse the easier aspect namely, the thinking aspect. What are we thinking about that object? Why did we go towards it? What is our intention behind it? Then we can go to the other aspect, which is the will. We have a determination for the purpose of confirming the attitude that we have adopted on account of a thought in respect of that object. But the deepest aspect of it is the emotion the feeling.
No pratyahara can be effective unless all these three aspects are properly analysed and isolated from the nature of the Object. Though the mind may not be thinking about the Object, there may be feeling towards it; then there is no pratyahara. Not only that the thinking, willing, feeling aspect has also a subconscious element in it, which also is to be probed into before complete mastery is gained. There may be a subtle restlessness at the time of the effecting of this practice. That restlessness may be due to the presence of a subconscious like for that very object from which the mind has been consciously withdrawn, which aspect is pointed out in a verse of the Bhagavadgita: rasavarjam rasopy asya para dv nivartate (B.G. II.59). The mind and the senses appear to be withdrawn from the Objects of sense in pratyahara, it is true. But how do we know that the mind and the senses have no taste for the Object? Hence, pratyahara is not merely a physical isolation or even a conscious disconnection of oneself from the Object, but is an emotional detachment that is necessary wherein alone is it possible to have no taste for a thing. The taste may go to the feeling; and as long as the taste is present, there is every possibility of the other aspects rising once again into action. As long as the root is there, there is every chance of the sprout coming up one day or the other.
Complete pratyahara is not practicable unless an aspect of concentration and meditation is combined with it. The positive side should also be brought into the role of the practice, to some extent at least. Just as in medical treatment, together with the particular prescription for the treatment of the illness we also give a constructive tonic so that there may not be a deleterious effect of the weakness of the system on account of an intensive treatment, likewise we have to be very cautious in dealing with the mind that in withdrawing the mind from objects, we are not merely focused on the aspect of withdrawing. We are not only emptying the mind and giving nothing else with which to fill it. There can be a parallel filling of the mind with a positive content, together with the emptying of it. Then the painful aspect of it will be mitigated to a large extent. We are not going to merely starve the mind and give it nothing. That would be a very difficult thing to stomach. Together with this starvation and the emptying or vacating of the mind gradually by detaching it from its usual objects of contact, it can also be positively filled with the content of dharana, whose winds will start blowing, gradually, with their own fragrance and solacing message, together with this deeper preceding stage of pratyahara or withdrawal.
1.083 - Choosing an Object for Concentration, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Dea bandha cittasya dhra (III.1). Tatra pratyaya ekatnat dhynam (III.2). These two sutras at the commencement of the Vibhuti Pada of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali define the processes of concentration and meditation. The fixing of the attention of the mind on a particular objective is called concentration, and the continuous flow of the mind uninterruptedly for a protracted period in respect of that objective is called meditation. This fixing of the mind on the Objective is itself a very difficult task, and the very fact that so much preparation had to be done in the form of yamas, niyamas, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, etc. for getting into this mood of concentration should prove the nature of the difficulty. The mind will not agree to concentration on anything exclusively because the structure of the mind is like a web which has its warps and woofs and is not a compact substance like a piece of diamond. It is a fabric constituted of various individual and isolated functions which get together into a so-called compactness and create the appearance of there being such a thing as a self-identical mind.
The mind is constituted, to some extent, in a way similar to the structure of the physical body. That means to say, even as the body is not a compact indivisible whole and is constituted of many, many minute parts, down to the most minute called cells and organisms, and yet the body appears to be a single concrete substance, so is the case with the mind. It is constituted of functions vrittis, as they are called and yet it appears to be a single entity. This singleness of its existence is an appearance, not a substantiality or reality, even as the single concrete presentation of the physical body is only an appearance. It is not there really. The peculiar structure of the mind namely, its internal disparity of character prevents it from focusing itself wholly on any objective. What is it that prevents the concentration of the mind on any one thing continuously? It is the mind itself. The nature of the mind is averse to the requisitions of concentration. Concentration is the flow of a single vritti, one continuous idea hammering itself upon an object that is presented before it. But the mind is not made up of a single idea. The mind has hundreds and thousands of ideas hidden within it, and it is made up of these ideas, like a cloth is made up of threads. Because of this composite character of the mind, which is made up of fine elements inside in the form of these vrittis, it becomes difficult for it to gather its forces into a single focus.
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The particular attention that the mind and the senses pay to a given object at a particular time is an indication of the preponderance of the particular vritti at that particular time in respect of that object, for the sake of fulfilment thereby. But the fulfilment by contact of the senses with the Objects is variegated, and it is not of any specific character. The reason why there is an endlessness of desires, and a continuous dissatisfaction felt even in spite of the fulfilment of desires, is due to the presence of infinite urges in the mind which want to press themselves forward in respect of their own objects. But, due to unfavourable conditions, all of them cannot press themselves forward at the same time. Though a hundred people may have a hundred desires in their minds, it may be that every desire cannot be fulfilled at the same time because of the different conditions which contri bute to the fulfilment of these desires, so each desire will raise its head at the appropriate moment. Hence, the mind is filled with these urges and is made up of these urges. How will we bring all these urges together in a compact mass and focus the whole of them into the direction of the Object of meditation?
The very first step is the most difficult step. This requires a very terrible adjustment of ideas. The sadhaka, the seeker, has to work very hard to introduce some sort of an organisation in the midst of the variegated ideas which run hither and thither in disparity just as the head of a family, if he is wise enough, may bring about some sort of an organisation in the family in spite of the fact that the members disagree among themselves, as otherwise there will be only disagreement and no such thing as a family. The very purpose of there being a head of the family is to introduce system into the chaos that would be there otherwise. The aspiration for the realisation of a higher goal acts like the head of a family which brings this disparity of ideas into a focused attention. It does not mean that the mind is really united in the act of concentration, or dharana. It is still disunited inside; therefore, there is a vast difference between the stage of dharana and the further advanced stages, which are yet to be reached, where there is a complete union of ideas. There is no such complete union in dharana there is still restlessness. But there is a force exerted upon the mind as a whole by the aspiration that is at the background of this effort at concentration.
The fixing of the mind on the point also implies the choosing of the point. What is the point on which we are concentrating? We have the traditional concept of the ishta devata, a term designating the nature of the Object of meditation, which gives a clue as to what sort of object it should be. It should be ishta and it should be our devata. Only then we can allow the mind to move towards it entirely. We must worship that object as our god or goddess, our deity, our alter-ego, our centre of affection, our love, our everything; that should be the Object. And, it is the dearest conceivable. There is nothing in this world so dear to us as that such a thing is called the ishta devata. What is there in this world which is so dear to us, which we worship as God Himself? Is there anything like that? If there was no such thing as that, it would have to be there; otherwise, the mind will not move towards the Object. How can the mind move towards an object which it does not regard as the highest ideal, which it regards as only one among the many? If the idea is that there is a possibility of other objects also, equally valuable as the one here presented, why should not the mind turn to other directions?
When there is an equal reality or value recognised in the other objects of the world, then there is every chance of the mind moving towards other objects also, because of an equal reality and value present there. Then there is no question of ishta or devata here. If there can be another ideal which is equal to this, this cannot be called ishta. The ishta is the highest conceivable object of affection and, therefore, it is necessary to feel the presence of the highest values in this object of meditation. Here the difficulty that one feels is really insurmountable, because there is no conceivable object in this world which can be regarded as the dearest, with nothing equal to it. How is it possible to imagine such an object? There are other things also equal to it; and as long as this feeling is there that other things are equal to it, there is a fallibility of concentration, a coming down of the aspiration and a lessening of the intensity of the process.
With a tremendous effort of will and understanding, we have to create an object of concentration if we have not got one already one which is physically available to us in this world. All that we need should be present in it. Only then the mind will go there. What is it that we need? Do we find it there in the Object of our concentration? If we are convinced that everything that we require, everything that is the ideal of our aspiration is present there, naturally there is a point in the mind going towards it. But if we think that our ideals and loves are somewhere else, then the mind will naturally go somewhere else and not to this object. So it is necessary at the outset to make an analysis of our needs, aspirations and requisitions. Why are we concentrating the mind at all? Why have we taken up this task? What is the purpose? The purpose is to achieve something. What is that something?
This something which we achieve, or wish to achieve through concentration, is something very difficult to understand in the beginning. People are very restless in their minds and incapable of thinking about one thing continuously, even for a few minutes. That is the reason why they cannot understand what is good for them. If we ask a person, What is it that you want? he cannot answer this question. He does not know what is good for him. Even a very intelligent man cannot answer this question, because this intelligence, ordinarily speaking, is useless when we come to this difficult problem of choosing the highest objective of ones life. Such a thing does not exist; it is not conceivable. Nobody has seen it and nobody can think about it. But now comes a time when it is necessary to pinpoint this object, and we cannot continue to hobnob with various other sense-objects, thinking that each one is equally good. If each one is equally good, even then, what prevents the mind from choosing one, since it is as good as the other? Why is it that the mind is restless?
Again we come to that original analysis of the nature of the mind why it is moving like that, from object to object. It has got many aims in intention, and these aims are nothing but the satisfaction of the different types of vrittis of which it is constituted. So it will not be amenable to any kind of pinpointing, because this pinpointing implies the satisfaction of a single vritti only, leaving the other vrittis unsatisfied. This is a difficulty which it feels, and a suspicion that it has got: You are trying to compel me to concentrate on one thing, so that I may get only that, but what about my other children who also ask for many things? If only one child is satisfied, the father is not happy. Other children are there, and they also have to be satisfied. So, what about the other children the other vrittis whom we have completely ignored, as it were, in our attempt at driving any one particular vritti only in the direction of the Object that we have chosen now? The mind cannot appreciate that this object of concentration is not going to be the fulfilment only of a single vritti that it is going to be the fulfilment of every vritti. It is something which can satisfy all our children and is not merely the goal of only one child. This is what the mind has to understand. But it will not understand.
the Objects in this world are, unfortunately, constituted in such a way that they can attract only a particular vritti at a particular time; they cannot attract all the vrittis. Hence, we are not accustomed to the conception of any object which can attract all the vrittis. Such a thing has not been seen in this world, and now we are saying that such a thing is possible. Is there anything which can draw the attention of the entire force of our mind at one stroke? We have not seen such a thing, and so we do not believe it when we are told that in yoga such a thing is possible. One thing that is important here is to make the mind awaken itself to this enlightenment that the Object of meditation is not the satisfaction of one vritti merely, like the Objects of the senses. It is the total aspiration of the whole structure of the mind getting fulfilled. The whole family will be happy, we must tell the mind, not merely one vritti.
The desires of the mind generally cannot get fulfilled, on account of an infinite craving that is behind the vrittis of the mind. It is not a finite desire that we have got; our desires are infinite. The reason is that we are in some way connected, rightly or wrongly, with something behind us that is endless. We are not completely cut off from the forces of nature, though it looks as if we are outside them. There is a pressure exerted by the vast reservoir of the entire nature, due to which it is not possible for any vritti to be satisfied entirely.
Therefore it is that no desire can be really satisfied, because the intention of a desire is not merely the contact of it with an object; it is a satisfaction that it seeks, not contact with objects. That satisfaction cannot come as long as the asker for the satisfaction is an infinite background. The infinite is asking for infinite joy through the little tunnel, or the pipe, which is the mind that connects the individual with the Objects. The whole ocean cannot pass through a pipe; it is not possible. But yet this is what is expected. We are trying the impossible; therefore, we can never be happy in this world. The impossibility of fulfilment of desire arises on account of an infinite urge that is at the background of a finite desire. This is a contradiction. A finite desire cannot comprehend or contain within itself the energy of an infinite asking, so we are kept in suspense at all moments of time. At any given moment of time we are forcefully driven to the Object for the achievement of a satisfaction which is really not in the hands of any vritti of the mind. This difficulty is there at the base of even the effort at concentration and meditation.
This difficulty has to be solved first, by proper viveka and vairagya a clear understanding of the difficulty in which we have been placed, the nature of the difficulty or the reason behind it, and the way out of it. How do we know that meditation is the remedy for all these problems? Why is it that we take to yoga? It is because we have got great sufferings in life. The whole of life is nothing but an endless medley of confusion, chaos and pain. We want to get out of this. That is why we take to yoga. But how do we know that yoga is the remedy for it? How is yoga going to rectify all these difficulties? Unless this is understood properly, the mind cannot be taken to the point of concentration. We cannot simply hear someone saying that yoga is the way, and then proceed. The mind has to be convinced that this is the remedy, and that this is the remedy because this is our problem. When we know the nature of the disease, we can also know the nature of the medicine. If we do not know the disease itself, how can we know the medicine? How can we know that yoga is the remedy unless we know what our problem is? So, what is the problem? What is the difficulty? What is the trouble? Why are we crying? What are we asking for? If this is clear to the mind, the way out of the problem also will be clear automatically. We will at once know that yoga is such a peculiar thing that there can be no other alternative for this problem.
As a little hint, I have mentioned what this problem is. It is the problem of fulfilment of desires nothing but that. The whole of life is nothing but this difficulty. The desires spontaneously arise in the mind but they cannot be fulfilled for various reasons, the main reason being that they are propelled by an infinite urge which seeks infinite satisfaction; but this cannot be achieved due to the little aperture through which the finite movement of the mind moves towards finite objects. Thus, the means adopted in the achievement of the Objective is defective. If the infinite urge within has to be satisfied, there should be an infinite means to fulfil it. We cannot have a finite means. The individual is finite, the senses are finite, the mind is finite, and the Objects also are finite. How can we have infinite satisfaction from them? But that the desire within is infinite is not known to us. We are cleverly screened away from this knowledge by a trick of nature which keeps the world going on. Otherwise, we will immediately wake up to the problem on hand, and then defeat nature of all its purposes.
Nature is very clever and will never allow us to know what her tricks are a great magician indeed. So we will not know what the magician is doing, and how things are coming up suddenly. We are placed in a very difficult context. We are always embarrassed and caught by both our ears, so that we cannot move either this way or that way. We cannot keep quiet and not attempt to fulfil the desires. That is one way we are caught. The other way is that we cannot be satisfied by any amount of satisfaction of desires. So we are caught the other way also. We cannot keep quiet and we cannot do anything. This is a problem. How is yoga going to be the remedy for it?
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When the cause is brought to the surface of consciousness, the problem is brought to the surface of consciousness and then we can deal with it directly in the manner required. This is what yoga does. In the great endeavour called concentration of mind, or dharana, we try to pull up to the surface of consciousness the infinitude of aspiration that is behind the desires of the mind which are limited in nature. If this is properly understood, we will know how and why the Object of concentration should be our ishta, because it is that which can fulfil the infinite longings of this infinite background. It is, really speaking, a symbol of all-round perfection that we place before ourselves as the Object of meditation. the Object of meditation is symbolic of perfection; it should have no defects. It should be artistically beautiful, philosophically sound and spiritually solacing. That is the nature of the Object of concentration, because if there is any defect either from the point of view of the understanding of the intellect or the appreciation of the aesthetic sense, or in any other manner the mind will not move towards this object. It should contain all the characteristics that are regarded as valuable in the world.
Thus, we have to superimpose, in the beginning, all those blessed qualities which we require to be satisfied in our mind, ordinarily speaking. This is a type of psychological analysis that we are making of the point on which the mind is to be fixed the desa, as the sutra puts it, to which the mind has to be tied. The mind cannot be tied to a point like that easily, unless all this background, or its history, is properly known. From this analysis we also come to the understanding that this point is not merely a dot on the wall, as many people imagine. Rather, it is a symbolic focusing point, a metaphorical point not a geometrical point which allows all the infinite characteristics of our longings to converge upon one point. It is the point, really speaking, where we find the satisfaction of our desires. Though the desires of the mind are endless, how is it that the mind sometimes rushes forward towards a single object? How does it become possible for the mind to see all perfection in a single object at the time when it runs towards the Object? That is because at that particular moment of time, the given object manages to attract towards itself all the values which the mind seeks. That becomes the converging point of all our longings for that particular time only. Afterwards, that object will withdraw itself and some other object will come to the forefront. So unless all our aspirations get focused at that particular point, it cannot become the point of concentration.
We now conclude that this point is not merely a physical point. It is more a type of conceptual point, or rather the centre of our affection, which cannot find a physical location anywhere. It cannot be seen in this world. Such is the intricacy that is involved in the choosing of the Object of meditation itself. This difficulty is a little bit obviated by the assistance that we receive from a Guru at the time of initiation.
1.089 - The Levels of Concentration, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The next sutra, which follows the descriptions given earlier, is tasya bhmiu viniyoga (III.6). The practice of absorption has to be applied to the different stages, or by different stages. The adjustment of thought in samyama is a total reconstitution of the mind, and it has to adapt itself in every way to the nature of the Object of samyama. There should not be even the least tinge of personality or self-affirmativeness when this adjustment with the Object is called for. We know very well that even to be a good friend, we have to do a lot of sacrifice. We cannot be an adamant egoist and then be a good friend of anybody, because friendship with anyone implies a capacity to adjust oneself with the living conditions of another person. If we stick to our own guns, we cannot have any friends.
Hence, this samyama is nothing but an entertainment of utter friendship with the Object and not merely friendship, but actual communion with the Object. For this purpose, it is necessary to understand the nature of the Object. If we do not know our friend, we cannot be a good friend to that person. The body, mind, soul and every type of environment of a person is to be understood very carefully, in every detail, in order that the friendship may be permanent. Likewise, the inner structure of the Object physical, subtle, as well as causal has to be grasped very well before samyama is attempted on the Object.
It has to be done by stages, says the sutra: tasya bhmiu viniyoga (III.6). The first stage, of course, is the grossest form of mental conception of the Object. It is essential that when we practise samyama on an object, we have to bear in mind every detail of the nature of the Object. It is not a bare, featureless perception. When I look at you, I do not look at the details of your bodily personality. I have only a general idea of your features. I may be seeing you every day for months together, and yet I may not be able to recollect the features of your face if I have not observed you properly, because observation of the details of the features of a personality is different from merely being acquainted with a person, even if it be for years together.
Samyama is not mere general acquaintance with an object in the sense of an ordinary social friendship. It is a very deep and thoroughgoing analysis of every bit of the constitution of the Object. Thus, yoga prescribes methods of very minute concentration on every detailed aspect of the Object, whatever that object be. It may be a bare physical object, an inanimate something; it may be a human form; it may be the concept of a celestial deity. Whatever be that object which has been chosen for the purpose of samyama, its details have to be borne in mind with great care because if some of the details are missed, the mind cannot absorb itself into those aspects which it has missed in its observation. The adjustment of the mind in a completeness and thoroughness with the nature of the Object is possible only if there is a thorough understanding of the structure of the Object.
Therefore, it is necessary that a detailed observation process be practised in the beginning. We have to observe, with a minute eye, every bit of the different aspects of the form of the Object, from head to foot, fix the mind on those aspects and not allow the mind to think of any other thing. In the beginning it will not be possible for the mind to fix itself on any single aspect exclusively. So, the method prescribed is to allow the mind to move from one aspect to another aspect of the same object. If we meditate on Lord Krishnas form, we conceive of His form from head to foot in various manners, right from the diadem down to the toenails. We cannot conceive the form at once, in its completeness, because the mind is not used to such forms of conception, so we take it part by part every aspect, every detail, every feature, colour and so on, of the Object. We allow the mind to roll like this, from top to bottom and bottom to top, again and again, until we are able to conceive the Object in its totality and the form of the Object grips us with a force which will draw the attention of the mind totally towards it. It should be like a powerful magnet drawing the mind towards it entirely, and not only in parts. the Object will not draw us entirely unless we have a clear concept of the entire object. Nothing in the world can draw us entirely, because we always have a partial and superficial observation of things. We never observe anything in detail. We are never used to such work. But here, a novelty is introduced in observation. A very methodical and acute observation is called for so that the mind is concentrated so concentrated that it has become practically one with that which it is contemplating.
The stages, as the sutra tells us the bhumis are the degrees of the manifestation of the nature of the Object. It is very difficult to explain to a novitiate what actually is the series of the stages of the development of an object. Any object, for the matter of that, is a very complex structure. It has deep details involved within its being which cannot easily be observed with the naked eye. The implications go deeper and deeper as we begin to conceive the details of the Object more and more, with greater and greater attention.
Before we try to touch upon what exactly is in the mind of the author of the sutra when he speaks of the bhumis, or the stages of meditation, I shall give you a gross commonplace example of how we can take the mind deeper and deeper into the nature of an object. Take a currency note. What do we see there? We see a great meaning. That is the first thing that we see in a currency note. We see a purchasing power, a value, a capacity, a treasure, something worthwhile and very commendable. This is all we can conceive when we cast our eyes on a governments currency note. It is, for the non-critical attention of the mind, a value and not a substance. This is the distinction, because its substance is something different from the value that we see in it. We always mix up two things when we see any object in this world. The substance gets buried under the value that we see. The substance of a child is different from the value that a mother sees in that child and so on, with respect to any object.
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Now we see that the concept that we have about the Object called the currency note is not to be identified with the substance of the note. This much is clear now. What is the currency note made of? It is not made up of the purchasing power, as we are thinking. It is made up of paper that is all. The purchasing power is an investiture upon it, a kind of superimposition, which is a meaning that we have foisted upon it for various reasons. Now we have gone one step above in our analysis of the Object. From the stage of calling it a currency note, we have come to the higher stage of calling it a piece of paper, which is the reality behind the currency note. It was paper even previously, but we did not want to call it paper, for reasons of our own. When I show you a thousand-rupee currency note, you will not say, Here is a piece of paper. You will say, Here is a note. We have a new name for it, coined for our practical convenience, notwithstanding the fact that it remains paper even today, as it will be one day after its value is negated by the governments orders.
Thus, the capacity of the mind to lay itself upon the substance of the note, divested of the value that has been superimposed upon it, will be the next step the next higher stage of contemplation. Now we begin to see the paper rather than the note. The idea of note has gone. We call it paper. But is paper the real substance of what we see there? What is paper? It is a name that we give to a peculiar form that wooden pulp has taken. Paper is nothing but wooden pulp which has been made malleable and flattened by a mechanical process in the factory; and we have a coloured piece of wooden pulp before us, which we call paper. We remove the idea of paper from our minds because that is only a name that we have coined to designate a particular form taken by a wooden pulp. What is there? What is the substance of paper? It is pulp, made of wood. From the currency note we have gone to paper, from paper we have gone to wooden pulp. What is the wooden pulp made of?
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See where we have gone now from a currency note we have gone to the electric energy. This so-called currency note of so many dollars, pounds or rupees is nothing but electric energy which has been compounded into grosser substances, and we have given an appellation to each stage of the development of this object in its grossified forms. In the subtlest form we call it electrical energy; when it grossifies we call it chemical substance; when it grossifies further we call it wooden pulp; still grosser we call it paper; then further we invest it with some imaginary value called money. This is what has happened to all the Objects in the world. The Yoga Sutras tell us that this is not the way of looking at things. We cannot have samyama on an object, we cannot enter into the nature of an object, we cannot commune with the Object, we cannot become the Object, unless we know what the Object is. We have ultimately found out that the so-called currency note is something quite different from what we are conceiving in our mind at the present moment. The stages, or the bhumis, which the sutra refers to here are the stages of the development of the manifestation of the Object.
To refresh our memory, we can go back to one or two definitions of Patanjali given in the Samadhi Pada, which we studied long ago. The gross form of the Object is a compound of several factors, says Patanjali: tatra abda artha jna vikalpai sa
kr savitark sampatti (I.42). This was told to us in the Samadhi Pada. When we look at an object, we have three ideas jumbled together the Object as such, the name that we have given to it, and the idea that we have about it. These three go together. Our idea about the Object is reinforced by the name that we have given to it. The idea and the name jointly prevent our proper evaluation of the nature of the Object as it is. It is my daughter. This idea, my daughter, my son, prevents us from knowing the nature of that person independently. We know very well what is the difference between our son and somebody elses son. There is a tremendous difference, though the substances behind these two persons are identical in every respect. the Object that is the base of this concept called son is of the same nature in either case, but a tremendous gulf is created by the mind in its definitions. The definitions have so much meaning.
What is a definition? It is nothing but a characterisation of an object in terms of our notion about that object. The moment we say, It is my son, there is so much meaning implied in that statement. If it is somebody elses son, that is another thing altogether. Why has such a meaning been foisted upon the Object? It is because the idea is connected with the Object, and the name is also there, together with it. We distinguish one of our sons from another of our sons by a name that we give. He is Rama. That is Gopal. They are only two words empty sounds that we have uttered. They themselves have no meaning, but they assume a meaning on account of their getting identified with the Object, so that the word Rama, or Krishna, or Gopala etc., which are the names of our children, evoke in our minds certain feelings. The name generates or stirs certain ideas in the mind, and this name which stirs ideas in the mind will not allow us to have a correct concept of the Object as it is. Our son is the most beautiful of all people. He is beautiful because he is our son.
There is an old story of a barber. He had a son who he thought was the most beautiful. The king of the country ordered the people to bring the most handsome of people. The barber brought his own son. He said, I think this is the most charming boy. The barber thought he was charming because he was his son that is all. Otherwise what is the charm? He was an unattractive fellow! Anyhow, the idea is so predominant in the mind that it will not allow us to have an impersonal, dispassionate idea of the Object. And samyama on the Object is not possible as long as we do not have a dispassionate definition of the Object in our mind. There should not be an emotional content in that definition. We should not say, It is mine. This is no good. It may be anybodys even then, it has a value.
The sutra, tatra abda artha jna vikalpai sa
kr savitark sampatti (I.42), tells us that the gross form of samyama is in the form of the envisagement of the Object as it is defined by a mix-up of the essential nature of the Object, together with the name and the idea of it. But when the name and the idea are withdrawn, the Object stands in its pristine purity. When we can conceive the Object independent of our idea about it and divested of the name that we have foisted upon it, we go to nirvitarka: smtipariuddhau svarpanye ivaarthamtranirbhs nirvitark (I.43). But nobody can reach that state, however much we may scratch our heads. We cannot go even one step above. We are always in the lowest because who can be free from the idea of the Object and the name that is attached to the Object? When we look at the tree, we have an idea of tree: It is a tree. We have attached some name to that particular substance which we call by this name or that name. The independent concept of an object, free from ideational evaluations, is difficult because we have been brought up in an atmosphere of prejudice. Yoga is against all prejudice. We must be thoroughly dispassionate and impersonal to the core if we want to know the nature of anything in this world.
That is what we are trying to achieve by samyama. Tasya bhmiu viniyoga (III.6). The bhumis, or the levels of concentration, which are suggested in this sutra are the levels mentioned in the Samadhi Pada where the various levels of samadhis, or samapattis, are described. The grossest form of the Object as it is visible to the ordinary, conceptual mind is the first stage of concentration. We take the Object as it is, in the manner we are able to conceive it, think of it, etc. Then, we try to free it from the associations that we have created in respect of it by thinking of it as lovable or not loveable, pleasurable or otherwise, liked or not liked, tall or short, etc. An object is neither tall nor short this also is a very important thing to remember. Tallness and shortness, thickness and thinness, etc., are relative terms. If I bring before you a shirt and ask you, Is it a big shirt or a small shirt? you cannot say it is big or small because it depends upon the person. If it is a small child, he will say it is too big; if it is for a big man, he will say it is too small. We cannot say anything about any object unless we compare it with something else. This comparison should be removed. We must take it as it is; and nothing can be more difficult than this task.
We cannot take anything as it is. We cannot take our own selves as we really are. Even we are invested with certain false values. We are really something different from what we appear. Everyone knows that. Likewise, everything else is different from what we think about it, so that there is a complete confusion in every kind of perception of the world. This is why we call it a world of relativities, where every characteristic hangs on something else. Independently, nothing is known. Hence the stages, or the bhumis, or the levels of the practice of samyama are the gradual characterisations of the Object, going deeper and deeper, freeing it more and more from external association.
Ultimately, what is in the mind of Patanjali is that we have to meditate upon the various stages through which prakriti passes in the manifestation of this world, the grossest of them being the five elements earth, water, fire, air and ether of which every physical object is made. What he expects us to do is to resolve every object into the five elements. We do not see a son, a daughter, etc.; we see only the five elements, because they are resolvable into these five elements. The body of that person, the body of this object, or whatever it is, is capable of reduction to the level of the five physical elements of which they are constituted.
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
of whatever nature, and suppress all thoughts by a direct concentration upon a single thought which itself is finally banished. Fichtean philosophy has shown us that the contents of the mind at any moment consisted of two things : the Object or Non-Ego, which is variable, and the Subject or Ego, apparently invariable. Success in meditation pro- duces the result of making the Object as invariable as the subject, this coming as a terrific shock, for a union takes place and the two become one. Rabbi Baer, the Chassidic successor of Israel Baal Shem Tov, taught that when one becomes so absorbed in the contemplation of an object that the whole power of thought is concentrated upon the one point then the self becomes blended and unified with that point. This is the mystical Marriage so often referred to in occult literature, and concerning which so many extrava- gant symbols have been employed. This union has the effect of utterly overthrowing the whole normal balance of the mind, throwing all the poetic, emotional, and spiritual faculties into a sublime ecstasy, making at the same time the rest of life seem absolutely banal. It comes as a tre- mendous experience altogether indescribable even to those who are masters of language, remaining only as a wonder- ful memory - perfect in all its details.
During this state all conditions of limitation such as time and space and thought are wholly abolished. It is impos- sible to explain the real implication of this fact ; only repeated experience can furnish one with apprehension.
1.08 - Independence from the Physical, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
submerged in Matter, has grown accustomed to depending upon outer organs and antennas to perceive the world; and since we have seen the antennas appear before the master of the antennas, we have childishly concluded that the antennas have created the master, and that without antennas there is no master, no perception of the world. But this is an illusion. Our dependence upon the senses is merely a habit true, a millenary one, but no more inescapable than the flintstone implements of the Chellean man: It is possible for the mind and it would be natural for it, if it could be persuaded to liberate itself from its consent to the domination of matter, to take direct cognizance of the Objects of sense without the aid of the sense-organs.91 We can see and feel across continents as if distances did not exist, because distance is an obstacle only to the body and its organs, not to consciousness, which can reach anywhere it wishes in a second, provided it has learned to expand itself; there is another, lighter space where all is together in a flash point. Here we might expect to receive some "recipe" for clairvoyance or ubiquity, but recipes are just another kind of machinery, which is why we are so fond of them. True, hatha yoga can be effective, as can many other kinds of yogic exercises, such as concentrating on a lighted candle (tratak), evolving infallible diets,
doing breathing exercises and choking scientifically (pranayama).
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independent of illnesses, and, to a large extent, independent of food and sleep, once it has discovered the inexhaustible reservoir of the great Force of Life; it can even be independent of the body. When the current of consciousness-force in us is sufficiently individualized, we find that we can detach it not only from the senses and the Objects of the senses, but also from the body. First in our meditations, which are the primary training ground prior to natural mastery, we observe that 93
Letters on Yoga, 22:314
1.08 - Information, Language, and Society, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
ket. We are too much in tune with the Objects of our investiga-
tion to be good probes. In short, whether our investigations in
1.08 - Origin of Rudra: his becoming eight Rudras, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
"Then Dakṣa, frightened, alarmed, and agitated, his eyes suffused with tears, raised his hands reverentially to his brow, and said, 'If, lord, thou art pleased; if I have found favour in thy sight; if I am to be the Object of thy benevolence; if thou wilt confer upon me a boon, this is the blessing I solicit, that all these provisions for the solemn sacrifice, which have been collected with much trouble and during a long time, and which have now been eaten, drunk, devoured, burnt, broken, scattered abroad, may not have been prepared in vain.' 'So let it be,' replied Hara, the subduer of Indra. And thereupon Dakṣa knelt down upon the earth, and praised gratefully the author of righteousness, the three-eyed god Mahādeva, repeating the eight thousand names of the deity whose emblem is a bull."
Footnotes and references:
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[3]: The Kūrma P. gives also this discussion between Dadhīca and Dakṣa, and their dialogue contains some curious matter. Dakṣa, for instance, states that no portion of a sacrifice is ever allotted to Śiva, and no prayers are directed to be addressed to him, or to his bride. Dadhīca apparently evades the Objection, and claims a share for Rudra, consisting of the triad of gods, as one with the sun, who is undoubtedly hymned by the several ministering priests of the Vedas. Dakṣa replies, that the twelve Ādityas receive special oblations; that they are all the suns; and p. 64 that he knows of no other. The Munis, who overhear the dispute, coñcur in his sentiments. These notions seem to have been exchanged for others in the days of the Padma P. and Bhāgavata, as they place Dakṣa's neglect of Śiva to the latter's filthy practices, his going naked, smearing himself with ashes, carrying a skull, and behaving as if he were drunk or crazed: alluding, no doubt, to the practices of Śaiva mendicants, who seem to have abounded in the days of Śa
kara Ācārya, and since. There is no discussion in the Bhāgavata, but Rudra is described as present at a former assembly, when his father-in-law censured him before the guests, and in consequence he departed in a rage. His follower Nandī curses the company, and Bhrigu retorts in language descriptive of the Vāmācāris, or left hand worshippers of Śiva. "May all those," he says, "who adopt the worship of Bhava (Śiva), all those who follow the practices of his worshippers, become heretics, and oppugners of holy doctrines; may they neglect the observances of purification; may they be of infirm intellects, wearing clotted hair, and ornamenting themselves with ashes and bones; and may they enter the Śaiva initiation, in which spirituous liquor is the libation."
1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
possibly be the Object of human education to create an anarchic
conglomeration of individual existences. That would be too much like the
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul [the Over-Soul, the World Soul]. . . . And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the Object, are one.11
In his famous "transparent eyeball" section from the essay Nature, Emerson speaks movingly of the union of the
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When one is no longer concerned with the Where, the When, the Why and the What-for of things, but only and alone with the What, and lets go even of all abstract thoughts about them, intellectual concepts and consciousness, but instead of all that, gives over the whole force of one's spirit to the act of perceiving, becomes absorbed in it and lets every bit of one's consciousness be filled in the quiet contemplation of the natural object immediately present-be it a landscape, a tree, a rock, a building, or anything else at all; actually and fully losing oneself in the Object\: forgetting one's individuality, one's will, and remaining there only as a pure subject, a clear mirror to the Object-so that it is as though the Object alone were there, without anyone regarding it, and to such a degree that one might no longer distinguish the beholder from the act of beholding, [then] the two have become one. . . .20
Schopenhauer's "clear mirror to the Object" is, of course, Emerson's "transparent eyeball," which is perfectly transpersonal, or no longer merely individual. Schopenhauer: "The person absorbed in this mode of seeing is no longer an individual-the individual has lost himself in the perception-but is a pure, will-less, painless, timeless,
Subject of Apprehension." The Over-Soul as intimation of the pure and timeless Witness. . . .
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Whoever does not leave all external aspects of creatures can neither be received into this divine birth nor be born. The more you are able to bring all your powers to a unity and a forgetfulness of all the Objects and images you have absorbed, and the more you depart from creatures and their images, the nearer and more receptive you are. If you were able to become completely unaware of all things, attain a forgetfulness of things and of self, the more [there is] the silent darkness where you will come to a recognition of the unknown, transbegotten God. For this ignorance draws you away from all knowledge about things, and beyond this it draws you away from yourself.49
Like Eckhart, Sri Ramana Maharshi, India's greatest modern sage, begins by merely giving us some verbal pointers and information about the Self and its relation to God (and Godhead). But he will soon, we will see, go beyond mere chatter and point directly to the unknown and unknowing Source. So here he speaks in "positive" terms, before drawing us into Divine Ignorance.
1.08 - The Gods of the Veda - The Secret of the Veda, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The word vja, usually rendered by Sayana, food or ghee,a sense which he is swift to foist upon any word which will at all admit that construction, as well as on some which will not admit it,has in other passages another sense assigned to it, strength, bala. It is the latter significance or its basis of substance & solidity which I propose to attach to vja in every line of the Rigveda where it occursand it occurs with an abundant frequency. There are a number of words in the Veda which have to be rendered by the English strength,bala, taras, vja, sahas, avas, to mention only the most common expressions. Can it be supposed that all these vocables rejoice in one identical connotation as commentators and lexicographers would lead us to conclude, and are used in the Veda promiscuously & indifferently to express the same idea of strength? The psychology of human language is more rich and delicate. In English the words strength, force, vigour, robustness differ in their mental values; force can be used in offices of expression to which strength and vigour are ineligible. In Vedic Sanscrit, as in every living tongue, the same law holds and a literary and thoughtful appreciation of its documents, whatever may be the way of the schools, must take account of these distinctions. In the brief list I have given, bala answers to the English strength, taras gives a shade of speed and impetuosity, sahas of violence or force, avas of flame and brilliance, vja of substance and solidity. In the philological appendix to this work there will be found detailed reasons for concluding that strength is in the history of the word vja only a secondary sense, like its other meanings, wealth and food; the basic idea is a strong sufficiency of substance or substantial energy. Vja is one of the great standing terms of the Vedic psychology. All states of being, whether matter, mind or life and all material, mental & vital activities depend upon an original flowing mass of Energy which is in the vivid phraseology of the Vedas called a flood or sea, samudra, sindhu or arnas. Our power or activity in any direction depends first on the amount & substantiality of this stream as it flows into, through or within our own limits of consciousness, secondly, on our largeness of being constituted by the wideness of those limits, thirdly, on our power of holding the divine flow and fourthly on the force and delight which enter into the use of our available Energy. The result is the self-expression, ansa or vyakti, which is the Objective of Vedic Yoga. In the language of the Rishis whatever we can make permanently ours is called our holding or wealth, dhanam or in the plural dhanni; the powers which assist us in the getting, keeping or increasing of our dhanni, the yoga, s ti & vriddhi, are the gods; the powers which oppose & labour to rob us of this wealth are our enemies & plunderers, dasyus, and appear under various names, Vritras, Panis, Daityas, Rakshasas, Yatudhanas. The wealth itself may be the substance of mental light and knowledge or of vital health, delight & longevity or of material strength & beauty or it may be external possessions, cattle, progeny, empire, women. A close, symbolic and to modern ideas mystic parallelism stood established in the Vedic mind between the external & the internal wealth, as between the outer sacrifice which earned from the gods the external wealth & the inner sacrifice which brought by the aid of the gods the internal riches. In this system the word vja represents that amount & substantial energy of the stuff of force in the dhanam brought to the service of the sacrificer for the great Jivayaja, our daily & continual life-sacrifice. It is a substantial wealth, vjavad dhanam that the gods are asked to bring with them. We see then in what sense Saraswati, a goddess purely mental in her functions of speech and knowledge, can be vjebhir vjinvat. Vjin is that which is composed of vja, substantial energy; the plural vj h or vj ni the particular substantialities of various composed. For the rest, to no other purpose can a deity of speech & knowledge be vjebhir vjinvat. In what appropriateness or coherent conceivable sense can the goddess of knowledge be possessed of material wealth or full-stored with material food, ghee & butter, beef & mutton? If it be suggested that Speech of the mantras was believed by these old superstitious barbarians to bring them their ghee & butter, beef & mutton, the answer is that this is not what the language of the hymns expresses. Saraswati herself is said to be vjinvat, possessed of substance of food; she is not spoken of as being the cause of fullness of food or wealth to others.
This explanation of vjebhir vjinvat leads at once to the figurative sense of maho arnas. Arnas or samudra is the image of the sea, flood or stream in which the Vedic seers saw the substance of being and its different states. Sometimes one great sea, sometimes seven streams of being are spoken of by the Rishis; they are the origin of the seven seas of the Purana. It cannot be doubted that the minds of the old thinkers were possessed with this image of ocean or water as the very type & nature of the flux of existence, for it occurs with a constant insistence in the Upanishads. The sole doubt is whether the image was already present to the minds of the primitive Vedic Rishis. The Europeans hold that these were the workings of a later imagination transfiguring the straightforward material expressions & physical ideas of the Veda; they admit no real parentage of Vedantic ideas in the preexistent Vedic notions, but only a fictitious derivation. I hold, on the contrary, that Vedantic ideas have a direct & true origin & even a previous existence in the religion & psychology of the Vedas. If, indeed, there were no stuff of high thinking or moral sensibility in the hymns of the Vedic sages, then I should have no foundation to stand upon and no right to see this figure in the Vedic arnas or samudra. But when these early minds,early to us, but not perhaps really so primitive in human history as we imagine,were capable of such high thoughts & perceptions as these three Riks bear on their surface, it would be ridiculous to deny them the capacity of conceiving these great philosophical images & symbols. A rich poetic imagery expressing a clear, direct & virgin perception of the facts of mind and being, is not by any means impossible, but rather natural in these bright-eyed sons of the morning not yet dominated in their vision by the dry light of the intellect or in their speech & thought by the abstractions & formalities of metaphysical thinking. Water was to them, let us hold in our hypothesis, the symbol of unformed substance of being, earth of the formed substance. They even saw a mystic identity between the thing symbolised & the symbol.
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Brahmni therefore may mean either the soul-activities, as dhiyas means the mental activities, or it may mean the words of the mantra which express the soul. If we take it in the latter sense, we must refer it to the girah of the second rik, the mantras taken up by the Aswins into the understanding in order to prepare for action & creation. Indra is to come to these mantras and support them by the brilliant substance of a mental force richly varied in its effulgent manifestation, controlled by the understanding and driven forward to its task in various ways. But it seems to me that the rendering is not quite satisfactory. The main point in this hymn is not the mantras, but the Soma wine and the power that it generates. It is in the forces of the Soma that the Aswins are to rejoice, in that strength they are to take up the girah, in that strength they are to rise to their fiercest intensity of strength & delight. Indra, as mental power, arrives in his richly varied lustre; yhi chitrabhno. Here says the Rishi are these life-forces in the nectar-wine; they are purified in their minute parts & in their whole extent, for so I understand anwbhis tan ptsah; that is to say the distillings of Ananda or divine delight whether in the body as nectar, [or] in the subjective system as streams of life-giving delight are purified of all that impairs & weakens the life forces, purified both in their little several movements & in the whole extent of their stream. These are phenomena that can easily be experienced & understood in Yoga, and the whole hymn like many in the Veda reads to those who have experience like a practical account of a great Yogic internal movement accurate in its every detail. Streng thened, like the Aswins, by the nectar, Indra is to prepare the many-sided activity supported by the Visve devah; therefore he has to come not only controlled by the understanding, dhishnya, like the Aswins, but driven forward in various paths. For an energetic & many-sided activity is the Object & for this there must be an energetic and many-sided but well-ordered action of the mental power. He has to come, thus manifold, thus controlled, to the spiritual activities generated by the Soma & the Aswins in the increasing soul (vghatah) full of the life-giving nectar, the immortalising Ananda, sutvatah. He has to come to those soul-activities, in this substance of mental brilliancy, yhi upa brahmni harivas. He has to come, ttujna, with a protective force, or else with a rapidly striving force & uphold by mind the joy of the Sacrificer in the nectar-offering, the offering of this Ananda to the gods of life & action & thought, sute dadhishwa na chanah. Protecting is, here, the best sense for ttujna. For Indra is not only to support swift & energetic action; that has already been provided for; he has also to uphold or bear in mind and by the power of mind the great & rapid delight which the Sacrificer is about to pour out into life & action, jvayja. The divine delight must not fail us in our activity; hostile shocks must not be allowed to disturb our established pleasure in the great offering. Therefore Indra must be there in his light & power to uphold and to protect.
We have gained, therefore, another great step in the understanding of the Veda. The figure of the mighty Indra, in his most essential quality & function, begins to appear to us as in a half-luminous silhouette full of suggestions. We have much yet to learn about him, especially his war with Vritra, his thunderbolt & his dealings with the seven rivers. But the central or root idea is fixed. The rest is the outgrowth, foliage & branchings.
1.08 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Form, taste, smell, sound, and touch-these are the Objects. It is extremely difficult to get rid of the consciousness of objects. And one cannot realize 'I am He' as long as one is aware of objects.
"The sannyasi is very little conscious of worldly objects. But the householder is always engrossed in them. Therefore it is good for him to feel, 'I am the servant of God.'"
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Women perform a ritualistic worship known as the 'Ananta-vrata', the Object of worship being the Infinite. But actually the Deity worshipped is Vishnu. In Him are the 'infinite'
forms of God.
1.08 - The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
5:In a sense all our experience is psychological since even what we receive by the senses, has no meaning or value to us till it is translated into the terms of the sense-mind, the Manas of Indian philosophical terminology. Manas, say our philosophers, is the sixth sense. But we may even say that it is the only sense and that the others, vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste are merely specialisations of the sense-mind which, although it normally uses the sense-organs for the basis of its experience, yet exceeds them and is capable of a direct experience proper to its own inherent action. As a result psychological experience, like the cognitions of the reason, is capable in man of a double action, mixed or dependent, pure or sovereign. Its mixed action takes place usually when the mind seeks to become aware of the external world, the Object; the pure action when it seeks to become aware of itself, the subject. In the former activity, it is dependent on the senses and forms its perceptions in accordance with their evidence; in the latter it acts in itself and is aware of things directly by a sort of identity with them. We are thus aware of our emotions; we are aware of anger, as has been acutely said, because we become anger. We are thus aware also of our own existence; and here the nature of experience as knowledge by identity becomes apparent. In reality, all experience is in its secret nature knowledge by identity; but its true character is hidden from us because we have separated ourselves from the rest of the world by exclusion, by the distinction of ourself as subject and everything else as object, and we are compelled to develop processes and organs by which we may again enter into communion with all that we have excluded. We have to replace direct knowledge through conscious identity by an indirect knowledge which appears to be caused by physical contact and mental sympathy. This limitation is a fundamental creation of the ego and an instance of the manner in which it has proceeded throughout, starting from an original falsehood and covering over the true truth of things by contingent falsehoods which become for us practical truths of relation.
6:From this nature of mental and sense knowledge as it is at present organised in us, it follows that there is no inevitable necessity in our existing limitations. They are the result of an evolution in which mind has accustomed itself to depend upon certain physiological functionings and their reactions as its normal means of entering into relation with the material universe. Therefore, although it is the rule that when we seek to become aware of the external world, we have to do so indirectly through the sense-organs and can experience only so much of the truth about things and men as the senses convey to us, yet this rule is merely the regularity of a dominant habit. It is possible for the mind - and it would be natural for it, if it could be persuaded to liberate itself from its consent to the domination of matter, - to take direct cognisance of the Objects of sense without the aid of the sense-organs. This is what happens in experiments of hypnosis and cognate psychological phenomena. Because our waking consciousness is determined and limited by the balance between mind and matter worked out by life in its evolution, this direct cognisance is usually impossible in our ordinary waking state and has therefore to be brought about by throwing the waking mind into a state of sleep which liberates the true or subliminal mind. Mind is then able to assert its true character as the one and allsufficient sense and free to apply to the Objects of sense its pure and sovereign instead of its mixed and dependent action. Nor is this extension of faculty really impossible but only more difficult in our waking state, - as is known to all who have been able to go far enough in certain paths of psychological experiment.
7:The sovereign action of the sense-mind can be employed to develop other senses besides the five which we ordinarily use. For instance, it is possible to develop the power of appreciating accurately without physical means the weight of an object which we hold in our hands. Here the sense of contact and pressure is merely used as a starting-point, just as the data of sense-experience are used by the pure reason, but it is not really the sense of touch which gives the measure of the weight to the mind; that finds the right value through its own independent perception and uses the touch only in order to enter into relation with the Object. And as with the pure reason, so with the sensemind, the sense-experience can be used as a mere first point from which it proceeds to a knowledge that has nothing to do with the sense-organs and often contradicts their evidence. Nor is the extension of faculty confined only to outsides and superficies. It is possible, once we have entered by any of the senses into relation with an external object, so to apply the Manas as to become aware of the contents of the Object, for example, to receive or to perceive the thoughts or feelings of others without aid from their utterance, gesture, action or facial expressions and even in contradiction of these always partial and often misleading data. Finally, by an utilisation of the inner senses, - that is to say, of the sense-powers, in themselves, in their purely mental or subtle activity as distinguished from the physical which is only a selection for the purposes of outward life from their total and general action, - we are able to take cognition of sense-experiences, of appearances and images of things other than those which belong to the organisation of our material environment. All these extensions of faculty, though received with hesitation and incredulity by the physical mind because they are abnormal to the habitual scheme of our ordinary life and experience, difficult to set in action, still more difficult to systematise so as to be able to make of them an orderly and serviceable set of instruments, must yet be admitted, since they are the invariable result of any attempt to enlarge the field of our superficially active consciousness whether by some kind of untaught effort and casual ill-ordered effect or by a scientific and well-regulated practice.
8:None of them, however, leads to the aim we have in view, the psychological experience of those truths that are "beyond perception by the sense but seizable by the perceptions of the reason", buddhigrahyam atndriyam.2 They give us only a larger field of phenomena and more effective means for the observation of phenomena. The truth of things always escapes beyond the sense. Yet is it a sound rule inherent in the very constitution of universal existence that where there are truths attainable by the reason, there must be somewhere in the organism possessed of that reason a means of arriving at or verifying them by experience. The one means we have left in our mentality is an extension of that form of knowledge by identity which gives us the awareness of our own existence. It is really upon a selfawareness more or less conscient, more or less present to our conception that the knowledge of the contents of our self is based. Or to put it in a more general formula, the knowledge of the contents is contained in the knowledge of the continent. If then we can extend our faculty of mental self-awareness to awareness of the Self beyond and outside us, Atman or Brahman of the Upanishads, we may become possessors in experience of the truths which form the contents of the Atman or Brahman in the universe. It is on this possibility that Indian Vedanta has based itself. It has sought through knowledge of the Self the knowledge of the universe.
1.08 - The Plot must be a Unity., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, to centre round an action that in our sense of the word is one. As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when the Object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.
author class:Aristotle
1.08 - The Splitting of the Human Personality during Spiritual Training, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
with the Objects of his daily physical environment.
These characteristics of life during sleep or in dreams illustrate what is continually taking place in the human being. The soul lives in uninterrupted activity in the higher worlds, even gathering from them the impulse to act upon the physical body. Ordinarily unconscious of his higher life, the esoteric student renders himself conscious of it, and thereby his whole life becomes transformed. As long as the soul remains unseeing in the higher sense it is guided by superior cosmic beings. And just as the life of a person born blind is changed, through a successful operation, from its previous dependence on a guide, so too is the life of a person changed through esoteric training. He outgrows the principle of being guided by a master and must henceforward undertake to be his own guide. The moment this occurs he is, of course, liable to commit errors totally unknown to ordinary consciousness. He acts now from a world from which, formerly, higher powers unknown to him influenced him. These higher powers are directed by the universal cosmic harmony.
1.08 - The Synthesis of Movement, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
But it is precisely in the apparent inertia of Matter that is hidden the secret of the relative movements return towards the absolute movement and of a correlative ascent of the being towards the Impersonal. It is there that by a veritable magic the Objective and analytical movements of the elements are transmuted into the synthetic, abstract and subjective movements which are those of the internal life and the conscient ego.
While in the successive states of pre-physical manifestation the universal movement slackened more and more in order to give birth to diverse vibrations without any limitation of the space offered for its development, in the physical state on the contrary that movement inclosed in the infinitesimal circle of the atom is transformed into vibrations of a rapidity increasing with the limitation of its field into a whirl the more vertiginous, the more it is internal.
1.08 - Worship of Substitutes and Images, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
But where Brahman Himself is the Object of worship, and the Pratika stands only as a substitute or a suggestion thereof, that is to say, where, through the Pratika the omnipresent Brahman is worshipped the Pratika itself being idealised into the cause of all, Brahman the worship is positively beneficial; nay, it is absolutely necessary for all mankind until they have all got beyond the primary or preparatory state of the mind in regard to worship. When, therefore, any gods or other beings are worshipped in and for themselves, such worship is only a ritualistic Karma; and as a Vidy (science) it gives us only the fruit belonging to that particular Vidya; but when the Devas or any other beings are looked upon as Brahman and worshipped, the result obtained is the same as by the worshipping of Ishvara. This explains how, in many cases, both in the Shrutis and the Smritis, a god, or a sage, or some other extraordinary being is taken up and lifted, as it were, out of his own nature and idealised into Brahman, and is then worshipped. Says the Advaitin, "Is not everything Brahman when the name and the form have been removed from it?" "Is not He, the Lord, the innermost Self of every one?" says the Vishishtdvaitin.
"The fruition of even the worship of Adityas etc. Brahman Himself bestows, because He is the Ruler of all." Says Shankara in his Brahma-Sutra-Bhsya
"Here in this way does Brahman become the Object of worship, because He, as Brahman, is superimposed on the Pratikas, just as Vishnu etc. are superimposed upon images etc."
The same ideas apply to the worship of the Pratimas as to that of the Pratikas; that is to say, if the image stands for a god or a saint, the worship is not the result of Bhakti, and does not lead lo liberation; but if it stands for the one God, the worship thereof will bring both Bhakti and Mukti. Of the principal religions of the world we see Vedantism, Buddhism, and certain forms of Christianity freely using images; only two religions, Mohammedanism and Protestantism, refuse such help. Yet the Mohammedans use the grave of their saints and martyrs almost in the place of images; and the Protestants, in rejecting all concrete helps to religion, are drifting away every year farther and farther from spirituality till at present there is scarcely any difference between the advanced Protestants and the followers of August Comte, or agnostics who preach ethics alone. Again, in Christianity and Mohammedanism whatever exists of image worship is made to fall under that category in which the Pratika or the Pratima is worshipped in itself, but not as a "help to the vision" (Drishtisaukaryam) of God; therefore it is at best only of the nature of ritualistic Karmas and cannot produce either Bhakti or Mukti. In this form of image-worship, the allegiance of the soul is given to other things than Ishvara, and, therefore, such use of images, or graves, or temples, or tombs, is real idolatry; it is in itself neither sinful nor wicked it is a rite a Karma, and worshippers must and will get the fruit thereof.
1.094 - Understanding the Structure of Things, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
The sutra we are studying, etena bhtendriyeu dharma lakaa avasth parim vykhyt (III.13), tells us that the variety of things that we see in this world is the last shape that is taken by prakriti through the processes known as dharma, laksana and avastha. Every object of perception of the senses is a condition, or avastha, that is maintained by prakriti. The maintenance of this avastha condition in its form as an object of sense is internally regulated by a pattern, or laksana; the form of the Object is a manifestation of this pattern. This laksana pattern, again, is due to a character called dharma that is inherent in the original substance, prakriti. In spite of the multitudinous variety that we see in the form of things in the world, all this variety is the last shape taken by prakriti and is reducible to a single substance by the reverse process of the return of the effects to the cause.
This is what is done in samyama on any particular object. It is this variety that troubles us and entangles us, confuses us, deludes us, and consequently makes us attached to variety, which is really not there. Thus, attachment of any kind is a kind of confusion of thought. It is a blunder that the mind commits due to not being able to gain entry into the basic substance which has taken this variety of shape in the form of these objects to which the mind is attached.
The relationship of the mind to the Objects is a very important thing to be taken into consideration at the time of the practice of samyama because samyama gradually reduces the distance between the mind and the Object, so that a stage will be reached when there will be no distance at all. The mind will be the Object, and the Object will be the mind; the thinker will be the thought of, and vice versa. But the mind will revolt against any such attempt, which is the reason why there is difficulty in concentration of mind. The refusal of the mind to concentrate on any given object is due to its inability to comprehend the relationship it maintains with the Object, and the relationship of any object with other objects. the Objects, which are the bhutas or rather, the evolutes of the bhutas, the elements are known to exist and operate on account of the action of the senses. The mind begins to be aware of the activity of the world outside through the senses, the indriyas. And, the transformation, which is the conditioning factor of the Objects outside in the world, again gets conditioned through the senses when it reaches the mind, so that there is no direct knowledge of the nature of the transformation which the Objects undergo.
It is not possible to have a correct insight into the nature of things directly by the mind, on account of there being an intervening activity called the senses or the indriyas. So there is a need for not only an adjustment of the internal processes of thought, but also there is a need for the regulation of the activity of the senses in order that there may be a harmony between the mental transformations inside and the outer transformations which are the conditioning factors of the Objects outside. We have, therefore, a final aim in yoga, which is the thorough harmonisation of the activities of the mind, the senses and the Objects outside, without any kind of discrepancy or disharmony intervening in the middle.
Now, at the present moment, what happens is that the thoughts of the mind do not correspond to the nature of objects; therefore, the mind has no control over things. If the mind has to correspond to fact, it has to understand what the fact is. Inasmuch as the fact is not known, there is no such correspondence. The fact is nothing but the law that operates behind the existence of the Objects which operates behind the mind also, subjectively. But the mind is ignorant of this fact.
The ignorance present in the mind is due to the very old matter about which we were speaking asmita, egoism. The mind and the egoism are united; they cannot be separated. The ego principle, which is the cohesive force that keeps the mind in a restricted position, prevents its connection with anything else other than that with which the ego is connected, so the mind is completely cut off from the world of objects outside. Inasmuch as the personal notions of the mind, as determined by the principle of the ego, cannot always correspond to the law of things in general, there is disharmony between the subject and the Object. This disharmony between the subject and the Object is the reason behind the subject having no knowledge of the Object. Consequently, there is no control over anything. There is a total helplessness on the part of the subject and a compulsion which the subject feels in respect of everything, because the law of the world presses upon the subject so forcefully to yield to its dictates, in spite of whatever the mind may be thinking according to its whims and fancies. Thus, the reason for the bondage of the jiva, or the subject, is the vehemence of the ego, or the asmita tattva, which will not sacrifice even a whit of its notions and opinions about things.
The yoga process here, in this great endeavour known as samyama, attempts to cut at the root of this problem by a direct focusing of the attention of the mind on the very same thing with which it cannot reconcile itself namely, the Object. The name object is given to that with which we cannot reconcile ourselves; otherwise, it will not be an object. It will be like us only it will be a subject. It is something different from us and, therefore, we call it an object. It stands outside us because we cannot cope with its ways of working and the manner of its relationship with other things of a similar nature.
the Object that we see with the eyes, for instance, is therefore, on a deeper probe, revealed to be an index of a condition which is cosmical in nature. It is not isolated as it appears. The vast prakriti, being universal in its operations, focuses itself on a pinpoint in the form of an object of sense. And every object has the background of a universal pressure which prakriti exerts at any given moment of time. This pressure is exerted by prakriti on any object, whatever be the shape of that object. The different characters exhibited by different objects do not in any way mean a difference in the nature of the pressure exerted by prakriti on these objects. It has a uniform pressure communicated to everything and anything, and that pressure is the pattern which prakriti wants to maintain in the form of this manifested universe. That is called the laksana.
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What we are told here is that any particular object or any particular group of objects, for the matter of that do not constitute a separate entity or a reality by itself, or by themselves. On the other hand, this particular object, or a group of objects, represents merely a condition of prakriti, even as the mind itself is such a condition in a more rarefied form. The subjective manifestation of prakriti is the mind, and its objective manifestation is the Object, the visaya.
In samyama, or the practice of meditation in the form of total absorption, this point is borne in mind namely, that the meditation is more on a situation or a condition rather than a compact substance. We are under the mistaken notion that there is a solid object in front of us which is completely different from other objects, with no connection at all with other things, separated by space and time. This is not the truth of things.
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Hence, we have to establish a connection between the mind and the Object by means of understanding these laksanas, avasthas, etc., which are the powers operating behind the form. It was also said that these properties inhere in the substance, prakriti, and because of the inherence of these properties which are dharmas, they are called dharmi. What is dharma and what is dharmi? It is mentioned in the next sutra: nta udita avyapadeya dharma anupt dharm (III.14). A dharmi is a substance in which dharmas inhere, exist. How do they exist? They exist in three ways: as the past, as the present and as the future. Santa, udita and avyapadesa, the three terms used in this sutra, mean respectively, the past, the present and the future. A particular character of an object that is cognisable or perceptible is the present condition of that object; it is not the whole condition.
We are all present here as human beings with different personalities. We have a body; we have a mind; we have our own individuality. Each individuality of each person sitting here is a present condition assumed by the characters of a substance of which we are made. It is not the entirety of our nature that is manifest here, because we have a past, and we also have a future. The past has been submerged by the preponderance of the forces that have become present, and similarly, the characters that are going to be manifest in the future are also put down, for the time being, by the force of the characters that are manifest in the present. There are potentialities, latent powers, potencies present in each form in you, in me, in everything which have the peculiarity in them of releasing only certain particular features at a particular time, and pressing down, not allowing to manifest, other features which are not required to manifest at that time. These features which are not manifest may be either past or future. This is a very strange thing, and is also something very terrible.
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It is very surprising how consciousness can assume such a shape a shape which is really not there, and which is totally unsubstantial. This point Patanjali wants to drive into our minds so that samyama can be made easy, because as long as there are attachments present in the mind, no samyama is possible. Subconscious impulses will drag us in another direction altogether, so the very subconscious attachment should be snapped in the bud. This is possible only by a thorough analysis of the structure of things, the nature of the Objects which are the causes of attachment, and the nature of asmita, the egoism, which is another reason for the impossibility of the mind to concentrate on anything that is given.
These few sutras which we have been studying are very difficult ones hard nuts to crack. But they are very important in the sense that an understanding of their import is necessary for the purpose of a whole-souled absorption in the Object of meditation, the Object of samyama, for the purpose of acquiring powers of mastery over nature. These powers are called siddhis which are described in the further sutras.
1.096 - Powers that Accrue in the Practice, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
As I mentioned previously, these powers are of three kinds, or categories: the Objective, the subjective and the Absolute, or we may call it the Universal. Powers that one gains in respect of the Objective world are of one kind; those pertaining to the subjective faculties are of a different kind; and those that are intended to bring about the salvation of the spirit, ultimately, are of a third kind altogether. The secret of this practice, or rather the technique behind this samyama in respect of any chosen object, is given in a sutra in the Samadhi Pada itself, which we studied long ago.
How is it that we come to acquire power at all? What is the secret behind it? Why is it that we do not simply have any power now, at this present moment? Why has this power come now? Where was it hidden up to this time? This has been made clear in a sutra in the Samadhi Pada which goes as follows: kavtte abhijtasya iva mae graht grahaa grhyeu tatstha tadajanat sampatti (I.41). This requires the meditating mind to become consubstantial with the Object the subject united with the Object so that it gains insight into the nature of the Object. Then it is that the gulf separating the mind from the Object is bridged by the practice of samyama, and the powers inherent in the Object flow into the subject. That is the secret. Whatever is your power becomes my power when I become one with you. This is to state the whole method in simple terms. That which is outside our capacity comes within our capacity when that in which this capacity is inherent comes under our control. And this control is not an ordinary type of authority that we exercise over an object, as a master exercises authority over a servant. It is not like that. It is a complete mastery where that which is to be controlled does not stand outside the subject controlling it. It has become one, organically. This is the meaning of this sutra which has been given to us in the Samadhi Pada.
Now, applying this technique, Patanjali tells us that we can control anything, whether it is visible or invisible, material or otherwise. the Objective side, which is known as grahaya samapatti in the language of yoga, is intended to control the elements. The five elements which constitute this vast world, or rather the entire universe of physical nature, are supposed to be under ones control, provided samyama is practised on them. Earth, water, fire, air and ether these are the elements, and no one can have any control over them. They are the masters, as is well known. But they can be controlled, says the sutra, provided we establish a harmony with them and we become one with the law which operates them in the universe. This is called bhutajaya control of the elements.
As I mentioned, these sutras are very terse and convey no meaning at all on a casual, superficial reading. To give only an instance, I am mentioning this sutra which gives us the method of controlling the elements: sthla svarpa skma avaya arthavatva sayamt bhtajaya (III.45). Such a terrific thing Patanjali explains in one small sutra. All the five elements are controlled by a practice which is mentioned in this sutra: sthla svarpa skma avaya arthavatva sayamt bhtajaya. We have to practise samyama on the elements. How is it done? This is what he is telling us in this sutra; and from the meaning of it we can find out why it is useless for a beginner.
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Thus, this grahsya samapatti, or the mastery one acquires over the Object, brings such powers as these. Incidentally, it has a result on the body of the person also. There is a perfection that follows in respect of ones own body, which is described in another sutra: rpa lvaya bala vajra sahananatvni kyasapat (III.47). It appears that one becomes very handsome in ones personality, beautiful in complexion, radiant in the skin, and so on; these are qualities described. Apart from that, great strength follows. One becomes vajrasamhana adamantine in ones energy so that one will become indefatigable and unapproachable by the forces of nature. These perfections of the body are subsidiary consequences that follow the mastery one gains over the elements. The third result that follows, as the sutra tells us, is that the elements do not any more obstruct the person. We will not sink into water, or get burnt by fire, etc. These are the non-obstructing characters revealed by the elements. One can pierce through a wall and pass through it, by the entry of the subtle body through these apparently gross objects. The non-obstructive character of the elements in respect of the yogi is the third aspect.
These are, generally speaking, the Objective powers that one gains. The subjective powers are mastery over the senses and the mind. Just as there are five aspects mentioned in connection with the control of the elements, five aspects are also mentioned in respect of the control of the senses. Grahaa svarpa asmit anvaya arthavattva sayamt indriyajaya (III.48). The senses can be controlled if we can understand their structure. Just as the five gradations of the manifestation of prakriti through the elements were mentioned, similar gradations are mentioned in respect of the senses.
The character of grasping an object is called grahana. The way in which the eyes see, the ears hear, etc. that manner of the senses operating upon objects is called grahana. Svarupa is the senses themselves, independent of these functions. Apart from the functions that the senses perform, they have a nature of their own. That independent nature of the senses, apart from their activity, is called svarupa. Asmita is the I-principle that controls the operation of the five senses. It is the ego principle which organises the activities of the different senses and focuses them on a particular object. That means to say, the higher controls the lower, and the higher includes the lower. Ultimately, it is the I-principle that is the reason behind the working of the senses. Thus, if we can grasp the meaning of this ego, the meaning of the senses also is clear. The fourth one is anvaya. That is similar to the fourth aspect in respect of the power of the five elements namely, the operation of the gunas. The three gunas sattva, rajas and tamas of prakriti are the rudimentary principles behind the senses and also the ahamkara tattva, or I-principle. Arthavattva is the purpose of the activity of the senses which is, again, to bring about experience for the purpose of the liberation of the spirit. With these connotations of the activities of the senses, one can concentrate, do samyama on the senses themselves, and the senses come under ones control. Grahaa svarpa asmita anvay arthavattva sayamat indriyajaya (III.48).
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The whole of yoga is summed up in one word: samyama. This is the entire system of Patanjali. How can we grasp the Object in our consciousness? That is called meditation. This grasping of the Object by consciousness is the gradual identification of consciousness with the Object, and vice versa. How this can be done is the point on hand; and once this is understood, every other perfection will follow. We ourselves will be surprised at the powers that we gain. And as I mentioned, many times we will not even know that we have such powers. Only if we are rubbed hard will we know that the power is there.
There is an anecdote which is not mentioned in the Yoga Sutras. Aurangzeb heard that Tulsidas had great powers, that he was a siddha. He wanted to see what powers Tulsidas had, so he ordered Tulsidas to come to his court. By some means they brought the saint to the court of Aurangzeb, and the emperor said, I want to see your powers. They say you are a person endowed with great occult forces. The saint said, I dont know what you are talking about. I have no powers. I myself have not seen any, and from where do these powers come? No, no, no, Aurangzeb said, I am not going to leave you like that. You must show me your powers. Tulsidas said, I do not have any powers. I have not exhibited any. Nor am I aware that I have any powers. So where comes this question of demonstrating before you? I myself do not know anything about them. Aurangzeb said, No! That is no good. I will not leave you. You must show them. If you are not going to show your powers, I will imprison you! And Aurangzeb put Tulsidas behind bars. Well, that is all; Tulsidas was in the prison of Aurangzeb. Then and there a miracle took place. They say huge, giant-like monkeys hundreds and thousands in number started demolishing the entire city of Aurangzeb. They threatened everybody, and they destroyed many. It was a ravaging experience. They started attacking the palace of Aurangzeb himself. The guards ran away; it was all confusion, and they did not know what had happened. Nobody could come out of the house. Everywhere were giant-like monkeys, showing their teeth and attacking.
1.097 - Sublimation of Object-Consciousness, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Svrthasayamt puruajnam (III.36). Here is the secret of yoga, or true meditation, from the spiritual point of view. Purusha jnana, or knowledge of the purusha, arises by svartha samyama samyama on svartha, meditation on ones own essential nature, or the purpose of the spirit. This is the meditation prescribed. The purpose of the spirit, the character of the spirit, is the Object of meditation. We cannot once again go into all the details of this subject, inasmuch as we have covered it in the Samadhi Pada. But suffice it to say that the contemplation of the nature of the spirit, or its purpose, is equivalent to a precondition of a grasp of the nature of the spirit by viveka shakti, or analytic understanding. It is enough for the mind to understand and appreciate that the purusha is consciousness in nature. And consciousness has to be indivisible, by the very nature of it, which means that it is infinite, unconditioned by objects, space and time. Therefore, any experience in terms of space and time or objects is contrary to the nature of the purusha. Hence, there should be an effort exercised upon the mind to sublimate object awareness into spiritual awareness.
Spiritual contemplation is a process of sublimation of objectivity into universality. This kind of meditation is what is introduced in this sutra, and when this is practised, purusha jnana arises knowledge of the purusha comes. But this is a hard task because the conception of the purusha is not provided to the mind usually, in ordinary world experience. The nature of the purusha does not mean the nature of the individual self. It is the nature of the Universal Self. Purusha is a name that we give to the Absolute itself that which comprehends all things. Therefore, there is the need for the practice of those conditions mentioned in the Samadhi Pada, meaning the conditions which are designated as vairagya and abhyasa.
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Patanjali mentions this to us once again, in the Vibhuti Pada, for the purpose of acquisition of the knowledge of the purusha. Sattva purua anyat khytimtrasya sarvabhva adhihttva sarvajttva ca (III.50). When there is an acquisition of this understanding and an establishment of oneself in this status of meditation, some extraordinary results follow, and they are mentioned as sarva bhava adhis thatritva and sarva jnatritva. One becomes the substratum of everything as a result of this meditation that is sarva bhava adhis thatritva. As the substratum of all things, there is no need for this consciousness to move towards objects, because it is the substratum of even the Object. As the result of this, again, there is sarva jnatritva knowledge of everything. The substance of everything is also endowed with the knowledge of everything. It follows, because everything is a modification of the substance. One who has become the substance itself, as the substratum of all things, naturally gets endowed with this knowledge. This knowledge is called taraka that which takes one across the ocean of sorrow.
Traka sarvaviaya sarvathviaya akrama ca iti vivekajam jnam (III.55). This taraka knowledge is of such a nature that its object is everything, as different from the mental knowledge which is provided to us now, at present, which has only certain objects as its contents, and not all objects. A certain set of objects becomes the content of mental consciousness, empirically. But here, there is sarva visayatva anything that is existent is a constant and perpetual content of this consciousness. It is not merely sarva visaya, but is also sarvatha visaya it is aware of everything in every condition, not only in one condition. For example, we are aware of objects in one condition only, not in all conditions. In the earlier sutras we have been told that every object undergoes various conditions the parinamas mentioned. And we cannot be aware of all the parinamas, or all the transformations of the past, present and future at one stroke, because of the limited character of the mind in its capacity to know things. Only the present is known. The past is not known. The future is not known.
But here, there is knowledge of all conditions of the Objects even those conditions which the Object has not undergone and are yet to come. They also will be known at one stroke that is sarvatha visaya. Sarvaviaya sarvathviaya all knowledge, and knowledge of every condition of everything, every state through which one passed, through which one passes and through which one has to pass all these will become contents of this awareness. How, in what manner, does it become a content of awareness? One after another, successively? No. Akramam. Akramam means not successive, but simultaneous. Instantaneous awareness of all conditions that are possible, at any period of time this is called viveka jnana.Traka sarvaviaya sarvathviaya akrama ca iti vivekajam jnam (III.55).
These are only stories to the mind which is sunk in the mire of world-consciousness. One cannot even dream of what this state of affairs is. What can be meant by simultaneous awareness of all things and simultaneous awareness of every condition of all things? This is called sarva jnatritva; this is omniscience. And this is designated by the term vivekajam jnanam, knowledge born of discriminative understanding, which is a peculiar term used in the yoga psychology. It is also called taraka, the saving knowledge. This information is given to us in these sutras to give us a comfort spiritually, that we are not merely entering into a lions den where we find nothing but death, but that we are entering into a new type of life altogether, where eternity embraces us with a new life which is durationless and, therefore, deathless. This contemplation is the only technique, the only method, the only means of the salvation of the soul.
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The ardour of the soul was stated to be a very essential condition for quick success. What is the ardour; what is the fervour; what is the aspiring spirit; what is its intensity? That will be the factor which will judge the quickness of the success. Of course, the other things that were mentioned in the Samadhi Pada are the different methods of practice. How the mind can be fixed on different objects initially so that later on it can be fixed on any object, for the matter of that, for the purpose of samyama, was mentioned in the Samadhi Pada. The world of objects becomes, finally, the Object of meditation. The methods of Patanjali are really those stated to be what he calls savitarka, savichara, sananda and sasmita samadhis. These are the secrets of Patanjalis yoga, and everything else is an explanation thereof. We have studied this what savitarka means, etc.
These stages are the gradual sublimations of world-consciousness, or object-consciousness, by diminishing the distance between the subject and the Object of meditation, which takes place automatically and for which there is no need for any special effort. The distance that separates the experiencing consciousness from its object becomes less and less as one advances more and more, so that what is called samyama in the Vibhuti Pada is the abolition of this distance itself. There is a complete transcendence of spatial awareness in samyama.
Thus, there is a very scientific methodology provided to us in these sutras, which have to be studied gradually, stage by stage, in their successive intensity and applicability. Many authors think that the sutras of Patanjali in respect of yoga are concluded with the Vibhuti Pada because in it he mentions that kaivalya is attained. What else is there to say, afterwards? Some people are of the opinion that there are only three sections of Patanjali, not four sections, but there are others who think that there should be four sections, not three, because each section is called a pada Samadhi Pada, Sadhana Pada, Vibhuti Pada and Kaivalya Pada. A pada is a quarter, and we cannot have three quarters; quarters are always four. So, inasmuch as the word pada is used in respect of each section, it is the opinion of many that four sections must be there, not three. And the fourth section has a meaning of its own. Though it is not directly connected with practice, it furnishes certain details. Just as there are people who think that the Bhagavadgita ends with the eleventh chapter and the successive chapters are additions, as a kind of commentary, there are others who think that they are not simply additions; they have an organic connection with what has preceded.
1.099 - The Entry of the Eternal into the Individual, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
But the most prominent of all these is samyama, which is the subject of the Vibhuti Pada. That is also referred to here by the term samadhi. The communion of the individual with the Object releases the total energy of the Objects, and then it is that the meditating subject is invested with an enormous power which would have otherwise been completely isolated from it. The power of the world is outside us, and we seem to be little inhabitants of the world who cannot participate in the powers of nature. But by samyama, the powers of nature can be absorbed into our system.
How this happens is mentioned in the next sutra: jtyantara parima praktyprt (IV.2). The powers of nature are permanently there in a uniform state. There is neither an increase nor a decrease in the powers of nature. As scientists tell us, there is what is known as the system or the principle of conservation of energy, which states that the energy the total power or force of nature is constant. It does not increase or decrease day by day by external factors. Factors outside nature do not exist. And so, what appears to be an increase of power or capacity is only an entry of certain forces of nature into the system of a human individual. Any kind of transformation in a positive degree is the flowing of the powers of nature into ones system. Prakriti-apuratis the term used in the sutra. The filling up by prakriti is what is known as prakriti-apurat.
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Thus, by the increase of sattva in us, we allow the powers of nature to enter us. It is the rajas that is predominant in ourselves which cuts off nature from our individual lives. The principal function of rajoguna is separation differentiating one from the other, not allowing in the cooperation of one with the other, and creating a dissimilarity of character and difference in function. Due to the intensity of the action of rajas, there is this division of properties and a separation of individualities, so that there has been the perception and experience of a dividedness of life, while this is really not there. For nature, taken in its completeness, there is no division. It is one total, a comprehensive completeness in which there is no distinction of the subject on one side and the Object on the other side. The distinction has been created by certain artificial factors, and these are the operations of the gunas. By diminishing the intensity of the action of rajas through intense concentration of mind, we become more and more approximate to the original condition of prakriti. The integrating powers of nature begin to act when sattva rises in us. On the other hand, if the rajas is to be predominant, the disintegrating factors start operating.
Thus, what is yoga? Yoga is nothing but an endeavour in the direction of the increase of sattva in oneself and a decrease of rajas. The methods have already been described in the earlier sections. The sutra merely tells us of a principle of how prakriti acts namely, that it fills a vacancy wherever a vacancy is created. Empty thyself, and I shall fill thee. This great statement is similar to the principle of this sutra. When we empty ourselves of all those conditioning factors of our individuality, the universal forces will enter us. The universal is not outside us. It is, on account of its being universal by itself, everywhere. But it is not allowed to operate, just as we do not allow the sunlight to enter a house by closing the windows and doors. The vehemence or the force with which the ego-principle, or the I-principle, works in us prevents the entry of universal forces into us. Yoga is the technique of the diminution of the intensity of this I-principle.
1.09 - Civilisation and Culture, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The pursuit of the mental life for its own sake is what we ordinarily mean by culture; but the word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense according to our ideas and predilections. For our mental existence is a very complex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we have its lower and fundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital. And we have in that stratum two sides, the mental life of the senses, sensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates although with the Objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of the mental being concerned with the organs of action and the field of conduct in which her objective purpose predominates although with the subjective as its occasion. We have next in the scale, more sublimated, on one side the moral being and its ethical life, on the other the aesthetic; each of them attempts to possess and dominate the fundamental mind stratum and turn its experiences and activities to its own benefit, one for the culture and worship of Right, the other for the culture and worship of Beauty. And we have, above all these, taking advantage of them, helping, forming, trying often to govern them entirely, the intellectual being. Mans highest accomplished range is the life of the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of intelligent will, the buddhi, which is or should be the driver of mans chariot.
But the intelligence of man is not composed entirely and exclusively of the rational intellect and the rational will; there enters into it a deeper, more intuitive, more splendid and powerful, but much less clear, much less developed and as yet hardly at all self-possessing light and force for which we have not even a name. But, at any rate, its character is to drive at a kind of illumination,not the dry light of the reason, nor the moist and suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar splendour. It may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and heart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its natural urge, which exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to illuminate the ethical and aesthetic, to illuminate the emotional and the active, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of revelation, it unveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic or psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a supernatural light a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by Reason and Science, a Right larger and more divine than the moralists scheme of virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous or imaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility which leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid, a Sense beyond the senses and sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which mans ordinary conduct of life hides away from his impulses and from his vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading are its effects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this in the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred deformations. It is caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and pious observances; it is unmercifully traded in and turned into poor and base coin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of which the religious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some pale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations.
1.09 - Concentration - Its Spiritual Uses, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
15. That effect which comes to these who have given up their thirst after objects, either seen or heard, and which wills to control the Objects, is non-attachment.
The two motive powers of our actions are (1) what we see ourselves, (2) the experience of others. These two forces throw the mind, the lake, into various waves. Renunciation is the power of battling against these forces and holding the mind in check. Their renunciation is what see want. I am passing through a street, and a man comes and takes away my watch. That is my own experience. I see it myself, and it immediately throws my Chitta into a wave, taking the form of anger. Allow not that to come. If you cannot prevent that, you are nothing; if you can, you have Vairgya. Again, the experience of the worldly-minded teaches us that sense-enjoyments are the highest ideal. These are tremendous temptations. To deny them, and not allow the mind to come to a wave form with regard to them, is renunciation; to control the twofold motive powers arising from my own experience and from the experience of others, and thus prevent the Chitta from being governed by them, is Vairagya. These should be controlled by me, and not I by them. This sort of mental strength is called renunciation. Vairagya is the only way to freedom.
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Samadhi is divided into two varieties. One is called the Samprajnta, and the other the Asamprajnta. In the Samprajnata Samadhi come all the powers of controlling nature. It is of four varieties. The first variety is called the Savitarka, when the mind meditates upon an object again and again, by isolating it from other objects. There are two sorts of objects for meditation in the twenty-five categories of the Sankhyas, (1) the twenty-four insentient categories of Nature, and (2) the one sentient Purusha. This part of Yoga is based entirely on Sankhya philosophy, about which I have already told you. As you will remember, egoism and will and mind have a common basis, the Chitta or the mind-stuff, out of which they are all manufactured. The mind-stuff takes in the forces of nature, and projects them as thought. There must be something, again, where both force and matter are one. This is called Avyakta, the unmanifested state of nature before creation, and to which, after the end of a cycle, the whole of nature returns, to come out again after another period. Beyond that is the Purusha, the essence of intelligence. Knowledge is power, and as soon as we begin to know a thing, we get power over it; so also when the mind begins to meditate on the different elements, it gains power over them. That sort of meditation where the external gross elements are the Objects is called Savitarka. Vitarka means question; Savitarka, with question, questioning the elements, as it were, that they may give their truths and their powers to the man who meditates upon them. There is no liberation in getting powers. It is a worldly search after enjoyments, and there is no enjoyment in this life; all search for enjoyment is vain; this is the old, old lesson which man finds so hard to learn. When he does learn it, he gets out of the universe and becomes free. The possession of what are called occult powers is only intensifying the world, and in the end, intensifying suffering. Though as a scientist Patanjali is bound to point out the possibilities of this science, he never misses an opportunity to warn us against these powers.
Again, in the very same meditation, when one struggles to take the elements out of time and space, and think of them as they are, it is called Nirvitarka, without question. When the meditation goes a step higher, and takes the Tanmatras as its object, and thinks of them as in time and space, it is called Savichra, with discrimination; and when in the same meditation one eliminates time and space, and thinks of the fine elements as they are, it is called Nirvichra, without discrimination. The next step is when the elements are given up, both gross and fine, and the Object of meditation is the interior organ, the thinking organ. When the thinking organ is thought of as bereft of the qualities of activity and dullness, it is then called Snanda, the blissful Samadhi. When the mind itself is the Object of meditation, when meditation becomes very ripe and concentrated, when all ideas of the gross and fine materials are given up, when the Sattva state only of the Ego remains, but differentiated from all other objects, it is called Ssmita Samadhi. The man who has attained to this has attained to what is called in the Vedas "bereft of body". He can think of himself as without his gross body; but he will have to think of himself as with a fine body. Those that in this state get merged in nature without attaining the goal are called Prakritilayas, but those who do not stop even there reach the goal, which is freedom.
18. There is another Samadhi which is attained by the constant practice of cessation of all mental activity, in which the Chitta retains only the unmanifested impressions.
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We must have these four sorts of ideas. We must have friendship for all; we must be merciful towards those that are in misery; when people are happy, we ought to be happy; and to the wicked we must be indifferent. So with all subjects that come before us. If the subject is a good one, we shall feel friendly towards it; if the subject of thought is one that is miserable, we must be merciful towards it. If it is good, we must be glad; if it is evil, we must be indifferent. These attitudes of the mind towards the different subjects that come before it will make the mind peaceful. Most of our difficulties in our daily lives come from being unable to hold our minds in this way. For instance, if a man does evil to us, instantly we want to react evil, and every reaction of evil shows that we are not able to hold the Chitta down; it comes out in waves towards the Object, and we lose our power. Every reaction in the form of hatred or evil is so much loss to the mind; and every evil thought or deed of hatred, or any thought of reaction, if it is controlled, will be laid in our favour. It is not that we lose by thus restraining ourselves; we are gaining infinitely more than we suspect. Each time we suppress hatred, or a feeling of anger, it is so much good energy stored up in our favour; that piece of energy will be converted into the higher powers.
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A process similar to the preceding is applied again; only, the Objects to be taken up in the former meditations are gross; in this they are fine.
45. The finer objects end with the Pradhna.
1.09 - Fundamental Questions of Psycho therapy, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
towards the Object (no matter what this object may be). Accordingly, I
have come to postulate a number of types which all depend on the
1.09 - SKIRMISHES IN A WAY WITH THE AGE, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
himself with the honey of revenge to allay his anguish. the Objects
towards which this lust of vengeance, like a lust of pleasure, are
1.09 - Sleep and Death, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
or houses, in which the slightest detail is significant: When one sets out to explore one's inner being, explains the Mother, and the different parts that form it, one often has the impression of entering a hall or a room; according to the color, the atmosphere, and the Objects it contains, one gets a very clear feeling of the part being visited. Then one may even move into deeper and deeper rooms, each with its own character. Sometimes, instead of rooms, we may encounter all kinds of beings an entire family or even a menagerie
which represent the forces and vibrations we are accustomed to harboring in us, and which make up "our" nature. These are not beings of "dream"' they are the real beings we harbor. Forces are conscious,
1.09 - Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
es only matter as the substance of reality and the Object of
its study. The wisdom of ages in East and West has held that
1.09 - Taras Ultimate Nature, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
between them is the negated object, sometimes translated as the Object to
be refuted or the Object to be negated. This is the Object we believe in
that doesnt, in fact, exist. The negated object is what the correct view sees
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or inherently. We give the name car, but the Object labeled car is not a
real car from its own side independent from our mind and the label given it.
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guilt, and fears are founded upon grasping at a truly existent I. the Object
our low self-esteem holds is an inherently existent I. Through analytical
1.09 - The Absolute Manifestation, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
It is enough that in the love of the all for the all a desire should awake, that one of the formulas of the Infinite should be the Object of a choice, a preference for the equation of the universe to arise out of the eternal equation, the numbers of the relative to start out of the absolute number.
Then the play of the child changes its form, it becomes a play of exclusive wills, of forces in conflict, and something of the eternal manifestation enters into Time and Space.
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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 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.
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The pull of that is indeed a categorical imperative, the self in us drawn to the Divine because of the imperative call of its greater Self, the soul ineffably drawn towards the Object of its adoration, because it cannot be otherwise, because it is it and
He is He. That is all about it.
1.1.02 - The Aim of the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
You have apparently a call and may be fit for Yoga; but there are different paths and each has a different aim and end before it. It is common to all the paths to conquer the desires, to put aside the ordinary relations of life, and to try to pass from uncertainty to everlasting certitude. One may also try to conquer dream and sleep, thirst and hunger etc. But it is no part of my Yoga to have nothing to do with the world or with life or to kill the senses or entirely inhibit their action. It is the Object of this
Yoga to transform life by bringing down into it the Light, Power and Bliss of the divine Truth and its dynamic certitudes. This
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Divine"], however, means that the Object of the 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 turned in our nature into nature of the Divine and in our will and works and life to be the instrument of the Divine. Its object is not to be a great Yogi or a superman (although that may come) or to grab at the Divine for the sake of the ego's power, pride or pleasure.
It is not for salvation though liberation comes by it and all else may come; but these must not be our objects. The Divine alone is our object.
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(1) the Object of Yoga is not to become "like" Sri Aurobindo or the Mother Those who cherish this idea easily come to the further idea that they can become their equals and even greater.
This is only to feed the ego.
(2) the Object of Yoga is not to get power or to be more powerful than others or to have great siddhis or to do great or wonderful or miraculous things.
(3) the Object of Yoga is not to be a great Yogi or a superman. This is an egoistic way of taking the Yoga and can lead to no good; avoid it altogether.
(4) To talk about the supramental and think of bringing it down in yourself is the most dangerous of all. It may bring an entire megalomania and loss of balance. What the sadhak has to seek is the full opening to the Divine, the psychic change of his consciousness, the spiritual change. Of that change of consciousness, selflessness, desirelessness, humility, bhakti, surrender, calm, equality, peace, quiet, sincerity are necessary constituents. Until he has the psychic and spiritual change, to think of being supramental is an absurdity and an arrogant absurdity.
11.04 - The Triple Cord, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
These gradations are the various statuses of consciousness which the human being assumes in its relation with the world reality. In other words, they are the instruments through which human consciousness comes in contact with the universe. They are as it were windows upon the world through which contact is made and relation established with the Objects of experience. But usually in the normal consciousness these windows are made a casement with bars and nets or even blinds over it which narrow and blur and even block the view. They are made into cords, as the Upanishad says, that blind and bind and stifle the consciousness. The cords have to be cut away, thrown out. As windows they have to be thrown wide open, open not merely outward towards the external object or reality but also inwardly to the realities, the worlds that lie within and above and beyond
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11.05 - The Ladder of Unconsciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Consciousness, the normal consciousness we know, has various degrees of potency: its familiar form is the rational consciousness or intellect; then at a higher level, there is the intuitive consciousness and at a still higher level the visionary consciousness, that is, the consciousness that sees the Truth, and at the highest, the Objectless consciousness, consciousness in itself or the sachchidananda consciousness.
Likewise unconsciousness too has its own various degrees. As consciousness rises up to higher and higher grades of consciousness, so unconsciousness too descends into lower and lower grades of unconsciousness. The first degree of unconsciousness is simple forgetfulness. It is the absence of consciousness, not the loss of consciousness. The consciousness is there but it is not apparent or expressed, it is held back for the time. One can recall it; it can be remembered and brought forward. The abeyance of consciousness, when it persists, when it amounts to a turn of nature, is called ignorance. Yet ignorance is not the negation of consciousness, it is clouded or veiled consciousness; it is not that the sun is set and gone but simply that it is behind the clouds, it is up in the sky but shrouded. This behind-the-veil consciousness is the subliminal consciousness or simply sub-consciousness. Sub-consciousness is a consciousness that is not dormant or asleep, stilled into silence, it is at work but behind the normal waking state It is the swapna-state as the Indian sages termed it. Lower down is the state of unconsciousness proper. It is a still more diminished degree of consciousness, apparently a total absence of consciousness, not merely an abeyance or subsidence of consciousness, it is a lack of consciousness. The animal consciousness might be taken as an instance or expression of the ignorant consciousness, likewise the plant consciousness parallels the subliminal consciousness the Indian description of it is antapraja. Next to it is the consciousness in the mineral, it is unconsciousness. By unconsciousness it is meant here naturally the absence of the mental consciousness: the presence or absence of consciousness means the presence or absence of the mental consciousness. There is a generic consciousness, consciousness in itself, or pure consciousness, which is imbedded in all created things, for creation itself is at bottom a vibration or pulsation of consciousness (vijana-vijmbhaam). There is a range or rung still further below with a still lesser degree of consciousness: it is called the inconscient, which is a totally total, in depth and in extent, absence of consciousness. In the other degree that is above it, there is the probability of consciousness in the midst of apparent absence, here it is reduced almost to nothingness or to just a possibility: for, as I have said, some consciousness, the presence of Sachchidananda is always there everywhere in the core of things. Yet there is also an absolute negation and this has been termed Nescience, it is the zero of things, where there is no question of possibility or impossibility: it is the final and definite end, sunyam of the Buddhists, termed asat by the Vedantists.
1.107 - The Bestowal of a Divine Gift, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
There are no physical obstacles in the higher realms. The obstacle in the physical world is the physical body. That is the Object and, therefore, we cannot enjoy it properly. The presence of the physical body obstructs the union that we seek with the Object, which is the reason for this search for enjoyment through the senses. But there are no physical bodies in the higher realms; therefore, the temptations are more powerful, and it is a greater difficulty there than here on earth. It is possible that one can get stuck in the higher realms more easily than on earth. All these have to be watched with great care, and the sutra tells us: What to talk of these enjoyments; you have to be free even from the desire to have omniscience, and you should ask for pure Being-consciousness only. Sarvatha vivekakhyateh it is not knowledge of things that we are asking for; it is knowledge as such, which is knowledge of being alone. This is the purusha. Then comes dharma-megha samadhi. At that time, what happens?
Nobody can say what happens. No one can go there and see what happens. Dharma-megha samadhi is only a term which is defined in various ways, but it is said to be a divine gift which is bestowed upon the seeker by the powers that be the divine forces that guard the cosmos. Rapturous descriptions of this condition can be found in such scriptures as the Yoga Vasishtha where we are told that even the divine beings, the guardians of the cosmos, become our servants. The guardians of the cosmos become the servants of this man. Such things are told in the Yoga Vasishtha and other scriptures of that kind.
1.10 - On our Knowledge of Universals, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
_error_. Some of our beliefs turn out to be erroneous, and therefore it becomes necessary to consider how, if at all, we can distinguish knowledge from error. This problem does not arise with regard to knowledge by acquaintance, for, whatever may be the Object of acquaintance, even in dreams and hallucinations, there is no error involved so long as we do not go beyond the immediate object: error can only arise when we regard the immediate object, i.e. the sense-datum, as the mark of some physical object. Thus the problems connected with knowledge of truths are more difficult than those connected with knowledge of things. As the first of the problems connected with knowledge of truths, let us examine the nature and scope of our intuitive judgements.
1.10 - Relics of Tree Worship in Modern Europe, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
new May-tree every year. As the Object of the custom was to bring in
the fructifying spirit of vegetation, newly awakened in spring, the
1.10 - The Absolute of the Being, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The contrary method may certainly have its advantages and this other may have dangers which in certain epochs caused the preference to be given to its opposite. They become one to the view of the soul that knows the death to oneself and the expanding of life, renunciation and the assumption of our true being to be one and the same thing. Our expansion is also a renunciation, not of our love for what we can aspire to be, but of our exclusive self-love which separates us from all that we really are. Not our possibilities of infinite joy, but our actualities of suffering should be the Object of our renunciation.
In each of its sufferings the being should recognise the error of its egoistic desire, but in each of its desires it should discover the will of an Absolute in itself which it ignores.
1.10 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES (II), #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
my, the illusion of knowledge, and Avidy-my, the illusion of ignorance. Through the help of Vidy-my one cultivates such virtues as the taste for holy company, knowledge, devotion, love, and renunciation. Avidy-my consists of the five elements and the Objects of the five senses-form, flavour, smell, touch, and sound. These make one forget God."
Why there is evil in the world
1.10 - The Methods and the Means, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Controlling the passions is the next thing to be attended to. To restrain the Indriyas (organs) from going towards the Objects of the senses, to control them and bring them under the guidance of the will, is the very central virtue in religious culture. Then comes the practice of self-restraint and self-denial.
All the immense possibilities of divine realisation in the soul cannot get actualised without struggle and without such practice on the part of the aspiring devotee. "The mind must always think of the Lord." It is very hard at first to compel the mind to think of the Lord always, but with every new effort the power to do so grows stronger in us. "By practice, O son of Kunti, and by non-attachment is it attained", says Shri Krishna in the Gita. And then as to sacrificial work, it is understood that the five great sacrificed (To gods, sages, manes, guests, and all creatures.) (Panchamahyajna) have to be performed as usual.
1.10 - The Yoga of the Intelligent Will, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
speaking, the mental power of understanding but it is evidently used by the Gita in a large philosophic sense for the whole action of the discriminating and deciding mind which determines both the direction and use of our thoughts and the direction and use of our acts; thought, intelligence, judgment, perceptive choice and aim are all included in its functioning: for the characteristic of the unified intelligence is not only concentration of the mind that knows, but especially concentration of the mind that decides and persists in the decision, vyavasaya, while the sign of the dissipated intelligence is not so much even discursiveness of the ideas and perceptions as discursiveness of the aims and desires, therefore of the will. Will, then, and knowledge are the two functions of the Buddhi. The unified intelligent will is fixed in the enlightened soul, it is concentrated in inner self-knowledge; the many-branching and multifarious, busied with many things, careless of the one thing needful is on the contrary subject to the restless and discursive action of the mind, dispersed in outward life and works and their fruits. "Works are far inferior," says the Teacher, "to Yoga of the intelligence; desire rather refuge in the intelligence; poor and wretched souls are they who make the fruit of their works the Object of their thoughts and activities."
We must remember the psychological order of the Sankhya which the Gita accepts. On one side there is the Purusha, the soul calm, inactive, immutable, one, not evolutive; on the other side there is Prakriti or Nature-force inert without the conscious
--
out of these the power which seizes the discriminations of objects, sense-mind or Manas, - we must record the Indian names because the corresponding English words are not real equivalents. As a tertiary evolution out of sense-mind we have the specialising organic senses, ten in number, five of perception, five of action; next the powers of each sense of perception, sound, form, scent, etc., which give their value to objects for the mind and make things what they are to our subjectivity, - and, as the substantial basis of these, the primary conditions of the Objects of sense, the five elements of ancient philosophy or rather elementary conditions of Nature, panca bhuta, which constitute objects by their various combination.
Reflected in the pure consciousness of Purusha these degrees and powers of Nature-force become the material of our impure subjectivity, impure because its action is dependent on the perceptions of the Objective world and on their subjective reactions.
Buddhi, which is simply the determinative power that determines all inertly out of indeterminate inconscient Force, takes for us the form of intelligence and will. Manas, the inconscient force which seizes Nature's discriminations by objective action and reaction and grasps at them by attraction, becomes sense-perception and desire, the two crude terms or degradations of intelligence and will, - becomes the sense-mind sensational, emotive, volitional in the lower sense of wish, hope, longing, passion, vital impulsion, all the deformations (vikara) of will. The senses become the instruments of sense-mind, the perceptive five of our senseknowledge, the active five of our impulsions and vital habits, mediators between the subjective and objective; the rest are the Objects of our consciousness, vis.ayas of the senses.
This order of evolution seems contrary to that which we perceive as the order of the material evolution; but if we remember that even Buddhi is in itself an inert action of inconscient
--
For evidently there are two possibilities of the action of the intelligent will. It may take its downward and outward orientation towards a discursive action of the perceptions and the will in the triple play of Prakriti, or it may take its upward and inward orientation towards a settled peace and equality in the calm and immutable purity of the conscious silent soul no longer subject to the distractions of Nature. In the former alternative the subjective being is at the mercy of the Objects of sense, it lives in the outward contact of things. That life is the life of desire. For the senses excited by their objects create a restless or often violent disturbance, a strong or even headlong outward movement towards the seizure of these objects and their enjoyment, and they carry away the sense-mind, "as the winds carry away a ship upon the sea"; the mind subjected to the emotions, passions, longings, impulsions awakened by this outward movement of the senses carries away similarly the intelligent will, which loses therefore its power of calm discrimination and mastery. Subjection of the soul to the confused play
The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
of the three gunas of Prakriti in their eternal entangled twining and wrestling, ignorance, a false, sensuous, objective life of the soul, enslavement to grief and wrath and attachment and passion, are the results of the downward trend of the buddhi, - the troubled life of the ordinary, unenlightened, undisciplined man. Those who like the Vedavadins make sense-enjoyment the Object of action and its fulfilment the highest aim of the soul, are misleading guides. The inner subjective self-delight independent of objects is our true aim and the high and wide poise of our peace and liberation.
Therefore, it is the upward and inward orientation of the intelligent will that we must resolutely choose with a settled concentration and perseverance, vyavasaya; we must fix it firmly in the calm self-knowledge of the Purusha. The first movement must be obviously to get rid of desire which is the whole root of the evil and suffering; and in order to get rid of desire, we must put an end to the cause of desire, the rushing out of the senses to seize and enjoy their objects. We must draw them back when they are inclined thus to rush out, draw them away from their objects, - as the tortoise draws in his limbs into the shell, so these into their source, quiescent in the mind, the mind quiescent in intelligence, the intelligence quiescent in the soul and its selfknowledge, observing the action of Nature, but not subject to it, not desiring anything that the Objective life can give.
It is not an external asceticism, the physical renunciation of the Objects of sense that I am teaching, suggests Krishna immediately to avoid a misunderstanding which is likely at once to arise. Not the renunciation of the Sankhyas or the austerities of the rigid ascetic with his fasts, his maceration of the body, his attempt to abstain even from food; that is not the selfdiscipline or the abstinence which I mean, for I speak of an inner withdrawal, a renunciation of desire. The embodied soul, having a body, has to support it normally by food for its normal physical action; by abstention from food it simply removes from itself the physical contact with the Object of sense, but does not get rid of the inner relation which makes that contact hurtful.
It retains the pleasure of the sense in the Object, the rasa, the
100
--
liking and disliking, - for rasa has two sides; the soul must, on the contrary, be capable of enduring the physical contact without suffering inwardly this sensuous reaction. Otherwise there is nivr.tti, cessation of the Object, vis.aya vinivartante, but no subjective cessation, no nivr.tti of the mind; but the senses are of the mind, subjective, and subjective cessation of the rasa is the only real sign of mastery. But how is this desireless contact with objects, this unsensuous use of the senses possible? It is possible, param dr.s.t.va, by the vision of the supreme, - param, the Soul, the Purusha, - and by living in the Yoga, in union or oneness of the whole subjective being with that, through the Yoga of the intelligence; for the one Soul is calm, satisfied in its own delight, and that delight free from duality can take, once we see this supreme thing in us and fix the mind and will on that, the place of the sensuous object-ridden pleasures and repulsions of the mind. This is the true way of liberation.
Certainly self-discipline, self-control is never easy. All intelligent human beings know that they must exercise some control over themselves and nothing is more common than this advice to control the senses; but ordinarily it is only advised imperfectly and practised imperfectly in the most limited and insufficient fashion. Even, however, the sage, the man of clear, wise and discerning soul who really labours to acquire complete self-mastery finds himself hurried and carried away by the senses. That is because the mind naturally lends itself to the senses; it observes the Objects of sense with an inner interest, settles upon them and makes them the Object of absorbing thought for the intelligence and of strong interest for the will. By that attachment comes, by attachment desire, by desire distress, passion and anger when the desire is not satisfied or is thwarted or opposed, and by passion the soul is obscured, the intelligence and will forget to see and be seated in the calm observing soul; there is a fall from the memory of one's true self, and by that lapse the intelligent will is also obscured, destroyed even. For, for the time being, it no longer exists to our memory of ourselves, it disappears in a cloud of passion; we become passion, wrath, grief and cease to be self and intelligence and will. This then must be prevented
The Yoga of the Intelligent Will
--
And for that we must at first make him the Object of our whole being and keep in soul-contact with him. This is the sense of the phrase "he must sit firm in Yoga, wholly given up to Me"; but as yet it is the merest passing hint after the manner of the
Gita, three words only which contain in seed the whole gist of the highest secret yet to be developed. Yukta asta matparah..
If this is done, then it becomes possible to move among the Objects of sense, in contact with them, acting on them, but with the senses entirely under the control of the subjective self,
- not at the mercy of the Objects and their contacts and reactions, - and that self again obedient to the highest self, the
Purusha. Then, free from reactions, the senses will be delivered from the affections of liking and disliking, escape the duality of positive and negative desire, and calm, peace, clearness, happy tranquillity, atmaprasada, will settle upon the man. That clear tranquillity is the source of the soul's felicity; all grief begins to lose its power of touching the tranquil soul; the intelligence is rapidly established in the peace of the self; suffering is destroyed.
1.11 - Delight of Existence - The Problem, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
3:The self-delight of Brahman is not limited, however, by the still and motionless possession of its absolute self-being. Just as its force of consciousness is capable of throwing itself into forms infinitely and with an endless variation, so also its self-delight is capable of movement, of variation, of revelling in that infinite flux and mutability of itself represented by numberless teeming universes. To loose forth and enjoy this infinite movement and variation of its self-delight is the Object of its extensive or creative play of Force.
4:In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight of being. Just as we find all things to be mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence. In everything that is, dwells the conscious force and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that conscious force; so also in everything that is there is the delight of existence and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight.
1.11 - Higher Laws, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the Objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt,
I have answered, yes,remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education,_make_ them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness,hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus far I am of the opinion of Chaucers nun, who
1.11 - Legend of Dhruva, the son of Uttanapada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Having thus spoken, Dhruva went forth from his mother's dwelling: he quitted the city, and entered an adjoining thicket, where he beheld seven Munis sitting upon hides of the black antelope, which they had taken from off their persons, and spread over the holy kusa grass. Saluting them reverentially, and bowing humbly before then, the prince said, "Behold in me, venerable men, the son of Uttānapāda, born of Sunīti. Dissatisfied with the world, I appear before you." The Ṛṣis replied; "The son of a king, and but four or five years of age, there can be no reason, child, why you should be dissatisfied with life; you cannot be in want of any thing whilst the king your father reigns; we cannot imagine that you suffer the pain of separation from the Object of your affections; nor do we observe in your person any sign of disease. What is the cause of your discontent? Tell us, if it is known to yourself."
Dhruva then repeated to the Ṛṣis what Suruci had spoken to him; and when they had heard his story, they said to one another, "How surprising is the vehemence of the Kṣetriya nature, that resentment is cerished even by a child, and he cannot efface from his mind the harsh speeches of a step-mother. Son of a Kṣetriya, tell us, if it be agreeable to thee, what thou hast proposed, through dissatisfaction with the world, to accomplish. If thou wishest our aid in what thou hast to do, declare it freely, for we perceive that thou art desirous to speak."
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[2]: The instructions of the Ṛṣis amount to the performance of the Yoga. External impressions are first to be obviated by particular positions, modes of breathing, &c.: the mind must then be fixed on the Object of meditation; this is Dhārana: next comes the meditation, or Dhyāna; and then the Japa, or inaudible repetition of a Mantra, or short prayer; as in the text. The subject of the Yoga is more fully detailed in a subsequent book.
1.11 - On Intuitive Knowledge, #The Problems of Philosophy, #Bertrand Russell, #Philosophy
It would seem that there are two kinds of self-evident truths of perception, though perhaps in the last analysis the two kinds may coalesce. First, there is the kind which simply asserts the _existence_ of the sense-datum, without in any way analysing it. We see a patch of red, and we judge 'there is such-and-such a patch of red', or more strictly 'there is that'; this is one kind of intuitive judgement of perception. The other kind arises when the Object of sense is complex, and we subject it to some degree of analysis. If, for instance, we see a
_round_ patch of red, we may judge 'that patch of red is round'. This is again a judgement of perception, but it differs from our previous kind.
--
Another class of intuitive judgements, analogous to those of sense and yet quite distinct from them, are judgements of _memory_. There is some danger of confusion as to the nature of memory, owing to the fact that memory of an object is apt to be accompanied by an image of the Object, and yet the image cannot be what constitutes memory. This is easily seen by merely noticing that the image is in the present, whereas what is remembered is known to be in the past. Moreover, we are certainly able to some extent to compare our image with the Object remembered, so that we often know, within somewhat wide limits, how far our image is accurate; but this would be impossible, unless the Object, as opposed to the image, were in some way before the mind. Thus the essence of memory is not constituted by the image, but by having immediately before the mind an object which is recognized as past. But for the fact of memory in this sense, we should not know that there ever was a past at all, nor should we be able to understand the word 'past', any more than a man born blind can understand the word 'light'. Thus there must be intuitive judgements of memory, and it is upon them, ultimately, that all our knowledge of the past depends.
The case of memory, however, raises a difficulty, for it is notoriously fallacious, and thus throws doubt on the trustworthiness of intuitive judgements in general. This difficulty is no light one. But let us first narrow its scope as far as possible. Broadly speaking, memory is trustworthy in proportion to the vividness of the experience and to its nearness in time. If the house next door was struck by lightning half a minute ago, my memory of what I saw and heard will be so reliable that it would be preposterous to doubt whether there had been a flash at all. And the same applies to less vivid experiences, so long as they are recent. I am absolutely certain that half a minute ago I was sitting in the same chair in which I am sitting now. Going backward over the day,
1.11 - Powers, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
When a man can direct his mind to any particular object and fix it there, and then keep it there for a long time, separating the Object from the internal part, this is Samyama; or Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi, one following the other, and making one. The form of the thing has vanished, and only its meaning remains in the mind.
5. By the conquest of that comes light of knowledge.
When one has succeeded in making this Samyama, all powers come under his control. This is the great instrument of the Yogi. the Objects of knowledge are infinite, and they are divided into the gross, grosser, grossest and the fine, finer, finest and so on. This Samyama should be first applied to gross things, and when you begin to get knowledge of this gross, slowly, by stages, it should be brought to finer things.
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We must not lose sight of the first definition of Samyama. When the mind has attained to that state when it identifies itself with the internal impression of the Object, leaving the external, and when, by long practice, that is retained by the mind and the mind can get into that state in a moment, that is Samyama. If a man in that state wants to know the past and future, he has to make a Samyama on the changes in the Samskaras (III. 13). Some are working now at present, some have worked out, and some are waiting to work. So by making a Samyama on these he knows the past and future.
l7. By making Samyama on word, meaning and knowledge, which are ordinarily confused, comes the knowledge of all animal sounds.
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20. But not its contents, that not being the Object of the Samyama.
He would not know the contents of the mind by making a Samyama on the body. There would be required a twofold Samyama, first on the signs in the body, and then on the mind itself. The Yogi would then know everything that is in that mind.
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48. By making Samyama on the Objectivity and power of illumination of the organs, on egoism, the inherence of the Gunas in them and on their contri buting to the experience of the soul, comes the conquest of the organs.
In the perception of external objects the organs leave their place in the mind and go towards the Object; this is followed by knowledge. Egoism also is present in the act. When the Yogi makes Samyama on these and the other two by gradation, he conquers the organs. Take up anything that you see or feel, a book for instance; first concentrate the mind on it, then on the knowledge that is in the form of a book, and then on the Ego that sees the book, and so on. By that practice all the organs will be conquered.
1.11 - The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
union of the sexes under the tree. the Object of the festival, we
are told, is to procure rain, plenty of food and drink, abundance of
--
twins a ceremony is performed, the Object of which clearly is to
transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains.
1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
admit that the Object of Avatarhood is to lead the evolution,
this is quite reasonable, the Divine appearing as Avatar in
1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Master and Mover of our works is the One, the Universal and Supreme, the Eternal and the Infinite. He is the transcendent unknown or Unknowable Absolute, the unexpressed and unmanifested Ineffable above us; but he is also the Self of all beings, the Master of all worlds, transcending all worlds, the Light and the Guide, the All-Beautiful and All-Blissful, the Beloved and the Lover. He is the Cosmic Spirit and all this creative Energy around us; he is the Immanent within us. All that is he, and he is the More than all that is, and we ourselves, though we know it not, are being of his being, force of his force, conscious with a consciousness derived from his; even our mortal existence is made out of his substance and there is an immortal within us that is a spark of the Light and Bliss that are for ever. No matter whether by knowledge, works, love or any other means, to become aware of this truth of our being, to realise it, to make it effective here or elsewhere is the Object of all Yoga.
But the passage is long and the labour arduous before we can look upon him with eyes that see true, and still longer and more arduous must be our endeavour if we would rebuild ourselves in his true image. The Master of the work does not reveal himself at once to the seeker. Always it is his Power that acts behind the veil, but it is manifest only when we renounce the egoism of the worker, and its direct movement increases in proportion as that renunciation becomes more and more concrete. Only when our surrender to his divine shakti is absolute, shall we have the right to live in his absolute presence. And only then can we see our work throw itself naturally, completely and simply into the mould of the Divine Will.
1.1.1 - The Mind and Other Levels of Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It [the perception of an intuitivised mind] is when, instead of seeing things as they appear to the external mind and senses, one begins to see things about them with a subtler physical mind and sensee.g. seeing intuitively what is to be done, how to do it, what the Object (even so-called inanimate objects) wants or needs, what is likely to happen next (or sometimes sure to happen), what forces are at play on the physical plane etc. etc. Even the body becomes intuitively conscious in this way, feels without being told by the mind what it has to do, what it has to avoid, what is near it or coming to it (though unseen) etc. etc.
***
1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"As long as God keeps the awareness of 'I' in us, so long do sense-objects exist; and we cannot very well speak of the world as a dream. There is fire in the hearth; therefore the rice and pulse and potatoes and the other vegetables jump about in the pot. They jump about as if to say: 'We are here! We are jumping!' This body is the pot. The mind and intelligence are the water. the Objects of the senses are the rice, potatoes, and other vegetables. The 'I-consciousness' identified with the senses says, 'I am jumping about.' And Satchidananda is the fire.
"Hence the Bhakti scriptures describe this very world as a 'mansion of mirth'.
Wikipedia - Abstraction (linguistics) -- Use of terms for concepts removed from the objects to which they were originally attached
Wikipedia - Central force -- Central force on an object is a force that is directed along the line joining the object and the origin
Wikipedia - Centre (geometry) -- Middle of the object in geometry
Wikipedia - Chassis -- Load-bearing framework of an artificial object, which structurally supports the object in its construction and function
Wikipedia - Child grooming -- Act of befriending and connecting with a child with the objective of sexual abuse
Wikipedia - Classification theorem -- Describes the objects of a given type, up to some equivalence
Wikipedia - Decision Model and Notation -- Standard published by the Object Management Group
Wikipedia - Flyby (spaceflight) -- Flight event at some distance from the object
Wikipedia - Inode -- Data structure describing a file-system object (e.g. file, directory) that stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the object data
Wikipedia - Invariant (mathematics) -- Property of mathematical objects that remains unchanged for transformations applied to the objects
Wikipedia - Loschmidt's paradox -- the objection that it should not be possible to deduce an irreversible process from time-symmetric dynamics
Wikipedia - Material culture -- Physical aspect of culture in the objects and architecture that surround people
Wikipedia - Overconfidence effect -- Bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgment is greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments
Wikipedia - Par (golf scoring format) -- Scoring system used mostly in amateur and club golf; involves scoring (+, 0, M-bM-^HM-^R) based on results at each hole; the objective is to have an end score with more pluses than minuses
Wikipedia - Proper length -- Length of an object in the object's rest frame
Wikipedia - Structure -- Arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in an object or system, or the object or system so organized
Wikipedia - Subject-verb-object -- Sentence structure where the subject comes 1st, the verb 2nd, the object 3rd (e.g. M-bM-^@M-^\I ate a pieM-bM-^@M-^]); the default word order in English as well as Cantonese, French, Hausa, Italian, Malay, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, etc.
Wikipedia - The Game (mind game) -- Mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself
Wikipedia - The Objectivist Newsletter
Wikipedia - The Objectivist
Wikipedia - This (computer programming) -- In programming languages, the object or class the currently running code belongs tot
Wikipedia - Type-token distinction -- Distinction that separates a concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10854829-the-objective-c-programming-language
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30915073-the-objective-vs-the-intrinsic-and-the-subjective
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/638426.The_Objectivist_Nexus
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6855197-manet-and-the-object-of-painting
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Object_of_My_Affection
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The Object Of My Affection(1998) - The Object of My Affection is a 1998 romantic comedy film, adapted from the book of the same name by Stephen McCauley, and starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. The story concerns a pregnant New York social worker who develops romantic feelings for her gay best friend and decides to raise her chi...
Little Nellie Kelly(1940) - In Ireland, Jerry Kelly (George Murphy) marries his sweetheart Nellie Noonan (Judy Garland) over the objections of her ne'er-do-well father Michael Noonan (Charles Winninger), who swears never to speak to her again, even though he reluctantly accompanies the newlyweds to the U.S., where Jerry become...
Dear Mr. Gacy (2010) ::: 6.4/10 -- R | 1h 43min | Crime, Drama, Thriller | 11 May 2010 (Canada) -- A chronicle of the interaction between college student Jason Moss and the object of his obsession, serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Director: Svetozar Ristovski Writers: Kellie Madison (screenplay), Clark Peterson (story) | 2 more credits
Mala Noche (1986) ::: 6.6/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 18min | Drama | 19 June 1987 (West Germany) -- A story of amour fou. Walt is madly in love/lust with a young illegal Mexican immigrant. However, the object of his unrequited affection doesn't even speak any English and finds Walt really... S Director: Gus Van Sant Writers: Walt Curtis (story), Gus Van Sant (screenplay)
The Cameraman (1928) ::: 8.1/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 16min | Comedy, Drama, Family | 22 September 1928 (USA) -- Hopelessly in love with a woman working at MGM Studios, a clumsy man attempts to become a motion picture cameraman to be close to the object of his desire. Directors: Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton (uncredited) Writers: Clyde Bruckman (story by), Lew Lipton (story by) | 1 more credit Stars:
The Jacket (2005) ::: 7.1/10 -- R | 1h 43min | Drama, Fantasy, Mystery | 4 March 2005 (USA) -- A Gulf war veteran is wrongly sent to a mental institution for insane criminals, where he becomes the object of a doctor's experiments, and his life is completely affected by them. Director: John Maybury Writers:
The Tatami Galaxy ::: Yojhan shinwa taikei (original tit ::: TV-14 | Animation, Comedy, Drama | TV Mini-Series (2010) Episode Guide 11 episodes The Tatami Galaxy Poster When a nameless student at Kyoto University encounters a demigod one night, he asks to relive the past three years in order to win the heart of Ms. Akashi, the object of his affection. Stars: Shintar Asanuma, Hiroyuki Yoshino, Rin Mizuhara
https://brawl-of-the-objects-fan-fiction.fandom.com/wiki/BOTO_Episode_6'_-_BOTO's_Night_Contest
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https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/Brawl_Of_the_Objects:_The_Official_TV_Series
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https://dreamfiction.fandom.com/wiki/The_Object_Show_Movie
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B-Legend! Battle B-Daman -- -- Nippon Animation -- 52 eps -- Manga -- Adventure Fantasy Game Kids -- B-Legend! Battle B-Daman B-Legend! Battle B-Daman -- Upon the creation of marble launching machines known as B-Daman, people started to participate in the competitive sport B-DaBattles. However, B-Daman contain hidden powers which enhance marble shooting that can be misused for combative purposes. -- -- One night, a certain object residing behind the walls of a restaurant calls upon Yamato Daiwa—a boy raised by cats. Yamato has been having visions of the object which resembles a machine familiar to everyone. Little does he know, hidden behind the walls is not a mere machine, but the fate of the world. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Hasbro -- 11,333 6.29
Cossette no Shouzou -- -- Daume -- 3 eps -- Original -- Drama Horror Magic Psychological Romance Supernatural -- Cossette no Shouzou Cossette no Shouzou -- Eiri Kurahashi is a Japanese art student who works in an antique shop. His friends begin to notice a dramatic, and rather concerning, change in Eiri, as he becomes more absent-minded and his behavior completely changes. They quickly decide to blame their friend's troubles on a girl. -- -- They may be right, however, as Eiri has begun seeing a beautiful, doll-like girl trapped within an antique Venetian glass that his uncle bought in France. She seems to be living in a strange other world, contained entirely inside this glass, but her image refuses to leave Eiri's mind. His sketchbook becomes filled with her likeness, and he realizes he has become completely infatuated with this strange little girl. When he recognizes her in a portrait by the mysterious Italian artist, Marchello Orlando, he learns her name is Cossette d’Auvergne, and that she was tragically murdered along with the rest of her family. -- -- One night, as he closes up the shop, he hears a voice asking him not to leave. Finally making contact with the object of his obsession, he makes a deal that he doesn't fully understand. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Geneon Entertainment USA, Sentai Filmworks -- OVA - Apr 11, 2004 -- 60,299 6.84
Cossette no Shouzou -- -- Daume -- 3 eps -- Original -- Drama Horror Magic Psychological Romance Supernatural -- Cossette no Shouzou Cossette no Shouzou -- Eiri Kurahashi is a Japanese art student who works in an antique shop. His friends begin to notice a dramatic, and rather concerning, change in Eiri, as he becomes more absent-minded and his behavior completely changes. They quickly decide to blame their friend's troubles on a girl. -- -- They may be right, however, as Eiri has begun seeing a beautiful, doll-like girl trapped within an antique Venetian glass that his uncle bought in France. She seems to be living in a strange other world, contained entirely inside this glass, but her image refuses to leave Eiri's mind. His sketchbook becomes filled with her likeness, and he realizes he has become completely infatuated with this strange little girl. When he recognizes her in a portrait by the mysterious Italian artist, Marchello Orlando, he learns her name is Cossette d’Auvergne, and that she was tragically murdered along with the rest of her family. -- -- One night, as he closes up the shop, he hears a voice asking him not to leave. Finally making contact with the object of his obsession, he makes a deal that he doesn't fully understand. -- -- OVA - Apr 11, 2004 -- 60,299 6.84
Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Adventure Fantasy Shounen -- Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu -- Gohan Son and Piccolo are peacefully playing when they sense a powerful entity approaching Earth. It soon reaches everyone's ears that this entity is in fact a small planet on a deadly collision course with Earth. Gokuu Son and Kuririn attempt to change the small planet's path with a Kamehameha, but the attack fails and the two warriors are blown away. However, after coming very close to Earth's surface, the object changes direction on its own and explodes soon after. -- -- The small planet reveals itself to be a vehicle for what seems to be a castle. A large army emerges out of the structure and declares that the planet is now in possession of Slug, king of the universe. While defending the city against the invaders' attack, Gohan loses his Dragon Ball, allowing Slug to take it. After reading Bulma's mind and stealing her Dragon Radar, Slug commands his army to collect the wish-granting relics. With the Dragon Balls in his possession, he uses them to wish his youth back. Now young, wise, and very powerful, Slug commences world domination. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Mar 9, 1991 -- 94,615 6.58
Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Adventure Fantasy Shounen -- Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu -- Gohan Son and Piccolo are peacefully playing when they sense a powerful entity approaching Earth. It soon reaches everyone's ears that this entity is in fact a small planet on a deadly collision course with Earth. Gokuu Son and Kuririn attempt to change the small planet's path with a Kamehameha, but the attack fails and the two warriors are blown away. However, after coming very close to Earth's surface, the object changes direction on its own and explodes soon after. -- -- The small planet reveals itself to be a vehicle for what seems to be a castle. A large army emerges out of the structure and declares that the planet is now in possession of Slug, king of the universe. While defending the city against the invaders' attack, Gohan loses his Dragon Ball, allowing Slug to take it. After reading Bulma's mind and stealing her Dragon Radar, Slug commands his army to collect the wish-granting relics. With the Dragon Balls in his possession, he uses them to wish his youth back. Now young, wise, and very powerful, Slug commences world domination. -- -- Movie - Mar 9, 1991 -- 94,615 6.58
Isshuukan Friends. -- -- Brain's Base -- 12 eps -- 4-koma manga -- Slice of Life Comedy School Shounen -- Isshuukan Friends. Isshuukan Friends. -- Sixteen-year-old Yuuki Hase finally finds the courage to speak to his crush and ask her if she wants to become friends. The object of his affection, Kaori Fujimiya, is a quiet and reserved girl who cuts herself off from everyone and does not spare him the same blunt rejection she gives everybody else. -- -- Some time after, Yuuki finds her eating lunch on the roof where she secludes herself during break. He decides to start meeting with Kaori every day in the hopes of beginning to understand her better. The more time they spend together, the more she begins to open up to him. However, nearing the end of the week, she starts to push him away once more. It is then revealed to him the reason for Kaori's cold front: at the end of the week, her memories of those close to her, excluding her family, are forgotten, as they are reset every Monday. The result of an accident in middle school, the once popular and kind Kaori is now unable to make friends in fear of hurting the people dear to her. -- -- Determined to become more than just one week friends, Yuuki asks her the exact same question each Monday: "Would you like to be friends?" Because he knows that deep down, Kaori wishes for that more than anything. -- -- 259,203 7.56
Isshuukan Friends. -- -- Brain's Base -- 12 eps -- 4-koma manga -- Slice of Life Comedy School Shounen -- Isshuukan Friends. Isshuukan Friends. -- Sixteen-year-old Yuuki Hase finally finds the courage to speak to his crush and ask her if she wants to become friends. The object of his affection, Kaori Fujimiya, is a quiet and reserved girl who cuts herself off from everyone and does not spare him the same blunt rejection she gives everybody else. -- -- Some time after, Yuuki finds her eating lunch on the roof where she secludes herself during break. He decides to start meeting with Kaori every day in the hopes of beginning to understand her better. The more time they spend together, the more she begins to open up to him. However, nearing the end of the week, she starts to push him away once more. It is then revealed to him the reason for Kaori's cold front: at the end of the week, her memories of those close to her, excluding her family, are forgotten, as they are reset every Monday. The result of an accident in middle school, the once popular and kind Kaori is now unable to make friends in fear of hurting the people dear to her. -- -- Determined to become more than just one week friends, Yuuki asks her the exact same question each Monday: "Would you like to be friends?" Because he knows that deep down, Kaori wishes for that more than anything. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 259,203 7.56
Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Action Mystery Supernatural Thriller -- Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- Following the events of Satsujin Kousatsu (Zen), Shiki Ryougi has been in a coma for two years due to a traffic accident. When she finally awakens, she has no memories of her past and is plagued by a profound loneliness. Even stranger, she notices dark lines encompassing the things around her, and if she touches them she can disassemble the object—something which completely terrifies her. Her friend, Mikiya Kokutou, enlists the help of Touko Aozaki, a mage who can help Shiki understand what her eyes—the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception"—are truly capable of and how to use them properly. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - May 24, 2008 -- 175,302 7.89
Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- -- ufotable -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Action Mystery Supernatural Thriller -- Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou Kara no Kyoukai 4: Garan no Dou -- Following the events of Satsujin Kousatsu (Zen), Shiki Ryougi has been in a coma for two years due to a traffic accident. When she finally awakens, she has no memories of her past and is plagued by a profound loneliness. Even stranger, she notices dark lines encompassing the things around her, and if she touches them she can disassemble the object—something which completely terrifies her. Her friend, Mikiya Kokutou, enlists the help of Touko Aozaki, a mage who can help Shiki understand what her eyes—the "Mystic Eyes of Death Perception"—are truly capable of and how to use them properly. -- -- Movie - May 24, 2008 -- 175,302 7.89
Kuromukuro -- -- P.A. Works -- 26 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- Kuromukuro Kuromukuro -- During the dawn of the 21st century, the United Nations Kurobe Research Institute was established in Japan to investigate an ancient artifact, which was discovered during the construction of the Kurobe Dam. Scientists from around the world have gathered in the facility to study the object, while their children enjoy their everyday lives attending Mt. Tate International Senior High School. -- -- Yukina Shirahane, a reserved high school girl, is the daughter of the facility's head scientist. While visiting her mother at the facility, Yukina manages to solve part of the artifact's puzzle. To her surprise, what appears before her is Kennosuke Tokisada Ouma, a young samurai from the Sengoku era. -- -- As a threat approaches from outer space, Yukina, along with Kennosuke, finds herself defending Earth against the invading forces. Along the way, she discovers the mystery behind Kennosuke and the reason he is determined to protect her. -- -- 115,000 7.19
Kuromukuro -- -- P.A. Works -- 26 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- Kuromukuro Kuromukuro -- During the dawn of the 21st century, the United Nations Kurobe Research Institute was established in Japan to investigate an ancient artifact, which was discovered during the construction of the Kurobe Dam. Scientists from around the world have gathered in the facility to study the object, while their children enjoy their everyday lives attending Mt. Tate International Senior High School. -- -- Yukina Shirahane, a reserved high school girl, is the daughter of the facility's head scientist. While visiting her mother at the facility, Yukina manages to solve part of the artifact's puzzle. To her surprise, what appears before her is Kennosuke Tokisada Ouma, a young samurai from the Sengoku era. -- -- As a threat approaches from outer space, Yukina, along with Kennosuke, finds herself defending Earth against the invading forces. Along the way, she discovers the mystery behind Kennosuke and the reason he is determined to protect her. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Ponycan USA -- 115,000 7.19
Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989) -- -- - -- 6 eps -- Manga -- Action Horror Sci-Fi Super Power -- Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989) Kyoushoku Soukou Guyver (1989) -- Shou and his friend, Tetsurou, stumble upon a strange orb-like mechanism, the Guyver Unit, in the woods. It physically bonds with Shou and turns him into the alien soldier, Guyver. His mission is to protect the Guyver Unit from the Japanese corporation known as Chronos. They are after it and two other units just like it. To retrieve the object, they send out vicious monsters known as Zoanoids. So no one is safe in Shou's life; not even himself. -- -- Licensor: -- Manga Entertainment -- OVA - Sep 25, 1989 -- 10,976 7.12
Little Witch Academia: Mahoujikake no Parade -- -- Trigger -- 1 ep -- Original -- Adventure Comedy Magic Fantasy School -- Little Witch Academia: Mahoujikake no Parade Little Witch Academia: Mahoujikake no Parade -- You can tell witch training is not going swimmingly for the young sorceresses Akko, Lotte, and Sucy—they face expulsion for screwing up one class too many, and their only way out is if they successfully organize their academy's annual parade through a nearby town. But when they stumble upon the momentous discovery that the objective of the parade is to humiliate witches and commemorate their past subjugation, Akko decides it is time for a change: It is time to show the world how fantastic modern witches truly are! However, with the other girls struggling to keep up with Akko's grandiose ambitions, and everything from mischievous boys to slumbering giants getting in their way, maybe pulling it off will require not only all the magical prowess the pupils of Luna Nova Magical Academy can muster, but also a miracle. -- -- Movie - Oct 9, 2015 -- 147,201 7.78
Mo Dao Zu Shi 3rd Season -- -- B.CMAY PICTURES -- ? eps -- Novel -- Action Historical Demons Supernatural Drama Magic -- Mo Dao Zu Shi 3rd Season Mo Dao Zu Shi 3rd Season -- Third season of Mo Dao Zu Shi. -- ONA - ??? ??, 2021 -- 18,671 N/ASoukou Kihei Votoms -- -- Sunrise -- 52 eps -- Original -- Action Space Mecha Military Drama Sci-Fi -- Soukou Kihei Votoms Soukou Kihei Votoms -- A century of bloodshed between warring star systems has plunged nearly 200 worlds into the flames of war. Now, an uneasy truce has settled across the Astragius Galaxy... -- -- Chirico Cuvie, a special forces powered-armor pilot is suddenly transferred into a unit engaged in a secret and highly illegal mission to steal military secrets—from their own military! Now he's on the run...from his own army! -- -- Unsure of his loyalties and to cover their own tracks, Chirico is left behind to die in space. Surviving by luck, the renegade is now hunted by both the conspirators and military intelligence. -- -- He is driven by the haunting image of a mysterious and beautiful woman—the objective of their mission, and his sole clue to unraveling their treacherous scheme. But the conspirators will do anything to preserve their mysterious agenda... -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media, Maiden Japan -- TV - Apr 1, 1983 -- 18,584 7.72
Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 13 eps -- Light novel -- Comedy Harem Romance School -- Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru -- The infidelity of Eita Kidou's parents not only made his family fall apart, but also made him skeptic of love. Having no intention to delve into romance, Eita devotes his entire high school life to his studies in order to become a doctor. -- -- It did not take long for the beautiful and popular Masuzu Natsukawa to notice Eita's apathy. Tired of being the object of people's affection, she asks him to pretend to be her boyfriend, as she too feels disgusted at the notion of love. Eita, however, refuses—yet Masuzu has one trick left up her sleeve: Eita’s journal and threatening to post the embarrassing content online if he does not comply. -- -- Now entangled in a fake romance with the most desired girl at school, Eita's life is turned upside down. Whether envied by his peers or receiving a confession, he must cope with his newfound relationship and all the troubles that come along with it. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 419,803 7.03
Soukou Kihei Votoms -- -- Sunrise -- 52 eps -- Original -- Action Space Mecha Military Drama Sci-Fi -- Soukou Kihei Votoms Soukou Kihei Votoms -- A century of bloodshed between warring star systems has plunged nearly 200 worlds into the flames of war. Now, an uneasy truce has settled across the Astragius Galaxy... -- -- Chirico Cuvie, a special forces powered-armor pilot is suddenly transferred into a unit engaged in a secret and highly illegal mission to steal military secrets—from their own military! Now he's on the run...from his own army! -- -- Unsure of his loyalties and to cover their own tracks, Chirico is left behind to die in space. Surviving by luck, the renegade is now hunted by both the conspirators and military intelligence. -- -- He is driven by the haunting image of a mysterious and beautiful woman—the objective of their mission, and his sole clue to unraveling their treacherous scheme. But the conspirators will do anything to preserve their mysterious agenda... -- -- (Source: AnimeNfo) -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media, Maiden Japan -- TV - Apr 1, 1983 -- 18,584 7.72
Strike Witches: Road to Berlin -- -- David Production -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Military Sci-Fi Magic Ecchi -- Strike Witches: Road to Berlin Strike Witches: Road to Berlin -- Preparations for a new offensive against the Neuroi—a mysterious race of alien invaders—are well underway. The objective is securing Berlin, the capital city of the Empire of Karlsland, which is necessary for wiping out the Neuroi threat from Europe. However, as the enemy is capable of adapting to the battlefield on a daily basis, the allied forces and the current state of Striker technology might not be enough to achieve a victory. -- -- Meanwhile, Yoshika Miyafuji, a Witch from Fuso, continues her medical studies in Lausanne. Having recovered from a recent incident that deprived her of magical power, she is eager to assist in the war effort. The call to arms soon arrives and the scattered witches of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing must be gathered once again for a final push against the enemy. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 16,634 7.30
Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 1 ep -- Light novel -- Action Game Adventure Romance Fantasy -- Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Hoshi Naki Yoru no Aria -- "There's no way to beat this game. The only difference is when and where you die..." -- -- One month has passed since Akihiko Kayaba's deadly game began, and the body count continues to rise. Two thousand players are already dead. -- -- Kirito and Asuna are two very different people, but they both desire to fight alone. Nonetheless, they find themselves drawn together to face challenges from both within and without. Given that the entire virtual world they now live in has been created as a deathtrap, the surviving players of Sword Art Online are starting to get desperate, and desperation makes them dangerous to loners like Kirito and Asuna. As it becomes clear that solitude equals suicide, will the two be able to overcome their differences to find the strength to believe in each other, and in so doing survive? -- -- Sword Art Online: Progressive is a new version of the Sword Art Online tale that starts at the beginning of Kirito and Asuna's epic adventure—on the very first level of the deadly world of Aincrad! -- -- (Source: Yen Press) -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- Movie - ??? ??, 2021 -- 94,949 N/ADragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Adventure Fantasy Shounen -- Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu Dragon Ball Z Movie 04: Super Saiyajin da Son Gokuu -- Gohan Son and Piccolo are peacefully playing when they sense a powerful entity approaching Earth. It soon reaches everyone's ears that this entity is in fact a small planet on a deadly collision course with Earth. Gokuu Son and Kuririn attempt to change the small planet's path with a Kamehameha, but the attack fails and the two warriors are blown away. However, after coming very close to Earth's surface, the object changes direction on its own and explodes soon after. -- -- The small planet reveals itself to be a vehicle for what seems to be a castle. A large army emerges out of the structure and declares that the planet is now in possession of Slug, king of the universe. While defending the city against the invaders' attack, Gohan loses his Dragon Ball, allowing Slug to take it. After reading Bulma's mind and stealing her Dragon Radar, Slug commands his army to collect the wish-granting relics. With the Dragon Balls in his possession, he uses them to wish his youth back. Now young, wise, and very powerful, Slug commences world domination. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Mar 9, 1991 -- 94,615 6.58
TO -- -- - -- 2 eps -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Space Drama Seinen -- TO TO -- Elliptical Orbit: -- Fifteen years after its last contact with our world, a space freighter known as the Flying Dutchman requests permission to dock at a remote moon base. This mysterious ship carries liquid protons: a power source essential to the survival of Earth’s population. But before the precious cargo can be delivered, the base is ambushed by galactic terrorists who seek to destroy the new form of energy and issue a death sentence to all of humanity. -- -- -- Symbiotic Planet: -- Against a backdrop of intergalactic colonization and bizarre alien life forms, Aon and Elena – star-crossed lovers from rival countries competing for valuable natural resources – struggle to build a life together despite the objections of their superiors. Their budding romance is thwarted by an outbreak of alien fungus and the interference of a cutthroat militaristic madman. To survive, the young couple must maintain their faith in each other and learn to trust the unique creatures which inhabit this strange and wondrous new world. -- -- (Source: Funimation) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- OVA - Oct 2, 2009 -- 5,096 6.39
To LOVE-Ru OVA -- -- Xebec -- 6 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Ecchi Harem School Sci-Fi Shounen -- To LOVE-Ru OVA To LOVE-Ru OVA -- Episode 01: Rito becomes a Woman -- Lala invents a gizmo to make her bust bigger. However, this invention of hers accidentally turns Rito into a woman. -- -- Episode 02: Rito and Mikan -- Feeling lonely because Rito is always spending time with Lala, Mikan storms out of the house. While Rito and Lala are out looking for her a few flashbacks from the past, showing Rito and Mikan as kids, are shown. -- -- Episode 03: Welcome to the Southern Resort!! -- Haruna wins an island resort trip for ten females. Rito gets turned into a dog by one of Lala's inventions and somehow ends up on the island as well. -- -- Episode 04: Trouble Quest -- Rito and the girls become trapped inside an RPG game where the objective is to save Lala and defeat the evil witch Kyouko. -- -- Episode 05: Nana and Momo -- Lala's sisters cause mischief for Rito and his harem at a cherry blossom viewing. -- -- Episode 06: Draft, Metamorphose, Hand & Tail -- Yami and Yui confront with a senior, causing Yui to lose her panties. -- -- Mikan finds Peke taking snapshots of new clothing while shopping. Suddenly, a stranger steals her bag. -- -- As Rito tries to explore Lala's cleaned-up bedroom, he accidentally activates one of Lala's invention, fusing his hand to Lala's tail. -- OVA - Apr 3, 2009 -- 145,159 7.30
Yozakura Quartet -- -- Nomad -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Magic Comedy Super Power Supernatural Shounen -- Yozakura Quartet Yozakura Quartet -- The world of Yozakura Quartet is actually not one, but two worlds: one of humans, and one of youkai. Despite appearing mostly human, youkai may have animal like physical traits, along with a number of special abilities. Normally youkai are confined to their world, but some have found their way into the realm of humanity. As a symbol of peace, and a bridge between the two realms, a city was constructed within the protective barrier of seven magical trees, otherwise known as the Seven Pillars. This city of Sakurashin is home to both humans and youkai, with the peace between them maintained by the Hizumi Life Counseling Office. -- -- The director of this office is Akina Hiizumi, a teenager with the inherited family ability to perform “tuning,” which can send harmful youkai back to their world permanently. He is aided by a group of girls, including the town’s 16 year old youkai mayor, Hime Yarizakura, their town’s announcer and resident telepath, Ao Nanami, and Kotoha Isone, a half-youkai who can summon objects just by stating the object’s name. -- -- As new residents enter and mysterious events begin to take place, this quartet of protectors and their closest friends must continue to guard the city of Sakurashin, and maintain the fragile balance of peace between humans and youkai. -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- TV - Oct 3, 2008 -- 122,344 6.83
Yozakura Quartet -- -- Nomad -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Magic Comedy Super Power Supernatural Shounen -- Yozakura Quartet Yozakura Quartet -- The world of Yozakura Quartet is actually not one, but two worlds: one of humans, and one of youkai. Despite appearing mostly human, youkai may have animal like physical traits, along with a number of special abilities. Normally youkai are confined to their world, but some have found their way into the realm of humanity. As a symbol of peace, and a bridge between the two realms, a city was constructed within the protective barrier of seven magical trees, otherwise known as the Seven Pillars. This city of Sakurashin is home to both humans and youkai, with the peace between them maintained by the Hizumi Life Counseling Office. -- -- The director of this office is Akina Hiizumi, a teenager with the inherited family ability to perform “tuning,” which can send harmful youkai back to their world permanently. He is aided by a group of girls, including the town’s 16 year old youkai mayor, Hime Yarizakura, their town’s announcer and resident telepath, Ao Nanami, and Kotoha Isone, a half-youkai who can summon objects just by stating the object’s name. -- -- As new residents enter and mysterious events begin to take place, this quartet of protectors and their closest friends must continue to guard the city of Sakurashin, and maintain the fragile balance of peace between humans and youkai. -- TV - Oct 3, 2008 -- 122,344 6.83
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