TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
1. Of or pertaining to the present time or moment. 2. Next in line or relation; closest or most direct in effect or relationship. 3. Without intervening medium or agent; direct.
1) Yemot Hamashiach (&
Abel thus is a generalizing term for womankind and Cain for mankind, when the sexes began separating in the third root-race but were not yet completely apart, before the androgynous humans became the present humanity with distinct sexes. A similar word, hebel (the pain of childbirth), is connected by some scholars with Abel. See also HABEL
Abhidharmadīpa. In Sanskrit, "Lamp of ABHIDHARMA"; an Indian scholastic treatise probably composed between 450 and 550 CE. Only fragments of the treatise (sixty-two of 150 folios) are extant; these were discovered in Tibet in 1937. The treatise is composed of two parts-the Abhidharmadīpa, written in verse (kArikA), and a prose autocommentary, the VibhAsAprabhAvṛtti-both of which were probably composed by the same anonymous author. The author, who refers to himself merely as the "DīpakAra" ("author of the Dīpa") may be Vimalamitra (d.u.), an otherwise-unknown disciple of SAMGHABHADRA. The structure of the text is modeled on that of the influential ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA, and almost half of the kArikA verses included in the Abhidharmadīpa are virtually identical to those found in the Abhidharmakosa. Although borrowing freely from the Kosa, the DīpakAra launches a harsh critique of VASUBANDHU's (whom he calls the "KosakAra," or "author of the Kosa") AbhidharmakosabhAsya, from the standpoint of SARVASTIVADA abhidharma. Vasubandhu is criticized for the SAUTRANTIKA tendencies betrayed in his doctrinal analyses and also for being a MahAyAnist adherent of the teachings of the "three natures" (TRISVABHAVA). As such, the Abhidharmadīpa's author seems to have been a follower of SAMGHABHADRA's *NYAYANUSARA, and the text helps to clarify the positions of SaMghabhadra and the orthodox VAIBHAsIKAs. The DīpakAra shares the latter's concern with providing both a systematic exegesis of abhidharma theory and a vigorous polemical defense of SarvAstivAda doctrinal positions. Since it presents theories of other thinkers not covered in the AbhidharmakosabhAsya, the Abhidharmadīpa serves as an important source for studying the history of Indian abhidharma. For example, in his discussion of the eponymous SarvAstivAda position that "everything exists" throughout all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future, the DīpakAra also critiques three rival positions: the VIBHAJYAVADA and DArstAntikas, who maintain that only "part" exists (viz., the present); the Vaitulika and AyogasunyatAvAda, who say that nothing exists; and the PUDGALAVADA, who presume that existence is indeterminate (AVYAKṚTA).
AbhisamayAlaMkAravivṛti. (T. [Shes rab phar phyin man ngag gi bstan bcos] mngon rtogs rgyan gyi 'grel pa). In Sanskrit, "Commentary on the Ornament of Realization" by HARIBHADRA. The work in four bundles (T. bam po) is a digest (called 'grel chung, "short commentary") of his long detailed explanation of the AstASAHASRIKAPRAJNAPARAMITA ("Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines"), the AstASAHASRIKAPRAJNAPARAMITAVYAKHYABHISAMAYALAMKARALOKA (called 'grel chen, "long commentary"). The AbhisamayAlaMkAravivṛti gained considerable importance in Tibet after RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB supplemented his translation of it with a summary (bsdus don) of its contents, beginning a tradition of PRAJNAPARAMITA commentary that spread from GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery into all four Tibetan sects. This tradition, which continues down to the present, uses the ABHISAMAYALAMKARA and ABHISAMAYALAMKARAVIVṚTI as twin root texts to structure wide-ranging discussions of abhidharma, right philosophical view and proper praxis. There are two subcommentaries to the work, Dharmamitra's PRASPHUtAPADA and DHARMAKĪRTIsRĪ's DurbodhAloka. PRAJNAKARAMATI, RATNAKĪRTI, and BuddhajNAna wrote summaries of the work, all extant in Tibetan translation. See also SPHUtARTHA.
abreast ::: adv. --> Side by side, with breasts in a line; as, "Two men could hardly walk abreast."
Side by side; also, opposite; over against; on a line with the vessel&
"A conscious being, no larger than a man"s thumb, stands in the centre of our self; he is master of the past and the present . . . he is today and he is tomorrow. — Katha Upanishad. (6)” The Life Divine - See *conscious being.
“A conscious being, no larger than a man’s thumb, stands in the centre of our self; he is master of the past and the present . . . he is today and he is tomorrow.—Katha Upanishad. (6)” The Life Divine
"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
active brahman ::: same as sagun.a brahman, the dynamic aspect of brahman which is expressed in the cosmic movement, "a universal Divine, one in being, multiple in personality and power, who conveys to us, when we enter into the consciousness of his universal forces, a sense of infinite quality and will and act and world-wide knowledge and a one yet innumerable delight"; realised by the mind separately from the santaṁ brahma or silent brahman, it is an aspect of universal being which "though wonderfully freed, uplifted and illumined, supports only the present self-expression of the Cosmic Spirit and does not transform, as would a transcendental Descent, the ambiguous symbols and veiled mysteries of a world of Ignorance". active samat samata
AdAnavijNAna. (T. len pa'i rnam par shes pa; C. atuona shi/xiangxu shi; J. adanashiki/sozokushiki; K. at'ana sik/sangsok sik 阿陀那識/相續識). In Sanskrit, "appropriating consciousness" or "retributory consciousness"; an alternate name for the ALAYAVIJNANA, the eighth consciousness in the YOGACARA analysis of consciousness, which serves as a repository (Alaya) of the seeds (BĪJA) of past action (KARMAN) until they can come to fruition (VIPAKA) in the future. Because that consciousness thus links the present with the future life, the AlayavijNAna also serves as the consciousness that "appropriates" a physical body at the moment of rebirth, hence, its name AdAnavijNAna.
Adrishta (Sanskrit) Adṛṣṭa [from a not + the verbal root dṛṣ to see, learn, perceive with the mind or intuition] Unseen, unforeseen, invisible; an unforeseen danger. In philosophy, that which is beyond the reach or observation of the percipient consciousness. W. Q. Judge defines it as “the merit or demerit attaching to a man’s conduct in a former incarnation, and the corresponding (apparently arbitrary) punishment or reward in the present or a future incarnation” (WG 2). This is clearly seen in the compound term adrishta-phala (unseen fruit), karma not yet come into force. Hence the connotation of fate, luck (sometimes bad luck) that is attached to adrishta. (BCW 5:580 with Kanada as “unseen force”; 4:61 with Nyayas as invisible principle)
Aeon (Gn.): A Gnostic term for the Supreme Deity; also a cycle of time denoting a period of approximately 2,000 years (in the Crowley Cult). The present Aeon is that of Horus,
agami karma. ::: current karma being freshly performed by the individual; new karma accumulated in the present lifetime, added to the store of sanchita karma and carried forward into future lives; actions good and bad, expected to bear fruit in future births
age ::: n. --> The whole duration of a being, whether animal, vegetable, or other kind; lifetime.
That part of the duration of a being or a thing which is between its beginning and any given time; as, what is the present age of a man, or of the earth?
The latter part of life; an advanced period of life; seniority; state of being old.
One of the stages of life; as, the age of infancy, of youth,
Agnishvatta(s) ::: (Sanskrit) ::: A compound of two words: agni, "fire"; shvatta, "tasted" or "sweetened," from svad, verb-rootmeaning "to taste" or "to sweeten." Therefore, literally one who has been delighted or sweetened by fire.A class of pitris: our solar ancestors as contrasted with the barhishads, our lunar ancestors.The kumaras, agnishvattas, and manasaputras are three groups or aspects of the same beings: thekumaras represent the aspect of original spiritual purity untouched by gross elements of matter. Theagnishvattas represent the aspect of their connection with the sun or solar spiritual fire. Having tasted orbeen "sweetened" by the spiritual fire -- the fire of intellectuality and spirituality -- they have beenpurified thereby. The manasaputras represent the aspect of intellectuality -- the functions of higherintellect.The agnishvattas and manasaputras are two names for the same class or host of beings, and set forth orsignify or represent two different aspects or activities of this one class of beings. Thus, for instance, aman may be said to be a kumara in his spiritual parts, an agnishvatta in his buddhic-manasic parts, and amanasaputra in his purely manasic aspect. Other beings could be called kumaras in their highest aspects,as for instance the beasts, but they are not imbodied agnishvattas or manasaputras.The agnishvattas are the solar spiritual-intellectual parts of us, and therefore are our inner teachers. Inpreceding manvantaras, they had completed their evolution in the realms of physical matter, and whenthe evolution of lower beings had brought these latter to the proper state, the agnishvattas came to therescue of these who had only the physical "creative fire," thus inspiring and enlightening these lowerlunar pitris with spiritual and intellectual energies or "fires."When this earth's planetary chain shall have reached the end of its seventh round, we, as then havingcompleted the evolutionary course for this planetary chain, will leave this planetary chain asdhyan-chohans, agnishvattas; but the others now trailing along behind us -- the present beasts -- will bethe lunar pitris of the next planetary chain to come.While it is correct to say that these three names appertain to the same class of beings, nevertheless eachname has its own significance in the occult teaching, which is why the three names are used with threedistinct meanings. Imagine an unconscious god-spark beginning its evolution in any one solar ormaha-manvantara. We may call it a kumara, a being of original spiritual purity, but with a destinythrough karmic evolution connected with the realms of matter.At the other end of the line, at the consummation of the evolution in this maha-manvantara, when theevolving entity has become a fully self-conscious god or divinity, its proper appellation then isagnishvatta, for it has been "sweetened" or purified by means of the working through it of the spiritualfires inherent in itself.Now then, when such an agnishvatta assumes the role of a bringer of mind or of intellectual light to alunar pitri which it overshadows and in which a ray from it incarnates, it then, although in its own realman agnishvatta, functions as a manasaputra or child of mind or mahat. A brief analysis of the compoundelements of these three names may be useful.Kumara is from ku meaning "with difficulty" and mara meaning "mortal." The significance of the wordtherefore can be paraphrased as "mortal with difficulty," and the meaning usually given to it by Sanskritscholars as "easily dying" is wholly exoteric and amusing, and doubtless arose from the fact that kumarais a word frequently used for child or boy, everybody knowing that young children "die easily." The ideatherefore is that purely spiritual beings, although ultimately destined by evolution to pass through therealms of matter, become mortal, i.e., material, only with difficulty.Agnishvatta has the meaning stated above, "delighted" or "pleased" or "sweetened," i.e., "purified" byfire -- which we may render in two ways: either as the fire of suffering and pain in material existenceproducing great fiber and strength of character, i.e., spirituality; or, perhaps still better from thestandpoint of occultism, as signifying an entity or entities who have become one in essence throughevolution with the aethery fire of spirit.Manasaputra is a compound of two words: manasa, "mental" or "intellectual," from the word manas,"mind," and putra, "son" or "child," therefore a child of the cosmic mind -- a "mind-born son" as H. P.Blavatsky phrases it. (See also Pitris, Lunar Pitris)
akashic record ::: the etheric writing (akasalipi) "that keeps the record of all things past, transcribes all that is in process in the present, writes out the future". akriy akriya a ud udasinata
aladr.s.t.i ::: the intuitive knowledge of things in the present "that are beyond the range of our physical senses or the reach of any means of knowledge open to the surface intelligence". primary d dasya
AlayavijNAna. (T. kun gzhi rnam par shes pa; C. alaiyeshi/zangshi; J. arayashiki/zoshiki; K. aroeyasik/changsik 阿賴耶識/藏識). In Sanskrit, "storehouse consciousness" or "foundational consciousness"; the eighth of the eight types of consciousness (VIJNANA) posited in the YOGACARA school. All forms of Buddhist thought must be able to uphold (1) the principle of the cause and effect of actions (KARMAN), the structure of SAMSARA, and the process of liberation (VIMOKsA) from it, while also upholding (2) the fundamental doctrines of impermanence (ANITYA) and the lack of a perduring self (ANATMAN). The most famous and comprehensive solution to the range of problems created by these apparently contradictory elements is the AlayavijNAna, often translated as the "storehouse consciousness." This doctrinal concept derives in India from the YOGACARA school, especially from ASAnGA and VASUBANDHU and their commentators. Whereas other schools of Buddhist thought posit six consciousnesses (vijNAna), in the YogAcAra system there are eight, adding the afflicted mind (KLIstAMANAS) and the AlayavijNAna. It appears that once the SarvAstivAda's school's eponymous doctrine of the existence of dharmas in the past, present, and future was rejected by most other schools of Buddhism, some doctrinal solution was required to provide continuity between past and future, including past and future lifetimes. The alAyavijNAna provides that solution as a foundational form of consciousness, itself ethically neutral, where all the seeds (BIJA) of all deeds done in the past reside, and from which they fructify in the form of experience. Thus, the AlayavijNAna is said to pervade the entire body during life, to withdraw from the body at the time of death (with the extremities becoming cold as it slowly exits), and to carry the complete karmic record to the next rebirth destiny. Among the many doctrinal problems that the presence of the AlayavijNAna is meant to solve, it appears that one of its earliest references is in the context not of rebirth but in that of the NIRODHASAMAPATTI, or "trance of cessation," where all conscious activity, that is, all CITTA and CAITTA, cease. Although the meditator may appear as if dead during that trance, consciousness is able to be reactivated because the AlayavijNAna remains present throughout, with the seeds of future experience lying dormant in it, available to bear fruit when the person arises from meditation. The AlayavijNAna thus provides continuity from moment to moment within a given lifetime and from lifetime to lifetime, all providing the link between an action performed in the past and its effect experienced in the present, despite protracted periods of latency between seed and fruition. In YogAcAra, where the existence of an external world is denied, when a seed bears fruit, it bifurcates into an observing subject and an observed object, with that object falsely imagined to exist separately from the consciousness that perceives it. The response by the subject to that object produces more seeds, either positive, negative, or neutral, which are deposited in the AlayavijNAna, remaining there until they in turn bear their fruit. Although said to be neutral and a kind of silent observer of experience, the AlayavijNAna is thus also the recipient of karmic seeds as they are produced, receiving impressions (VASANA) from them. In the context of Buddhist soteriological discussions, the AlayavijNAna explains why contaminants (ASRAVA) remain even when unwholesome states of mind are not actively present, and it provides the basis for the mistaken belief in self (Atman). Indeed, it is said that the klistamanas perceives the AlayavijNAna as a perduring self. The AlayavijNAna also explains how progress on the path can continue over several lifetimes and why some follow the path of the sRAVAKA and others the path of the BODHISATTVA; it is said that one's lineage (GOTRA) is in fact a seed that resides permanently in the AlayavijNAna. In India, the doctrine of the AlayavijNAna was controversial, with some members of the YogAcAra school rejecting its existence, arguing that the functions it is meant to serve can be accommodated within the standard six-consciousness system. The MADHYAMAKA, notably figures such as BHAVAVIVEKA and CANDRAKĪRTI, attacked the YogAcAra proponents of the AlayavijNAna, describing it as a form of self, which all Buddhists must reject. ¶ In East Asia, the AlayavijNAna was conceived as one possible solution to persistent questions in Buddhism about karmic continuity and about the origin of ignorance (MOHA). For the latter, some explanation was required as to how sentient beings, whom many strands of MAHAYANA claimed were inherently enlightened, began to presume themselves to be ignorant. Debates raged within different strands of the Chinese YogAcAra traditions as to whether the AlayavijNAna is intrinsically impure because of the presence of these seeds of past experience (the position of the Northern branch of the Chinese DI LUN ZONG and the Chinese FAXIANG tradition of XUANZANG and KUIJI), or whether the AlayavijNAna included both pure and impure elements because it involved also the functioning of thusness, or TATHATA (the Southern Di lun school's position). Since the sentient being has had a veritable interminable period of time in which to collect an infinity of seeds-which would essentially make it impossible to hope to counteract them one by one-the mainstream strands of YogAcAra viewed the mind as nevertheless tending inveterately toward impurity (dausthulya). This impurity could only be overcome through a "transformation of the basis" (AsRAYAPARAVṚTTI), which would completely eradicate the karmic seeds stored in the storehouse consciousness, liberating the bodhisattva from the effects of all past actions and freeing him to project compassion liberally throughout the world. In some later interpretations, this transformation would then convert the AlayavijNAna into a ninth "immaculate consciousness" (AMALAVIJNANA). See also DASHENG QIXIN LUN.
Amdo (Tibetan) a mdo. The northeastern-most region of the Tibetan cultural area, roughly equivalent to the northeastern quarter of the present Chinese province of Tsinghai (Qinghai), including the area around the Koko Nor. Tsong-kha-pa was born here, in the locality of Tsong-kha, southeast of the Koko Nor. In the time of the third Dalai Lama the great monastery of Kumbum (Tibetan shu ’bum) was founded at Tsong-kha-pa’s birthplace.
"A mind of light will replace the present confusion and trouble of this earthly ignorance; it is likely that even those parts of humanity which cannot reach it will yet be aware of its possibility and consciously tend towards it; not only so, but the life of humanity will be enlightened, uplifted, governed, harmonised by this luminous principle and even the body become something much less powerless, obscure and animal in its propensities and capable instead of a new and harmonised perfection. It is this possibility that we have to look at and that would mean a new humanity uplifted into Light, capable of a spiritualised being and action, open to governance by some light of the Truth-consciousness, capable even on the mental level and in its own order of something that might be called the beginning of a divinised life.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
“A mind of light will replace the present confusion and trouble of this earthly ignorance; it is likely that even those parts of humanity which cannot reach it will yet be aware of its possibility and consciously tend towards it; not only so, but the life of humanity will be enlightened, uplifted, governed, harmonised by this luminous principle and even the body become something much less powerless, obscure and animal in its propensities and capable instead of a new and harmonised perfection. It is this possibility that we have to look at and that would mean a new humanity uplifted into Light, capable of a spiritualised being and action, open to governance by some light of the Truth-consciousness, capable even on the mental level and in its own order of something that might be called the beginning of a divinised life.” Essays in Philosophy and Yoga
Among its members W. Dubislav (1937), K. Grelling, O. Helmer, C. G. Hempel, A. Herzberg, K.. Korsch, H. Reichenbach (q.v.), M. Strauss. Many members of the following groups may be regarded as adherents of Scientific Empiricism: the Berlin Society for Scientific Philosophy, the W arsaw School, the Cambridge School for Analytic Philosophy (q.v.), further, in U. S. A., some of the representatives of contemporary Pragmatism (q.v.), especially C. W. Morris, of Neo-Realism (q.v.), and of Operationalism (q.v.). Among the individual adherents not belonging to the groups mentioned: E. Kaila (Finland), J. Jörgensen (Denmark), A. Ness (Norway); A. J. Ayer, J. H. Woodger (England); M. Boll (France); K. Popper (now New Zealand); E. Brunswik, H. Gomperz, Felix Kaufmann, R. V. Mises, L. Rougier, E. Zilsel (now in U. S. A.); E. Nagel, W. V. Quine, and many others (in U.S.A.). The general attitude and the views of Scientific Empiricism are in esential agreement with those of Logical Empiricism (see above, 1). Here, the unity of science is especially emphasized, in various respects There is a logical unity of the language of science; the concepts of different branches of science are not of fundamentally different kinds but belong to one coherent system. The unity of science in this sense is closely connected with the thesis of Physicahsm (q.v.). There is a practical task in the present stage of development, to come to a better mutual adaptation of terminologies in different branches of science. There is today no unity of the laws of science. It is an aim of the future development of science to come, if possible, to a simple set of connected, fundamental laws from which the special laws in the different branches of science, including the social sciences, can be deduced. Here also, the analysis of language is regarded as one of the chief methods of the science of science. While logical positivism stressed chiefly the logical side of this analysis, it is here carried out from various directions, including an analysis of the biological and sociological sides of the activities of language and knowledge, as they have been emphasized earlier by Pragmatism (q.v.), especially C. S. Peirce and G. H. Mead. Thus the development leads now to a comprehensive general theory of signs or semiotic (q.v.) as a basis for philosophy The following publications and meetings may be regarded as organs of this movement. The periodical "Erkenntnis", since 1930, now continued as "Journal of Unified Science" The "Encyclopedia of Unified Science", its first part ("Foundations of the Unity of Science", 2 vols.) consisting of twenty monographs (eight appeared by 1940). Here, the foundations of various fields of science are discussed, especially from the point of view of the unity of science and scientific procedure, and the relations between the fields. Thus, the work intends to serve as an introduction to the science of science (q.v.). A series of International Congresses for the Unity of Science was started by a preliminary conference in Prague 1934 (see report, Erkenntnis 5, 1935). The congresses took place at Pans in 1935 ("Actes", Pans 1936; Erkenntnis 5, 1936); at Copenhagen in 1936 (Erkenntnis 6, 1937); at Paris in 1937; at Cambridge, England, in 1938 (Erkenntnis 7, 1938); at Cambridge, Mass., in 1939 (J. Unif. Sc. 9, 1941); at Chicago in 1941. Concerning the development and the aims of this movement, see O. Neurath and C. W. Morris (for both, see above, I D), further H. Reichenbach, Ziele and Wege der heutigen Naturphilosophie, 1931; S. S. Stevens, "Psychology and the Science of Science", Psych. Bull. 36, 1939 (with bibliography). Bibliographies in "Erkenntnis": 1, 1931, p. 315, p. 335 (Polish authors); 2, 1931, p. 151, p. 189; 5, 1935, p. 185, p. 195 (American authors), p. 199 (Polish authors), p. 409, larger bibliography: in Encycl. Unif. Science, vol. II, No. 10 (to ippetr in 1942). -- R.C.
anAgAmin. (T. phyir mi 'ong ba; C. buhuan/bulai/anahan; J. fugen/furai/anagon; K. purhwan/pullae/anaham 不還/來/阿那含). In Sanskrit and PAli, "nonreturner"; the third of the four types of Buddhist saint or "noble person" (ARYAPUDGALA) in the mainstream traditions, along with the SROTAAPANNA or "stream-enterer" (the first and lowest grade), the SAKṚDAGAMIN or "once-returner" (the second grade), and the ARHAT or "worthy-one" (the fourth and highest grade). The anAgAmin is one who has completely put aside the first five of ten fetters (SAMYOJANA) that bind one to the cycle of rebirth: (1) belief in the existence of a perduring self (SATKAYADṚstI), (2) belief in the efficacy of rites and rituals (sĪLAVRATAPARAMARsA), (3) skeptical doubt about the efficacy of the path (VICIKITSA), (4) sensual craving (KAMARAGA), and (5) malice (VYAPADA). The anAgAmin has also weakened considerably the last five of the ten fetters (including such affective fetters as pride, restlessness, and ignorance), thus enervating the power of SAMSARA. Having completely eradicated the first five fetters, which are associated with the sensuous realm (KAMADHATU), and weakened the latter five, the anAgAmin is a "nonreturner" in the sense that he will never be reborn in the kAmadhAtu again; instead, he will either complete the path and become an arhat in the present lifetime or he will be reborn in the "pure abodes," or sUDDHAVASA (corresponding to the five highest heavens in the subtle-materiality realm, or RuPADHATU); and specifically, in the AKANIstHA heaven, the fifth and highest of the pure abodes, which often serves as a way station for anAgAmins before they achieve arhatship. As one of the twenty members of the ARYASAMGHA (see VIMsATIPRABHEDASAMGHA), the anAgAmin is the name for a candidate (pratipannaka) for anAgAmin (the third fruit of the noble path). In addition, the ANAGAMIPHALASTHA is the basis for several subdivisions of the twenty members. The anAgamin may be either a follower through faith (sRADDHANUSARIN) or a follower through doctrine (DHARMANUSARIN) with either dull (MṚDVINDRIYA) or keen faculties (TĪKsnENDRIYA). The anAgAmins have eliminated all of the nine levels of afflictions that cause rebirth in the sensuous realm (kAmadhAtu) that the ordinary (LAUKIKA) path of meditation (BHAVANAMARGA) removes. Depending on their earlier career, they may be VĪTARAGAPuRVIN (those who have already eliminated sensuous-realm faults prior to reaching the path of vision) and an Anupurvin (those who reach the four fruits of the noble path in a series). Those with dull faculties are Anupurvin who have earlier been SAKṚDAGAMIPHALASTHA. Those with keen faculties reach the third fruit when they attain the VIMUKTIMARGA (path of liberation from the afflictions, or KLEsA) on the DARsANAMARGA (path of vision). See also ANABHISAMSKARAPARINIRVAYIN; SABHISAMSKARAPARINIRVAYIN; UPAPADYAPARINIRVAYIN.
Ananda Temple. A monumental THERAVADA Buddhist monastery located outside the Tharba Gate in the medieval Burmese capital of Pagan. The Ananda was built around 1105 by King Kyanzittha (r. 1084-1111), third monarch of the Pagan empire, and is dedicated to the four buddhas who have appeared during the present auspicious age: Krakucchanda (P. Kakusandha), Kanakamuni (P. KonAgamana), KAsYAPA, and GAUTAMA. In architectural style, the Ananda represents a fusion of Bengali, Burmese, and Pyu (precursors of the ethnic Burmans) elements. Legend states that eight ARHATs from Mount Gandhamadana in India visited King Kyanzittha, and he was so impressed that he constructed a monastery for them, and next to it founded the Ananda. Like all temples and pagodas of the city of Pagan, the Ananda is built of fired brick and faced with stucco. It is cruciform in plan following a Pyu prototype and crowned with a North Indian style tower, or sikhara. Its interior consists of two circumambulatory halls pierced by windows that allow a limited amount of light into the interior. The hallways are decorated with terracotta plaques depicting episodes from the PAli JATAKAs, the MahAnipAta, and NIDANAKATHA. The inner hall contains niches housing numerous seated images of the Buddha that are rendered in a distinctive Pala style. The temple is entered from four entrances facing the four cardinal directions, which lead directly to four large inner chambers, each containing a colossal standing statue of a buddha. Two of the statues are original; a third was rebuilt in the eighteenth century; and the fourth has been repaired. Three of the statues are flanked by smaller images of their chief disciples. The exception is the statue of Gautama Buddha, located in the western chamber, which is flanked by what is believed to be portrait statues of King Kyanzitha and SHIN ARAHAN, the Mon monk said to have converted Pagan to TheravAda Buddhism, who was also Kyanzittha's preceptor.
anAtman. (P. anattA; T. bdag med; C. wuwo; J. muga; K. mua 無我). In Sanskrit, "no self" or "nonself" or more broadly "insubstantiality"; the third of the "three marks" (TRILAKsAnA) of existence, along with impermanence (ANITYA) and suffering (DUḤKHA). The concept is one of the key insights of the Buddha, and it is foundational to the Buddhist analysis of the compounded quality (SAMSKṚTA) of existence: since all compounded things are the fruition (PHALA) of a specific set of causes (HETU) and conditions (PRATYAYA), they are therefore absent of any perduring substratum of being. In the sutra analysis of existence, the "person" (PUDGALA) is said to be a product of five aggregates (SKANDHA)-materiality (RuPA), physical sensations (VEDANA), perception (SAMJNA), impulses (SAMSKARA), and consciousness (VIJNANA)-which together comprise the totality of the individual's physical, mental, and emotional existence. What in common parlance is called the person is a continuum (SAMTANA) imputed to the construction of these aggregates, but when these aggregates are separated at the time of death, the person also simultaneously vanishes. This relationship between the person and the skandhas is clarified in the MILINDAPANHA's famous simile of the chariot: a chariot is composed of various constituent parts, but if that chariot is broken down into its parts, there is no sense of "chariot" remaining. So it is with the person and his constituent parts, the skandhas. The Buddha is rigorously against any analysis of phenomena that imputes the reality of a person: when a questioner asks him, "Who senses?," for example, the Buddha rejects the question as wrongly conceived and reframes it in terms of conditionality, i.e., "With what as condition does sensation occur?" ("Sensory contact" [SPARsA] is the answer.) Buddhism thus rejects any notion of an eternal, perduring soul that survives death, or which transmigrates from lifetime to lifetime; rather, just as we can impute a conventional continuity to the person over one lifetime, so can this same continuity be imputed over several lifetimes. The continuum of karmic action and reaction ensures that the last moment of consciousness in the present life serves as the condition for the first moment of consciousness in the next. The next life is therefore neither the same as nor different from the preceding lifetime; instead, it is causally related to it. For this reason, any specific existence, or series of existences, is governed by the causes and conditions that create it, rendering life fundamentally beyond our attempts to control it (another connotation of "nonself") and thus unworthy as an object of attachment. Seeing this lack of selfhood in compounded things generates a sense of "danger" (ADĪNAVA) that catalyzes the aspiration to seek liberation (VIMOKsA). Thus, understanding this mark of anAtman is the crucial antidote (PRATIPAKsA) to ignorance (AVIDYA) and the key to liberation from suffering (duḥkha) and the continuing cycle of rebirth (SAMSARA). Although the notion of anAtman is applied to the notion of a person in mainstream Buddhism, in the PRAJNAPARAMITA scriptures and the broader MAHAYANA tradition the connotation of the term is extended to take in the "nonself of phenomena" (DHARMANAIRATMYA) as well. This extension may be a response to certain strands of the mainstream tradition, such as SARVASTIVADA (lit. the "Teaching That All [Dharmas] Exist"), which considered dharmas (i.e., the five skandhas and so on) to be factors that existed in reality throughout all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future. In order to clarify that dharmas have only conventional validity, the MahAyAna posited that they also were anAtman, although the nature of this lack of self was differently understood by the YOGACARA and MADHYAMAKA schools.
An examination of the generally recognized problems of epistemology and of the representative solutions of these problems will serve to further clarify the nature and scope of epistemological inquiry. The emphasis in epistemology has varied from one historical era to another and yet there is a residium of epistemological problems which has persisted to the present.
Animal Kingdom One of the main divisions or life-waves of entities on earth, separated from the human kingdom by its lack of the emanated or evolved self-conscious mind, a faculty which can be acquired only by the aid of beings already having it — the manasaputras. The entities now pursuing their evolution in the animal kingdom will in a future imbodiment of the planetary chain become human in the same way, although a certain number of the highest animal stocks now living, such as the apes and possibly some of the monkeys, may attain incipient humanity before the end of the seventh round in the present planetary manvantara.
Ank, Ankh (Egyptian) The symbol of life in ancient Egypt, represented as the tau-cross surmounted by a circle, and often called crux ansata (cross with a handle). Usually placed in the hand of every representation of god or goddess; likewise in the hand of the initiant, and again on the mummy. Also the present astronomical planetary sign for Venus; and the ansated cross reversed is the sign of the earth.
Another phase of evolution of the life-waves during the third round was the great outflow of differing animal forms which took place, due to the immense pressure of the inner urge of the various life-centers to express themselves in their respective phases of evolutionary unfolding. However, what we now call the mammalian stocks were a much later development, for these appeared during the fourth round; though there were forerunners even of the mammalia during the last part of the third round. Furthermore, all of these various stocks or groups of evolving beings originated in astral types thrown off by third round man. The present “amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks” (SD 2:684) when this took place during the fourth round.
antarAbhava. (T. bar do'i srid pa/bar do; C. zhongyin/zhongyou; J. chuin/chuu; K. chungŭm/chungyu 中陰/中有). In Sanskrit, "intermediate state" or "transitional existence," a transitional state between death (maranabhava) and rebirth (upapattibhava), distinct from the five or six destinies of SAMSARA (see GATI), during which time the transitional being (GANDHARVA) prepares for rebirth. The antarAbhava is considered one of sentient beings' "four modes of existence" (catvAro bhavAḥ), along with birth/rebirth (upapattibhava), life (purvakAlabhava), and death (maranabhava). The notion of an intermediate state was controversial. Schools that accepted it, including the SARVASTIVADA and most MAHAYANA traditions, resorted to scriptural authority to justify its existence, citing, for example, SuTRAs that refer to seven states of existence (bhava), including an antarAbhava. A type of nonreturner (ANAGAMIN), the third stage of sanctity in the mainstream Buddhist schools, was also called "one who achieved NIRVAnA while in the intermediate state" (ANTARAPARINIRVAYIN), again suggesting the scriptural legitimacy of the antarAbhava. There were several views concerning the maximum duration of the ANTARABHAVA. The ABHIDHARMAMAHAVIBHAsA, for example, lists such variations as instantaneous rebirth, rebirth after a week, indeterminate duration, and forty-nine days. Of these different durations, forty-nine days became dominant, and this duration is found in the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA and the YOGACARABHuMIsASTRA. Ceremonies to help guide the transitional being toward a more salutary rebirth, if not toward enlightenment itself, take place once weekly (see QIQI JI); these observances culminate in a "forty-ninth day ceremony" (SISHIJIU [RI] ZHAI), which is thought to mark the end of the process of transition, when rebirth actually occurs. The transitional being in the intermediate state is termed either a gandharva (lit. "fragrance eater"), because it does not take solid food but is said to subsist only on scent (gandha), or sometimes a "mind-made body" (MANOMAYAKAYA). During the transitional period, the gandharva is searching for the appropriate place and parents for its next existence and takes the form of the beings in the realm where it is destined to be reborn. In the Tibetan tradition, the antarAbhava is termed the BAR DO, and the guidance given to the transitional being through the process of rebirth is systematized in such works as the BAR DO THOS GROL CHEN MO, commonly known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Like several of the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS, the THERAVADA scholastic tradition rejects the notion of an intermediate state, positing instead that an instantaneous "connecting" or "linking" consciousness (P. patisandhiviNNAna; S. *pratisaMdhivijNAna) directly links the final moment of consciousness in the present life to the first moment of consciousness in the next.
antique ::: a. --> Old; ancient; of genuine antiquity; as, an antique statue. In this sense it usually refers to the flourishing ages of Greece and Rome.
Old, as respects the present age, or a modern period of time; of old fashion; antiquated; as, an antique robe.
Made in imitation of antiquity; as, the antique style of Thomson&
ApadAna. In PAli, "Heroic Tales" or "Narratives" (cf. S. AVADANA); the thirteenth book of the KHUDDAKANIKAYA of the PAli SUTTAPItAKA, this collection includes hagiographies of 547 monks and forty nuns, all arahant (S. ARHAT) disciples who lived during the lifetime of the Buddha. The text also contains two introductory chapters in verse. The first, the "BuddhApadAna," is a series of encomiums praising the merits and perfections (P. pAramī; S. PARAMITA) of the Buddha and an account of the past lives during which he mastered these qualities. The second chapter, the "PaccekabuddhApadAna," deals with solitary buddhas who do not teach (paccekabuddha; S. PRATYEKABUDDHA). Quite distinctively, the ApadAna names thirty-five buddhas of antiquity, in contrast to the twenty-four listed in the BUDDHAVAMSA; this is one of the reasons that the ApadAna is presumed to be one of the latest books in the PAli canon. The third and fourth chapters offer accounts of the noble deeds of the senior disciples, including many of the most famous names in Buddhist history. Each story focuses on a specific meritorious action performed by one of these elders while they trained under a buddha in a previous lifetime, followed by an account of what wholesome result that action produced in subsequent lifetimes, and how this ultimately led them to achieve arahantship in the present life. The collection thus highlights the merit that results from perfecting specific types of moral actions.
Application Service Element ::: (networking) (ASE) Software in the presentation layer of the OSI seven layer model which provides an abstracted interface layer to service application protocol data units (APDU). Because applications and networks vary, ASEs are split into common services and specific services.Examples of services provided by the common application service element (CASE) include remote operations (ROSE) and database concurrency control and recovery (CCR).The specific application service element (SASE) provides more specialised services such as file transfer, database access, and order entry. .(2003-09-27)
apratisaMkhyAnirodha. (T. so sor brtags min gyi 'gog pa; C. feizemie; J. hichakumetsu; K. pit'aekmyol 非擇滅). In Sanskrit, "nonanalytical suppression" or "nonanalytical cessation," one of the uncompounded factors (ASAMSKṚTADHARMA) listed by both the VAIBHAsIKA-SARVASTIVADA and the YOGACARA schools. In the VaibhAsika dharma theory, where all factors were presumed to exist in all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future, this dharma was posited to suppress the production of all other dharmas, ensuring that they remain ever positioned in future mode and never again able to arise in the present. Whenever any specific factor is unproduced, this is due to its position in the present mode being occupied by the nonanalytical suppression; thus the number of apratisaMkhyAnirodha is coextensive with the number of factors. Because this dharma is not produced, not an object of knowledge, and not a result of insight, it is considered to be "nonanalytical." Other schools, such as the SAUTRANTIKA, presume that this factor has only nominal validity and refers to dharmas when they are in their unproduced state. The term also refers to states of temporary absence or cessation that do not occur as the result of meditative practice, such as the cessation of hunger after eating a meal. See also PRATISAMKHYANIRODHA.
Arambha (Sanskrit) Ārambha Beginning; the Hindu philosophic stance that a supreme divinity formed the universe out of pre-existing material. It includes the Nyaya and Vaiseshika schools of philosophy, the two atomistic schools, and corresponds to the scientific outlook in the Western division of science, religion, and philosophy. It “envisions the universe as proceeding forth as a ‘new’ production of already pre-existent cosmic intelligence and pre-existent ‘points’ of individuality, what we would call monads rather than atoms. Although such newly produced universe is recognized as being the karmic resultant of a preceding universe, the former ‘self’ of the present, nevertheless emphasis is laid upon beginnings, upon the universe as a ‘new’ production, very much as scientists construe the universe to be” (FSO 101; SOPh 33).
Ardhamatra (Sanskrit) Ardhamātra, Ardhamātrā [from ardha half + mātra or mātrā a metrical unit] Half a short syllable; the Nadabindu-Upanishad in speaking of Aum says that the syllable or character A is considered to be Kalahamsa’s right wing; U, the left wing; M, the tail of the Swan, and the ardhamatra its head (cf VS 5, 74-5). In the Mahabharata kalahamsa is the name of several species of the hamsa bird, a goose or swan. Ardhamatra is a mystical term for one of the portions of the swan of time — Brahma or the manifest or Third Logos of the universe, whose emanation or creative activity is hamsa-vahana (the vehicle or carrier of the swan). Ardhamatra, therefore, has reference to the egoic individuality of the cosmic Third Logos or Brahma (also called Purusha), considered to be “one-half the measure” of the eternal past and the eternal future — such egoic individuality being the product in space and time of the continuously reimbodying spirit of the universe, evolving and changing its nature by evolution as the cycles of time pass from the present into the past, and forwards into the future.
are ::: --> The present indicative plural of the substantive verb to be; but etymologically a different word from be, or was. Am, art, are, and is, all come from the root as. ::: n. --> The unit of superficial measure, being a square of which each side is ten meters in length; 100 square meters, or about 119.6 square
armorican ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the northwestern part of France (formerly called Armorica, now Bretagne or Brittany), or to its people. ::: n. --> The language of the Armoricans, a Celtic dialect which has remained to the present times.
A native of Armorica.
Arthur, King (Welsh) A dual figure: historical ruler who held up for forty years or so the Saxon incursions; said to have passed (not died) at or after the Battle of Camlan (540 AD). The mythological Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, or Uthr Ben, the Wonderful Head. In Prydwen, his Ship of Glass, he made an expedition into Annwn (the underworld) to obtain the Pair Dadeni, or cauldron of reincarnation, the symbol of initiation. As the king that was and shall be, he appears in the Welsh version of the coming of the Kalki-avatara, which will come to pass at the end of the present yuga. After Camlan he was taken to Ynys Afallen (Apple-tree Island), to be healed of his wounds and to await his return. But the apple tree of the island, as we see in the 6th-century poem “Afallenan” by Myrddin Gwyllt, is the Tree of Wisdom. The poem tells how the tree had to be hidden and guarded, but the time would come when it should be known again: then Arthur would return, and Cadwalaor, and then “shall Wales rejoice; bright shall be her dragon (leader). The horns of joy shall sound the Song of Peace and serenity. Before the Child of the Sun, bold in his courses, evil shall be rooted out. Bards shall triumph.”
asaMskṛtadharma. (P. asankhatadhamma; T. 'dus ma byas kyi chos; C. wuweifa; J. muiho; K. muwibop 無爲法). In Sanskrit, "uncompounded" or "unconditioned" "factors"; a term used to describe the few DHARMAs that are not conditioned (SAMSKṚTA) and are therefore perduring phenomena (NITYADHARMA) that are not subject to impermanence (ANITYA). The lists differ in the various schools. The PAli tradition's list of eighty-two dharmas (P. dhamma) recognizes only one uncompounded dharma: NIRVAnA (P. nibbAna). The SARVASTIVADA school recognizes three out of seventy-five: space (AKAsA), and two varieties of nirvAna: "analytical" "suppression" or "cessation" (PRATISAMKHYANIRODHA) and "nonanalytical suppression" (APRATISAMKHYANIRODHA). YOGACARA recognizes six of its one hundred dharmas as uncompounded: the preceding three, plus "motionlessness" (AniNjya, [alt. aniNjya]), the "cessation of perception and sensation" (SAMJNAVEDAYITANIRODHA), and "suchness" (TATHATA). NirvAna is the one factor that all Buddhist schools accept as being uncompounded. It is the one dharma that exists without being the result of a cause (ahetuja), though it may be accessed through the three "gates to deliverance" (VIMOKsAMUKHA). Because nirvAna neither produces nor is produced by anything else, it is utterly distinct from the conditioned realm that is subject to production and cessation; its achievement, therefore, means the end to the repeated cycle of rebirth (SAMSARA). In several schools of Buddhism, including the SarvAstivAda, nirvAna is subdivided into two complementary aspects: an "analytical cessation" (pratisaMkhyAnirodha) that corresponds to earlier notions of nirvAna and "nonanalytical suppression" (apratisaMkhyAnirodha), which ensures that the enlightened person will never again be subject to the vagaries of the conditioned world. "Analytical cessation" (pratisaMkhyAnirodha) occurs through the direct meditative insight into the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (catvAry AryasatyAni) and the cognition of nonproduction (ANUTPADAJNANA), which brings about the disjunction (visaMyoga) from all unwholesome factors (AKUsALADHARMA). "Nonanalytical suppression" (apratisaMkhyAnirodha) prevents the dharmas of the conditioned realm from ever appearing again for the enlightened person. In the VAIBHAsIKA interpretation, this dharma suppresses the conditions that would lead to the production of dharmas, thus ensuring that they remain forever positioned in future mode and unable ever again to arise in the present. Because this dharma is not a result of insight, it is called "nonanalytical." Space (AkAsa) has two discrete denotations. First, space is an absence that delimits forms; like the empty space inside a door frame, AkAsa is a hole that is itself empty but that defines, or is defined by, the material that surrounds it. Second, as the vast emptiness of space, space comes also to be described as the absence of obstruction; in this sense, space also comes to be interpreted as something akin to the Western conception of ether, a virtually immaterial, but glowing fluid that serves as the support for the four material elements (MAHABHuTA). Space is accepted as an uncompounded dharma in six of the mainstream Buddhist schools, including the SARVASTIVADA and the MAHASAMGHIKA, as well as the later YOGACARA; three others reject this interpretation, including the THERAVADA. The YogAcAra additions to this list essentially subsume the upper reaches of the immaterial realm (ArupyAvacara) into the listing of uncompounded dharmas. AniNjya, or motionlessness, is used even in the early Buddhist tradition to refer to actions that are neither wholesome nor unwholesome (see ANINJYAKARMAN), which lead to rebirth in the realm of subtle materiality or the immaterial realm and, by extension, to those realms themselves. The "cessation of perception and sensation" (saMjNAvedayitanirodha) is the last of the eight liberations (VIMOKsA; P. vimokkha) and the ninth and highest of the immaterial attainments (SAMAPATTI). "Suchness" (TATHATA) is the ultimate reality (i.e., suNYATA) shared in common by a TATHAGATA and all other afflicted (SAMKLIstA) and pure (VIsUDDHI) dharmas; the "cessation of perception and sensation" (saMjNAvedayitanirodha) is not only "a meditative trance wherein no perceptual activity remains," but one where no feeling, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, is experienced.
A second meaning as a noun is one of the portions of Vedic literature containing rules for the proper chanting and usage of the mantras or hymns at sacrifices, and explanations in detail of what these sacrifices are, illustrated by legends and old stories. These Brahmanas are “pre-eminently occult works, hence used purposely as blinds. They were allowed to survive for public use and property only because they were and are absolutely unintelligible to the masses. Otherwise they would have disappeared from circulation as long ago as the days of Akbar” (SD 1:68). Though the Brahmanas are the oldest scholastic treatises on the primitive hymns, they themselves require a key for a proper understanding of them which Orientalists have hitherto failed to secure. Since the time of Gautama Buddha, the keys to the Brahmanical secret code have been in the possession of initiates alone, who guard their treasure with extreme and jealous care. There are indeed few, if any, individuals of the present-day Brahmanical cast in India who are even conscious that such keys exists; although no small number of them, possibly, have intimations or intuitions that a secret wisdom has been lost which is uniformly understood to have been in the possession of the ancient Indian rishis.
::: "As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, — for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga
“As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body,—for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.” Letters on Yoga
A striking similarity is present in the mythology of the Algonquin Indians of North America; their chief deity was a mighty hare known as Menabosho or Michabo, to whom they went at death. One account places him in the east, another in the west. The ancient Germanic and Scandinavian peoples used the hare as a symbol, being sacred to the nature goddess Freyja; likewise to the Anglo-Saxon Ostara, goddess of springtime. This is believed to be the basis for the present-day association of the rabbit or hare with Easter. The anthropomorphic idea is found also among other races, very frequently among the Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, and other Far Eastern peoples. It was considered to be androgynous, thus typifying an attribute of the creative Logos.
"At every turn it is the divine Reality which we can discover behind that which we are yet compelled by the nature of the superficial consciousness in which we dwell to call undivine and in a sense are right in using that apellation; for these appearances are a veil over the Divine Perfection, a veil necessary for the present, but not at all the true and complete figure.” The Life Divine
“At every turn it is the divine Reality which we can discover behind that which we are yet compelled by the nature of the superficial consciousness in which we dwell to call undivine and in a sense are right in using that apellation; for these appearances are a veil over the Divine Perfection, a veil necessary for the present, but not at all the true and complete figure.” The Life Divine
ATLANTIS Hemispherical continent and abode of the fourth root-race. It was situated at the present location of the Atlantic and North America and was submerged into the ocean in four stages: 800 000, 200 000, 75 025 and 9564 BC.
The Atlanteans were physicalists of repulsive emotionality. K 6.5.7
At more than one million words, this is the largest dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in the English language. Yet even at this length, it only begins to represent the full breadth and depth of the Buddhist tradition. Many great dictionaries and glossaries have been produced in Asia over the long history of Buddhism and Buddhist Studies. One thinks immediately of works like the MahAvyutpatti, the ninth-century Tibetan-Sanskrit lexicon said to have been commissioned by the king of Tibet to serve as a guide for translators of the dharma. It contains 9,565 entries in 283 categories. One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Buddhology was the Bukkyo Daijiten ("Encyclopedia of Buddhism"), published in ten massive volumes between 1932 and 1964 by the distinguished Japanese scholar Mochizuki Shinko. Among English-language works, there is William Soothill and Lewis Hodous's A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms, published in 1937, and, from the same year, G. P. Malalasekera's invaluable Dictionary of PAli Proper Names. In preparing the present dictionary, we have sought to build upon these classic works in substantial ways.
At that period even the more evolved monads of the lunar chain, representing and leading the human kingdom, had but reached the state of “presentments of men,” having huge ape-like forms; yet they were not apes in any sense of the word, for what we know now as monkeys and apes were of far later development as partial offsprings from the human stock, which took place during the present fourth round. These third round men were “no fit rupa for the Brothers of the Fifth” (SD 2:57) — referring to the fifth class of monads or manasaputras.
avadAna. (P. apadAna; T. rtogs par brjod pa; C. apotuona/piyu; J. ahadana or apadana/hiyu; K. ap'adana/piyu 阿波陀那/譬喩). In Sanskrit, "tales" or "narrative"; a term used to denote a type of story found in both Buddhist and non-Buddhist literature. The precise meaning of the word has been the subject of much discussion. In the Indian BrAhmanas and srauta literature, the term denotes either something that is sacrificed or a portion of a sacrifice. The term avadAna was originally thought to mean "something cut off; something selected" and was presumed to derive from the prefix ava- + the Sanskrit root √dA. Feer, who published a French translation of the AVADANAsATAKA in 1891, tentatively translated it as "légende, action héroïque," while noting that the Tibetans, the Chinese, and the Mongols all employed differing translations of the word as well. (The Chinese use a transcription, apotuona, as well as a translation, piyu, meaning "simile." The Tibetan rtogs brjod has been rendered as "judgment" or "moral legend"; literally, it means the presentation or expression of the realizations [of an adept]. The Mongolian equivalent is domok.) Feer's rendering of avadAna is closer to its meaning of "heroic action" in classical Indian works such as the RaghuvaMsa and the KumArasambhava. AvadAnas are listed as the tenth of the twelvefold (DVADAsAnGA) division of the traditional genres of Buddhist literature, as classified by compositional style and content. The total corpus of the genre is quite extensive, ranging from individual avadAnas embedded in VINAYA texts, or separate sutras in the SuTRAPItAKA, to avadAnas that circulated either individually or in avadAna collections. These stories typically illustrate the results of both good and bad KARMAN, i.e., past events that led to present circumstances; in certain cases, however, they also depict present events that lead to a prediction (VYAKARAnA) of high spiritual attainment in the future. AvadAnas are closely related to JATAKAs, or birth stories of the Buddha; indeed, some scholars have considered jAtakas to be a subset of the avadAna genre, and some jAtaka tales are also included in the AVADANAsATAKA, an early avadAna collection. AvadAnas typically exhibit a three-part narrative structure, with a story of the present, followed by a story of past action (karman), which is then connected by identifying the past actor as a prior incarnation of the main character in the narrative present. In contrast to the jAtakas, however, the main character in an avadAna is generally not the Buddha (an exception is Ksemendra's eleventh-century BodhisattvAvadAnakalpalatA) but rather someone who is or becomes his follower. Moreover, some avadAnas are related by narrators other than the Buddha, such as those of the AsOKAVADANA, which are narrated by UPAGUPTA. Although the avadAna genre was once dismissed as "edifying stories" for the masses, the frequent references to monks as listeners and the directives to monks on how to practice that are embedded in these tales make it clear that the primary audience was monastics. Some of the notations appended to the stories in sura's [alt. Aryasura; c. second century CE] JATAKAMALA suggest that such stories were also used secondarily for lay audiences. On the Indian mainland, both mainstream and MAHAYANA monks compiled avadAna collections. Some of the avadAnas from northwestern India have been traced from kernel stories in the MuLASARVASTIVADA VINAYA via other mainstream Buddhist versions. In his French translation of the AvadAnasataka, Feer documented a number of tales from earlier mainstream collections, such as the AvadAnasataka, which were reworked and expanded in later MahAyAna collections, such as the RatnAvadAnamAlA and the KalpadrumAvadAnamAlA, which attests to the durability and popularity of the genre. Generally speaking, the earlier mainstream avadAnas were prose works, while the later MahAyAna collections were composed largely in verse.
AvadAnasataka. (T. Rtogs pa brjod pa brgya pa; C. Zhuanji baiyuan jing; J. Senju hyakuengyo; K. Ch'anjip paegyon kyong 撰集百經). In Sanskrit, "A Hundred Tales" (AVADANA). The collection was originally ascribed to the SARVASTIVADA school but is now thought to belong to the MuLASARVASTIVADA, because of the large number of stereotyped passages that the AvadAnasataka shares with the DIVYAVADANA and the MulasarvAstivAda VINAYA and its close correlation with certain other elements of the MulasarvAstivAda vinaya. Hence, the AvadAnasataka most likely originated in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, a provenance confirmed with the recent discovery of fragments of the text in the Schoyen Collection that most likely come from BAMIYAN. The AvadAnasataka is one of the earliest avadAna collections and was translated into Chinese (Zhuanji baiyuan jing), a translation traditionally attributed to ZHI QIAN. The Tibetan translation (Gang po la sogs pa rtogs pa brjod pa brgya pa) was carried out in the early ninth century by the monk Jinamitra and Devacandra. The composition date of the AvadAnasataka is uncertain. A date c. 100 CE has been proposed, based on Zhi Qian's putative Chinese translation, whose traditional date of c. 223-253 CE provided a terminus ante quem for the compilation of the anthology. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this attribution to Zhi Qian and indicates that the translation probably dates instead to the late fifth or early sixth century CE. The significant degree of divergence between the known Sanskrit texts and the Chinese recension may indicate that two or more Sanskrit versions were in circulation. The Chinese text also includes interpolations of story elements that derive from another Chinese collection, the Xian yu jing. In terms of structure, the stories in the AvadAnasataka are arranged symmetrically in ten chapters of ten stories apiece, each with a central theme: (1) prophecies (VYAKARAnA) of buddhahood, (2) JATAKA tales, (3) prophecies of pratyeka ("solitary") buddhahood (see PRATYEKABUDDHA), (4) more jAtakas, (5) tales of PRETA or "hungry ghosts," (6) heavenly rebirths as DEVA ("divinities"), (7)-(9) male and female disciples who become ARHATs, and (10) stories of suffering resulting from misdeeds in past lives. The structure of a typical avadAna story includes (1) a frame story told in the narrative present; (2) a story of past deeds (which is the cause of the present achievement or suffering); and (3) a bridge between the two, linking the past actor with the person presently experiencing its consequence. Major motifs include devotion to the Buddha, the benefits of donation (DANA), and the workings of moral cause and effect (see KARMAN), as indicated in the stock passage with which more than half of the tales end: "Thus, O monks, knowing that black actions bear black fruits, white actions white fruits, and mixed ones mixed fruits, you should shun the black and the mixed and pursue only the white." Although avadAnas have often been assumed to target the laity, the reference to monks in this stock passage clearly indicates the monastic audience to which these tales were directed.
Back order - Customer's order that cannot be filled at the present time usually because the merchandise is not currently in stock. As soon as the product is available, it will be shipped to the customer. There usually exists a company policy of how long an unshipped order remains an order without some sort of confirmation or communication. An excessive amount of back orders may indicate to the accountant that poor inventory planning exists.
bahirdhA. (P. bahiddhA; T. phyi; C. wai; J. ge; K. oe 外). In Sanskrit, "outer" (also written bAhya); usually paired with "inner" (adhyAtma) and sometimes with a third "both" (ubhaya), particularly in lists of the types of emptiness (suNYATA) in the PRAJNAPARAMITA SuTRAs. Outer refers to the first six external sense-fields (AYATANA, the objects of eye, ear, nose, and so on); inner to the six internal sense-fields (from the eye-to mind-faculties); and both to the inner and outer sense-fields of other persons. The emptiness of these three categories completes the presentation of the emptiness of a person (PUDGALA); it is followed by the demonstration of the emptiness of emptiness itself. See also BAHYARTHA.
Bahishprajna (Sanskrit) Bahiṣprajña [from bahiṣ out, outside + prajñā intuitive consciousness] Also Bahir-prajñā. One whose knowledge is directed towards external objects; the present state of human consciousness.
Because of the successive divisions into septenary units, it is at times difficult to determine just what subrace may be intended by a writer, and careful study is needed. The length of a subrace is given as approximately 210,000 years (SD 2:435) — and here no qualifying adjective appears to define which subrace is intended; on the same page the present European race is referred to as a family race of approximately 30,000 years.
Bhaddekarattasutta. In PAli, "The Ideal Lover of Solitude," the 131st sutra in the MAJJHIMANIKAYA (there is no corresponding version in the Chinese translations of the AGAMAs); spoken at Jeta's Grove in SAvatthi (sRAVASTĪ); several related DHARMAGUPTAKA recensions appear in the Chinese translation of the MADHYAMAGAMA, although none with a corresponding title. The Buddha recites an enigmatic verse, in which he defines ideal solitude as letting go of everything involving the past or the future and dwelling solely in the present moment, discerning phenomena with wisdom as they appear. In his own exposition of the meaning of his verses, the Buddha explains that tracing back the past means not so much remembering the past but rather binding oneself to one's past aggregates (SKANDHA) through delighting in them; similarly, yearning for the future means the desire to have one's aggregates appear a certain way in the future. Instead, the religious should not identify with any of the five skandhas as being oneself; such a one is called an "ideal lover of solitude." The MajjhimanikAya collects subsequent expositions of these same verses by the Buddha's attendant ANANDA, MahAkaccAna (MAHAKATYAYANA), and Lomasakangiya. The term bhaddekaratta has given traditional PAli commentators difficulties and has sometimes been interpreted to mean "one who is happy [viz., auspicious?] for one night" (bhaddakassa ekarattassa) because he possesses insight, an interpretation that has its analogues in the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit title BHADRAKARATRĪ as shanye (a good night).
bhadrakalpa. (P. bhaddakappa; T. bskal pa bzang po; C. xianjie; J. kengo/gengo; K. hyon'gop 賢劫). In Sanskrit, "auspicious eon"; the current of the numerous "great eons" (MAHAKALPA), or cyclic periods in the existence of a universe, that are recognized in Buddhist cosmology. The "auspicious eon" along with the last and the next "great eons"-that is, the "glorious eon" (vyuhakalpa) and "the eon of the constellations" (naksatrakalpa)-are together termed the "three great eons." Each great eon is presumed to consist of four "intermediate eons" (antarakalpa), viz., an "eon of formation" (VIVARTAKALPA); "stability" or "abiding" (VIVARTASTHAYIKALPA); "decay" (SAMVARTAKALPA); and "dissolution" (SAMVARTASTHAYIKALPA). A bhadrakalpa refers specifically to an eon in which buddhas appear, the present eon being such an era. The bhadrakalpa occurs during an eon (KALPA) of stability, following a period when the lifespan of human beings has been gradually reduced from innumerable years to eighty thousand. The number of buddhas who take rebirth during a bhadrakalpa varies widely in the texts, some stating that five buddhas will appear during this era, others that upward of a thousand buddhas will appear. In many texts, sAKYAMUNI is presumed to have been preceded by six previous buddhas, bridging two different eons, who together are called the "seven buddhas of antiquity" (SAPTATATHAGATA). Elsewhere, it is presumed that a thousand buddhas appear during the "eon of stability" in each of the three preceding great eons. The full list of the thousand buddhas of the present bhadrakalpa is extolled in the BHADRAKALPIKASuTRA, a MAHAYANA scripture that lists the names of the buddhas, their entourages, and their places of residence and enjoins the practice of various concentrations (SAMADHI) and perfections (PARAMITA). In this sutra, the current buddha sAkyamuni is said to be the fourth buddha of the present kalpa, MAITREYA is to follow him, and another 995 buddhas will follow in succession, in order to continually renew Buddhism throughout the eon. A bhadrakalpa is presumed to last some 236 million years, of which over 151 million years have already elapsed in our current eon.
Bhadra-kalpa (Sanskrit) Bhadra-kalpa [from bhadra auspicious, blessed + kalpa age] The time period of the sages; the present age, said exoterically to last 236 million years, so called because 1,000 buddhas or sages appear in the course of it. “The Bhadra Kalpa, or the ‘period of stability,’ is the name of our present Round, esoterically — its duration applying, of course, only to our globe (D), the ‘1,000’ Buddhas being thus in reality limited to but forty-nine in all” (TG 55-6).
Bhallika. (T. Bzang pa; C. Boli; J. Hari; K. P'ari 波利). In Sanskrit and PAli, one of the two merchants (together with his brother TRAPUsA, P. Tapussa) who became the first lay Buddhists (UPASAKA). Following his enlightenment, the Buddha remained in the vicinity of the BODHI TREE. In the seventh week, he went to the RAjAyatana tree to continue his meditation. Two merchants, Bhallika and his older brother Trapusa, who were leading a large trading caravan with five hundred carts, saw him there and, realizing that he had not eaten for weeks (as many as eight weeks, in some accounts), offered the Buddha sweet rice cakes with butter and honey. In response to their act of charity (DANA), the Buddha spoke with them informally and gave them the Buddha and dharma refuges (sARAnA) (the SAMGHA had not yet been created), making them the first lay Buddhists. The Buddha is said to have given the two brothers eight strands of hair from his head, which they took back to their homeland and interred for worship as relics (sARĪRA) in a STuPA. According to Mon-Burmese legend, Tapussa and Bhallika were Mon natives, and their homeland of Ukkala was a place also called Dagon in the Mon homeland of RAmaNNa in lower Burma. The stupa they constructed at Ukkala/Dagon, which was the first shrine in the world to be erected over relics of the present buddha, was to be enlarged and embellished over the centuries to become, eventually, the golden SHWEDAGON PAGODA of Rangoon. Because of the preeminence of this shrine, some Burmese chroniclers date the first introduction of Buddhism among the Mon in RAmaNNa to Tapussa and Bhallika's time. Bhallika eventually ordained and became an ARHAT; Trapusa achieved the stage of stream-enterer (SROTAAPANNA). The merchants were also the subject of a Chinese apocryphal text, the TIWEI [BOLI] JING, written c. 460-464, which praises the value of the lay practices of giving and of keeping the five precepts (PANCAsĪLA).
bhayatupatthAnANAna. In PAli, "knowledge arising from the awareness of terror"; according to the VISUDDHIMAGGA, the third of nine knowledges (NAna; JNANA) cultivated as part of "purity of knowledge and vision of progress along the path" (PAtIPADANAnADASSANAVISUDDHI). This latter category, in turn, constitutes the sixth and penultimate purity (VISUDDHI) to be developed along the path to liberation. Knowledge arising from the contemplation of terror is developed by noting how all conditioned formations (sankhAra; SAMSKARA) or mental and physical phenomena (NAMARuPA) of the past, present and future have either gone, are going, or are destined to go to destruction. A simile given in the Visuddhimagga is that of a woman whose three sons have offended the king. The woman, who has already witnessed the beheading of her eldest son, witnesses the beheading of her middle son. And having witnessed the beheadings of her two older sons, the woman is filled with terror at the knowledge that her youngest son will likewise be executed. In the same way, the practitioner observes how phenomena of the past have ceased, how phenomena of the present are ceasing, and how those of the future are likewise destined to cease. Seeing conditioned formations as destined to destruction in this way, that is, as impermanent (anicca; ANITYA), the practitioner is filled with terror. Similarly, the practitioner sees conditioned formations as suffering (dukkha; DUḤKHA), and as impersonal and nonself (anattA; ANATMAN) and is filled with terror. In this way, the practitioner comes to realize that all mental and physical phenomena, being characterized by the three universal marks of existence (tilakkhana; TRILAKsAnA), are frightful.
biandi. (J. henji; K. pyonji 邊地). In Chinese, "peripheral," or "outlying" "regions"; referring to the regions beyond the civilizing influences of Buddhism and higher spiritual culture. The corresponding Sanskrit term YAVANA was used to designate Greeks (Ionians) and later even Arab Muslims. In Buddhist cosmology, the term refers to regions north and west of India proper, which are inhabited by illiterate, barbaric peoples hostile to Buddhism. The birth into a "peripheral region" is considered to be one of the states that constitute an "inopportune moment or birth" (AKsAnA), i.e., a state that precludes attainment of enlightenment in the present lifetime. In other contexts, as in the SUKHAVATĪVYuHASuTRA, a PURE LAND devotee who practices with doubt, hesitancy, and intermittent faith, or who eventually regrets and regresses from his or her devotion, will not be able to be reborn directly into AMITABHA Buddha's pure land (see SUKHAVATĪ). Instead, he or she would be reborn first in the biandi ("outlying region") of the pure land for five hundred years before being granted access to sukhAvatī proper. The outlaying region of the pure land is depicted as a bejeweled place landscaped with lotus ponds and teeming with palatial buildings; it is almost as blissful and trouble-free as the pure land itself, except that its denizens lack the freedom to roam anywhere beyond its confines.
Binglingsi. (J. Heireiji; K. Pyongnyongsa 炳靈寺). In Chinese, "Bright and Numinous Monastery"; site of a Buddhist cave complex, located fifty miles outside Lanzhou, the capital of the present-day Chinese province of Gansu, and accessible only by boat. The complex contains 183 caves with 694 stone and eighty-two clay statues. Binglingsi, along with MAIJISHAN, developed under the patronage of the Qifu rulers of the Western Qin dynasty (385-43). The carving of Buddhist caves at Binglingsi may have started as early as the late fourth century; however, the earliest inscription was found in cave 169 and is dated 420. Two novel features can be found in cave 169. One is the stylistic link of some of its sculptures with the Buddhist art of KHOTAN on the southern SILK ROAD. For example, five seated buddhas in niche 23 inside the cave are attired in their monastic robes and perform the meditation gesture (DHYANAMUDRA), backed by a large aureole. Second, numerous inscriptions identify the sculptures and painted images in this cave, which include AMITABHA Buddha, accompanied by AVALOKITEsVARA (GUANYIN) and MAHASTHAMAPRAPTA (Dashizi). This triad in niche 6 closely resembles the style of Liangzhou, and thus KUCHA. Among the painted images are the buddhas of the ten directions (see DAsADIs), members of the Qin dynastic house, and the state preceptor (GUOSHI) Tanmobi (Dharmapriya), cotranslator with ZHU FONIAN of the AstASAHASRIKAPRAJNAPARAMITA. The representations in cave 169 depict the content of then-newly translated scriptures such as the VIMALAKĪRTINIRDEsA, SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA, and the shorter SUKHAVATĪVYuHASuTRA (see also AMITABHASuTRA), which had been translated by KUMARAJĪVA in Chang'an around 400-410. The sculptures and paintings at Binglingsi serve as precedents for the subsequent Northern Wei sculpture found at YUNGANG and LONGMEN.
Boat of the Sun, Seker Boat, Hennu (Egyptian) Ḥennu. A frequent Egyptian representation is the boat in which the god Seker is seated. In its center is placed a large coffer, representing the covering of the dead body of the sun god Af or of Osiris. Oftentimes a hawk, a symbol of the sun, is represented hovering over it with outstretched wings, and the boat was said to be steered by the dead — a reference both to the spiritual power of those who have passed on to other planes and to the idea of cycles, in that the past or dead produces the present, which in its turn is both the parent and self of the future.
BodhgayA. (S. BuddhagayA). Modern Indian place name for the most significant site in the Buddhist world, renowned as the place where sAKYAMUNI Buddha (then, still the BODHISATTVA prince SIDDHARTHA) became a buddha while meditating under the BODHI TREE at the "seat of enlightenment" (BODHIMAndA) or the "diamond seat" (VAJRASANA). The site is especially sacred because, according to tradition, not only did sAkyamuni Buddha attain enlightenment there, but all buddhas of this world system have or will do so, albeit under different species of trees. BodhgayA is situated along the banks of the NAIRANJANA river, near RAJAGṚHA, the ancient capital city of the MAGADHA kingdom. Seven sacred places are said to be located in BodhgayA, each being a site where the Buddha stayed during each of the seven weeks following his enlightenment. These include, in addition to the bodhimanda under the Bodhi tree: the place where the Buddha sat facing the Bodhi tree during the second week, with an unblinking gaze (and hence the site of the animesalocana caitya); the place where the Buddha walked back and forth in meditation (CAnKRAMA) during the third week; the place called the ratnagṛha, where the Buddha meditated during the fourth week, emanating rays of light from his body; the place under the ajapAla tree where the god BRAHMA requested that the Buddha turn the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA) during the fifth week; the lake where the NAGA MUCILINDA used his hood to shelter the Buddha from a storm during the sixth week; and the place under the rAjAyatana tree where the merchants TRAPUsA and BHALLIKA met the Buddha after the seventh week, becoming his first lay disciples. ¶ Located in the territory of MAGADHA (in modern Bihar), the ancient Indian kingdom where the Buddha spent much of his teaching career, BodhgayA is one of the four major pilgrimage sites (MAHASTHANA) sanctioned by the Buddha himself, along with LUMBINĪ in modern-day Nepal, where the Buddha was born; the Deer Park (MṚGADAVA) at SARNATH, where he first taught by "turning the wheel of the dharma" (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA); and KUsINAGARĪ in Uttar Pradesh, where he passed into PARINIRVAnA. According to the AsOKAVADANA, the emperor AsOKA visited BodhgayA with the monk UPAGUPTA and established a STuPA at the site. There is evidence that Asoka erected a pillar and shrine at the site during the third century BCE. A more elaborate structure, called the vajrAsana GANDHAKUtĪ ("perfumed chamber of the diamond seat"), is depicted in a relief at BodhgayA, dating from c. 100 BCE. It shows a two-storied structure supported by pillars, enclosing the Bodhi tree and the vajrAsana, the "diamond seat," where the Buddha sat on the night of his enlightenment. The forerunner of the present temple is described by the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG. This has led scholars to speculate that the structure was built sometime between the third and sixth centuries CE, with subsequent renovations. Despite various persecutions by non-Buddhist Indian kings, the site continued to receive patronage, especially during the PAla period, from which many of the surrounding monuments date. A monastery, called the BodhimandavihAra, was established there and flourished for several centuries. FAXIAN mentions three monasteries at BodhgayA; Xuanzang found only one, called the MahAbodhisaMghArAma (see MAHABODHI TEMPLE). The temple and its environs fell into neglect after the Muslim invasions that began in the thirteenth century. British photographs from the nineteenth century show the temple in ruins. Restoration of the site was ordered by the British governor-general of Bengal in 1880, with a small eleventh-century replica of the temple serving as a model. There is a tall central tower some 165 feet (fifty meters) in height, with a high arch over the entrance with smaller towers at the four corners. The central tower houses a small temple with an image of the Buddha. The temple is surrounded by stone railings, some dating from 150 BCE, others from the Gupta period (300-600 CE) that preserve important carvings. In 1886, EDWIN ARNOLD visited BodhgayA. He published an account of his visit, which was read by ANAGARIKA DHARMAPALA and others. Arnold described a temple surrounded by hundreds of broken statues scattered in the jungle. The MahAbodhi Temple itself had stood in ruins prior to renovations undertaken by the British in 1880. Also of great concern was the fact that the site had been under saiva control since the eighteenth century, with reports of animal sacrifice taking place in the environs of the temple. DharmapAla visited BodhgayA himself in 1891, and returned to Sri Lanka, where he worked with a group of leading Sinhalese Buddhists to found the MAHABODHI SOCIETY with the aim of restoring BodhgayA as place of Buddhist worship and pilgrimage. The society undertook a series of unsuccessful lawsuits to that end. In 1949, after Indian independence, the BodhgayA Temple Act was passed, which established a committee of four Buddhists and four Hindus to supervise the temple and its grounds. The Government of India asked AnagArika Munindra, a Bengali monk and active member of the MahAbodhi Society, to oversee the restoration of BodhgayA. Since then, numerous Buddhist countries-including Bhutan, China, Japan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sikkim, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam-have constructed (or restored) their own temples and monasteries in BodhgayA, each reflecting its national architectural style. In 2002, the MahAbodhi Temple was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Body transjormauon If the transformation is complete that means no subjection to death it does not mean that one will be bound to keep the same body for all time One creates a new body for oneself when one wants to change but how it will be done cannot be said now The present method is by physical birth — some occultists suppose that a time will come when that will not be necessary *— but the question must be left for the
Bones The hard tissues that constitute the framework or skeleton of the physical body. They have an organic matrix for the inorganic mineral salts, which go through cycles of dissolution, changed location, crystallization, and reconstruction. Mineral molecules dissolving in their matrix and re-forming themselves anew occurs at that zero-point of transition between the living mineral matter and that of the live animal tissue. This transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization is “the same function, and bears the same relation to its inorganic (so-called) upadhi (or basis) as the formation of cells to their organic nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man” (SD 2:255). The bones also furnish blood cells and mineral content to the blood stream. In the embryonic resume of racial imbodiments, the process of ossification appears after the progressive stages of its protoplasmic, gelatinous, and cartilaginous frames, analogous to those forms through which nascent humanity passed in the first two and one-half root-races. With the deposit of bones in the fetal framework, and its functional relation to the blood, and with the development of the placenta and of the organs in the mesoderm, the conditions review the gradual physicalization of the gelatinous androgynes of the early third root-race into the bisexual humanity with organized functions like the present mammalian type.
borrowed ::: taken from another source, appropriated; assumed; adopted or adapted for the present.
Bsam yas. (Samye). Tibet's first Buddhist monastery, constructed on the north bank of the Gtsang po (Tsangpo) River in central Tibet, probably circa 779. The Tibetan king KHRI SRONG LDE BTSAN invited the renowned Indian Buddhist preceptor sANTARAKsITA to found the institution and ordain Tibet's first monks. According to traditional accounts, local spirits hostile to Buddhism blocked the completion of the project. Unable to continue his work, sAntaraksita convinced the Tibetan ruler to invite the powerful Indian tantric master PADMASAMBHAVA to his kingdom in order to subdue these autochthonous spirits. Padmasambhava reached the site and, from atop the nearby hill called He po ri, he subjugated the demons, binding them by oath to become protectors of the dharma (DHARMAPALA). The Bsam yas complex was subsequently constructed in the form of a MAndALA arranged in the shape of the universe according to Buddhist cosmological accounts, based on the model of ODANTAPURĪ, a PAla-dynasty monastery located in the present-day Indian state of Bihar. At the center stands the main basilica, serving as Mount SUMERU, surrounded by chapels representing the four continents and eight subcontinents in the four cardinal directions, all of which is ringed by a massive wall capped with a thousand STuPAs. According to Tibetan and Chinese sources, in about 797 the monastery served as the venue for a great dispute between proponents of Indian and Chinese Buddhist perspectives on enlightenment and meditation. The outcome of this famous BSAM YAS DEBATE, in which the Indian view is said to have prevailed, greatly influenced the development of Buddhism in Tibet, which subsequently became a tradition that looked more to India than China for inspiration. Bsam yas was a religiously and politically vibrant institution from its inception up to the tenth century, after which its influence waned under BKA' GDAMS, SA SKYA, and eventually DGE LUGS control. Bsam yas's central basilica is renowned for its art and its architectural design, said to be a fusion of styles from India, China, Tibet, and Central Asia. The complex suffered on numerous occasions due to fires and, most recently, at the hands of the Chinese military during the Cultural Revolution. Extensive reconstruction and renovations were begun in the 1980s and Bsam yas remains an important pilgrimage destination and a potent symbol of Tibet's Buddhist heritage.
bsdus grwa. (dudra). A distinctively Tibetan genre of monastic textbook (used widely in DGE LUGS monasteries) that introduces beginners to the main topics in PRAMAnA (T. tshad ma) and ABHIDHARMA. The genre probably originated with the summaries (bsdus pa) of important pramAna texts composed by the translator RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB of GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery. PHYWA PA CHOS KYI SENG GE is credited with originating the distinctively Tibetan dialectical form that strings together a chain of consequences linked by a chain of reasons that distinguishes bsdus grwa. Beginners are introduced to the main topics in abhidharma and pramAna using this formal language, a language that has been heard in Tibetan debate institutions (RTSOD GRWA) down to the present day.
Budding or Gemmation A form a asexual reproduction in which the new individual is developed from a protuberance on the body of the parent, the new individual either remaining attached, as in polyzoa and most corals, or separating, as in hydra. This process is used as an analogy to convey the method of reproduction followed by the humanity of the second root-race. The bodies were more ethereal and also differed in certain reproductive processes from what takes place in humans today, so that it is not now easy to give a complete picture of the process of budding as it then was. The development of the germ-cell and its extrusion of polar cells furnish additional clues, both to this process and the allied process of fission. Besides a survival of analogous methods of reproduction in some of the present lower forms of life, there are also similar instances in the power which some creatures have of reproducing lost limbs, and in the power of cicatrization of wounds in the higher mammalia.
bug "programming" An unwanted and unintended property of a {program} or piece of {hardware}, especially one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of {feature}. E.g. "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backward." The identification and removal of bugs in a program is called "{debugging}". Admiral {Grace Hopper} (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a {glitch} in the {Harvard Mark II machine} by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated {bug} in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the "Annals of the History of Computing", Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545 Relay
Business entity principle - A firm or business is seen as separate from its owner(s) in the presentation of the final accounts and financial statements.
By some sects in early Christian times the doctrine of the Demiourgos or secondary creator prevailed, assuming a variety of forms, more of less philosophical and approximating the esoteric teachings; but the spirit of the times demanded a cruder conception. In the Middle Ages the idea of a personified devil and devils inflicting trials upon mankind become a veritable obsession: the idea has persisted up the present time in many churches.
By way of connoting different types of society, many contemporary Marxists, especially in the U.S.S.R., building upon Marx's analysis of the two phases of "communist society" ("Gotha Program") designate the first or lower phase by the term socialism, the second or higher by the term communism (q.v.). The general features of socialist society (identified by Soviet thinkers with the present phase of development of the U.S.S.R.) are conceived as follows: Economic collective ownership of the means of production, such as factories, industrial equipment, the land, and of the basic apparatus of distribution and exchange, including the banking system; the consequent abolition of classes, private profit, exploitation, surplus value, (q.v.) private hiring and firing and involuntary unemployment; an integrated economy based on long time planning in terms of needs and use. It is held that only under these economic conditions is it possible to apply the formula, "from each according to ability, to each according to work performed", the first part of which implies continuous employment, and the second part, the absence of private profit. Political: a state based upon the dictatorship of the proletariat (q.v.) Cultural the extension of all educational and cultural facilities through state planning; the emancipation of women through unrestricted economic opportunities, the abolition of race discrimination through state enforcement, a struggle against all cultural and social institutions which oppose the socialist society and attempt to obstruct its realization. Marx and Engels held that socialism becomes the inevitable outgrowth of capitalism because the evolution of the latter type of society generates problems which can only be solved by a transition to socialism. These problems are traced primarily to the fact that the economic relations under capitalism, such as individual ownership of productive technics, private hiring and firing in the light of profits and production for a money market, all of which originally released powerful new productive potentialities, come to operate, in the course of time, to prevent full utilization of productive technics, and to cause periodic crises, unemployment, economic insecurity and consequent suffering for masses of people. Marx and Engels regarded their doctrine of the transformation of capitalist into socialist society as based upon a scientific examination of the laws of development of capitalism and a realistic appreciation of the role of the proletariat. (q.v.) Unlike the Utopian socialism (q.v.) of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen (q.v.) and others, their socialism asserted the necessity of mass political organization of the working classes for the purpose of gaining political power in order to effect the transition from capitalism, and also foresaw the probability of a contest of force in which, they held, the working class majority would ultimately be victorious. The view taken is that Marx was the first to explain scientifically the nature of capitalist exploitation as based upon surplus value and to predict its necessary consequences. "These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production by means of surplus value we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science . . ." (Engels: Anti-Dühring, pp. 33-34.) See Historical materialism. -- J.M.S.
Cave Dwellers, Cavemen People of primitive habits lived in caves in the past, in various parts of the world, as they do in the present. Skulls, bones, implements, and art works of past cavemen have served paleethnologists as material for a stratification of human history based on a supposed ascent of humanity through progressive stages from the animal kingdom; but all that can legitimately be inferred from it is that primitive peoples have existed at all times, together with technologically sophisticated races, and that the human type has not changed for millions of years past except as to minor fluctuations of physiologic parts around the persisting general physiologic structure. These cavemen were not mere stages in an upward evolution, but decadent offshoots of great races who, once having become racial relics, took to cave life, and commenced a career of slow extinction, yet in some cases preserving something of their former fine physique and artistic ability.
celt ::: n. --> One of an ancient race of people, who formerly inhabited a great part of Central and Western Europe, and whose descendants at the present day occupy Ireland, Wales, the Highlands of Scotland, and the northern shores of France.
A weapon or implement of stone or metal, found in the tumuli, or barrows, of the early Celtic nations.
Chidakasa ::: Depths of more and more subtle ether which are heavily curtained from the physical sense by the grosser ether of the material universe, and all things sensible, whether in the material world or any other, create reconstituting vibrations, sensible echoes, reproductions, recurrent images of themselves which that subtler ether receives and retains. It is this which explains many of the phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc.; for these phenomena are only the exceptional admission of the waking mentality into a limited sensitiveness to what might be called the image memory of the subtle ether, by which not only the signs of all things past and present, but even those of things future can be seized; for things future are already accomplished to knowledge and vision on higher planes of mind and their images can be
reflected upon mind in the present. But these things which are exceptional to the waking mentality, difficult and to be perceived only by the possession of a special power or else after assiduous training, are natural to the dream-state of trance consciousness in which the subliminal mind is free. And that mind can also take cognizance of things on various planes not only by these sensible images, but by a species of thought perception or of thought reception and impression analogous to that phenomenon of consciousness which in modern psychical science has been given the name of telepathy.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 523-24
Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism and Taoism have been the dual basis of Chinese thought, with Buddhism presenting a strong challenge in medieval times. The former two, the priority of either of which is still controversial, rivaled each other from the very beginning to the present day. Taoism (tao chia) opposed nature to man, glorifying Tao or the Way, spontaneity (tzu jan), "inaction" (wu wei) in the sense of non-artificiality or following nature, simplicity (p'u), "emptiness," tranquillity and enlightenment, all dedicated to the search for "long life and lasting vision" (in the case of Lao Tzu, 570 B.C.?), for "preserving life and keeping the essence of our being intact" (in the case of Yang Chu, c. 440-360 B.C.), and for "companionship with nature" (in the case of Chuang Tzu, between 399 and 295 B.C.). The notes of the "equality of things and opinions" (ch'i wu) and the "spontaneous and unceasing transformation of things" (tzu hua) were particularly stressed in Chuang Tzu.
Chonghye Kyolsa. (定慧結社). In Korean, the "SAMADHI and PRAJNA Society"; an important Korean "retreat society" (kyolsa; C. JIESHI) during the Koryo dynasty. The first SamAdhi and PrajNA Society was established by the Korean SoN master POJO CHINUL at the monastery of Kojosa on Mt. Kong in 1188. At the invitation of a monk by the name of Tŭkchae (d.u.), Chinul and a handful of monks gathered at Kojosa in 1188 and formally began their retreat two years later in 1190. Throughout the retreat, Chinul continued to invite willing participants, both clergy and laity, to join the community. Among the most renowned of these recruits was the Korean CHoNT'AE CHONG (TIANTAI ZONG) adept WoNMYO YOSE (1163-1240). Seven years later, in 1197, the community had grown to such a size that Chinul began looking for a larger, more suitable site to relocate the community. A small, dilapidated monastery known as Kilsangsa on Mt. Songgwang was chosen as the new site, and reconstruction of the temple began immediately. King Hŭijong (r. 1204-1211) later renamed Kilsangsa SUSoNSA, or Son Cultivation Community; it is now the major monastery of SONGGWANGSA, the so-called SaMgha-Jewel monastery (Sŭngbo sach'al) of Korean Buddhism. Chinul's first composition, the Kwon su Chonghye kyolsa mun ("Encouragement to Practice: The Compact of the SamAdhi and PrajNA Society"), written in 1290, provides the rationale behind the establishment of the community and critiques PURE LAND adepts who claim that buddhahood cannot be achieved in the present lifetime.
clairvoyance ::: Clairvoyance This is a French word meaning 'clear seeing'. It is a paranormal mode of perception in which visual images are presented to the conscious mind. The perception may be of objects, people and/or scenes from the present, past or future. The clairvoyant experience may be spontaneous or induced through meditation, scrying or other methods of divination.
collation ::: v. t. --> The act of collating or comparing; a comparison of one copy er thing (as of a book, or manuscript) with another of a like kind; comparison, in general.
The gathering and examination of sheets preparatory to binding.
The act of conferring or bestowing.
A conference.
The presentation of a clergyman to a benefice by a
Compilation - The presentation of financial statement information by the entity without theaccountant’s assurance as to conformity with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). In performing this accounting service, the accountant must conform to the AICPA Statements on Standards for Accounting and Review Services (SSARS).
Conditioned Reflex: See Conditioned Response. Conditioned Response: Response of an organism which, originally produced by its "natural" stimulus, is subsequently produced in the absence of the original stimulus by a substitute or "conditioning" stimulus. Thus if S represents an original stimulus (in Pavlov's experiment, the presentation of food to a dog) and R is the natural response (the salivary flow of the dog) and if S' is a conditioning stimulus associated with S (the ringing of a bell at the time of presenting food to the dog) then R, produced by S' in the absence of S is said to be a conditioned or conditional response. See Behaviorism. -- L.W.
congo ::: n. --> Black tea, of higher grade (finer leaf and less dusty) than the present bohea. See Tea.
Consentience: (Lat. con + sentire, to feel) Conscious unity existing at the level of sensation after the subtraction of all conceptual and interpretative unity. Consentience includes both: (a) the intra-sensory unity of a single sensory continuum (e.g. the visual, tactual or auditory) and (b) the inter-sensory unit embracing the diverse sensory continua. Consentience plays an important role in the psychological doctrine of the presentation-continuum of J. Ward and G. F. Stout. An allied concept is the sensory organization of Gestalt Psychology. See Gestalt Psychology. -- L.W.
contemporary period: Broadly speaking the term covers literature written from 1939 to the present.
CuladhammasamAdAnasutta. (C. Shoufa jing; J. Juhokyo; K. Subop kyong 受法經). In PAli, "Shorter Discourse on Undertaking the Dharma"; the forty-fifth sutta of the MAJJHIMANIKAYA (a separate SARVASTIVADA recension appears as the 174th sutra in the Chinese translation of the MADHYAMAGAMA); preached by the Buddha to a gathering of monks in the JETAVANA Grove at SAvatthi (S. sRAVASTĪ). The Buddha describes four ways of undertaking things in this life and the good and bad consequences that accrue to one who follows these ways. The first way is to live happily in the present, but suffer a painful consequence in the future, e.g., when a person wantonly indulges in sensual pleasures in the present life and, as a result, is reborn into a woeful state later. The second way is to live a painful existence in the present, and suffer a painful consequence in the future; this is the case with ascetics who mortify their flesh only to be reborn in a woeful state. The third way is to live a painful existence in the present, but enjoy a happy consequence in the future; this is the case with a person who suffers in this life due to greed, hatred, and delusion but nevertheless strives to lead a blameless life and is consequently reborn in a happy existence as a human or lesser divinity (DEVA). The fourth way is to live happily in the present, and enjoy a happy consequence, as is the case with a person who cultivates the meditative absorptions (JHANA; S. DHYANA); he is happy in the present life and is rewarded with a happy rebirth as a BRAHMA divinity. An expanded version of this sermon is found in the MAHADHAMMASAMADANASUTTA, or "Longer Discourse on Undertaking the Dharma," also contained in the MajjhimanikAya.
cyberpunk /si:'ber-puhnk/ (Originally coined by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois) A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel "Neuromancer" (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's "True Names" to John Brunner's 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider"). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly na"ive and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See {cyberspace}, {ice}, {jack in}, {go flatline}. Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion trend that calls itself "cyberpunk", associated especially with the rave/techno subculture. Hackers have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, self-described cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow trendoids in black leather who have substituted enthusiastic blathering about technology for actually learning and *doing* it. Attitude is no substitute for competence. On the other hand, at least cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly respectful of hacking talent in those who have it. The general consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll attract people who grow into being true hackers. [{Jargon File}]
dasabhumi. (T. sa bcu; C. shidi; J. juji; K. sipchi 十地). In Sanskrit, lit., "ten grounds," "ten stages"; the ten highest reaches of the bodhisattva path (MARGA) leading to buddhahood. The most systematic and methodical presentation of the ten BHuMIs appears in the DAsABHuMIKASuTRA ("Ten Bhumis Sutra"), where each of the ten stages is correlated with seminal doctrines of mainstream Buddhism-such as the four means of conversion (SAMGRAHAVASTU) on the first four bhumis, the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (CATVARY ARYASATYANI) on the fifth bhumi, and the chain of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA) on the sixth bhumi, etc.-as well as with mastery of one of a list of ten perfections (PARAMITA) completed in the course of training as a bodhisattva. The list of the ten bhumis of the Dasabhumikasutra, which becomes standard in most MahAyAna traditions, is as follows: (1) PRAMUDITA (joyful) corresponds to the path of vision (DARsANAMARGA) and the bodhisattva's first direct realization of emptiness (suNYATA). The bodhisattva masters on this bhumi the perfection of giving (DANAPARAMITA), learning to give away those things most precious to him, including his wealth, his wife and family, and even his body (see DEHADANA); (2) VIMALA (immaculate, stainless) marks the inception of the path of cultivation (BHAVANAMARGA), where the bodhisattva develops all the superlative traits of character incumbent on a buddha through mastering the perfection of morality (sĪLAPARAMITA); (3) PRABHAKARĪ (luminous, splendrous), where the bodhisattva masters all the various types of meditative experiences, such as DHYANA, SAMAPATTI, and the BRAHMAVIHARA; despite the emphasis on meditation in this bhumi, it comes to be identified instead with the perfection of patience (KsANTIPARAMITA), ostensibly because the bodhisattva is willing to endure any and all suffering in order to master his practices; (4) ARCIsMATĪ (radiance, effulgence), where the flaming radiance of the thirty-seven factors pertaining to enlightenment (BODHIPAKsIKADHARMA) becomes so intense that it incinerates obstructions (AVARAnA) and afflictions (KLEsA), giving the bodhisattva inexhaustible energy in his quest for enlightenment and thus mastering the perfection of vigor or energy (VĪRYAPARAMITA); (5) SUDURJAYA (invincibility, hard-to-conquer), where the bodhisattva comprehends the various permutations of truth (SATYA), including the four noble truths, the two truths (SATYADVAYA) of provisional (NEYARTHA) and absolute (NĪTARTHA), and masters the perfection of meditative absorption (DHYANAPARAMITA); (6) ABHIMUKHĪ (immediacy, face-to-face), where, as the name implies, the bodhisattva stands at the intersection between SAMSARA and NIRVAnA, turning away from the compounded dharmas of saMsAra and turning to face the profound wisdom of the buddhas, thus placing him "face-to-face" with both the compounded (SAMSKṚTA) and uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA) realms; this bhumi is correlated with mastery of the perfection of wisdom (PRAJNAPARAMITA); (7) DuRAnGAMA (far-reaching, transcendent), which marks the bodhisattva's freedom from the four perverted views (VIPARYASA) and his mastery of the perfection of expedients (UPAYAPARAMITA), which he uses to help infinite numbers of sentient beings; (8) ACALA (immovable, steadfast), which is marked by the bodhisattva's acquiescence or receptivity to the nonproduction of dharmas (ANUTPATTIKADHARMAKsANTI); because he is now able to project transformation bodies (NIRMAnAKAYA) anywhere in the universe to help sentient beings, this bhumi is correlated with mastery of the perfection of aspiration or resolve (PRAnIDHANAPARAMITA); (9) SADHUMATĪ (eminence, auspicious intellect), where the bodhisattva acquires the four analytical knowledges (PRATISAMVID), removing any remaining delusions regarding the use of the supernatural knowledges or powers (ABHIJNA), and giving the bodhisattva complete autonomy in manipulating all dharmas through the perfection of power (BALAPARAMITA); and (10) DHARMAMEGHA (cloud of dharma), the final bhumi, where the bodhisattva becomes autonomous in interacting with all material and mental factors, and gains all-pervasive knowledge that is like a cloud producing a rain of dharma that nurtures the entire world; this stage is also described as being pervaded by meditative absorption (DHYANA) and mastery of the use of codes (DHARAnĪ), just as the sky is filled by clouds; here the bodhisattva achieves the perfection of knowledge (JNANAPARAMITA). As the bodhisattva ascends through the ten bhumis, he acquires extraordinary powers, which CANDRAKĪRTI describes in the eleventh chapter of his MADHYAMAKAVATARA. On the first bhumi, the bodhisattva can, in a single instant (1) see one hundred buddhas, (2) be blessed by one hundred buddhas and understand their blessings, (3) live for one hundred eons, (4) see the past and future in those one hundred eons, (5) enter into and rise from one hundred SAMADHIs, (6) vibrate one hundred worlds, (7) illuminate one hundred worlds, (8) bring one hundred beings to spiritual maturity using emanations, (9) go to one hundred BUDDHAKsETRA, (10), open one hundred doors of the doctrine (DHARMAPARYAYA), (11) display one hundred versions of his body, and (12) surround each of those bodies with one hundred bodhisattvas. The number one hundred increases exponentially as the bodhisattva proceeds; on the second bhumi it becomes one thousand, on the third one hundred thousand, and so on; on the tenth, it is a number equal to the particles of an inexpressible number of buddhaksetra. As the bodhisattva moves from stage to stage, he is reborn as the king of greater and greater realms, ascending through the Buddhist cosmos. Thus, on the first bhumi he is born as king of JAMBUDVĪPA, on the second of the four continents, on the third as the king of TRAYATRIMsA, and so on, such that on the tenth he is born as the lord of AKANIstHA. ¶ According to the rather more elaborate account in chapter eleven of the CHENG WEISHI LUN (*VijNaptimAtratAsiddhi), each of the ten bhumis is correlated with the attainment of one of the ten types of suchness (TATHATA); these are accomplished by discarding one of the ten kinds of obstructions (Avarana) by mastering one of the ten perfections (pAramitA). The suchnesses achieved on each of the ten bhumis are, respectively: (1) universal suchness (sarvatragatathatA; C. bianxing zhenru), (2) supreme suchness (paramatathatA; C. zuisheng zhenru), (3) ubiquitous, or "supreme outflow" suchness (paramanisyandatathatA; C. shengliu zhenru), (4) unappropriated suchness (aparigrahatathatA; C. wusheshou zhenru), (5) undifferentiated suchness (abhinnajAtīyatathatA; C. wubie zhenru), (6) the suchness that is devoid of maculations and contaminants (asaMklistAvyavadAtatathatA; C. wuranjing zhenru), (7) the suchness of the undifferentiated dharma (abhinnatathatA; C. fawubie zhenru), (8) the suchness that neither increases nor decreases (anupacayApacayatathatA; C. buzengjian), (9) the suchness that serves as the support of the mastery of wisdom (jNAnavasitAsaMnisrayatathatA; C. zhizizai suoyi zhenru), and (10) the suchness that serves as the support for mastery over actions (kriyAdivasitAsaMnisrayatathatA; C. yezizai dengsuoyi). These ten suchnessses are obtained by discarding, respectively: (1) the obstruction of the common illusions of the unenlightened (pṛthagjanatvAvarana; C. yishengxing zhang), (2) the obstruction of the deluded (mithyApratipattyAvarana; C. xiexing zhang), (3) the obstruction of dullness (dhandhatvAvarana; C. andun zhang), (4) the obstruction of the manifestation of subtle afflictions (suksmaklesasamudAcArAvarana; C. xihuo xianxing zhang), (5) the obstruction of the lesser HĪNAYANA ideal of parinirvAna (hīnayAnaparinirvAnAvarana; C. xiasheng niepan zhang), (6) the obstruction of the manifestation of coarse characteristics (sthulanimittasamudAcArAvarana; C. cuxiang xianxing zhang), (7) the obstruction of the manifestation of subtle characteristics (suksmanimittasamudAcArAvarana; C. xixiang xianxing zhang), (8) the obstruction of the continuance of activity even in the immaterial realm that is free from characteristics (nirnimittAbhisaMskArAvarana; C. wuxiang jiaxing zhang), (9) the obstruction of not desiring to act on behalf of others' salvation (parahitacaryAkAmanAvarana; C. buyuxing zhang), and (10) the obstruction of not yet acquiring mastery over all things (fa weizizai zhang). These ten obstructions are overcome by practicing, respectively: (1) the perfection of giving (dAnapAramitA), (2) the perfection of morality (sīlapAramitA), (3) the perfection of forbearance (ksAntipAramitA), (4) the perfection of energetic effort (vīryapAramitA), (5) the perfection of meditation (dhyAnapAramitA), (6) the perfection of wisdom (prajNApAramitA), (7) the perfection of expedient means (upAyapAramitA), (8) the perfection of the vow (to attain enlightenment) (pranidhAnapAramitA), (9) the perfection of power (balapAramitA), and (10) the perfection of knowledge (jNAnapAramitA). ¶ The eighth, ninth, and tenth bhumis are sometimes called "pure bhumis," because, according to some commentators, upon reaching the eighth bhumi, the bodhisattva has abandoned all of the afflictive obstructions (KLEsAVARAnA) and is thus liberated from any further rebirth. It appears that there were originally only seven bhumis, as is found in the BODHISATTVABHuMI, where the seven bhumis overlap with an elaborate system of thirteen abidings or stations (vihAra), some of the names of which (such as pramuditA) appear also in the standard bhumi schema of the Dasabhumikasutra. Similarly, though a listing of ten bhumis appears in the MAHAVASTU, a text associated with the LOKOTTARAVADA subsect of the MAHASAMGHIKA school, only seven are actually discussed there, and the names given to the stages are completely different from those found in the later Dasabhumikasutra; the stages there are also a retrospective account of how past buddhas have achieved enlightenment, rather than a prescription for future practice. ¶ The dasabhumi schema is sometimes correlated with other systems of classifying the bodhisattva path. In the five levels of the YogAcAra school's outline of the bodhisattva path (PANCAMARGA; C. wuwei), the first bhumi (pramuditA) is presumed to be equivalent to the level of proficiency (*prativedhAvasthA; C. tongdawei), the third of the five levels; while the second bhumi onward corresponds to the level of cultivation (C. xiuxiwei), the fourth of the five levels. The first bhumi is also correlated with the path of vision (DARsANAMARGA), while the second and higher bhumis correlate with the path of cultivation (BHAVANAMARGA). In terms of the doctrine of the five acquiescences (C. ren; S. ksAnti) listed in the RENWANG JING, the first through the third bhumis are equivalent to the second acquiescence, the acquiescence of belief (C. xinren; J. shinnin; K. sinin); the fourth through the sixth stages to the third, the acquiescence of obedience (C. shunren; J. junnin; K. sunin); the seventh through the ninth stages to the fourth, the acquiescence to the nonproduction of dharmas (anutpattikadharmaksAnti; C. wushengren; J. mushonin; K. musaengin); the tenth stage to the fifth and final acquiescence, to extinction (jimieren; J. jakumetsunin; K. chongmyorin). FAZANG's HUAYANJING TANXUAN JI ("Notes Plumbing the Profundities of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA") classifies the ten bhumis in terms of practice by correlating the first bhumi to the practice of faith (sRADDHA), the second bhumi to the practice of morality (sĪLA), the third bhumi to the practice of concentration (SAMADHI), and the fourth bhumi and higher to the practice of wisdom (PRAJNA). In the same text, Fazang also classifies the bhumis in terms of vehicle (YANA) by correlating the first through third bhumis with the vehicle of humans and gods (rentiansheng), the fourth through the seventh stage to the three vehicles (TRIYANA), and the eighth through tenth bhumis to the one vehicle (EKAYANA). ¶ Besides the list of the dasabhumi outlined in the Dasabhumikasutra, the MAHAPRAJNAPARAMITASuTRA and the DAZHIDU LUN (*MahAprajNApAramitAsAstra) list a set of ten bhumis, called the "bhumis in common" (gongdi), which are shared between all the three vehicles of sRAVAKAs, PRATYEKABUDDHAs, and bodhisattvas. These are the bhumis of: (1) dry wisdom (suklavidarsanAbhumi; C. ganhuidi), which corresponds to the level of three worthies (sanxianwei, viz., ten abidings, ten practices, ten transferences) in the srAvaka vehicle and the initial arousal of the thought of enlightenment (prathamacittotpAda) in the bodhisattva vehicle; (2) lineage (gotrabhumi; C. xingdi, zhongxingdi), which corresponds to the stage of the "aids to penetration" (NIRVEDHABHAGĪYA) in the srAvaka vehicle, and the final stage of the ten transferences in the fifty-two bodhisattva stages; (3) eight acquiescences (astamakabhumi; C. barendi), the causal incipiency of stream-enterer (SROTAAPANNA) in the case of the srAvaka vehicle and the acquiescence to the nonproduction of dharmas (anutpattikadharmaksAnti) in the bodhisattva path (usually corresponding to the first or the seventh through ninth bhumis of the bodhisattva path); (4) vision (darsanabhumi; C. jiandi), corresponding to the fruition or fulfillment (PHALA) level of the stream-enterer in the srAvaka vehicle and the stage of nonretrogression (AVAIVARTIKA), in the bodhisattva path (usually corresponding to the completion of the first or the eighth bhumi); (5) diminishment (tanubhumi; C. baodi), corresponding to the fulfillment level (phala) of stream-enterer or the causal incipiency of the once-returner (sakṛdAgAmin) in the srAvaka vehicle, or to the stage following nonretrogression before the attainment of buddhahood in the bodhisattva path; (6) freedom from desire (vītarAgabhumi; C. liyudi), equivalent to the fulfillment level of the nonreturner in the srAvaka vehicle, or to the stage where a bodhisattva attains the five supernatural powers (ABHIJNA); (7) complete discrimination (kṛtAvibhumi), equivalent to the fulfillment level of the ARHAT in the srAvaka vehicle, or to the stage of buddhahood (buddhabhumi) in the bodhisattva path (buddhabhumi) here refers not to the fruition of buddhahood but merely to the state in which a bodhisattva has the ability to exhibit the eighteen qualities distinctive to the buddhas (AVEnIKA[BUDDHA]DHARMA); (8) pratyekabuddha (pratyekabuddhabhumi); (9) bodhisattva (bodhisattvabhumi), the whole bodhisattva career prior to the fruition of buddhahood; (10) buddhahood (buddhabhumi), the stage of the fruition of buddhahood, when the buddha is completely equipped with all the buddhadharmas, such as omniscience (SARVAKARAJNATĀ). As is obvious in this schema, despite being called the bhumis "common" to all three vehicles, the shared stages continue only up to the seventh stage; the eighth through tenth stages are exclusive to the bodhisattva vehicle. This anomaly suggests that the last three bhumis of the bodhisattvayāna were added to an earlier srāvakayāna seven-bhumi scheme. ¶ The presentation of the bhumis in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ commentarial tradition following the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA uses the names found in the Dasabhumikasutra for the bhumis and understands them all as bodhisattva levels; it introduces the names of the ten bhumis found in the Dazhidu lun as levels that bodhisattvas have to pass beyond (S. atikrama) on the tenth bodhisattva level, which it calls the buddhabhumi. This tenth bodhisattva level is not the level of an actual buddha, but the level on which a bodhisattva has to transcend attachment (abhinivesa) to not only the levels reached by the four sets of noble persons (ĀRYAPUDGALA) but to the bodhisattvabhumis as well. See also BHuMI.
Definition: In the development of a logistic system (q. v.) it is usually desirable to introduce new notations, beyond what is afforded by the primitive symbols alone, by means of syntactical definitions or nominal definitions, i.e., conventions which provide that certain symbols or expressions shall stand (as substitutes or abbreviations) for particular formulas of the system. This may be done either by particular definitions, each introducing a symbol or expression to stand for some one formula, or by schemata of definition, providing that any expression of a certain form shall stand for a certain corresponding formula (so condensing many -- often infinitely many -- particular definitions into a single schema). Such definitions, whether particular definitions or schemata, are indicated, in articles herein by the present writer, by an arrow →, the new notation introduced (the definiendum) being placed at the left, or base of the arrow, and the formula for which it shall stand (the definiens) being placed at the right, or head, of the arrow. Another sign commonly employed for the same purpose (instead of the arrow) is the equality sign = with the letters Df, or df, appearing either as a subscript or separately after the definiens.
departure ::: n. --> Division; separation; putting away.
Separation or removal from a place; the act or process of departing or going away.
Removal from the present life; death; decease.
Deviation or abandonment, as from or of a rule or course of action, a plan, or a purpose.
The desertion by a party to any pleading of the ground taken by him in his last antecedent pleading, and the adoption of
Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada "language" (DIANA) A formerly {de facto standard} {intermediate language} for {Ada} programs, developed by Goos and Wulf at {CMU} in January 1981. DIANA is an {attributed tree} representation, with an abstract interface defined in {Interface Description Language} (Nestor, Lamb and Wulf, CMU, 1981; Snodgrass(?), 1989(?)). DIANA resulted from a merger of {AIDA} and {TCOL.Ada}. At the present (2001) it is no longer used by the major ADA compilers ["DIANA - An Intermediate Language for Ada", G.T. Goos et al, LNCS 161, Springer 1983]. (2001-09-15)
Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada ::: (language) (DIANA) A formerly de facto standard intermediate language for Ada programs, developed by Goos and Wulf at CMU in January 1981. DIANA is an DIANA resulted from a merger of AIDA and TCOL.Ada. At the present (2001) it is no longer used by the major ADA compilers[DIANA - An Intermediate Language for Ada, G.T. Goos et al, LNCS 161, Springer 1983].(2001-09-15)
Despite the best efforts of the king of Tibet more than a thousand years ago, it has always been difficult for scholars of Buddhism to agree on translations. That difficulty persists in the present work for a variety of reasons, including the different ways that Buddhist scholiasts chose to translate technical terms into their various languages over the centuries, the preferences of the many modern scholars whose works we consulted, and the relative stubbornness of the authors. As a result, there will inevitably be some variation in the renderings of specific Buddhist terminology in the pages that follow. In our main entries, however, we have tried to guide users to the range of possible English translations that have been used to render a term. In addition, a significant effort has been made to provide the original language equivalencies in parentheses so that specialists in those languages can draw their own conclusions as to the appropriate rendering.
destiny ::: “Destiny in the rigid sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One’s spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.” Letters on Yoga
DESTINY. ::: Destiny in the ripd sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and detenmning the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiri- tual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher
Deus Mundus (Latin) World God; the maker and ruler of the world. In one sense, the esoteric hierarchical head of the present world order; and in another, the divine aspect of this world order, as shown clearly by the word mundus, of which the primal etymological significance is clean, neat, orderly — corresponding with the Greek term kosmos, signifying orderliness and neatness in cosmical arrangement. It is thus both the world-divinity itself, abstracted from the more material plane in which it works, and this divinity identified with the hierarchical world-system through which it works.
Dhammakāya. (Thai, Thammakai). A Buddhist reform movement in Thailand that originated in 1916, when a monk named Luang Phor Sodh is said to have rediscovered a technique of meditation that had been lost since the time of the Buddha. The movement began to gain impetus in 1970, when one of the abbot's disciples, a nun known as Khun Yay Upāsika, founded Wat Phra Dhammakāya. Dhammakāya meditation practice consists of visualizing a small crystal sphere entering one's body through the nasal passage; the sphere settles in the solar plexus and eventually becomes transformed into a crystal image of the Buddha. While engaging in this visualization, the meditator is supposed to focus on the MANTRA "samma arahang." The practice is supposed to culminate in the ability to see a buddha image (the dhammakāya, or "truth body" of the Buddha; see DHARMAKĀYA) inside oneself, an experience compared to tasting NIRVĀnA in the present life. Meditation is the principal Dhammakāya practice, and the organization encourages its followers to meditate twice a day as a way of improving self-confidence and as a tool for success, well being, and fostering family life. Dhammakāya also offers group training courses for adults in the private and public sectors. Devotees dress in white, and temple buildings are simple in design. Dhammakāya is also known for organizing massive ceremonies involving several thousand monks and tens of thousands of laypeople on Buddhist holy days. Rather than following the traditional lunar calendar and practicing on the days of the waning and waxing moon, Dhammakāya practice is held every Sunday, with meditation in the morning, followed by a sermon on topics relevant to the problems and concerns of everyday life. Its adherents are also encouraged to take part in such activities as retreats, youth camps, and massive ordinations for college students during the summer break. The Dhammakāya movement also differs from mainstream Thai Buddhism in that it requires monks to be ordained for life rather than the temporary ordination that is common among Thai laymen. In addition to its massive WAT outside of Bangkok, it has established branches throughout Thailand and overseas. Many Thais, especially intellectuals who support the forest meditation tradition, criticize Dhammakāya for its "direct marketing" type of organization and its quick-fix solutions to complex problems.
Dialogic method: The presentation of a thesis or argument in dialogue form. -- C.A.B.
Discount - 1. difference between the face value (i.e., future value) and the present value of a payment. Or 2. reduction in price given for prompt payment.Or 3. excess of the par value (face value) of a financial instrument over the price paid for it.
Discounted cash flow (DCF) - A method of investment appraisal which takes interest rates into account by calculating the present value of future income.
Divyāvadāna. In Sanskrit, "Divine Exploits"; a collection of thirty-eight "heroic tales" or "narratives" (AVADĀNA). Avadānas are the tenth of the twelvefold (DVĀDAsĀnGA[PRAVACANA]) categorization of the traditional genres of Buddhist literature and relate the past and present deeds of a person, either lay or ordained, who in some specific fashion exemplifies Buddhist ethics and practice. The present characters in the stories in the Divyāvadāna are often identified as persons whom the Buddha encountered in a former life. Thus, its tales have a narrative structure similar to JĀTAKA stories, in which an event in the present offers an opportunity to recount a story from the past, which in turn illuminates details regarding present circumstances. Themes that run throughout the Divyāvadāna include the realization of positive or negative consequences of action (KARMAN), the importance of moral discipline, and the great merit (PUnYA) that can be accrued through service or reverence offered to the buddhas or to sites related to the buddhas, such as a STuPA. The Divyāvadāna includes thirty-six avadānas and two SuTRAs. Famous stories found in the Divyāvadāna collection include the Purnāvadāna, the story of the monk PuRnA, and the AsOKĀVADĀNA, which recounts the birth, life, and reign of King AsOKA, the monarch whom the Buddhist tradition considers the great protector of the religion. Although the style and language of the works vary tremendously, more than half of the tales also appear in the MuLASARVĀSTIVĀDA VINAYA. Given their debt to vinaya literature, it is not surprising that many of the tales in the Divyāvadāna often make reference to points of monastic discipline (VINAYA). This association with the Mulasarvāstivāda vinaya suggests that these stories could date as far back as the beginning of the Common Era. However, the oldest extant manuscript of the Divyāvadāna dates only to the seventeenth century, and there is no reference to a text by that title in a Buddhist source prior to that date. There also is no Tibetan or Chinese translation of the text, although many of its stories are found in the Tibetan and Chinese canons. (For example, twenty-one of the thirty-eight stories of the collection are found in the vinaya section of the Tibetan canon.) This has led some scholars to conclude that, although the stories themselves are quite old, the particular compilation as the Divyāvadāna may be rather late. A number of stories from the Divyāvadāna were translated by EUGÈNE BURNOUF in his 1844 Introduction à l'histoire du Buddhisme indien. The first Sanskrit edition of the entire text was undertaken in 1866 by Edward B. Cowell and Robert A. Neil. The Divyāvadāna legends had a significant influence on Buddhist art and were often the subject of Buddhist sculptures and paintings. For instance, in the "Sahasodgata" chapter of this collection, the Buddha describes the "wheel of existence" (BHAVACAKRA), which became a popular subject of painting in many of the Buddhist traditions.
Dohākosa. [alt. Dohākosagīti] (T. Do ha mdzod). In Sanskrit, "Treasury of Dohā Verses"; a collection of DOHĀ verses sung by SARAHA (perhaps fl. in the tenth century, one of the eighty-four MAHĀSIDDHAs); the verses express the immediacy of the ultimate spiritual experience and the inadequacy of language to convey it, often using sarcasm to mock social conventions. At the same time, the work is based on the traditional tantric premise that meditative practice, motivated by BODHICITTA, and undertaken with devotion to one's GURU, can bring about the bliss of enlightenment within the present lifetime. The order and number of the verses vary significantly among the different versions of the text, reflecting the interests and views of the Nepalese or Tibetan compilers and exegetes. The verses were transmitted sixteen times to Tibet and gave rise to a large and varied commentarial literature; Advayavajra's (1007-1085) DohākosapaNjikā is extant in Sanskrit. See also DO HA SKOR GSUM.
Douglas Engelbart "person" Douglas C. Engelbart, the inventor of the {mouse}. On 1968-12-09, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the {Augmentation Research Center} at {Stanford Research Institute} in Menlo Park, California, USA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the on live system, {NLS}, they had been working on since 1962. The presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer {mouse}, {hypertext}, object addressing, dynamic file linking and shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. The original 90-minute video: {Hyperlinks (http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/08engel200.ram)}, {Mouse (http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/12engel200.ram)}, {Web-board (http://vodreal.stanford.edu/engel/23engel200.ram)}. {Biography (http://www2.bootstrap.org/dce-bio.htm)}. {Tia O'Brien, "The Mouse", Silicon Valley News (http://mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/special/engelbart/)}. {(http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa081898.htm)}. (2003-08-06)
Dpal yul. (Payul). The Tibetan short name of a monastery in Khams (now part of the Chinese province of Sichuan). The name is an abbreviation of Dpal yul rnam rgyal byang chub chos gling, one of the four main RNYING MA monasteries in eastern Tibet, the others being KAḤ THOG, RDZOGS CHEN, and ZHE CHEN; founded in 1665 by Kun bzang shes rab (1636-1699). The monastery specializes in the GTER MA (treasure text) teachings of KARMA CHAGS MED; members of the monastery follow a set course of preliminary practices and engage in a three-year retreat. The monastery, destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), has been rebuilt and currently houses about three hundred monks. The eleventh khri 'dzin (throne-holder) Thub bstan legs bshad chos kyi sgra dbyangs, Penor Rin po che (1932-2009), established a new monastery called Rnam grol gling with great success near Bylakuppe in South India; at present it is the largest Rnying ma institution outside Tibet, with perhaps as many as five thousand monks and nuns. The present throne-holder is the fifth Karma sku chen (b. 1970).
Dweller on the Threshold ::: A literary invention of the English mystic and novelist Sir Bulwer Lytton, found in his romance Zanoni.The term has obtained wide currency and usage in theosophical circles. In occultism the word "dweller,"or some exactly equivalent phrase or expression, has been known and used during long ages past. Itrefers to several things, but more particularly has an application to what H. P. Blavatsky calls "certainmaleficent astral Doubles of defunct persons." This is exact. But there is another meaning of this phrasestill more mystical and still more difficult to explain which refers to the imbodied karmic consequencesor results of the man's past, haunting the thresholds which the initiant or initiate must pass before he canadvance or progress into a higher degree of initiation. These dwellers, in the significance of the word justlast referred to are, as it were, the imbodied quasi-human astral haunting parts of the constitution thrownoff in past incarnations by the man who now has to face them and overcome them -- very real and livingbeings, parts of the "new" man's haunting past. The initiant must face these old "selves" of himself andconquer or -- fail, which failure may mean either insanity or death. They are verily ghosts of the deadmen that the present man formerly was, now arising to dog his footsteps, and hence are very truly calledDwellers on the Threshold. In a specific sense they may be truly called the kama-rupas of the man's pastincarnations arising out of the records in the astral light left there by the "old" man of the "new" man whonow is.
Each one of these gunas, with its corresponding quality or sense organ, is evolved in each one of the seven root-races that form a globe manvantara. The above listing gives the order in which these gunas appear correspondentially to the root-race which brings them into activity. At the present time, being in the fifth root-race, we have evolved five perceptible gunas with their corresponding qualities and sense organs.
Easter [from Eostre or Ostara goddess of spring] In the northern hemisphere, the time of the renewal of life in nature, and therefore the appropriate season for celebrating the mystery of rebirth and regeneration. Easter day was close to the time of one of the four sacred seasons connected with the equinoxes and solstices, which were individually celebrated in the ancient Mysteries as representatives of the four main phases of the drama of initiation. It was the second stage of initiation when the awakened person, in whom the Christ had already been born (as celebrated at a winter solstice), was preparing to become a conqueror of self and then a teacher. Easter today is the result of a confusion and compromise between this ancient spring festival (chiefly in its Northern European form) with ecclesiastical legends and the Jewish Feast of the Passover (pesah). Good Friday, following the Christian version of this ancient theme, commemorates the descent of the Christ into the tomb, and the Sunday following, which is the third day counting inclusively, celebrates the resurrection. Due to a confusion in early Christian thought, there are certain aspects of the Easter celebration which properly pertain to the winter solstice, which the Christians, however, have rightly held as commemorating the birth of Christ. The Jewish ecclesiastical calendar was lunar, and the attempt to reconcile the solar calendar with the date of the Passover as fixed by the lunar calendar resulted in protracted disputes, ending in the present compromise with its fluctuating date. The use of eggs at Easter is symbolic of rebirth and shows the influence of the ancient rites, especially of Northern Europe.
Economic_conditions ::: refer to the present state of the economy in a country or region. The conditions change over time along with the economic and business cycles, as an economy goes through expansion and contraction. Economic conditions are considered to be sound or positive when an economy is expanding and are seen as adverse or negative when an economy is contracting.
Ellorā. [alt. Elurā]. Among the many cave complexes scattered throughout Asia, perhaps the most famous are Ellorā and AJAntĀ in India; YUNGANG, DUNHUANG, and DAZU in China; and SoKKURAM in Korea. The site of Ellorā is located near Ajantā, eighteen miles north of the present-day city of Aurangabad, in the state of Maharashtra. From the sixth through the tenth centuries, there were thirty-four caves carved out of the solid rock of its cliffs. Twelve of these caves date from c. 600 to 730 CE and are Buddhist in orientation. They are rather modest in comparison to the site's Hindu and JAINA caves, which were built at a later date. As monks and nuns built retreats at the site, cave complexes were dug into the base of the cliffs. Some of these excavations were plain cells; others were more elaborate sanctuaries, adorned with paintings, statues, and bas-reliefs. Constructed in the late-seventh or early-eighth centuries, the three-storied Cave 12 was probably one of the last Buddhist caves created at Ellorā. While the central shrine on each floor shows a buddha flanked by the two BODHISATTVAs AVALOKITEsVARA and VAJRAPĀnI, it is especially noteworthy that Cave 12's interior artistic scheme also illustrates the early development of diagrams (MAndALA), both in two-dimensional relief and three-dimensional sculpture. The so-called eight-bodhisattva mandala (astabodhisattvamandala) is depicted on each floor. In addition, in some sections of the cave, the eight bodhisattvas (AstAMAHOPAPUTRA) surround a central buddha in a nine-square diagram. The mandalas shown in this cave attest to the highly developed ritual environments at Ellorā and also demonstrate that over the course of time artistic imagery was used in the service of specific Buddhist beliefs. The developments documented in exceptional caves like this one were nurtured by lay patronage and royal support. Stylistically, the Ellorā caves are similar to those of neighboring Ajantā, and may have been crafted by sculptors who worked at that earlier cave site.
E. L. Thorndike, Human Nature and the Social Order. See Freud, Gestalt, Introspection, Mind, Subconscious. Psychology of Religion: A scientific, descriptive study of mental life and behavior with special reference to religious activities. The aim of this study is not to criticize or evaluate religion (see Philosophy of Religion) but to describe its forms as they reflect the mental processes of men. As an extended chapter in the field of general psychology, psychology of religion reflects the various types of psychology now current. As a scientific study this subject began its fruitful career at the beginning of this century, making illuminating disclosures on the nature of conversion, varieties of religious experience, the origin and character of beliefs in God and immortality, the techniques of mystics, types of worship, etc. Due to the confused state of psychology-in-general and especially to the recent vogue of behaviorism this subject has fallen somewhat into an eclipse -- at least for the present. Cf. Wm. James: Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. -- V.F.
EMOTIONAL CULTURE The stage of emotional culture has been reached when everybody serves and nobody feels like a master. When everybody serves something higher, something beyond himself, something for several, for many, for all together, then that harmony will present itself which is the expression of cultured emotion. The present intellectual possibilities of man have been overrated, and his emotional ones undervalued and neglected. It is also easier to realize emotional culture, with the sense of unity as its highest value. P 1.1.11
english ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to England, or to its inhabitants, or to the present so-called Anglo-Saxon race.
See 1st Bond, n., 8. ::: n. --> Collectively, the people of England; English people or persons.
eocene ::: a. --> Pertaining to the first in time of the three subdivisions into which the Tertiary formation is divided by geologists, and alluding to the approximation in its life to that of the present era; as, Eocene deposits. ::: n. --> The Eocene formation.
Equinox [from Latin aequinoctium equal nights] The two annual epochs when the sun, in its apparent path around the ecliptic, crosses the celestial equator, occurring about March 2l and September 23, when the days and nights are equal to each other in length. The position of this intersection or node — the equinoctial point — on the ecliptic, at the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere, is called the first degree of Aries in the ecliptic zodiac. But this point shifts continuously, having a retrograde motion around the ecliptic occupying about 25,920 years. This period is very important because every astronomical cycle is indicative of cosmic and human cycles. In accordance with the signs of the zodiac, it is divided into twelve parts, each of 2160 years, called in theosophy the Messianic cycle and marking the coming of a world savior. The recession of the equinoxes from Pisces into Aquarius is stated to occur somewhere about the present age, and to mark a new spiritual dispensation.
erastian ::: n. --> One of the followers of Thomas Erastus, a German physician and theologian of the 16th century. He held that the punishment of all offenses should be referred to the civil power, and that holy communion was open to all. In the present day, an Erastian is one who would see the church placed entirely under the control of the State.
Eridu One of the oldest seats of religious culture in ancient Babylonia, located a few miles SSW of Ur in Chaldea, and mentioned in ancient records as the city of the deep. In it was a temple of Ea, god of the sea and of wisdom. Rediscovered in 1854, it is now about 120 miles from the Persian Gulf, though spoken of in old records as being on the shore; calculations based on the rate of alluvial deposition places its date in the seventh millennium BC. Sayce, by comparing the Akkadian calendar with the present position of the vernal equinox, gives a date going back to 4700 BC.
ESOTERICIAN The esoterician has once and for all left the world of illusions and fictions, which mankind prefers living in, to enter into the world of reality. K 1.43.6
The mystic thinks that man&
Eternity: An infinite extent of time, in which every event is future at one time, present at another, past at another. As everlastingness, it was formerly divided into two eternities, eternitv a parte ante, an infinite extent of time before the present, and eternity a parte post, an infinite extent of time after the present. Anything can be called "eternal" which is not subject to change, f.i. laws of nature, or which transcends all time. See Timeless. -- R.B.W.
Eternity [from Latin aeternus, aeviternus from aevum an age] Originally eternity signified time divided into endless cycles stretching from the indefinite past through the present into the indefinite future, comprised within encompassing frontierless duration. Eternity therefore is the abstract sum total of endlessly cyclical time periods. As used in The Secret Doctrine, eternity often means a kosmic mahakalpa or manifestation period; thus the seven eternities means seven kosmic periods equivalent to 100 Years of Brahma or 311,040,000,000,000 human years. Even in the Hindu Vishnu-Purana, immortality, which is given as a definition of eternity, means merely “existence to the end of the Kalpa” (2:8). Occasionally used as a synonym for duration.
Every round brings about a new evolutionary development on every one of the globes of the earth-chain, and a fundamental change in the physical, psychic, mental, intellectual, and spiritual constitution of man. The manas principle (the fifth or intellectual principle) will be fully developed at the end of the fifth round, and corresponding aspects of the human constitution will be evolved in minor degree during the sixth and seventh root-races of the fourth round. Although the vast majority of human beings in that future round will be far more evolved than is the present-day or fourth round mankind, nevertheless during the fifth round on this globe will occur what theosophical literature calls the moment of choice. At that time the monads which will continue to rise on the ascending arc must have reached a certain point in their unfolding evolution enabling them successfully to pursue their upward evolutionary journey towards spirit. Those monads who shall not have reached this evolutionary status, and who therefore are not able to continue the upward arc, must perforce wait for the future manvantara, a loss in evolutionary opportunity and in time of many hundreds of millions of years.
Eye of Siva The third eye; physically the pineal gland, which when awakened into activity becomes the organ of the inner spiritual vision of a seer. The pineal gland was in former ages an active physical exterior organ before the present-day two eyes were developed, and was then the faculty both of physical vision and of interior illumination. As the ages passed, this third eye or pineal gland receded within the skull, finally being covered by hardened bone and the scalp. This eye may be described as the organ on this plane of spiritual intuition, through which direct and certain knowledge is obtainable at any time at the will of the seer. “The ‘eye of Siva’ did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the deva-man of the Third had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse, the eye lost its powers” (SD 2:302).
fate ::: “The Indian explanation of fate is Karma. We ourselves are our own fate through our actions, but the fate created by us binds us; for what we have sown, we must reap in this life or another. Still we are creating our fate for the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present. That gives a meaning to our will and action and does not, as European critics wrongly believe, constitute a rigid and sterilising fatalism. But again, our will and action can often annul or modify even the past Karma, it is only certain strong effects, called utkata karma, that are non-modifiable. Here too the achievement of the spiritual consciousness and life is supposed to annul or give the power to annul Karma. For we enter into union with the Will Divine, cosmic or transcendent, which can annul what it had sanctioned for certain conditions, new-create what it had created, the narrow fixed lines disappear, there is a more plastic freedom and wideness. Neither Karma nor Astrology therefore points to a rigid and for ever immutable fate.” Letters on Yoga
FATE. ::: Tlic Indian explanation of fate is karma. We our- selves arc our own fate through our actions, but the fate created by us binds us ; for what we have sown, we must reap in this life or another. Still, we arc creating our fate tor the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present,
fazhi. (J. hoshu/hosshu; K. popchip 法執). In Chinese, "attachment to factors"; in contrast to ĀTMAGRĀHA, the attachment to a self, attachment to factors (DHARMA) refers to either a clinging to the constituent aggregates that make up a person as ultimately real, or an attachment to the Buddhist teachings themselves. In the former scenario, the SARVĀSTIVĀDA, for example, rejects the reality of a self among the constituent factors (DHARMA) that constitute the person, but maintained that constituent parts themselves do have a perduring, ultimate reality. Rival Buddhist schools, most notably the MADHYAMAKA tradition, criticize such a view as being emblematic of an attachment to the dharmas. In the latter scenario, dharma-attachment is the clinging to Buddhist teachings and other heuristic devices as being ultimately real (cf. PARAMĀRTHASATYA). Various Buddhist scriptures tout the Buddhist teachings as skillful strategems (UPĀYA) that serve a provisional purpose. Buddhist teachings are likened to a raft that could be used to cross a river, but once having reached the other shore, the traveler should leave the raft behind lest it become a burden. Doctrinaire interpretations of, or an undue fascination with, the Buddhist teachings, especially when they are ill-suited for the present situation, is said to be a kind of dharma-attachment. Traditionally, two kinds of dharma-attachment are delineated: "dharma-attachment that arises from discriminatory cognition" (fenbie fazhi) and "inborn dharma-attachment" (jusheng fazhi). The former is primarily an epistemic error resulting from improper thinking and exposure to fallacious doctrines-it is eradicated at the path of vision (DARsANAMĀRGA). The latter is primarily an affective, habitual, and instinctive clinging (conditioned by similar tendencies accrued from previous lives) that may be present whether or not one subscribes to fenbie fazhi-the view of independent, irreducibly real dharmas. "Inborn dharma-attachment" is only gradually attenuated through the successive stages of the path of cultivation (BHĀVANĀLĀRGA). In Mahāyāna polemics, the so-called HĪNAYĀNA can only lead to the eradication of the attachment to self but never to the attachment to dharmas. Cf. DHARMANAIRĀTMYA.
flashback: A method of narration in which the present action is temporarily interrupted, to relive an episode in the character’s past. This flashback could take the form of memory, dream, narration, or even authorial commentary. See in media res
foretime ::: n. --> The past; the time before the present.
Future: That part of time which includes all the events which will happen. According to many occultists and esoteric philosophers, the future co-exists with the present and the past, time is indivisible, unchangeable, and past, present and future are merely concepts of the human mind which moves along a “time track” through the reality which is time; foreknowledge, prophecy, etc., can be explained as glimpses ahead along the time track.
future ::: v. i. --> That is to be or come hereafter; that will exist at any time after the present; as, the next moment is future, to the present. ::: a. --> Time to come; time subsequent to the present (as, the future shall be as the present); collectively, events that are to happen in time to come.
Gemara’ (Hebrew) Gĕmārā’ [from the verbal root gāmar to complete, perfect] Teaching leading to full initiation; the supplementary part of the Talmud based upon the Mishnah. The arrangement of the present Gemara’ is attributed originally to Rabbi Ashi (352-427).
Geological Eras When H. P. Blavatsky was writing about the age of the earth in The Secret Doctrine she compared the teachings of the scientists of that time and found nothing but confusion and uncertainty as to geological figures. However, Professor Lefevre in his Philosophy adopted an original method of interpreting the data available. Instead of trying to reach exact figures in regard to the length of the entire fossil-bearing period of sedimentation from the Laurentian period to the present day, or of its subdivisions, he worked out the relative durations of the sedimentary deposits. With this for a background the actual duration of the eras and periods could easily be calculated when reliable evidence was found. Lefevre’s studies were based on the erosion of rocks and the deposition of sediments, and his conclusions have stood with little modification till now. H. P. Blavatsky noticed that his estimates of the relative duration of the geological ages agreed fairly well with the ‘esoteric’ information in her possession, and so by adapting her knowledge of the real figures to Lefevre’s proportional scale she constructed a time table which, she says, approximates the truth “in almost every particular.” Her total of “320,000,000 years of sedimentation” is much less than that of modern geologists, even though she includes the Laurentian period in her table, which they omit. Her “Esoteric” table (SD 2:710) is as follows:
glossic ::: n. --> A system of phonetic spelling based upon the present values of English letters, but invariably using one symbol to represent one sound only.
Gnas chung. (Nechung). In Tibetan, lit. "Small Place," a monastery serving as the seat of the GNAS CHUNG ORACLE, Tibet's state oracle, located near 'BRAS SPUNGS monastery outside LHA SA. According to tradition, on the advice of sĀNTARAKsITA, KHRI SRONG SDE BTSAN invited the tantric thaumaturge PADMASAMBHAVA to Tibet to subdue spirits hostile to the introduction of Buddhism. Padmasambhava appointed a powerful spirit PE HAR as the protector of Buddhism of Tibet in general and of BSAM YAS monastery in particular. The main place (T. gnas chen) of Pe har is in Bsam yas, and a smaller shrine dedicated to his worship (and to the worship of RDO RJE GRAGS LDAN, the chief form in which Pe har carries out his work in Tibet) was located on the site of the present Gnas chung monastery. The monastery became important during the time of the fifth DALAI LAMA (1617-1682) and his regent SDE SRID SANGS RGYAS RGYA MTSHO, who completed an extensive expansion of the monastery in 1683 as part of a strategy to legitimatize the new government of Tibet (the DGA' LDAN PHO BRANG). They expanded the role of Pe har and made Nechung monastery the seat of Tibet's state oracle, introducing new invocations and rituals as an integral part of the monastery's practices. In the late nineteenth century, O rgyan Phrin las chos 'phel, a lama from SMIN GROL GLING monastery, introduced a number of RNYING MA tantric practices to the monastery; his incarnations are called the Gnas chung sprul skus.
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Gobi or Shamo Desert A wild, arid region of mountains and sandy plains which was once fertile land and in part the site of a former inland sea or lake on which was the “Sacred Island” where the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” the elect of the third root-race, took refuge when the daityas prevailed over the devas and humanity became black with sin. It has been called by the Chinese the Sea of Knowledge, and tradition says that the descendants of the holy refugees still inhabit an oasis in “the dreadful wildernesses of the great Desert, the Gobi . . .” (SD 2:220). This region was transformed into a sea for the last time ten or twelve thousand years ago; a local cataclysm drained off the waters southward and westward, leaving the present conditions. It is also said that the events connected with the drying up of the Gobi region are associated with allegories of wars between the good and evil forces and the “systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by those of the Left” which led the world into materialistic forms of thought.
Grace (Divine Grace) ::: the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature.
Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. ::: (person) (GLS) A software engineer whose most notable contributions to the art of computing include the design of Scheme (in cooperation with Gerald (from WAITS to ITS). He wrote the book Common Lisp, which virtually defines the language.He was working at Sun Microsystems, Inc. from 1996 to the present (June 2001).(2001-06-14)
Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. "person" (GLS) A software engineer whose most notable contributions to the art of computing include the design of {Scheme} (in cooperation with {Gerald Sussman}) and the design of the original command set of {Emacs}. He is also known for his contribution to the {Jargon File} and for being the first to port {TeX} (from {WAITS} to {ITS}). He wrote the book "Common Lisp", which virtually defines the language. He was working at {Sun Microsystems, Inc.} from 1996 to the present (June 2001). (2001-06-14)
Haredi or Charedi ::: (Heb. Shaker) Ultra-Orthodox Jews, so called by the backwards and forwards motions they make when praying. The term is also a scriptural reference to a verse describing "the righteous person who fears the word of God". Haredim adhere strictly to traditional form of dress, a strict interpretation of Jewish law, rejection of secular culture, and an ambivalent attitude toward the present State of Israel. Formerly a term for any Orthodox Jew, currently it means an “ultra-Orthodox” Jew. Internally, Haredim are broadly divided between hasidim and misnagdim (q.v.)
Haribhadra. (T. Seng ge bzang po) (c. 800). Indian Buddhist exegete during the Pāla dynasty, whom later Tibetan doxographers associate with the YOGĀCĀRA-*SVĀTANTRIKA syncretistic strand of Indian philosophy. He may have been a student of sĀNTARAKsITA and was a contemporary of KAMALAsĪLA; he himself lists Vairocanabhadra as his teacher. Haribhadra is known for his two commentaries on the AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA ("PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ in Eight Thousand Lines"): the longer ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRĀLOKĀ-PrajNāpāramitāvyākhyā, and its summary, the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRAVIVṚTI. He is also known for his recasting of the twenty-five-thousand-line version of the prajNāpāramitā (PANCAVIMsATISĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA) in a work entitled the Le'u brgyad ma in Tibetan. Each of these works is based on the interpretative scheme set forth in the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA ("Ornament for Clear Realizations"), a guide to the PaNcaviMsati that Haribhadra explicitly attributes to MAITREYA. His AbhisamayālaMkārālokā builds upon PRAMĀnA, MADHYAMAKA, and ABHIDHARMA literature and was extremely influential in Tibet; its summary (known as "'grel pa don gsal" in Tibetan) is the root text (rtsa ba) for commentaries in the GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery tradition originating with RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB. It is the most widely studied prajNāpāramitā commentary in Tibetan Buddhism to the present day. Haribhadra is known for his explanation of a JNĀNADHARMAKĀYA (knowledge truth-body) in addition to a SVĀBHĀVAKĀYA, viz., the eternally pure DHARMADHĀTU that is free from duality. He is characterized as an alīkākāravādin ("false-aspectarian") to differentiate him from Kamalasīla, a satyākāravādin ("true-aspectarian") who holds that the objects appearing in the diverse forms of knowledge in a buddha's all-knowing mind are truly what they seem to be. He cites DHARMAKĪRTI frequently but appears to accept that scripture (ĀGAMA) is also a valid authority (PRAMĀnA). There are two principal commentaries on his work, by Dharmamitra and Dharmakīrtisrī. BuddhasrījNāna (or simply BuddhajNāna) was his disciple. The Subodhinī, a commentary on the RATNAGUnASAMCAYAGĀTHĀ, is also attributed to him.
Harpocrates (Greek) Heru-pa-khart (Egyptian) Ḥeru-pa-kharṭ. Horus the Younger, or Horus the Babe. Representations of his mother Isis with an infant are common in Egypt, and with his father, Osiris, a trinity is formed of Father-Mother-Son. Harpocrates came to be regarded as the type of new birth and life, thus the first hours of the day, the first days of the month, and the first days of the year, were especially associated with him. He was the god of silence or of the Mysteries, and little has come down to the present day with regard to this aspect of the deity.
Harpocrates: The Greek form of the Egyptian god, Hoor-paar kraat, the dwarf-god or "child" that is the symbol of the present Aeon of Horus.In magical terms Hoor-paar-kraat represents the result of the psychosexual formula of love under will; the "child" assumes the form impressed upon its mother (Nuit) at the moment ofits conception.
hodiernal ::: a. --> Of this day; belonging to the present day.
humanly ::: adv. --> In a human manner; after the manner of men; according to the knowledge or wisdom of men; as, the present prospects, humanly speaking, promise a happy issue.
Kindly; humanely.
IBM System/36 "computer" A mid-range {computer} introduced in 1983, which remained popular in the 1990s because of its low cost and high performance. Prices started in the $20k range for the small 5362 to $100+k for the expanded 5360. In 1994, IBM introduced the Advanced 36 for $9,000. The largest 5360 had 7MB of {RAM} and 1432MB of {hard disk}. The smallest 5362 had 256K of RAM and 30MB of hard disk. The Advanced 36 had 64MB of RAM and 4300MB of hard disk, but design issues limit the amount of storage that can actually be addressed by the {operating system}; underlying {microcode} allowed additional RAM to cache disk reads and writes, allowing the Advanced 36 to outperform the S/36 by 600 to 800%. There was only one operating system for the S/36: SSP ({System Support Product}). SSP consumed about 7-10MB of hard drive space. Computer programs on the S/36 reside in "libraries," and the SSP itself resides in a special system library called
IBM System/36 ::: (computer) A mid-range computer introduced in 1983, which remained popular in the 1990s because of its low cost and high performance. Prices started in the $20k range for the small 5362 to $100+k for the expanded 5360. In 1994, IBM introduced the Advanced 36 for $9,000.The largest 5360 had 7MB of RAM and 1432MB of hard disk. The smallest 5362 had 256K of RAM and 30MB of hard disk. The Advanced 36 had 64MB of RAM and 4300MB of to cache disk reads and writes, allowing the Advanced 36 to outperform the S/36 by 600 to 800%.There was only one operating system for the S/36: SSP (System Support Product). SSP consumed about 7-10MB of hard drive space. Computer programs on the S/36 reside in libraries, and the SSP itself resides in a special system library called
icchantika. (T. 'dod chen; C. yichanti; J. issendai; K. ilch'onje 一闡提). In Sanskrit, "incorrigibles"; a term used in the MAHĀYĀNA tradition to refer to a class of beings who have lost all potential to achieve enlightenment or buddhahood. The term seems to derive from the present participle icchant (desiring), and may be rendered loosely into English as something like "hedonist" or "dissipated" (denotations suggested in the Tibetan rendering 'dod chen (po), "subject to great desire"). (The Sinographs are simply a transcription of the Sanskrit.) The Mahāyāna MAHĀPARINIRVĀnASuTRA states that persons become icchantika when they refuse to accept such basic principles as the law of causality, have lost their moral compass, are no longer concerned about either present actions or their future consequences, do not associate with spiritual mentors, and generally do not follow the teachings of the Buddha. In the LAnKĀVATĀRASuTRA, an icchantika is defined as a being who is explicitly antagonistic to the "bodhisattva collection" (BODHISATTVAPItAKA) of the canon, viz., to Mahāyāna scriptures, and who falsely claims that those scriptures do not conform to the SuTRA and the VINAYA. As a consequence of their disdain for the dharma, icchantikas were commonly assumed to be condemned to an indefinite period (and, according to some texts, an eternity) in the hells (see NĀRAKA). Certain bodhisattvas, such as KsITIGARBHA, could, however, voluntarily choose to become icchantikas by renouncing all of their own wholesome faculties (KUsALAMuLA) in order to save even the denizens of the hells. In East Asia, there was a major debate about whether icchantikas were subject to eternal damnation or whether even they retained the innate capacity to attain enlightenment. The Chinese monk DAOSHENG (355-434) rejected the implication that Buddhism would condemn any class of being to hell forever. He went so far as to reject the accuracy of passages suggesting such a fate that appeared in the first Chinese rendering of the Mahāparinirvānasutra made by FAXIAN and BUDDHABHADRA in 418. DHARMAKsEMA's subsequent translation of the sutra in 421, however, affirmed Daosheng's view that the buddha-nature (C. FOXING; S. BUDDHADHĀTU) was inherent in all beings, even icchantikas. The FAXIANG school of YOGĀCĀRA Buddhism was the only school of East Asian Buddhism that posited the existence of icchantikas, which it viewed as beings who had destroyed the pure seeds (BĪJA) innate in the mind through their heinous actions and thus had lost all hope of becoming buddhas. Virtually all other schools of East Asian Buddhism, however, asserted the doctrine of the universality of the buddha-nature in all sentient beings (and, in some cases, even in inanimate objects), and thus rejected any implication that icchantikas were bereft of all prospect of achieving buddhahood. See also SAMUCCHINNAKUsALAMuLA; QINI[ZUI].
IDEA—A thought which is conceived to be in a measure independent of the thinker, and, in a sense, self existent, "Thought" is used to name the presentation which is the direct product of the active mind and which would not and could not exist apart from the acting mind, while "idea" is used to name the presentation of the mind which is no longer considered as acting; a presentation which might even exist apart from, and independently of, a mind or its activities. A thought is felt to be peculiar to the one thinking it, while the idea is felt to be, in a measure, self-determined or due to the nature of that with which it is associated so that all minds would foam it the same; the term still feels the influence of Plato's conception of the ideas as the forms of fundamental reality.
Ikshvaku (Sanskrit) Ikṣvāku The son of Vaivasvata-Manu — progenitor of the present human race and son of Vivasvat (the sun). Ikshvaku was the founder of the solar race of kings (Suryavansa), reigning at Ayodhya at the commencement of the treta yuga (second age). It is said that he had a hundred sons, one of whom, Nimi, founded the Mithila dynasty.
In articles herein by the present writer, the notation λx[A] will be employed for the function obtained from A by abstraction relative to (or, as we may also say, with respect to) x. Russell, and Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica, employ for this purpose the formula A with a circumflex ˆ placed over each (free) occurrence of x -- but only for propositional functions. Frege (1893) uses a Greek vowel, say ε, as the variable relative to which abstraction is made, and employs the notation ε(A) to denote what is essentially the function in extension (the "Werthverlauf" in his terminology) obtained from A by abstraction relative to ε.
In articles in this dictionary by the present writer the word proposition is to be understood in sense (b) above. This still leaves an element of ambiguity, since common usage does not always determine of two sentences whether they are strictly synonymous or merely logically equivalent. For a particular language or logistic system, this ambiguity may be resolved in various ways. -- A.C.
Indian Philosophy: General name designating a plethora of more or less systematic thinking born and cultivated in the geographic region of India among the Hindus who represent an amalgamation of adventitious and indigenous peoples, but confined at first exclusively to the caste-conscious Indo-germanic conquerors of the lands of the Indus and Ganges. Its beginnings are lost in the dim past, while a distinct emergence in tangible form is demonstrable from about 1000 B.C. Hindu idiosyncrasies are responsible for our inability to date with any degree of accuracy many of the systems, schools, and philosophers, or in some cases even to refer to the latter by name. Inasmuch as memory, not writing, has been universally favored in India, an aphoristic form (cf. sutra), subtended by copious commentaries, give Indian Philosophy its distinctive appearance. The medium is Sanskrit and the dialects derived from it. There are translations in all major Asiatic and European languages. The West became familiar with it when philologists discovered during last century the importance of Sanskrit. As a type of thinking employing unfamiliar conceptions and a terminology fluctuating in meaning (cf., e.g., rasa), it is distinct from Western speculations. Several peaks have been reached in the past, yet Indian Philosophy does not cease to act fructifyingly upon the present mind in India as elsewhere. Various factions advance conflicting claims as to the value of Indian speculation, because interpretations have not as yet become standardized. Textual criticism is now making strides, but with varying successes. Among larger histories of Indian Philosophy may be mentioned those of Deussen, Das Gupta, Bel-valkar and Ranade, and Radhakrishnan.
instant ::: a. --> Pressing; urgent; importunate; earnest.
Closely pressing or impending in respect to time; not deferred; immediate; without delay.
Present; current.
A point in duration; a moment; a portion of time too short to be estimated; also, any particular moment.
A day of the present or current month; as, the sixth instant; -- an elliptical expression equivalent to the sixth of the
In the earlier third root-races, the Sons of Wisdom produced by kriyasakti a progeny called the Sons of Ad, Sons of the Fire-mist, or Sons of Will and Yoga. This was not a race, but “at first a wondrous Being, called the ‘Initiator,’ and after him a group of semi-divine and semi-human beings. ‘Set apart’ in Archaic genesis for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated the highest Dhyanis, ‘Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras’ — to form the nursery for future human adepts, on this earth and during the present cycle” (SD 1:207). This Wondrous Being, who descended in the early part of the Third Age, is the tree from which have come the great historically known sages and hierophants, and it holds spiritual sway over the initiated adepts. “He is the ‘Initiator,’ called the ‘great sacrifice.’ For, sitting at the threshold of light, he looks into it from within the circle of Darkness, which he will not cross, nor will he quit his post till the last day of this life-cycle. Why does the solitary Watcher remain at his self-chosen post? Why does he sit by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, of which he drinks no longer, as he has naught to learn which he does not know . . .? Because the lonely, sore-footed pilgrims on their way back to their home are never sure to the last moment of not losing their way in this limitless desert of illusion and matter called Earth-Life. Because he would fain show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he is a voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in liberating himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in short, he has sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, though but a few Elect may profit by the great sacrifice” (SD 1:208).
In the Eddas, Odin (spirit), Vili (will), and Vi (sanctity or awe) are born from Bore and Bestla, the karmic residue carried over from the preceding world cycle. The present universe is thus the direct result of its predecessor. The triune creative deity slays the frostgiant Ymir and from his latent (frozen) body form the matter of worlds-to-be.
In theosophic philosophy, the root-manu of our present fourth round, and in a more restricted sense the manu of the fourth root-race; and again the manu of the fifth subrace of the present fifth root-race. Vaivasvata corresponds to Xisuthrus, Deukalion, Noah, etc. — all head-figures or eponyms of races inaugurating a “new” humanity after a deluge, whether universal or partial, astronomical or geological, according to the interpretation. See also SURYAVANSA
in the present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary realisation, it has )ct delcrniincd the soul's future.
Introspection: The observation of the presentations and processes of one’s own consciousness.
It is here, when this foundation has been secured, that the practice of Asana and Franayama 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 preli- minary condition ; it cannot bring about that evolution or mani- festation of the higher psychic being which is neccssaiy for the greater aims of Yoga. In order fo bring about this manifesta- tion the present nodus of the rrital 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 Franayama.
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
It is this which explains many of the phenomena of clair- voyance, clairaudience, etc. ; for these phenomena are only the exceptional admission of the waking mentality into a limited sensitiveness to what might be called the image memory of the subtle ether,' by which not only the signs of all things past and present, but even those of things future can be seized ; for things future are already accomplished to knowledge and vision on higher planes of mind and their images can be reflected upon mind in the present. But these things which are exceptional to the w’aking mentality, difficult and to be perceived only by the pos- session of a special power or else after assiduous training, are natural to the dream-state of trance consciousness in which the subliminal mind is free. And that mind can al^o take cognizance
I. Vienna Circle; Logical Positivsm, Logical Empiricism. The Vienna Circle, founded by M. Schlick (q.v.) in 1924, ending with his death in 1936. Among its members: G. Bergmann, R. Carnap (q.v.), H. Feigl, Ph. Frank (q.v.), K. G&oUML;del (q.v.), H. Hahn (d. 1934), O. Neurath, F Waismann. Seen historically, the movement shows influences from three sides the older empiricism and positivism, especially Hume, Mill, Mach; methodology of empirical science, as developed by scientists since about the middle of the 19th century, e.g., Helmholtz, Mach, Poincare. Duhem, Boltzmann, Einstein; symbolic logic and logical analysis of language as developed especially by Frege, Whitehead and Russell, Wittgenstein. Russell (q.v.) was the first to combine these trends and therefore had an especially strong influence. The views developed in the V. C. have been called Logical Positivism (A. E. Blumberg and H. Feigl, J. Phil. 28, 1931); many members now prefer the term "Logical Empiricism". Among the characteristic features: emphasis on scientific attitude and on co-operation, hence emphasis on intersubjective (q.v.) language and unity of science. Empiricism: every knowledge that is factual (see Meaning, Kinds of, 1), is connected with experiences in such a way that verification or direct or indirect confirmation is possible (see Verification). The emphasis on logical analysis of language (see Semiotic) distinguishes this movement from earlier empiricism and positivism. The task of philosophy is amlysis of knowledge, especially of science; chief method: analysis of the language of science (see Semiotic; Meaning, Kinds of). Publications concerning the historical development of this movement and its chief views: Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis, Wien 1929 (with bibliography). O. Neurath, Le Developpement du Cercle de Vienne, et l'Avenir de l'Empirisme Logique, 1935. C. W. Morris, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism, Paris 1937. E. Nagel, "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe", I, II, tic Empiricism in Germany, and the Present State of its Problems. Ibid. E. Nagel, "The Fight for Clarity: Logical Empiricism", Amer. Scholar, 1938. Many papers by members of the group have been published in "Erkenntnis" since 1930, now continued as "Journal of Unified Science". Compare M. Black, "Relations between Logical Positivism and the Cambridge School of Analysis", J. Un. Sc. 8, 1940. II. Scientific Empiricism. A wider movement, comprising besides Logical Empiricism other groups and individuals with related views in various countries. Also called Unity of Science Movement.
Jaina. In Sanskrit, lit., "followers of The Victor [JINA]"; one of the major early sects of Indian wandering religious (sRAMAnA), a movement in the fifth-century BCE that included Buddhism among its groups. One of the founders of Jainism, NIRGRANTHA-JNĀTĪPUTRA (P. Nigantha Nātaputta), who is also known by his title of MAHĀVĪRA (Great Victor) (d. c. 488 BCE), was a contemporary of the Buddha and figures prominently in Buddhist literature. The Buddhists classified the Jainas among the TĪRTHIKA groups, the adherents of non-Buddhist religions who are sometimes mistranslated as "heretics." The Jainas were the sramana group closest to Buddhism in its beliefs and practices, and the Buddha often used their teachings as a foil in order to present his own interpretations of important religious principles. Mahāvīra claimed to have achieved enlightenment and become one in a long line of jinas ("victors," e.g., over ignorance) or tīrthaMkaras ("ford-makers") going back through twenty-four generations to Pārsva; this notion of an enlightened lineage of spiritual leaders is found also in Buddhism's doctrine that the Buddha was the latest in a series of previous buddhas (see SAPTATATHĀGATA). The Jainas believed in a theory of KARMAN, as did the Buddhists, but treated karman as a physical substance created through previous unwholesome actions, which constrained the soul and hindered its ability to rise above the physical world to the highest sphere of being; although the Buddhists accepted the notion of moral causality, as did the Jainas, they redefined karman instead as mental intention (CETANĀ). In order to free the soul from the bonds created through past actions, the Jainas held that the body had therefore to be rigorously cleansed of this karmic substance. The foundation of this cleansing process was the five great vows, the basic Jaina code of moral discipline, which parallel the Buddhist five precepts (PANCAsĪLA). The Jainas also practiced more severe austerities than did the Buddhists, including a stricture requiring "non-harming" (AHIMSĀ) of living creatures, rather than Buddhism's somewhat more lenient prohibition against "killing" living creatures. The Jainas also demanded strict vegetarianism from their followers in order to avoid injuring sentient creatures, a requirement that the Buddha rejected when his rival in the order, DEVADATTA, proposed it in his list of austerities (see DHUTAnGA). The Buddha's view was that monks were a "field of merit" (PUnYAKsETRA) for the laity and it was be inappropriate to refuse offerings of meat made to them, except in a very limited number of specific situations (such as if the monk, for example, knew that the animal had been killed specifically to feed him). The vegetarianism that is now prevalent in both MAHĀYĀNA Buddhism and wider Indian Hindu culture is almost certainly a result of Jaina influence and constitutes that religion's most enduring contribution to Indian religion. One branch of the Jainas, the Digambara (lit. "Sky Clad"), took the prohibition against material possessions so strictly that their male adherents were forbidden from even wearing clothing; hence, the Jainas are often referred to in translations of Pāli materials as "naked ascetics." The Jainas were the only one of the six major sramana traditions to survive into the present day on the Indian subcontinent, until Buddhism was reintroduced in the twentieth century by B. R. AMBEDKAR (1891-1956). In Buddhist texts, the Jainas are most commonly referred to as NIRGRANTHA, literally "freed from all ties."
Jaspers, Karl: (1883-) Inspired by Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's psychology, but aiming at a strictly scientific method, the "existentialist" Jaspers analyzes the possible attitudes of man towards the world; the decisions which the individual must make in inescapable situations like death, struggle, change, guilt; and the various ways in which man meets these situations. Motivated by the boundless desire for clarity and precision, Jaspers earnestly presents as his main objective to awaken the desire for a fuller, more genuine philosophy, these three methods of philosophizing which have existed from te earliest times to the present: Philosophical world orientation consisting in an analysis of the limitations, incompleteness and relativity of the researches, methods, world pictures of all the sciences; elucidation of existence consisting of a cognitive penetration into reality on the basis of the deepest inner decisions experienced by the individual, and striving to satisfy the deepest demands of human nature; the way of metaphysics, the never-satisfied and unending search for truth in the world of knowledge, conduct of life and in the seeking for the one being, dimly seen through antithetic thoughts, deep existential conflicts and differently conceived metaphysical symbols of the past. Realizing the decisive problematic relation between philosophy and religion in the Middle Ages, Jaspers elevates psychology and history to a more important place in the future of philosophy.
jātaka. (T. skyes rabs; C. bensheng jing; J. honshokyo; K. ponsaeng kyong 本生經). In Sanskrit and Pāli, literally, "birth," or "nativity"; a term used in Buddhism to refer by extension to narrative accounts of previous births or lives, especially of a buddha. The jātaka constitute one of the nine (NAVAnGA[PĀVACANA]) (Pāli) or twelve (DVĀDAsĀnGA[PRAVACANA]) (Sanskrit) categories (AnGA) of Buddhist scripture that are delineated according to their structure or literary style. There are hundreds of such stories (547 in the Pāli collection alone) and together they form one of the most popular genres of Buddhist literature. In a typical tale, GAUTAMA Buddha will recount a story from one of his past lives as a human or an animal, demonstrating a particular virtue, or perfection (PĀRAMITĀ), after which he will identify the other characters in the story as the past incarnations of members of his present audience. A jātaka story usually has five components: (1) an introduction, in which the Buddha recounts the circumstances leading up to the story to be recounted; (2) a prose narrative, in which the story from one of the Buddha's past lives is related; (3) stanzas of poetry, which often contain the moral of the story; (4) a prose commentary on the stanzas; and (5) a conclusion that connects the past with the present, in which the Buddha identifies members of his current audience as incarnations in the present of the characters in the story from the past. ¶ The Pāli Jātaka is the tenth book of the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA of the SUTTAPItAKA. The collection is comprised of 547 stories of former lives of Gotama Buddha while he was a bodhisatta (S. BODHISATTVA). The Jātaka itself is made up entirely of short verses, but these are accompanied by prose commentary called the JĀTAKAttHAKATHĀ, which recounts the relevant stories. Some of the Jātakas have been included in another collection contained in the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA, the CARIYĀPItAKA. In Sanskrit, the most famous jātaka collection is the JĀTAKAMĀLĀ by sura. Over the course of the history of Buddhism and throughout the Buddhist world, jātakas have been one of the most popular forms of Buddhist literature, especially among the laity, due both to their entertaining plots and their edifying moral lessons. Scenes from various jātaka stories are widely depicted in Buddhist art and occur among some of the earliest Buddhist stone carvings in India. Scholarship has demonstrated that the plots of many of the jātakas derive from Indian folklore, with the same story occurring in Hindu, JAINA, and Buddhist works. In the Buddhist versions, the plot has been adapted by adding a prologue and epilogue that identifies the protagonist as the bodhisattva and the other characters as members of the Buddha's circle in a former life; the hero's antagonist in the story is often identified as DEVADATTA in a former life. In addition to their general popularity, individual jātakas have had great influence, such as the VESSANTARA JĀTAKA in Southeast Asia.
jāti. (T. skye ba; C. sheng; J. sho; K. saeng 生). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "birth," "origination." Birth is one of the varieties of the suffering (DUḤKHA) that is inherent in the conditioned realm of existence and the eleventh of the twelve links in the chain of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA). The future buddha is said to have left the life of the householder in search of a state beyond birth, aging, sickness, and death. In the SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA system, origination is treated as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought" (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA), which functions as one of the four conditioned characteristics (SAMSKṚTALAKsAnA) that is associated with all conditioned objects. Because the ontology of the Sarvāstivāda school, as its name implies, postulated that "everything exists" in all three time periods (TRIKĀLA) of past, present, and future, there had to be some mechanism to account for the apparent change that conditioned objects underwent through time. Therefore, along with the other three characteristics of continuance (STHITI), senescence (JARĀ), and desinence (ANITYATĀ; viz., death), origination was posited as a "conditioned force dissociated from thought," which prepares an object to be produced and thus pulls that object out of the future and into the present. The very definition of conditioned objects is that they are subject to these conditioned characteristics, including this process of production, and this is what ultimately distinguishes them from the unconditioned (ASAMSKṚTA), viz., NIRVĀnA. In less technical contexts, beginning with the Buddha's first sermon (see DHAMMACAKKAPPAVATTANASUTTA), jāti appears in various lists of the sufferings of SAMSĀRA, with a variety of texts describing at length the pain experienced in the womb and during birth.
jieshe. (J. kessha; K. kyolsa 結社). In Chinese, "retreat society"; a generic designation for various religious reform movements that were especially popular during Song-dynasty China and Koryo-dynasty Korea. These fraternal societies had their antecedents in the AMITĀBHA society of LUSHAN HUIYUAN (334-416) during the Eastern Jin dynasty and were widespread by the ninth century. By the Song dynasty, such communities were pervasive throughout China, especially in the south. These societies were typically involved in TIANTAI, HUAYAN, and PURE LAND practice, though some were dedicated to the worship of a specific BODHISATTVA, such as SAMANTABHADRA. These societies were typically founded outside the ecclesiastical establishment and, by encouraging both lay and ordained adepts to train together, they fostered some measure of religious egalitarianism within East Asian Buddhism. The jieshe movement was especially influential in Koryo-dynasty Korea, where some fourteen separate kyolsa sites are mentioned in the Koryosa ("History of Koryo"), from Kangwon province in the north to South Cholla province in the south. The best known is the CHoNGHYE KYoLSA (Samādhi and PrajNā Society) initiated in 1180 by POJO CHINUL (1158-1210) and formally established in 1188, which was dedicated to SoN (Chan) cultivation. In 1197, the community had grown so large that it was relocated to Kilsangsa on Mt. Songgwang, the site of the major present-day monastery of SONGGWANGSA. The residents of the society are said to have gathered together to recite sutras, train in meditation, and engage in group work activity. Chinul's first composition, the Kwon su Chonghye kyolsa mun ("Encouragement to Practice: The Compact of the Samādhi and PrajNā Society"), written in 1290, provided the rationale behind the establishment of the community and critiqued pure land adepts who claim that buddhahood cannot be achieved in the present lifetime. Chinul was joined at his community by the Ch'ont'ae (TIANTAI) adept WoNMYO YOSE (1163-1240), who subsequently founded the Paengnyon kyolsa (White Lotus Society) in 1211 at Mandoksan in the far southwest of the peninsula, which was engaged in Ch'ont'ae practice.
Jo nang. A sect of Tibetan Buddhism that flourished between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, seated primarily at the monastery of JO NANG PHUN TSHOGS GLING, northwest of Shigatse. The lineage of masters affiliated with the Jo nang, traditionally said to begin with the eleventh-century yogin-scholar Yu mo Mi bskyod rdo rje (Yumo Mikyo Dorje), includes such highly acclaimed luminaries as DOL PO PA SHES RAB RGYAL MTSHAN and TĀRANĀTHA. Jo nang scholars are often noted for their interest in the KĀLACAKRATANTRA and the controversial doctrine of GZHAN STONG, or "extrinsic emptiness," developed and promulgated by Dol po pa. This theory, and its attendant interpretation of TATHĀGATAGARBHA, was later adopted, reformulated, and actively transmitted by numerous other masters, especially those of the BKA' BRGYUD and RNYING MA sects. Others, especially SA SKYA and later DGE LUGS adherents, presumed that these doctrines were incorrect and even heretical. In 1650, under the aegis of the fifth DALAI LAMA, the monastery of Jo nang was forcibly converted to the Dge lugs sect, its books locked under state seal. The Jo nang tradition survived, however, secretly in small pockets throughout central and western Tibet, and at 'DZAM THANG monastery in A mdo in eastern Tibet, where it has been practiced openly up to the present day. The name is also used to designate the principal central Tibetan monastery affiliated with the Jo nang tradition, Phun tshogs gling; see JO NANG PHUN TSHOGS GLING.
Kali (Sanskrit) Kālī The black; name of the seventh tongue of Agni, the fire god, which was a black fiery flame. Blackness and darkness have always been associated with the pre-cosmic night in its mystical sense, the pralaya preceding the awakening manifestations of life in the present universe. Hence kali represents pre-cosmic wisdom. By that strange inversion of fact which nature manifests nearly everywhere, the highest is reflected in the lowest as in a mirror, so that in this sense the black fiery flame is the condensed fiery magnetic vitality of the lowest material worlds; therefore in this sense kali often stands for wickedness and evil.
kankhāvitaranavisuddhi. In Pāli, "the purity of overcoming doubt"; the fourth of seven "purities" (VISUDDHI) to be developed along the path to liberation, according to the VISUDDHIMAGGA. The purity of overcoming doubt refers to the understanding of the conditions that give rise to name and form (NĀMARuPA), viz., mentality and materiality, with reference to the three time periods (S. TRIKĀLA) of past, present, and future. The practitioner notes that no instance of name and form arisen in the present came into being through the will of a creator, nor did it arise spontaneously by itself without a cause. Rather, the practitioner understands that everything that has arisen has occurred because of a specific cause or condition. Thus, the practitioner understands, for example, that, due to the contact of the eye sense base with a visible object, a moment of visual consciousness arises. In the same way, the practitioner understands that what has arisen in the present because of causes and conditions (HETUPRATYAYA) becomes the cause and condition for something arising in the future. This knowledge encompasses knowledge of the relationship between volitional action (KARMAN) and its result (VIPĀKA) and that future existence within the cycle of rebirth occurs as a result of volitional action. In addition, the practitioner clearly understands the distinction between volitional action and its result, that is, that there is neither volitional action in the result nor result in the volitional action. In this way, the practitioner overcomes doubt regarding causality underlying the appearance of name and form in relation to the three times.
karman. (P. kamma; T. las; C. ye; J. go; K. op 業). In Sanskrit, "action"; in its inflected form "karma," it is now accepted as an English word; a term used to refer to the doctrine of action and its corresponding "ripening" or "fruition" (VIPĀKA), according to which virtuous deeds of body, speech, and mind produce happiness in the future (in this life or subsequent lives), while nonvirtuous deeds lead instead to suffering. In Vedic religion, karman referred especially to ritual actions. The term came to take on wider meanings among the sRAMAnA movements of wandering ascetics, to which Buddhism belonged. The JAINAs, for example, have a theory of karman as a physical substance created through unwholesome actions, which hinder the soul's ability to achieve liberation; in order to free the soul from the bonds created through past actions, the body had to be rigorously cleansed of this karmic substance through moral discipline and asceticism. Although the Buddhists accepted the notion of moral causality, as did the Jainas, they redefined karman instead as mental intention (CETANĀ) or intentional (cetayitvā) acts: the Buddha specifically says, "Action is volition, for after having intended something, one accomplishes action through body, speech, and mind." These actions are of four types: (1) wholesome (KUsALA), which lead to wholesome results (vipāka); (2) unwholesome (AKUsALA), which lead to unwholesome results; (3) mixed, with mixed results that may be partially harmful and partially beneficial; and (4) indeterminate (AVYĀKṚTA), which are actions done after enlightenment, which yield no result in the conditioned realm. The term karman describes both the potential and kinetic energy necessary to sustain a process; and, just as energy is not lost in a physical process, neither is it lost in the process of moral cause and effect. The Buddhists assert that there is a necessary relationship that exists between the action and its fruition, but this need not manifest itself in the present life; rather, when the complex of conditions and the appropriate time for their fruition come together, actions will bear their retributive fruit, even after an interval of hundreds of millions of eons (KALPA). The fruition of action is also received by the mental continuum (CITTASAMTĀNA) of the being who initially performed the action, not by another; thus, in mainstream Buddhism, one can neither receive the fruition of another's karman nor redeem another's actions. The physical universe (BHĀJANALOKA) and all experience within it are also said to be the products of karman, although in a passive, ethically neutral sense (viz., upapattibhava; see BHAVA). The goal of the Buddhist path is to be liberated from the effects of karman and the cycle of rebirth (SAMSĀRA) by destroying attachment to the sense of self (ĀTMAN). The doctrine of karman is meant to counter the errors of antinomianism (that morality is unnecessary to salvation), annihilationism, and materialism. Actions do, in fact, matter, even if there is ultimately no self that is the agent of action. Hence, karman as representing the continuity between action and result must be understood in conjunction with the teaching of discontinuity that is ANĀTMAN: there is indeed a causal chain connecting the initiator of action and the recipient of its result, but it is not the case that the person who performs the action is the same as the person who experiences the result (the wrong view of eternality) or that the agent is different from the experiencer (the wrong view of annihilationism). This connection is likened to milk changing to its different forms of curds, butter, and ghee: the milk and the ghee are neither identical nor different, but they are causally connected. The process that connects karmic cause and effect, as well as the process by which that connection is severed, is detailed in the twelvefold chain of dependent origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPĀDA). Enlightened beings, such as a buddha or an ARHAT, have destroyed this chain and thus have eradicated all attachment to their past karmic continuums; consequently, after their enlightenment, they can still perform actions, but those will not lead to results that would lead to additional lifetimes in saMsāra. Although the Buddha acknowledges that the connections between karman and its effect may seem so complex as to appear unfathomable (why, for example, does the evil person who harms others live in wealth, while the good Samaritan who helps others lives in poverty?), he is adamant that those connections can be known, and known with perfect precision, through the experience of awakening (BODHI). Indeed, two of the three kinds of knowledge (TRIVIDYĀ; P. tevijja) and one of the superknowledges (ABHIJNĀ) that are by-products of enlightenment involve insight into the validity of the connection between karmic cause and effect for both oneself and for all beings: viz., the ability to remember one's own former lives (PuRVANIVĀSĀNUSMṚTI: P. pubbenivāsānunssati) in all their detail; and the insight into the karmic destinies of all other beings as well (CYUTYUPAPATTIJNĀNA; P. cutupapātānuNāna). Distinguish KARMAN, "ecclesiastical proceeding," s.v.; see also ĀNANTARYAKARMAN; ANINJYAKARMAN; ER BAO; KARMĀVARAnA.
Kāsyapīya. (P. Kassapīya/Kassapika; T. 'Od srung ba'i sde; C. Jiasheyibu/Yinguangbu; J. Kashoyuibu/Onksho; K. Kasobyubu/Ŭmgwangbu 迦遺部/飮光部). In Sanskrit, "Followers of Kāsyapa"; one of the eighteen traditional schools of the mainstream Indian Buddhist tradition. There have been several accounts of the identity of the founder Kāsyapa. PARAMĀRTHA and KUIJI presume he was the Indian sage Kāsyapa (MAHĀKĀsYAPA), while others opine that he was a Kāsyapa who was born some three centuries after the Buddha's death. DAOXUAN (596-667) in his Sifen lü kaizong ji says that Jiashe (Kāsyapa) was the personal name of the founder of the Kāsyapīya school and Shansui (SUVARsAKA) his surname. According to the tradition he is relating, Kāsyapa was one of the five disciples of UPAGUPTA, the fifth successor in the Buddha's lineage about one hundred years following his death. These five disciples established their own schools based on their differing views regarding doctrine and redacted the VINAYA into five distinct recensions (C. Wubu lü). The so-called *Prātimoksavinaya of the Kāsyapīya school is not extant, but it is known through the Prātimoksasutra (Jietuojie jing), a primer of the school's monastic discipline. There are several competing theories regarding the lineage of the Kāsyapīya school. The SAMAYABHEDOPARACANACAKRA posits that the Kāsyapīya split off from the SARVĀSTIVĀDA school about three hundred years after the Buddha's death and identifies it with the Suvarsaka school (C. Shansuibu). But other texts, such as the sariputraparipṛcchāsutra, state that the Kāsyapīya and Suvarsaka schools are distinct, with the former having descended from the STHAVIRANIKĀYA and the latter from the Sarvāstivāda school. (The name of the Suvarsaka school is, however, not attested in Pāli sources.) The MaNjusrīparipṛcchā instead claims that the school derived from the DHARMAGUPTAKA school, while the Tibetan tradition considers it as a collateral lineage of the VIBHAJYAVĀDA school. The most plausible scenario is that the Kāsyapīya, MAHĪsĀSAKA, and Dharmaguptaka were each subsections of the Vibhajyavāda, which was a loose umbrella term for all those schools (except the Sarvāstivāda) that split off from the Sthaviranikāya. Inscriptional evidence for all three schools survives in northwestern India. The doctrines of the Kāsyapīya tend to be closest to those ascribed to the Sarvāstivāda and Dharmaguptaka schools. The arrangement of its TRIPItAKA also seems to have paralleled that of the Dharmaguptaka school, and its ABHIDHARMAPItAKA in particular seems to have been similar in structure to the sāriputrābhidharmasāstra of the Dharmaguptakas. Some of the doctrines that are peculiar to the Kāsyapīyas are as follows: (1) Past KARMAN that has not yet borne fruit exists (but the rest of the past does not), the present exists, and some of the future exists. By limiting the existence of past objects, the Kāsyapīyas reject the Sarvāstivāda position that dharmas perdure in all three time periods. (2) All compounded things (SAMSKĀRA) are instantly destroyed. (3) Whatever is compounded (SAMSKṚTA) has its cause in the past, while the uncompounded (ASAMSKṚTA) has its cause in the future. This view also contrasts with that of the Sarvāstivāda, which holds that future actions can serve as either the retributive cause (VIPĀKAHETU) or the efficient or generic cause (KĀRAnAHETU) of compounded objects, such that every conditioned dharma serves as the generic, indirect cause for the creation of all other compounded things, except itself. (4) The worthy ones (ARHAT) perfect both the knowledge of cessation (KsAYAJNĀNA) and the knowledge of nonproduction (ANUTPĀDAJNĀNA), the two types of knowledge that accompany liberation from rebirth (SAMSĀRA); thus, they are no longer subject to the afflictions (KLEsA).
Katsuragisan. (J) (葛城山). Mountain practice site on the border between the present-day Japanese prefectures of Nara and osaka, which was an important center of SHUGENDo practice. The semilegendary founder of Shugendo, EN NO OZUNU (b. 634), is said to have lived for some thirty years in a cave on this mountain. Since En no Ozunu was considered to be a manifestation of Hoki Bosatsu (DHARMODGATA) who, according to the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, lived in the Diamond Mountains, the Katsuragi range includes the appositely named KONGoSAN (Mt. Kongo; see also KŬMGANGSAN). Like many sacred mountains around Japan, there are encased sutras known to be interred in Katsuragisan region. Twenty-eight buried scrolls (J. kyozuka) of the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra")-corresponding to its twenty-eight chapters-were presumed to have been buried at Mt. Katsuragi, according to the late twelfth-century Shozan engi text. Also purportedly interred on the mountain are twenty-nine scrolls of the Nyohokyo (C. *Rufa jing) and eight hannyakyo (PRAJNAPĀRAMITĀ) scrolls. During the Heian period, burying Buddhist scriptures at mountains in Japan served the dual role of physically sacralizing the mountain and also preserving the dharma in the face of the religion's predicted demise (J. mappo; C. MOFA).
Kinkakuji. (金閣寺). In Japanese, "Golden Pavilion monastery"; a Japanese temple located in northern Kyoto, the ancient capital city of Japan, formally known as Rokuonji (Deer Park temple, cf. MṚGADĀVA). It was originally built as a retirement villa for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), the third shogun of the Muromachi (1337-1573) shogunate. However, following his father's wishes, his son converted it to a ZEN temple of the RINZAI school after the shogun's death in 1408. The temple inspired the building of Ginkakuji (Silver Pavilion monastery), which was constructed about sixty years later on the other side of the city. The name Kinkaku derived from the pavilion's extravagant use of gold leaf, typical of Muromachi style, which covers the entire top two stories of the three-story pavilion. The pavilion uses three different architectural styles on each floor: the first emulates the residential style of Heian aristocracy; the second, warrior aristocracy; the third, Chinese CHAN style. The second floor enshrines the image of the BODHISATTVA Kannon (AVALOKITEsVARA), surrounded by the statues of the four heavenly kings (CĀTURMAHĀRĀJAN), the guardian divinities (DEVA) of Buddhism. The pavilion burned down several times, including twice during the onin war (1467-1477) and most recently by arson in 1950; the present structure was reconstructed in 1955. Kinkakuji is currently a branch temple of the RINZAI ZEN monastery of SHoKOKUJI.
Kizil. [alt. Qizil]. A complex of some 230 Buddhist caves from the ancient Central Asian kingdom of KUCHA, located about seventy kilometers northwest of the present-day city of Kucha on the bank of the Muzat River in Baicheng County, in the Uighur Autonomous Region of China's Xinjiang province. The Kizil caves represent some of the highest cultural achievements of the ancient Indo-European petty kingdom of Kucha, an important oasis along the northern SILK ROAD connecting China to the bastions of Buddhist culture in the greater Indian cultural sphere. Construction at the site perhaps began as early as the third century CE and lasted for some five hundred years, until the region succumbed in the ninth century to Islamic control. Given the importance of the Kucha region in the development and transmission of Buddhism along the ancient Silk Road, scholars believe that the DUNHUANG murals were influenced by the art of Kizil. Although no statuary remains at the Kizil site, many wall paintings are preserved depicting events from the life of the Buddha; indeed, Kizil is second only to the Mogao caves of Dunhuang in the number of wall paintings it contains. The layout of many of the intact caves includes a central pillar, forming both a front chamber and a rear chamber, which often contains a PARINIRVĀnA scene. The first modern studies of the site were conducted in the early twentieth century by the German explorers Alfred Grünwedel and Alfred von Le Coq. The nearby site of Kumtura contains over a hundred caves, forty of which contain painted murals or inscriptions. Other cave sites near Kucha include Subashi, Kizilgaha, and Simsim.
klippoth ::: Klippoth In Lurianic Kabbalah, the purpose of man is to restore the original harmony in the universe that was destroyed with the breaking of the Vessels (also known as the 'Fall'). The original vessels shattered and fell to earth as the evil Klippoth. Many worlds were created and destroyed prior to the present creation. These are compared with sparks which fly out from a red hot iron beaten by a hammer, and which are extinguished according to the distance they are removed from the burning mass. These creations, which have been succeeded by the present order of things, are indicated in Genesis, chapter 36, verses 31 40. The kings of Edom, who reigned before the monarchs of Israel, are mentioned as having died one after the other. They are the primordial worlds which were successively destroyed, the worlds of the Klippoth.
Kongosan. (J) (金剛山). In Japanese, "Diamond Mountain(s)"; the highest peak in the KATSURAGISAN region, on the border between the present-day Japanese prefectures of Nara and osaka. The mountain was likely visited by EN NO OZUNU, the putative founder of the SHUGENDo school of Japanese esoterism, who spent three decades practicing in the Katsuragi mountains. Its name may refer to the belief that En no Ozunu was a manifestation of Hoki Bosatsu (DHARMODGATA), who resided in the Diamond Mountains (see KŬMGANGSAN), according to the account in the AVATAMSAKASuTRA.
ksanikavāda. (T. skad cig ma smra ba; C. chanalun; J. setsunaron; K. ch'allaron 刹那論). In Sanskrit, "doctrine of momentariness"; a doctrinal position emblematic of the SAUTRĀNTIKA school of the mainstream Buddhist tradition. The doctrine of momentariness derives from attempts to elaborate the foundational Buddhist concept of impermanence (ANITYA): viz., how long exactly do causally created events or objects exist before their destruction? Some of the early mainstream schools of Buddhism, such as the SARVĀSTIVĀDA and STHAVIRANIKĀYA, presume that this process of existence, although extremely brief, could be differentiated into several specific moments. The Sarvāstivāda school, for example, assumed that events persisted through four moments (KsAnA), viz., the four marks (CATURLAKsAnA) of birth, subsistence, decay, and extinction; the Sarvāstivāda school posited that these marks were forces dissociated from thought (CITTAVIPRAYUKTASAMSKĀRA), which exerted real power over compounded objects, carrying an object along from one force to another, until the force "extinction" extinguishes it. According to the Sthaviranikāya, all mental events include three moments of origination (uppāda), subsistence (thiti), and dissolution (bhanga), which together constitute the present. The SAUTRĀNTIKA, by contrast, believed that the elements of existence (DHARMA) are momentary (KsAnIKA) appearances in the phenomenal world, which are disconnected in space and not linked by any pervading substance. They are also disconnected in time or duration, since they last only a single moment (ksana), a moment that includes both its genesis and its destruction. Unlike the Sarvāstivāda school, then, the Sautrāntikas assert that, because all conditioned dharmas are inherently destined to be extinguished, annihilation occurs spontaneously and simultaneously with origination, without the exertion of a specific "force."
Kucha. (S. *Kucīna; C. Qiuzi; J. Kiji; K. Kuja 龜茲). Indo-European oasis kingdom at the northern edge of the Taklamakhan Desert, which served as a major center of Buddhism in Central Asia and an important conduit for the transmission of Buddhism from India to China; the name probably corresponds to *Kucīna in Sanskrit. Indian Buddhism began to be transmitted into the Kuchean region by the beginning of the Common Era; and starting at least by the fourth century CE, Kucha had emerged as a major Buddhist and trade center along the northern SILK ROAD through Central Asia. Both mainstream and MAHĀYĀNA traditions are said to have coexisted side by side in Kucha, although the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG, who visited Kucha in 630, says that SARVĀSTIVĀDA scholasticism predominated. Xuanzang also reports that there were over one hundred monasteries in Kucha, with some five thousand monks in residence. The indigenous Kuchean language, which no longer survives, belongs to Tocharian B, one of the two dialects of TOCHARIAN, the easternmost branch of the western Indo-European language family. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, many Kuchean monks and scholars began to make their way to China to transmit Buddhist texts, including the preeminent translator of Buddhist materials into Chinese, KUMĀRAJĪVA. To the west of Kucha are the KIZIL caves, a complex of some 230 Buddhist caves that represent some of the highest cultural achievements of Central Asian Buddhism. Construction at the site perhaps began as early as the third century CE and lasted for some five hundred years, until Kucha came under Muslim control in the ninth century. Since the mid-eighteenth century, during the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912), Kucha has been under the political control of China, and the present-day city of Kucha is located along the banks of the Muzat River in Baicheng County, in the Uighur Autonomous Region of China's Xinjiang province. In East Asia, monks from Kucha were given the ethnikon BO, the Chinese transcription of the surname of the reigning family of Kucha. See also KHOTAN.
Kukkutapāda, Mount. (T. Ri bo bya rkang; C. Jizushan; J. Keisokusen; K. Kyejoksan 鶏足山). In Sanskrit, "Cock's Foot"; a mountain located in the ancient Indian state of MAGADHA; also known as Gurupādaka (Honored Foot); the present Kurkihar, sixteen miles northeast of BODHGAYĀ. The mountain is renowned as the site where the Buddha's senior disciple, MAHĀKĀsYAPA, is said to be waiting in trance for the advent of the future buddha MAITREYA. Once Maiteya appears, Mahākāsyapa will hand over to him the robe (CĪVARA) of sĀKYAMUNI, symbolizing that Maitreya is his legitimate successor in the lineage of the buddhas. The Chinese monk-pilgrim FAXIAN visited the mountain on his sojourn in India in the fifth century CE, describing the mountain as home to many dangerous predators, including tigers and wolves.
Kumil-Madan (Tamil) Blowing like a bubble; the elemental associated with water, called undine in the Occident. A merry imp in popular tales, assisting people in the proximity of water, even causing a rain shower. To those who resort to divination by water, the Kumil-Madan lends his aid by showing the present or the future.
Lam rim chung ba. (Lamrim Chungwa). In Tibetan, "Short Treatise on the Stages of the Path"; also called Lam rim 'bring ba ("Intermediate Treatise on the Stages of the Path"); the middle-length of three major treatises on LAM RIM, or stages of the path, composed by the renowned Tibetan luminary TSONG KHA PA BLO BZANG GRAGS PA. It is about half the size of the author's classic LAM RIM CHEN MO ("Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path"), and also less formal. He wrote this work in 1415, some thirteen years after Lam rim chen mo. Although the first sections of the text are largely a summary of what appears in Lam rim chen mo, the section on insight (VIPAsYANĀ) is substantially different from what appears in Tsong kha pa's earlier and longer work, changing the order of the presentation and adding dozens of quotations from Indian works that he did not use in Lam rim chen mo. Perhaps the most important contribution of this later work is its discussion of the two truths (SATYADVAYA) found in the vipasyanā section.
late modern English: The English language as it is used from 1800 to the present day.
LEMURIA Hemispherical continent and abode of the third root-race. It was situated in the present Pacific and was submerged into the ocean about four million years ago.
The Lemurians led a half-dreamlike life of consciousness on the border between the physical and the emotional. It took millions of years to mentalize the brain. K
6.5.6
Letter of credit (LOC) - A legal letter or document that is issued by the buyer’s bank which upon the presentation of any specific required documents the payment should be forth coming. It is the Usual practice for the seller's bank to confirmby the seller's the protection to be given to a seller that the agreed payment will be made on time if the items specified in the agreement are shipped as agreed, and also protection is given to a buyer that the specified items will be supplied or shipped prior to the payment being made.
Lithos, Lithoi (Greek) Stone monuments in Egypt, at Carnac in Brittany, and elsewhere, with symbolic markings on them. Those of archaic age were set up by the last subrace of the Lemurians, who lived until late in Atlantean times, and by the late subraces of the Atlanteans as well as by early races of the present fifth root-race.
Madhav: “Moment is the sequence of Time. Each moment records what is happening at that point. It relates to the present. The Ray of the Eternal interrupts the movement of Time for a while and lights up things that are not yet manifest. It gives a peep into the future. The Ray of the Eternal is able to do it because the future is already present in the vision of the Eternal.” The Book of the Divine Mother
Madhav: “Our time is divided into past, present, future, but there is a level where Time is continuous. The past, the present and the future are spread out as a map, undivided; in one glance one can see everything.” Sat-Sang Vol. IX
Mahābodhi Temple. (T. Byang chub chen po; C. Daputisi; J. Daibodaiji; K. Taeborisa 大菩提寺). The "Temple of the Great Awakening"; proper name used to refer to the great STuPA at BODHGAYĀ, marking the place of the Buddha's enlightenment, and hence the most important place of pilgrimage (see MAHĀSTHĀNA) in the Buddhist world. The Emperor AsOKA erected a pillar and shrine at the site in the third century BCE. A more elaborate structure, called the VAJRĀSANA GANDHAKUtĪ ("perfumed chamber of the diamond seat"), is depicted in a relief at Bodhgayā, dating from c. 100 BCE. It shows a two-storied structure supported by pillars, enclosing the BODHI TREE and the vajrāsana, the "diamond seat," where the Buddha sat on the night of his enlightenment. The forerunner of the present structure is described by the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG. This has led scholars to speculate that the temple was built between the third and sixth centuries CE, with subsequent renovations. Despite various persecutions by Hindu kings, the site continued to receive patronage, especially during the Pāla period, from which many of the surrounding monuments date. The monastery fell into neglect after the Muslim invasions that began in the thirteenth century. British photographs from the nineteenth century show the monastery in ruins. Restoration of the site was ordered by the British governor-general of Bengal in 1880, with a small eleventh-century replica of the monastery serving as a model. There is a tall central tower some 165 feet (fifty meters) in height, with a high arch over the entrance with smaller towers at the four corners. The central tower houses a small shrine with an image of the Buddha. The structure is surrounded by stone railings, some dating from 150 BCE, others from the Gupta period (300-600 CE), which preserve important carvings. The area came under the control of a saiva mahant in the eighteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, the Sinhalese Buddhist activist Anagārika Dharmapāla (see DHARMAPĀLA, ANAGĀRIKA), was part of a group that founded the MAHĀBODHI SOCIETY and began an unsuccessful legal campaign to have control of the site returned to Buddhists. In 1949, after Indian independence, the Bodhgayā Temple Act was passed, which is established a joint committee of four Buddhists and four Hindus to oversee the monastery and its grounds.
Mahāthupa. In Pāli, "great STuPA"; the great reliquary mound built by the Sinhalese king DUttHAGĀMAnĪ in the first century BCE, erected after he had vanquished the Damilas and reunited the island kingdom under his rule. The Mahāthupa was erected in the MAHĀMEGHAVANA grove near ANURĀDHAPURA at a spot visited by all four of the buddhas who had been born thus far in the present auspicious eon (P. bhaddakappa; S. BHADRAKALPA). The monument, which was 120 cubits high and designed in the shape of a water drop, was crowned with a richly adorned relic chamber that housed physical relics (S. sARĪRA) of the Buddha acquired from the NĀGA MAHĀKĀLA. The arahant MAHINDA is said to have once indicated to King DEVĀNAMPIYATISSA the site where the Mahāthupa was to be built. DevānaMpiyatissa wished to construct the shrine himself, but Mahinda informed him that that honor was to go the future king, Dutthagāmanī. To commemorate that prophecy, DevānaMpiyatissa had it inscribed on a pillar at the site. It was the discovery of that pillar that prompted Dutthagāmanī to take up the task. Thousands of saints from various parts of the island and JAMBUDVĪPA (meaning India in this case) gathered at the Mahāmeghavana to celebrate the construction of the Mahāthupa. Dutthagāmanī fell ill and died just before the monument was completed. The royal umbrella was raised above the Mahāthupa by his brother and successor, Saddhatissa.
Mahayazawin-gyi. In Burmese, "The Great Chronicle"; a voluminous Burmese YAZAWIN or royal chronicle written c. 1730 by U Kala. Historically, other Burmese (Myanmar) royal chronicles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are based directly or indirectly on this text. Following the outlines of the DĪPAVAMSA and MAHĀVAMSA, the first part of U Kala's work traces the history of kings from the time of MAHĀSAMMATA at the beginning of the present world-eon, through the Mauryan dynasty in India, to the history of kings in Sri Lanka. As in the Pāli chronicles upon which it is patterned, the Mahayazawin-gyi portrays the histories of the Buddhist religion and of Buddhist kingdoms as intertwined. The history of Burma, which occupies the majority of the text, is organized into periods according to the capital cities. It begins with the founding of Tagaung, the first Burmese capital, before the lifetime of the Buddha. The Tagaung period is followed in turn by the Sirīkhettarā, PAGAN, AVA, PEGU, and the second Ava periods. The most famous episode of the chronicle is the long account of the conversion of Pagan's king ANAWRAHTA (P. Anuruddha; S. Aniruddha; r. c. 1044-1077 CE) to Theravāda Buddhism through the efforts of the Mon saint, SHIN ARAHAN. This event allegedly precipitated Anawrahta's conquest of the neighboring Mon kingdom of Thaton in search of texts and relics, and in turn the founding of the first Burmese empire. U Kala's chronicle concludes with an account of the meritorious deeds of Tanin gan wei (r. 1714-1733), the king of Ava at the time the text was composed.
Main works: Philosophy of the Present, 1932; Mind, Self, and Society, 1934; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1936; Philosophy of the Act, 1938.
Maitreya. (P. Metteya; T. Byams pa; C. Mile; J. Miroku; K. Mirŭk 彌勒). In Sanskrit, "The Benevolent One"; the name of the next buddha, who now abides in TUsITA heaven as a BODHISATTVA, awaiting the proper time for him to take his final rebirth. Buddhists believed that their religion, like all conditioned things, was inevitably impermanent and would eventually vanish from the earth (cf. SADDHARMAVIPRALOPA; MOFA). According to one such calculation, the teachings of the current buddha sĀKYAMUNI would flourish for five hundred years after his death, after which would follow a one-thousand-year period of decline and a three-thousand-year period in which the dharma would be completely forgotten. At the conclusion of this long disappearance, Maitreya would then take his final birth in India (JAMBUDVĪPA) in order to reestablish the Buddhist dispensation anew. According to later calculations, Maitreya will not take rebirth for some time, far longer than the 4,500 years mentioned earlier. He will do so only after the human life span has decreased to ten years and then increased to eighty thousand years. (Stalwart scholiasts have calculated that his rebirth will occur 5.67 billion years after the death of sākyamuni.) Initially a minor figure in early Indian Buddhism, Maitreya (whose name derives from the Indic MAITRĪ, meaning "loving-kindness" or "benevolence") evolved during the early centuries of the Common Era into one of the most popular figures in Buddhism across Asia in both the mainstream and MAHĀYĀNA traditions. He is also known as AJITA, although there are indications that, at some point in history, the two were understood to be different deities. As the first bodhisattva to become a figure of worship, his imagery and cult set standards for the development of later bodhisattvas who became objects of cultic worship, such as AVALOKITEsVARA and MANJUsRĪ. Worship of Maitreya began early in Indian Buddhism and became especially popular in Central and East Asia during the fifth and sixth centuries. Such worship takes several forms, with disciples praying to either meet him when he is reborn on earth or in tusita heaven so that they may then take rebirth with him when he becomes a buddha, a destiny promised in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") to those who recite his name. Maitreya is also said to appear on earth, such as in a scene in the Chinese pilgrim XUANZANG's account of his seventh-century travels to India: attacked by pirates as he sailed on the Ganges River, Xuanzang prayed to and was rescued by the bodhisattva. Maitreya also famously appeared to the great Indian commentator ASAnGA in the form of a wounded dog as a means of teaching him the importance of compassion. Devotees across the Buddhist world also attempt to extend their life span in order to be alive when Maitreya comes, or to be reborn at the time of his presence in the world, a worldly paradise that will be known as ketumati. His earliest iconography depicts him standing or sitting, holding a vase (KUndIKĀ), symbolizing his imminent birth into the brāhmana caste, and displaying the ABHAYAMUDRĀ, both features that remain common attributes of his images. In addition, he frequently has a small STuPA in his headdress, believed to represent a prophecy regarding his descent to earth to receive the robes of his predecessor from MAHĀKĀsYAPA. Maitreya is also commonly depicted as a buddha, often shown sitting in "European pose" (BHADRĀSANA; see also MAITREYĀSANA), displaying the DHARMACAKRAMUDRĀ. He is said to sit in a chair in "pensive" posture in order to be able to quickly stand and descend to earth at the appropriate time. Once he is reborn, Maitreya will replicate the deeds of sākyamuni, with certain variations. For example, he will live the life of a householder for eight thousand years, but having seen the four sights (CATURNIMITTA) and renounced the world, he will practice asceticism for only one week before achieving buddhahood. As the Buddha, he will first travel to Mount KUKKUtAPĀDA near BODHGAYĀ where the great ARHAT Mahākāsyapa has been entombed in a state of deep SAMĀDHI, awaiting the advent of Maitreya. Mahākāsyapa has kept the robes of sākyamuni, which the previous buddha had entrusted to him to pass on to his successor. Upon his arrival, the mountain will break open, and Mahākāsyapa will come forth from a stupa and give Maitreya his robes. When Maitreya accepts the robes, it will only cover two fingers of his hands, causing people to comment at how diminutive the past buddha must have been. ¶ The cult of Maitreya entered East Asia with the initial propagation of Buddhism and reached widespread popularity starting in the fourth century CE, a result of the popularity of the Saddharmapundarīkasutra and several other early translations of Maitreya scriptures made in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Saddharmapundarīkasutra describes Maitreya's present abode in the tusita heaven, while other sutras discuss his future rebirth on earth and his present residence in heaven. Three important texts belonging to the latter category were translated into Chinese, starting in the fifth century, with two differing emphases: (1) the Guan Mile pusa shangsheng doushuo tian jing promised sentient beings the prospect of rebirth in tusita heaven together with Maitreya; and (2) the Guan Mile pusa xiasheng jing and (3) the Foshuo Mile da chengfo jing emphasized the rebirth of Maitreya in this world, where he will attain buddhahood under the Dragon Flower Tree (Nāgapuspa) and save numerous sentient beings. These three texts constituted the three principal scriptures of the Maitreya cult in East Asia. In China, Maitreya worship became popular from at least the fourth century: DAO'AN (312-385) and his followers were among the first to propagate the cult of Maitreya and the prospect of rebirth in tusita heaven. With the growing popularity of Maitreya, millenarian movements associated with his cult periodically developed in East Asia, which had both devotional and political dimensions. For example, when the Empress WU ZETIAN usurped the Tang-dynasty throne in 690, her followers attempted to justify the coup by referring to her as Maitreya being reborn on earth. In Korea, Maitreya worship was already popular by the sixth century. The Paekche king Mu (r. 600-641) identified his realm as the world in which Maitreya would be reborn. In Silla, the hwarang, an elite group of male youths, was often identified with Maitreya and such eminent Silla monks as WoNHYO (617-686), WoNCH'ŬK (613-696), and Kyonghŭng (fl. seventh century) composed commentaries on the Maitreya scriptures. Paekche monks transmitted Maitreya worship to Japan in the sixth century, where it became especially popular in the late eighth century. The worship of Maitreya in Japan regained popularity around the eleventh century, but gradually was replaced by devotions to AMITĀBHA and KsITIGARBHA. The worship of Maitreya has continued to exist to the present day in both Korea and Japan. The Maitreya cult was influential in the twentieth century, for example, in the establishment of the Korean new religions of Chŭngsan kyo and Yonghwa kyo. Maitreya also merged in China and Japan with a popular indigenous figure, BUDAI (d. 916)-a monk known for his fat belly-whence he acquired his now popular East Asian form of the "laughing Buddha." This Chinese holy man is said to have been an incarnation of the bodhisattva Maitreya (J. Miroku Bosatsu) and is included among the Japanese indigenous pantheon known as the "seven gods of good fortune"(SHICHIFUKUJIN). Hotei represents contentment and happiness and is often depicted holding a large cloth bag (Hotei literally means "hemp sack"). From this bag, which never empties, he feeds the poor and needy. In some places, he has also become the patron saint of restaurants and bars, since those who drink and eat well are said to be influenced by Hotei. Today, nearly all Chinese Buddhist monasteries (and many restaurants as well) will have an image of this Maitreya at the front entrance; folk belief has it that by rubbing his belly one can establish the potential for wealth.
Malkuth: The tenth and final Sephira of the Tree of Life. It is the Sphere of the Earth and represents the densest manifestation of the cosmic current. It is the equivalent of the "daughter" in the formula of IHVH (q.v.). It is on the plane of Malkuth that the process of "redemption" begins. The formula of this redemption varies with successive aeons. It is the purpose of the present book to indicate its mechanism in the New Aeon.
Man ::: Man is in his essence a spark of the central kosmic spiritual fire. Man being an inseparable part of theuniverse of which he is the child -- the organism of graded consciousness and substance which thehuman constitution contains or rather is -- is a copy of the graded organism of consciousnesses andsubstances of the universe in its various planes of being, inner and outer, especially inner as being by farthe more important and larger, because causal.Human beings are one class of "young gods" incarnated in bodies of flesh at the present stage of theirown particular evolutionary journey. The human stage of evolution is about halfway between theundeveloped life-atom and the fully developed kosmic spirit or god.From another point of view, man is a sheaf or bundle of forces or energies. Force and matter, or spiritand substance being fundamentally one, hence, man is de facto a sheaf or bundle of matters of variousand differing grades of ethereality, or of substantiality; and so are all other entities and thingseverywhere.Man's nature, and the nature of the universe likewise, of which man is a reflection or microcosm or "littleworld," is composite of seven stages or grades or degrees of ethereality or of substantiality; or,kosmically speaking, of three generally inclusive degrees: gods, monads, and atoms. And so far as man isconcerned, we may take the New Testament division of the Christians, which gives the same triformconception of man, that he is composed of spirit, soul, body -- remembering, however, that all these threewords are generalizing terms.Man stands at the midway point of the evolutionary ladder of life: below him are the hosts of beings lessthan he is; above him are other hosts greater than he is only because older in experience, riper in wisdom,stronger in spiritual and in intellectual fiber and power. And these beings are such as they are because ofthe evolutionary unfoldment of the inherent faculties and powers immanent in the individuality of theinner god -- the ever-living, inner, individualized spirit.Man, then, like everything else -- entity or what is called "thing" -- is, to use the modern terminology ofphilosophical scientists, an "event," that is to say, the expression of a central consciousness-center ormonad passing through one or another particular phase of its long, long pilgrimage over and throughinfinity, and through eternity. This, therefore, is the reason why the theosophist often speaks of themonadic consciousness-center as the pilgrim of eternity.Man can be considered as a being composed of three essential upadhis or bases: first, the monadic ordivine-spiritual; second, that which is supplied by the Lords of Light, the so-called manasa-dhyanis,meaning the intellectual and intuitive side of man, the element-principle that makes man Man; and thethird upadhi we may call the vital-astral-physical.These three bases spring from three different lines of evolution, from three different and separatehierarchies of being. This is the reason why man is composite. He is not one sole and unmixed entity; heis a composite entity, a "thing" built up of various elements, and hence his principles are to a certainextent separable. Any one of these three bases can be temporarily separated from the two others withoutbringing about the death of the man physically. But the elements that go to form any one of these basescannot be separated without bringing about physical dissolution or inner dissolution.These three lines of evolution, these three aspects or qualities of man, come from three differenthierarchies or states, often spoken of as three different planes of being. The lowest comes from thevital-astral-physical earth, ultimately from the moon, our cosmogonic mother. The middle, the manasicor intellectualintuitional, from the sun. The monadic from the monad of monads, the supreme flower oracme, or rather the supreme seed of the universal hierarchy which forms our kosmical universe oruniversal kosmos.
man ngag sde. (me ngak de). In Tibetan, "instruction class"; comprising the third of three main divisions of RDZOGS CHEN doctrine according to the RNYING MA sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The other two are SEMS SDE (mental class) and KLONG SDE (spatial class). The man ngag sde teachings, regarded as the highest of the three, have constituted the core of Rnying ma practice since the eleventh century. It is said that sems sde teaches the clarity/awareness side of enlightenment, klong sde teaches the spatial side of enlightenment, and man ngag sde combines the two. A wide range of practices are included in the man ngag sde, concerned above all with the presentation by the teacher of a "pure awareness" (RIG PA) that is free from dualistic conceptions, and the recognition and maintenance of that state by the student; the instructions on the BAR DO emerged from these texts. The most famous practices of man ngag sde are "cutting through" (KHREGS CHOD) and "leaping over" (THOD RGAL). The man ngag sde has a number of subcategories, the most famous of which is the SNYING THIG. The root tantras of the man ngag sde are said to be the seventeen tantras.
manu ::: 1. the thinker, the mental being, man. ::: 2. Manu: the father of man. ::: 3. the four Manus (catvaro manavah): the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. ::: 4. [one of the fourteen progenitors who preside successively over the fourteen manvantaras; to the first of these is attributed the Manava-dharmasastra; the manu of the present (seventh) manvantara is Vaivasvata].
Māyā. [alt. Māyādevī; Mahāmāyā] (T. Sgyu 'phrul ma; C. Moye; J. Maya; K. Maya 摩耶). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "Illusion"; the mother of GAUTAMA Buddha. Her father was ANjana, king of Devadaha, and her mother was Yasodharā. Māyā and her sister MAHĀPRAJĀPATĪ were both married to the Buddha's father sUDDHODANA, the king of KAPILAVASTU. Māyā was between forty and fifty when the future buddha was conceived. At that time, the future buddha was a BODHISATTVA residing in TUsITA heaven, where he surveyed the world and selected his future parents. On the night of his conception, Māyā dreamed that four great gods transported her to the Himalayas, where goddesses bathed her in the waters of the Anotatta Lake and clad her in divine raiment. As she lay on a couch prepared for her, the future buddha, in the form of a white elephant holding a white lotus in its trunk, entered into her right side. After ten lunar months, during which time she remained chaste, Māyā set out to visit her parents in Devadaha. Along the way she stopped at the LUMBINĪ grove, where she gave birth to the prince and future buddha while holding onto a branch of a sĀLA tree; according to some accounts, he emerged from her right side. Seven days later, Māyā died. Varying reasons are provided for her demise, including that she died from joy at having given birth to the future buddha and that she died after seven days because she would have died from a broken heart when Prince SIDDHĀRTHA subsequently renounced the world at the age of twenty-nine. It is also said that the mothers of all buddhas die shortly after their birth because it is not suitable that any other child be conceived in the womb that had been occupied by a future buddha. Māyā was reborn as a male divinity named Māyādevaputra in the TUsITA heaven. After her death, Māyā's sister Mahāprājāpatī raised the future buddha as her own child. Because his mother's death had prevented her from benefiting from his teachings, the Buddha once spent a rainy season in TRĀYASTRIMsA heaven atop Mount SUMERU, during which time he preached the ABHIDHARMA to his mother, who had come from tusita heaven to listen, along with the other assembled divinities. These teachings, which the Buddha later recounted to sĀRIPUTRA, would become the ABHIDHARMAPItAKA. The Buddha's descent from the heaven at SĀMKĀsYA at the conclusion of his teachings is one of the most commonly depicted scenes in Buddhist art. The entry of the future Buddha into his mother's womb, and by extension into the human realm of existence, is a momentous event in Buddhist history, and elaborate descriptions of that descent and of that womb appear in a number of texts. One of the most famous is found in the forty-fourth chapter of the GAndAVYuHA, a MAHĀYĀNA SuTRA dating from perhaps the second century of the Common Era. In the sutra, SUDHANA goes in search of enlightenment. During his journey, he encounters all manner of exalted beings, each of whom provides him with instruction. One of the teachers he meets is Māyā. She describes in elaborate detail how her son entered her womb, revealing that it was able to accommodate much more than a white elephant, without for a moment distorting her form. She reveals that it was not only the bodhisattva SIDDHĀRTHA who descended from the tusita and entered her womb; in fact, countless other bodhisattvas accompanied him to become buddhas simultaneously in millions of similar universes. She reveals as well that she is the mother not only of all the buddhas of the present, but of all the buddhas of the past and that she will also be the mother of the next buddha, MAITREYA.
mechanical intuivity ::: the lowest form of intuivity, corresponding on the level of the intuitive mind to the habitual mind on the intellectual plane; it is related to intuitional intellectuality and stresses the perception "of the powers and tendencies of the present and what they mean and presage".
mitre ::: n. --> A covering for the head, worn on solemn occasions by church dignitaries. It has been made in many forms, the present form being a lofty cap with two points or peaks.
The surface forming the beveled end or edge of a piece where a miter joint is made; also, a joint formed or a junction effected by two beveled ends or edges; a miter joint.
A sort of base money or coin.
Mobed (Persian) Magupat (Pahlavi) [from mogh, magus great] Also Maubed. The chief priest; the priest of Mazdeism and of the present-day Parsis. Mobeds are the middle class of priests, the highest class being the Dasturs. In ancient days the Maubedan Maubed was the chief high priest of Mazdeism, and today the chief high priest of the Parsis is also termed the High Mobed.
Model-View-Presenter "programming" (MVP) A {user interface} {architectural pattern} where functions are separated between the model, view and presenter. The model defines the data to be displayed or otherwise acted upon in the user interface. The view displays data from the model and routes user commands (events) to the presenter to act upon that data. The presenter retrieves data from the model and displays it in the view. The implementation of MVP can vary as to how much presentation logic is handled by the presenter and the view. In a {web application} most presentation logic is usually in the view which runs in the {web browser}. MVP is one of the {MV*} variations of the {MVC} pattern. (2014-11-27)
modern ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the present time, or time not long past; late; not ancient or remote in past time; of recent period; as, modern days, ages, or time; modern authors; modern fashions; modern taste; modern practice.
New and common; trite; commonplace. ::: n.
Mohe zhiguan. (J. Makashikan; K. Maha chigwan 摩訶止觀). In Chinese, "The Great Calming and Contemplation"; a comprehensive treatise on soteriological theory and meditation according to the TIANTAI ZONG; attributed to TIANTAI ZHIYI (538-597). The Mohe zhiguan is based on a series of lectures Zhiyi delivered in 594, which were transcribed and edited by his disciple GUANDING. Zhi (lit. "stopping") is the Chinese translation for sAMATHA (calmness, serenity) and guan (lit. "observation") is the Chinese for VIPAsYANĀ (insight); the work as a whole seeks to establish a proper balance between meditative practice and philosophical insight. Zhi and guan practice are treated in three different ways in this treatise. Zhi in its denotation of "stopping" means calming the mind so that it is not buffeted by distracting thoughts; fixing the mind so that it stays focused on the present; and recognizing that distraction and concentration are both manifestations of a unitary, nondual reality. Guan in its denotation of "observation" means to illuminate the illusory nature of thought so that distractions are brought to an end; to have insight into the suchness (TATHATĀ) that is the ultimate nature of all phenomena in the universe; and to recognize that in suchness both insight and noninsight ultimately are identical. The original text of the Mohe zhiguan consists of ten chapters, but only the titles of the last three chapters survive. The last extant chapter, Chapter 7 on "Proper Contemplation," comprises approximately half of the entire treatise and, as the title suggests, provides a detailed description of the ten modes of contemplation and the ten spheres of contemplation. The first of the ten spheres of contemplation is called "the realm of the inconceivable" (S. ACINTYA). In his discussion of this realm in the first part of the fifth roll, Zhiyi covers one of the most famous of Tiantai doctrines: "the TRICHILIOCOSM in a single instant of thought" (YINIAN SANQIAN), which Zhiyi frames here as the "the trichiliocosm contained in the mind during an instant of thought" (sanqian zai yinian xin), viz., that any given thought-moment perfectly encompasses all reality, both temporally and spatially. By emphatically noting the "inconceivable" ability of the mind to contain the trichiliocosm, Zhiyi sought to emphasize the importance and mystery of the mind during the practice of meditation. This chapter, however, remains incomplete. The work also offers an influential presentation of the "four SAMĀDHIs," that is, the samādhis of constant sitting, constant walking, both sitting and walking, and neither sitting nor walking. Along with Zhiyi's FAHUA XUANYI and FAHUA WENJU, the Mohe zhiguan is considered to be one of the three most important treatises in the Tiantai tradition and is regarded as Zhiyi's magnum opus. The Tiantai monk ZHANRAN's MOHE ZHIGUAN FUXING ZHUANHONG JUE is considered to be the most authoritative commentary on the Mohe zhiguan.
Moira (Greek) Plural morai or morae. One’s allotted share; destiny. As a proper name, there was originally only one Moira, but later there were three: Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos. Lachesis is from a root lach, as in lagchano “to obtain that which has already been determined or fixed”; she is depicted as a grave maiden holding a staff pointing to a horoscope, signifying that which man has built in the past is now unfolding. She was occultly connected with the earth. Clotho or Klotho is from a verb meaning “to spin,” and is represented as a woman holding a spindle, spinning thread which is man’s destiny, that which he is at present weaving for the future, and is connected with the future in that what we weave now determines what our future shall be. Thus it is linked with the psychological part of human nature, and connected occultly with the moon. Atropos is from a verb meaning “impossible to set aside or evade,” and therefore is translated as “inevitable, ineluctable.” It was often represented as a woman pointing to a sundial signifying that as the sun brings its light to the earth, so the future shall bring its destiny to man, as the flying hours unfold what comes to us out of the womb of time. Thus we have Lachesis representing the ineluctable destiny coming to us in our present life on earth from our past; Clotho, the present spinning of our future destiny because of the actions and reactions, mental and emotional, by which we are now weaving the web of fate which someday will become the present; and Atropos, the ineluctable and inescapable future represented as held in store, every thread of which has been woven by ourselves in past and present. Their respective functions are sometimes interchanged. Equivalent to the Latin Parcae and Fata, and the Scandinavian Norns.
moksa. (P. mokkha; T. thar pa; C. jietuo; J. gedatsu; K. haet'al 解). In Sanskrit, "liberation," "freedom" or "release"; the state of liberation from suffering and rebirth, achieved via the path of the sRĀVAKA, PRATYEKABUDDHA, or BODHISATTVA and virtually interchangeable with the synonymous VIMOKsA. The term is often used as a synonym for NIRVĀnA. Buddhahood is the ultimate form of moksa, but it is possible to achieve liberation (as an ARHAT) without achieving buddhahood. Whether all beings will eventually achieve some form of moksa and whether all beings will eventually achieve buddhahood are points of controversy among Buddhist schools. The term is often paired with SVARGA ("heaven") as the two destinations that may result from practicing the Buddha's teachings. That is, by leading a virtuous life, one is reborn as a divinity (DEVA) in one of several heavenly realms. By understanding the nature of reality, one attains moksa, final liberation from all forms of rebirth. In this pairing, svarga is the lesser goal for those incapable of seeking the ultimate goal of moksa in the present lifetime.
moment ::: n. **1. An indefinitely short period of time; an instant. 2. Now, the present instant. 3. A particular period of importance, influence, or significance in a series of events or developments 4. A specific instant or point in time. moment"s, moments, moments", momentless, moment-beats, moment-ridden. v. moments. 5.** Brings significance to the moment.
Moon-colored Races Four principal racial colors are enumerated in the Stanzas of Dzyan: moon-colored (yellow-white), yellow like gold, red, and brown or black. The subraces of the fourth root-race had these colors in serial order, and every root-race repeats the sequence in its own time period. In one allegory, Siva as Svetalohita, a root-kumara, goes through these (and other unmentioned) transformations of color. The moon-colored race disappeared entirely when the present fifth root-race appeared.
More generally, the winged wheel or globe suggests cyclic time unrolling its mysterious destiny, emerging from the darkness of the mists of the past, passing through the present, and pursuing its equally mysterious but always karmic courses into the future. In a more restricted sense, it applies to the reimbodying monads, the egg, wheel, or disk representing the monad or consciousness-center, and its wings suggesting its passage through not only duration but space. See also WHEEL
morrow ::: n. --> Morning.
The next following day; the day subsequent to any day specified or understood.
The day following the present; to-morrow.
move ::: v. t. --> To cause to change place or posture in any manner; to set in motion; to carry, convey, draw, or push from one place to another; to impel; to stir; as, the wind moves a vessel; the horse moves a carriage.
To transfer (a piece or man) from one space or position to another, according to the rules of the game; as, to move a king.
To excite to action by the presentation of motives; to rouse by representation, persuasion, or appeal; to influence.
Mucilinda. [alt. Mahāmucilinda] (P. Mucalinda; T. Btang bzung; C. Muzhenlintuo; J. Mokushinrinda; K. Mokchillinda 目眞隣陀). In Sanskrit, the name of a snake divinity (NĀGA) who is said to have sheltered GAUTAMA Buddha while he was meditating following his enlightenment. According to the Pāli account, Mucalinda (S. Mucilinda) was the eponymous name of the nāga king of the Mucalinda tree, which was located in URUVILVĀ, along the bank of the NERANJARĀ river near the BODHI TREE in BODHGAYĀ, the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. In the third week following his enlightenment, the Buddha was meditating there, experiencing the bliss of enlightenment, when a severe thunderstorm broke out. Seeing that the Buddha was in danger, the nāga king of the tree (whom the commentaries say lived in a pond next to the tree), coiled himself around the Buddha seven times and then spread his hood over him like an umbrella to protect him from the storm. In other accounts, the nāga king resides in the Mucilinda lake, which is located just south of the present-day site of the MAHĀBODHI TEMPLE at Bodhgayā, and the event occurs in the sixth week following the enlightenment. In some versions of the story, once the storm had passed, the nāga transformed himself into a youth who then paid his respects before the buddha. The scene is a frequent subject of Buddhist art, where Mucilinda is often depicted in multiheaded form (often with seven heads). The story of Mucilinda is also exuberantly told in the LALITAVISTARA as well as in various MAHĀYĀNA sources.
musitasmṛti. (P. mutthassati; T. brjed nges; C. shinian; J. shitsunen; K. sillyom 失念). In Sanskrit, "inattentiveness," "negligence," or "forgetfulness"; one of the forty-six mental concomitants (CAITTA) according to the SARVĀSTIVĀDA school of ABHIDHARMA (where the term is also called smṛtināsa) and one of the fifty-one according to the YOGĀCĀRA school. Within this group, it falls into the category of the "secondary afflictions" (UPAKLEsA). "Inattentiveness" refers to the lack of clarity caused by the failure to attend properly to and be mindful of either the present moment or an intended object of attention, or the failure to recollect what had transpired in the immediately preceding moments. It involves the inattentiveness to virtuous objects, thus leading to attention to nonvirtuous objects. The term is taken to be one of the possible derivative mental states of "ignorance" (AVIDYĀ), because it causes the mind to become distracted to the objects of the afflictions. It is the opposite of "attentiveness," "proper recollection," and "presence of mind" (SMṚTI).
Myokoninden. (妙好人傳). In Japanese, "Record of Sublimely Excellent People"; a JoDO SHINSHu collection of the biographies of the MYoKoNIN, viz., devoted practitioners of the practice of nenbutsu (C. NIANFO; recitation of the Buddha's name). The anthology was first compiled by a NISHI HONGANJIHA priest Gosei (1721-1794) and edited by Gosei's disciple Rizen (1753-1819). The Nishi Honganji priest Sojun (1791-1872) made additional editorial changes to this earlier edition and first published the Myokoninden in 1842. Sojun's original edition collected the biographies of twenty-two myokonin, in two rolls. Sojun added more biographies between 1843 and 1858, and eventually published four additional chapters, adding biographies of thirty-seven myokonin in 1843, nineteen in 1847, thirty-seven in 1856, and twenty-one in 1858. In 1852, Zo'o (fl. nineteenth century) also published the Zoku Myokoninden ("Supplement to the Myokoninden") with additional biographies of twenty-three myokonin. The present version of the text was first published in 1898, combining in a single volume all six chapters (viz., Gosei's original first chapter, Sojun's four additional chapters, and Zo'o's supplement). The myokonin featured in the collection comes from various social classes, although most of them are common people, such as peasants and merchants. The accounts of their lives emphasize such traditional social virtues as filial piety, loyalty, and generosity, as well as the rewards of exclusive nenbutsu practice and the dangers of KAMI (spirit) worship.
Nāgārjunakondā. "Nāgārjuna's hill" (kondā means "hill" in Telugu), an important archaeological site in southern India, in the modern state of Andhra Pradesh; it is the present name for Vijayapurī, the capital of the Iksvāku dynasty (c. 227-309) founded by Vāsistīputra CaMtamula after the decline of AMARĀVATĪ, the southern capital of the later Sātavāhana [alt. sātavāhana] dynasty. In 1926, ruins were discovered of what was the most important monastic center in the Deccan. There is no archaeological evidence to support its traditional association with the philosopher NĀGĀRJUNA, although there are remains of Buddhist monasteries and reliquaries of at least four Buddhist schools. Each monastic unit consisted of a STuPA, two CAITYA halls (one containing a stupa, the other an image of the buddha), and a VIHĀRA (residential quarters). The stupas at the site are designed in the shape of a wheel. Limestone panels and friezes have also been discovered at the site. Nāgārjunakondā and AMARĀVATĪ are particularly important for showing how Buddhist and Brahmanical structures were constructed at the same time, alongside each other, supported by different members of the same ruling families.
NairaNjanā. (P. NeraNjarā; T. Ne ran dza na; C. Nilianchanhe; J. Nirenzenga; K. Niryonsonha 尼連禪河). Ancient name of the present-day Lilaja River, a tributary of the Ganges, located in the modern Indian state of Bihar; site of the Buddha's austerities and enlightenment. During a six-year period, from the time of his departure from the palace to his achievement of buddhahood, the BODHISATTVA Prince SIDDHĀRTHA practiced austerities at URUVILVĀ along the banks of this river. It was while bathing in this river during a period of intense self-mortification that the bodhisattva swooned from hunger, after which he concluded that extreme asceticism was not a viable path to liberation from suffering and continued rebirth. Sitting under a tree on the bank of the river, he accepted a bowl of milk porridge from a young woman named SUJĀTĀ, who mistook his gaunt visage for a YAKsA to whom the local village made offerings. He ate the meal and then cast the dish into the river, saying, "If I am to become a buddha today, may the dish float upstream." The plate floated upstream for some distance before disappearing into a whirlpool, descending down to the palace of a serpent king (NĀGA), where it landed on top of the bowls used by the previous buddhas, making a clicking sound. The bodhisattva spent the afternoon prior to the night of his enlightenment in a grove on the banks of the river. After his enlightenment, it was on the banks of this river that BRAHMĀ persuaded him to teach the dharma. The Buddha later converted the ascetic URUVILVĀ-KĀsYAPA, whose hermitage was located along this NairaNjanā River.
Nanna The Norse goddess of the now-dead moon, wife of the sun god Balder. When Balder was slain by his blind brother Hoder with the fateful mistletoe twig, Nanna died of a broken heart and was placed beside her husband on his pyreship. Her half-sister is Idun, the present earth goddess corresponding to the Greek Gaia. Idun continues to carry out Nanna’s task of supplying the gods with the apples of immortality of which they must partake daily to preserve their youth.
Nā ro chos drug. (Naro chodruk). The Tibetan name for a series of tantric practices, often translated into English as "the six yogas (or dharmas) of Nāropa," which are attributed to the eleventh-century Indian adept NĀROPA. These practices spread widely throughout Tibet, where they were transmitted among various Tibetan Buddhist traditions, including those of the SA SKYA and DGE LUGS. However, the Nā ro chos drug became a fundamental component in the meditation training of BKA' BRGYUD practitioners and continue to be practiced especially in the context of the traditional three-year retreat. Nāropa received several streams of tantric instruction from his GURU, the Indian SIDDHA TILOPA, including the BKA' BABS BZHI (four transmissions). According to tradition, he later codified these instructions and transmitted them to his Tibetan disciple MAR PA CHOS KYI BLO GROS, although Nāropa had died before Mar pa's first journey to India. However, Mar pa received these teachings from Nāropa's disciples and taught them in Tibet as the Nā ro chos drug. There are several slight variations in their presentation, but the most common enumeration of the Nā ro chos drug are (1) GTUM MO (tummo), literally "fierce woman," referring to the inner heat produced as an effect of manipulating the body's subtle energies; (2) sgyu lus (gyulu), "illusory body" (see MĀYĀDEHA), in which the meditator realizes the illusory nature of ordinary experiences; (3) rmi lam (milam), "dreams," referring to the practice of developing conscious awareness during dream states; (4) 'od gsal (osel), "clear light" (see PRABHĀSVARA), referring to the luminous aspect of mind and its recognition; (5) BAR DO, "intermediate state," referring to the practice of mental control during the disorienting period between death in one lifetime and rebirth into another; (6) 'PHO BA (powa), "transference," which is the practice of ejecting the consciousness out of the body at the moment of death to take rebirth in a pure realm. The first four are generally believed to facilitate liberation in the present life, the last two at the time of death.
neology ::: n. --> The introduction of a new word, or of words or significations, into a language; as, the present nomenclature of chemistry is a remarkable instance of neology.
A new doctrine; esp. (Theol.), a doctrine at variance with the received interpretation of revealed truth; a new method of theological interpretation; rationalism.
Net present value (NPV) – The present value from future income from an investment project, less the cost. This method is used to evaluate investments, where the NPV of all cash outflows (such as the cost of the investment) and cash inflows (returns) is calculated by using a predetermined discount rate.
nihilist ::: n. --> One who advocates the doctrine of nihilism; one who believes or teaches that nothing can be known, or asserted to exist.
A member of a secret association (esp. in Russia), which is devoted to the destruction of the present political, religious, and social institutions.
nirodha. (T. 'gog pa; C. mie; J. metsu; K. myol 滅). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "cessation," "extinction," or "suppression," referring especially to the extinction of a specific affliction (KLEsA) or group of afflictions. Because NIRVĀnA is the cessation of all action (KARMAN) and affliction, it is thus a form of nirodha. The "truth of cessation," or NIRODHASATYA, is the third of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS articulated by the Buddha in his first sermon, "Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dharma" (P. DHAMMACAKKAPPAVATTANASUTTA; S. DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANASuTRA). Because nirodha is an absence and hence does not change from moment to moment, it is sometimes classified as a permanent factor (NITYADHARMA). Two types of nirodha are described in ABHIDHARMA literature. PRATISAMKHYĀNIRODHA, or "analytical cessation," refers to a cessation that occurs as a result of meditative analysis of the real nature of phenomena; it is one of the uncompounded factors (ASAMSKṚTADHARMA) recognized in both the SARVĀSTIVĀDA-VAIBHĀsIKA and YOGĀCĀRA schools. APRATISAMKHYĀNIRODHA, or "nonanalytical cessation," refers to a mere absence, such as the temporary absence of hunger after a meal, or to an uncompounded factor (asaMskṛtadharma) that suppresses the production of all other dharmas, ensuring that they are restrained from ever again arising in the present. See also NIRODHASAMĀPATTI.
Noah stands for the present fifth root-race, as Enoch stands for the fourth, “thus symbolizing both the Root-Manu and the Seed-Manu, or the Power which developed the planetary chain, and our earth, and the Seed Race (the Fifth) which was saved while the last sub-races of the Fourth perished” (SD 2:597). Noah is connected with cyclic time periods and can be applied to shorter or longer cycles. Thus, there is a Noah for every root-race and for every globe of a planetary chain, and what might be called the chain-Noah, when the chain itself goes into pralaya.
nonce ::: n. --> The one or single occasion; the present call or purpose; -- chiefly used in the phrase for the nonce.
Note on the Indian Sign-Language. Certain general principles concerning gesture speech may be established, by considering the sign-language of the North American Indian which seems to be the most developed. A sign-language is established when equally powerful tribes of different tongues come into contact. Better gestures are composed and undesirable ones are weeded out, partly as a result of tribal federations and partly through the development of technical skills and crafts. Signs come into being, grow and die, according to the needs of the time and to the changes in practical processes. Stimulus of outside intercourse is necessary to keep alive the interest required for the maintenance and growth of a gesture speech; without it, the weaker tribe is absorbed in the stronger, and the vocal language most easily acquired prevails. Sign-languages involve a basic syntax destined to convey the fundamental meanings without refinement and in abbreviated form. Articles, prepositions and conjunctions are omitted; adjectives follow nouns; verbs are used in the present tense; nouns and verbs are used in the singular, while the idea of plurality is expressed in some other way. The use of signals with the smoke, the pony, the mirror, the blanket and the drum (as is also the case with the African tam-tams) may be considered as an extension of the sign-language, though they are related more directly to the general art of signalling. -- T.G.
Nothing definite is revealed about the chronology of the four earlier subraces of the third root-race, but approximately exact figures are given for the first time when we reach the fifth subrace, and we learn that about 18,618,000 years have elapsed from that subrace to the present day. This period is called by Blavatsky that of “our humanity” because the characteristics of mankind as we understand it — physically, emotionally and mentally — showed their first indications in the fifth subrace.
Not only have the series of reproductive methods been in keeping with the changing conditions of the rounds and races, but this is seen now in those races whose time is nearly run, where their end is hastened by an unusual sterility in the women, not otherwise explained. Furthermore, the present method of procreation, like all the preceding ones, is a passing phase of human reimbodiment and will in time become human evolutionary history, and other methods, already foreshadowed, will have taken its place. As man, evolving upon the ascending arc, brings forth his higher nature, his progeny will be brought forth from himself as generating source by his voluntary spiritual and intellectual creative powers.
nowadays ::: adv. --> In these days; at the present time.
now ::: adv. --> At the present time; at this moment; at the time of speaking; instantly; as, I will write now.
Very lately; not long ago.
At a time contemporaneous with something spoken of or contemplated; at a particular time referred to.
In present circumstances; things being as they are; -- hence, used as a connective particle, to introduce an inference or an explanation.
Now A fundamental concept of the theosophical philosophy is the Eternal Now. The past lingers in the memory and the future is ever vanishing from the present into the past: only Now eternally exists. In the case of man, at any given moment he is the result of what he has fashioned himself to be out of all preceding moments; his future will therefore be the working out of his previous thoughts and actions, and one by one these disappear into what to us is the past, and yet is always present. These philosophical reflections apply universally.
Of all the gods, only Vali and Vidar survive the destruction of the world, Ragnarok, when the gods return to their ground, thus preparing the seed for the future world, the child and successor of the present one.
-. “On the Present State of Proto-Septuagint
On the other hand the passage through the higher zones — higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, overmind is obligatory — they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the supermind.” Letters on Yoga
On the other hand the passage through the higher zones—higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, overmind is obligatory—they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the supermind.” Letters on Yoga
Oomancy [from Greek oon egg + manteia divination] The ancient art of divination by eggs was taught to mankind by Orpheus (SD 1:362); and the diviner was able by inspecting the contents of the egg to perceive whatever the bird born from it would have seen, had it ever been born. The possibility of divination is a logical deduction from the principle of universal correspondences and the interrelation and interpenetration of all parts of the universe. It is therefore only a question of esoteric knowledge and skill. The germ of the future lies concealed in the present, making prediction possible by one whose spiritual faculties have been awakened.
OS/2 ::: /O S too/ IBM and Microsoft's successor to the MS-DOS operating system for Intel 80286 and Intel 80386-based microprocessors. It is proof that they couldn't get hackers now rate them superior to Microsoft Windows, which isn't saying much. See second-system effect.On an Intel 80386 or better, OS/2 can multitask between existing MS-DOS applications. OS/2 is strong on connectivity and the provision of robust virtual native applications. It also supports the Presentation Manager graphical user interface.OS/2 supports hybrid multiprocessing (HMP), which provides some elements of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), using add-on IBM software called MP/2. OS/2 SMP was planned for release in late 1993.After OS/2 1.x the IBM and Microsoft partnership split. IBM continued to develop OS/2 2.0, while Microsoft developed what was originally intended to be OS/2 3.0 Warp) but it is only distantly related to Windows NT. This version raised the limit on RAM from 16MB to 1GB (like Windows NT).IBM introduced networking with OS/2 Warp Connect, the first multi-user version. OS/2 Warp 4.0 (Merlin) is a network operating system. .[Dates?][Jargon File] (1995-07-20)
Our first debt of gratitude is to the several generations of scholars of Buddhism around the world whose research we have mined shamelessly in the course of preparing our entries. We are unable to mention them by name, but those who remain during the present lifetime will recognize the fruits of their research as they read the entries. In addition to our collaborators listed on the title page, we would like to thank the following graduate students and colleagues, each of whom assisted with some of the myriad details of such a massive project: Wesley Borton, Bonnie Brereton, Tyler Cann, Caleb Carter, Mui-fong Choi, Shayne Clarke, Jacob Dalton, Martino Dibeltulo, Alexander Gardner, Heng Yi fashi (Chi Chen Ho), Anna Johnson, Min Ku Kim, Youme Kim, Alison Melnick, Karen Muldoon-Hules, Cuong Tu Nguyen, Aaron Proffitt, Cedar Bough Saeji, and Sherin Wing. In addition, we would like to thank our long-suffering colleagues: William Bodiford, Gregory Schopen, Natasha Heller, Stephanie Jamison, and Jennifer Jung-Kim at UCLA, and Madhav Deshpande, Luis Gómez, Robert Sharf, and James Robson, now or formerly at the University of Michigan. The map of Tibet was designed by Tsering Wangyal Shawa; the map of Japan and Korea was designed by Maya Stiller; all other maps were designed by Trevor Weltman. Christina Lee Buswell also provided invaluable assistance with preparing the lists of language cross-references.
Overmind ::: Above the mind there are several levels of conscious of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic Gods. Now it is this Overmind that has up to the present governed our world: it is the highest that man has been able to attain in illumined consciousness. It has been taken for the Supreme Divine and all those who have reached it have never for a moment doubted that they have touched the true Spirit. For, its splendours are so great to the ordinary human consciousness that it is absolutely dazzled into believing that here at last is the crowning reality. And yet the fact is that the Overmind is far below the true Divine. It is not the authentic home of the Truth. It is only the domain of the formateurs , all those creative powers and deities to whom men have bowed down since the beginning of history. And the reason why the true Divine has not manifested and transformed the earth-nature is precisely that the Overmind has been mistaken for the Supermind.being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world. The cosmic Gods do not wholly live in the Truth-Consciousness: they are only in touch with it and represent, each of them, an aspect of its glories.
Overmind is a sort of delegation from the Supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary uni- verse in which we live here in Matter. Though luminous in itself, it keeps from us the full indivisible Supramental Tight, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictor^ to it. But this does not create a disharmony, because the Over- mind has the sense of the Infinite and in the true (not spatial)
overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga
"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine
"The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, — although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.” The Life Divine
"The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga
"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri
"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga
*Overmind"s.
Overmind ::: “The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental)—the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” Letters on Yoga
Paekp'a Kŭngson. (白坡亘璇) (1767-1852). Korean SoN master of the Choson dynasty, also known as Kusan. Paekp'a was a native of Mujang in present-day North Cholla province. In 1778, he was ordained by a certain Sihon (d.u.) at the nearby monastery of Sonŭnsa. In 1790, he moved from his original residence at the hermitage of Yongmunam on Mt. Ch'o to the Yongwonam on Mt. Pangchang, where he studied under the renowned Hwaom chong (C. HUAYAN ZONG) master, Solp'a Sangon (1707-1791). A year before Sangon passed away, Kŭngson received the full monastic precepts from him. Paekp'a established himself at the famous hermitage of Unmunam and attracted many students. He studied the teachings of the renowned CHAN master XUEFENG YICUN at Mt. Yonggu and acquired the name Paekp'a. In order to practice Son meditation, he returned to Yongmunam and revived POJO CHINUL's Samādhi and PrajNā Society (CHoNGHYE KYoLSA). He subsequently returned to Unmunam to compile his influential treatise Sonmun sugyong ("Hand Mirror of the Son School"), which was later the subject of a famous critique by the Son master CH'OŬI ŬISUN (1786-1866) in his Sonmun sabyon mano ("Prolix Words on Four Distinctive Types in the Son School"). Paekp'a was a staunch promoter of Son, who sought to resolve what he perceived to be a fundamental internal tension within the Son tradition: the radical subitism of the Imje chong (LINJI ZONG), which advocated the simultaneity of sudden awakening (DUNWU) and cultivation (K. tono tonsu; C. dunwu dunxiu), and the more moderate subitism of the Heze zong and POJO CHINUL (1158-1210), which advocated sudden awakening followed by gradual cultivation (K. tono chomsu; C. DUNWU JIANXIU). Paekp'a's goal was to demonstrate how the subitist "questioning meditation" (K. kanhwa Son; C. KANHUA CHAN) that became emblematic of both the Linji zong and the Korean Son tradition after Chinul could be reconciled with Korean Buddhism's preferred soteriological schema of moderate subitism. By contrast, Ch'oŭi was more concerned with exploring deeper levels of accommodation between Son practice and Buddhist doctrinal teachings (KYO), by demonstrating the fundamental unity of these two major strands of the religion. Their respective positions set the stage for subsequent debates during the late Choson dynasty over whether Korean Buddhism was an exclusively Son, or a broader ecumenical, tradition, an identity debate that continues into the present day. Kŭngson's many writings also include the Suson kyolsamun, T'aegoamga kwasok, Sikchisol, Ojong kangyo sagi, Sonyo ki, and Chakpop kwigam.
PaNcaskandhaprakarana. (T. Phung po lnga'i rab tu byed pa; C. Dasheng wuyun lun; J. Daijo gounron; K. Taesŭng oon non 大乘五蘊論). In Sanskrit, "Explanation of the Five Aggregates," the title of two different works. The earliest PaNcaskandhaprakarana is a short work, now lost in the original Sanskrit, by the fourth or fifth century CE Indian master VASUBANDHU. According to tradition, Vasubandhu had both a "HĪNAYĀNA" and a MAHĀYĀNA period, beginning as an adherent of the SAUTRĀNTIKA school of the mainstream Buddhist tradition, before being converted to the Mahāyāna by his half brother ASAnGA. Although his presentation of the five aggregates bears many similarities to that in his ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA (the chief work of his so-called hīnayāna period), this work derives from his Mahāyāna period; it begins with a homage to the bodhisattva MANJUsRĪ and mentions the ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA. In this work, Vasubandhu seems to be reworking the presentation of the five aggregates found in Asanga's ABHIDHARMASAMUCCAYA; he also sets forth and criticizes the positions of the MAHĪsĀSAKA, the school in which Asanga was originally trained. ¶ There is also a PaNcaskandhaprakarana by the seventh-century Indian MADHYAMAKA master CANDRAKĪRTI, discussing the factors (DHARMA) categorized under the headings of the five SKANDHA, the twelve ĀYATANA, and the eighteen DHĀTU.
Paramartha, in the view of Buddhist initiates, is that final or ultimate goal possible of attainment in the present sevenfold planetary manvantara by the striving and advancing adept. When he has overcome, subdued, and transformed the characteristics of the lower quaternary of his sevenfold constitution so that he lives in the highest part of the upper triad — when he has attained self-conscious living in his own monadic essence — he thereupon attains paramartha or that absolute consciousness which, because of its freedom from all human qualifications or characteristics, can equally be called absolute unconsciousness. Expressed in another way, it is conscious existence as a nirvani. It is the state into which the upper triad of the buddha passes, once the buddha state has been reached. This entrance of the buddha’s higher triad into nirvana by no means inhibits his lower quaternary from active service in the world, for his lower quaternary, being washed of all the characteristics of ordinary personality and overshadowed by the buddha’s higher triad, is a nirmanakaya of high degree.
paraMparā. (T. rgyud pa; C. xiangcheng; J. sojo; K. sangsŭng 相承). In Sanskrit and Pāli, "succession," "lineage"; a lineage of teachers and disciples (ācāryaparaMparā), through which the specific teachings and practices of a teacher are transmitted down through successive generations of students. The term, also important in both Hindu and JAINA traditions, has the sense of instructions passed down orally from master to disciple over the generations. In Buddhism, paraMparā refers most often to a transmission of teachings that can be traced from the present time and place back to India and to the Buddha. Although such transmission is particularly important in Buddhist TANTRA and in the CHAN traditions of East Asia, it is a dominant element throughout the Buddhist world, including the ordination lineages of monks and nuns. See also CHUANDENGLU; FASI; YINKE.
parikalpitaklesāvarana. (T. nyon sgrib kun btags; C. fenbie huo; J. funbetsuwaku; K. punbyol hok 分別惑). In Sanskrit, "imaginary" or "artificial" "afflictive obstructions," those obstructions (ĀVARAnA) to liberation that derive from mistaken conceptions of self (ĀTMAN) generated through the study of flawed philosophical systems in the present lifetime. This type is in distinction to SAHAJAKLEsĀVARAnA, "innate afflictive obstructions," which derive from the mistaken conceptions of self generated and reinforced over the course of many lifetimes. In progressing along the path to liberation, the parikalpitaklesāvarana are said to be easier to abandon than the sahajaklesāvarana.
parikalpitāvidyā. (T. kun btags ma rig pa; C. fenbie wuming; J. funbetsumumyo; K. punbyol mumyong 分別無明). In Sanskrit, "imaginary" or "artificial ignorance"; the form of ignorance that derives from the study and adoption of mistaken philosophical views during the present lifetime of a human being. It is thus more superficial and more easily overcome than the "innate ignorance" (SAHAJĀVIDYA) that is accumulated over the course of many lifetimes. Because of its more superficial nature, imaginary ignorance is not cited as the cause of cyclical existence; rebirth is instead said to be caused by innate ignorance. Imaginary ignorance is, however, understood to be the cause of the multitude of wrong views (MITHYĀDṚstI) regarding the nature of the self.
paroksa. (T. lkog gyur; C. zhiwai; J. chige; K. chioe 智外). In Sanskrit, "hidden," a term used in the twofold classification of phenomena into the manifest (ABHIMUKHĪ), those things that are evident to sense perception, and the hidden (paroksa), those things whose existence must be inferred through reasoning. The latter category includes such important matters as subtle impermanence, the existence of rebirth, and the existence of liberation. A third category of the "very hidden" (atyantaparoksa) is sometimes added, comprising those things that are known only by a buddha, such as the specific deeds in a past life that produced specific consequences in the present. Because those things that are "very hidden" are not accessible to direct perception or inference, they are known through statements by the Buddha in the scriptures (ĀGAMA).
parusia ::: n. --> A figure of speech by which the present tense is used instead of the past or the future, as in the animated narration of past, or in the prediction of future, events.
past actuals ::: Anything that existed in the past. The totality of past facts-and-interpretations that are handed to the present occasion as a fact or a given. See present occasions and future potentials.
Petavatthu. In Pāli, "Accounts of Ghosts," the seventh book of the KHUDDAKANIKĀYA of the Pāli SUTTAPItAKA. It consists of fifty-one stories of petas (S. PRETA, often translated as "ghosts" or "hungry ghosts") who are suffering the negative consequences of their unsalutary deeds in a previous life. The stories seem to have been intended to serve as cautionary tales for the laity; the Petavatthu describes the horrors that await the wicked, just as the VIMĀNAVATTHU describes the pleasures in the heavens that await the good. In most of the stories, a monk encounters a peta and asks how he or she has come to suffer this fate. The peta then recounts the negative deeds in a former life that led to the present sorrowful rebirth.
'Phags pa wa ti lha khang. (Pakpawati Lhakhang). A Nepalese pagoda-style temple located in the southwest Tibetan village of Skyid grong (Kyirong). It is named after its principal image, the famed 'Phags pa wa ti, said to be one of FOUR BROTHER STATUES OF AVALOKITEsVARA (alt. three or five according to some sources) miraculously formed from the trunk of a single sandalwood tree. The 'Phag pa wa ti of Skyid grong, also called the Skyid grong Jo bo (Kyirong Jowo), is a likeness of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara in the form known as Khasarpāni and is considered one of the most sacred Buddhist images in Tibet. Its praises have been sung by many of the country's leading masters. The image was secretly removed to India in 1959 by Tibetan guerilla fighters and currently resides in the private chapel of the present DALAI LAMA in DHARMAsĀLĀ. The other brother statues have been identified as the 'Phags pa Lokesvara of the PO TA LA palace and the white and red MATSYENDRANĀTH statues in the Kathmandu Valley.
Pisces, the Fishes (Sanskrit Mina), is the last sign of the zodiac, and therefore marks the end of one cycle and the initiatory stage of the succeeding cycle. The fish-avatara of Vishnu is both the first and the tenth or last; and this applies both to mahakalpas and to minor cycles within them, likewise to a division of the present and former manvantara. Though Pisces as now understood refers to cyclic junctions in general, with their accompanying world saviors and floods, it has particular reference for Occidentals to Jesus and the entry of the equinoctial point into Pisces.
Planetary Spirit(s) ::: Every celestial body in space, of whatever kind or type, is under the overseeing and directing influenceof a hierarchy of spiritual and quasi-spiritual and astral beings, who in their aggregate are generalizedunder the name of celestial spirits. These celestial spirits exist therefore in various stages or degrees ofevolution; but the term planetary spirits is usually restricted to the highest class of these beings whenreferring to a planet.In every case, and whatever the celestial body may be, such a hierarchy of ethereal beings, when themost advanced in evolution of them are considered, in long past cycles of kosmic evolution had evolvedthrough a stage of development corresponding to the humanity of earth. Every planetary spirit therefore,wherever existent, in those far past aeons of kosmic time was a man or a being equivalent to what wehumans on earth call man. The planetary spirits of earth, for instance, are intimately linked with theorigin and destiny of our present humanity, for not only are they our predecessors along the evolutionarypath, but certain classes of them are actually the spiritual guides and instructors of mankind. We humans,in far distant aeons of the future, on a planetary chain which will be the child or grandchild of the presentearth-chain, will be the planetary spirits of that future planetary chain. It is obvious that as H. P.Blavatsky says: "Our Earth, being as yet only in its Fourth Round, is far too young to have produced highPlanetary Spirits"; but when the seventh round of this earth planetary chain shall have reached its end,our present humanity will then have become dhyanchohans of various grades, planetary spirits of onegroup or class, with necessary evolutionary differences as among themselves. The planetary spirits watchover, guide, and lead the hosts of evolving entities inferior to themselves during the various rounds of aplanetary chain. Finally, every celestial globe, whether sun or planet or other celestial body, has as thesummit or acme of its spiritual hierarchy a supreme celestial spirit who is the hierarch of its ownhierarchy. It should not be forgotten that the humanity of today forms a component element or stage ordegree in the hierarchy of this (our) planetary chain.
Planetary Spirits Every celestial body is under the directing influence of a hierarchy of beings, spiritual, quasi-spiritual, and astral, the higher of which may be called celestial spirits; the term planetary spirits is usually restricted to the highest class of these beings pertaining to planets, although the phrase is also used in other senses. These planetary spirits have evolved through past cosmic cycles of evolution from a state equivalent to the human; and the general hierarchy pertaining to each planet is closely linked with the destinies of the present various life-waves of that planet. We ourselves are destined in the future to become planetary spirits of a planetary chain that will be a later imbodiment of our present earth-chain. This earth, being only in its fourth round, has not yet produced high planetary spirits; but it will have begun to do so at the end of the seventh round. At the summit of the hierarchy of planetary spirits is a supreme hierarch.
Pongwonsa. (奉元寺). In Korean, "Respecting Primacy Monastery"; the head monastery of the T'AEGO CHONG of Korean Buddhism. Pongwonsa was founded in 889 by state preceptor (K. kuksa; C. GUOSHI) TOSoN (827-898) on the grounds of what is currently the campus of Yonsei University in Seoul. It was moved by the great masters (TAESA) Ch'anjŭp and Chŭngam up the hill overlooking the present-day sites of Yonsei and Ewha universities in 1748, during the reign of king Yongjo (r. 1724-1776). During the reign of the next king, Chongjo (r. 1776-1800), an institute to reform and police Buddhism was established at Pongwonsa. A signboard for the monastery shows the calligraphy of the noted Confucian scholar Chong Tojon (1337-1398). The monastery is arguably the most beautiful in Seoul, partially due to the now well-weathered reconstruction carried out in 1911 by abbot Yi Podam (1859-?). The present main shrine hall (TAEUNG CHoN) was built in 1966. Today the monastery is well known for its association with Korean Buddhist art and culture. Not only is it the current home of the troupe of monks who perform and preserve the Buddhist rite YoNGSANJAE, including the dances NABICH'UM, PARACH'UM, and PoPKO CH'UM, and the chanting of pomp'ae (C. FANBAI), but it has also been home to the premier master of TANCH'oNG and other types of Buddhist painting. The monastery also houses the Okchon Buddhist Music College, which trains laity as well as monks and nuns from other sects of Buddhism in traditional Korean music.
post-modernism: A general name which refers to the philosophical, artistic, andliterary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to the present day. Primarily, the tendencies of post-modernism include a rejection of traditional authority and a doubt over established discourses. Post-modernist authors include Carter and Rushdie.
Po ta la. The most famous building in Tibet and one of the great achievements of Tibetan architecture. Located in the Tibetan capital of LHA SA, it served as the winter residence of the DALAI LAMAs and seat of the Tibetan government from the seventeenth century until the fourteenth Dalai Lama's flight into exile in 1959. It takes its name from Mount POTALAKA, the abode of AVALOKITEsVARA, the bodhisattva of compassion, of whom the three Tibetan dharma kings (chos rgyal) and the Dalai Lamas are said to be human incarnations. The full name of the Potala is "Palace of Potala Peak" (Rtse po ta la'i pho brang), and it is commonly referred to by Tibetans simply as the Red Palace (Pho brang dmar po), because the edifice is located on Mar po ri (Red Hill) on the northwestern edge of Lha sa and because of the red palace at the summit of the white structure. In the early seventh century, the Tibetan king SRONG BTSAN SGAM PO is said to have meditated in a cave located on the hill; the cave is preserved within the present structure. The earliest structure to have been constructed there was an elevenstoried palace that he had built in 637 when he moved his capital to Lha sa. In 1645, three years after his installation as temporal ruler of Tibet, the fifth Dalai Lama NGAG DBANG BLO BZANG RGYA MTSHO began renovations of what remained of this original structure, with the new structure serving as his own residence, as well as the site of his government (known as the DGA' LDAN PHO BRANG), which he moved from the DGE LUGS PA monastery of 'BRAS SPUNGS, located some five miles outside the city. The exterior of the White Palace (Pho brang dkar po), which includes the apartments of the Dalai Lama, was completed in 1648 and the Dalai Lama took up residence in 1649. The portion of the Po ta la known as the Red Palace was added by the regent SANGS RGYAS RGYA MTSHO in honor of the fifth Dalai Lama after his death in 1682. Fearing that the project would cease if news of his death became known, Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho was able successfully to conceal the Dalai Lama's death for some twelve years (making use of a double who physically resembled the Dalai Lama to meet foreign dignitaries) until construction could be completed in 1694. The current structure is thirteen stories (approximately 384 feet) tall and is said to have over a thousand rooms, including the private apartments of the Dalai Lama, reception and assembly halls, temples, chapels containing the stupas of the fifth and seventh through thirteenth Dalai Lamas, the Rnam rgyal monastery that performed state rituals, and government offices. From the time of the eighth Dalai Lama, the Po ta la served as the winter residence for the Dalai Lamas, who moved each summer to the smaller NOR BU GLING KHA. The first Europeans to see the Po ta la were likely the Jesuit missionaries Albert Dorville and Johannes Grueber, who visited Lha sa in 1661 and made sketches of the palace, which was still under construction at the time. During the Tibetan uprising against the People's Liberation Army in March 1959, the Po ta la was shelled by Chinese artillery. It is said to have survived the Chinese Cultural Revolution through the intervention of the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai, although many of its texts and works of art were looted or destroyed. In old Lha sa, the Po ta la stood outside the central city, with the small village of Zhol located at its foot. This was the site of a prison, a printing house, and residences of some of the lovers of the sixth Dalai Lama. In modern Lha sa, the Po ta la is now encompassed by the city, and much of Zhol has been destroyed. The Po ta la still forms the northern boundary of the large circumambulation route around Lha sa, called the gling bskor (ling khor). Since the Chinese opened Tibet to foreign access in the 1980s, the Po ta la has been visited by millions of Tibetan pilgrims and foreign tourists. The stress of tourist traffic has required frequent restoration projects. In 1994, the Po ta la was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. See also PUTUOSHAN.
pragmatic ideality ::: an inspirational form of logistic ideality which, applied to the field of trikaladr.s.t.i and tapas, takes the present actuality as a passing circumstance and "claims to go altogether beyond it, to create with a certain large freedom according to the Will".
pragmatic intuitivity ::: the second form of intuitivity, corresponding on the level of the intuitive mind to the pragmatic reason on the intellectual plane; it is related to inspirational mentality and gives the perception of the "powers and forces which attempt to create a future not bound by the probabilities of the present".
prajNāpāramitā. (P. paNNāpāramī; T. shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa; C. bore boluomiduo/zhidu; J. hannya haramitta/chido; K. panya paramilta/chido 般若波羅蜜多/智度). In Sanskrit, "perfection of wisdom" or "perfect wisdom"; a polysemous term, which appears in Pāli accounts of the Buddha's prior training as a BODHISATTVA (P. bodhisatta), but is widely used in MAHĀYĀNA Buddhism. ¶ PrajNāpāramitā refers to a level of understanding beyond that of ordinary wisdom, especially referring to the the wisdom associated with, or required to achieve, buddhahood. The term receives a variety of interpretations, but it is often said to be the wisdom that does not conceive of an agent, an object, or an action as being ultimately real. The perfection of wisdom is also sometimes defined as the knowledge of emptiness (suNYATĀ). ¶ As the wisdom associated with buddhahood, prajNāpāramitā is the sixth of the six perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) that are practiced on the bodhisattva path. When the practice of the six perfections is aligned with the ten bodhisattva bhumis, the perfection of wisdom is practiced on the sixth BHuMI, called ABHIMUKHĪ. ¶ PrajNāpāramitā is also used to designate the genre of Mahāyāna sutras that sets forth the perfection of wisdom. These texts are considered to be among the earliest of the Mahāyāna sutras, with the first texts appearing sometime between the first century BCE and the first century CE. Here, the title "perfection of wisdom" may have a polemical meaning, claiming to possess a wisdom beyond that taught in the MAINSTREAM BUDDHIST SCHOOLS. In addition to numerous descriptions of, and paeans to, emptiness, the perfection of wisdom sutras also extol the practice of the bodhisattva path as the superior form of Buddhist practice. Although emptiness is said to be the chief topic of the sutras, their "hidden meaning" is said to be the detailed structure of the bodhisattva path. A number of later commentaries, most notably the ABHISAMAYĀLAMKĀRA, extracted terminology from these sutras in order to systematize the presentation of the bodhisattva path. There are numerous sutras with prajNāpāramitā in their titles, the earliest of which are designated simply by their length as measured in sLOKAs, a unit of metrical verse in traditional Sanskrit literature that is typically rendered in English as "stanza," "verse," or "line." Scholars speculate that there was a core text, which was then expanded. Hence, for example, the prajNāpāramitā sutra in eight thousand lines (AstASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) is often thought to be one of the earliest of the genre, later followed by twenty-five thousand lines (PANCAVIMsATISĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA), and one hundred thousand lines (sATASĀHASRIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ), as well as compilations many times longer, such as XUANZANG's translation of the MAHĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRA. The texts known in English as the "Heart Sutra" (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀHṚDAYASuTRA) and the "Diamond Sutra" (VAJRACCHEDIKĀPRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) are both much shorter versions of these prajNāpāramitā sutras. ¶ Perhaps because the Sanskrit term prajNāpāramitā is in the feminine gender, PrajNāpāramitā also became the name of a goddess, referred to as the mother of all buddhas, who is the embodiment of the perfection of wisdom. ¶ In the traditional Tibetan monastic curriculum, prajNāpāramitā is one of the primary topics of study, based on the AbhisamayālaMkāra of MAITREYANĀTHA and its commentaries.
pranidhāna. (P. panidhāna; T. smon lam; C. yuan; J. gan; K. won 願). In Sanskrit, "vow" or "aspiration"; a statement expressing the solemn wish that a specific aim be achieved. The most famous type of pranidhāna is the vow the BODHISATTVA takes to become a buddha in order to liberate all sentient beings from suffering (see PuRVAPRAnIDHĀNA). Pranidhāna is also listed as one of the ten perfections (PĀRAMITĀ) and as one of the ten powers (BALA) of a bodhisattva. A vow may take the form of an oath, in which one promises to achieve an aim, or the form of a prayer, in which one asks that an aim be fulfilled, often through dedicating merit toward that aim. The term occurs also in purvapranidhāna, or "prior vow," a vow made in the past that has either been fulfilled in the present or will be fulfilled in the future, typically in conjunction with the aspiration to attain buddhahood. The term purvapranidhāna is used specifically in the MAHĀYĀNA to denote the vow made in the past by a bodhisattva to become a buddha himself, often specifying the place, the time, and the retinue that will be associated with that event. Since the buddhas succeeded in achieving their goal of buddhahood, their prior vows are therefore all considered to have been fulfilled. The most famous of all purvapranidhāna are the forty-eight vows that the monk DHARMĀKARA made before the buddha LOKEsVARARĀJA, which ultimately led to his becoming the buddha AMITĀBHA and creating the pure land of SUKHĀVATĪ; these vows are described in the SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA and are foundational to the PURE LAND traditions of East Asia.
prarabdha karma. ::: the destined acts that one has to undergo in one's present life; the part of sanchita karma which is ready to be experienced through the present body incarnation; portion of the past karma which is responsible for the present body &
Prarabhda (Sanskrit) Prārabhda [from pra-ā-rabh to begin, undertake] That which has commenced or been undertaken; that karma arising from the past which is already ripe and which begins to work itself out in the present incarnation. That class of karma which is in the making and will exhaust itself in the future is called sanchita-karma. Prarabhda-karma parallels the Greek idea of the Moira Lachesis; whereas sanchita-karma corresponds to Atropos; Clotho, third of the Moirae, is the spinner of the present, the karma or destiny which we are now spinning for ourselves. See also LIPIKA
pratikalpa (pratikalpa; prati-kalpa; prati kalpa) ::: a period of a hundred caturyugas, one tenth of a kalpa, also divided into fourteen manvantaras of several caturyugas each; each pratikalpa corresponds to one of the ten types or forms of consciousness (dasa-gavas) in the evolutionary scale, the present pratikalpa being regarded as the sixth in the current kalpa, the pratikalpa of the asura in which mind is concentrated on the buddhi.
pratisaMkhyānirodha. (T. so sor brtags 'gog; C. zemie; J. chakumetsu; K. t'aengmyol 擇滅). In Sanskrit, "analytical cessation," the permanent elimination of an affliction (KLEsA) that occurs as a result of meditative analysis of the true nature of phenomena; one of the uncompounded factors (ASAMSKṚTA-DHARMA) recognized in both the VAIBHĀsIKA school of SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA and the YOGĀCĀRA schools. The "true cessations" or "truth of cessation" (NIRODHASATYA) that constitute the third of the four noble truths (see NIRODHASATYA) involve analytical cessations. Analytical cessations are permanent phenomena because they are the permanent absence of a specific klesa, essentially serving as a kind of "place marker" that ensures that a klesa, once eliminated, can never recur. Analytical cessations are distinguished from nonanalytical suppressions (APRATISAMKHYĀNIRODHA), which are neither an object of knowledge nor the result of insight; they suppress the production of any kind of dharma, ensuring (in the Sarvāstivāda interpretation) that they remain positioned in future mode and are never again able to arise in the present. The state of the analytical cessation of all the klesas is synonymous with NIRVĀnA.
PratyutpannabuddhasaMmukhāvasthitasamādhisutra. (T. Da ltar gyi sangs rgyas mngon sum du bzhugs pa'i ting nge 'dzin gyi mdo; C. Banzhou sanmei jing; J. Hanju zanmaikyo; K. Panju sammae kyong 般舟三昧經). In Sanskrit, "Sutra on the SAMĀDHI for Encountering Face-to-Face the Buddhas of the Present," often known by its abbreviated title Pratyutpannasamādhisutra; one of the earliest MAHĀYĀNA SuTRAs, and one of the very first Mahāyāna sutras to be translated into Chinese, by the Indo-Scythian monk LOKAKsEMA in 179 CE. (There are also three other Chinese translations, as well as Tibetan and Mongolian recensions.) The sutra sets forth a meditation and visualization practice (which seems related to the traditional "recollection of the Buddha," or BUDDHĀNUSMṚTI), whereby one is able to come directly into the presence of the buddhas of the present in various world systems. An adept was to sit in meditation for up to seven days, facing the direction of his or her preferred buddha and visualizing that buddha's thirty-two major marks (MAHĀPURUsALAKsAnA) and his eighty minor characteristics (ANUVYANJANA) until he had a vision of that buddha in his world system. Through this visualization, one could receive the teachings of one's preferred buddha, transmit those teachings to others, and then be reborn in that buddha's realm (BUDDHAKsETRA). Because AMITĀBHA is used as an example of how to apply this technique, this sutra is retrospectively associated in East Asia with PURE LAND traditions. The sutra also contains expositions of the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), in which the insubstantiality of meditative experiences can be extended to all phenomena, a perspective that seems to adumbrate later YOGĀCĀRA views on the projection of external phenomena by the mind. Like many other early Mahāyāna sutras, the text also extols both lay and monastic practice, the worship of STuPAs, the making of buddha images, and the veneration of texts. Because the sutra describes a technique for hearing (viz. learning) new Buddhist teachings even after sĀKYAMUNI Buddha has passed into PARINIRVĀnA, this technique might have been employed to authenticate the production of new Mahāyāna sutras.
present ::: a. --> Being at hand, within reach or call, within certain contemplated limits; -- opposed to absent.
Now existing, or in process; begun but not ended; now in view, or under consideration; being at this time; not past or future; as, the present session of Congress; the present state of affairs; the present instance.
Not delayed; immediate; instant; coincident.
Ready; quick in emergency; as a present wit.
presentable ::: a. --> Capable or admitting of being presented; suitable to be exhibited, represented, or offered; fit to be brought forward or set forth; hence, fitted to be introduced to another, or to go into society; as, ideas that are presentable in simple language; she is not presentable in such a gown.
Admitting of the presentation of a clergiman; as, a church presentable.
present ::: adj. 1. Being, existing, occurring, or going on now, current. 2. Existing or in use at, or belonging to, the particular time under consideration n. 3. The present time, the time that now is (as opposed to the past and the future). present"s.
presentative ::: a. --> Having the right of presentation, or offering a clergyman to the bishop for institution; as, advowsons are presentative, collative, or donative.
Admitting the presentation of a clergyman; as, a presentative parsonage.
Capable of being directly known by, or presented to, the mind; intuitive; directly apprehensible, as objects; capable of apprehending, as faculties.
presentment ::: n. --> The act of presenting, or the state of being presented; presentation.
Setting forth to view; delineation; appearance; representation; exhibition.
The notice taken by a grand jury of any offence from their own knowledge or observation, without any bill of indictment laid before them, as, the presentment of a nuisance, a libel, or the like; also, an inquisition of office and indictment by a grand jury; an
Prevision Foresight, seeing an event with the inner eye before or at the time of its occurrence. As the inner eye is independent of the time sequence on which our physical eyes and minds act, it is aware of things which to our physical perceptions belong to the future. Hence, if a contact is established between our consciousness and this inner sense, we may obtain a picture of events which have not yet come into the present. Events on the physical plane are the effects of causes which are preparing on invisible planes. The effect follows the cause — not infallibly, but with varying degrees of probability. Theosophy teaches an objective idealism, that while the universe in its phenomenal or manifested attributes is a product of maya, yet for all beings within such universe and subject to the sway of maya, events, manifestations, and similar things which occur are relatively real to their consciousness. Thus to the eye of the spirit — the awakened eye of Siva as it is called in the Orient — all events whatsoever, past, present, or future, appear as in an eternal Now, a shadow cast up from the waves of maya to the consciousness of the said seeing eye, and it is this underlying fact which gives the power of prevision, true premonition, foresight, etc. See also PROPHECY; PREMONITION
Principles of Man ::: The seven principles of man are a likeness or rather copy of the seven cosmic principles. They areactually the offspring or reflection of the seven cosmic principles, limited in their action in us by theworkings of the law of karma, but running in their origin back into THAT which is beyond: into THATwhich is the essence of the universe or the universal -- above, beyond, within, to the unmanifest, to theunmanifestable, to that first principle which H. P. Blavatsky enunciates as the leading thought of thewisdom-philosophy of The Secret Doctrine.These principles of man are reckoned as seven in the philosophy by which the human spiritual andpsychical economy has been publicly explained to us in the present age. In other ages these principles orparts of man were differently reckoned -- the Christian reckoned them as body, soul, and spirit,generalizing the seven under these three heads.Some of the Indian thinkers divided man into a basic fourfold entity, others into a fivefold. The Jewishphilosophy, as found in the Qabbalah which is the esoteric tradition of the Jews, teaches that man isdivided into four parts: neshamah, ruah, nefesh, and guf.Theosophists for convenience often employ in their current literature a manner of viewing man'scomposite constitution which is the dividing of his nature into a trichotomy, meaning a division intothree, being spirit, soul, and body, which in this respect is identical with the generalized Christianizedtheosophical division. Following this trichotomy, man's three parts, therefore, are: first and highest, thedivine spirit or the divine monad of him, which is rooted in the universe, which spirit is linked with theAll, being in a highly mystical sense a ray of the All; second, the intermediate part, or the spiritualmonad, which in its higher and lower aspects is the spiritual and human souls; then, third, the lowest partof man's composite constitution, the vital-astral-physical part of him, which is composed of material orquasi-material life-atoms. (See also Atman, Buddhi, Manas, Kama, Prana, Linga-sarira, Sthula-sarira)
Procreation The progressive series of methods by which the human life-wave has reproduced its kind on earth is closely related to the unfolding of composite human nature, and is also a part of the evolutionary history of the rounds and races. The reimbodying ego manifested its composite nature in the degree corresponding to the various gradations of matter in and through which it slowly descended, plane after plane, to the present state of things. Evidences of this series of former kinds of racial imbodiments, and of the progressive modes of reproduction are found repeated in the development of the human embryo, in the persistence of vestigial organs in adults, and in reproductive methods which still prevail in the lower kingdoms of plant and animal life. The histologist, in watching the division of cells, sees a microscopic review of the age-old history of mankind’s series of imbodiments. He observes, in the lowest forms of life, a homogeneous speck of protoplasm dividing into two. Next, in a nucleated cell, the cell nucleus splits into two subnuclei which develop within the cell wall, or burst through to multiply outside into independent entities. This fission is a copy of the reproductive method of the first root-race. The next type of cell division is budding, where a portion of the parent swells out at the surface, finally to separate and to grow into a full-sized individual, as in many vegetables, the sea anemone, etc. This repeats the way in which the primeval human race merged out of its first reproductive method. At the next step in biology, the parent organism throws off a single cell which develops into a multicellular organism like the parent, as in bacteria and mosses. The formation of these spores is followed by a type of intermediate hermaphroditism with the bisexual organs inhering in the same individual, as in plants. Corresponding to this, about the middle of the second root-race, the “buds” grew more numerous and became what zoologists would call human spores or seeds, or what Blavatsky described as vital sweat. Thus many of these buds at certain seasons when the parent entity had become mature, would leave it, as do the spores or seeds of plants today. These seeds were taken care of by nature and developed in the proper environment. At present, the exceptional cases of multiple human births hint at this long-past condition in procreation.
proximo ::: --> In the next month after the present; -- often contracted to prox.; as, on the 3d proximo.
Public offering - The presenting new securities to the investing public, after registration requirements have been filed with the appropriate authorities.
purvapranidhāna. (T. sngon gyi smon lam; C. benyuan; J. hongan; K. ponwon 本願). In Sanskrit, "prior vow," a vow made in the past that has either been fulfilled in the present or will be fulfilled in the future, typically in conjunction with the attainment of buddhahood. The term purvapranidhāna is used specifically in the MAHĀYĀNA to denote the vow made in the past by a BODHISATTVA to become a buddha himself, often specifying the place, the time, and the retinue that will be associated with that achievement. Since the buddhas have perforce succeeded in achieving their goal of buddhahood, their prior vows are therefore all considered to have been fulfilled. The most famous of all prior vows are the forty-eight vows described in the SUKHĀVATĪVYuHASuTRA, in which the bodhisattva DHARMĀKARA makes a series of forty-eight vows to create the PURE LAND of SUKHĀVATĪ. These vows are narrated by the Buddha, who explains that the bodhisattva fulfilled all the vows and became the buddha AMITĀBHA. The exegesis of the vows of Dharmākara was an important element of JoDOSHu and JoDO SHINSHu buddhology in Japan. (The Chinese translation of this term literally means "original vow," and this English rendering is commonly seen in Western translations of PURE LAND works.) The compound *pubbepanidhāna is unattested in Pāli sources, but the term panidhāna is used to refer to this aspiration made in a previous life.
P'yohunsa. (表訓寺). In Korean, "P'yohun's monastery"; one of the four major monasteries on the Buddhist sacred mountain of KŬMGANGSAN (Diamond Mountains), now in North Korea. The monastery is said to have been built in 598 during the Silla dynasty by Kwallŭk (d.u.) and Yungun (d.u.), and rebuilt in 675 by P'yohun (d.u.), one of the ten disciples of ŬISANG (625-702), the vaunt-courier of the Korean HWAoM (C. HUAYAN) school. The present monastery was rebuilt after the Korean War (1950-1953) on the model of an earlier reconstruction project finished in 1778 during the late-Choson dynasty. The main shrine hall of the monastery is named Panya Pojon (PrajNā Jeweled Basilica), rather than the typical TAEUNG CHoN (basilica of the great hero [the Buddha]), and the image of the bodhisattva DHARMODGATA (Popki Posal) that used to be enshrined therein was installed facing Dharmodgata Peak (Popkibong) to the northeast of the hall, rather than toward the front. The relics (sARĪRA) of NAONG HYEGŬN (1320-1376), a late-Koryo period Son monk who introduced the orthodox LINJI ZONG (K. IMJE CHONG) lineage to Korea from China, were enshrined at P'yohunsa. The monastery also was famous for its iron pagoda (STuPA) with fifty-three enshrined buddha images, but these were lost sometime during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), along with Naong's relics. Chongyangsa, one of the branch monasteries of P'yohunsa, is said to have been built at the spot where Dharmodgata and his attendant bodhisattvas appeared before the first king of the Koryo dynasty, Wang Kon, T'aejo (877-943; r. 918-943), on his visit to Kŭmgangsan. The peak where Dharmodgata made his appearance is named Panggwangdae (Radiant Terrace), and the spot where T'aejo prostrated himself before Dharmodgata is called Paejom (Prostration Hill). Podogam, a hermitage affiliated with P'yohunsa, is notable for its peculiar construction: for four hundred years it has been suspended off a cliff, supported by a single copper foundation pillar.
Qabbalah (Hebrew) Qabbālāh [from qābal to receive, hand down] Also Cabala, Kabala, Kabbalah, etc. Tradition, that which is handed down; the theosophy of the Jews. Originally these truths were passed on orally by one initiate to chosen disciples, hence were referred to as the Tradition. The first one historically alleged to have reduced a large part of the secret Qabbalah of the Chaldees into systematic, and perhaps written, form was the Rabbi Shim‘on ben Yohai, in the Zohar; but the work of this name that has come down to the present day — through the medieval Qabbalists — is but a compilation of the 13th century, presumably by Moses de Leon.
Qabbalah(More frequently spelled Kabala or Kabbala.) ::: The Hebrew word for what the Jewish theosophicalinitiates called "the Tradition," or "the Secret Doctrine" -- meaning something which is handed down orpassed down from man to man by tradition; from a Hebrew word meaning "to receive" or "to take over."Unquestionably the Jewish Qabbalah existed as a traditional system of doctrine long before the presentmanuscripts of it were written, for these are of comparatively late production and probably date from theEuropean Middle Ages; and one proof of this statement is found in the fact that in the earliest centuriesof the Christian era several of the Church Fathers of the new Christian religion used language whichcould have been taken only from the Hebrew theosophy, that is, the Hebrew Qabbalah. The expressionshere are in some cases identic, and the thought is in all cases the same.The Zohar may be called the original and main book of the Qabbalah.The basis of the Jewish Qabbalah was the archaic Chaldean secret doctrine which was a system of occultor esoteric philosophy handed down in part by oral, and in part by written, transmission -- and mostly byoral reception, wholly so in the case of the deeper mysteries of the Qabbalah. The Jewish Qabbalah, suchas it exists today, has been disfigured and distorted by the interpolations and mutilations of manyWestern occultists, especially by mystics of strong Christian bias. The Qabbalah, therefore, is essentiallythe theosophy of the Jews, or rather the form which the universal theosophy of the archaic ages took inits transmission through the Jewish mind.
Qedem (Hebrew) Qēdem The east, the eastern country; applied to the east wind. Also used for former times, antiquity, as that which precedes the present and the future, just as the east is the quarter where the sun begins its heavenly journey before it reaches midheaven and sinks into the west.
Races ::: During evolution on our earth (and on the other six manifest globes of the planetary chain of earthcorrespondentially), mankind as a life-wave passes through seven evolutionary stages called root-races.Seven such root-races form the evolutionary cycle on this globe earth in this fourth round through theplanetary chain; and this evolutionary cycle through our globe earth is called one globe round. We are atthe present time in the fourth subrace of our present fifth root-race, on globe D or our earth.Each root-race is divided in our teachings into seven minor races, and each one of these seven minorraces is again in its turn subdivided into seven branchlet or still smaller racial units, etc.The student who is interested in the matter of tracing the evolutionary arrangement or history of theseven root-races on our globe earth is referred primarily to H. P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, andsecondarily to Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy.Each one of the seven root-races reaches its maximum of material efflorescence and power at about itsmiddle point. When half of the cycle of any one of the seven root-races is run, then the racial cataclysmensues, for such is the way in which nature operates; and at this middle racial point, at the middle pointof the fourth subrace of the mother-race or root-race, a new root-race begins or is born out of thepreceding root-race, and pursues its evolution from birth towards maturity, side by side with, or rather inconnection with, the latter half of the preceding mother-race or root-race. It is in this fashion that theroot-races overlap each other, a most interesting fact in ethnological or racial history. This overlappinglikewise takes place in the cases of the minor and branchlet races.It will be between sixteen thousand and twenty thousand years more before the racial cataclysm willensue which will cut our own fifth root-race in two -- exactly as the same racial cataclysmic occurrencehappened to the fourth-race Atlanteans who preceded us, and to the third-race Lemurians who precededthem; and as it will happen to the two root-races which will follow ours, the sixth and seventh -- for weare now approaching the middle point of our own fifth root-race, because we are nearing the middle pointof the fourth subrace of this fifth root-race. (See also Globe, Planetary Chain, Round)
Ragnarok: In Norse and Teutonic cosmogony, the end of the present state of the world, when a new age of righteousness on a new earth will be accomplished by a battle between the gods and the evil giants, in which evil will be overthrown.
recent ::: a. --> Of late origin, existence, or occurrence; lately come; not of remote date, antiquated style, or the like; not already known, familiar, worn out, trite, etc.; fresh; novel; new; modern; as, recent news.
Of or pertaining to the present or existing epoch; as, recent shells.
Referring to the vast expanse of lands, including both continents and islands, occupied by the populations of the fourth root-race, Blavatsky wrote: “at a remote epoch a traveller could traverse what is now the Atlantic Ocean, almost the entire distance by land, crossing in boats from one island to another, where narrow straits then existed” (IU 1:558). While the term Atlantis derived from Greek sources undoubtedly gave its name to what we now call the Atlantic Ocean, yet the Atlantic continental system reached even into what is now called the pacific; and the islanders of this body of water almost universally amongst themselves have legends all pointing to the fact that their ancestors lived on and came from “great islands” which preceded the present distribution of land and sea. See also ATLANTEANS; ROOT-RACE, FOURTH
Rejected in particular by intuitionism are the use of impredicative definition (q. v.); the assumption that all things satisfying a given condition can be united into a set and this set then treated as an individual thing --or even the weakened form of this assumption which is found in Zermelo's Aussonderungsaxiom or axiom of subset formation (see logic, formal, § 9); the law of excluded middle as applied to propositions whose expression lequires a quantifier for which the variable involved has an infinite range. As an example of the rejection of the law of excluded middle, consider the proposition, "Either every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers or else not every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers." This proposition is intuitionistically unacceptable, because there are infinitely many even numbers greater than 2 and it is impossible to try them all one by one and decide of each whether or not it is the sum of two prime numbers. An intuitionist would accept the disjunction only after a proof had been given of one or other of the two disjoined propositions -- and in the present state of mathematical knowledge it is not certain that this can be done (it is not certain that the mathematical problem involved is solvable). If, however, we replace "greater than 2" by "greater than 2 and less than 1,000,000,000," the resulting disjunction becomes intuitionistically acceptable, since the number of numbers involved is then finite. The intuitionistic rejection of the law of excluded middle is not to be understood as an assertion of the negation of the law of excluded middle; on the contrary, Brouwer asserts the negation of the negation of the law of excluded middle, i.e., ∼∼[p ∨ ∼p]. Still less is the intuitionistic rejection of the law of excluded middle to be understood as the assertion of the existence of a third truth-value intermediate between truth and falsehood.
Renaissance: (Lat. re + nasci, to be born) Is a term used by historians to characterize various periods of intellectual revival, and especially that which took place in Italy and Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. The term was coined by Michelet and developed into a historical concept by J. Burckhardt (1860) who considered individualism, the revival of classical antiquity, the "discovery" of the world and of man as the main characters of that period as opposed to the Middle Ages. The meaning, the temporal limits, and even the usefulness of the concept have been disputed ever since. For the emphasis placed by various historians on the different fields of culture and on the contribution of different countries must lead to different interpretations of the whole period, and attempts to express a complicated historical phenomenon in a simple, abstract definition are apt to fail. Historians are now inclined to admit a very considerable continuity between the "Renaissance" and the Middle Ages. Yet a sweeping rejection of the whole concept is excluded, for it expresses the view of the writers of the period itself, who considered their century a revival of ancient civilization after a penod of decay. While Burckhardt had paid no attention to philosophy, others began to speak of a "philosophy of the renaissance," regarding thought of those centuries not as an accidental accompaniment of renaissance culture, but as its characteristic philosophical manifestation. As yet this view has served as a fruitful guiding principle rather than as a verified hypothesis. Renaissance thought can be defined in a negative way as the period of transition from the medieval, theological to the modern, scientific interpretation of reality. It also displays a few common features, such as an emphasis on man and on his place in the universe, the rejection of certain medieval standards and methods of science, the increased influence of some newly discovered ancient sources, and a new style and literary form in the presentation of philosophical ideas. More obvious are the differences between the various schools and traditions which cannot easily be brought to a common denominator Humimsm, Platonism, Aristotelianism, scepticism and natural philosophy, to which may be added the group of the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo). -- P.O.K.
rendering ::: p. pr. & vb. n. --> of Render ::: n. --> The act of one who renders, or that which is rendered.
A version; translation; as, the rendering of the Hebrew text.
In art, the presentation, expression, or interpretation
Repentance In theology, a change of mental and spiritual habit respecting sin, involving a hatred of and sorrow because of it, and a genuine abandonment of it in conduct of life. The frequent reference made by Christians with regard to death-bed repentance, however distorted, nevertheless is based upon a truth. However, a person must always face the causes he has set in motion — which will appear as effects in some subsequent life, these lives being linked together with the present one by and through the skandhas.
Reproduction In theosophical writing, usually confined to the various modes of physical procreation and excluding the production of offspring by kriyasakti. The essential principle in natural reproduction is that an individual separates a portion of itself, which then evolves independently into a similar individual. This may occur by fission, as in the amoeba and other unicellular forms, the mode of the first root-race of humanity. Or by budding, as in the sea anemone and many plants, and in the second root-race. By the throwing off of spores, as occurs in mosses and fungi. By the production of an egg, hatched within or without the body; the egg may contain the so-called positive and negative reproductive elements, and so be self-fertilizing; or it may contain only the negative element and so require fertilizing. The positive element may be contributed by the same individual as supplies the negative element; and then we have hermaphroditism. Or the positive and negative elements may be in different individuals, and we have the present usual mode of reproduction. The human body has at one time or another passed through all these states. Part of the second and the earlier third root-race were hermaphroditic, and the later third practiced ordinary sexual reproduction. Mankind is destined to transcend the present mode, which is but a passing phase in evolutionary history, and then pass to modes analogous to the modes which obtain on the descending arc.
Rinzaishu. (濟宗). In Japanese, "Rinzai School"; one of the major Japanese ZEN schools established in the early Kamakura period. The various branches of the Japanese Rinzai Zen tradition trace their lineages back to the Chinese CHAN master LINJI YIXUAN (J. Rinzai Gigen) and his eponymous LINJI ZONG; the name Rinzai, like its Chinese counterpart, is derived from Linji's toponym. The tradition was first transmitted to Japan by the TENDAISHu monk MYoAN EISAI (1141-1215), who visited China twice and received training and certification in the HUANGLONG PAI collateral line of the Linji lineage on his second trip. Eisai's Zen teachings, however, reflected his training in the esoteric (MIKKYo) teachings of the Tendai school; he did not really intend to establish an entirely new school. After Eisai, the Rinzai tradition was transferred through Japanese monks who trained in China and Chinese monks who immigrated to Japan. Virtually all of the Japanese Rinzai tradition was associated with the YANGQI PAI collateral line of the Linji lineage (see YANGQI FANGHUI), which was first imported by the Japanese vinaya specialist Shunjo (1166-1227). According to the early-Edo-period Nijushiryu shugen zuki ("Diagrammatic Record of the Sources of the Twenty-Four Transmissions of the Teaching"), twenty-four Zen lineages had been transmitted to Japan since the Kamakura period, twenty-one of which belonged to the Rinzai tradition; with the exception of Eisai's own lineage, the remaining twenty lineages were all associated with the Yangqi collateral line. Soon after its introduction into Japan, the Rinzai Zen tradition rose to prominence in Kamakura and Kyoto, where it received the patronage of shoguns, emperors, and the warrior class. The Rinzai teachers of this period included monks from Tendai and SHINGONSHu backgrounds, such as ENNI BEN'EN (1202-1280) and SHINCHI KAKUSHIN (1207-1298), who promoted Zen with an admixture of esoteric elements. Chinese immigrant monks like LANXI DAOLONG (J. Rankei Doryu, 1213-1278) and WUXUE ZUYUAN (J. Mugaku Sogen, 1226-1286) also contributed to the rapid growth in the popularity of the Rinzai tradition among the Japanese ruling classes, by transporting the Song-style Linji Chan tradition as well as Song-dynasty Chinese culture more broadly. With the establishment of the Ashikaga shogunate in 1338, the major Zen temples were organized following the Song Chinese model into the GOZAN (five mountains) system, a tripartite state control system consisting of "five mountains" (gozan), "ten temples" (jissetsu), and several associated "miscellaneous mountains" (shozan). The powerful gozan monasteries located in Kamakura and Kyoto functioned as centers of classical Chinese learning and culture, and continued to influence the ruling classes in Japan until the decline of the Ashikaga shogunate in the sixteenth century. The disciples of Enni Ben'en and MUSo SOSEKI (1275-1351) dominated the gozan monasteries. In particular, Muso Soseki was deeply engaged in both literary endeavors and political activities; his lineage produced several famous gozan poets, such as Gido Shushin (1325-1388) and Zekkai Chushin (1336-1405). Outside the official gozan ecclesiastical system were the RINKA, or forest, monasteries. DAITOKUJI and MYoSHINJI, the two principal rinka Rinzai monasteries, belonged to the otokan lineage, which is named after its first three masters NANPO JoMYo (1235-1309), SoHo MYoCHo (1282-1337), and KANZAN EGEN (1277-1360). This lineage emphasized rigorous Zen training rather than the broader cultural endeavors pursued in the gozan monasteries. After the decline of the gozan monasteries, the otokan lineage came to dominate the Rinzai Zen tradition during the Edo period and was the only Rinzai line to survive to the present. Despite the presence of such influential monks as TAKUAN SoHo (1573-1645) and BANKEI YoTAKU (1622-1693), the Rinzai tradition began to decline by the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The monk credited with revitalizing the Rinzai tradition during the Edo period is the Myoshinji monk HAKUIN EKAKU (1685-1768). Hakuin systematized the KoAN (see GONG'AN; KANHUA CHAN) method of meditation, which is the basis of modern Rinzai Zen practice; it is also through Hakuin and his disciples that most Rinzai masters of today trace their lineages. The Rinzai tradition is currently divided into the fifteen branches named after each of their head monasteries, which represents the influence of the head and branch temple system designed in the Edo period. Of the fifteen branches, the Myoshinji branch has largely eclipsed its rivals and today is the largest and most influential of all the Rinzai lines.
Romakapura (Sanskrit) Romakapura [from romaka hairy + pura city, fortified town] City of hairy ones; in the Surya-Siddhanta (1:6; 12:39), the birth place of Asuramaya, the putative author of the Surya-Siddhanta itself, who states that he received the knowledge which the scripture contains by dictation from the sun. It is stated to have been told to Asuramaya when but little of the krita yuga was left, making the work’s age at least 2,200,000 years. The “fact of ‘Romaka-pura in the West’ being named as the birth-place of this hero of the archaic ages, is the more interesting because it is so very suggestive of the esoteric teaching about the ‘Sweat-born’ Races, the men born from the pores of their parents. ‘Romakupas’ means ‘hair-pores’ in Sanskrit” (SD 2:68). Romakapura therefore has a vague allusion to the land and cradle of the sweat-born of the third root-race, but more particularly in this case to the early days of Atlantis. The figure of 2,200,000 years ago brings Asuramaya and his work into the first part of the present fifth root-race.
Root-race, Fifth The human race at present on earth; the fifth root-race on this globe D in the fourth round originated from the seed-race of the middle fourth root-race and as the ages passed began to occupy the lands which have since gradually taken form in our present continental distribution. It is subdivided, like all other root-races, into seven subraces, and these again each into smaller divisions. The present predominant sub-subrace is the fifth of its fourth primary subrace, only a little beyond the point of greatest materiality of this root-race.
Root-race, Second Like the first root-race of the present round on globe D of the earth-chain, the second was astral, though somewhat more concreted, physicalized, or materialized. The bodies were unlike what is now regarded as human, bearing but vaguely the human outline of a gelatinous, filamentoid, jelly-like nature, as yet without evolved bones, organs, hair, or true skin. Reproduction was by budding, as occurs in some lower organisms today. About the middle of the race, these buds became numerous and the process became modified to one analogous to the casting off of spores or seeds, or to the exuding of drops of vital sweat. These beings were mindless and unmoral, innocent, guided unconsciously by their spiritual instincts, nevertheless largely under the sway of lower rather than spiritual impulses, somewhat like the animals of today. For as yet no intellectual fire from the manasaputras (sons of mind) had been communicated to them, so that as yet there was no working bridge of mentality between spirit and matter in them.
Root-race, Sixth The root-race which will succeed the present fifth root-race, sometimes called the Aryan race in theosophical literature because the Aryan Hindus were a part of the original first subrace of the fifth root-race. Care should be taken not to confuse the sixth root-race with the sixth subrace of the fifth root-race which was stated by Blavatsky to be in process of forming in America as seeds — the earliest pioneers, although already beginning to appear, will not be numerous for several thousand years. The preparation for the sixth root-race will take place during the sixth and seventh subraces of the fifth root-race in the Americas. When the time arrives, this future sixth root-race will be predominant on the earth, new lands will have appeared, and many of the present lands will be submerged. The surface of the globe will, in time of course, be entirely changed, and there will then be more land than water (as also was the case during the fourth root-race).
Root-race The main serial divisions of the human life-wave on any globe of a planetary chain; for instance, the root-races on our globe D include the third or Lemurian, the fourth or Atlantean, and the present fifth. Each such root-race contains many and various races as the word is commonly understood. All the human beings alive today are part of the fifth root-race. Each life-wave when it has completed its cycle of seven root-races on one globe, transfers its life-energies to the next globe, whereupon begins the same sequence of seven root-races on that next globe. Thus each globe of a planetary chain has its seven root-races, which together constitute one globe-round, the whole set of seven globe-rounds completing one planetary round. See also RACE(S)
Root-types In biology animal or plant species derive from seven, ten, or twelve primeval physico-astral root-types, being in the case of every kingdom the origins of the widely differentiated, greatly specialized individuals now found on earth. “Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of forms, types and species; every type of the preceding organic forms — vegetable, animal and human — changes and is perfected in the next, even to the mineral, which has received in this Round its final opacity and hardness; its softer portions having formed the present vegetation; the astral relics of previous vegetation and fauna having been utilized in the formation of the lower animals, and determining the structure of the primeval Root-Types of the highest mammalia” (SD 2:730). Primeval astral man was the root-type of those early mammalians, from whom the anthropoids sprang by human miscegenation, although this does not apply to the animals beneath the mammals.
Rudimentary or Vestigial Organs These include a number of different tissue-remnants or organs of primitive type, some of which are only transients in the developing fetus, while others persist in the bodies of animals or man, where they are dwarfed, atrophied, or functionless as far as is known. The vermiform appendix, the ear muscles, the gill clefts, pineal gland, rudimentary tail of the embryo, etc., are referred to as affording silent testimony to the reality of functions which were vitally active in primeval life, but which have long since atrophied in the course of animal and human progress (SD 2:119). The fact of such organs in the human body is adduced in support of the Darwinian theory, but it can equally well support the theory that the mammals came from man. Again, we know that, though man did not evolve from the apes, there was a time when his form somewhat resembled that which the apes now have. The possession of distinct traces in each sex of the reproductive apparatus of the other sex is biological evidence of ancient hermaphroditism. The undifferentiated sex of the embryo during its early growth also reviews the asexual character of the first root-races. The present routine process of maturation or reduction of chromosomes in the fertilized cell, and the death of the polar cells, appear to biologists as somehow unnaturally involved. This process, however, apparently in some degree, echoes distantly the change in the third root-race from an androgynous reproductive method to that of the separated sexes. The law of retardation which operates when a higher type has been evolved, now “preserves hermaphroditism as the reproductive method of the majority of plants and many lower animals” (SD 2:172n). Thus, man is not the copy but the evolutionary prototype, for “the potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man — the microcosm of the Macrocosm” (SD 2:685). The human form is the repertory of all mammalian forms, and nature preserves organs and functions in vestigial condition against a future time when, if these organs and functions be latent and not merely in process of disappearance, they will become active again. This accounts for the occasional reversion to utterly unknown primeval types as noted in teratology. A general unity of type has been preserved throughout the ages all through the multitude of organisms which grew out of a few basic types. “The economy of Nature does not sanction the co-existence of several utterly opposed ‘ground plans’ of organic evolution on one planet” (SD 2:683).
Rudra-Siva (Sanskrit) Rudra-Śiva Siva in the form of the regenerating god; also “the great Yogi, the forefather of all the Adepts — in Esotericism one of the greatest Kings of the Divine Dynasties. Called ‘the Earliest’ and the ‘Last,’ he is the patron of the Third, Fourth, and the Fifth Root-Races. For, in his earliest character, he is the ascetic Dig-ambara, ‘clothed with the Elements,’ Trilochana, ‘the three-eyed’; Pancha-anana, ‘the five-faced,’ an allusion to the past four and the present fifth race, for, though five-faced, he is only ‘four-armed,’ as the fifth race is still alive. He is the ‘God of Time,’ Saturn-Kronos, as his damaru (drum), in the shape of an hour-glass, shows; and if he is accused of having cut off Brahma’s fifth head, and left him with only four, it is again an allusion to a certain degree in initiation, and also to the Races” (SD 2:502n). See also RUDRA
Sadhana is the opening of the consciousness to the Divine, the change of the present consciousness to the psychic and spiritual consciousness. In this yoga it means also the offering of all consciousness and its activities to the Divine for possession and use by the Divine and for transformation.
sahajaklesāvarana. (T. nyon sgrib lhan skyes; C. jusheng fannao zhang/jusheng huo; J. kusho no bonnosho/kusho no waku; K. kusaeng ponnoe chang/kusaeng hok 生煩惱障/生惑). In Sanskrit, "innate afflictive obstructions," those obstructions (ĀVARAnA) to liberation that derive from mistaken conceptions of self (ĀTMAN) that are generated and reinforced over many lifetimes. This type is in distinction to PARIKALPITAKLEsĀVARAnA (T. nyon sgrib kun btags) or "artificial afflictive obstructions," which are mistaken conceptions of self that are generated through the study of flawed philosophical systems or ideologies in the present lifetime. The latter are understood to be more easily abandoned than the sahajaklesāvarana.
Sakwala (Sinhalese, Cakkavāḷa in Pali) Gautama Buddha uttered this “word” (bana) in his oral instructions to denote “a solar system, of which there is an infinite number in the universe, and which denotes that space to which the light of every sun extends. Each Sakwala contains earths, hells and heavens (meaning good and bad spheres, our earth being considered as hell, in Occultism); attains its prime, then falls into decay and is finally destroyed at regularly recurring periods, in virtue of one immutable law. Upon the earth, the Master taught that there have been already four great ‘continents’ (the Land of the Gods, Lemuria, Atlantis, and the present ‘continent’ divided into five parts of the Secret Doctrine), and that three more have to appear. The former ‘did not communicate with each other,’ a sentence showing that Buddha was not speaking of the actual continents known in his day (for Patala or America was perfectly familiar to the ancient Hindus), but of the four geological formations of the earth, with their four distinct root-races which had already disappeared” (TG 285). See also SAHA
sākya. (P. Sākiya; T. Shākya; C. Shijia; J. Shaka; K. Sokka; V. Thích ca 釋迦). Name of an ancient north Indian tribe that flourished in the southern foothills of the Himālayas near what is now the border between Nepal and India. This tribe produced the historical buddha, called either GAUTAMA or sĀKYAMUNI, whose name means "Sage of the sākya Clan." Unfortunately virtually no sources referring to the sākyas can be found outside the Buddhist tradition. The origin of the name is uncertain, being variously described as synonymous with the Sanskrit term sākya, meaning "able," or as a derivative of the noun sāka, a kind of tree used by this clan in construction. Texts describe this clan as ruled by KsATRIYAs, the military or administrative caste of the Indian social system. At the time of the Buddha, the sākyas were ruled by his father, King sUDDHODANA. The sākyas made KAPILAVASTU the capital of their region. Both the MAHĀVASTU and the BUDDHACARITA name the sākyas as descendants of the legendary solar king Iksvāku; the ultimate progenitor of the sākyas was MAHĀSAMMATA, the first king of the present world system. In the time of the Buddha, the sākyas, although they were self-governing, were subjects of the neighboring kingdom of KOsALA. According to various accounts, VIRudHAKA (P. Vidudabha), the king of KOsALA, annexed the territory of the sākyas and killed most of its inhabitants after they insulted him by revealing that his mother, whom they had provided as a bride to his father PRASENAJIT, was a servant. Prior to their demise, the Buddha himself is said to have dissuaded Virudhaka from invading the territory of the sākyas. In East Asian Buddhism after the fourth century CE, monks and nuns traditionally abandoned their family surnames and adopted instead the Buddha's clan name sākya (C. Shi); see SHI.
Samantabhadra (Sanskrit) Samantabhadra The universal sage, the wholly auspicious one; a name of Gautama Buddha, and also of one of the four bodhisattvas of the Yogacharya school of Mahayana philosophy. A Yogacharya legend states that there are three celestial and four terrestrial bodhisattvas — an allusion to the upper triad and the lower quaternary of the seven human principles. The four terrestrial bodhisattvas act only in the present races, yet in the middle of the fifth root-race has appeared the fifth terrestrial bodhisattva, the Buddha Siddhartha-Gautama. It is said that he appeared somewhat before his periodic time and was obliged to disappear bodily from the world for a while. The four terrestrial bodhisattvas refer to the four rounds thus far appearing in our present planetary chain — three rounds having been completed, and the fourth about half run. The three celestial bodhisattvas mentioned refer to the spiritual forces or powers of the three rounds still to come — the fifth, sixth, and seventh rounds. These bodhisattvas are in celestial spheres awaiting their turn to take their place in the septenary line of cosmic teachers. Once they appear on earth they become terrestrial bodhisattvas, although remaining nevertheless celestial or transcendent — as the four bodhisattvas who have already appeared have done or are.
Samaritans ::: Another of the numerous sub-groups in early Judaism (see also Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes) and residents of the district of Samaria north of Jerusalem and Judah in what is now Israel. They are said to have recognized only the Pentateuch as scripture and Mt. Gerizim as the sacred center rather than Jerusalem. There was ongoing hostility between Samaritans and Judahites. Samaritan communities exist to the present.
samayamudrā. (T. dam tshig gi phyag rgya; C. sanmoye yin; J. sanmayain; K. sammaya in 三摩耶印). In Sanskrit, "seal of the vow," "seal of time," or "seal of the symbol," all three denotations related to objects of meditation in tantric Buddhism. The samayamudrā is usually listed as the third of four "seals" (MUDRĀ), "seal" here being used in the sense of a doorway through which one must pass in order to attain full realization; the other three are the KARMAMUDRĀ, the JNĀNAMUDRĀ, and the MAHĀMUDRĀ. In the context of sexual yoga, the term is also used to refer to a tantric consort who maintains the tantric pledges, as opposed to a karmamudrā (a consort who does not maintain such pledges) and a jNānamudrā (a consort who is not a physical person but is visualized in meditation). As "seal of the vow," the samayamudrā involves sustained focus on one's intention to keep a specific set of vows received as part of one's initiation (ABHIsEKA, dīksā) into tantric practice. As "seal of time," samaya carries its temporal denotation and the meditation involves an abandonment of past and future for the sake of a sustained experience of the present moment. As "seal of the symbol," the object of attention is a symbolic representation of various aspects of a buddha, BODHISATTVA, or deity.
SaMghabhadra. (T. 'Dus bzang; C. Zhongxian; J. Shugen; K. Chunghyon 衆賢) (c. fifth century CE). In Sanskrit, "Auspicious to the Community"; the proper name of an influential Indian master of the VAIBHĀsIKA school of SARVĀSTIVĀDA ABHIDHARMA. Historical sources suggest that SaMghabhadra hailed from KASHMIR and was a younger contemporary of his principal rival VASUBANDHU. The historical records of XUANZANG and PARAMĀRTHA agree that SaMghabhadra publicly challenged Vasubandhu to debate, but his challenge was never accepted. SaMghabhadra's most famous works include the *NYĀYĀNUSĀRA, or "Conformity with Correct Principle," and the *Abhidharmasamayapradīpikā (C. Xianzong lun), or "Exposition of Accepted Doctrine." The *Nyāyānusāra is both a clarification of the ABHIDHARMA philosophy of the Vaibhāsika school and a critical commentary on the presentation found in Vasubandhu's ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA. The later Samayapradīpikā is a shorter explanation of the doctrines of the Vaibhāsikas, which in large measure summarizes the positions explored in the *Nyāyānusāra. Neither of these works survives in their Sanskrit originals but only in their Chinese translations. SaMghabhadra's defense of Kashmir Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāsika positions ushered in the neo-Vaibhāsika period of Sarvāstivāda thought, which took the *Nyāyānusāra and the Samayapradīpikā as its main texts.
saMvṛtibodhicitta. (T. kun rdzob byang chub kyi sems). In Sanskrit, "conventional (or relative) aspiration to enlightenment." In Indian MAHĀYĀNA scholastic literature, this term is contrasted with the "ultimate aspiration to enlightenment" (PARAMĀRTHABODHICITTA). The term saMvṛtibodhicitta is used to refer to BODHICITTA in its more common usage, as the aspiration to achieve buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. It is the generation of this aspiration for enlightenment (BODHICITTOTPĀDA) that marks the beginning of the bodhisattva path and the Mahāyāna path of accumulation (SAMBHĀRAMĀRGA). The ultimate aspiration or mind of enlightenment refers to the bodhisattva's direct realization of the ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA). In the case of the MADHYAMAKA school's interpretation, this would be the direct realization of emptiness (suNYATĀ). Such realization, and hence the ultimate aspiration to enlightenment, occurs beginning on the Mahāyāna path of vision (DARsANAMĀRGA) and is further developed on the path of cultivation (BHĀVANĀMĀRGA). These two types of bodhicitta explain how bodhicitta is present both during periods of concentration or equipoise (see SAMĀPATTI, SAMĀHITA) on the ultimate truth and during all the other stages of the path, called subsequent attainment (pṛsthalabdha; cf. PṚstHALABDHAJNĀNA). These two terms inform the presentation of bodhicitta in the BODHICITTAVIVARAnA, attributed to NĀGĀRJUNA, and are widely employed in Tibetan BLO SBYONG literature.
samyakpradhāna. (P. sammāpadhāna; T. yang dag par spong ba; C. zhengqin; J. shogon; K. chonggŭn 正勤). In Sanskrit, "right effort" or "correct effort"; in Tibetan (which reads the term as PRAHĀnA), "right abandonment." There are four right efforts, which are set forth within the presentation of the second set of dharmas making up the thirty-seven constituents of enlightenment (BODHIPĀKsIKADHARMA). The four pradhānas (efforts or, as prahāna, abandonments) describe effort at incipient stages of the path or religious training; by contrast, right effort (SAMYAKVYĀYĀMA), the sixth constituent of the eightfold path (ĀRYĀstĀnGAMĀRGA), denotes the effort or abandonment that occurs during the path of vision (DARsANAMĀRGA) or the path of cultivation (BHĀVANĀMĀRGA), when the path is more fully developed. Pradhāna involves the effort to abandon unwholesome (AKUsALA) mental states-and their resulting actions via body, speech, and mind-that are conducive to suffering. Simultaneously, samyakpradhāna encompasses the effort to cultivate those wholesome (KUsALA) mental states that are conducive to happiness for both oneself and others. These wholesome mental states are characterized by mindfulness (SMṚTI), energy (VĪRYA), rapture (PRĪTI), concentration (SAMĀDHI), and equanimity (UPEKsĀ). At the first stage of practice, the focus is on SMṚTI, which, as the foundations of mindfulness (SMṚTYUPASTHĀNA), involves mindfulness of the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS as applied to the body, sensations, states of mind, and wholesome and unwholesome dharmas. At the second stage of the practice, the focus is on the effort needed to develop samādhi. When fully developed in the mind of the awakened person, the practice of mindfulness is called right mindfulness; concentration, rapture, and equanimity are included under right concentration; and energy is called right effort (samyakvyāyāma).
Sanjie jiao. (J. Sangaikyo/Sankaikyo; K. Samgye kyo 三階教). In Chinese, often translated as the "Three Stages School," but more probably referring to the "School of the Third Stage." The Sanjie jiao was a Chinese religious movement that was inspired by the influential teachings of the Chinese monk XINXING (540-594). The community shared Xinxing's belief in the decline of the DHARMA (MOFA) and the concomitant decay of one's potential or capacity (genji) for attaining buddhahood. According to the Three Stages teachings, the capacities of sentient beings are roughly divided into the so-called three stages (sanjie). The first two stages, now past, are those of the one vehicle (YISHENG; cf. EKAYĀNA) or three vehicles (TRIYĀNA), during which correct views about Buddhism were still present in the world. The current "third stage" (i.e., the present) was characterized instead by the proliferation of false views and prejudices. Because people during this degenerate age of the dharma were inevitably mistaken in their perceptions of reality, it was impossible for them to make any correct distinctions, whether between right and wrong, good and evil, ordained and lay. To counter these inveterate tendencies toward discrimination, Sanjie jiao adherents were taught instead to treat all things as manifestations of the buddha-nature (FOXING), leading to a "universalist teaching" (pufa) of Buddhism that was presumed to have supplanted all the previous teachings of the religion. Xinxing advocated that almsgiving (DĀNA) was the epitome of Buddhist practice during the degenerate age of the dharma and that the true perfection of giving (DĀNAPĀRAMITĀ) meant that all people, monks and laypeople alike, should be making offerings to relieve the suffering to those most in need, including the poor, the orphaned, and the sick. In its radical reinterpretation of the practice of giving in Buddhism, even animals were considered to be a more appropriate object of charity than were buddhas, bodhisattvas, monks, or the three jewels (RATNATRAYA); members of the community were even said to bow down to dogs. As the only reliable practice during this degenerate third stage, the Sanjie jiao community institutionalized giving in the form of an "inexhaustible storehouse cloister" (WUJINZANG YUAN). Donations made to the inexhaustible storehouse established by the Three Stages community at the monastery Huadusi in Chang'an would be distributed again during times of famine. The offerings were also used to fund the restoration of monasteries and the performance of religious services (i.e., the reverence field of merit, C. jingtian), and to provide alms to the poor (i.e., the compassion field of merit, C. beitian; see PUnYAKsETRA). The inexhaustible storehouse also came to serve as a powerful money-lending institution. The Three Stages community was labeled a heresy during the persecution of Buddhism during the Tang dynasty and, in 713, the Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-756) issued an edict closing the inexhaustible storehouse due to charges of embezzlement; its scriptures were eventually labeled spurious (see APOCRYPHA) and dropped out of circulation, only to be rediscovered in the DUNHUANG manuscript cache. Despite these persecutions, the school continued to be influential for several more centuries.
sanskrit ::: n. --> The ancient language of the Hindoos, long since obsolete in vernacular use, but preserved to the present day as the literary and sacred dialect of India. It is nearly allied to the Persian, and to the principal languages of Europe, classical and modern, and by its more perfect preservation of the roots and forms of the primitive language from which they are all descended, is a most important assistance in determining their history and relations. Cf. Prakrit, and Veda.
Sanskrit, on the other hand, “was really the sacred language of the Brahmanas and held more or less private or secret by them. The Sanskrit even in those ancient times was the vehicle for the archaic Wisdom-teachings of the Aryan peoples of India, such as the Vedas, and the Puranas, and the Upanishads, and the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But Pali was one of several other languages of culture in ancient India, all which were of so-called Prakrit character, although very little is known about these other literary languages. Pali has survived to the present time because . . . it became the linguistic vehicle in which were enshrined the teachings of Buddhism, i.e., of Southern Buddhism, much as Latin has survived because enshrining the teachings of early medieval Christianity. Just as there were in ancient Italy many other Italic tongues, each one having its literary or cultured form, and likewise its popular idiom, so was it in ancient India.
sanyao. (J. san'yo; K. samyo 三要). In Chinese, the "three essentials," of meditation practice in the CHAN school: (1) the faculty of great faith (da xingen; cf. sRADDHĀ and INDRIYA), (2) great ferocity or tenacity of purpose (da fenzhi), and (3) the sensation of great doubt (da YIQING). These essentials are specifically relevant to cultivation of the "Chan of observing the meditative topic" (KANHUA CHAN), or "questioning meditation." This list was first compiled by the Yuan-dynasty Chan monk GAOFENG YUANMIAO (1238-1295) in his Gaofeng heshang chanyao, better known as simply the CHANYAO ("Essentials of Chan"; K. Sonyo); the list figures prominently in the presentation of SoN in the SoN'GA KWIGAM by the Korean Son monk CH'oNGHo HYUJoNG (1520-1604), whence it enters into the Japanese ZEN tradition. As Gaofeng explains them, the faculty of great faith (sraddhendriya) refers to the steadfastness of belief in the inherency of the buddha-nature (FOXING) as the ground of enlightenment. Great ferocity means intense passion toward practice, which he compares to the emotions you would feel if you came across your father's murderer. Gaofeng describes the sensation of doubt (YIQING) regarding the intent behind Chan meditative topics (HUATOU) as like the anxiety and anticipation you feel when you are about to be exposed for some heinous act you committed. All three of these factors are essential, Gaofeng says, if the adept is to have any hope of mastering the kanhua Chan technique.
Savarna (Sanskrit) Sāvarṇa Similar in color or appearance or class; the eighth manu. A name used either alone or in combination for all the manus succeeding the eighth, except the last two, the 13th and 14th. Being the eighth manu of our earth-chain, Savarna is the seed-manu of the present fourth round; and Savarna’s culmination of svabhavic individuality will be during the last root-races on globe G of our planetary chain.
Scepticism, Fourteenth Century: At the beginning of the 14th century, Duns Scotus adopted a position which is not formally sceptical, though his critical attitude to earlier scholasticism may contain the germs of the scepticism of his century. Among Scotistic pre-sceptical tendencies may be mentioned the stress on self-knowledge rather than the knowledge of extra-mental reality, psychological voluntarism which eventuallj made the assent of judgment a matter of will rather than of intellect, and a theory of the reality of universal essences which led to a despair of the intellect's capacity to know such objects and thus spawned Ockhamism. Before 1317, Henry of Harclay noticed that, since the two terms of efficient causal connection are mutually distinct and absolute things, God, by his omnipotent will, can cause anything which naturally (naturaliter) is caused by a finite agent. He inferred from this that neither the present nor past existence of a finite external agent is necessarily involved in cognition (Pelstex p. 346). Later Petrus Aureoli and Ockham made the sime observation (Michalski, p. 94), and Ockham concluded that natural knowledge of substance and causal connection is possible only on the assumption that nature is pursuing a uniform, uninterrupted course at the moment of intuitive cognition. Without this assumption, observed sequences might well be the occasion of direct divine causal action rather than evidence of natural causation. It is possible that these sceptical views were suggested by reading the arguments of certain Moslem theologians (Al Gazali and the Mutakallimun), as well as by a consideration of miracles. The most influential sceptical author of the fourteenth century was Nicholas of Autrecourt (fl. 1340). Influenced perhaps by the Scotist conception of logical demonstration, Nicholas held that the law of noncontradiction is the ultimate and sole source of certainty. In logical inference, certainty is guaranteed because the consequent is identical with part or all of the antecedent. No logical connection can be established, therefore, between the existence or non-existence of one thing and the existence or non-existence of another and different thing. The inference from cause to effect or conversely is thus not a matter of certainty. The existence of substance, spiritual or physical, is neither known nor probable. We are unable to infer the existence of intellect or will from acts of intellection or volition, and sensible experience provides no evidence of external substances. The only certitudes properly so-called are those of immediate experience and those of principles known ex terminis together with conclusions immediately dependent on them. This thoroughgoing scepticism appears to have had considerable influence in its time, for we find many philosophers expressing, expounding, or criticizing it. John Buridan has a detailed criticism in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics (in 1 I, q. 4), Fitz-Ralph, Jacques d'Eltville, and Pierre d'Ailly maintain views similar to Nicholas', with some modifications, and there is at least one exposition of Nicholas' views in an anonymous commentary on the Sentences (British Museum, Ms. Harley 3243). These sceptical views were usually accompanied by a kind of probabilism. The condemnation of Nicholas in 1347 put a damper on the sceptical movement, and there is probably no continuity from these thinkers to the French sceptics of the 16th century. Despite this lack of direct influence, the sceptical arguments of 14th century thinkers bear marked resemblances to those employed by the French Occasionalists, Berkeley and Hume.
Science [from Latin scientia from scire to know] In its widest sense formulated knowledge, a knowledge of structure, laws, and operations. The unity of human knowledge may be artificially divided into religion, philosophy, and science. Science and philosophy, as presently understood, have in common the quality of being speculative, as opposed to religion, which in the West is supposed to be founded merely on faith and moral sentiments. The present distinction between science and philosophy lies largely in their respective fields of speculation. What is known as modern science investigates the phenomena of physical nature and by inferential reasoning formulates general laws therefrom. Its method is called inductive and its data are so-called facts — i.e., sensory observations; whereas deductive philosophy starts from axioms. Yet a scientist, in order to reason from his data at all, must necessarily use both induction and deduction.
secularist ::: n. --> One who theoretically rejects every form of religious faith, and every kind of religious worship, and accepts only the facts and influences which are derived from the present life; also, one who believes that education and other matters of civil policy should be managed without the introduction of a religious element.
secularity ::: n. --> Supreme attention to the things of the present life; worldliness.
Sesha (Sanskrit) Śeṣa [from the verbal root śiṣ to leave a remainder or residue] Remainder; the karmic remainders of the preceding cosmic manvantara which become the basis for the manifestation of the present manvantara. Also the name of the seven-headed serpent of space on which Vishnu rests during pralaya, representing the seven principles of the cosmos in which the spiritual or unmanifested universe remains until the period for its new manifestation arrives, thereafter to become manifest by degrees. Sesha or Ananta, the couch of Vishnu, is an abstraction symbolizing ever-continuing cosmic life in space, which contains the remainders or germs of the future manvantara, and throws off periodically the efflorescence of these germs as the manifested universe. But during a solar pralaya, the cosmic spirit from which all flows forth, reposes sleeping upon Sesha, the serpent of eternity, in the midst of the kosmic Deep. Hence Sesha is considered Vishnu’s first vahana (vehicle) in the primordial water of space, before manvantaric activity begins.
session layer ::: (networking) The third highest protocol layer (layer 5) in the OSI seven layer model. The session layer uses the transport layer to establish a connection between processes on different hosts. It handles security and creation of the session. It is used by the presentation layer.Documents: ITU Rec. X.225 (ISO 8327), ITU Rec. X.215 (ISO 8326).[Examples?] (1997-12-07)
Set (or Sut): Lit. Black. Our word "soot" derives from this incalculably ancient name. Set was the primordial god of the Egyptians; no earlier exists in the recorded history of the present human race. See also Shaitan.
Shaitan: The ancient deity* of the Yezidi, worshipped in Lower Mesopotamia, the source of the Sumerian Tradition that Crowley set out to restore. The name Shin tan is a form of Set and has many qabalistic meanings,some of which have been dealt with fully in the present volume. The namealso conceals the complete formula of Sexual Magick as practised by Crowley. The corruption of the name as Satan is the work of those who failed to understand the true formula and thus degraded the image.
Shambalah: The sacred island of esoteric tradition, believed to have been situated in the present Gobi desert in Asia. According to the teachings of several occult schools, including the theosophists, Shambalah is a place or town in the Himalayas.
Shin (Heb.): The letter of Spirit in the Hebrew Alphabet. Its numerical value is 300. It is of great importance in the present Aeon becauseit is attributed to the twentieth Key of the
Siddhanta (Sanskrit) Siddhānta [from siddha accomplished from the verbal root sidh to accomplish, succeed + anta end, completion] An established or canonical textbook or scientific treatise on astronomy and mathematics. One of the best known and most ancient in India is the Surya-Siddhanta, whose age dates even from Atlantean times. The Surya-Siddhanta itself claims to have been written down under solar instruction by the Atlantean astronomer and mathematician Asuramaya, so that it is contemporaneous with the first appearance of the present fifth root-race.
Silence of the ordinary rmnd-mechanism is necessary in order that the higher meiitahty nray mamifest, descend, occupy by degrees the place of the present im|«rfect mentality and trans- form the activities ot the latter into its own fuller movements.
silsila ::: lit., chain; the lineage of a Sufi tariqa descending from Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), through Ali Ibn Abu Talib or Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with them). The chain of transmission includes all murshids of the order up to the present.
since ::: adv. --> From a definite past time until now; as, he went a month ago, and I have not seen him since.
In the time past, counting backward from the present; before this or now; ago.
When or that. ::: prep.
Since the middle of the fourth root-race, no monads from the animal kingdom could any longer enter the human kingdom because from that time the earth started on its ascending arc of evolution. Nevertheless, the monads imbodied in the anthropoids will enter the very lowest and least evolved branchlets of the human kingdom during the fifth round. The monads now in anthropoid bodies will disappear from incarnation during the present fifth root-race to enter their inter-round paranirvana, remaining as astral monads until the next (fifth) round. A relatively few individuals among the anthropoids, because of having attained the most advanced degree of evolution in the anthropoid stock, will reach quasi-human status, although still in anthropoid bodies, before the fifth root-race has reached its end. Even these exceptional anthropoids will probably have died out before the fifth root-race is ended or by the early sixth root-race — a period several million years from now.
Skuld (Icelandic) A debt, due; the third of the three norns who determine the fate of heroes in Norse mythology and who parallel the Greek Moirai. Skuld represents the future or unexpended karma, that which is due and owing. Her sister norns are named Urd (origin) and Verdandi (becoming). Skuld is said to be created by her two sisters: by the causes set in motion in the past (Urd) and the decisions and actions taken in the present (Verdandi). Hence she is the inevitable consequence of what has gone before.
Sortes Sanctorum (Latin) [from sors lot + sanctum holy] Divination of the holy ones; the oracular responses, sayings, or prophecies of the oracles. In a more popular sense, the mere casting of lots, or the attempt to ascertain the future by methods which have been popular throughout the ages. Divination was sometimes resorted to in the early Christian Church, and sanctioned even by Augustine, with the proviso that it must be used only for pure and lofty purposes. One manner probably consisted in picking a passage in holy writ, after praying for divine guidance. In the ancient sanctuaries, however, a genuine divination was practiced by actual seers who based their operations upon mathematics and on the fact that nature foreshadows what is to come to pass, because all her processes are regulated by law, and are consistent sequences of phenomena connected in a causal chain from spiritual originants. Thus the ancient seer or forecaster, taking almost any natural occurrence, or a series of them, could from his trained faculties, forecast what the present series of events in nature were inevitably leading towards. To do this successfully one would have to be a genuine seer, which means employing the awakened intuition and spiritual clairvoyance which lie latent in most human beings.
Sri Aurobindo: "Destiny in the rigid sense applies only to the outer being so long as it lives in the Ignorance. What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One"s spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.” *Letters on Yoga
*Sri Aurobindo: "The Indian explanation of fate is Karma. We ourselves are our own fate through our actions, but the fate created by us binds us; for what we have sown, we must reap in this life or another. Still we are creating our fate for the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present. That gives a meaning to our will and action and does not, as European critics wrongly believe, constitute a rigid and sterilising fatalism. But again, our will and action can often annul or modify even the past Karma, it is only certain strong effects, called utkata karma, that are non-modifiable. Here too the achievement of the spiritual consciousness and life is supposed to annul or give the power to annul Karma. For we enter into union with the Will Divine, cosmic or transcendent, which can annul what it had sanctioned for certain conditions, new-create what it had created, the narrow fixed lines disappear, there is a more plastic freedom and wideness. Neither Karma nor Astrology therefore points to a rigid and for ever immutable fate.” Letters on Yoga
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)
Such traditions are found everywhere, from Chaldea to Peru and Mexico, and always consistent with one plan. They recount the evolution of mankind through long ages preceding the present kali yuga; and teach that, as mankind proceeded on the descending arc, human beings were ruled successively by gods, demigods, heroes, and finally mortal initiate-kings, who later gave way to ordinary human rulers. Among genuine semidivine heroes who belong to the earliest part of the present root-race, are such names as Orpheus, Hermes, Cadmus, and Asclepios, all of whom revealed true esoteric sciences to humanity, from which sciences have descended to our own times the various arts, knowledges, and sciences.
Sustainable development - Is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Syndicalism: This social and political theory, usually considered as the creation of Georges Sorel, is philosophically rooted in a radical anti-intellectualism. Will, faith and action are the basic and creative realities of human nature, whereas all ideological factors are but creatures of these realities -- they are 'myths.' Working upon this metaphysical assumption and upon the Marxist concept of the class struggle, Syndicalsm argues that the ills and vices of bourgeois society can be eliminated only if that class which possesses the most creative power (such a class is known as the 'elite') destroys the present form of society by direct action and violence guided by the 'myth of the general strike.' The working class is, of course, taken to be this elite, and hence the trade unions, or 'syndicates', become the center of the revolution. The economic aim of the revolution is to substitute collectivism for capitalism, its political aim, to substitute 'proletarian management' through the instrumentality of the various syndicates (which represent functional interests) for political control through the instrumentality of the State. Some features of Syndicalism have been consciously incorporated into the ideology of Italian Fascism. -- M.B.M.
Ta’aroa (Tahitian) The chief Tahitian god who broke out of the darkness within the cosmic egg. After living alone, he created a daughter with whom he made the manifested world. Later he fashioned man out of red earth, and then put him to sleep for ages — referring to the ages during which the mind principle had not yet awakened to conscious activity. During this sleep Ta’aroa extracted a bone from the man, and from this fashioned woman, a reference to the third root-race when the androgynous mankind separated into the present type of sexual humanity. The mental sleep of the third root-race mankind lasted from a number of minor time periods after the separation, and before mind really incarnated in the relatively mindless bodies. Whether the myths relating to the creation of man and woman are indigenous or imported from Christianity is debated.
Tantra: That body of Hindu religious literature which is stated to have been revealed by Shiva as the specific scripture of the Kali Yuga (the present age). The Tantras were the encyclopedias of esoteric knowledge of their time; the topics of a Tantra are: the creation of the universe, worship of the gods, spiritual exercise, rituals, the six magical powers, and meditation.
Teleology: (Gr. telos, end, completion) The theory of purpose, ends, goals, final causes, values, the Good (s.). The opposite of Mechanism. As opposed to mechanism, which explains the present and the future in terms of the past, teleology explains the past and the present in terms of the future. Teleology as such does not imply personal consciousness, volition, or intended purpose (q.v.). Physics, Biology: See Vitalism. Psychology: See Hormic, Instinct, Hedonism, Voluntarism. Epistemology: the view that mind is guided or governed by purposes, values, interests, "instinct", as well as by "factual", "objective" or logical evidence in its pursuit of truth (see Fideism, Voluntarism, Pragmatism, Will-to-believe, Value judgment). Metaphysics: The doctrine that reality is ordered by goals, ends, purposes, values, formal or final causes (q.v.). Ethics: The view that the standard of human life is value, the Good, rather than duty, law, or formal decorum.
temporal ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the temple or temples; as, the temporal bone; a temporal artery. ::: n. --> Of or pertaining to time, that is, to the present life, or this world; secular, as distinguished from sacred or eternal.
Civil or political, as distinguished from ecclesiastical;
Term to maturity - The period of time from the present to the redemption date of a bond. Also called simply the term.
terrestrial ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the earth; existing on the earth; earthly; as, terrestrial animals.
Representing, or consisting of, the earth; as, a terrestrial globe.
Of or pertaining to the world, or to the present state; sublunary; mundane.
Consisting of land, in distinction from water; belonging to, or inhabiting, the land or ground, in distinction from
The asexual procreative methods of the early root-races had evolved to the hermaphroditic status in the early and middle third root-race. The present conditions of sex will also pass away in due course of time after ages of experience as man and woman shall have brought forth the innate masculine and feminine aspects of the human ego. The human race in the course of millions of years will become dual-sexed and finally sexless.
The beasts, for instance, as indeed all other kingdoms in similar circumstances, are undergoing retardation at the present time in another slightly different sense: because they have not as yet evolved forth human qualities and powers. They will not make the grade into the human kingdom on the ascending arc for all the remainder of the present chain-manvantara, and this is the meaning of the phrase frequently found in theosophical writings that the door into the human kingdom closed at about the midpoint of the fourth root-race.
The Brahmanas and Puranas generally reckon twelve adityas. In a preceding manvantara they were called tushitas, but when the end of the cycle was near they entered the “womb of Aditi, that we may be born in the next Manwantara; for, thereby, we shall again enjoy the rank of gods.” Hence in the present seventh manvantara, they are known as adityas (VP 1:15). When the pralaya (dissolution) of the world comes, twelve suns will appear (MB 3:3, 26; Dict Hind 3). The twelve adityas are the twelve great gods of the Hindu pantheon; also, the twelve signs of the zodiac or twelve months of the year.
The capital roman letters here denote arbitrary formulas of the propositional calculus (in the technical sense defined below) and the arrow is to be read "stands for" or "is an abbreviation for." Suppose that we have given some specific list of propositional symbols, which may be infinite in number, and to which we shall refer as the fundamental propositional symbols. These are not necessarily single letters or characters, but may be expressions taken from any language or system of notation; they may denote particular propositions, or they may contain variables and denote ambiguously any proposition of a certain form or class. Certain restrictions are also necessary upon the way in which the fundamental propositional symbols can contain square brackets [ ]; for the present purpose it will suffice to suppose that they do not contain square brackets at all, although they may contain parentheses or other kinds of brackets. We call formulas of the propositional calculus (relative to the given list of fundamental propositional symbols) all the expressions determined by the four following rules: all the fundamental propositional symbols are formulas if A is a formula, ∼[A] is a formula; if A and B are formulas [A][B] is a formula; if A and B are formulas [A] ∨ [B] is a formula. The formulas of the propositional calculus as thus defined will in general contain more brackets than are necessary for clarity or freedom from ambiguity; in practice we omit superfluous brackets and regard the shortened expressions as abbreviations for the full formulas. It will be noted also that, if A and B are formulas, we regard [A] | [B], [A] ⊃ [B], [A] ≡ [B], and [A] + [B], not as formulas, but as abbreviations for certain formulas in accordance with the above given definitions.
The_current_price ::: is the actual selling price of a security trading on an exchange, as well as the most recent price of a security listed in an investment portfolio. In the case of a bond, a bond's current price will often be quoted as 10% of the par value of $1000. A bond that currently trades at $99 is really priced at $990. Current price also refers to the present price of a stock, currency, commodity, stamps or a precious metal.
“The Earth is said to cast off her old three skins, because this refers to the three preceding Rounds she has already passed through; the present being the fourth Round out of the seven. At the beginning of every new Round, after a period of ‘obscuration,’ the earth (as do also the other six ‘earths’) casts off, or is supposed to cast off, her old skins as the Serpent does . . .” (SD 2:47).
The existing anthropoid apes, however, are truly the closest of the animals or semi-animals to the human stock, actually having originated from a miscegenation by very early, quasi-mindless humans (actually undeveloped savages of those far distant times) with what then were fairly evolved simian types. Thus the present-day anthropoids are a somewhat, if slightly, advanced stock over their earlier forefathers who were the original anthropoids produced by the “sin” of unevolved and savage Atlantean tribes with simians. Precisely because the anthropoids have some human ancestry they will attract to incarnation in the future human egos as yet in a low state of unfolded spiritual and intellectual powers and capacities, and who will thus, as the cycles roll on, finally evolve into a low type of thinking and sensitive human being.
The human senses are actually seven including, besides the usual five already developed, the organ or function of manas (mind) and of buddhi (understanding). These latter two are not senses in the physical significance pertaining to the bodily senses, but the emphasis is laid on organic and functional activities, both being inner and spiritual-intellectual. At the present stage of evolution man has not developed the power of manifesting the sixth and seventh sense functions and organs, but in the fifth round the development of ether will bring forth into relatively full evolution the manasic sense organ with the beginnings of the buddhic.
The leukocytes born in the spleen are analogous, in their spherical, nucleated, colorless, ameboid, and regenerating character, to the bloodless, astral, rounded form of the second root-race which reproduced its kind by spores or budding. This early type of racial imbodiment continued through the transition stages which led up to the physicalization of the grosser layers of the astral body when the third root-race evolved into red-blooded, sexual, organized form not unlike the present humanity.
The linga-sarira has great tensile strength. It changes continuously during a lifetime, although these changes never depart from the fundamental human type or pattern, just as the physical body alters every moment. It also possesses the ability to exteriorize itself to a certain distance from its physical encasement, but in no case more than a few feet. It is composed of electromagnetic matter, which is somewhat more refined than the matter of our physical body. The whole world was composed of such matter in far past ages before it became the dense physical sphere it now is. After long ages the astral form had evolved and perfected, so that it has the form that the human races had during the early period of the third root-race — a more or less materialized concretion of the still more ethereal astrals of the first and second root-races. After another long period, during which the cycle of further descent into matter progressed, the gradually thickening astral form oozed forth from itself a coat of skin, corresponding to the Hebrew allegory of the Garden of Eden. Thus the present physical flesh-form of mankind appears.
The more advanced portion of the Mimansa is called the Vedanta, which is the present-day theosophy of Hindustan. The Vedanta, also called the Uttara-mimansa, is attributed to Vyasa, the arranger of the Vedas, as its founder.
The Norns dwell under one of the three roots of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, which is watered by the spring of Urd (past causes). So also is every individual tree of life, large or little, watered by the causes created in the past, modified by the choices of the present, and helping to create the future.
“The numberless traditions about Satyrs are no fables, but represent an extinct race of animal men. The animal ‘Eves’ were their foremothers, and the human ‘Adams’ their forefathers; hence the Kabalistic allegory of Lilith or Lilatu, Adam’s first wife, whom the Talmud describes as a charming woman, with long wavy hair, i.e., — a female hairy animal of a character now unknown, still a female animal, who in the Kabalistic and Talmudic allegories is called the female reflection of Samael, Samael-Lilith, or man-animal united, a being called Hayoh Bishah, the Beast or Evil Beast. (Zohar, ii, 255, 259). It is from this unnatural union that the present apes descended” (SD 2:262).
::: ". . . the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the Person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by any structural limits.” *The Life Divine
“… the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the Person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by any structural limits.” The Life Divine
The reader will observe that this use of quotation marks has not been followed in the present article, and in fact that there are frequent inaccuracies from the point of view of strict preservation of the distinction between a symbol and its name. These inaccuracies are of too involved a character to be removed by merely supplying quotation marks at appropriate places. But it is thought that there is no point at which real doubt will arise as to the meaning intended. -- Alonzo Church
These beings belong to two general divisions, the arupa (formless) and the rupa (form) divinities. Those having forms should not be imagined as necessarily having human forms as in the ancient pantheons, yet rupa gods do have highly ethereal forms, some perhaps resembling the present human shape and others of quite different construction. But the arupa divinities are to our power of imagination “beings of pure intelligence and of understanding, pure essences, pure spirits, formless as we conceive form” (Fund 347).
“The Secret Doctrine teaches that ‘He who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Re-absorption (pralaya).’ Thus the logoi of all nations, from the Vedic Visvakarma of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilised nations, are the ‘Word’ who was ‘in the beginning’ (or the reawakening of the energising powers of Nature) with the One Absolute. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct elements, It was the ‘Maker’ (fashioner or modeller) of all things . . . who finally may be called, as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of manifested Nature” (SD 1:470).
“The three periods — the Present, the Past, and the Future — are in the esoteric philosophy a compound time; for the three are a composite number only in relation to the phenomenal plane, but in the realm of noumena have no abstract validity” (SD 1:43).
The three signs Virgo-Libra-Scorpio were formerly represented by one sign, Virgo-Scorpio, so that originally the zodiac exoterically consisted of ten signs; and then two secret signs were added, thus making the present zodiac of twelve signs or houses. This was done by dividing this sign into Virgo and Scorpio and placing between them the balancing sign Libra, said to have been invented by the Greeks. The Hindu zodiac also has the sign Tula (balance) in this position, presided over by Kuvera, ruler of the Underworld. As said by Subba Row, this sign prepares the way for the earthly Adam to become Nara (spiritual man).
The tree has three roots watered by three wells. One is in Asgard, home of the gods, where it is watered by the three norns: the past (Urd, origin), the present (Verdandi, becoming), and the future which is created by them — owing (Skuld, debt). A second root penetrates the world of matter, where it is watered from the well of the giant Mimer whose waters are experience of life. Odin gave one eye as forfeit in order to receive a draft of that well, while Mimer has the use of Odin’s eye which is sunk in the bottom of the well. The third root is watered by Hvergelmir, source of all the rivers of lives (kingdoms of nature) which rises in Niflheim, the world of mists (nebulae) where worlds are born.
The Zohar contains the universal wisdom or theosophy of the ages. Nevertheless it “teaches practical occultism more than any other work on that subject; not as it is translated though, and commented upon by its various critics, but with the secret signs on its margins. These signs contain the hidden instructions, apart form the metaphysical interpretations and apparent absurdities . . .” (IU 2:350). The present “approximation of the Zohar was written by Moses de Leon in the 13th century. “Mistaken is he who accepts the Kabalistic works of to-day, and the interpretations of the Zohar by the Rabbis, for the genuine Kabalistic lore of old! For no more to-day than in the day of Frederick von Schelling does the Kabala accessible to Europe and America, contain much more than ‘ruins and fragments, much distorted remnants still of that primitive system which is the key to all religious systems’ . . . The oldest system and the Chaldean Kabala were identical. The latest renderings of the Zohar are those of the Synagogue in the early centuries — i.e., the Thorah, dogmatic and uncompromising” (SD 2:461-2).
Though the roots of Scholasticism are to be found in the preoccupation of the Patristical (vide) period, its proper history does not begin until the Carolingian renaissance in the ninth century. From that date to the present day, its history may be divided into seven divisions.
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 when Jesus speaks of my Father and your Father, he means the cosmic paramatman or universal spirit presiding over our universe, of which every monad in the present solar manvantara — except those peregrinating through our solar system as visitors — is an offspring or spark; furthermore, every class of adepts has its own bond of spiritual communion which knits them together, because of identity of origin in a dhyani-buddha of our universe; and thus it is that every buddha, indeed every great adept, meets at his last initiation all the great adepts who had reached buddhahood during the preceding ages. “Such communion is only possible between persons whose souls derive their life and sustenance from the same divine ray” (Subba Row in SD 1:574). The awareness of such a community of origin pertains to planes of being far above the personal self, and it has nothing to do with so transitory a phase of human evolution as sex.
time ::: 1. Duration regarded as belonging to the present life as distinct from the life to come or from eternity; finite duration. 2. A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. 3. A period in the existence or history of the world; an age, an era. Time, time-born, time-bound, time-constructed, time-driven, time-field, time-flakes, time-inn, time-loop, time-made, time-plan, time-vexed, time-walk, world-time, World-Time"s.
“Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but ‘lies asleep.’ The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past. Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change — or the same — for the billionth part of a second; and the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past” (SD 1:37).
T'ime: The general medium in which all events take place in succession or appear to take place in succession. All specific and finite periods of time, whether past, present or future, constitute merely parts of the entire and single Time. Common-sense interprets Time vaguely as something moving toward the future or as something in which events point in that direction. But the many contradictions contained in this notion have led philosophers to postulate doctrines purporting to eliminate some of the difficulties implied in common-sense ideas. The first famous but unresolved controversy arose in Ancient Greece, between Parmenides, who maintained that change and becoming were irrational illusions, and Heraclitus, who asserted that there was no permanence and that change characterized everything without exception. Another great controversy arose centuries later between disciples of Newton and Leibniz. According to Newton, time was independent of, and prior to, events; in his own words, "absolute time, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external." According to Leibniz, on the other hand, there can be no time independent of events: for time is formed by events and relations among them, and constitutes the universal order of succession. It was this latter doctrine which eventually gave rise to the doctrine of space-time, in which both space and time are regarded as two systems of relations, distinct from a perceptual standpoint, but inseparably bound together in reality. All these controversies led many thinkers to believe that the concept of time cannot be fully accounted for, unless we distinguish between perceptual, or subjective, time, which is confined to the perceptually shifting 'now' of the present, and conceptual, or objective, time, which includes til periods of time and in which the events we call past, present and future can be mutually and fixedly related. See Becoming, Change, Duration, Persistence, Space-Time. -- R.B.W.
TIME Time simply means continuation, continued existence. Time is various ways of measuring motion, various kinds of processes of manifestation. Physical time is determined by the rotation of the earth and its circling round the sun. K
1.8.5
Time lacks dimension. Using a line to symbolize time was a failure, a thoroughly badly chosen simile which has given raise to many misconceptions. Only space has dimension. Time is that unity which links the past to the present and the future. Time is durability, continued existence, duration. Objective time is always connected with space in a succession of events. It is a measure of processes and therefore can be divided into periods, or time-cycles. Time is both objective and subjective. The cosmos (in primordial matter) consists of manifestational matter and is that which we can term space in which all worlds exist. Time is a way of measuring the total process in which all events occur.
Space as well as time can be divided into units however small and, for us, are ways of measuring and grading.
The past exists in the present. To a causal self, there is no past of the planetary atomic worlds 47-49, nor is there to a 43-self of the systemic atomic worlds 43-49.
K 5.36.3,5
to-day ::: prep. --> On this day; on the present day. ::: n. --> The present day.
tomorrow ::: adv. --> On the day after the present day; on the next day; on the morrow. ::: n. --> The day after the present; the morrow.
tonight ::: adv. --> On this present or coming night.
On the last night past. ::: n. --> The present or the coming night; the night after the present day.
trikaladr.s.t.i (trikaladrishti; trikaldrishti; trikaldristi) ::: literally "the trikaladrsti vision of the three times", i.e., "the direct knowledge of the past, the intuitive knowledge of the present and the prophetic knowledge of the future", the second member of the vijñana catus.t.aya. It is a special faculty of jñana "by which that general power is applied to the actuality of things"; its essence is a consciousness of "the Infinite deploying in itself and organising all things in time", making possible "a total view of the three times as one movement singly and indivisibly seen even in their succession of stages, periods, cycles".
Trinity The divine powers at the head of every theogony. In the Christian Trinity, the original idea of a triune divinity is preserved but has become confused and adapted to theological speculation. If the Holy Ghost is regarded as feminine, as it was in primitive Christianity, we have the trinity of Father-Mother-Son. The present manner of the procession of the Holy Ghost in the Occident is due to the early theological quarrels which was one of the main causes of the final rupture between the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches — the filioque (“and from the son”) controversy. The Orthodox held with the original procession of Father, Holy Ghost, and Son, while in the West the Holy Ghost or Spirit has become a kind of emanation from the Father or Son, or both of them, and is scarcely distinguishable in its attributes from the Son; while the place of Mother has been filled in the Roman Catholic Church by Mary who, though the mother of Jesus, nevertheless is not a member of the Trinity.
Tsela‘ (Hebrew) Tsēlā‘ A rib, side; a quarter of the heavens; a part or division. Used in reference to the Biblical allegory of the formation of Eve or woman from a rib, side, or portion of Adam (Genesis 2:21-3), who was the first man only in the sense of first humanity or mankind. The Biblical allegory refers to the teaching that the third root-race was androgynous or hermaphrodite — that the individuals of humanity were dual-sexed — so that when the sexes separated into the distinct male and female portions of mankind, as mankind is at present, the Jewish writers described this biological and historical physiological event as the separation of woman from man. One could equally say that man was separated from woman, or that man was made from a rib or side of woman. The ridiculous supposition that the female part of mankind was born from the male part of mankind because the first woman was separated from the first man by the Lord God taking one of the ribs of the latter and forming a woman out of it, arose from the error of understanding the Hebrew word Adam as signifying one individual human being of the present male type.
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
ultimo ::: --> In the month immediately preceding the present; as, on the 1st ultimo; -- usually abbreviated to ult. Cf. Proximo.
uniformitarian ::: a. --> Of, pertaining to, or designating, the view or doctrine that existing causes, acting in the same manner and with essentially the same intensity as at the present time, are sufficient to account for all geological changes. ::: n. --> One who accepts uniformitarianism, or the
Uniformity – Is the term describing the presentation of financial statements by different companies using the same accounting procedures, measurement concepts, classifications, and methods of disclosure.
Urd, Urdr (Scandinavian, Icelandic) [cf Swedish ur original, fundamental; Anglo-Saxon wyrd, English weird] Also Urdar. The principal of the three norns (Fates) in Norse mythology, representing the past in the sense of causation: all that has gone before, giving rise to the present. Her sister norns are Verdande (becoming), usually translated as the present; and Skuld (debt), obligations yet to be repaid. The past and present create the third sister, norn of the future, which is suggestive of karma, where the future is the outcome of all past and present acts.
Vaivasvata Manu (Vaivaswata Manu) ::: [the "sun-born Manu", the progenitor and sovereign of the present manvantara].
Verdandi (Icelandic) [from verda to become] In Norse mythology, the second of the three norns who determine the fate of heroes. All beings are subject to these three Fates, who correspond to the Greek Moirai. They have been described as Past, Present, and Future, though their names imply much more. Verdandi, the present, literally means “becoming,” the ever-renewed present moment wherein all things are possible and the future is determined.
VII. Leonine Restoration (1879). The Encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII gave this new movement a conscious direction. Since Leo XIII's time to the present day, Catholic Scholars have been active both in the fields of speculation and history. Numerous reviews have been founded and Scholasticism has raised its voice even in the non-sectarian Universities of America. -- W.G.
Viscid Earth Applied principally to the semi-astral material of our earth globe during the third round, and likewise to our earth during the first part of the present fourth round and during the first, second, and early third root-races of mankind when the earth, although quasi-astral and nearly compact, was nevertheless more concrete and solid than were the earliest root-races of mankind. Because the first and second root-races were far more ethereal or astral than the earth was, it is almost hopeless to expect to find fossils of these earliest humanities at the present time; they were too ethereal in their earliest portions to leave fossil remains in the earth which was more solid in consistency than they.
Voluspa (Icelandic) [from volva, vala sibyl + spa see clairvoyantly] The foremost lay of the poetic or Elder Edda, sung by the “wise sibyl” in response to Odin’s quest for knowledge. The vala represents the indelible record of the past, which here is consulted by the god Odin. Odin Allfather is the central character in Norse myths, and represents evolving consciousness, whether human, solar, planetary, or cosmic. Odin questions the vala and she responds with an account of creation and foretells the future destiny of conscious beings. From this record of the past history of the world, Odin learns about our planet’s destiny and of nine former worlds that preceded the present one. The entire process of cosmic evolution is here comprised in a thumbnail sketch, which is all but incomprehensible unless amplified by the other lays of the Elder Edda.
Waldenses A movement arising in the last quarter of the 12th century in the south of France, when Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons, distributed his wealth among the poor and went forth as a preacher of voluntary poverty, likewise preaching the doctrines of the Christ. He had the Bible translated into the language of the Provence, which he and his followers read and interpreted in their own way. This brought upon them the wrath of the clergy. At length Pope Alexander prohibited them from preaching without the permission of the bishops (1179). To this Waldo replied that he must obey God rather than man — for which he was excommunicated by Lucius III in 1184, which brought on a persecution of the Waldenses which continued through the Middle Ages. During the cruel and bloody crusade against the Albigenses, the Waldenses were also attacked and almost exterminated: they survived by fleeing into the mountains and secluded valleys of the Alps. Nevertheless the persecution continued inasmuch as their doctrines were called heretical. Many adherents joined the various reforming movements which arose in Europe from time to time — such as the Hussite, Lutheran, and Protestant — although a center remained in the valleys of the Vaudois even to the present day.
Week The period of seven days was known to the Hindus, Egyptians, Hebrews, and other ancient nations, but not used by the Greeks or Romans until the Christian Emperor Theodosius. It is not based on any exact astronomical cycle, so far as is ordinarily known, though it may be considered roughly as a subdivision of the month. It was well known to the Hebrews, and in the New Testament the word week translates the Greek Sabbator which is the Hebrew Shabbath. Though commonly Sabbath is taken to mean a seventh day after six, a more esoteric sense makes it a period of seven time units of rest after a period of seven active time units — in other words after a septenary manvantara comes a septenary pralaya. The word is also used of other sevenfold time periods, such as a week of years or of ages; for each of the days in a week of years represents 360 solar years, and the whole week 2,520 years. The Hebrews “had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc., etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years — in their secret calculations of the Sods. We of the present times call an age a century” (SD 2:395).
which commenced in 1904. It superseded the Aeon of Osiris, which was typified by the rise and fall of such religions as Juadaism and Christianity. Previous to that was the Aeon of Isis, the Pagan era, many elements of which are reappearing in the present Aeon.
Will-born Used in The Secret Doctrine as equivalent to mind-born — referring specifically to those beings in the early third root-race “while it was yet in its state of purity” who were created by means of will power through kriyasakti by the Sons of Wisdom. This progeny is termed the Sons of Ad, Sons of the Fire-mist, or Sons of Will and Yoga. “It was not a Race, this progeny. It was at first a wondrous Being, called the ‘Initiator,’ and after him a group of semi-divine and semi-human beings. ‘Set apart’ in Archaic genesis for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated the highest Dhyanis, ‘Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras’ — to form the nursery for future human adepts, on this earth and during the present cycle” (SD 1:207). Theosophy teaches that in future ages generation by means of will power through krisyasakti will again be the method of producing offspring.
Without any claims whatever to treat of the subject-matter in its entire depth or to describe exhaustively its terminology, the Institute in December 1986 published the first Swedish edition of the present work to the Scandinavian readers. After this first edition ran out of print 1991, the work at a new edition was begun, and in 1996 this second edition was published. The present English edition is a translation of the
1996 Swedish edition.
wonder ::: n. --> That emotion which is excited by novelty, or the presentation to the sight or mind of something new, unusual, strange, great, extraordinary, or not well understood; surprise; astonishment; admiration; amazement.
A cause of wonder; that which excites surprise; a strange thing; a prodigy; a miracle. ::: v. i.
worldly-minded ::: a. --> Devoted to worldly interests; mindful of the affairs of the present life, and forgetful of those of the future; loving and pursuing this world&
WORLD TEACHER, THE (T.B.) The head of the second department of the planetary hierarchy (department of education). The same as bodhisattva. The present holder of the office is 43-self Christos-Maitreya. (K 3.1.28)
Yadava (Sanskrit) Yādava A descendant of Yadu; also a great race of Hindustan in which Krishna was born. The founder of this race, Yadu, was the son of Yayati and Devayani, and ruled over the country west of the Jumna River, adjoining the Kurus. He was the half-brother of Puru, who became the founder of the Paurava line of the Chandravansa (lunar dynasty) — to which also belonged the Kurus and Pandus. The greatest of the Yadavas in Hindu story was Krishna (hence he is called Yadava, “son of Yadu”). He established the Yadavas in Gujarat, his capital city being Dvaraka, to which Krishna brought all the inhabitants of the city of Mathura after he had slain his wicked cousin Kansa who had usurped the throne. Sometime after Krishna’s death (3102 BC), a catastrophe occurred at Dvaraka in which the city and all its inhabitants were engulfed by the ocean. Only a few members of the race who were absent from the city were saved. The present rajas of Vijaya-nagara maintain that they are living descendants of the Yadavas.
Yellow Race(s) The intermingling of races is very complicated, and has been an ethnological fact for almost innumerable millennia in the past, so that we can only use the term in the plural and say yellow races, in reference to peoples in which a yellow or near-yellow skin is predominant and characteristic. Even during the fourth root-race on Atlantis “there were brown, red, yellow, white and black Atlanteans,” “who represented several humanities, and almost a countless number of races and nations”; “The present yellow races are the descendants, however, of the early branches of the Fourth Race” (SD 2:433; 199). Certain European ethnologists say that three fundamental colors enter into the human complexion — red, yellow, and black — and that these mingle in various proportions, giving the numerous other shades.
yesterday ::: n. --> The day last past; the day next before the present.
Fig.: A recent time; time not long past. ::: adv. --> On the day last past; on the day preceding to-day; as, the affair took place yesterday.
yet ::: n. --> Any one of several species of large marine gastropods belonging to the genus Yetus, or Cymba; a boat shell. ::: adv. --> In addition; further; besides; over and above; still.
At the same time; by continuance from a former state; still.
Up to the present time; thus far; hitherto; until now; --
Yuga(Sanskrit) ::: A word meaning an "age," a period of time. A yuga is a period of mundane time, and four ofthese periods are usually enumerated in "divine years":1. Krita or Satya Yuga. . . . 4,000Sandhya. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400Sandhyamsa. . . . . . . . . . . . . 400Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4,8002. Treta Yuga. . . . . . . . . . . 3,000Sandhya. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300Sandhyamsa. . . . . . . . . . . . . 300Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,6003. Dvapara Yuga. . . . . . . . 2,000Sandhya. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200Sandhyamsa. . . . . . . . . . . . . 200Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,4004. Kali Yuga. . . . . . . . . . . . 1,000Sandhya. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100Sandhyamsa. . . . . . . . . . . . . 100Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,200TOTAL . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . .12,000This rendered in years of mortals equals:4,800 x 360 = 1,728,0003,600 x 360 = 1,296,0002,400 x 360 = 864,0001,200 x 360 = 432,000. . . . . .Total 4,320,000Of these four yugas, our present racial period is the fourth or kali yuga, often called the "iron age" or the"black age." It is stated to have commenced at the moment of Krishna's death, usually given as 3,102years before the Christian era. There is a very important point of the teaching in connection with theyugas which must not be forgotten. It is the following: The four yugas as above outlined refer to whatmodern theosophical philosophy calls a root-race, although indeed a root-race from its individualbeginning to its individual ending is about double the length of the composite yuga above set forth incolumnar form. The racial yugas, however, overlap because each new great race is born at about themiddle period of the parent race, although the individual length of any one race is as above stated. Thus itis that by the overlapping of the races, a race and its succeeding race may for a long time becontemporaneous on the face of the globe.As the four yugas are a reflection in human history of what takes place in the evolution of the earth itselfand of the planetary chain, therefore the same scheme of yugas applies also on a cosmic scale -- thereexist the four series of satya yuga, treta yuga, dvapara yuga, and kali yuga, in the evolution of the earth,and on a still larger scale in the evolution of a planetary chain. Of course these cosmic yugas are verymuch longer than the racial yugas, but the same general scheme of 4, 3, 2 applies throughout. For furtherdetails of the teaching concerning the yugas, the student should consult H. P. Blavatsky's The SecretDoctrine, and the work by the present author, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy.
Zodiac ::: The Greeks called the zodiac the "circle of life," and they divided it into twelve houses or signs, namedas follows: Aries, the Ram; Taurus, the Bull; Gemini, the Twins; Cancer, the Crab; Leo, the Lion; Virgo,the Virgin; Libra, the Scales; Scorpio, the Scorpion; Sagittarius, the Archer; Capricornus, the Goat;Aquarius, the Water-bearer; Pisces, the Fishes.The entrance of the sun into each one of the twelve zodiacal constellations or signs brings with it a newcosmic force into operation, not merely on our earth, but distributively speaking throughout our ownindividual lives. The entering into the present astrological era which is now under way will inauguratethe development in the human race, in a certain line, of powers to come that will be nobler than werethose of the last astrological zodiacal era.There is a strict and close correspondence between each one of the globes of our earth-chain, and arespective one of the constellations of the zodiac -- each such constellation being one of the "houses ofthe circle of life."
KEYS (10k)
13 Sri Aurobindo
5 Alfred Korzybski
5 The Mother
4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Lao Tzu
2 Yamamoto Tsunetomo
2 Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange
2 Ramesh Balsekar
2 Ken Wilber
2 James George Frazer
2 Henry David Thoreau
2 Chamtrul Rinpoche
2 Buddha
2 Saint Thomas Aquinas
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2 Ibn Arabi
1 William S Burroughs
1 Whitman
1 Voltaire
1 Tolstoy
1 Tolstoi
1 Tao Te Ching
1 Swami Satyananda Saraswati
1 Swami Chinmayananda
1 SWAMI ABHEDANANDA
1 Sören Kierkegaard
1 Seneca
1 Sebastian Dabovich
1 Schopenhauer
1 Saul Williams
1 Satprem
1 Saint Thérèse de Lisieux
1 Saint Martin de Porres
1 Saint Isidore of Seville
1 Saint Francis de Sales
1 Robert Burton
1 Pope Pius XII
1 Philip K Dick
1 Phil Hine
1 Peace Pilgrim
1 P. Desmond
1 Omar Khayyam
1 Norbert Wiener
1 Nolini Kanta Gupta
1 Meister
1 Masanobu Fukuoka
1 Marshall McLuhan
1 Marcus Aurelius
1 Louis Bouyer
1 Li Bai
1 Julian Huxley
1 Joseph Campbell
1 Jordan Peterson
1 Jon Kabat-Zinn
1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1 Joan Rivers
1 Jim Rohn
1 Jean de La Bruyère
1 James Clerk Maxwell
1 https://wiki.auroville.org.in/wiki/Nirodbaran
1 Hermes Trismegistus
1 Georges Van Vrekhem
1 George Orwell
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king
1 Dante
1 Dalai Lama XIV
1 Byung-Chul Han
1 Buddhist Text
1 Basil the Great
1 Bankei
1 Awaghosha
1 Attar of Nishapur
1 Anonymous
1 Andrew of Crete
1 Anamander
1 Alice A. Bailey
1 Alfred North Whitehead
1 Swami Vivekananda
1 Sri Ramakrishna
1 Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
1 Jorge Luis Borges
1 Dogen Zenji
1 Aleister Crowley
1 Abu Said
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
68 Eckhart Tolle
37 Thich Nhat Hanh
23 Nhat Hanh
23 Anonymous
19 Paulo Coelho
16 Deepak Chopra
9 Rajneesh
9 Mehmet Murat ildan
9 Kurt Vonnegut
9 Jon Kabat Zinn
8 Sri Ramana Maharshi
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
8 Alan Watts
7 Samuel Johnson
7 Marcus Aurelius
7 John Green
7 Gautama Buddha
7 C S Lewis
6 Seneca
6 Horace
1:Be greatly aware of the present." ~ Buddha, #KEYS
2:The most important hour is always the present. ~ Meister, #KEYS
3:It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
~ Voltaire,#KEYS
4:Stay with the ancient Tao, Move with the present. ~ Tao Te Ching, ch.14, #KEYS
5:Move in harmony with the present moment." ~ Lao Tzu, #KEYS
6:When you cut into the present, the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #KEYS
7:There is neither Past nor Future. There is only the Present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
8:Look after the present and the future will look after itself. ~ Swami Chinmayananda, #KEYS
9:Judge by the truth. The truth is in the present. ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
10:The present is the only reality of wich a man can truly be deprived. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #KEYS
11:Acceptive and at ease, distilling the present hour, whatever, wherever it is. ~ Whitman, #KEYS
12:It is enough to pay attention to what is before one's eyes, that is, to the present. ~ Dante, #KEYS
13:The present is a powerful deity. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
14:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ Buddha, #KEYS
15:He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. ~ George Orwell, #KEYS
16:The young grasp at the future. The old grasp at the past. The wise remain in the present. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche, #KEYS
17:Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present." ~ Jim Rohn, #KEYS
18:The present moment is a powerful goddess. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
19:Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is God's gift, that why we call it the present." ~ Joan Rivers, #KEYS
20:There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
21:Do not complain, that shows discontent with the will of GOD in the present moment. ~ Saint Martin de Porres, (1579-1639), #KEYS
22:Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us." ~ Jean de La Bruyère, #KEYS
23:Hold tight to your own time, hour after hour; you will not depend on the future if you grasp the present in hand. ~ Seneca, #KEYS
24:The past must be abandoned to God's mercy, the present to our fidelity, the future to divine providence. ~ Saint Francis de Sales, #KEYS
25:A Sadhu or a God should never be visited empty-handed, however trifling the present. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
26:Give value to your time. Live in the present moment. Do not live in imagination and throw your time away. ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
27:Whatever happens in the working of the universe at the present moment, has to be accepted. Not accepting it means human misery. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
28:We have not understood the present. Why should we seek to know the future? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day By Day, 10-2-46, #KEYS
29:Tell me why you should be in search of a goal? Why are you not content with the present condition? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
30:Spiritual power in the present creates material power in the future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, One More for the Altar, #KEYS
31:The present world and the next are but a drop of water whose existence is of no account. ~ Attar of Nishapur, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
32:Do not occupy your precious time except with the most precious of things, and the most precious of things is the state of being occupied with the present. ~ Abu Said, #KEYS
33:May we always remain as pure as we are at the present moment, and as enthusiastic for spirituality as we are just now! ~ Swami Vivekananda, #KEYS
34:The present is the most precious moment. Use all the forces of thy spirit not to let that momentescape thee. ~ Tolstoy, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
35:The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, 'Create silence'." ~ Sören Kierkegaard, #KEYS
36:Your duty for the present is complete resignation to the will of God. If you practice resignation to the will of the Lord, you will get peace of mind. ~ SWAMI ABHEDANANDA, #KEYS
37:Always hold fast to the present. Every situation, indeed every moment, is of infinite value, for it is the representative of a whole eternity." ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #KEYS
38:A revolutionary mysticism which seems to be the present drive of the Time Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, The Curve of the Rational Age, #KEYS
39:It is important to be quiet and absorbent, especially around beautiful impressions. In this way one brings everything one has learned in one's life to the present. ~ Robert Burton, #KEYS
40:In the present growing conflict what should be our attitude?
Faith and total confidence in the Divine's Grace.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
41:I f you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present. ~ Lao Tzu, #KEYS
42:This day foreshadows the state which is to follow the present age: a day without sunset, nightfall, or successor, an age which does not grow old or come to an end. ~ Basil the Great, #KEYS
43:If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present." ~ Lao Tzu, #KEYS
44:The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realise the Self.
There is nothing else to do. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks, 219,#KEYS
45:The past is our foundation, the present our material, the future our aim and summit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Early Cultural Writings, A System of National Education, #KEYS
46:The more we are afflicted in this world, the greater is our assurance in the next; the more we sorrow in the present, the greater will be our joy in the future." ~ Saint Isidore of Seville, #KEYS
47:For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. ~ Anonymous, The Bible, 1 Timothy, 4:8, #KEYS
48:When the present dream of our life is finished, a new dream will succeed it and there our life and death will not be known. ~ Schopenhauer, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
49:You must obey God, above the public and all other masters, or lose your souls for the responsibility which rests upon you for the present and future welfare of your children. ~ Sebastian Dabovich, #KEYS
50:We are creating new fate for the future even while undergoing old fate from the past in the present. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - I, Fate, Free Will and Prediction, #KEYS
51:God could make other things, or add something to the present creation, and then there would be an other and better universe ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.25.6ad3)., #KEYS
52:What is the most important moment in life?
The present moment. For the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother III,#KEYS
53:The principal work of life is love. And one cannot love in the past or in the future: one can only love in the present, at this hour, at this minute. ~ Tolstoi, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
54:Excess sadness is a disease of the mind, but mild sadness is the mark of a well-conditioned mind, according to the present state of life ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1-2 59.3ad3)., #KEYS
55:The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #KEYS
56:The Christian religion is not simply a doctrine, it is a fact, an action, and an action, not of the past, but of the present, where the past is recovered and the future draws near. ~ Louis Bouyer, The Paschal Mystery, #KEYS
57:The world is an eternal present, and the present is now; what was is no more and who can say whatwill come or whether tomorrow morning the dawnwill arise. ~ Anamander, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
58:This is why I would put to profit the present moment, penetrated with the conviction that now has come the right moment to seek for the Truth. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
59:Mindfulness is awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a sustained and particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, (b. 1944), "Mindfulness for Beginners,", (2012, 2016), #KEYS
60:He who has conquered the desire of the present life and of the future life, who has vanquished all fear and broken all chain, he is indeed a man of religion. ~ Buddhist Text, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
61:The divine Self in things is the sustaining Spirit of the present, the withdrawing Spirit of the past, the creative Spirit of the future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, God in Power of Becoming, #KEYS
62:If I did not simply live from one moment to another, it would be impossible for me to be patient, but I only look at the present, I forget the past, and I take good care not to forestall the future." ~ Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, #KEYS
63:The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #KEYS
64:God's death punctuates time itself, deprives it of any theological, teleological, historical tension. The present moment shrinks to a fleeting *point* in time, devoid of heirs and free of goals. ~ Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time, #KEYS
65:Do not keep putting off practice, thinking that another location or another time would be more suitable.
Nothing is better than the present moment. Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, bring your life to the path. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche,#KEYS
66:The present difficulty is that man thinks he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the higher power which does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles, otherwise he courts them. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
67:You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #KEYS
68:You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
~ Henry David Thoreau,#KEYS
69:The present difficulty is that man thinks that he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the Higher Power which does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles; otherwise he courts them. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
70:Enter not into questions of the vicissitudes of this world, ask not of things to come. Regard as booty won the present moment; trouble not thyself with the past, question not of the future. ~ Omar Khayyam, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
71:Actual grace is constantly offered to us for the accomplishment of the duty of the present moment, just as air comes constantly into our lungs to permit us to breathe. ~ Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life, #KEYS
72:In the eternal moment, the present moment, there is no "me" and there is no duration - no past, present and future. And when there is no "me" and no sense of duration, all there is, is that silence in which conceptualization cannot take place. ~ Ramesh Balsekar, #KEYS
73:I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution, #KEYS
74:There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment." ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
75:Facing wine, I missed night coming on and falling blossoms filling my robe. Drunk, I rise and wade the midstream moon, birds soon gone, and people scarcer still." ~ Li Bai, (aka Li Po, 701-762), Chinese poet, acclaimed from his own day to the present as a genius, Wikipedia., #KEYS
76:Live in the present, Do all the things that need to be done. Do all the good you can each day. The future will unfold." ~ Peace Pilgrim, (1908 - 1981), b. Mildred Norman, American non-denominational spiritual teacher, mystic, vegetarian activist and peace activist. Wikipedia, #KEYS
77:The present festival, the birth of the Mother of God, is a prelude, while the final act is the foreordained union of the Word with flesh. Today the Virgin is born, tended and formed and prepared for her role as Mother of God, who is the universal King of the ages ~ Andrew of Crete, #KEYS
78:The present issues from the past, and the future from the present. Everything is made one by this continuity. Time is like a circle, where all the points are so linked that one cannot say where it begins or ends, for all points precede and follow one another for ever.
~ Hermes Trismegistus,#KEYS
79:It is not in order to be happy that we are upon earth, for in the present conditions of terrestrial life happiness is an impossibility. We are upon earth to find and realise the Divine, for the Divine Consciousness alone can give true happiness.
~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother II,#KEYS
80:There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #KEYS
81:If you can't as yet remember the Divine all the time you are working, it does not greatly matter. To remember and dedicate at the beginning and give thanks at the end ought to be enough for the present. Or at the most to remember too when there is a pause...
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
82:There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous or the coming do not have. There is a livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illuminated. There is 'stamp of reality' on actual which past and future do not have. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #KEYS
83:he disciple should think that all things in this world are subject to a constant transformation...that all things in the past are like a dream, that all in the present are like a flash of lightning and all in the future like images that arrive spontaneously into existence. ~ Awaghosha, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
84:The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
~ Jorge Luis Borges,#KEYS
85:Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #KEYS
86:The crisis we are experiencing is unique in history. It is a world which must burst out of a crucible in which so many different energies are working. Let us thank God that He makes us live among the present problems... it is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre. All men have the imperative duty to remember that they have a mission to fulfill, that of doing the impossible. ~ Pope Pius XII, #KEYS
87:For the time being" here means time itself is being, and all being is time. A golden sixteen-foot body is time; because it is time, there is the radiant illumination of time. Study it as the twelve hours of the present."Three heads and eight arms" is time; because it is time, it is not separate from the twelve hours of the present. ~ Dogen Zenji, Uji - The Time-Being, https://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Uji_Welch.htm #KEYS
88:The life of God is above the past, the present, and the future; it is measured by the single instant of immobile eternity... [However] forgetfulness of God leaves us in this banal and horizontal view of things on the line of time which passes; the contemplation of God is like a vertical view of things which pass, and of their bond with God who does not pass. To be immersed in time, is to forget the value of time, that is to say, its relation to eternity. ~ Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life: Prelude of Eternal Life, #KEYS
89:What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson gives us a precise answer: "Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices, intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past-often to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable value. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, #KEYS
90:For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present for the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth. ~ James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, #KEYS
91:In Mahayana Buddhism the universe is therefore likened to a vast net of jewels, wherein the reflection from one jewel is contained in all jewels, and the reflections of all are contained in each. As the Buddhists put it, "All in one and one in all." This sounds very mystical and far-out, until you hear a modern physicist explain the present-day view of elementary particles: "This states, in ordinary language, that each particle consists of all the other particles, each of which is in the same way and at the same time all other particles together." ~ Ken Wilber, No Boundary, #KEYS
92:Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. ~ James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Volume 1, #KEYS
93:The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought, - these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present.
For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
94:What we call destiny is only in fact the result of the present condition of the being and the nature and energies it has accumulated in the past acting on each other and determining the present attempts and their future results. But as soon as one enters the path of spiritual life, this old predetermined destiny begins to recede. There comes in a new factor, the Divine Grace, the help of a higher Divine Force other than the force of Karma, which can lift the sadhak beyond the present possibilities of his nature. One's spiritual destiny is then the divine election which ensures the future.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, [T1],#KEYS
95:Where can you find anyone who steals because his karma is deep or his sins heavy? Stealing is the karma, stealing is the sin! If it weren't for stealing, that sin and karma couldn't exist. Whether you steal or whether you don't depends on the present state of your own mind, not on your past karma. And what I'm telling you now doesn't go only for stealing. Generally speaking, all delusions are just the same as stealing. Whether you're going to be deluded or you're not going to, all depends on the present state of your own mind. When you're deluded, you're an unenlightened being; when you're not deluded, you're a buddha. There's no special shortcut to being a buddha beyond this. Isn't it so? Everyone, realize this conclusively!" ~ Bankei, #KEYS
96:Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.
Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. ~ James Clerk Maxwell,#KEYS
97:The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga, lord, light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort, is of the utmost importance in the path of integral perfection. It is immaterial whether he is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom, Love and Power behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting in the relative and attracting it, as one's highest Self and the highest Self of all, as a Divine Person within us and in the world, in one of his-or her-numerous forms and names or as the ideal which the mind conceives. In the end we perceive that he is all and more than all these things together. The mind's door of entry to the conception of him must necessarily vary according to the past evolution and the present nature.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62,#KEYS
98:Only, in all he sees God, sees the supreme reality, and his motive of work is to help mankind towards the knowledge of God and the possession of the supreme reality. He sees God through the data of science, God through the conclusions of philosophy, God through the forms of Beauty and the forms of Good, God in all the activities of life, God in the past of the world and its effects, in the present and its tendencies, in the future and its great progression. Into any or all of these he can bring his illumined vision and his liberated power of the spirit. The lower knowledge has been the step from which he has risen to the higher; the higher illumines for him the lower and makes it part of itself, even if only its lower fringe and most external radiation.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Higher and the Lower Knowledge,#KEYS
99:II. POSTULATE: ANY required Change may be effected by application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object.
(Illustration: I wish to prepare an ounce of Chloride of Gold. I must take the right kind of acid, nitro-hydrochloric and no other, in sufficient quantity and of adequate strength, and place it, in a vessel which will not break, leak or corrode, in such a manner as will not produce undesirable results, with the necessary quantity of Gold, and so forth. Every Change has its own conditions.
In the present state of our knowledge and power some changes are not possible in practice; we cannot cause eclipses, for instance, or transform lead into tin, or create men from mushrooms. But it is theoretically possible to cause in any object any change of which that object is capable by nature; and the conditions are covered by the above postulate.)
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Magick,#KEYS
100:At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people. This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of Golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of God. In the time of Newton, the automaton becomes the clockwork music box, with the little effigies pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth century, the automaton is a glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of the human muscles. Finally, the present automaton opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns to the place at which a radar beam picks up an airplane, or computes the solution of a differential equation.
~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, 1961,#KEYS
101:The matter of definition, I have said, is very important. I am not now speaking of nominal definitions, which for convenience merely give names to known objects. I am speaking of such definitions of phenomena as result from correct analysis of the phenomena. Nominal definitions are mere conveniences and are neither true nor false; but analytic definitions are definitive propositions and are true or else false. Let us dwell upon the matter a little more.
In the illustration of the definitions of lightning, there were three; the first was the most mistaken and its application brought the most harm; the second was less incorrect and the practical results less bad; the third under the present conditions of our knowledge, was the "true one" and it brought the maximum benefit. This lightning illustration suggests the important idea of relative truth and relative falsehood-the idea, that is, of degrees of truth and degrees of falsehood. A definition may be neither absolutely true nor absolutely false; but of two definitions of the same thing' one of them may be truer or falser than the other. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity, 49,#KEYS
102:...the present terms are there not as an unprofitable recurrence, but in active pregnant gestation of all that is yet to be unfolded by the spirit, no irrational decimal recurrence helplessly repeating for ever its figures, but an expanding series of powers of the Infinite. What is in front of us is the greater potentialities, the steps yet unclimbed, the intended mightier manifestations. Why we are here is to be this means of the spirit's upward self-unfolding. What we have to do with ourselves and our significances is to grow and open them to greater significances of divine being, divine consciousness, divine power, divine delight and multiplied unity, and what we have to do with our environment is to use it consciously for increasing spiritual purposes and make it more and more a mould for the ideal unfolding of the perfect nature and self-conception of the Divine in the cosmos. This is surely the Will in things which moves, great and deliberate, unhasting, unresting, through whatever cycles, towards a greater and greater informing of its own finite figures with its own infinite Reality.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays In Philosophy And Yoga,#KEYS
103:3. Meeting the Mentor:For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance-promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within or just behind the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. ~ Joseph Campbell, #KEYS
104:And now what methods may be employed to safeguard the worker in the field of the world? What can be done to ensure his safety in the present strife, and in the greater strife of the coming centuries? 1. A realisation that purity of all the vehicles is the prime essential. If a Dark Brother gains control over any man, it but shows that that man has in his life some weak spot.... 2. The elimination of all fear. The forces of evolution vibrate more rapidly than those of involution, and in this fact lies a recognisable security. Fear causes weakness; weakness causes a disintegration; the weak spot breaks and a gap appears, and through that gap evil force may enter.... 3. A standing firm and unmoved, no matter what occurs. Your feet may be bathed in the mud of earth, but your head may be bathed in the sunshine of the higher regions... 4. A recognition of the use of common-sense, and the application of this common-sense to the matter in hand. Sleep much, and in sleeping, learn to render the body positive; keep busy on the emotional plane, and achieve the inner calm. Do naught to overtire the body physical, and play whenever possible. In hours of relaxation comes the adjustment that obviates later tension. ~ Alice A. Bailey, Letters on Occult Meditation p. 137/8, (1922) #KEYS
105:Truly speaking, I have no opinion. According to a vision of truth, everything is still terribly mixed, a more or less favourable combination of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, and so long as decisions are made and action is undertaken according to opinions, it will always be like that.
We want to give the example of an action that is undertaken in accordance with a vision of truth, but unfortunately we are still very far from realising this ideal, and even if the vision of truth expresses itself, it is immediately distorted in its implementation.
So, in the present state of affairs, it is impossible to say, "This is true and that is false, this leads us away from the goal and that brings us nearer the goal."
Everything can be used for the progress to be made; everything can be useful if we know how to use it.
The important thing is never to lose sight of the ideal we want to realise and to make use of all circumstances in view of this goal.
And finally, it is always better not to make an arbitrary decision for or against things, and to watch the unfolding of events with the impartiality of a witness, relying on the Divine Wisdom which will decide for the best and do what is necessary. 29 July 1961 ~ The Mother, Words Of The Mother I, [T8],#KEYS
106:For this is the other face of the psychic: not only is it joy and sweetness, but also quiet strength, as if it were forever above every possible tragedy - an invulnerable master. In this case, too, the details of a scene can be indelibly engraved. But what passes on to the next life is not so much the details as the essence of the scene: we will be struck by certain repetitive patterns of events or deadlocked situations that have an air of déjà vu and seem surrounded by an aura of fatality - for what has not been overcome in the past returns again and again, each time with a slightly different appearance, but basically always identical, until we confront the old knot and untie it. Such is the law of inner progress. Generally, however, the memory of actual physical circumstances does not remain, because, although our small surface consciousness makes much of them, they are, after all, of little significance. There is even a spontaneous mechanism that erases the profusion of useless past memories, just as those of the present life soon become eradicated. If we glance behind us, without thinking, what is actually left of our present life? A nebulous mass with perhaps two or three outstanding images; all the rest is blotted out. This is likewise the case for the soul and its past lives.
~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,#KEYS
107:The great men of the past have given us glimpses of what is possible in the way of personality, of intellectual understanding, of spiritual achievement, of artistic creation. But these are scarcely more than Pisgah glimpses. We need to explore and map the whole realm of human possibility, as the realm of physical geography has been explored and mapped. How to create new possibilities for ordinary living? What can be done to bring out the latent capacities of the ordinary man and woman for understanding and enjoyment; to teach people the techniques of achieving spiritual experience (after all, one can acquire the technique of dancing or tennis, so why not of mystical ecstasy or spiritual peace?)...
The zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities and of the techniques for realizing them will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality, by showing how much of them are indeed realizable. Already, we can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted. We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings of our ancestors, that were rooted in superstition and professional secrecy. ~ Julian Huxley, Transhumanism,#KEYS
108:I have spoken of Sri Aurobindo's life as a series of radical turns that changed the movement, the mode of life, almost radically every time the turn came. The turn meant a break with the past and a moving into the future. We have a word for this phenomenon of radical and unforeseen change. You know the word, it is intervention. Intervention means, as the Mother has explained to us more than once, the entry of a higher, a greater force from another world into the already existent world. Into the familiar established mode of existence that runs on the routine of some definite rules and regulations, the Law of the present, there drops all on a sudden another mode of being and consciousness and force, a Higher Law which obliterates or changes out of recognition the familiar mode of living; it is thus that one rises from level to level, moves out into wider ranges of being, otherwise one stands still, remains for ever what he is, stagnant, like an unchanging clod or at the most a repetitive animal. The higher the destiny, the higher also the source of intervention, that is to say, more radical - more destructive yet more creative - destructive of the past, creative of the future.
I have spoken of the passing away of Sri Aurobindo as a phenomenon of intervention, a great decisive event in view of the work to be done. Even so we may say that his birth too was an act of intervention, a deliberate divine intervention. The world needed it, the time was ripe and the intervention happened and that was his birth as an embodied human being - to which we offer our salutation and obeisance today. ~ Nolini Kanta Gupta,#KEYS
109:The whole history of mankind and especially the present condition of the world unite in showing that far from being merely hypothetical, the case supposed has always been actual and is actual to-day on a vaster scale than ever before. My contention is that while progress in some of the great matters of human concern has been long proceeding in accordance with the law of a rapidly increasing geometric progression, progress in the other matters of no less importance has advanced only at the rate of an arithmetical progression or at best at the rate of some geometric progression of relatively slow growth. To see it and to understand it we have to pay the small price of a little observation and a little meditation.
Some technological invention is made, like that of a steam engine or a printing press, for example; or some discovery of scientific method, like that of analytical geometry or the infinitesimal calculus; or some discovery of natural law, like that of falling bodies or the Newtonian law of gravitation. What happens? What is the effect upon the progress of knowledge and invention? The effect is stimulation. Each invention leads to new inventions and each discovery to new discoveries; invention breeds invention, science begets science, the children of knowledge produce their kind in larger and larger families; the process goes on from decade to decade, from generation to generation, and the spectacle we behold is that of advancement in scientific knowledge and technological power according to the law and rate of a rapidly increasing geometric progression or logarithmic function. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#KEYS
110:[4:131] A human being is a material system which time, a form of energy, enters. Probably time enters him also as noos-Mind. Time, the future, contains in it all the events which are going to occur. Therefore when time enters a person as energy, and acting as noos to him, it brings with it in potentium all that will happen to him, like a window shade unrolling to display an unfolding pattern. Events in the future pop into being, into actualization, the present, but until they do, they are not truly real-not yet actualized-but there in an encoded form, like the grooves of an LP before the needle reaches it; the only "music" is where the needle touches-ahead lies only an encoded wiggle along a helical spiral. Thus, dreams deal with the future lying direct ahead, as during the night, the next series of encoded future events begin to move toward actualization: i.e., the present. What is hard to realize is that in a certain very real way these events are inside the person, within his head, so to speak; but only in their potential, encoded form; the arena in which they are actualized is that of space; time, in the present, flows out to fill space-i.e., the spatial universe. This is why we experience déjà vu. We have somehow caught a glimpse now and then of the script unrolling in our head-caught a glimpse in advance, so we feel "I know exactly what I'm going to say next, and what gestures he'll make," etc. Sure; they're encoded-encased, waiting-in time, and time, being energy, has entered you; is burning bright inside, like Blake's tyger. Tyger, tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night. . . . Who framed thy awful symmetry?
~ Philip K Dick, Exegesis Of Philip K Dick,#KEYS
111:The obsession clouds all reason, impairs the ability to act, makes anything secondary to it seem unimportant. It's a double-bind tug o'war. The desire to maintain the fantasy may be stronger than the desire to make it real.
In classical occult terms I am describing a thought-form, a monster bred from the darker reccesses of mind, fed by psychic energy, clothed in imagination and nurtured by umbilical cords which twist through years of growth. we all have our personal Tunnels of Set; set in our ways through habit and patterns piling on top of each other. The thought-form rides us like a monkey; it's tail wrapped firmly about the spine of a self lost to us years ago; an earlier version threshing blindly in a moment of fear, pain, or desire.
Thus we are formed; and in a moment of loss we feel the monster's hot breath against our backs, it's claws digging into muscle and flesh. we dance to the pull of strings that were woven years ago, and in a lightning flash of insight, or better yet, the gentle admonitions of a friend, we may see the lie; the program. it is first necessary to see that there is a program. To say perhaps, this creature is mine, but not wholly me. What follows then is that the prey becomes the hunter, pulling apart the obsession, naming its parts, searching for fragments of understanding in its entrails. Shrinking it, devouring it, peeling the layers of onion-skin.
This is in itself a magick as powerful as any sorcery. Unbinding the knots that we have tied and tangled; sorting out the threads of experience and colour-coding the chains of chance. It may leave us freer, more able to act effectively and less likely to repeat old mistakes. The thing has a chinese puzzle-like nature. We can perceive only the present, and it requires intense sifting through memory to see the scaffolding beneath.
~ Phil Hine, Oven Ready Chaos,#KEYS
112:What is the most useful idea to spread and what is the best example to set?
The question can be considered in two ways, a very general one applicable to the whole earth, and another specific one which concerns our present social environment.
From the general point of view, it seems to me that the most useful idea to spread is twofold:
1) Man carries within himself perfect power, perfect wisdom and perfect knowledge, and if he wants to possess them, he must discover them in the depth of his being, by introspection and concentration.
2) These divine qualities are identical at the centre, at the heart of all beings; this implies the essential unity of all, and all the consequences of solidarity and fraternity that follow from it.
The best example to give would be the unalloyed serenity and immutably peaceful happiness which belong to one who knows how to live integrally this thought of the One God in all.
From the point of view of our present environment, here is the idea which, it seems to me, it is most useful to spread:
True progressive evolution, an evolution which can lead man to his rightful happiness, does not lie in any external means, material improvement or social change. Only a deep and inner process of individual self-perfection can make for real progress and completely transform the present state of things, and change suffering and misery into a serene and lasting contentment.
Consequently, the best example is one that shows the first stage of individual self-perfection which makes possible all the rest, the first victory to be won over the egoistic personality: disinterestedness.
At a time when all rush upon money as the means to sat- isfy their innumerable cravings, one who remains indifferent to wealth and acts, not for the sake of gain, but solely to follow a disinterested ideal, is probably setting the example which is most useful at present.
~ The Mother, Words Of Long Ago, Volume-2, 22-06-1912, page no.66-67,#KEYS
113:If we analyse the classes of life, we readily find that there are three cardinal classes which are radically distinct in function. A short analysis will disclose to us that, though minerals have various activities, they are not "living." The plants have a very definite and well known function-the transformation of solar energy into organic chemical energy. They are a class of life which appropriates one kind of energy, converts it into another kind and stores it up; in that sense they are a kind of storage battery for the solar energy; and so I define THE PLANTS AS THE CHEMISTRY-BINDING class of life.
The animals use the highly dynamic products of the chemistry-binding class-the plants-as food, and those products-the results of plant-transformation-undergo in animals a further transformation into yet higher forms; and the animals are correspondingly a more dynamic class of life; their energy is kinetic; they have a remarkable freedom and power which the plants do not possess-I mean the freedom and faculty to move about in space; and so I define ANIMALS AS THE SPACE-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.
And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarise, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#KEYS
114:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.
But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.
But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...
This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,#KEYS
115:The one high and reasonable course for the individual human being, - unless indeed he is satisfied with pursuing his personal purposes or somehow living his life until it passes out of him, - is to study the laws of the Becoming and take the best advantage of them to realise, rationally or intuitionally, inwardly or in the dynamism of life, its potentialities in himself or for himself or in or for the race of which he is a member; his business is to make the most of such actualities as exist and to seize on or to advance towards the highest possibilities that can be developed here or are in the making. Only mankind as a whole can do this with entire effect, by the mass of individual and collective action, in the process of time, in the evolution of the race experience: but the individual man can help towards it in his own limits, can do all these things for himself to a certain extent in the brief space of life allotted to him; but, especially, his thought and action can be a contribution towards the present intellectual, moral and vital welfare and the future progress of the race. He is capable of a certain nobility of being; an acceptance of his inevitable and early individual annihilation does not preclude him from making a high use of the will and thought which have been developed in him or from directing them to great ends which shall or may be worked out by humanity. Even the temporary character of the collective being of humanity does not so very much matter, - except in the most materialist view of existence; for so long as the universal Becoming takes the form of human body and mind, the thought, the will it has developed in its human creature will work itself out and to follow that intelligently is the natural law and best rule of human life. Humanity and its welfare and progress during its persistence on earth provide the largest field and the natural limits for the terrestrial aim of our being; the superior persistence of the race and the greatness and importance of the collective life should determine the nature and scope of our ideals. But if the progress or welfare of humanity be excluded as not our business or as a delusion, the individual is there; to achieve his greatest possible perfection or make the most of his life in whatever way his nature demands will then be life's significance.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, [T1],#KEYS
116:But this is not always the manner of the commencement. The sadhaka is often led gradually and there is a long space between the first turning of the mind and the full assent of the nature to the thing towards which it turns. There may at first be only a vivid intellectual interest, a forcible attraction towards the idea and some imperfect form of practice. Or perhaps there is an effort not favoured by the whole nature, a decision or a turn imposed by an intellectual influence or dictated by personal affection and admiration for someone who is himself consecrated and devoted to the Highest. In such cases, a long period of preparation may be necessary before there comes the irrevocable consecration; and in some instances it may not come. There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort, even much purification and many experiences other than those that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in preparation or, a certain stage having been reached, the mind pushed by an insufficient driving-force may rest content at the limit of the effort possible to it. Or there may even be a recoil to the lower life, - what is called in the ordinary parlance of Yoga a fall from the path. This lapse happens because there is a defect at the very centre. The intellect has been interested, the heart attracted, the will has strung itself to the effort, but the whole nature has not been taken captive by the Divine. It has only acquiesced in the interest, the attraction or the endeavour. There has been an experiment, perhaps even an eager experiment, but not a total self-giving to an imperative need of the soul or to an unforsakable ideal. Even such imperfect Yoga has not been wasted; for no upward effort is made in vain. Even if it fails in the present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary realisation, it has yet determined the soul's future.
But if we desire to make the most of the opportunity that this life gives us, if we wish to respond adequately to the call we have received and to attain to the goal we have glimpsed, not merely advance a little towards it, it is essential that there should be an entire self-giving. The secret of success in Yoga is to regard it not as one of the aims to be pursued in life, but as the one and only aim, not as an important part of life, but as the whole of life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration,#KEYS
117:He continuously reflected on her image and attributes, day and night. His bhakti was such that he could not stop thinking of her. Eventually, he saw her everywhere and in everything. This was his path to illumination.
He was often asked by people: what is the way to the supreme? His answer was sharp and definite: bhakti yoga. He said time and time again that bhakti yoga is the best sadhana for the Kali Yuga (Dark Age) of the present.
His bhakti is illustrated by the following statement he made to a disciple:
To my divine mother I prayed only for pure love.
At her lotus feet I offered a few flowers and I prayed:
Mother! here is virtue and here is vice;
Take them both from me.
Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
Mother! here is knowledge and here is ignorance;
Take them both from me.
Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
Mother! here is purity and impurity;
Take them both from me.
Grant me only love, pure love for Thee.
Ramakrishna, like Kabir, was a practical man.
He said: "So long as passions are directed towards the world and its objects, they are enemies. But when they are directed towards a deity, then they become the best of friends to man, for they take him to illumination. The desire for worldly things must be changed into longing for the supreme; the anger which you feel for fellow man must be directed towards the supreme for not manifesting himself to you . . . and so on, with all other emotions. The passions cannot be eradicated, but they can be turned into new directions."
A disciple once asked him: "How can one conquer the weaknesses within us?" He answered: "When the fruit grows out of the flower, the petals drop off themselves. So when divinity in you increases, the weaknesses of human nature will vanish of their own accord." He emphasized that the aspirant should not give up his practices. "If a single dive into the sea does not bring you a pearl, do not conclude that there are no pearls in the sea. There are countless pearls hidden in the sea.
So if you fail to merge with the supreme during devotional practices, do not lose heart. Go on patiently with the practices, and in time you will invoke divine grace." It does not matter what form you care to worship. He said: "Many are the names of the supreme and infinite are the forms through which he may be approached. In whatever name and form you choose to worship him, through that he will be realized by you." He indicated the importance of surrender on the path of bhakti when he said:
~ Swami Satyananda Saraswati, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya,#KEYS
118:Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spoke thus: Man is a rope stretched between animal and overman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous trembling and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. I love those who know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. I love the great despisers, because they are the great reverers, and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the overman may some day arrive. I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the overman may someday live. Thus he seeks his own down-going. I love him who works and invents, that he may build a house for the overman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus he seeks his own down-going. I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing. I love him who reserves no drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he walks as spirit over the bridge. I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more. I love him who does not desire too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for ones destiny to cling to. I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and gives none back: for he always gives, and desires not to preserve himself. I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: Am I a dishonest player? - for he is willing to perish. I love him who scatters golden words in front of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going. I love him who justifies those people of the future, and redeems those of the past: for he is willing to perish by those of the present. I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must perish by the wrath of his God. I love him whose soul is deep even in being wounded, and may perish from a small experience: thus goes he gladly over the bridge. I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going. I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the entrails of his heart; his heart, however, drives him to go down. I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and perish as heralds. Behold, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is called overman.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,#KEYS
119:The Mother once described the characteristics of the unity-body, of the future supramental body, to a young Ashramite: 'You know, if there is something on that window-sill and if I [in a supramental body] want to take it, I stretch out my hand and it becomes - wow! - long, and I have the thing in my hand without even having to get up from my chair ... Physically, I shall be able to be here and there at the same time. I shall be able to communicate with many people at the same time. To have something in my hand, I'll just have to wish for it. I think about something and I want it and it is already in my hand. With this transformed body I shall be free of the fetters of ignorance, pain, of mortality and unconsciousness. I shall be able to do many things at the same time. The transparent, luminous, strong, light, elastic body won't need any material things to subsist on ... The body can even be lengthened if one wants it to become tall, or shrunk when one wants it to be small, in any circumstances ... There will be all kinds of changes and there will be powers without limit. And it won't be something funny. Of course, I am giving you somewhat childish examples to tease you and to show the difference. 'It will be a true being, perfect in proportion, very, very beautiful and strong, light, luminous or else transparent. It will have a supple and malleable body endowed with extraordinary capacities and able to do everything; a body without age, a creation of the New Consciousness or else a transformed body such as none has ever imagined ... All that is above man will be within its reach. It will be guided by the Truth alone and nothing less. That is what it is and more even than has ever been conceived.'895 This the Mother told in French to Mona Sarkar, who noted it down as faithfully as possible and read it out to her for verification. The supramental body will not only be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnipresent. And immortal. Not condemned to a never ending monotonous immortality - which, again, is one of our human interpretations of immortality - but for ever existing in an ecstasy of inexhaustible delight in 'the Joy that surpasses all understanding.' Moment after moment, eternity after eternity. For in that state each moment is an eternity and eternity an ever present moment. If gross matter is not capable of being used as a permanent coating of the soul in the present phase of its evolution, then it certainly is not capable of being the covering of the supramental consciousness, to form the body that has, to some extent, been described above. This means that the crux of the process of supramental transformation lies in matter; the supramental world has to become possible in matter, which at present still is gross matter. - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were supramentalized in their mental and vital, but their enormous problem was the supramentalization of the physical body, consisting of the gross matter of the Earth. As the Mother said: 'It is matter itself that must change so that the Supramental may manifest. A new kind of matter no longer corresponding with Mendeleyev's periodic table of the elements? Is that possible?
~ Georges Van Vrekhem,#KEYS
120:(Novum Organum by Francis Bacon.)
34. "Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction's sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.
40. "The information of notions and axioms on the foundation of true induction is the only fitting remedy by which we can ward off and expel these idols. It is, however, of great service to point them out; for the doctrine of idols bears the same relation to the interpretation of nature as that of the confutation of sophisms does to common logic.
41. "The idols of the tribe are inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man; for man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the Universe, and the human mind resembles these uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them.
42. "The idols of the den are those of each individual; for everybody (in addition to the errors common to the race of man) has his own individual den or cavern, which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature, either from his own peculiar and singular disposition, or from his education and intercourse with others, or from his reading, and the authority acquired by those whom he reverences and admires, or from the different impressions produced on the mind, as it happens to be preoccupied and predisposed, or equable and tranquil, and the like; so that the spirit of man (according to its several dispositions), is variable, confused, and, as it were, actuated by chance; and Heraclitus said well that men search for knowledge in lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.
43. "There are also idols formed by the reciprocal intercourse and society of man with man, which we call idols of the market, from the commerce and association of men with each other; for men converse by means of language, but words are formed at the will of the generality, and there arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. Nor can the definitions and explanations with which learned men are wont to guard and protect themselves in some instances afford a complete remedy-words still manifestly force the understanding, throw everything into confusion, and lead mankind into vain and innumerable controversies and fallacies.
44. "Lastly, there are idols which have crept into men's minds from the various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy, and also from the perverted rules of demonstration, and these we denominate idols of the theatre: for we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds. Nor do we speak only of the present systems, or of the philosophy and sects of the ancients, since numerous other plays of a similar nature can be still composed and made to agree with each other, the causes of the most opposite errors being generally the same. Nor, again, do we allude merely to general systems, but also to many elements and axioms of sciences which have become inveterate by tradition, implicit credence, and neglect. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity,#KEYS
121:(Nirodbaran:) "It was the first week of January 1930.
At about 3 p.m., I reached Dilip Kumar Roy's place. "Oh, you have come! Let us go," he said, and cutting a rose from his terrace-garden he added, "Offer this to the Mother." When we arrived at the Ashram he left me at the present Reading Room saying, "Wait here." My heart was beating nervously as if I were going to face an examination. A stately chair in the middle of the room attracted momentarily my attention. In a short while the Mother came accompanied by Nolini, Amrita and Dilip. She took her seat in the chair, the others stood by her side. I was dazzled by the sight. Was it a ‘visionary gleam’ or a reality? Nothing like it had I seen before. Her fair complexion, set off by a finely coloured sari and a headband, gave me the impression of a goddess such as we see in pictures or in the idols during the Durga Puja festival. She was all smiles and redolent with grace. I suppose this was the Mahalakshmi smile Sri Aurobindo had spoken of in his book The Mother. She bathed me in the cascade of her smile and heart-melting look. I stood before her, shy and speechless, made more so by the presence of the others who were enjoying the silent sweet spectacle. Minutes passed. Then I offered to her hand my rose and did my pranam at her feet which had gold anklets on them. She stooped and blessed me. On standing up, I got again the same enchanting smile like moonbeams from a magic sky. After a time she said to the others, "He is very shy." "[1]
(Amal Kiran:) "Now to come back to all the people, all – the undamned all who were there in the Ashram. Very soon after my coming Dilip Kumar Roy came with Sahana Devi. They came and settled down. And, soon after that, I saw the face of my friend Nirod. It was of course an unforgettable face. (laughter) I think he had come straight from England or via some place in Bengal, but he carried something of the air of England. (laughter) He had passed out as a doctor at Edinburgh. I saw him, we became friends and we have remained friends ever since. But when he came as a doctor he was not given doctoring work here. As far as I remember he was made the head of a timber godown! (laughter) All sorts of strange jobs were being given to people. Look at the first job I got. The Mother once told me, "I would like you to do some work." I said, "All right, I am prepared to do some work." Then she said,"Will you take charge of our stock of furniture?" (laughter)"[2]
(Amal Kiran:) "To return to my friend Nirod – it was after some time that he got the Dispensary. I don't know whether he wanted it, or liked it or not, but he established his reputation as the frowning physician. (laughter) People used to come to him with a cold and he would stand and glare at them, and say, "What? You have a cold!" Poor people, they would simply shiver (laughter) and this had a very salutary effect because they thought that it was better not to fall ill than face the doctor's drastic disapproval of any kind of illness which would give him any botheration. (laughter) But he did his job all right, and every time he frightened off a patient he went to his room and started trying to write poetry (laughter) – because that, he thought, was his most important job. And, whether he succeeded as a doctor or not, as a poet he has eminently succeeded. Sri Aurobindo has really made him a poet.
The doctoring as well as the poetry was a bond between us, because my father had been a doctor and medicine ran in my blood. We used to discuss medical matters sometimes, but more often the problems and pains of poetry."[3] ~ https://wiki.auroville.org.in/wiki/Nirodbaran#KEYS
122:There's an idea in Christianity of the image of God as a Trinity. There's the element of the Father, there's the element of the Son, and there's the element of the Holy Spirit. It's something like the spirit of tradition, human beings as the living incarnation of that tradition, and the spirit in people that makes relationship with the spirit and individuals possible. I'm going to bounce my way quickly through some of the classical, metaphorical attributes of God, so that we kind of have a cloud of notions about what we're talking about, when we return to Genesis 1 and talk about the God who spoke chaos into Being.
There's a fatherly aspect, so here's what God as a father is like. You can enter into a covenant with it, so you can make a bargain with it. Now, you think about that. Money is like that, because money is a bargain you make with the future. We structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future. I don't think that we would have got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with. You can act as if the future's a reality; there's a spirit of tradition that enables you to act as if the future is something that can be bargained with. That's why you make sacrifices. The sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time, and now they're psychological. We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present and expect that you're negotiating with something that's representing the transcendent future. That's an amazing human discovery. No other creature can do that; to act as if the future is real; to know that you can bargain with reality itself, and that you can do it successfully. It's unbelievable.
It responds to sacrifice. It answers prayers. I'm not saying that any of this is true, by the way. I'm just saying what the cloud of ideas represents. It punishes and rewards. It judges and forgives. It's not nature. One of the things weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and nature are not the same thing, at all. Whatever God is, partially manifest in this logos, is something that stands outside of nature. I think that's something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world. It built Eden for mankind and then banished us for disobedience. It's too powerful to be touched. It granted free will. Distance from it is hell. Distance from it is death. It reveals itself in dogma and in mystical experience, and it's the law. That's sort of like the fatherly aspect.
The son-like aspect. It speaks chaos into order. It slays dragons and feeds people with the remains. It finds gold. It rescues virgins. It is the body and blood of Christ. It is a tragic victim, scapegoat, and eternally triumphant redeemer simultaneously. It cares for the outcast. It dies and is reborn. It is the king of kings and hero of heroes. It's not the state, but is both the fulfillment and critic of the state. It dwells in the perfect house. It is aiming at paradise or heaven. It can rescue from hell. It cares for the outcast. It is the foundation and the cornerstone that was rejected. It is the spirit of the law.
The spirit-like aspect. It's akin to the human soul. It's the prophetic voice. It's the still, small voice of conscience. It's the spoken truth. It's called forth by music. It is the enemy of deceit, arrogance, and resentment. It is the water of life. It burns without consuming. It's a blinding light.
That's a very well-developed set of poetic metaphors. These are all...what would you say...glimpses of the transcendent ideal. That's the right way of thinking about it. They're glimpses of the transcendent ideal, and all of them have a specific meaning. In part, what we're going to do is go over that meaning, as we continue with this series. What we've got now is a brief description, at least, of what this is. ~ Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series, 1,#KEYS
123:Coded Language
Whereas, breakbeats have been the missing link connecting the diasporic community to its drum woven past
Whereas the quantised drum has allowed the whirling mathematicians to calculate the ever changing distance between rock and stardom.
Whereas the velocity of the spinning vinyl, cross-faded, spun backwards, and re-released at the same given moment of recorded history , yet at a different moment in time's continuum has allowed history to catch up with the present.
We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue.
Statements, such as, "keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is.
Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness of this state of being and the lessened distance between thought patterns and their secular manifestations, the role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased by a number no less than 70 percent of the current enlisted as vocal aggressors.
Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize
We have found evidence that hip hops standard 85 rpm when increased by a number as least half the rate of it's standard or decreased at ¾ of it's speed may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness.
Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.
Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season
Our cyclical relationship to phenomenon has encouraged scholars to erase the centers of periods, thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effect
Reject mediocrity!
Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which as been given for you to understand.
The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant.
The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears
Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.
The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.
Thus, in the name of:
ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN
LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITH, LOURDE, WHITMAN
BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA
MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GURDJIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY
DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMANINOV
ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHAWAY, HENDRIX, KUTI, DICKINSON, RIPPERTON
MARY, ISIS, THERESA, HANSBURY, TESLA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI
LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR
LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERÓN, MARLEY, MAGDALENE, COSBY
SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURN, THOSE STILL AFLAME, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED
We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter.
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone
Our music is our alchemy
We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a hand full of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussion factor of forever.
If you must count to keep the beat then count.
Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious.
Curve you circles counterclockwise
Use your cipher to decipher, Coded Language, man made laws.
Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees.
Let your children name themselves and claim themselves as the new day for today we are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love.
We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic.
Every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference.
Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World.
Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain
Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain
~ Saul Williams,#KEYS
124:One little picture in this book, the Magic Locket, was drawn by 'Miss Alice Havers.' I did not state this on the title-page, since it seemed only due, to the artist of all these (to my mind) wonderful pictures, that his name should stand there alone.
The descriptions, of Sunday as spent by children of the last generation, are quoted verbatim from a speech made to me by a child-friend and a letter written to me by a lady-friend.
The Chapters, headed 'Fairy Sylvie' and 'Bruno's Revenge,' are a reprint, with a few alterations, of a little fairy-tale which I wrote in the year 1867, at the request of the late Mrs. Gatty, for 'Aunt Judy's Magazine,' which she was then editing.
It was in 1874, I believe, that the idea first occurred to me of making it the nucleus of a longer story.
As the years went on, I jotted down, at odd moments, all sorts of odd ideas, and fragments of dialogue, that occurred to me--who knows how?--with a transitory suddenness that left me no choice but either to record them then and there, or to abandon them to oblivion. Sometimes one could trace to their source these random flashes of thought--as being suggested by the book one was reading, or struck out from the 'flint' of one's own mind by the 'steel' of a friend's chance remark but they had also a way of their own, of occurring, a propos of nothing --specimens of that hopelessly illogical phenomenon, 'an effect without a cause.' Such, for example, was the last line of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' which came into my head (as I have already related in 'The Theatre' for April, 1887) quite suddenly, during a solitary walk: and such, again, have been passages which occurred in dreams, and which I cannot trace to any antecedent cause whatever. There are at least two instances of such dream-suggestions in this book--one, my Lady's remark, 'it often runs in families, just as a love for pastry does', the other, Eric Lindon's badinage about having been in domestic service.
And thus it came to pass that I found myself at last in possession of a huge unwieldy mass of litterature--if the reader will kindly excuse the spelling --which only needed stringing together, upon the thread of a consecutive story, to constitute the book I hoped to write. Only! The task, at first, seemed absolutely hopeless, and gave me a far clearer idea, than I ever had before, of the meaning of the word 'chaos': and I think it must have been ten years, or more, before I had succeeded in classifying these odds-and-ends sufficiently to see what sort of a story they indicated: for the story had to grow out of the incidents, not the incidents out of the story I am telling all this, in no spirit of egoism, but because I really believe that some of my readers will be interested in these details of the 'genesis' of a book, which looks so simple and straight-forward a matter, when completed, that they might suppose it to have been written straight off, page by page, as one would write a letter, beginning at the beginning; and ending at the end.
It is, no doubt, possible to write a story in that way: and, if it be not vanity to say so, I believe that I could, myself,--if I were in the unfortunate position (for I do hold it to be a real misfortune) of being obliged to produce a given amount of fiction in a given time,--that I could 'fulfil my task,' and produce my 'tale of bricks,' as other slaves have done. One thing, at any rate, I could guarantee as to the story so produced--that it should be utterly commonplace, should contain no new ideas whatever, and should be very very weary reading!
This species of literature has received the very appropriate name of 'padding' which might fitly be defined as 'that which all can write and none can read.' That the present volume contains no such writing I dare not avow: sometimes, in order to bring a picture into its proper place, it has been necessary to eke out a page with two or three extra lines : but I can honestly say I have put in no more than I was absolutely compelled to do.
My readers may perhaps like to amuse themselves by trying to detect, in a given passage, the one piece of 'padding' it contains. While arranging the 'slips' into pages, I found that the passage was 3 lines too short. I supplied the deficiency, not by interpolating a word here and a word there, but by writing in 3 consecutive lines. Now can my readers guess which they are?
A harder puzzle if a harder be desired would be to determine, as to the Gardener's Song, in which cases (if any) the stanza was adapted to the surrounding text, and in which (if any) the text was adapted to the stanza.
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it come's is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. I do not know if 'Alice in Wonderland' was an original story--I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it--but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen storybooks have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'--is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.
Hence it is that, in 'Sylvie and Bruno,' I have striven with I know not what success to strike out yet another new path: be it bad or good, it is the best I can do. It is written, not for money, and not for fame, but in the hope of supplying, for the children whom I love, some thoughts that may suit those hours of innocent merriment which are the very life of Childhood; and also in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others, some thoughts that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.
If I have not already exhausted the patience of my readers, I would like to seize this opportunity perhaps the last I shall have of addressing so many friends at once of putting on record some ideas that have occurred to me, as to books desirable to be written--which I should much like to attempt, but may not ever have the time or power to carry through--in the hope that, if I should fail (and the years are gliding away very fast) to finish the task I have set myself, other hands may take it up.
First, a Child's Bible. The only real essentials of this would be, carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love--no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great difficulty: no new ones would be needed : hundreds of excellent pictures already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size with a pretty attractive looking cover--in a clear legible type--and, above all, with abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!
Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible--not single texts, but passages of from 10 to 20 verses each--to be committed to memory. Such passages would be found useful, to repeat to one's self and to ponder over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible: for instance, when lying awake at night--on a railway-journey --when taking a solitary walk-in old age, when eyesight is failing or wholly lost--and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of David's rapturous cry "O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea, sweeter than honey unto my mouth!"
I have said 'passages,' rather than single texts, because we have no means of recalling single texts: memory needs links, and here are none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen--and those by mere chance: whereas, once get hold of any portion of a chapter that has been committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.
Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called 'un-inspired' literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there are such passages--enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.
These two books of sacred, and secular, passages for memory--will serve other good purposes besides merely occupying vacant hours: they will help to keep at bay many anxious thoughts, worrying thoughts, uncharitable thoughts, unholy thoughts. Let me say this, in better words than my own, by copying a passage from that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX. "If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images, which will generally be at periodical hours, let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy, suicidal thoughts, beset him. Let these be to him the sword, turning everywhere to keep the way of the Garden of Life from the intrusion of profaner footsteps."
Fourthly, a "Shakespeare" for girls: that is, an edition in which everything, not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. Few children under 10 would be likely to understand or enjoy the greatest of poets: and those, who have passed out of girlhood, may safely be left to read Shakespeare, in any edition, 'expurgated' or not, that they may prefer: but it seems a pity that so many children, in the intermediate stage, should be debarred from a great pleasure for want of an edition suitable to them. Neither Bowdler's, Chambers's, Brandram's, nor Cundell's 'Boudoir' Shakespeare, seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently 'expurgated.' Bowdler's is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out! Besides relentlessly erasing all that is unsuitable on the score of reverence or decency, I should be inclined to omit also all that seems too difficult, or not likely to interest young readers. The resulting book might be slightly fragmentary: but it would be a real treasure to all British maidens who have any taste for poetry.
If it be needful to apologize to any one for the new departure I have taken in this story--by introducing, along with what will, I hope, prove to be acceptable nonsense for children, some of the graver thoughts of human life--it must be to one who has learned the Art of keeping such thoughts wholly at a distance in hours of mirth and careless ease. To him such a mixture will seem, no doubt, ill-judged and repulsive. And that such an Art exists I do not dispute: with youth, good health, and sufficient money, it seems quite possible to lead, for years together, a life of unmixed gaiety--with the exception of one solemn fact, with which we are liable to be confronted at any moment, even in the midst of the most brilliant company or the most sparkling entertainment. A man may fix his own times for admitting serious thought, for attending public worship, for prayer, for reading the Bible: all such matters he can defer to that 'convenient season', which is so apt never to occur at all: but he cannot defer, for one single moment, the necessity of attending to a message, which may come before he has finished reading this page,' this night shalt thy soul be required of thee.'
The ever-present sense of this grim possibility has been, in all ages, 1 an incubus that men have striven to shake off. Few more interesting subjects of enquiry could be found, by a student of history, than the various weapons that have been used against this shadowy foe. Saddest of all must have been the thoughts of those who saw indeed an existence beyond the grave, but an existence far more terrible than annihilation--an existence as filmy, impalpable, all but invisible spectres, drifting about, through endless ages, in a world of shadows, with nothing to do, nothing to hope for, nothing to love! In the midst of the gay verses of that genial 'bon vivant' Horace, there stands one dreary word whose utter sadness goes to one's heart. It is the word 'exilium' in the well-known passage
Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura et nos in aeternum
Exilium impositura cymbae.
Yes, to him this present life--spite of all its weariness and all its sorrow--was the only life worth having: all else was 'exile'! Does it not seem almost incredible that one, holding such a creed, should ever have smiled?
And many in this day, I fear, even though believing in an existence beyond the grave far more real than Horace ever dreamed of, yet regard it as a sort of 'exile' from all the joys of life, and so adopt Horace's theory, and say 'let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.'
We go to entertainments, such as the theatre--I say 'we', for I also go to the play, whenever I get a chance of seeing a really good one and keep at arm's length, if possible, the thought that we may not return alive. Yet how do you know--dear friend, whose patience has carried you through this garrulous preface that it may not be your lot, when mirth is fastest and most furious, to feel the sharp pang, or the deadly faintness, which heralds the final crisis--to see, with vague wonder, anxious friends bending over you to hear their troubled whispers perhaps yourself to shape the question, with trembling lips, "Is it serious?", and to be told "Yes: the end is near" (and oh, how different all Life will look when those words are said!)--how do you know, I say, that all this may not happen to you, this night?
And dare you, knowing this, say to yourself "Well, perhaps it is an immoral play: perhaps the situations are a little too 'risky', the dialogue a little too strong, the 'business' a little too suggestive.
I don't say that conscience is quite easy: but the piece is so clever, I must see it this once! I'll begin a stricter life to-morrow." To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow!
"Who sins in hope, who, sinning, says,
'Sorrow for sin God's judgement stays!'
Against God's Spirit he lies; quite stops Mercy with insult; dares, and drops,
Like a scorch'd fly, that spins in vain
Upon the axis of its pain,
Then takes its doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and forgot, from fall to fall."
Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death--if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.
But, once realise what the true object is in life--that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds'--but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man--and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
One other matter may perhaps seem to call for apology--that I should have treated with such entire want of sympathy the British passion for 'Sport', which no doubt has been in by-gone days, and is still, in some forms of it, an excellent school for hardihood and for coolness in moments of danger.
But I am not entirely without sympathy for genuine 'Sport': I can heartily admire the courage of the man who, with severe bodily toil, and at the risk of his life, hunts down some 'man-eating' tiger: and I can heartily sympathize with him when he exults in the glorious excitement of the chase and the hand-to-hand struggle with the monster brought to bay. But I can but look with deep wonder and sorrow on the hunter who, at his ease and in safety, can find pleasure in what involves, for some defenceless creature, wild terror and a death of agony: deeper, if the hunter be one who has pledged himself to preach to men the Religion of universal Love: deepest of all, if it be one of those 'tender and delicate' beings, whose very name serves as a symbol of Love--'thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women'--whose mission here is surely to help and comfort all that are in pain or sorrow!
'Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.' ~ Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Make a good use of the present. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 2:Relax into the present moment. ~ gary-zukav, @wisdomtrove 3:Confine yourself to the present. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 4:Decisions exist only in the present. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 5:Gladly accept the gifts of the present hour. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 6:The future is bought with the present. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 7:Only the present moment contains life. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 8:Only in the present do things happen. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 9:Confidence is the present tense of hope. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 10:Learn that the present hour alone is man's. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 11:Life is the past, the present and the perhaps. ~ bette-davis, @wisdomtrove 12:To live in the present moment is a miracle. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 13:The past has no power over the present moment. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 14:Life is available only in the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 15:The present is big with the future. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 16:The present moment is the pivotal point of power. ~ debbie-ford, @wisdomtrove 17:So eager are our people to obliterate the present. ~ franz-kafka, @wisdomtrove 18:The future is no more uncertain than the present. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 19:Focus on the present, to reduce anxiety and stress. ~ leo-babauta, @wisdomtrove 20:The future depends on what we do in the present. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 21:The present condition of fame is merely fashion. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 22:The present is great with the future. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 23:The whole past is the procession of the present. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 24:Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met? ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 25:You have to know the past to understand the present. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 26:The past is pregnant with the present. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 27:Do not live in the future, only the present is real ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 28:Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 29:The present moment is a powerful goddess. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 30:Enjoy the present day, as distrusting that which is to follow. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 31:Enjoy the present day, trust the least possible to the future. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 32:Memory should be the starting point of the present. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 33:Practice being in the present. Do what you're doing 100%. ~ t-harv-eker, @wisdomtrove 34:The present is never a happy state to any human being. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 35:The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 36:For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 37:If you balance in the Present, you are living in Eternity ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 38:Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past. ~ fred-rogers, @wisdomtrove 39:Live in the present, forget the past. Give up hopes of future. ~ sivananda, @wisdomtrove 40:The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 41:Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour? ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 42:Dwelling in the past prevents doing something in the present. ~ john-wooden, @wisdomtrove 43:I live in the present moment and easily release all past pain. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 44:Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 45:Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 46:The present is the only time that we have to know anything. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 47:The present is the only reality and the only certainty. ~ arthur-schopenhauer, @wisdomtrove 48:Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present! ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 49:Surrender and living in the present are one and the same. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 50:Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 51:Everything is worship if your mind is focused on the present moment. ~ paulo-coelho, @wisdomtrove 52:We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 53:I embrace the present and become one with it. I fully experience it. ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 54:Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present. ~ t-s-eliot, @wisdomtrove 55:What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 56:The present is the only time in which any duty may be done or grace received. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 57:What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 58:It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 59:The separate entity we imagine our self to be cannot reside in the present. ~ rupert-spira, @wisdomtrove 60:Welcome to the present moment. Here. Now. The only moment there ever is. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 61:Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 62:Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future ~ salvador-dali, @wisdomtrove 63:I am in the present. I don't think of the past. I don't think of the future. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 64:Nothing in the past is as powerful as what we choose to do in the present moment. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 65:The past is your LESSON. The present is your GIFT. The future is your MOTIVATION. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 66:Have not all past human beings parted, And must not all the present, one day part? ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 67:How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 68:If we do not find happiness in the present moment, in what shall we find it? ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 69:Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 70:Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 71:The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 72:The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 73:If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 74:The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 75:The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 76:.. offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 77:The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 78:It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 79:Regularly ask yourself "What is my relationship right now with the present moment?" ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 80:When in haste, rest in the present. Take a deep breath and come back to here and now. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 81:Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose in the present moment without judgement. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 82:The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present, and fools of the future. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 83:One of the commonest ailments of the present day is the premature formation of opinion. ~ kin-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 84:Nothing is more precious than being in the present moment. Fully alive, fully aware. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 85:Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 86:It's impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 87:You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 88:Let your mind, happily contented with the present, care not what the morrow will bring with it. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 89:Say goodbye to golden yesterdays: or your heart will never learn to love the present. ~ anthony-de-mello, @wisdomtrove 90:Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value. ~ johann-wolfgang-von-goethe, @wisdomtrove 91:I steeled myself to focus only on the present yet remain alert to what might come next. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 92:The present offers itself to our touch for only an instant of time and then eludes the senses. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 93:Breathing in, there is only the present moment. Breathing out, it is a wonderful moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 94:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ buddha, @wisdomtrove 95:Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 96:Rewrite your major goals every day, in the present tense, exactly as if they already existed ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 97:The only way we have of influencing the future is to own the present, however we find it. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 98:The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 99:We all cling to the past and because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 100:Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 101:I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 102:If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 103:We do not heal the past by dwelling there. We heal the past by living in the present. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 104:Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 105:The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 106:You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 107:Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 108:Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 109:I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 110:Transformations is the word. We can do the work of transformation only in the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 111:If we want a new future that does not look like our past, we must make new choices in the present. ~ debbie-ford, @wisdomtrove 112:The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 113:The present moment is the only moment available to us and it is the door to all other moments. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 114:The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 115:Trust the past to the mercy of God, the present to His love, and the future to His providence. ~ saint-augustine, @wisdomtrove 116:For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 117:Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 118:The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 119:The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 120:The truth brings the past into the present and prepares us for the future. That's what truth does. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 121:To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 122:And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 123:Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present? ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove 124:You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 125:Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 126:The failures of the past must not be an excuse for the inaction of the present and the future. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 127:Acceptance is the magic that makes change possible. It is not forever, it is for the present moment ~ melody-beattie, @wisdomtrove 128:The only way the past can drag you back is if you choose to bring it with you into the present. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 129:We’re always thinking about the future (goals) instead of the present. I prefer to live in the present. ~ leo-babauta, @wisdomtrove 130:Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 131:The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 132:I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 133:Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future. ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 134:The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice in the present. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 135:Enjoy the present hour, be mindful of the past; And neither fear nor wish the Approaches of the last. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 136:God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 137:It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 138:No mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 139:Setting goals helps bring your future into your present and the present is the only time we can take action. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 140:The Master said, "A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present." ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 141:Grace keeps us from worrying because worry deals with the past, while grace deals with the present and future. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 142:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 143:We seldom require more to the happiness of the present hour than to surpass him that stands next before us. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 144:Your body exists in the past and your mind exists in the future. In yoga, they come together in the present. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 145:By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better & prepare for a better future. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 146:Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 147:I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 148:We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present. ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 149:The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 150:Does the thoughtful man suppose that... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 151:The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future. ~ martin-seligman, @wisdomtrove 152:Live in the present. Do the things that need to be done. Do all the good you can each day. The future will unfold ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 153:Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 154:The only thing we know about the future is that it will be faster changing and more unpredictable than the present. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 155:Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 156:Hope is the magic carpet that transports us from the present moment into the realm of infinite possibilities. ~ h-jackson-brown-jr, @wisdomtrove 157:What will the present chaos lead to? How will it all end? It can only end in one way. Mankind will be sick of it all. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 158:There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. ~ arthur-schopenhauer, @wisdomtrove 159:There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove 160:Allow rather than resist what arises in the present moment-inside or out. Let it be interesting rather than good or bad. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 161:But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 162:Reality is what makes the present so vital, so different from the past and future, which are merely mental. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 163:The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 164:The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 165:From its origin to the present hour, in all its vicissitudes, Masonry has been the steady unwearing friend of man. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 166:How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 167:How we pay attention to the present moment... determin es the character of our experience and... the quality of our lives. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove 168:Only through staying in the present, and Being, can we be free of our mind and its misery, and access the power of Now. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 169:The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment. ~ buddha, @wisdomtrove 170:Breathing in I calm my body. Breathing out I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment! ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 171:Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future. ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 172:When we enter the present moment deeply, our regrets and sorrows disappear, and we discover life with all its wonders. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 173:The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not ‘this moment.’ Is this not a fact? ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 174:To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all. ~ pablo-picasso, @wisdomtrove 175:We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 176:We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams. ~ edgar-allan-poe, @wisdomtrove 177:You can’t control the future, but you can affect the present moment. If you want to have a better future, create it now. ~ celestine-chua, @wisdomtrove 178:As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 179:If you concentrate on the present, you eliminate what happened yesterday and any apprehension of what may happen tomorrow. ~ denis-waitley, @wisdomtrove 180:The foundation of greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment, instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 181:We try to live every moment like that, dwelling peacefully in the present moment, and respond to events with compassion. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 182:... What will the present chaos lead to? How will it all end? It can only end in one way. Mankind will be sick of it all... . ~ meher-baba, @wisdomtrove 183:You are a success when you have made friends with your past, are focused on the present, and are optimistic about your future ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 184:The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 185:To abandon the present in order to look for things in the future is to throw away the substance and hold onto the shadow. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 186:Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is the only moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 187:Embrace the present moment with gratefulness and wonder, and you will turn it into whatever you have been waiting for. ~ neale-donald-walsch, @wisdomtrove 188:Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 189:No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can always set our compass to our highest intentions in the present moment ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 190:The thought of the future life with its prerogatives and joys helps to make the trials of the present seem light and transient. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 191:There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 192:God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 193:If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present. ~ les-brown, @wisdomtrove 194:First, study the present construction. Second, ask for all past experiences ... study and read everything you can on the subject. ~ thomas-edison, @wisdomtrove 195:Our appointment with life is in the present moment. If we do not have peace and joy right now, when will we have peace and joy? ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 196:The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 197:A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 198:Feeling the movement of movements is wandering to the past or future. Living in the movements of movement is being in the present. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 199:I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 200:We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late. ~ stephen-king, @wisdomtrove 201:After all, the wrong is done. It is past and cannot be changed. We have only the present and the future upon which to move forward. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 202:How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 203:I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape. ~ jean-paul-sartre, @wisdomtrove 204:A story may be about the past, the present, or the future; it may be about what things should be, what they could be, or why they are. ~ byron-katie, @wisdomtrove 205:Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. ~ winston-churchill, @wisdomtrove 206:We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 207:Affirmation statements are going beyond the reality of the present into the creation of the future through the words you use in the now. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 208:... the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 209:Training yourself to live in the present - without regretting the past or fearing the future - is a recipe for a happy life. ~ jonathan-lockwood-huie, @wisdomtrove 210:All futurity seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled; Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage. ~ william-blake, @wisdomtrove 211:Attention brings you back to the present, the now, and the presence in the now is a state ever at hand, but rarely noticed. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 212:If people tell you that you should live your life preparing for the future, do not believe them. Real Life is found only in the present. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 213:There cannot be a cause without an effect, the present must have had its cause in the past and will have its effect in the future. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 214:With mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 215:The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 216:The power of the present moment is so immense it is capable - when lived in fully - of destroying forever every past mistake and regret. ~ vernon-howard, @wisdomtrove 217:The present moment is the still point around which the universe arises and subsides, only to be reborn again, fresh as a new born child. ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 218:What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 219:Questioner: What is your state at the present moment? Maharaj: A state of non-experiencing. In it all experience is included. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 220:Remember that a man, a true man, never hates. His rages and his bad moods never last beyond the present moment-like electric shocks. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 221:The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 222:A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 223:It’s impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is. But you can tend to the causes of a better future. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 224:If you are truly present and know how to take care of the present moment as best you can, you are doing your best for the future already. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 225:What happens in the present moment? In the present moment, you are producing thought, speech, and action. And they continue in the world. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 226:I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following. ~ mahatma-gandhi, @wisdomtrove 227:When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present. ~ dalai-lama, @wisdomtrove 228:Mindfulness refers to keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality. It is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 229:That is why those who are not capable of being there in the present moment, they don't really live their life - they live like dead people. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 230:The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 231:To meditate with mindful breathing is to bring body and mind back to the present moment so that you do not miss your appointment with life. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 232:If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present. ~ lao-tzu, @wisdomtrove 233:Once you have tasted the juice of the present, you don’t care about dangers. Once you are in tune with life then nothing matter. Life all there is. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 234:You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove 235:Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 236:Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 237:Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 238:The only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 239:Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 240:Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole. ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 241:The conjunction of effort, concentration and balance in asana forces us to live intensely in the present moment, a rare experience in modern life. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 242:The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 243:The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 244:History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future. ~ miguel-de-cervantes, @wisdomtrove 245:It is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 246:Such is the emptiness of human enjoyment that we are always impatient of the present. Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession by disgust. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 247:If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 248:In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 249:The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 250:The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future. ~ hermann-hesse, @wisdomtrove 251:As a feminine cocreator, having lived through the arc of evolution from 1929 to the present, I offer encouragement and vocational arousal to all! ~ barbara-marx-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 252:People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ~ albert-einstein, @wisdomtrove 253:The general rule is that my life is focused on the present, and very little on the past. If anything, I'm a little bit more focused toward the future. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 254:For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 255:Being a lover of life means being open to the present moment as a precious opportunity to experience the richness of life and feel its transformational power. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 256:If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door- or i'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 257:So commit! Commit yourself to pushing through the fear and becoming more than you are at the present moment. The you that could be is absolutely colossal. ~ susan-jeffers, @wisdomtrove 258:The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 259:The word of a gentleman is as good as his bond ‚Äî sometimes better; as in the present case, where his bond might prove but a doubtful sort of security. ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 260:Because if the manifestations that happen in the present moment are beautiful and good, their continuation in the future will be also good and beautiful. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 261:A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future. ~ oliver-goldsmith, @wisdomtrove 262:Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 263:The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking, for the edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of the present travel. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 264:And as every state of a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preceding state, so that the present state of it is big with the future. ~ gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz, @wisdomtrove 265:If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you will look forward, do so prayerfully. But the wisest course would be to be present in the present gratefully. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove 266:Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens. ~ william-somerset-maugham, @wisdomtrove 267:The states of utter clarity, immense love, utter fearlessness; these are mere words at the present, outlines without colour, hints at what can be. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 268:The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 269:You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment, which is the dying now to the now. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 270:Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 271:The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, & 272:There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 273:Which cheers the sad, revives the old, inspires The young, makes Weariness forget his toil, And Fear her danger; opens a new world When this, the present, palls. ~ lord-byron, @wisdomtrove 274:I am real for I am always now, in the present, and what is with me now shares in my reality. It is my own reality that I impart to the present event. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 275:I am real for I am always now, in the present, and what is with me now shares in my reality. The past is in memory, the future - in imagination. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 276:Consciousness is observing your thoughts and actions so that you can live from true choice in the present moment rather than being run by programming from the past. ~ t-harv-eker, @wisdomtrove 277:Just breathing and smiling can make us very happy, because when we breathe consciously we recover ourselves completely and encounter life in the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 278:Behold, I am writing anew, through scribes on Earth who are willing to listen to me again with new ears, in the light of the present crises on planet Earth. ~ barbara-marx-hubbard, @wisdomtrove 279:Carrying the past in to the present, we program the future to continue the past. Letting go the past in the present, we free the future to be something else. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 280:If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 281:One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart, that every day is the best day in the year. ~ ralph-waldo-emerson, @wisdomtrove 282:When there is hope in the future, there is power in the present, and since hope is the foundational quality of all change, there is considerable reason to be excited. ~ zig-ziglar, @wisdomtrove 283:All negativity is caused by denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry—all forms of fear—are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 284:Enlightenment, peace, and joy will not be granted by someone else. The well is within us, And if we dig deeply in the present moment, The water will spring forth. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 285:... in the present State of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 286:It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 287:Let's forgive the past and who we were then. Let's embrace the present and who we're capable of becoming. Let's surrender the future and watch miracles unfold. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 288:Eternity is not ever-lasting time but the real, unfading, indestructible, and timeless Present, for, as Schroedinger said, the present is the only thing that has no end. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 289:I will practice coming back to the present moment... not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past or letting anxieties, fears, or cravings pull me out. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 290:Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 291:Just as future eclipses of the Sun and Moon are indicated in the present relations of those bodies, so are future earthly lives indicated in what now lives within us. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 292:Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 293:Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 294:Make it a habit to feel the inner body as often as you can. Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment, it is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 295:The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. ~ buddha, @wisdomtrove 296:Let be the future: mind the present need and leave the rest to whom the rest concerns ... present tasks claim our care: the ordering of the future rests where it should rest. ~ sophocles, @wisdomtrove 297:From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 298:If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove 299:The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. ~ buddha, @wisdomtrove 300:You can’t change the past; it has happened and it is what it is. Fixating on it isn’t going to get you anywhere. You can only change the present to create a better future. ~ celestine-chua, @wisdomtrove 301:The past doesn't determine your future unless you carry it with you into the present. Forgiving yourself and others, you free the universe to begin again at any moment. ~ marianne-williamson, @wisdomtrove 302:this present moment never comes to be and it never ceases to be, it is simply our minds that construct the continuity of thoughts we call time. In the present moment is nirvana. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 303:When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 304:When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 305:The conduct of a wise politician is ever suited to the present posture of affairs. Often by foregoing a part he saves the whole, and by yielding in a small matter secures a greater. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 306:Ask yourself: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? If there isn’t, then time is covering up the present moment, and life is perceived as a burden or a struggle. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 307:It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 308:And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results. ~ walt-whitman, @wisdomtrove 309:At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 310:Forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! control the present! Live supremely well now! This is the way of the wise. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 311:Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 312:The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do? ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 313:This present moment, since it knows neither past nor future, is itself timeless, and that which is timeless is Eternal. Thus the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 314:I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ abraham-maslow, @wisdomtrove 315:Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 316:The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present. Yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable. ~ nicholas-sparks, @wisdomtrove 317:Your life is not between the moments of your birth and death. Your life is between now and your next breath. The present – the here and now – is all the life you ever get. ~ marc-and-angel-chernoff, @wisdomtrove 318:Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we can't be in touch with life. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 319:Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart. ~ henry-wadsworth-longfellow, @wisdomtrove 320:I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus I have found peace. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 321:To understand the present with its full, rich significance, the mind must free itself from the habit of self-protecting acquisition; when it is utterly naked, then there is immortality. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 322:It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 323:Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 324:The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove 325:Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it. Value your present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you've lost them forever. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 326:The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time& 327:The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time. ~ arthur-c-carke, @wisdomtrove 328:Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savour it. Value your present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you've lost them forever. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 329:I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 330:Never confuse yourself by visions of an entire lifetime at once... remember that it is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. ~ marcus-aurelius, @wisdomtrove 331:I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same,& 332:Start with a picture of your goal as already achieved in the future, and work back to the present. Imagine the steps that you would have taken to get from where you are now to where you want to be. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 333:He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 334:The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice. ~ bruce-lee, @wisdomtrove 335:The States separately have very inadequate ideas of the present danger. Party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day, whilst the concerns of the nation are secondary. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 336:... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 337:Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 338:The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we're continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 339:When you are grounded in the present - feeling your feelings, listening to your body, tasting your food, and expressing your ideas - you do not build up toxicity. You digest your experience as you go. ~ debbie-ford, @wisdomtrove 340:The present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple, but concealed within it lies the greatest power. Like the atom, it is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 341:One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present. ~ f-scott-fitzgerald, @wisdomtrove 342:To meditate is to be aware of what is going on - in our bodies, our feelings our minds, and in the world. When we settle into the present moment, we can see the beauties and wonders before our eyes. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 343:With a practice, we can always remain alive in the present moment. With mindfulness, you can establish yourself in the present in order to touch the wonders of life that are available in that moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 344:but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. it soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 345:Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 346:Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 347:I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitious. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 348:To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 349:The past has no power over us. It doesn't matter how long we have had a negative pattern. The point of power is in the present moment. What a wonderful thing to realize! We can begin to be free in this moment! ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 350:Pick the day. Enjoy it - to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come... The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present - and I don't want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future. ~ audrey-hepburn, @wisdomtrove 351:Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 352:Human beings are the only creatures who have the ability to write down their goals and design their future. And here is why most of us don't. We're trapped either by regret of the past or the routine of the present. ~ jim-rohn, @wisdomtrove 353:Forgiveness is a gift to yourself. It frees you from the past, past experiences, and past relationships. It allows you to live in the present time. When you forgive yourself and forgive others, you are indeed free. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 354:The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts. ~ bertrand-russell, @wisdomtrove 355:There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 356:The present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes - rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments. ~ alexander-hamilton, @wisdomtrove 357:It is a mistake, too, to say that the face is the mirror of the soul. The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only. ~ napoleon-bonaparte, @wisdomtrove 358:The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain. ~ hellen-keller, @wisdomtrove 359:It were better, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divinity, the better. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 360:No morn ever dawned more favorable than ours did; and no day was every more clouded than the present! Wisdom, and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 361:What the angel of death can teach us is how to be truly alive. We become aware that we can die at any moment; we have just the present to be alive. The truth is we don't if we are going to die tomorrow. Who knows? ~ don-miguel-ruiz, @wisdomtrove 362:If you become more conscious, it will be like coming around from a coma. You'll remember that you're alive. You'll discover who you really are. You'll know that all is one. And you'll fall in love with the present moment. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 363:In whatever position one is in, or in whatever condition in life one is placed, one must find balance. Balance is the state of the present - the here and now. If you balance in the present, you are living in Eternity. ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 364:We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 365:Eating mindfully is a most important practice of meditation. We can eat in a way that we restore the cookie of our childhood. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 366:The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The new order is Rapidly fadin'. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin'. ~ bob-dylan, @wisdomtrove 367:The people must be helped to think naturally about money. They must be told what it is, and what makes it money, and what are the possible tricks of the present system which put nations and peoples under control of the few. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 368:Accept—then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 369:A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 370:In order to reveal the gifts that lie beneath the surface of your heart’s greatest desires, you must look beyond your years here on earth, reconnect with the Divine, and bring forth your soul’s legacy into the present moment. ~ debbie-ford, @wisdomtrove 371:I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach! ~ charles-dickens, @wisdomtrove 372:We began a contest for liberty ill provided with the means for the war, relying on our patriotism to supply the deficiency. We expected to encounter many wants and distressed we must bear the present evils and fortitude ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 373:How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 374:How does personality, come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 375:It is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 376:The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live. ~ alain-de-botton, @wisdomtrove 377:We may win a battle, but if in doing so we have planted thousands of seeds of hatred and fear..the war is not over- only the present conflict has ceased. There will be no peace as long as we react to violence with violence. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 378:Action delayed is action abandoned. There may be other chances for other actions, but the present moment is lost - irretrievably lost. All preparation is for the future - you cannot prepare for the present. ~ sri-nisargadatta-maharaj, @wisdomtrove 379:Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 380:There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 381:Intelligence is the capacity to be in the present. The more you are in the past or are in the future, the less intelligent you are. Intelligence is the capacity to be here-now, to be in this moment and nowhere else. Then you are awake. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 382:It is not the present which unfluences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable. ~ frank-herbert, @wisdomtrove 383:You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 384:A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 385:The wild life of today is not ours to do with as we please. The original stock was given to us in trust for the benefit both of the present and the future. We must render an accounting of this trust to those who come after us. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 386:Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment —- allow it to be as it is —- then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 387:Abridge your hopes in proportion to the shortness of the span of human life; for while we converse, the hours, as if envious of our pleasure, fly away: enjoy, therefore, the present time, and trust not too much to what to-morrow may produce. ~ horace, @wisdomtrove 388:Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 389:The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 390:The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came, taking pleasure in every meal, and in every word and song. ~ j-r-r-tolkien, @wisdomtrove 391:One of the computer models for a four degree temperature rise would give rise to a 10 degree temperature rise in Africa. And bear in mind also that in the depth of an ice age the mean temperature drop compared to the present was five degrees. ~ martin-rees, @wisdomtrove 392:Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present. ~ elie-wiesel, @wisdomtrove 393:If Bible Christianity is to survive the present world upheaval, we shall need to have a fresh revelation of the greatness and the beauty of Jesus... . He alone can raise our cold hearts to rapture and restore again the art of true worship. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 394:It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 395:Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. We should live for the future, and yet should find our life in the fidelities of the present; the last is only the method of the first. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 396:In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past. ~ alan-moore, @wisdomtrove 397:Perhaps the most incapable Executive that ever filled the presidential chair... it would be difficult to imagine a man less fit to guide the state with honor and safety through the stormy times that marked the opening of the present century. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 398:I pray for faith that my future will be good if I live today well, and in peace. I will remember that staying in the present is the best thing I can do for my future. I will focus on what’s happening now instead of what’s going to happen tomorrow. ~ melody-beattie, @wisdomtrove 399:The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of the ego. The ego can never be in alignment with the present moment, which is to say, aligned with life, since its very nature compels it to ignore, resist, or devalue the Now. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 400:Usually, people have a tendency to be caught in the worries concerning the future or in the regret concerning the past. There is some kind of energy that is pushing them to run, and they are not able to establish themselves in the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 401:The present tax codes inhibit the mobility and formation of capital, add complexities and inequities which undermine the morale of the taxpayer, and make tax avoidance rather than market factors a prime consideration in too many economic decisions. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 402:When we let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with the past, and strategies to protect the present, there is nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect with the present moment is to begin to appreciate the beauty of true simplicity. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 403:The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory. Arthur Eddington ~ sir-arthur-eddington, @wisdomtrove 404:If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 405:Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 406:The past, present and future are not linear. Everything is happening in this eternal now. The future is determined by what we do now; by our present state of consciousness. And magically, when we joyfully live in the present, we reframe and heal our past. ~ aimee-davies, @wisdomtrove 407:Make a commitment to yourself to create the best possible present moment in every moment. If you do that, you're already guaranteed a great future because your only commitment is to the present moment, and your future is just a string of present moments. ~ anita-moorjani, @wisdomtrove 408:The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality. ~ edmund-burke, @wisdomtrove 409:“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” ~ william-james, @wisdomtrove 410:The present moment has always been available to spiritual seekers, but as long as you are seeking you are not available to the present moment. "Seeking" implies that you are looking to the future for some answer, or for some achievement, spiritual or otherwise. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 411:I was in the drug store the other day trying to get a cold medication... Not easy. There's an entire wall of products you need. You stand there going,"Well, this one is quick acting but this is long lasting... Which is more important, the present or the future?" ~ jerry-seinfeld, @wisdomtrove 412:We are in effect making a - to some extent, making a choice between future inflation and getting our - getting off the floor. And we're likely - we're likely to have more inflation in the future as a consequence of the things we do to fight the present situation. ~ warren-buffet, @wisdomtrove 413:Are you waiting to start living? If you develop such a mind pattern, no matter what you achieve or get, the present will never be good enough; the future will always seem better. A perfect recipe for permanent dissatisfaction and non- fulfillment, don’t you agree? ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 414:I stand for the square deal. I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 415:The present moment is really all that we have. The only place you can really love another person is in the present. Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love - or any other experience - must take place in the present. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 416:. . . Action always happens in the present, because it is an expression of the body, which can only exist in the here and now. But the mind is like a phantom that lives only in the past or future. It's only power over you is to draw your attention our of the present. ~ dan-millman, @wisdomtrove 417:Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 418:Conservation and rural-life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at the bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily given for the future. ~ theodore-roosevelt, @wisdomtrove 419:Sometimes we believe that happiness is not possible in the here and now, that we need a few more conditions to be happy. So we run toward the future to get the conditions we think are missing. But by doing so we sacrifice the present moment; we sacrifice true life. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 420:And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. & 421:I scarcely remember counting upon happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. ~ john-keats, @wisdomtrove 422:If you're not careful to think and speak words of faith, worry will creep in, and it will not only steal your peace and joy, it will steal your & 423:What is the next step, the practical application? ‚ÄîI will answer that the absolutely vital thing is to consolidate your understanding, to become capable of enjoyment, of living in the present, and of the discipline which this involves. Without this you have nothing to give. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 424:As I look back at the entire tapestry of my life, I can see from the perspective of the present moment that every aspect of my life was necessary and perfect. Each step eventually led to a higher place, even though these steps often felt like obstacles or painful experiences. ~ wayne-dyer, @wisdomtrove 425:Well, I believe you created those experiences over and over because they mirrored something you believed about yourself. It doesn't really matter how long we have had a problem, or how big it is, or how life-threatening it is. The Point of Power Is Always in the Present Moment. ~ louise-hay, @wisdomtrove 426:Intention combined with detachment leads to life centred, present-moment awareness. My intent is for the future, but my attention is in the present. I accept the present and intend the future. I let go of my attachment to outcome. I enjoy every moment in the journey of life. ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 427:Men are in a restless pursuit after satisfaction and earthly things. They have no forethought for their eternal state, the present hour absorbs them. They turn to another and another of earth's broken cisterns, hoping to find water, where not a drop was ever discovered yet. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 428:When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they're full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the Great Uncertainty. But sages don't consider the past. And they don't worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the Way. ~ bodhidharma, @wisdomtrove 429:A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 430:The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 431:In proportion as our cares are employed upon the future, they are abstracted from the present, from the only time which we can call our own, and of which, if we neglect the apparent duties to make provision against visionary attacks, we shall certainly counteract our own purpose. ~ samuel-johnson, @wisdomtrove 432:Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything we do and see. Every breath we take, every step we take, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. The question is whether or not we are in touch with it. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 433:Imagine for a moment your own version of a perfect future. See yourself in that future with everything you could wish for at this very moment fulfilled. Now take the memory of that future and bring it here into the present. Let it influence how you will behave from this moment on. ~ deepak-chopra, @wisdomtrove 434:If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 435:Since, O sweet Lord Jesus, Thou art the present portion of Thy people, favour us this year with such a sense of Thy preciousness, that from its first to its last day we may be glad and rejoice in Thee. Let January open with joy in the Lord, and December close with gladness in Jesus. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 436:How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove 437:Our present tax system ... exerts too heavy a drag on growth ... It reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking ... The present tax load ... distorts economic judgments and channels an undue amount of energy into efforts to avoidtaxliabilities. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 438:Settle into the present moment. Drop the past and let go of the future. Receive each moment without trying to connect one moment to the next. Abide as presence, neither remembering nor planning. There is no straining, no seeking for anything. Nothing to have, nothing to do, nothing to be. ~ rick-hanson, @wisdomtrove 439:To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 440:Societal transformation isn't going to happen in one month, one year, or even one lifetime. But we see it happen person by person in front of us, and we don't have to worry about the future if we're taking care of the present. In some sense, that's the best insurance policy we can have. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 441:The present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 442:We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ~ kurt-vonnegut, @wisdomtrove 443:The individual needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his Creator and subject to Him. ~ peter-drucker, @wisdomtrove 444:There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future. ~ john-f-kennedy, @wisdomtrove 445:In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for & 446:The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove 447:When we come into the present, we begin to feel the life around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding. We must have the courage to face whatever is present - our pain, our desires, our grief, our loss, our secret hopes our love - everything that moves us most deeply. ~ jack-kornfield, @wisdomtrove 448:Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. ~ ernest-hemingway, @wisdomtrove 449:If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. ~ benjamin-franklin, @wisdomtrove 450:Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, & 451:Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause: And I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of ‚ü®the present‚ü© age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this Kind. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 452:Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life as it is unfolding. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 453:Every life has a purpose. We need to let go of the past. Live in the present. Do not waste today worrying about what will happen tomorrow. Embrace your true spirit, embrace and listen to grace and you be transformed in the moment. Do not fixate on what you want but give thanks for what you have. ~ caroline-myss, @wisdomtrove 454:It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in numbers, has been rather carefully thought out... The seemingly miraculous concurrence of these numerical values must remain the most compelling evidence for cosmic design. ~ paul-davies, @wisdomtrove 455:I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. ~ henry-ford, @wisdomtrove 456:Meditation is not meant to help us avoid problems or run away from difficulties. It is meant to allow positive healing to take place. To meditate is to learn how to stop—to stop being carried away by our regrets about the past, our anger or despair in the present, or our worries about the future. ~ thich-nhat-hanh, @wisdomtrove 457:Children, in the present dark age of materialism, chanting the mantra is the easiest way for us to obtain inner purification and concentration. Japa can be done at any time, anywhere, without observing any rule regarding the purity of mind and body. Japa can be done while engaged in any task. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 458:I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 459:Rant Casey used to say, "No matter what happens, it's always now... " Talk about cryptic. I think what Rant meant was, we live in the present moment of reality, and no matter what's come before, no matter how much we loved a person or a dog, when it attacks us we'll react to that moment of danger. ~ chuck-palahniuk, @wisdomtrove 460:There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become your teacher. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 461:Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion. ~ virginia-woolf, @wisdomtrove 462:I've often hesitated in beginning a project because I've thought, & 463:We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances. ~ dean-koontz, @wisdomtrove 464:Every life has a purpose. We need to let go of the past. Live in the present. Do not waste today worrying about what will happen tomorrow. Embrace your true spirit, embrace and listen to grace and you be transformed in the moment. Do not fixate on what you want but give thanks for what you have. ~ norman-vincent-peale, @wisdomtrove 465:The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 466:In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 467:The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. . . Live each moment completely and the future will take care of itself. Fully enjoy the wonder and beauty of each moment. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 468:I wish the constitution, which is offered, had been made more perfect; but I sincerely believe it is the best that could be obtained at this time. And, as a constitutional door is opened for amendment hereafter, the adoption of it, under the present circumstances of the Union, is in my opinion desirable. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 469:The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. The longer he lives, the more stupid he becomes, because his anxiety to avoid unavoidable death becomes more and more acute. What bitterness! He lives for what is always out of reach! His thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present. ~ zhuangzi, @wisdomtrove 470:Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possess the past. ~ susan-sontag, @wisdomtrove 471:Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. ~ fyodor-dostoevsky, @wisdomtrove 472:The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 473:We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage. ~ malcolm-gladwell, @wisdomtrove 474:Art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a & 475:Loving yourself involves the discovery of the true wonder of you; not only the present you, but the many possibilities of you. It involves the continual realization that you are unique, like no other person in the world, that life is, or should be, the discovery, the development and the sharing of this uniqueness. ~ leo-buscaglia, @wisdomtrove 476:Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only - you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is essentially spaceless. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 477:Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past. ~ george-orwell, @wisdomtrove 478:The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 479:We are all affected by five things. But the most important thing that affects us is our dreams& 480:On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 481:Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity. ~ e-m-forster, @wisdomtrove 482:How she might have felt had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth: and be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his forever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation. ~ jane-austen, @wisdomtrove 483:I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 484:It is no very good symptom, either of nations or individuals, that they deal much in vaticination. Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand. ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 485:While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will soon go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, with the deep trust that God will never leave us alone but will fulfill the deepest desires of our heart... Joy in this perspective is the fruit of hope. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 486:You are daydreaming about the future because you have not tasted the present. Start tasting the present. Find out a few moments where you are simply delighting. Looking at the trees, just be the look. Listening to the birds, just be a listening ear. Let them reach to your deepest core. Let their song spread all over your being. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 487:Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment. It’s good to have a big picture outlook, to set goals, to establish budgets and make plans, but if you’re always living in the future, you’re never really enjoying the present in the way God wants you to. ~ joel-osteen, @wisdomtrove 488:Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination. ~ georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel, @wisdomtrove 489:We do not rest satisfied with the present... . So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 490:It's hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been... one of the primary sources of progress. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 491:To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in; long enough to actually feel the present moment, to see it in its fullness, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know and understand it better. ~ jon-kabat-zinn, @wisdomtrove 492:We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 493:We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 494:Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order. ~ hannah-arendt, @wisdomtrove 495:Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 496:We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. ~ anais-nin, @wisdomtrove 497:From the descent of the Holy Spirit at the beginning we may learn something concerning His operations at the present time. Remember at the outset that whatever the Holy Spirit was at the first, He is that now, for as God, He remains forever the same-whatever He did then He is able to do still, for His power is by no means diminished. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 498:A Zen master was walking with one of his students who asked him: ‘How can I awaken?’ The master was quiet for a moment and then he replied: ‘Can you hear that babbling brook? … Enter there.’ The master is telling him to become profoundly conscious of what he’s already experiencing, by ‘entering’ into his sensual experience in the present moment. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 499:How interesting it would be to write the story of the experiences in this life of a man who killed himself in his previous life; how he stumbles against the very demands which had offered themselves before, until he arrives at the realization that he must fulfill those demands. The deeds of the preceding life give direction to the present life. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 500:A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one. ~ john-steinbeck, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Make a good use of the present. ~ Horace, #NFDB
2:I am the I of the present ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
3:No time like the present ~ Jeffrey Archer, #NFDB
4:The present is the point of power. ~ Seth, #NFDB
5:The present is an illusion. ~ Ian McDonald, #NFDB
6:The present will not long endure. ~ Pindar, #NFDB
7:Only the present counts. ~ Georges Bernanos, #NFDB
8:Relax into the present moment. ~ Gary Zukav, #NFDB
9:In music the present is extended. ~ Ned Rorem, #NFDB
10:I like the present and tomorrow ~ Karl Lagerfeld, #NFDB
11:Be greatly aware of the present. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
12:be greatly aware of the present. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
13:The present is shaped by the past. ~ Amine A Ayad, #NFDB
14:There is no time like the present. ~ Georgia Byng, #NFDB
15:Confine yourself to the present. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
16:Ever-present is the present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
17:In art the Present is the eternal. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
18:Only the present moment contains life. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
19:The present is the key to the past ~ Charles Lyell, #NFDB
20:The present joys of life we doubly taste, ~ Martial, #NFDB
21:Decisions exist only in the present. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
22:looking for a path back to the present: ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
23:The Point of Power Is in the Present. ~ Jane Roberts, #NFDB
24:The present alone can make no man wretched. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
25:The present tense made him nervous. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
26:dwell deeply in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
27:Like a dart the present glances, ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
28:Memories rob us of the present. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
29:The past has to inform the present... ~ John Turturro, #NFDB
30:Living in the present is the way to go. ~ Renee Marino, #NFDB
31:Politics is history in the present tense. ~ John Avlon, #NFDB
32:The future is bought with the present. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
33:To live in the present moment is a miracle. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
34:Fuck the past. This was the present. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
35:It's like the past has poisoned the present. ~ Will Hill, #NFDB
36:Only the present moment contains life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
37:The future is purchased by the present. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
38:The past is the father of the present. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
39:The present day composer refuses to die. ~ Edgard Varese, #NFDB
40:The present is merely the past reassembled, ~ Jamie Ford, #NFDB
41:The present moment is all you ever have. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
42:The present necessarily betrays the past. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
43:Endure the present, and watch for better things. ~ Virgil, #NFDB
44:Life is available only in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
45:Life is only available in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
46:Only in the present do things happen. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
47:Our true home is in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
48:Spontaneity is being present in the present. ~ Wei Wu Wei, #NFDB
49:We all use the future to escape the present. ~ John Green, #NFDB
50:My last defense / Is the present tense. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks, #NFDB
51:Work keeps you in the present moment. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
52:You just use the future to escape the present ~ John Green, #NFDB
53:Give yourself a gift: the present moment. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
54:If you are at peace, you are living in the present. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
55:The flower of the present rosily blossomed. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
56:The past is what the present is doing now. ~ Rowan Williams, #NFDB
57:The worst time is always the present. ~ Jean de La Fontaine, #NFDB
58:You just use the future to escape the present. ~ John Green, #NFDB
59:Accept the present moment without judgement. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
60:Concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
61:Confidence is the present tense of hope. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
62:Learn that the present hour alone is man's. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
63:Life is the past, the present and the perhaps. ~ Bette Davis, #NFDB
64:The art of life is to live in the present moment ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
65:The future has taken root in the present. ~ Nicol Williamson, #NFDB
66:The past lies like a nightmare upon the present. ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
67:The present is the past biting into the future. ~ Edwin Land, #NFDB
68:What I am interested in is the present time ~ Sophie Marceau, #NFDB
69:In the present, every day is a miracle. ~ James Gould Cozzens, #NFDB
70:longing for the future and weariness of the present. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
71:The Golden Age was never the present age. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
72:The present is a powerful deity. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
73:The present moment is all you will ever have. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
74:Focus on the present moment. Stay in the moment. ~ Tony Horton, #NFDB
75:If we lose the present moment, we lose life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
76:Planning is bringing the future into the present. ~ Mike Vance, #NFDB
77:The most important time in life is the present. ~ Aitzaz Ahsan, #NFDB
78:The past has no power over the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
79:The present is a powerful deity. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
80:To live in the past is to die in the present. ~ Bill Belichick, #NFDB
81:An unresolved past erodes beauty in the present. ~ Romany Malco, #NFDB
82:Be intent upon the perfection of the present day. ~ William Law, #NFDB
83:bookshop, a denizen of the present once more. He ~ Layton Green, #NFDB
84:Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day. ~ Mary Douglas, #NFDB
85:Life is available only in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
86:The present is big with the future. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
87:The present is the most important moment in life . ~ The Mother, #NFDB
88:The present moment is the pivotal point of power. ~ Debbie Ford, #NFDB
89:We are always getting away from the present moment. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
90:We move forward, but we must stay in the present. ~ Scott Jurek, #NFDB
91:Without a future, the present serves no purpose, ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
92:Don’t fear the future. Only endure the present. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
93:I've always been hopelessly stuck in the present. ~ Joy Fielding, #NFDB
94:I write with my past, about the future, for the present ~ Eyedea, #NFDB
95:So eager are our people to obliterate the present. ~ Franz Kafka, #NFDB
96:The future is no more uncertain than the present. ~ Walt Whitman, #NFDB
97:The Present is the womb of the future. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati, #NFDB
98:The present moment contains the whole of life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
99:To be in the present is actually to be in eternity. ~ Ayya Khema, #NFDB
100:Well, Mr. Antichrist, that’s all for the present! ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
101:Become intensely conscious of the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
102:Forget the past and live the present hour. ~ Sarah Knowles Bolton, #NFDB
103:"Life is only available in the present moment." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
104:Live with nature
In the present
Above time ~ Jon Kabat Zinn,#NFDB
105:The future depends on what we do in the present. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
106:-the future is but the present a little farther on. ~ Jules Verne, #NFDB
107:The present eye praises the present object. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
108:The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency. ~ Adam Haslett, #NFDB
109:The present is great with the future. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
110:The whole past is the procession of the present. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
111:We serve the future by protecting the present. ~ Maria Montessori, #NFDB
112:Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met? ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
113:You have to know the past to understand the present. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
114:A mind in the present moment is meditation. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
115:Crying over what's gone won't find the present. ~ Edwin Louis Cole, #NFDB
116:Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
117:I was in an acute case of the present tense. P.30 ~ Rachel Kushner, #NFDB
118:Joy and life exist nowhere but the present. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston, #NFDB
119:The future is made of the same stuff as the present. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
120:The past does not define, you the present does. ~ Jillian Michaels, #NFDB
121:The past is pregnant with the present. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
122:the past rolls forward to touch the present hour. ~ Eleanor Catton, #NFDB
123:The point of power is always in the present moment. ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
124:The present is the only thing that has no end. ~ Erwin Schrodinger, #NFDB
125:The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb. ~ Rene Magritte, #NFDB
126:The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present, ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
127:The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
128:What is happening in the present moment is life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
129:With Instagram, the focus is on the present tense. ~ Kevin Systrom, #NFDB
130:Do not live in the future, only the present is real ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
131:Don’t we all make up history to suit the present? ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
132:Focusing on the present helps reduce anxiety and worry, ~ Alex Korb, #NFDB
133:Getting soft—that's the curse of the present day. ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
134:It is said that the present is pregnant with the future. ~ Voltaire, #NFDB
135:Know that life can only be found in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
136:The future is the worst thing about the present. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
137:The past is always with us, for it feeds the present. ~ Ruskin Bond, #NFDB
138:The present is always the best, even when its rough. ~ Julien Torma, #NFDB
139:The present is the only things that has no end. ~ Erwin Schr dinger, #NFDB
140:The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present. ~ Patrick Rothfuss, #NFDB
141:Be not bound by the present, but leave nothing to luck. ~ Henry Ford, #NFDB
142:But remember, there's no greater gift than the present. ~ Dan Santat, #NFDB
143:He who lives in the present lives in eternity. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
144:The best futures get created in the present moment. ~ Steve Chandler, #NFDB
145:The passivity of the present Govt is beyond belief. ~ Martin Gilbert, #NFDB
146:The past overshadows the present foreshadows the future. ~ Tami Hoag, #NFDB
147:The present could never be held, it did not allow it. ~ Meg Wolitzer, #NFDB
148:To be concentrated means to live fully in the present. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
149:Keep dwelling in the past and you won’t see the present. ~ Jake Bible, #NFDB
150:Our appointment with life is in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
151:The present grows within the boundaries of the past. ~ Simon Van Booy, #NFDB
152:We will never have repose. The present is perpetual. ~ Georges Braque, #NFDB
153:Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, #NFDB
154:A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense. ~ V S Pritchett, #NFDB
155:Gratitude can help you stay in the present moment. ~ Christopher Dines, #NFDB
156:It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
~ Voltaire,#NFDB
157:Memories about the past are always about the present. ~ Nelson DeMille, #NFDB
158:The present is burthened too much with the past. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
159:The present moment is a powerful goddess. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
160:When the past controls the present, the future is a rerun. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
161:When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable ~ Martin Amis, #NFDB
162:Americans often have trouble enjoying the present moment. ~ Alan Dundes, #NFDB
163:Because animals seem to dwell in the present moment, ~ Brenda Peterson, #NFDB
164:Enjoy the present day, as distrusting that which is to follow. ~ Horace, #NFDB
165:Enjoy the present day, trust the least possible to the future. ~ Horace, #NFDB
166:Government rules the present. Literature rules the future. ~ Lord Acton, #NFDB
167:Practice being in the present. Do what you're doing 100%. ~ T Harv Eker, #NFDB
168:The future was with Fate. The present was our own. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
169:The only moment to be alive is in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
170:The present condition of fame is merely fashion. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
171:The present is never a happy state to any human being. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
172:The present is not exempt from the mistakes of the past. ~ John Beachem, #NFDB
173:The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past. ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
174:The present moment is a powerful goddess. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
175:There is nowhere to arrive except the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
176:To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present. ~ Jill Lepore, #NFDB
177:Tradition, indeed, but the present is built on the past. ~ Karen Harper, #NFDB
178:For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
179:ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present ~ Joanne Greenberg, #NFDB
180:The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too. ~ Eugene O Neill, #NFDB
181:The present was too urgent to let the past intrude. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
182:Today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present. ~ Bil Keane, #NFDB
183:What’s important is the time we have now. The present. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
184:If you balance in the Present, you are living in Eternity ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
185:Indian people are relics; we do not exist in the present. ~ Russell Means, #NFDB
186:In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim. ~ Osamu Dazai, #NFDB
187:Know that life can only be found in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
188:Memory should be the starting point of the present. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
189:Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
190:The most important time in history is - NOW - the present, ~ Talib Kweli, #NFDB
191:The present is an edifice which God cannot rebuild. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
192:The present is the present. Tomorrow will still be ‘now. ~ Brian Staveley, #NFDB
193:The present moment is a conspiracy of the total universe. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
194:To have a future we have to live and leave the present. ~ Akiane Kramarik, #NFDB
195:When you cut into the present the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
196:When you cut into the present, the future leaks out ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
197:Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past. ~ Fred Rogers, #NFDB
198:You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
199:Because joy and life exist nowhere but the present. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston, #NFDB
200:Conformity to the present is invisibility to the future. ~ Stefan Molyneux, #NFDB
201:Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
202:I am in the present and only the present matters to me ~ Ariane Mnouchkine, #NFDB
203:I stay in the present, so I don't know about the future. ~ Malachy McCourt, #NFDB
204:"It is in the present and only in the present that you live." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
205:Limit time to the present. Meditate upon your last hour. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
206:Live in the present, forget the past. Give up hopes of future. ~ Sivananda, #NFDB
207:Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present. ~ Regina Brett, #NFDB
208:See things in the present, even if they are in the future. ~ Larry Ellison, #NFDB
209:"So-called problems cannot survive in the present moment." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
210:Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present. ~ Joan Rivers, #NFDB
211:The past and the present existed simultaneously aboard a ship. ~ Dan Lopez, #NFDB
212:The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. We ~ Carlo Rovelli, #NFDB
213:The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be? ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
214:The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past. ~ Sophocles, #NFDB
215:We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
216:We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
217:Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour? ~ Horace, #NFDB
218:But for the present gentle reader! And still gentler purchaser ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
219:If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
220:I live in the present moment and easily release all past pain. ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
221:In the present moment, we are all innocent. Wake up! ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
222:Just don’t forsake the present for the unknowns of the future. ~ Kim Holden, #NFDB
223:Live in the present, or die in your past; it's your choice. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
224:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
225:Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
226:The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
227:The present is a text, and the past its interpretation. ~ John Henry Newman, #NFDB
228:The Present is where the Past shakes hands with the Future. ~ Deborah Cooke, #NFDB
229:There is no peace that cannot be found in the present moment. ~ Tasha Tudor, #NFDB
230:What good is the present if you cannot change the future? ~ Robert Liparulo, #NFDB
231:When you cut into the present, the future leaks out. ~ William S Burroughs, #NFDB
232:Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage. ~ William Blake, #NFDB
233:Don't shortchange the future, because of fear in the present. ~ Barack Obama, #NFDB
234:Literature gives us the great gift of the present moment. ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
235:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
236:Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present. ~ Iain Banks, #NFDB
237:The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about. ~ Paul Russell, #NFDB
238:The present is the only time that we have to know anything. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
239:"The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be?" ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
240:To constantly relive the past is to miss out on the present. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
241:To the right mind, no time exists other than the present moment, ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
242:Always remember to bound thy thoughts to the present occasion. ~ William Penn, #NFDB
243:Because we cling to the past we become unavailable to the present. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
244:Children have a way of forcing you back into the present moment. ~ Lorna Luft, #NFDB
245:If the present is left unopened,
now, it is closed. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen,#NFDB
246:If we are to better the future we must disturb the present. ~ Catherine Booth, #NFDB
247:I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
248:keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality,”13 ~ Chade Meng Tan, #NFDB
249:Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present. ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
250:The future will be different if we make the present different. ~ Peter Maurin, #NFDB
251:The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. I ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
252:The present is only faced in any generation by the artist. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
253:The present is the only reality and the only certainty. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
254:Defrosting a frozen memory can get the present all wet. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen, #NFDB
255:Forever could wait. The present was too intoxicating to ignore. ~ Lisa Kessler, #NFDB
256:Gladly take the gifts of the present hour and abandon serious things! ~ Horace, #NFDB
257:If you lend the present,
it will never be returned. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen,#NFDB
258:Life is lived in the present and directed toward a future. ~ Milton H Erickson, #NFDB
259:Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present. ~ Iain M Banks, #NFDB
260:The fullness of life is only accessible in the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
261:Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present. ~ Helen Dunmore, #NFDB
262:Whoever thought the future would feel so much like the present? ~ Ed Robertson, #NFDB
263:Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present. ~ Brenda Ueland, #NFDB
264:Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present! ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
265:Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. ~ Pericles, #NFDB
266:He who neglects the present moment throws away all he has. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
267:No other generation but ours can evangelize the present generation. ~ John Mott, #NFDB
268:Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
269:The characteristic of the present age is craving credulity. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
270:[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present. ~ Fritz Stern, #NFDB
271:The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values. ~ Christopher Dawson, #NFDB
272:Work to recognize the primary importance of the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
273:You can't change the past by punishing yourself in the present. ~ Penelope Ward, #NFDB
274:It is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
275:It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present. ~ Franklin D Roosevelt, #NFDB
276:Living in the present moment creates the experience of eternity. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
277:Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present. ~ Carlos Fuentes, #NFDB
278:She was all about the present. Paint and blood and lust. The now. ~ Danika Stone, #NFDB
279:Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
280:Surrender and living in the present are one and the same. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
281:the kiss turned as turbulent as the sea under the present storm. ~ Robin Bielman, #NFDB
282:"The only material that the future is made of is the present." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
283:The past can be used to renew the present, not just to bury it. ~ Terry Eagleton, #NFDB
284:The past is altered, constantly, by our actions in the present. ~ Stephen Baxter, #NFDB
285:The past is over; the present is fleeting; we live in the future. ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
286:The past is truly an inoperable tumor that spreads to the present. ~ Steve Toltz, #NFDB
287:The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost. ~ John Jay Chapman, #NFDB
288:The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past. THOMAS CARLYLE ~ J D Robb, #NFDB
289:Directing the mind to stay in the present can be a formidable task. ~ Allan Lokos, #NFDB
290:I am glad you appreciate the past. History helps make the present, ~ Karen Harper, #NFDB
291:If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past. ~ Libba Bray, #NFDB
292:Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present. ~ Rudy Giuliani, #NFDB
293:Let me say it again:
the present moment is all you ever have. ~ Eckhart Tolle,#NFDB
294:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you will ever have. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
295:"Somehow the past must become vocal, and participate in the present." ~ Carl Jung, #NFDB
296:The eternal life is given to those who live in the present. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
297:The future influences the present just as much as the past. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
298:The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift. ~ Lisa Unger, #NFDB
299:The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present. ~ Steve Toltz, #NFDB
300:The present is a text, and the past its interpretation. ~ Saint John Henry Newman, #NFDB
301:There are three fashion periods: the past, the present and Mae West. ~ Edith Head, #NFDB
302:To revert to the present moment To focus on what can be controlled ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
303:We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present. ~ Charles Handy, #NFDB
304:You don't have to forget the past to start enjoying the present. ~ Kentaro Yabuki, #NFDB
305:A sense of urgency comes from a powerful connection to the present ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
306:Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope. ~ Bill Cosby, #NFDB
307:Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
308:If you move in the present moment, the whole eternity is in your hands. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
309:I had traded against my future for the shiny toys of the present, ~ David duChemin, #NFDB
310:I'm an actor who hates dialogue and the present day and reality. ~ Christina Ricci, #NFDB
311:In the present state of the world it is difficult not to write lampoons. ~ Juvenal, #NFDB
312:One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
313:The past is for the present, the present for the future. ~ William Least Heat Moon, #NFDB
314:There is neither Past nor Future. There is only the Present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
315:There is neither past nor future. There is only the present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
316:There is neither past nor future; there is only the present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
317:There is no future, no past. There is only the present. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
318:There is no improving the future without disturbing the present. ~ Catherine Booth, #NFDB
319:Those who fear the future are likely to fumble the present. ~ Suzanne Woods Fisher, #NFDB
320:to not understand neocolonialism is to not fully live in the present. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
321:A reader is unsatisfied with the present and yearns for something more. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
322:Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
323:Everything is worship if your mind is focused on the present moment. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
324:History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present. ~ David Von Drehle, #NFDB
325:If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
326:If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
327:If you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
328:Give my effort to the present, let God handle the future. ~ Jane Kirkpatrick, #NFDB
329:Learn from the past, prepare for the future, live in the present. ~ Thomas S Monson, #NFDB
330:Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
331:Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. ~ Lionel Shriver, #NFDB
332:Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
333:The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. ~ Lex Martin, #NFDB
334:The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
335:The wise man guards against the future as if it were the present. ~ Publilius Syrus, #NFDB
336:Treat every moment as a gift, that is why it is called the present. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
337:We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
338:As the vision faded, the past and the present seemed to merge. ~ Alexandra Adornetto, #NFDB
339:Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
340:He looked away as if he were again disengaging himself from the present. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
341:help our patients to live fully and securely in the present. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
342:Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
343:If nostalgia holds you hostage,
the ransom is the present. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen,#NFDB
344:Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
345:Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
346:The ego romanticizes the past to avoid the true romance of the present. ~ Alan Cohen, #NFDB
347:The past has but one path, the present has many and the future none. ~ Stephen Leigh, #NFDB
348:The past is ignorant of the present. Be careful in taking its advice. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
349:The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
350:The present is only intelligible in the light of the past. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench, #NFDB
351:The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
352:To be happy, you must live in, but not for, the present moment. ~ Goswami Kriyananda, #NFDB
353:we should live like we smoke— inhale the present and exhale the past. ~ Cora Carmack, #NFDB
354:You can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. ~ Edith Eger, #NFDB
355:All there really is to do now, is to be in the present Moment. ~ Drunvalo Melchizedek, #NFDB
356:A pill that the present moment is daily bread to thousands. ~ Douglas William Jerrold, #NFDB
357:Assuming they’re really Albert’s sons, they’re the present earl’s first ~ Carola Dunn, #NFDB
358:Be in The Present; Learn from The Past; and Help Create The Future. ~ Spencer Johnson, #NFDB
359:Each time a friend dies, the present becomes the past, in an instant. ~ Lauren Bacall, #NFDB
360:I love the fact that the present is the only real reality we have. ~ Paz de la Huerta, #NFDB
361:I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present. ~ Glen Cook, #NFDB
362:Keep pace with the present. Take a trip to the moon. envision the future. ~ Uta Hagen, #NFDB
363:lived only for the present, because the present was full of surprises. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
364:Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present. ~ Loren Eiseley, #NFDB
365:The actual experience of awakening can only be in the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
366:The past, the present and the future were having an argument. It was tense. ~ Various, #NFDB
367:The present is our future past, we've gotta make this moment last ~ Sabrina Carpenter, #NFDB
368:The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
369:The present moment is creative, creating with an unheard-of intensity. ~ Le Corbusier, #NFDB
370:The present system of protecting NHS patients was a bit of a shambles. ~ Frank Dobson, #NFDB
371:The rulings of the past do not always apply in the present. ~ Richard North Patterson, #NFDB
372:Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present. ~ T S Eliot, #NFDB
373:"Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
374:When our attention is on the present, our life is constantly renewed. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
375:Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
376:Yoga takes you into the present moment, the only place where life exists. ~ Patanjali, #NFDB
377:You just use the future to escape the present.” I guess that made sense. ~ John Green, #NFDB
378:And verily the Hereafter will be better for thee than the present." (93:4) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
379:He always says that those who control the present can rewrite the past. ~ Anne Fortier, #NFDB
380:I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present. ~ Samuel R Delany, #NFDB
381:If the Best is yet to come, the Present will blend with it Beautifully. ~ Dorothy West, #NFDB
382:I live in the present due to the constraints of the time-space continuum. ~ Hank Green, #NFDB
383:It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable. ~ Fay Weldon, #NFDB
384:Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
385:Never worry about anything. Live in the present. Live now. Be happy. ~ Marsilio Ficino, #NFDB
386:Night is when the whispers of the past become the echoes of the present. ~ Faraaz Kazi, #NFDB
387:Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future. ~ Ruth Benedict, #NFDB
388:settling for the present, you sacrifice the potential of the future. ~ Juliette Harper, #NFDB
389:The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. Then things get tense. ~ Various, #NFDB
390:The present is the closest that you will ever get to the future. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
391:The present moment is that one point where everything comes together. ~ Robert Anthony, #NFDB
392:Those who don’t know history become lost in the desert of the present. ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
393:To live in the present, you need to act or accept but never stay stuck. ~ John Kuypers, #NFDB
394:And thinking in the present æra That Friendship is a pure chimæra: More ~ Matthew Lewis, #NFDB
395:Confront your past, live in the present, and look forward to the future. ~ Mary A P rez, #NFDB
396:For a solo work I need a definite idea. For the present I have none. ~ Alfred Schnittke, #NFDB
397:For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present. ~ Davis Bunn, #NFDB
398:Great acting is all about being in the moment, being in the present tense. ~ Tom Hooper, #NFDB
399:He leaned over, catching her lowered gaze. “I’m the present, Darlin’. ~ Lindsay McKenna, #NFDB
400:I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future. ~ Wilfred Thesiger, #NFDB
401:I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present. ~ Meg Rosoff, #NFDB
402:If you give the future all your attention, the present will pass you by. ~ Phil Jackson, #NFDB
403:If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past. ~ Baruch Spinoza, #NFDB
404:In religion the Future is behind us. In art the Present is the eternal. ~ Kakuz Okakura, #NFDB
405:Legends are all to do with the past and nothing to do with the present. ~ Lauren Bacall, #NFDB
406:Let the past rest. Let the future unfold. Let the present be a gift. I ~ Lauren Blakely, #NFDB
407:"Live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have." ~ Buddhist proverb, #NFDB
408:Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present. ~ Cassandra Clare, #NFDB
409:The absent are never without fault. Nor the present without excuse. ~ Benjamin Franklin, #NFDB
410:The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
411:The past is the father of the present,” said Poirot sententiously. He ~ Agatha Christie, #NFDB
412:The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present. ~ Bill Watterson, #NFDB
413:They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
414:Today is a gift from God - that is why it is called the present. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
415:What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
416:Working for peace in the future is to work for peace in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
417:You chose to live here now. You should try to live in the present. ~ Francesca Marciano, #NFDB
418:And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
419:Forgiveness empties the past of its power to empty the present of its peace. ~ L R Knost, #NFDB
420:God always ignores the present perfection for the ultimate perfection. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
421:I am in the present. I don't think of the past. I don't think of the future. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
422:I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present. ~ Meg Rosoff, #NFDB
423:My father used to say the seeds of the past bear fruit in the present. ~ Joe Abercrombie, #NFDB
424:Nothing could be closer than the present, yet nothing slips away faster. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
425:of what value was the past when the present was so thrilling, and pleasing ~ V C Andrews, #NFDB
426:paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
427:roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
428:The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief. ~ William Irwin Thompson, #NFDB
429:The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow. ~ Charles Olson, #NFDB
430:The problem about the future is that it keeps turning into the present. ~ Bill Watterson, #NFDB
431:track the past and order the present so that you can design your future. ~ Ryder Carroll, #NFDB
432:We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. ~ Gregory Bateson, #NFDB
433:Welcome to the present moment. Here. Now. The only moment there ever is. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
434:Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
435:Where there is no hope in the future, there is no power in the present. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
436:Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
437:If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
438:In old age, past haunts the present; memories replace the real life! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
439:In the present circumstances, no one can afford to assume that someone else ~ Dalai Lama, #NFDB
440:Learning to live in the present moment is part of the path of joy. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, #NFDB
441:Of course it is upon the rubble of ancient history that the present stands. ~ Jan Ellison, #NFDB
442:The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present. ~ Anthony Marra, #NFDB
443:The past and the future are complicated. It's the present that's simple. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
444:The present is the only time in which any duty may be done or grace received. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
445:The separate entity we imagine ourself to be cannot reside in the present. ~ Rupert Spira, #NFDB
446:Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past. ~ Adam Johnson, #NFDB
447:We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson, #NFDB
448:What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
449:When there is no hope in the future, the present appears atrociously bitter. ~ mile Zola, #NFDB
450:You can't worry about the future so much that you miss out on the present. ~ Molly Harper, #NFDB
451:Expectations imply a future, which doesn’t exist. There’s only the present. ~ Mark Tullius, #NFDB
452:It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
453:"Just as the wake doesn't move the ship, the past does not move the present." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
454:No matter how important the present appeared, it soon turned to the past, ~ Faye Kellerman, #NFDB
455:Sometimes you have to put the present through hell to get the future you want. ~ Dan Wells, #NFDB
456:The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
457:The demands of the present must stand above the political habits of the past. ~ Matt Blunt, #NFDB
458:The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present. ~ Edith Eger, #NFDB
459:The only way to deal with the future is to make sure the present is okay. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
460:The past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him. ~ Dominic Smith, #NFDB
461:The present and future of knowledge attainment and essential business skills. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
462:The present is the funeral of the past, And man the living sepulchre of life. ~ John Clare, #NFDB
463:The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
464:Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. ~ Paul Fussell, #NFDB
465:we don’t know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
466:"Welcome to the present moment. Here. Now. The only moment there ever is." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
467:We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
468:"Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
469:Worrying about the past won’t help. I can only deal with the present. ~ Joelle Charbonneau, #NFDB
470:For memories are magic, too. They are the wand the present waves over the past. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
471:History is just the present in retrospect. Times change but people do not. ~ Jeanne C Stein, #NFDB
472:If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
473:In the present age, a man with harmonious ideas is regarded as out of touch. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
474:It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past ~ Ken Burns, #NFDB
475:Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream. ~ John Banville, #NFDB
476:Of course it is upon the rubble of ancient history that the present stands. L ~ Jan Ellison, #NFDB
477:Our future experiences will be colored by the choices we make in the present. ~ Noah Levine, #NFDB
478:The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
479:The past should remain firmly behind one. The present holds enough obstacles. ~ Scott Frost, #NFDB
480:There is no better boost in the present than an invitation to the future. ~ Caroline Kepnes, #NFDB
481:There was nothing like the pain of the present to cure the pain of the past. ~ Louise Penny, #NFDB
482:This is the present moment. Learn how to gobble it up without fear or guilt. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
483:To bask in the present, care nothing about the future, and forget the past. ~ R A Salvatore, #NFDB
484:You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past. ~ Robert Harris, #NFDB
485:And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
486:Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else. ~ Natalie Goldberg, #NFDB
487:Future is something imaginary but the present moment is something real! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
488:History is like therapy for the present, it makes it talk about its parents. ~ Maya Jasanoff, #NFDB
489:How can there be a future, Atticus, when we’re not even in the present? Huh? ~ Fisher Amelie, #NFDB
490:I also live in the present, due to the constraints of the space-time continuum. ~ Hank Green, #NFDB
491:I cannot control the past but I can control the present through forgiveness. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
492:I forced my eyes open, forced myself to see the present instead of the past. ~ Shannon Mayer, #NFDB
493:It is because of faith that we exchange the present for the future. ~ Fidelis of Sigmaringen, #NFDB
494:Sifting through regrets failed to help the present or brighten the future. ~ Pepper D Basham, #NFDB
495:Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
496:the ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ S J Scott, #NFDB
497:The ego's greatest enemy is the present moment, which is to say, life itself ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
498:The past and future are what's complicated. It's the present that's simple. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
499:The past and future are what’s complicated. It’s the present that’s simple. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
500:The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
501:The past, the present, and the future are really one: they are today ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, #NFDB
502:Unless you can change the past, you’re wasting the present on this guilt ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
503:Usually, we ignore the present moment and, by doing so, we take away its power. ~ Tom Kenyon, #NFDB
504:We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past. ~ John D Barrow, #NFDB
505:We have no control over the future. We can only make the most of the present. ~ Jody Hedlund, #NFDB
506:Fear is always about something in the future. Fear never exists in the present moment. ~ Osho, #NFDB
507:Future leaps from the present, formed by the thought processes of mankind. ~ Stephen Richards, #NFDB
508:He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation. ~ Margaret Atwood, #NFDB
509:History belongs to the past, but understanding it is the duty of the present ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
510:Hold on to the ancient Way to master the present, and to learn the distant beginning. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
511:How can you expect to handle the future if you can’t even handle the present? ~ Daniel Suarez, #NFDB
512:In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. ~ Adrienne Rich, #NFDB
513:Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future ~ Salvador Dali, #NFDB
514:She accepted the permission bestowed by passion to live entirely in the present. ~ Meg Rosoff, #NFDB
515:the closest man can come to the feeling of eternity is by living in the present ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
516:The present is an eternal attempt to separate the past from the future. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
517:The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
518:Touch-me-notism that disfigures the present day Hinduism is a morbid growth. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
519:We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future. The ~ Shaun David Hutchinson, #NFDB
520:We sort the past in an attempt to sort the present and anticipate the future. ~ Michael Perry, #NFDB
521:Arrow-swift the present sweepeth, and motionless forever stands the past. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
522:Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
523:Focus on the future for 50%, on the present for 40%, and on the past for 10% ~ Masaaki Hatsumi, #NFDB
524:From your past emerges the present, and from the present is born your future. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
525:He who lives not in time, but in the present, is happy. —LUDWIG VON WITTGENSTEIN ~ William Ury, #NFDB
526:History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
527:If the present is shitty and the future is worse, the past is all you've got ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
528:Nothing in the past is as powerful as what we choose to do in the present moment. ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
529:One principal characteristic of vice in the present age is the contempt of fame. ~ Thomas Gray, #NFDB
530:Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. ~ Storm Jameson, #NFDB
531:Personally, I am stuck with one foot in the past and one foot in the present. ~ Anthony Kiedis, #NFDB
532:Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present. ~ Federico Fellini, #NFDB
533:Sometimes I -- I feel caught between the present and the past. Waiting. Hoping. ~ Laura Frantz, #NFDB
534:The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present. ~ Margaret MacMillan, #NFDB
535:The most intriguing thing about the present moment is that it never grows old. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
536:The only use of knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
537:The past is the past," Vader said. "The present and future are all that matter. ~ Timothy Zahn, #NFDB
538:The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind. ~ Kiran Desai, #NFDB
539:The present-day Prussian is one of the most dangerous enemies of culture ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
540:The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams. ~ Jean Pierre de Caussade, #NFDB
541:There's no time like the present to start eating chocolate with your greens. ~ Molly Wizenberg, #NFDB
542:They had their past to remember, the present to live in and the future to fear. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
543:To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory ~ Jeremy Aldana, #NFDB
544:True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
545:True generosity toward the future consists in giving everything to the present. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
546:True happiness is...to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
547:We should not miss the present opportunity or we shall be blamed by posterity. ~ Shunroku Hata, #NFDB
548:When you are in the present without thinking, you are for the first time spiritual. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
549:You really don't even own the present moment, for even this belongs to God. ~ Francois Fenelon, #NFDB
550:You’re not here anymore. You’ve got to leave in order to return to the present. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
551:As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
552:Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. —JORGE LUIS BORGES ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
553:Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
554:Have not all past human beings parted, And must not all the present, one day part? ~ Lord Byron, #NFDB
555:Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. ~ Edmond de Goncourt, #NFDB
556:How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
557:I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
558:I'd say you pass muster" "Past master? I'm the present master." "...Yes. Of course. ~ NisiOisiN, #NFDB
559:If we do not find happiness in the present moment, in what shall we find it? ~ Oliver Goldsmith, #NFDB
560:If you focus too much on the future, you’ll forget to have fun in the present. ~ Deborah Bladon, #NFDB
561:Maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present. ~ Ken Loach, #NFDB
562:My friend, the sufi is the friend of the present moment. To say tomorrow is not our way. ~ Rumi, #NFDB
563:Nobody can predict the future; the idea is to have a firm grasp of the present. ~ Peter Drucker, #NFDB
564:Only in the present is your mind free to do what it does best — solve problems. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
565:The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of the ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
566:The future can not blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. ~ Susan Cooper, #NFDB
567:The greatest privilege of childhood is to live totally in the present. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore, #NFDB
568:The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
569:The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children. ~ Elif Safak, #NFDB
570:You believe in the future now. It's easy for you, because you love the present. ~ Matthew Quick, #NFDB
571:You can't really live in the past because the present is always present. ~ John Benjamin Hickey, #NFDB
572:A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
573:Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practice these acts. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
574:He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present ~ Leslie Marmon Silko, #NFDB
575:If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
576:I'm living in the present. I have no ambition. It's true. But I want to live. ~ Gerard Depardieu, #NFDB
577:Let the past be what it was, the present what it is, the future the best it can be. ~ R J Ellory, #NFDB
578:Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
579:memories to the distant past, allowing the present and future to emerge. ~ Bessel A van der Kolk, #NFDB
580:Nothing is more precious than being in the present moment. Fully alive, fully aware. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
581:The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
582:The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present ~ Terry Brooks, #NFDB
583:The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
584:The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. ~ Miguel de Unamuno, #NFDB
585:The only way to atone for the past is to do something meaningful in the present. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
586:The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death. ~ Guy de Maupassant, #NFDB
587:the past could stay where it belonged without darkening the promise of the present. ~ Lyla Payne, #NFDB
588:The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, #NFDB
589:Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present. ~ Robert Silverberg, #NFDB
590:What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. —Sai Baba ~ T J Klune, #NFDB
591:composed of all the innocence of the present, and of all the passion of the future. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
592:Free action is to live in the present society as though it were a natural society. ~ Paul Goodman, #NFDB
593:Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
594:If the present tries to sit in judgment of the past, it will lose the future. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
595:If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought. ~ Dante Alighieri, #NFDB
596:If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
597:I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
598:I've had a past that promises no future so it's better to stick with the present. ~ Katie McGarry, #NFDB
599:Never lookin' back or too far in front of me; the present is a gift and I just wanna be. ~ Common, #NFDB
600:No matter what decade science fiction comes from, it's representing the present. ~ Don Hertzfeldt, #NFDB
601:One could not change the past anyway. Why let it blight the present and the future? ~ Mary Balogh, #NFDB
602:The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness. ~ Abraham Maslow, #NFDB
603:The essence of saintliness is total acceptance of the present moment, ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, #NFDB
604:The future is only a thought form. Work with the present moment. Be with what is. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
605:The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
606:the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around. ~ Joseph Brodsky, #NFDB
607:The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
608:the promise of a big payoff diminishes our appreciation of the present situation ~ Ellen J Langer, #NFDB
609:Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why it is called the present. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt, #NFDB
610:To remember was an act not of excavation but of self-creation in the present tense. ~ Laura Secor, #NFDB
611:who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
612:Who wants to live in the present? It's such a limiting period compared to the past. ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
613:Accept that you are strong enough to endure the present. The rest doesn’t matter. ~ Pepper Winters, #NFDB
614:...does it seem strange in the loneliness of the present time, that I run to you?... ~ John Geddes, #NFDB
615:Each and every event in the past is connected to the present by invisible threads. ~ Momofuku Ando, #NFDB
616:I don't build a house without predicting the end of the present social order. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
617:in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
618:It’s often hard to consider the future when you are struggling with the present, ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
619:"Let go of the story – and return to the only place of power: the present moment." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
620:The ability to see into the future the consequences of your choices in the present. ~ Andy Andrews, #NFDB
621:The future comes slowly, the present flies and the past stands still forever. ~ Friedrich Schiller, #NFDB
622:The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory. ~ Daniel Kahneman, #NFDB
623:The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
624:The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
625:The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell. ~ Zora Neale Hurston, #NFDB
626:There is one undeniable truth about our body: it only exists in the present moment. ~ John Kuypers, #NFDB
627:Too often the past has been twisted to fit the visions and agendas of the present. ~ Thomas Sowell, #NFDB
628:Unlike the past decades, the present moment is lacking in architectural discourse. ~ Lebbeus Woods, #NFDB
629:who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
630:Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
631:I can’t seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present. ~ Isaac Marion, #NFDB
632:Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present. ~ Cyril Connolly, #NFDB
633:If the present tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
634:If you take good care of the present, there is no need to worry about the future. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
635:Indeed, what sense is there in continuing the present when one has seen the future? ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
636:I think the biggest hazard of technology is how it is pulling us away from the present. ~ Jason Gay, #NFDB
637:It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
638:Live in the present moment and find your interest and happiness in the things of today. ~ Emmet Fox, #NFDB
639:Mistakes happen. Learn from the past, but concentrate on the present and the future. ~ Brandon Mull, #NFDB
640:The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
641:The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment. ~ Pema Ch dr n, #NFDB
642:The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
643:The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit. ~ Norman Douglas, #NFDB
644:To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. ~ Emma Goldman, #NFDB
645:To live with God is to live always in the present, with him who is the eternal Now. ~ John Robinson, #NFDB
646:Tolstoy was the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
647:You may shelve your Shakespearian plans for the present. I am going to play Peter Pan. ~ Maud Adams, #NFDB
648:Appeasement is a vote to live in the present tense, to hold the comforts of the moment. ~ Mark Steyn, #NFDB
649:Breathing in, there is only the present moment. Breathing out, it is a wonderful moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
650:But I dare not think too far into the future on the risk that I'll miss the present. ~ Colin Farrell, #NFDB
651:From 1991 till the present, Iraq sovereignty has been trampled by the United States. ~ Vijay Prashad, #NFDB
652:If you want to change the future, then you are going to have to trouble the present. ~ William Booth, #NFDB
653:In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present. ~ Margaret Mead, #NFDB
654:Live the present, remember the past, and fear not the future-Saphira in Eldest ~ Christopher Paolini, #NFDB
655:My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign. ~ Jonathan Lethem, #NFDB
656:People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.” “Maybe ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, #NFDB
657:Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past. ~ Oliver Sacks, #NFDB
658:Since you can't change the past, you may as well make the best of the present. ~ Wanda E Brunstetter, #NFDB
659:The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child. ~ George Crumb, #NFDB
660:The heart knows nothing of the past, nothing of the future; it knows only of the present. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
661:The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
662:The most important decision you'll ever make is how to spend the present moment ! ~ Gaurav Dagaonkar, #NFDB
663:The new trick is to stay in the present ... Get lost in the detail of it ... Enjoy it! ~ Sally Green, #NFDB
664:The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around. ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
665:The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past. ~ Emmuska Orczy, #NFDB
666:The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present, and fools of the future. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte, #NFDB
667:To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
668:To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
669:You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future. ~ Isak Dinesen, #NFDB
670:All the happiness and fulfillment that humans yearn for exists in the present moment. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
671:At the present time, I long only to sleep and to remain silent. I am sick of humanity. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
672:But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
673:Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life. ~ Stephen Ambrose, #NFDB
674:He who spends time regretting the past loses the present and risks the future. ~ Francisco de Quevedo, #NFDB
675:If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past. ~ John Berger, #NFDB
676:If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
677:If you make a movie of the present day culture, in the future it'll be a horror film. ~ Jacque Fresco, #NFDB
678:I guess the only way I could describe myself is someone that lives right in the present. ~ Lorna Luft, #NFDB
679:I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism. ~ Andrew Mellon, #NFDB
680:It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present. ~ Jonathan Maberry, #NFDB
681:My friend, let us enjoy the present and give no thought to the evils of the future. ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
682:One thing that's certain about the future: it will have more history than the present. ~ Paul McAuley, #NFDB
683:The best weather prediction for the present moment is to look out of the window! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
684:The past and the present kept smashing into each other in completely untenable ways. ~ Theresa Rebeck, #NFDB
685:The present is theirs; the future for which I really worked, is mine.” —Nikola Tesla ~ Hourly History, #NFDB
686:There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past. ~ Emma Lazarus, #NFDB
687:There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now. ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
688:These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. ~ Annie Dillard, #NFDB
689:To cut ourselves off from the past is to rob ourselves from understanding the present. ~ John M Frame, #NFDB
690:When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present. ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
691:You cannot erase a wrong. You can only make it right in the present and the future. ~ Katherine Locke, #NFDB
692:Above all, live in the present moment and God will give you all the grace you need. ~ Francois Fenelon, #NFDB
693:Even if you had discovered the future, it didn´t change how you lived the present. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
694:For a person who lives 100 years in the future, the present comes as no surprise. ~ Viktor Schauberger, #NFDB
695:It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
696:I would tell people to enjoy the present moment and the journey rather than the outcome. ~ Judith Hill, #NFDB
697:Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
698:Oh, we talk of progress, but what we really desire is the perpetuation of the present ~ Steven Erikson, #NFDB
699:One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. ~ Golda Meir, #NFDB
700:The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius. ~ Honore de Balzac, #NFDB
701:The past doesn't matter. People cling to it because it allows them to ignore the present. ~ James Frey, #NFDB
702:We bother about the past and the future, not realizing the truth of the present. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
703:Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. ~ George Orwell, #NFDB
704:You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything. ~ Simone Weil, #NFDB
705:Accountants are in the past, managers are in the present, and leaders are in the future. ~ Paul Orfalea, #NFDB
706:Because I don't live in either my past or my future.I'm interested only in the present". ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
707:But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present? ~ Arundhati Roy, #NFDB
708:Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. —JORGE LUIS BORGES ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, #NFDB
709:How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible. ~ William Gaddis, #NFDB
710:If the present is any guide, government-sanctioned, counterfeit history is in your future. ~ Nick Turse, #NFDB
711:it is impossible to separate the present and future from the history that precedes it. ~ Marie Bostwick, #NFDB
712:It's impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is. ~ Rick Hanson, #NFDB
713:It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
714:It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
715:It takes guts to stop fretting about the unknown and concentrate on the present moment. ~ Camille Pag n, #NFDB
716:It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present. ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
717:Men are suspicious; prone to discontent: Subjects still loathe the present Government. ~ Robert Herrick, #NFDB
718:Reality is stuck in the present. Games help us imagine and invent the future together. ~ Jane McGonigal, #NFDB
719:The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
720:The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
721:What is concisely referred to as global warming, is a fatal mistake of the present time. ~ Vaclav Klaus, #NFDB
722:When you live in the present, the past is forgotten & the future takes care of itself. ~ Mandy Hale, #NFDB
723:Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. ~ Stephen Hunter, #NFDB
724:Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people's stories. ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
725:You can't change the past, but you can live in the present to create a better future. ~ Brandon Varnell, #NFDB
726:You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving. ~ John Keats, #NFDB
727:You’ve got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present. ~ Lauren Kate, #NFDB
728:Don't let the sadness from the past and fear of the future ruin the happiness of the present. ~ Kid Cudi, #NFDB
729:Everything flows with much greater ease when people live as one with the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
730:Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future. ~ L Ron Hubbard, #NFDB
731:In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
732:Let your mind, happily contented with the present, care not what the morrow will bring with it. ~ Horace, #NFDB
733:Office not required” isn’t just the future—it’s the present. Now is your chance to catch up. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
734:Prayer infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present. ~ Walter Wink, #NFDB
735:Say goodbye to golden yesterdays: or your heart will never learn to love the present. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
736:The present has passed before we can touch it, but the future is ours to shape. Serve ~ Craig A Falconer, #NFDB
737:The present isn’t more capable of causing mental pain than the past or the future. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
738:The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, #NFDB
739:To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep. ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
740:Training your mind to be in the present moment is the #1 key to making healthier choices. ~ Susan Albers, #NFDB
741:Transformations is the word. We can do the work of transformation only in the present moment ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
742:Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. Why? Because it is all we ever have. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
743:When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
744:Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. ~ Nelson DeMille, #NFDB
745:Be always resolute with the present hour. Every moment is of infinite value. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
746:But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present. ~ Charles de Lint, #NFDB
747:Do the best you can . . . enjoy the present . . . rest satisfied with what you have. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
748:Exchange love for hate...Thereby, making the present comfortable and the future promising. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
749:For he lives twice who can at once employ,
The present well, and e’en the past enjoy. ~ Alexander Pope,#NFDB
750:How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible... ~ William Gaddis, #NFDB
751:I always live in the present. I never dream about what might happen. Why? It might not. ~ Fernando Torres, #NFDB
752:I don't believe in trading in your future for a little extra power in the present. ~ Cinda Williams Chima, #NFDB
753:I don't carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present. ~ Narendra Modi, #NFDB
754:I'm trying to abandon the present, but I don't even have the skills to master the past. ~ Lindsey Leavitt, #NFDB
755:In relation to law I am doubtful whether, even at the present time, science has fairly begun. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
756:I steeled myself to focus only on the present yet remain alert to what might come next. ~ Nicholas Sparks, #NFDB
757:"Mindfulness is the capacity of being aware of what is going on in the present moment." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
758:Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now. ~ Alan Lakein, #NFDB
759:Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now. ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
760:Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown. ~ Neil Postman, #NFDB
761:The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
762:The future is never fixed, but always in flux until the moment it meets with the present. ~ Mindee Arnett, #NFDB
763:The present offers itself to our touch for only an instant of time and then eludes the senses. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
764:this, this is the meaning of
"a fortunate life": it means
to exist in the present. ~ Louise Gl ck,#NFDB
765:We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
766:We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We match backwards into the future. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
767:when we are brave enough to be in the present, we have the power to transform the world. ~ Sakyong Mipham, #NFDB
768:Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
769:Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. ~ Edward Said, #NFDB
770:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ Buddha, #NFDB
771:For me the present is merged in eternity. I may not sacrifice the latter for the present. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
772:I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. ~ Helen Keller, #NFDB
773:Instead of fearing the future, I should live and enjoy the present, she told herself. ~ Melissa de la Cruz, #NFDB
774:It is hard to find romance in the present because there's nothing left to the imagination. ~ James McBride, #NFDB
775:It's in vain, Trot, to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
776:It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present. ~ David Levithan, #NFDB
777:Memories establish the past;
Senses perceive the present;
Imaginations shape the future. ~ Toba Beta,#NFDB
778:Mind concentrates: it acts out of the past. Meditation acts in the present, out of the present. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
779:Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. ~ Rick Hanson, #NFDB
780:Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment. ~ Harold Bloom, #NFDB
781:their density and depth, like they bore some great burden beyond the intake of the present. ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
782:The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realize the Self. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
783:The only way we have of influencing the future is to own the present, however we find it. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
784:The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
785:The present moment is the only moment available to us and it is the door to all other moments. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
786:There is no cause for nostalgia save the good and life-enhancing nostalgia for the present. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
787:This is the sleep: being absent, being not present to the present moment, being somewhere else. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
788:True happiness is...to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future. ~ Seneca the Younger, #NFDB
789:We have no need for the past. All we need are the present and the future. - Ciel Phantomhive ~ Yana Toboso, #NFDB
790:"Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. Why? Because it is all we ever have." ~ Pema Chödron, #NFDB
791:We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past. ~ Ken Kesey, #NFDB
792:When you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
793:When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present. ~ George W Bush, #NFDB
794:Accept yourself, your physical condition and your fate as they are at the present moment. ~ Morrie Schwartz, #NFDB
795:A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense. ~ Joshua Foer, #NFDB
796:Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
797:... an era of turmoil and ideological confusion, the principal phenomenon of the present age. ~ Saul Bellow, #NFDB
798:Beauty comes from abandoning the refuge of the old forms for the uncertainty of the present. ~ Mathias nard, #NFDB
799:But remember, you don’t need to know the details of her past to love her heart in the present. ~ K Bromberg, #NFDB
800:Challenges are something that can only be tackled in the present moment and require action. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
801:F. A. Hayek is probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period. ~ Peter L Berger, #NFDB
802:Hindsight creates the illusion that your life has led you inevitably to the present moment. ~ Jennifer Egan, #NFDB
803:Hindsight is a beautiful thing, mage. The past is for the memory, the present is for the mind. ~ Ben Galley, #NFDB
804:I am interested in circulating past iconography in the present in order to get to the future. ~ Mariko Mori, #NFDB
805:I don't connect much with the present. I have more of an affinity for what came in the past. ~ Paloma Faith, #NFDB
806:In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
807:Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future and it doesn't brood over the past. ~ Ann Landers, #NFDB
808:More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
809:Never forget it. But stop living there. Live here, in the present. Think forward to your future. ~ A S King, #NFDB
810:"Nothing is more precious than being in the present moment, fully alive and fully aware." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
811:Notwithstanding the propensity of mankind to exalt the past, and to depreciate the present, ~ Edward Gibbon, #NFDB
812:The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
813:The best way to lead people into the future is to connect with them deeply in the present. ~ James M Kouzes, #NFDB
814:The future of this nation, with the present generation, You must admit is nothing but a joke ~ Ira Gershwin, #NFDB
815:The only thing that keeps us rooted in the past is our refusal to embrace the present. ~ Karen Marie Moning, #NFDB
816:The present is no more exempt from the sneer of the future than the past has been. ~ Cassius Jackson Keyser, #NFDB
817:The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
818:The present war is the saturation point in violence. It spells, to my mind, also its doom. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
819:the whole of world history there is always only one really significant hour—the present. . . ~ Eric Metaxas, #NFDB
820:Those who have no hope for a future life are already dead for the present one. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
821:We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
822:We do not heal the past by dwelling there. We heal the past by living in the present. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
823:We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past. ~ Chiang Kai shek, #NFDB
824:All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
825:Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. ~ Edward W Said, #NFDB
826:A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system. ~ Donella H Meadows, #NFDB
827:Don't live in the past, don't ponder about the future, stay at the PRESENT moment NOW...always. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
828:Eternal life is personal existence in continuity with the present life, but transfigured. ~ Georgia Harkness, #NFDB
829:Having contentment and gratitude in the present moment is the surest way to achieve success. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
830:I began reluctantly to steal from the present to pay off debts I knew I'd incur in the future. ~ Andr Aciman, #NFDB
831:It’s not exactly easy to save things for the future when the present is so uncertain. (Xander) ~ Ally Condie, #NFDB
832:Past and future have no power over you. Just the present - and even that can be minimized. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
833:She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
834:The best preparation for the future, is the present well seen to, and the last duty done. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
835:The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross. ~ Thomas Malthus, #NFDB
836:The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
837:The meeting of two eternities, the past and future....is precisely the present moment. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
838:The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21) ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
839:To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
840:We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
841:Working requires being in the present time! So, if you want to be in the present, work! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
842:You can only be held back by your past if you use it to reject yourself in the present. Your ~ Robert Holden, #NFDB
843:and goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen. ~ Diane Setterfield, #NFDB
844:Aviation records don't fall until someone is willing to mortgage the present for the future. ~ Amelia Earhart, #NFDB
845:Breathing in, there is only the present moment.
Breathing out, it is a wonderful moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh,#NFDB
846:Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
847:From the example of the past, the man of the present acts prudently so as not to imperil the future. ~ Titian, #NFDB
848:He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. ~ Stephen Hunter, #NFDB
849:I find myself living in thoughts of the future more than activities in the present. Hurrying ~ Jennae Cecelia, #NFDB
850:If we are meant to be gifts to one another, living in the past negates the present we need to be. ~ T F Hodge, #NFDB
851:If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, you're pissing on the present. ~ Malachy McCourt, #NFDB
852:Isn’t it better to wake up each day, living for the present rather than waiting for the future? ~ Julie C Dao, #NFDB
853:It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
854:Life can only take place in the present moment. If we lose the present moment, we lose life. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
855:My future is in my past and my past is my present. I must now make the present my future. ~ Vladimir Horowitz, #NFDB
856:Nora, I just don't want you to become so obsessed with the present that you can't see the future. ~ Lia Habel, #NFDB
857:Such is the nature of man-made laws: ignorant of the past and insensitive to the present. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
858:That which is lacking in the present world is a profound knowledge of the nature of things. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
859:The best way to prepare for any moment in the future is to be fully conscious in the present. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
860:the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present ~ Karl Marx, #NFDB
861:The future isn't something hidden in a corner.The future is something we build in the present. ~ Paulo Freire, #NFDB
862:The Gospel offers forgiveness for the past, new life for the present, and hope for the future. ~ John Sentamu, #NFDB
863:The more the future occupies your mind, the less the present time will occupy your life! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
864:The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating. ~ Dominic Smith, #NFDB
865:The present! It’s so different from the past. The past! It will never come back. Never ever! ~ Ravinder Singh, #NFDB
866:The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
867:The present moment is the greatest gift we have from God, but if we are not present we miss it. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
868:"The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
869:The present world and the next are but a drop of water whose existence is of no account. ~ Farid-ud-diu attar, #NFDB
870:We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future. ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
871:We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present. ~ Maria Edgeworth, #NFDB
872:We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present. ~ Robyn Schneider, #NFDB
873:We must be faithful to the present moment or we will frustrate the plan of God for our lives. ~ Solanus Casey, #NFDB
874:While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
875:You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
876:All our past deeds, gentlemen, one way or another, will be washed up on the shore of the present. ~ S J Parris, #NFDB
877:a place in the present. This, as they say, is where my roots are. The trick is in reattaching. ~ Michael Perry, #NFDB
878:Brown, C. S. (2007). Big history: From the Big Bang to the present. New York: The New Press. ~ David Christian, #NFDB
879:Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance. ~ Italo Svevo, #NFDB
880:Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
881:Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present. ~ Jim Rohn, #NFDB
882:He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
883:He ought to let the past keep its glow and not try to mix it with what he had in the present. ~ Larry McMurtry, #NFDB
884:History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past. ~ Aidan Chambers, #NFDB
885:I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
886:"It is in the present moment that life, peace, joy, happiness, and well-being are possible." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
887:It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be? ~ H Rider Haggard, #NFDB
888:Life gives you plenty of time to do whatever you want to do if you stay in the present moment. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
889:One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
890:"Real life is the present moment—not the memories of the past, nor the dreams of the future." ~ Walpola Rahula, #NFDB
891:The past is not important. The present is inconsequential. The future is indeterminate. He ~ Sergei Lukyanenko, #NFDB
892:The place where...knowledge occurs is the present. That which recognizes the present is mind. ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
893:The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present’? ~ Michael Scott, #NFDB
894:There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
895:The young grasp at the future. The old grasp at the past. The wise remain in the present. ~ Chamtrul Rinpoche, #NFDB
896:The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
897:They who look but little into futurity, have, perhaps, the quickest sensation of the present. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
898:To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
899:"To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
900:Whatever someone did to you in the past has no power over the present. Only you give it power. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
901:You're looking for a reason," she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
902:Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future. *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
903:Apothegms are the wisdom of the past condensed for the instruction and guidance of the present. ~ Tryon Edwards, #NFDB
904:Conservatism... offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
905:eternity, where time does not exist and so the future and the past are both the present. ~ William Peter Blatty, #NFDB
906:I'm a young girl with an old soul. I wanted to fuse the two together, the past and the present. ~ Melanie Fiona, #NFDB
907:"It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
908:It's not easy to find a topic. Talking of home is painful. Talking of the present unbearable. ~ Suzanne Collins, #NFDB
909:Let me fall in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present. ~ Jack Gilbert, #NFDB
910:Passion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive 'nows.' ~ Sue Halpern, #NFDB
911:Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present. ~ Colum McCann, #NFDB
912:The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands. ~ Madeleine Thien, #NFDB
913:The present is re-created to immortalize memories. It's pathetic, but that's human tendency now. ~ Young Ha Kim, #NFDB
914:The present state is short and transitory; but our state in the other world, is everlasting. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
915:The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
916:The secret of health for both mind and body is...live the present moment wisely and earnestly. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
917:Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
918:Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
919:A peep into the future, gives us a reflection of the past, and a picture of the present ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
920:"A vital question to ask yourself frequently is: What is my relationship to the present moment?" ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
921:Even if you had discovered the future, it really didn't change how you lived in the present. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
922:Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
923:Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch, #NFDB
924:If we want a new future that does not look like our past, we must make new choices in the present. ~ Debbie Ford, #NFDB
925:Is any life so isolated that it lives only in the past and not in the present and future, too? ~ Jackson Burnett, #NFDB
926:take the trouble you’re dealing with and use it as an opportunity to focus on the present moment. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
927:The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
928:The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
929:The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it. ~ Cara Black, #NFDB
930:The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
931:The present is that elusive moment between what no longer exists and what has not yet happened. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
932:The present moment is the only moment available to us and it is the door to all other moments. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
933:The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules. ~ Richard P Feynman, #NFDB
934:The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it. ~ William Greider, #NFDB
935:There are no defi nitive histories because the past keeps looking diff erent as the present changes. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
936:There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
937:The system is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
938:The truth brings the past into the present and prepares us for the future. That's what truth does ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
939:...they did not speak of the future; they merely lived in the present. It was a perfect summer. ~ Charlie Lovett, #NFDB
940:Trust the past to the mercy of God, the present to His love, and the future to His providence. ~ Saint Augustine, #NFDB
941:What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
942:"Whenever you are not honoring the present moment by allowing it to be, you are creating drama." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
943:Yeah, that's what the present is. It's a little unsatisfying because life's a little unsatisfying. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
944:YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT’S WHY IT’S CALLED THE PRESENT. ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
945:You have to be able to risk your identity for a bigger future than the present you are living. ~ Fernando Flores, #NFDB
946:And i asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
947:Every day when I wake up, I remind myself that the present is possibility, and the past is a lesson. ~ Kim Holden, #NFDB
948:For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
949:History is not the pure past; history is a past interpreted from the present of the historian. ~ Justo L Gonz lez, #NFDB
950:In reality there is nothing to fear in the present. Fear is projected onto the present by memory. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
951:It is well for us that we live at the present time, when everybody is logical and consistent. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell, #NFDB
952:Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
953:Marriage does not exist for the benefit of the present generation but for the benefit of the next ~ Roger Scruton, #NFDB
954:Meditation helps us to get out of our thoughts about the future and really be in the present moment. ~ Tara Brach, #NFDB
955:Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
956:Real generosity toward the future,” as Camus famously put it, “lies in giving all to the present. ~ James Carroll, #NFDB
957:The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil. ~ Washington Irving, #NFDB
958:The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
959:The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now. ~ W Somerset Maugham, #NFDB
960:The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
961:There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
962:These strange-looking people weren't peculiars. They were nerds. We were very much in the present. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
963:These strange-looking people weren’t peculiars. They were nerds. We were very much in the present. ~ Ransom Riggs, #NFDB
964:To live in the present, we must deeply believe that what is most important is in the here and now. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
965:We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present. ~ Marina Abramovic, #NFDB
966:We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
967:Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present. ~ Bil Keane, #NFDB
968:Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
969:Albert Einstein, “a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell on the future. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
970:And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
971:Being fully in the present, you experience the timeless. In the timeless, you find your true self. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
972:But you have to live in the present. You have to take the old and make it new -- that's my point. ~ Lauren Myracle, #NFDB
973:Deception may give us what we want for the present, but it will always take it away in the end. ~ Rachel Hawthorne, #NFDB
974:Dipping into the pitcher of the past, his father often said, can only sour the cup of the present. ~ Gerald N Lund, #NFDB
975:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
976:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~ Liane Moriarty, #NFDB
977:Every life is precious. Please treasure each and every day, the present, the moment, and yourself. ~ Ichigo Takano, #NFDB
978:every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now. ~ Jeanette Winterson, #NFDB
979:human beings are the only creatures to spend the present driving themselves crazy about the future. ~ Nancy Thayer, #NFDB
980:I adore the past. So much more restful than the present. So much more dependable than the future. ~ Anton Walbrook, #NFDB
981:I have often said that God is creating the entire universe fully and totally in the present now. ~ Meister Eckhart, #NFDB
982:Let us live simply in the freshness of the present moment, in the clarity of pure awakened mind. ~ Matthieu Ricard, #NFDB
983:Nowness or the magic of the present moment is what joins the wisdom of the past with the present ~ Chogyam Trungpa, #NFDB
984:Only a thought compares the present with an imaginary past, creating the old and therefore the new. ~ Rupert Spira, #NFDB
985:The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion. ~ Albert Camus, #NFDB
986:The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
987:The future holds little hope for any government where the present holds no hope for the people. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
988:The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
989:The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21) ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
990:The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
991:The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present. ~ Niccol Machiavelli, #NFDB
992:Thinking about the future and thinking about the past is really only a way of ignoring the present. ~ Billy Corgan, #NFDB
993:Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman, #NFDB
994:Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present? ~ D H Lawrence, #NFDB
995:Wishing, hoping and regretting are the most common and dangerous tactics for evading the present. ~ Sammy Davis Jr, #NFDB
996:You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
997:You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise. ~ Pete Hamill, #NFDB
998:all you have to lose in death, no matter how long you’ve lived, is the present moment in which you die. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
999:Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1000:By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better & prepare for a better future. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1001:Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1002:For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1003:He to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1004:I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic. ~ Douglas Coupland, #NFDB
1005:In the present age doubt has become immune to faith and faith has dissociated itself from doubt. ~ Gabriel Vahanian, #NFDB
1006:I see stuff from the future, and I'm such a futurist that I have to slow down and talk in the present. ~ Kanye West, #NFDB
1007:It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past. ~ Charles C Mann, #NFDB
1008:It isn't until you forgive what's in the past that you'll be able to receive the gift of the present ~ Andy Andrews, #NFDB
1009:Memory, the priestess, kills the present and offers its heart to the shrine of the dead past. ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
1010:One learns the art of dying by learning the art of living: how to become master of the present moment. ~ S N Goenka, #NFDB
1011:She knows that stories have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. ~ Chloe Benjamin, #NFDB
1012:The future was with Fate. The present was our own.
~ Arthur Conan Doyle The Poison Belt ~ Arthur Conan Doyle,#NFDB
1013:The only thing that makes the present palatable is the fact that the past was, at times, torture. ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1014:The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form. ~ Beaumont Newhall, #NFDB
1015:The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright, #NFDB
1016:The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not 'this moment". ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1017:The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli, #NFDB
1018:The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present. ~ Adolf Loos, #NFDB
1019:...when you have a foot in tomorrow and a foot in yesterday, you're pissing all over the present. ~ Bill Konigsberg, #NFDB
1020:Acceptance is the magic that makes change possible. It is not forever, it is for the present moment ~ Melody Beattie, #NFDB
1021:And he will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters. ~ Hippocrates, #NFDB
1022:And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1023:Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability 2dwell in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1024:Architecture is measured against the past, you build in the present, and try to imagine the future. ~ Richard Rogers, #NFDB
1025:But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1026:Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. A ~ Gautama Buddha, #NFDB
1027:Don't expect to much of the future. Live in the present and let the future evolve as it will and trust. ~ Robyn Carr, #NFDB
1028:Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past? ~ Sylvia Plath, #NFDB
1029:I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else. ~ Richard Linklater, #NFDB
1030:In its world, there are no names, nor past, nor future, only the sureness of the present moment. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
1031:In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind ~ Peter Matthiessen, #NFDB
1032:"It is in the present and only in the present that you live." ~ Alan Watts #awareness #AlanWatts #lotus #photograghy, #NFDB
1033:People who notice birds are all listening in the same language, and it's always in the present tense. ~ Laura Munson, #NFDB
1034:Politics is topical - it's what's happening now, and we can either respond in the present or avoid it. ~ Hank Azaria, #NFDB
1035:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1036:The Church knows too that to marry the present age and its spirit is to become a widow in the next. ~ Fulton J Sheen, #NFDB
1037:The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
1038:"The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1039:The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future. ~ James Joyce, #NFDB
1040:The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of wilful blindness. ~ Jared Diamond, #NFDB
1041:The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present. ~ Steven Pressfield, #NFDB
1042:The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”5 ~ Will Durant, #NFDB
1043:The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. ~ Ariel Durant, #NFDB
1044:What do you really want? Sit down and write it out on a piece of paper. Write it in the present tense. ~ Bob Proctor, #NFDB
1045:Acceptance does not mean inaction; acceptance is actually acknowledging the present situation. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, #NFDB
1046:Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1047:...and I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1048:Anxiety, the illness of our time comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1049:Fill your heart with the creative power to accept the past, decorate the present and transform the future. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1050:For the ego to survive, it must make time - past and future - more important than the present moment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1051:I don't regret the passing of time. I try to live in the present, which should mean my life's full. ~ Francesca Annis, #NFDB
1052:I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don't deny the past, but it's a page to turn. ~ Juliette Binoche, #NFDB
1053:Look closely at the present you are constructing:
it should look like the future you are dreaming. ~ Alice Walker,#NFDB
1054:Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. ~ Mario Vargas Llosa, #NFDB
1055:Sanitizing the past is every bit as morally irresponsible as whitewashing atrocities in the present. ~ W Michael Gear, #NFDB
1056:Sculpting the future and healing the past can only happen through mindful action in the present moment. ~ Darren Main, #NFDB
1057:So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1058:The only way the past can drag you back is if you choose to bring it with you into the present. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1059:The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
1060:The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
1061:Time that never ends, that never passes, that remains in the present, where all of life's secrets lie. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1062:Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1063:When you are living in the present, you know what's important now for you and you act on that knowing. ~ John Kuypers, #NFDB
1064:You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1065:And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. *** ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1066:Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1067:As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1068:At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. ~ Paul Hawken, #NFDB
1069:Everything which is done in the present, affects the future by consequence, and the past by redemption. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1070:Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1071:Happy is the person who cherishes the precious lessons of the past and lives vigorously in the present. ~ Jerome Hines, #NFDB
1072:History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are. ~ Ken Burns, #NFDB
1073:I finally learned to live in the present and focus only on what I want rather than what I don't want. ~ Darren Johnson, #NFDB
1074:If there is any danger in the present weather, in the name of God, Monsieur, wait until spring ~ Saint Vincent de Paul, #NFDB
1075:If you’re living in the present...you only have to deal with what’s actually going on in that moment. ~ Sheri Van Dijk, #NFDB
1076:Integration is a word of the past, the word of the future and the word of the present is contribution. ~ Tariq Ramadan, #NFDB
1077:It reminds me to let the past be the past, let the present be the present, and let the future be the future. ~ M Never, #NFDB
1078:It wouldn't do to go mixing up the present and the past, and cutting bits out of one to fit into the other. ~ E Nesbit, #NFDB
1079:Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
1080:Life is short. That's all there is to say. Get what you can from the present - thoughtfully, justly. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1081:No way exists in the present to accurately determine the future effect of the least of our actions. ~ Gerald Jampolsky, #NFDB
1082:SUCH A THIN VEIL separated the past from the present; they existed simultaneously in the human heart. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
1083:Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present. ~ Margi Preus, #NFDB
1084:The failures of the past must not be an excuse for the inaction of the present and the future. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
1085:The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1086:The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
1087:The past is nothing more than the present romanticized, while the future is history with imagination. ~ Scott Wilbanks, #NFDB
1088:The present is the most precious moment. Use all the forces of thy spirit not to let that momentescape thee. ~ Tolstoy, #NFDB
1089:To surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. ~ Tolle, #NFDB
1090:To the wise man, to the wise nation, the mistakes of the past are the torches of the present. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
1091:We can’t take back who we’ve been in the past, Charlie. But we can control who we are in the present. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
1092:We have not understood the present. Why should we seek to know the future? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day By Day, 10-2-46, #NFDB
1093:A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day. ~ Adam Sedgwick, #NFDB
1094:Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine? ~ Jane Austen, #NFDB
1095:Fancy rules over two thirds of the universe, the past, and future, while reality is confined to the present ~ Jean Paul, #NFDB
1096:I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste. ~ Anne Rice, #NFDB
1097:If they past is a different country, the present is a spaceship passing through the void to the future. ~ Chloe Thurlow, #NFDB
1098:If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future, ~ William Manchester, #NFDB
1099:If you try to measure the future, you will never risk the present. Playing it safe. A ghastly game. ~ Catherine Deneuve, #NFDB
1100:Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1101:I'm English and love England. Whenever I'm there, I'm always seeing the present but feeling its past. ~ Jez Butterworth, #NFDB
1102:I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1103:It is good to look to the past to gain appreciation for the present and perspective for the future. ~ Gordon B Hinckley, #NFDB
1104:I try to live my life every day in the present, and try not to turn a blind eye to injustice and need. ~ Susan Sarandon, #NFDB
1105:Memory overshadows the present and dims the future "into something thicker than its usual pea soup." ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1106:No time like the present, and all that. You of all people should know we're only guaranteed right now. ~ Jennifer Niven, #NFDB
1107:November, I'll give thanks that you belong to me. December, you're the present beneath my Christmas tree. ~ Neil Sedaka, #NFDB
1108:Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1109:Past and future exist only in our memory. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it’s Eternity. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1110:Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” —Alan Lakein ~ Gary Keller, #NFDB
1111:Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
1112:Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, #NFDB
1113:that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present. ~ Jordan Peterson, #NFDB
1114:The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1115:The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it. ~ Thomas S Monson, #NFDB
1116:We view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present ~ Edward Hallett Carr, #NFDB
1117:Working to anticipate the future can be a distraction from the important task of dealing with the present. ~ Ed Seykota, #NFDB
1118:24Is man to have everything he wishes for,a 25when the present life and the life to come belong only to God? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1119:A major contributor to the present-day tendency to accept and encourage homosexuality is Dr. Sigmund Freud. ~ Tim LaHaye, #NFDB
1120:For life is what animals can teach us: how the present moment is all, and past and future are illusion. ~ Alison Croggon, #NFDB
1121:I also believed that our public at home would be strong enough to survive even the present crisis. ~ Paul von Hindenburg, #NFDB
1122:If your mind is not in the present time, your body will look like a dead body, cold and insensible! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1123:I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have direct knowledge of the Middle Ages. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1124:I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1125:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1126:Sooner or later, Meg, it’s always about family. The past has an irritating way of becoming the present. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
1127:Tell me why you should be in search of a goal? Why are you not content with the present condition? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
1128:The most effective way to transform into higher consciousness is to pay attention in the present moment. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1129:the past is only a second ago. The present merely exists for a brief second before becoming history itself. ~ Jane Corry, #NFDB
1130:The present indicative asserts something which is occuring while the speaker is making the statement. ~ Spiros Zodhiates, #NFDB
1131:there was no future: there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present. ~ John le Carr, #NFDB
1132:The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice in the present. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1133:The verses are meant to help us to bring our awareness back to what’s happening in the present moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1134:This is real freedom-the ability to enjoy the choices we make in every successive moment of the present. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1135:To the being of fully alive, the future is not ominous but a promise; it surrounds the present like a halo. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1136:Trust the past to God's mercy, the present to God's love, and the future to God's providence. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
1137:...we are haunting ourselves in the present from the past and the future via the ghost and the alien. ~ Jeffrey J Kripal, #NFDB
1138:We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
1139:Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time. The ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1140:Be idealistic about the future, be realistic about the present, and never forget the lessons of the past. ~ Dean F Wilson, #NFDB
1141:Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. ~ N T Wright, #NFDB
1142:God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
1143:Humans can't live in the present, like animals do. Humans are always thinking about the future or the ~ Townes Van Zandt, #NFDB
1144:If I would expect better spiritual conditions to serve, I would not have started until the present moment. ~ Chico Xavier, #NFDB
1145:I know there is never only one version of the past. We resurrect the past to suit the needs of the present. ~ Sari Wilson, #NFDB
1146:in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1147:It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1148:It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. ~ David Benioff, #NFDB
1149:Ludens felt that everyone around him was living in the present, a place where he certainly could not live. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1150:No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1151:Often the more lavish the present, the greater the treachery the giver had probably been contemplating. ~ Alex Rutherford, #NFDB
1152:Prince,' said Puck's voice, drawing me out of my dark thoughts, back to the present. 'Prince. Oy, ice-boy! ~ Julie Kagawa, #NFDB
1153:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1154:that something better might be attained in the future by giving up something of value in the present. ~ Jordan B Peterson, #NFDB
1155:The Master said, "A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present." ~ Confucius, #NFDB
1156:Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1157:What is past, one cannot change,
so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away. ~ James Conroyd Martin,#NFDB
1158:When we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1159:You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read. ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1160:105. " I congratulate myself on not having arrived into this world until the present time. This age suits my taste. ~ Ovid, #NFDB
1161:All a company report and balance sheet can tell you is the past and the present. They cannot tell future. ~ Nicolas Darvas, #NFDB
1162:And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. • • • ~ Kurt Vonnegut, #NFDB
1163:Fear can be a natural ally, a homemade power source... Staying in the present, fear can only help you. ~ Georges St Pierre, #NFDB
1164:He questioned the present, the past, and he realized that life had a way of preparing you for nothing at all. ~ R J Ellory, #NFDB
1165:How foolish is man! He ruins the present while worrying about the future, but weeps in the future by recalling his past! ~, #NFDB
1166:If you look at today through the eyes of the past, you can never see what the present moment has to offer. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
1167:It’s the age of daring. It’s the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive. ~ Gregory Maguire, #NFDB
1168:No time better than the present,’ I always say. Or was that, ‘Nothing is better than a present’? I forget. ~ Kaza Kingsley, #NFDB
1169:So much time is currently spent in worrying about the future that the present is allowed to go to hell. ~ Russell L Ackoff, #NFDB
1170:The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them. ~ Agnes Repplier, #NFDB
1171:The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. ~ Henri Bergson, #NFDB
1172:There’s no such thing as difficulty when you live in the present moment, doing only what you can right now. ~ Wayne W Dyer, #NFDB
1173:Touching the present moment, we realize that the present is made of the past and is creating the future. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1174:We experience only the one moment of the present. The past is only memory and the future only possibility. ~ David A Wells, #NFDB
1175:You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read. ~ Charlotte Bronte, #NFDB
1176:You can’t go back and fix the past.”
“No. But you can make the present and the future a whole lot better. ~ Dani Harper,#NFDB
1177:And imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. ~ John Green, #NFDB
1178:At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost. ~ Karl Jaspers, #NFDB
1179:God is not in heaven - God is in the present moment. If you are also in the present moment you enter the temple. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1180:It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. ~ Frank Herbert, #NFDB
1181:"Make the present moment, the here and the now, into your true home. That is the only home that we have." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1182:Neurotics think of the past with resentment, and the future with dread; the present just doesn't exist. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, #NFDB
1183:Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence. ~ Horace Mann, #NFDB
1184:O MY WIFE-who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity. ~ Herbert C Brown, #NFDB
1185:"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1186:"The growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present." ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
1187:The present moment is the only time that is eternal and the only time in which we can experience happiness. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1188:We are seeing these nearby stars, not as they are at the present moment, but as they were 4 years ago ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
1189:We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
1190:Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1191:He couldn’t change the past, and he couldn’t control the future. But he would beat the present into submission. ~ Joel Ohman, #NFDB
1192:Hygge is charged with a strong orientation and commitment toward experiencing and savoring the present moment. ~ Meik Wiking, #NFDB
1193:If we do not understand the significance of our presence, we can never give anyone the present of our lives. ~ Dale Carnegie, #NFDB
1194:III. Modern Christianity, from the Reformation of the sixteenth century to the present time. A.D. 1517–1880. ~ Philip Schaff, #NFDB
1195:It is only when people don’t know history well that they judge the present so blindly in ignorance! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
1196:It's in the present that lies the secret: if you pay attention to the present you will be able to enhance it. ~ Paulo Coelho, #NFDB
1197:Let us attend to the present, and as to the future we shall know how to manage when the occasion arrives. ~ Pierre Corneille, #NFDB
1198:Look at what happened in the Past. Learn something valuable from it. Do things differently in the present. ~ Spencer Johnson, #NFDB
1199:nonjudgmental awareness—the process of being aware of the present, without attaching emotional reactivity to it. ~ Alex Korb, #NFDB
1200:Nothing is going to remain the way it is. Let us, in the present, study the past, so as to invent the future. ~ Augusto Boal, #NFDB
1201:Recovery is also the ability to inhabit the conditions of the present reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant. ~ Noah Levine, #NFDB
1202:The ego does not, cannot live in the present, because the present is real and the ego is false - they never meet. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
1203:The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past. ~ Erica Jong, #NFDB
1204:The present generation has the same right of self-government which the past one has exercised for itself. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
1205:The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment. ~ Geneen Roth, #NFDB
1206:Time is an illusion of life; the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
1207:We seldom require more to the happiness of the present hour than to surpass him that stands next before us. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
1208:When the mind is creating troubles, it’s time to come back to the body and the serenity of the present moment. ~ Dan Millman, #NFDB
1209:When the present is full of gloom, the past becomes haven of refuge that provides relief and inspiration. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru, #NFDB
1210:Your body exists in the past and your mind exists in the future. In yoga, they come together in the present. ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
1211:Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. This is why we may also call it Presence. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1212:Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment. It is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1213:Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us, they rejoice in the present. ~ Jean de la Bruyere, #NFDB
1214:Don't let them tell you that your pain should be confined to the past, that it bears no relevance to the present. ~ Lang Leav, #NFDB
1215:Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1216:Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo, #NFDB
1217:Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
1218:I can see everything once it’s already happened—I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
1219:I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
1220:I think the most well-adjusted people live in the present with an eye toward the future - I'm not among those. ~ Emily Giffin, #NFDB
1221:It’s not that the past doesn’t matter, it’s that the future matters more, and the present matters most of all. ~ Elle Newmark, #NFDB
1222:I've spent most of my life perfecting the craft of living history. I have no practice at living in the present. ~ Leila Sales, #NFDB
1223:Kids don’t have much accumulated and deep memories and that’s why they happily live in the present time! ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1224:Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
1225:One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
1226:Still she wondered: did the present deliver up the future, or must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist? ~ Edith Pearlman, #NFDB
1227:Then I'll cleave to my old self and spirit the full host of angels into the present with me.Even the ugly ones. ~ Lauren Kate, #NFDB
1228:The older one gets, the more one feels that the present moment must be enjoyed, comparable to a state of grace. ~ Marie Curie, #NFDB
1229:The present time of believers is no longer determined by the past. It takes its definition from the future. ~ Jurgen Moltmann, #NFDB
1230:The present U.N. must be annihilated by our power. That is the stage for Communists. We must make a new U.N. ~ Sun Myung Moon, #NFDB
1231:Trust the past to the mercy of God, the present to God’s love, and the future to God’s providence. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
1232:We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’ ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
1233:We see past time in a telescope and present time in a microscope. Hence the apparent enormities of the present. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
1234:America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. ~ Frederick Douglass, #NFDB
1235:As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
1236:Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future. ~ John F Kennedy, #NFDB
1237:Every moment of our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs for ever to the past. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1238:For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
1239:For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
1240:I can see everything once it's already happened--I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand. ~ Nick Hornby, #NFDB
1241:If you ask why we meditate, I would say it's so we can become more flexible and tolerant to the present moment. ~ Pema Chodron, #NFDB
1242:I’m pretty sure the past is only good for one thing and that’s getting a person where they are at the present. ~ Susan Donovan, #NFDB
1243:...is any history really all that ancient?...Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present? ~ Margaret Peterson Haddix, #NFDB
1244:It often feels like I'm not so much living for the present as I am busy making memories for the future. ~ Amy Krouse Rosenthal, #NFDB
1245:Love doesn’t dwell in the past. It lives in the present—in our hearts and the memories we carry with us. Love ~ Daisy Prescott, #NFDB
1246:Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. ~ Carrie Brownstein, #NFDB
1247:Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. ~ Kristin Hannah, #NFDB
1248:The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us. ~ Eugene O Neill, #NFDB
1249:The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come. ~ Walter Savage Landor, #NFDB
1250:The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist. ~ Jean Paul Sartre, #NFDB
1251:The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. ~ Alan Lightman, #NFDB
1252:we can’t use someone else’s irresponsibility in the past as an excuse for our irresponsibility in the present. If ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
1253:What can never be proven or verified in the present, Tertullian says, “must be believed, because it is absurd. ~ Elaine Pagels, #NFDB
1254:What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter? ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1255:What's important now? - To evaluate the past, focus on the future, and tell you what you have to do in the present ~ Lou Holtz, #NFDB
1256:When you're young you don't realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older; ~ Roger Ebert, #NFDB
1257:Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future ~ Jozef Pilsudski, #NFDB
1258:You live in the present and you eliminate things that don't matter. You don't carry the burden of the past. ~ Paulette Goddard, #NFDB
1259:Accept that living in the present moment, with your present desires, is the best, the highest thing you can do. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1260:Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
1261:For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1262:God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1263:had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present. ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
1264:How many times has He delivered me! Yet, alas! How distrustful and ungrateful is my heart even until the present! ~ John Newton, #NFDB
1265:If the present,” I said a few weeks later, “tries to sit in judgment on the past it will lose the future. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
1266:If we have abandoned ourselves to God, there is only one rule for us: the duty of the present moment. ~ Jean Pierre de Caussade, #NFDB
1267:If you stand with one foot in the past and the other foot in the future, Matt, all you do is piss on the present. ~ P J Parrish, #NFDB
1268:In this world, all--men, women, and kings--must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God ~ Alexandre Dumas, #NFDB
1269:I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce. ~ Claes Oldenburg, #NFDB
1270:one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1271:Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1272:The important part of the present development is the anti-capitalist sentiment that is permeating our people. ~ Gregor Strasser, #NFDB
1273:The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy. ~ William Wilberforce, #NFDB
1274:The present and the future cannot change the past…but the passing of time makes the pain at our backs less severe ~ Callie Hart, #NFDB
1275:to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
1276:We need a proper understanding of the past to correctly judge the present if we ever are to foretell the future. ~ Craig D Idso, #NFDB
1277:What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter? ~ Charlotte Bronte, #NFDB
1278:You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read.” But ~ Charlotte Bront, #NFDB
1279:Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
1280:For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.4 ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1281:He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 ~ Blake Crouch, #NFDB
1282:I do think it's important to live in the present because in that way you won't be living in a state of regret. ~ Francesca Annis, #NFDB
1283:If you carve out what you expect, that's how you end up getting disappointed, not living fully in the present. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow, #NFDB
1284:In order to live in the present, we have to learn how to feel safe even when a situation feels threatening to us. ~ John Kuypers, #NFDB
1285:It is in our nature to travel into our past, hoping thereby to illuminate the darkness that bedevils the present. ~ Farley Mowat, #NFDB
1286:Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
1287:Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
1288:Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future. ~ James Clear, #NFDB
1289:So much history buried underneath. We spend our lives to try to dig it out, but always the present buries it again. ~ Tom Harper, #NFDB
1290:The hard part about living in the present is it forces you to abandon hope for the future. Thanks for nothing, now. ~ Dana Gould, #NFDB
1291:The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present. ~ Barbara De Angelis, #NFDB
1292:The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively. ~ Rollo May, #NFDB
1293:The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour ~ Beryl Bainbridge, #NFDB
1294:The past haunts the present in mores ways than we realize. It certainly scares the living daylights out of me. ~ Cressida Cowell, #NFDB
1295:The pleasant life: a life that successfully pursues the positive emotions about the present, past, and future. ~ Martin Seligman, #NFDB
1296:The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1297:The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1298:The promise given was necessity of the past: the word borken is a necessity of the present" -Niccolo Machiavelli ~ Michael Scott, #NFDB
1299:The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it. ~ Elizabeth Kostova, #NFDB
1300:To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past. ~ Amitav Ghosh, #NFDB
1301:We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk! ~ Wangari Maathai, #NFDB
1302:We show our animal nature by not living for the future, and our human nature by not living in the present. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
1303:"Without thinking and talking, there is no obstacle to get in the way of our enjoyment of the present moment." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1304:Cast the burden of the present along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future upon the Lord. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
1305:Creating code that fails with reasonable error messages takes minor effort in the present but provides value forever. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1306:Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1307:He [Abram] believes that the PRESENT is the only real thing and everything else is an illusion
a distraction ~ Jennifer DeLucy,#NFDB
1308:If YOU want to BUILD and MAINTAIN a POSITIVE ATTITUDE, get into the habit of LIVING IN THE PRESENT and DOING IT NOW. ~ Shiv Khera, #NFDB
1309:I pretend I'm fighting to live in the present but really I'm having an affair with the past every secret moment. ~ Jillian Lauren, #NFDB
1310:Is the future, is the past, all that matters to you? Don't you have just a little bit of room for the present? ~ Orson Scott Card, #NFDB
1311:Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgementally ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
1312:Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. ~ Jon Kabat Zinn, #NFDB
1313:Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1314:Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. ~ Don DeLillo, #NFDB
1315:Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life. Whereas ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1316:Spiritual power in the present creates material power in the future. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram - II, One More for the Altar, #NFDB
1317:Sustainable leadership does not compromise the future by expanding and accelerating too quickly in the present. ~ Andy Hargreaves, #NFDB
1318:The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth. ~ Stendhal, #NFDB
1319:The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play. ~ Oscar Wilde, #NFDB
1320:The past is only the present become invisible and mute; its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. ~ Mary Webb, #NFDB
1321:The past would always be part of the present, but at least that was true for both sides: the good and the bad. ~ Aleksandr Voinov, #NFDB
1322:There are very few men-and they are the exceptions-who are able to think and feel beyond the present moment ~ Carl von Clausewitz, #NFDB
1323:There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1324:We have within ourselves Enough to fill the present day with joy, And overspread the future years with hope. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
1325:What man really seeks is not perfection which is in the future, but fulfillment which is ever in the present. ~ Nilakanta Sri Ram, #NFDB
1326:When we lack a sense of past and future, the present feels like a shaky platform, an uncertain basis for action. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
1327:Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
1328:And, as you know, the present moment is where ALL your power is. A reminder I need regularly. Maybe you too. ~ Christiane Northrup, #NFDB
1329:A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
1330:As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present. ~ Franz Grillparzer, #NFDB
1331:Boredom is a sign that you're detached from your own bodily experience and aren't living in the present moment. ~ Georg Feuerstein, #NFDB
1332:Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
1333:Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1334:For me, the present is a golden era. That's the greatest golden era. Right now. I just like pining for lost times. ~ Whit Stillman, #NFDB
1335:Getting back to Albert Einstein, “a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell on the future. ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
1336:Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes. ~ E M Forster, #NFDB
1337:If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible. ~ Germaine Greer, #NFDB
1338:Is not every man the sum of the present character and the bloody skin in which his good and bad memories are sewn? I ~ Miro Gavran, #NFDB
1339:"Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn't more complicated than that." ~ Sylvia Boorstein, #NFDB
1340:She had a slightly dizzying sense of being overtaken by time, the future becoming the present before she was ready. ~ Tom Perrotta, #NFDB
1341:Sometimes in order to be happy in the present moment you have to be willing to give up all hope for a better past. ~ Robert Holden, #NFDB
1342:Sometimes we try to convince ourselves of things that are not true, reframing the past to better explain the present. ~ Roxane Gay, #NFDB
1343:The past and the present wilt. I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. ~ Walt Whitman,#NFDB
1344:The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess. ~ James Thurber, #NFDB
1345:The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
1346:We may have doubts, but we control the present. We always have the choice to move forward with hope and confidence. ~ Teri Hatcher, #NFDB
1347:What will the present chaos lead to? How will it all end? It can only end in one way. Mankind will be sick of it all. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
1348:When we enter the present moment deeply, our regrets and sorrows disappear, and we discover life with all its wonders. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1349:When you are living in the present moment, you will experience a deep sense of inner joy, peace and awareness. ~ Christopher Dines, #NFDB
1350:You should enjoy the present moment because this is all you have. Create for tomorrow, but live in and for today. ~ Robert Anthony, #NFDB
1351:A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn't change how you lived in the present. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1352:A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn’t change how you lived in the present. ~ Maggie Stiefvater, #NFDB
1353:as if the imminent could not wait to become the past, or the present lunged at the future, eager for what would be. ~ Anthony Doerr, #NFDB
1354:Balance lives in the present. The surest way to lose your footing is to focus on what dreadful things might happen. ~ Oprah Winfrey, #NFDB
1355:I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. ~ John Maynard Keynes, #NFDB
1356:I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary. ~ William Gibson, #NFDB
1357:One who lives in accordance with nature does not go against the way of things but moves in harmony with the present moment. ~ Laozi, #NFDB
1358:Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment. ~ Sharon Salzberg, #NFDB
1359:Remembering what you want about the past, even if it’s not entirely true, keeps you from giving up on the present. ~ Susan Meissner, #NFDB
1360:Some so fear the future that they suffocate the present. It's like committing suicide to avoid being murdered. ~ Richard Paul Evans, #NFDB
1361:The great secret about goals and visions is not the future they describe but the change in the present they engender. ~ David Allen, #NFDB
1362:The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city. ~ Tom Piazza, #NFDB
1363:The past is as powerless to darken the present moment as is a shadow to reach up and drag down the form that casts it. ~ Guy Finley, #NFDB
1364:The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good. ~ Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
1365:The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England. ~ Nat Hentoff, #NFDB
1366:The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us. ~ Hillary Clinton, #NFDB
1367:There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
1368:Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
1369:Those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future. ~ Bernard Lewis, #NFDB
1370:We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future. Our mood is as much expectation as experience. ~ Hugh Howey, #NFDB
1371:But it's easy to solve the past in the present, and when you do, you sometimes forget to leave room for forgiveness. ~ Tiffany Baker, #NFDB
1372:Destroy desire completely for the present. For if you desire anything which is not in our power, you must be unfortunate ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
1373:Do not look back to the past, nor forward to the future. Claim only the present, for it holds God's will. ~ Rose Philippine Duchesne, #NFDB
1374:Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. ~ Annie Dillard, #NFDB
1375:For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. ~ Erwin Schrodinger, #NFDB
1376:For young people, if someone tells you: you are the future - say No! I'm the present. You have things to do right now. ~ Hamza Yusuf, #NFDB
1377:Getting back to Albert Einstein, “a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell on the future.”4 ~ Hector Garcia Puigcerver, #NFDB
1378:Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, #NFDB
1379:He savours every instant of the present as if it were still the best and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements. ~ Kim Th y, #NFDB
1380:how often did people sacrifice the present for the future? And how wise was that when there might not be a future? ~ L E Modesitt Jr, #NFDB
1381:If you always sit in expectation, you’re not in the present moment. The present moment contains the whole of life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1382:I have wisdom. I feel love. I live in the present and I try to present a dimension that brings harmony and healing. ~ Carlos Santana, #NFDB
1383:. . .I think a lot of people just don't want to go back. Sometimes that's the best thing to do--to live in the present. ~ Jamie Ford, #NFDB
1384:It's entirely possible that the notion of what is the past, what is the present and what is the future, could change. ~ Carlton Cuse, #NFDB
1385:It takes guts to stop fretting about the unknown and concentrate on the present moment. That’s what matters, anyway. ~ Camille Pag n, #NFDB
1386:Letting go isn’t about having the courage to release the past; it’s about having the wisdom to embrace the present. ~ Steve Maraboli, #NFDB
1387:No man bears more responsibility for the present worldwide financial crisis and coming depression than Alan Greenspan. ~ Bill Bonner, #NFDB
1388:One of poverty's meanest tricks is to replace the mundane pleasures of the present with the grand worries of the future. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1389:Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1390:The great menace of civilization in the present is that we offer an education with too little regard for the roots. ~ Vincent Massey, #NFDB
1391:The Present Is Not The Past And It Is Not The Future. The Present Is The Present Moment! The Present Is Right Now! ~ Spencer Johnson, #NFDB
1392:The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1393:the present moment is all we can call our own for works of mercy, of righteous dealing, and of family tenderness. All ~ George Eliot, #NFDB
1394:There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past. ~ Isaac Asimov, #NFDB
1395:To lose one's life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
1396:We try to live every moment like that, dwelling peacefully in the present moment, and respond to events with compassion. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1397:Work is an anchor; it prevents the undisciplined minds drifting to the past. It keeps them in the present time. ~ Mehmet Murat ildan, #NFDB
1398:You have no choice but to live in the present, if you're really being open to events and people as they come along. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
1399:Ah, America,” Pestilence says with distaste, dragging me back to the present. “Here they are made particularly mean. ~ Laura Thalassa, #NFDB
1400:As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. ~ Norman Foster, #NFDB
1401:... but we cannot go back to happier times. We can only live in the present, and right now that present is painful. ~ Christie Golden, #NFDB
1402:Confidence equals contentment with self; contentment is knowing you have all you need for the present circumstances. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
1403:"Don't follow the past.Don't anticipate the future.Remain in the present moment.Leave your mind alone." ~ Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, #NFDB
1404:Do you believe, she went on, that the past dies?
Yes, said Margaret. Yes, if the present cuts its throat. ~ Leonora Carrington,#NFDB
1405:Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
1406:Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity. ~ Stephen Hawking, #NFDB
1407:Every moment is an eternity in itself. Bliss is the present moment and each and everyone of us needs to understand this. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
1408:Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present? ~ Chuck Palahniuk, #NFDB
1409:Faculty X is the ability to grasp the reality not simply of other times and places, but of the present moment as well. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
1410:How we pay attention to the present moment...determin es the character of our experience and...the quality of our lives. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
1411:I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
1412:I think we're going to carry the 'Ice Age's up to 'Ice Age 15,' which means basically they'll be in the present decade. ~ Denis Leary, #NFDB
1413:It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield ~ David Nicholls, #NFDB
1414:No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love. ~ Jamaica Kincaid, #NFDB
1415:Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1416:Photographing a culture in the here and now often means photographing the intersection of the present with the past. ~ David duChemin, #NFDB
1417:Put the past behind you and the future ahead where they belong and spend your time in the present with the rest of us. ~ Terry Brooks, #NFDB
1418:Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all. ~ Evelyn Waugh, #NFDB
1419:Stand before it and there is no beginning. Follow it and there is no end. Stay with the ancient Tao, Move with the present. ~ Lao Tzu, #NFDB
1420:That’s how things look from the future. To people in the valley (the dark valley) of the present, they look different. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
1421:The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer, #NFDB
1422:The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. ~ Anne Michaels, #NFDB
1423:To abandon the present in order to look for things in the future is to throw away the substance and hold onto the shadow. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1424:To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. ~ Rebecca Solnit, #NFDB
1425:We’re grown-ups, sugar. We all have pasts. I bet even you do. But those don’t much matter compared to the present, right? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1426:When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1427:whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed. ~ Dorothy L Sayers, #NFDB
1428:16th century advertisements cannot market 21st century products. Look for what is necessary at the present moment. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
1429:Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is the only moment. ~ Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1430:But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
1431:God is the God of the present as well as of the future...even here on earth, He reigneth, dispensing good and evil. ~ Alfred Edersheim, #NFDB
1432:Hamilton cast himself as “a warm advocate for limited monarchy and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
1433:How do you know antiquity was foolish? How do you know the present is wise? Who made it foolish? Who made it wise? ~ Francois Rabelais, #NFDB
1434:If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
1435:One thing you learn from surfing is how to operate in the present. It's really what the surfing experience is all about. ~ Gerry Lopez, #NFDB
1436:strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
1437:"Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there,' or being in the present but wanting to be in the future." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1438:The essence of the present moment, no matter how chaotic it may appear on the surface, is stillness, sacred stillness. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1439:The path to equanimity lies in observing the present and allowing it to float undisturbed down the river of our awareness. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1440:We are all victims of our human experience,” Alice continued, “apt to view the present through the lens of our own past. ~ Kate Morton, #NFDB
1441:when set in its proper historical context, the present time appears less unnervingly unprecedented and more familiar. ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
1442:You may as well know, also, that every great leader, from the dawn of civilization down to the present, was a dreamer. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
1443:A daughter is the happy memories of the past, the joyful moments of the present, and the hope and promise of the future. ~ Bruce Barton, #NFDB
1444:Boundaries are actually the main factor in space, just as the present, another boundary, is the main factor in time. ~ Eduardo Chillida, #NFDB
1445:Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably. ~ Walter Benjamin, #NFDB
1446:From its origin to the present hour, in all its vicissitudes, Masonry has been the steady unwearing friend of man. ~ Theodore Roosevelt, #NFDB
1447:History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future. ~ Benjamin Cardozo, #NFDB
1448:How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
1449:I don't think you go out of style when you're living in the present most of the time. And I think that is what I do. ~ Shirley MacLaine, #NFDB
1450:If you want to be happy, do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, focus on living fully in the present. ~ Roy T Bennett, #NFDB
1451:Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ? ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
1452:I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's where the fun is. ~ Donald Trump, #NFDB
1453:It's critical to God that we think about how we live, how we spend the present time with which we're gifted each day. ~ Craig Groeschel, #NFDB
1454:Live in the present. The past is gone; the future is unknown - but the present is real, and your opportunities are now. ~ Maxwell Maltz, #NFDB
1455:Mindfulness is not a mechanical process. It is developing a very gentle, kind, and creative awareness to the present moment. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
1456:The future is carved out of the present moment. Tomorrow's harvest depends upon today's ploughing and sowing. ~ Chinmayananda Saraswati, #NFDB
1457:The past scampers like an alley cat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter. ~ Charles de Lint, #NFDB
1458:The present moment is all you ever have. There is never a time when your life is not 'this moment.' Is this not a fact? ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
1459:The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future. ~ Aldo Leopold, #NFDB
1460:The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future. ~ Charles Baudelaire, #NFDB
1461:Those who forget the past, ignore the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and filled with anxiety. ~ Seneca, #NFDB
1462:Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back at the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb. ~ Brandon Mull, #NFDB
1463:Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb. ~ Brandon Mull, #NFDB
1464:We will never know peace if we lose the present because we are trapped in the past and paralyzed by the future. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus, #NFDB
1465:Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead. ~ Henry Rollins, #NFDB
1466:Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions. ~ Randal Marlin, #NFDB
1467:If I work incessantly to the last, nature owes me another form of existence when the present one collapses. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
1468:I think sometimes - do not we all? - that perhaps the present year is my last year and that all my busyness is foolish. ~ Marjorie Bowen, #NFDB
1469:It is my opinion that enjoying yourself in the present and loosening your definition of time slows the aging process. ~ Frederick Dodson, #NFDB
1470:I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's were the fun is. ~ Donald J Trump, #NFDB
1471:Live for the present –’ I heard my parents’ old maxim in the back of my head ‘– and the future will look after itself. ~ Richard Branson, #NFDB
1472:Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future. ~ Meher Baba, #NFDB
1473:No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present. ~ Thomas B Macaulay, #NFDB
1474:People's - most people's job is talking about the future or like money not even in the present tense. It's not even paper. ~ Colin Quinn, #NFDB
1475:Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre. ~ Dorothy Day, #NFDB
1476:The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch, #NFDB
1477:The present moment, if you think about it, is the only time there is. No matter what time it is, it is always NOW! ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1478:The present moment, if you think about it, is the only time there is. No matter what time it is, it is always now. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1479:There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment., #NFDB
1480:There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. ~ Laini Taylor, #NFDB
1481:The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters. ~ Ross Macdonald, #NFDB
1482:Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future. ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
1483:[A]wareness of time ceases to be an asset when concern for the future makes it almost impossible to live in the present[.] ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
1484:Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment I know this is a wonderful moment. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1485:Find yourself in the present. See the possibilities right in front of you and hold on tight to the ones tou want to keep. ~ Robin Bielman, #NFDB
1486:I believe in living in the present and making each day count. I don't pay much attention to the past or the future. ~ Matthew McConaughey, #NFDB
1487:In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life. ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
1488:Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1489:Positive thinkers create large pictures of what they want in their minds and can predict the future from the present. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
1490:She would say that what is past, one cannot change, so each backward glance is a bit of the present slipping away. ~ James Conroyd Martin, #NFDB
1491:The past is history, the future is a mystery, and this moment is a gift. That is why this moment is called ‘the present’. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
1492:The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good. ~ Saint Alphonsus Liguori, #NFDB
1493:To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all. ~ Pablo Picasso, #NFDB
1494:Tomorrow will always hold curiosities but it is the enchantment of today's possibilities which has me true to the present. ~ Truth Devour, #NFDB
1495:We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
1496:We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams. ~ Edgar Allan Poe, #NFDB
1497:We ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is' that there is no viable alternative to the present. ~ Tom Hayden, #NFDB
1498:You shouldn't let something that happened in the past stop you from having something that could be great in the present. ~ Katie Ganshert, #NFDB
1499:Being in the present moment, one can step outside the mechanical train of life, and this is where the inner revolution begins. ~ Belsebuub, #NFDB
1500:"By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better, and prepare for a better future." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh #hereandnow, #NFDB
488 Integral Yoga
88 Poetry
82 Occultism
81 Christianity
51 Philosophy
43 Fiction
32 Yoga
32 Psychology
24 Science
10 Integral Theory
10 Hinduism
7 Cybernetics
6 Theosophy
4 Sufism
4 Mythology
4 Education
4 Baha i Faith
3 Mysticism
3 Kabbalah
3 Buddhism
2 Philsophy
1 Thelema
1 Alchemy
272 Sri Aurobindo
211 The Mother
139 Satprem
113 Nolini Kanta Gupta
34 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
30 Carl Jung
28 James George Frazer
28 Aleister Crowley
26 H P Lovecraft
21 Walt Whitman
21 Saint Augustine of Hippo
19 Plotinus
19 A B Purani
17 Percy Bysshe Shelley
14 Swami Krishnananda
12 Aldous Huxley
10 Swami Vivekananda
10 George Van Vrekhem
9 Sri Ramakrishna
9 Friedrich Nietzsche
8 Rudolf Steiner
7 Sri Ramana Maharshi
7 Plato
7 Norbert Wiener
7 Nirodbaran
7 John Keats
6 William Wordsworth
6 Vyasa
5 Saint John of Climacus
5 Robert Browning
5 Patanjali
5 Jordan Peterson
5 Friedrich Schiller
5 Anonymous
4 Rabbi Abraham Abulafia
4 Jorge Luis Borges
4 Baha u llah
4 Al-Ghazali
3 Thubten Chodron
3 Rabbi Moses Luzzatto
3 Paul Richard
3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3 Henry David Thoreau
3 Franz Bardon
3 Bokar Rinpoche
3 Alice Bailey
2 Saint Teresa of Avila
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson
2 Rabindranath Tagore
2 Ovid
2 Mirabai
2 Ken Wilber
2 Joseph Campbell
2 Jorge Luis Borges
2 Jean Gebser
2 Edgar Allan Poe
64 Record of Yoga
46 The Synthesis Of Yoga
28 The Golden Bough
28 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
26 Lovecraft - Poems
25 The Life Divine
23 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
21 Whitman - Poems
20 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
19 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
17 Shelley - Poems
17 Magick Without Tears
17 City of God
16 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
15 The Future of Man
15 Letters On Yoga IV
15 Letters On Yoga II
15 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
15 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
14 The Study and Practice of Yoga
14 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
13 Agenda Vol 10
13 Agenda Vol 04
13 Agenda Vol 03
12 The Perennial Philosophy
12 The Human Cycle
12 Talks
12 Agenda Vol 05
11 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
11 Letters On Yoga I
11 Agenda Vol 06
11 Agenda Vol 02
10 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
10 Preparing for the Miraculous
10 Prayers And Meditations
10 Agenda Vol 08
9 The Phenomenon of Man
9 Liber ABA
9 Let Me Explain
9 Agenda Vol 12
9 Agenda Vol 07
8 The Practice of Psycho therapy
8 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
8 Some Answers From The Mother
8 Essays Divine And Human
8 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
8 Agenda Vol 13
8 Agenda Vol 09
8 Agenda Vol 01
7 Twilight of the Idols
7 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
7 The Bible
7 Questions And Answers 1954
7 Questions And Answers 1953
7 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 03
7 Mysterium Coniunctionis
7 Keats - Poems
7 Cybernetics
6 Wordsworth - Poems
6 Vishnu Purana
6 The Secret Doctrine
6 The Problems of Philosophy
6 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04
6 Letters On Yoga III
6 Essays On The Gita
5 Words Of Long Ago
5 The Ladder of Divine Ascent
5 Schiller - Poems
5 Questions And Answers 1955
5 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
5 Patanjali Yoga Sutras
5 Maps of Meaning
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08
5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
5 Browning - Poems
5 Aion
4 Vedic and Philological Studies
4 The Confessions of Saint Augustine
4 The Alchemy of Happiness
4 Raja-Yoga
4 Questions And Answers 1956
4 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
4 On Education
4 Labyrinths
4 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
4 Agenda Vol 11
3 Walden
3 The Secret Of The Veda
3 Theosophy
3 The Divine Comedy
3 Tara - The Feminine Divine
3 Savitri
3 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
3 Kena and Other Upanishads
3 Isha Upanishad
3 Initiation Into Hermetics
3 How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator
3 General Principles of Kabbalah
3 A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
2 Words Of The Mother III
2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
2 The Red Book Liber Novus
2 The Lotus Sutra
2 The Interior Castle or The Mansions
2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 The Ever-Present Origin
2 The Book of Certitude
2 Tagore - Poems
2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
2 Selected Fictions
2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01
2 On the Way to Supermanhood
2 Metamorphoses
2 Hymns to the Mystic Fire
2 Goethe - Poems
2 Emerson - Poems
2 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
00.00 - Publishers Note A, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Present volume consists of the first seven parts of the book The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo which has run into twelve parts, as it stands now; of these twelve, parts five to nine are based upon talks of the Mother (given by Her to the children of the Ashram). In this volume the later parts of the Talks (8 and 9) could not be included: they are to wait for a subsequent volume. The talks, originally in French, were spread over a number of years, ending in about 1960. We are pleased to note that the Government of India have given us a grant to meet the cost of publication of this volume.
13 January 1972
00.00 - Publishers Note B, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Present volume consists of five parts of the book Yoga of Sri Aurobindo which has now run into twelve parts. Of these five parts, eight and nine are based on talks of the Mother given by Her, in French, to the children of the Ashram.
We are pleased to note that the Government of India have given us a grant to meet the cost of publication of this volume.
00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It would be interesting to know what the five ranges or levels or movements of consciousness exactly are that make up the Universal Brahman described in this passage. It is the mystic knowledge, the Upanishad says, of the secret delight in thingsmadhuvidy. The five ranges are the five fundamental principles of delightimmortalities, the Veda would say that form the inner core of the pyramid of creation. They form a rising tier and are ruled respectively by the godsAgni, Indra, Varuna, Soma and Brahmawith their emanations and instrumental personalities the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Maruts and the Sadhyas. We suggest that these refer to the five well-known levels of being, the modes or nodi of consciousness or something very much like them. The Upanishad speaks elsewhere of the five sheaths. The six Chakras of Tantric system lie in the same line. The first and the basic mode is the physical and the ascent from the physical: Agni and the Vasus are always intimately connected with the earth and -the earth-principles (it can be compared with the Muladhara of the Tantras). Next, second in the line of ascent is the Vital, the centre of power and dynamism of which the Rudras are the deities and Indra the presiding God (cf. Swadhishthana of the Tantras the navel centre). Indra, in the Vedas, has two aspects, one of knowledge and vision and the other of dynamic force and drive. In the first aspect he is more often considered as the Lord of the Mind, of the Luminous Mind. In the Present passage, Indra is taken in his second aspect and instead of the Maruts with whom he is usually invoked has the Rudras as his agents and associates.
The third in the line of ascension is the region of Varuna and the Adityas, that is to say, of the large Mind and its lightsperhaps it can be connected with Tantric Ajnachakra. The fourth is the domain of Soma and the Marutsthis seems to be the inner heart, the fount of delight and keen and sweeping aspirations the Anahata of the Tantras. The fifth is the region of the crown of the head, the domain of Brahma and the Sadhyas: it is the Overmind status from where comes the descending inflatus, the creative Maya of Brahma. And when you go beyond, you pass into the ultimate status of the Sun, the reality absolute, the Transcendent which is indescribable, unseizable, indeterminate, indeterminable, incommensurable; and once there, one never returns, neverna ca punarvartate na ca punarvartate.
--
The third boon is the secret of secrets, for it is the knowledge and realisation of Transcendence that is sought here. Beyond the individual lies the universal; is there anything beyond the universal? The release of the individual into the cosmic existence gives him the griefless life eternal: can the cosmos be rolled up and flung into something beyond? What would be the nature of that thing? What is there outside creation, outside manifestation, outside Maya, to use a latter day term? Is there existence or non-existence (utter dissolution or extinctionDeath in his supreme and absolute status)? King Yama did not choose to answer immediately and even endeavoured to dissuade Nachiketas from pursuing the question over which people were confounded, as he said. Evidently it was a much discussed problem in those days. Buddha was asked the same question and he evaded it, saying that the pragmatic man should attend to practical and immediate realities and not, waste time and energy in discussing things ultimate and beyond that have hardly any relation to the Present and the actual.
But Yama did answer and unveil the mystery and impart the supreme secret knowledge the knowledge of the Transcendent Brahman: it is out of the transcendent reality that the immanent deity takes his birth. Hence the Divine Fire, the Lord of creation and the Inner Mastersarvabhtntartm, antarymis called brahmajam, born of the Brahman. Yama teaches the process of transcendence. Apart from the knowledge and experience first of the individual and then of the cosmic Brahman, there is a definite line along which the human consciousness (or unconsciousness, as it is at present) is to ascend and evolve. The first step is to learn to distinguish between the Good and the Pleasurable (reya and preya). The line of pleasure leads to the external, the superficial, the false: while the other path leads towards the inner and the higher truth. So the second step is the gradual withdrawal of the consciousness from the physical and the sensual and even the mental preoccupation and focussing it upon what is certain and permanent. In the midst of the death-ridden consciousness in the heart of all that is unstable and fleetingone has to look for Agni, the eternal godhead, the Immortal in mortality, the Timeless in time through whom lies the passage to Immortality beyond Time.
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Even when man descends from this dizzy height, he is devoid of ideas of "I" and "mine"; he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought for the future, and looks with indifference on the Present. He surveys everything in the world with an eye of equality; he is no longer touched by the infinite variety of phenomena; he no longer reacts to pleasure and pain. He remains unmoved whether he — that is to say, his body — is worshipped by the good or tormented by the wicked; for he realizes that it is the one Brahman that manifests Itself through everything. The impact of such an experience devastates the body and mind. Consciousness becomes blasted, as it were, with an excess of Light. In the Vedanta books it is said that after the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi the body drops off like a dry leaf. Only those who are born with a special mission for the world can return
from this height to the valleys of normal life. They live and move in the world for the welfare of mankind. They are invested with a supreme spiritual power. A divine glory shines through them.
--
Mahendranath Gupta, better known as "M.", arrived at Dakshineswar in March 1882. He belonged to the Brahmo Samaj and was headmaster of the Vidyasagar High School at Syambazar, Calcutta. At the very first sight the Master recognized him as one of his "marked" disciples. Mahendra recorded in his diary Sri Ramakrishna's conversations with his devotees. These are the first directly recorded words, in the spiritual history of the world, of a man recognized as belonging in the class of Buddha and Christ. the Present volume is a translation of this diary. Mahendra was instrumental, through his personal contacts, in spreading the Master's message among many young and aspiring souls.
--- NAG MAHASHAY
0.00 - Publishers Note C, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Present volume consists of three books: Light of Lights, Eight Talks and Sweet Mother; there are also translations from Sanskrit, Pali, Bengali and French. These, along with the translations of the Dhammapada and Charyapada, have been mostly serialised in Ashram journals.
His original writings in French have also been included here. We are grateful to the Government of India for a grant towards meeting the cost of publication of this volume.
0.00 - The Book of Lies Text, #The Book of Lies, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
third person plural of the Present tense of Latin words of the Third and
Fourth Conjugations.
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
I have made a literal translation, omitting only a few pages of no particular interest to English-speaking readers. Often literary grace has been sacrificed for the sake of literal translation. No translation can do full justice to the original. This difficulty is all the more felt in the Present work, whose contents are of a deep mystical nature and describe the inner experiences of a great seer. Human language is an altogether inadequate vehicle to express supersensuous perception. Sri Ramakrishna was almost illiterate. He never clothed his thoughts in formal language. His words sought to convey his direct realization of Truth. His conversation was in a village patois. Therein lies its charm. In order to explain to his listeners an abstruse philosophy, he, like Christ before him, used with telling effect homely parables and illustrations, culled from his observation of the daily life around him.
The reader will find mentioned in this work many visions and experiences that fall outside the ken of physical science and even psychology. With the development of modern knowledge the border line between the natural and the supernatural is ever shifting its position. Genuine mystical experiences are not as suspect now as they were half a century ago. The words of Sri Ramakrishna have already exerted a tremendous influence in the land of his birth. Savants of Europe have found in his words the ring of universal truth.
0.01 - I - Sri Aurobindos personality, his outer retirement - outside contacts after 1910 - spiritual personalities- Vibhutis and Avatars - transformtion of human personality, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo has explained the mystery of personality in some of his writings. Ordinarily by personality we mean something which can be described as "a pattern of being marked out by a settled combination of fixed qualities, a determined character.... In one view personality is regarded as a fixed structure of recognisable qualities expressing a power of being"; another idea regards "personality as a flux of self-expressive or sensitive and responsive being.... But flux of nature and fixity of nature" which some call character "are two aspects of being neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality.... But besides this flux and this fixity there is also a third and occult element, the Person behind of whom the personality is a self-expression; the Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the Present act of his long drama of manifested existence. But the Person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by structural limits."[4]
The gospel of the Supermind which Sri Aurobindo brought to man envisages a new level of consciousness beyond Mind. When this level is attained it imposes a complete and radical reintegration of the human personality. Sri Aurobindo was not merely the exponent but the embodiment of the new, dynamic truth of the Supermind. While exploring and sounding the tremendous possibilities of human personality in his intense spiritual Sadhana, he has shown us that practically there are no limits to its expansion and ascent. It can reach in its growth what appears to man at present as a 'divine' status. It goes without saying that this attainment is not an easy task; there are conditions to be fulfilled for the transformation from the human to the divine.
The Gita in its chapters on the Vibhuti and the Avatar takes in general the same position. It shows that the Present formula of our nature, and therefore the mental personality of man, is not final. A Vibhuti embodies in a human manifestation a certain divine quality and thus demonstrates the possibility of overcoming the limits of ordinary human personality. The Vibhuti the embodiment of a divine quality or power, and the Avatar the divine incarnation, are not to be looked upon as supraphysical miracles thrown at humanity without regard to the process of evolution; they are, in fact, indications of human possibility, a sign that points to the goal of evolution.
In his Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo says about the Avatar: "He may, on the other hand, descend as an incarnation of divine life, the divine personality and power in its characteristic action, for a mission ostensibly social, ethical and political, as is represented in the story of Rama or Krishna; but always then this descent becomes in the soul of the race a permanent power for the inner living and the spiritual rebirth."[5]
0.01 - Letters from the Mother to Her Son, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
budget averages one "lakh" of rupees, which at the Present rate
of exchange corresponds approximately to 650,000 francs); and
0.02 - II - The Home of the Guru, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
The Master, the Guru, set at rest the puzzled human mind by his illuminating answers, perhaps even more by his silent consciousness, so that it might be able to pursue unhampered the path of realisation of the Truth. Those ancient discourses answer the mind of man today even across the ages. They have rightly acquired as everything of the past does a certain sanctity. But sometimes that very reverence prevents men from properly evaluating, and living in, the Present. This happens when the mind instead of seeking the Spirit looks at the form. For instance, it is not necessary for such discourses that they take place in forest-groves in order to be highly spiritual. Wherever the Master is, there is Light. And guru-griha the house of the Master can be his private dwelling place. So much was this feeling a part of Sri Aurobindo's nature and so particular was he to maintain the personal character of his work that during the first few years after 1923 he did not like his house to be called an 'Ashram', as the word had acquired the sense of a public institution to the modern mind. But there was no doubt that the flower of Divinity had blossomed in him; and disciples, like bees seeking honey, came to him. It is no exaggeration to say that these Evening Talks were to the small company of disciples what the Aranyakas were to the ancient seekers. Seeking the Light, they came to the dwelling place of their Guru, the greatest seer of the age, and found it their spiritual home the home of their parents, for the Mother, his companion in the great mission, had come. And these spiritual parents bestowed upon the disciples freely of their Light, their Consciousness, their Power and their Grace. The modern reader may find that the form of these discourses differs from those of the past but it was bound to be so for the simple reason that the times have changed and the problems that puzzle the modern mind are so different. Even though the disciples may be very imperfect representations of what he aimed at in them, still they are his creations. It is in order to repay, in however infinitesimal a degree, the debt which we owe to him that the effort is made to partake of the joy of his company the Evening Talks with a larger public.
***
0.02 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the Present conditions I think it would be better not to
persist in your attempt at friendly relations with him, for it only
0.03 - The Threefold Life, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But by that very utility such men and the life they lead are condemned to be limited, irrationally conservative and earthbound. The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought, - these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the Present. For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. In the ancient Indian distinction between the once born and the twice born, it is to this material man that the former description can be applied. He does Nature's inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher activities; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second birth.
Yet he admits so much of spirituality as has been enforced on his customary ideas by the great religious outbursts of the past and he makes in his scheme of society a place, venerable though not often effective, for the priest or the learned theologian who can be trusted to provide him with a safe and ordinary spiritual pabulum. But to the man who would assert for himself the liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life, he assigns, if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dangerous freedom. So he may even serve as a human lightning-rod receiving the electricity of the Spirit and turning it away from the social edifice.
0.04 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
other bullocks so closely). The truth is that they dislike and distrust the Present driver, and not without reason. When they were
working under the previous one they were happy and cheerful
0.05 - Letters to a Child, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
become very restricted in the Present war conditions.
(2) You will live here, as all of us, night and day under the
0.06 - INTRODUCTION, #Dark Night of the Soul, #Saint John of the Cross, #Christianity
treated in the Present stanza, and will be treated in the first part of this book.
And the second is of the spiritual part; of this speaks the second stanza,
--
union. The combined description of the two nights completes the Presentation of
active and passive purgation, to which the Saint limits himself in these treatises,
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
have with me in the Present state of your consciousness? Are
you capable of feeling me, experiencing concretely my presence,
--
Only the resolution to face courageously, in the Present existence, all the difficulties, and to overcome them, is the sure
means of attaining the union you desire.
01.01 - Sri Aurobindo - The Age of Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Well, the view expressed in these words is not a new revelation. It has been the cry of suffering humanity through the ages. Man has borne his cross since the beginning of his creation through want and privation, through disease and bereavement, through all manner of turmoil and tribulation, and yetmirabile dictuat the same time, in the very midst of those conditions, he has been aspiring and yearning for something else, ignoring the Present, looking into the beyond. It is not the prosperous and the more happily placed in life who find it more easy to turn to the higher life, it is not the wealthiest who has the greatest opportunity to pursue a spiritual idea. On the contrary, spiritual leaders have thought and experienced otherwise.
Apart from the well-recognised fact that only in distress does the normal man think of God and non-worldly things, the real matter, however, is that the inner life is a thing apart and follows its own line of movement, does not depend upon, is not subservient to, the kind of outer life that one may happen to live under. The Bible says indeed, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are they that mourn"... But the Upanishad declares, on the other hand, that even as one lies happily on a royal couch, bathes and anoints himself with all the perfumes of the world, has attendants all around and always to serve him, even so, one can be full of the divine consciousness from the crown of the head to the tip of his toe-nail. In fact, a poor or a prosperous life is in no direct or even indirect ratio to a spiritual life. All the miseries and immediate needs of a physical life do not and cannot detain or delay one from following the path of the ideal; nor can all your riches be a burden to your soul and overwhelm it, if it chooses to walk onit can not only walk, but soar and fly with all that knapsack on its back.
If one were to be busy about reforming the world and when that was done then alone to turn to other-worldly things, in that case, one would never take the turn, for the world will never be reformed totally or even considerably in that way. It is not that reformers have for the first time appeared on the earth in the Present age. Men have attempted social, political, economic and moral reforms from times immemorial. But that has not barred the spiritual attempt or minimised its importance. To say that because an ideal is apparently too high or too great for the Present age, it must be kept in cold storage is to set a premium on the Present nature of humanity arid eternise it: that would bind the world to its old moorings and never give it the opportunity to be free and go out into the high seas of larger and greater realisations.
The ideal or perhaps one should say the policy of Real-politick is the thing needed in this world. To achieve something actually in the physical and material field, even a lesser something, is worth much more than speculating on high flaunting chimeras and indulging in day-dreams. Yes, but what is this something that has to be achieved in the material world? It is always an ideal. Even procuring food for each and every person, clothing and housing all is not less an ideal for all its concern about actuality. Only there are ideals and ideals; some are nearer to the earth, some seem to be in the background. But the mystery is that it is not always the ideal nearest to the earth which is the easiest to achieve or the first thing to be done first. Do we not see before our very eye show some very simple innocent social and economic changes are difficult to carry outthey bring in their train quite disproportionately gestures and movements of violence and revolution? That is because we seek to cure the symptoms and not touch the root of the disease. For even the most innocent-looking social, economic or political abuse has at its base far-reaching attitudes and life-urgeseven a spiritual outlook that have to be sought out and tackled first, if the attempt at reform is to be permanently and wholly successful. Even in mundane matters we do not dig deep enough, or rise high enough.
01.01 - The New Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Another humanity is rising out of the Present human species. The beings of the new order are everywhere and it is they who will soon hold sway over earth, be the head and front of the terrestrial evolution in the cycle that is approaching as it was with man in the cycle that is passing away. What will this new order of being be like? It will be what man is not, also what man is. It will not be man, because it will overstep the limitations and incapacities inherent in man; and it will be man by the realisation of those fundamental aspirations and yearnings that have troubled and consoled the deeper strata the soulin him throughout the varied experiences of his terrestrial life.
The New Man will be Master and not slave. He will be master, first, of himself and then of the world. Man as he actually is, is but a slave. He has no personal voice or choice; the determining soul, the Ishwara, in him is sleep-bound and hushed. He is a mere plaything in the hands of nature and circumstances. Therefore it is that Science has become his supreme Dharmashastra; for science seeks to teach us the moods of Nature and the methods of propitiating her. Our actual ideal of man is that of the cleverest slave. But the New Man will have found himself and by and according to his inner will, mould and create his world. He will not be in awe of Nature and in an attitude of perpetual apprehension and hesitation, but will ground himself on a secret harmony and union that will declare him as the lord. We will recognise the New Man by his very gait and manner, by a certain kingly ease and dominion in every shade of his expression.
01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, with regard to the time that the Present stage of evolution is likely to take for its fulfilment, one can presume that since or if the specific urge and stress has manifested and come up to the front, this very fact would show that the problem has become a problem of actuality, and even that it can be dealt with as if it had to be solved now or never. We have said that in man, with man's self-consciousness or the consciousness of the psychic being as the instrument, evolution has attained the capacity of a swift and concentrated process, which is the process of Yoga; the process will become swifter and more concentrated, the more that instrument grows and gathers power and is infused with the divine afflatus. In fact, evolution has been such a process of gradual acceleration in tempo from the very beginning. The earliest stage, for example, the stage of dead Matter, of the play of the mere chemical forces was a very, very long one; it took millions and millions of years to come to the point when the manifestation of life became possible. But the period of elementary life, as manifested in the plant world that followed, although it too lasted a good many millions of years, was much briefer than the preceding periodit ended with the advent of the first animal form. The age of animal life, again, has been very much shorter than that of the plant life before man came upon earth. And man is already more than a million or two years oldit is fully time that a higher order of being should be created out of him.
The Dhammapada, I. 1
01.02 - Sri Aurobindo - Ahana and Other Poems, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have been speaking of philosophy and the philosophic manner. But what are the exact implications of the words, let us ask again. They mean nothing more and nothing lessthan the force of thought and the mass of thought content. After all, that seems to be almost the whole difference between the past and the Present human consciousness in so far at least as it has found expression in poetry. That element, we wish to point out, is precisely what the old-world poets lacked or did not care to possess or express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all, emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet
Of imagination all compact.. . .
01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mentalwhich is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activitiesserves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contri buting factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the Present-day demand.
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and other where. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
--
This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the Presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attri buteless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunarMoon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed devious waysstrongly negative at timeseven like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power,kavi kavitv divi rpam sajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
01.03 - Sri Aurobindo and his School, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the Present nature of man, with its threefold nexus of mind and life and body, that stands there to be fought and conquered. This is the inferior nature, of which the ancients spoke, that holds man down inexorably to a lower dharma, imperfect mode of life the life that is and has been the human order till today. No amount of ceaseless action, however selflessly done, can move this wheel of Nature even by a hair's breadth away from the path that it has carved out from of old. Human nature and human society have been built up and are run by the forces of this inferior nature, and whatever shuffling and reshuffling we may make in its apparent factors and elements, the general scheme and fundamental form of life will never change. To displace earth (and to conquer nature means nothing less than that) and give it another orbit, one must find a fulcrum outside earth.
Sri Aurobindo does not preach flight from life and a retreat into the silent and passive Infinite; the goal of life is not, in his view, the extinction of life. Neither is he satisfied on that account to hold that life is best lived in the ordinary round of its unregenerate dharma. If the first is a blind alley, the second is a vicious circle,both lead nowhere.
01.04 - The Intuition of the Age, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, in order to understand the new orientation of the spirit of the Present age, we may profitably ask what was the inspiration of the past age, the characteristic note which has failed to satisfy us and which we are endeavouring to transform. We know that that age was the Scientific age or the age of Reason. Its great prophets were Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists or if you mount further up in time, we may begin from Bacon and the humanists. Its motto was first, "The proper study of mankind is man" and secondly, Reason is the supreme organon of knowledge, the highest deity in manla Desse Raison. And it is precisely against these two basic principles that the new age has entered its protest. In face of Humanism, Nietzsche has posited the Superman and in face of Reason Bergson has posited Intuition.
The worship of man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary, the other doctrine, viz the deification of Reason; and vice versa. Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says, "All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far, wrong to say that it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least, it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element; there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia always reflected that which transcends the mind the spirit, the Gods and the Beyonds.
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Whether the original and true source of the poet's inspiration lies deep within or high above, all depends upon the mediating instrument the mind (in its most general sense) and speech for a successful transcription. Man's ever-growing consciousness demanded also a conscious development and remoulding of these two factors. A growth, a heightening and deepening of the consciousness meant inevitably a movement towards the spiritual element in things. And that means, we have said, a twofold change in the future poet's make-up. First as regards the substance. The revolutionary shift that we notice in modern poets towards a completely new domain of subject-matter is a signpost that more is meant than what is expressed. The superficialities and futilities that are dealt with do not in their outward form give the real trend of things. In and through all these major and constant preoccupation of our poets is "the pain of the Present and the passion for the future": they are, as already stated, more prophets than poets, but prophets for the moment crying in the wildernessalthough some have chosen the path of denial and revolt. They are all looking ahead or beyond or deep down, always yearning for another truth and reality which will explain, justify and transmute the Present calvary of human living. Such an acute tension of consciousness has necessitated an overhauling of the vehicle of expression too, the creation of a mode of expressing the inexpressible. For that is indeed what human consciousness and craft are aiming at in the Present stage of man's evolution. For everything, almost everything that can be normally expressed has been expressed and in a variety of ways as much as is possible: that is the history of man's aesthetic creativity. Now the eye probes into the unexpressed world; for the artist too the Upanishadic problem has cropped up:
By whom impelled does the mind fall to its target, what is the agent that is behind the eye and sees through the eyes, what is the hearing and what the speech that their respective sense organs do not and cannot convey and record adequately or at all?
01.04 - The Secret Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But few can look beyond the Present state
Or overleap this matted hedge of sense.
01.08 - Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the Present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it."
If you are told you are still full of sins and you are not worthy to follow the path, that you must go and work out your sins first, here is your answer: "Go shrive thee better: trow not this saying, for it is false, for thou art shriven. Trust securely that thou art on the way, and thee needeth no ransacking of shrift for that that is passed, hold forth thy way and think on Jerusalem." That is to say, do not be too busy with the difficulties of the moment, but look ahead, as far as possible, fix your attention upon the goal, the intermediate steps will become easy. Jerusalem is another name of the Love of Jesus or the Bliss in Heaven. Grow in this love, your sins will fade away of themselves. "Though thou be thrust in an house with thy body, nevertheless in thine heart, where the stead of love is, thou shouldst be able to have part of that love... " What exquisite utterance, what a deep truth!
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
change take place in the Present body or does one have
Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 11.
--
Mother, is the Present situation in India25 like the
debt that must be paid to Rudra?
--
those who want to know the reason for the Present situation. I
am sending it to you so that your question becomes unnecessary.
01.11 - The Basis of Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Unlike the previous irruptions that merged and were lost in the general life and consciousness, Islam entered as a leaven that maintained its integrity and revolutionized Indian life and culture by infusing into its tone a Semitic accent. After the Islamic impact India could not be what she was beforea change became inevitable even in the major note. It was a psychological cataclysm almost on a par with the geological one that formed her body; but the spirit behind which created the body was working automatically, inexorably towards the greater and more difficult synthesis demanded by the situation. Only the thing is to be done now consciously, not through an unconscious process of laissez-faire as on the inferior stages of evolution in the past. And that is the true genesis of the Present conflict.
History abounds in instances of racial and cultural immixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some primitiveaboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent. The Briton, the Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman have combined to form the British; a Frenchman has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him; and a Spaniard's blood would show an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish element in it. And much more than a people, a culture in modern times has been a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion could not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected or crushed out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and Mayas in South America, the decadence of the Red Indians in North America, of the Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce clash with European peoples and European culture illustrate the point.
01.13 - T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Our poet is too self-conscious, he himself feels that he has not the perfect voice. A Homer, even a Milton possesses a unity of tone and a wholeness of perception which are denied to the modern. To the modern, however, the old masters are not subtle enough, broad enough, psychological enough, let us say the word, spiritual enough. And yet the poetic inspiration, more than the religious urge, needs the injunction not to be busy with too many things, but to be centred upon the one thing needful, viz., to create poetically and not to discourse philosophically or preach prophetically. Not that it is impossible for the poet to swallow the philosopher and the prophet, metabolising them into the substance of his bone and marrow, of "the trilling wire in his blood", as Eliot graphically expresses. That perhaps is the consummation towards which poetry is tending. But at present, in Eliot, at least, the strands remain distinct, each with its own temper and rhythm, not fused and moulded into a single streamlined form of beauty. Our poet flies high, very high indeed at times, often or often he flies low, not disdaining the perilous limit of bathos. Perhaps it is all wilful, it is a mannerism which he cherishes. The mannerism may explain his psychology and enshrine his philosophy. But the poet, the magician is to be looked for elsewhere. In the Present collection of poems it is the philosophical, exegetical, discursive Eliot who dominates: although the high lights of the subject-matter may be its justification. Still even if we have here doldrums like
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence
0.11 - Letters to a Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Looking at the Present state of the world, we can say
that the worst has already happened. We await the day
--
In the Present state of human consciousness, it is good for it
to think that aspiration and human effort can hasten the advent
0.13 - Letters to a Student, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I must say that at the Present moment conditions are
particularly favourable.
0 1954-08-25 - what is this personality? and when will she come?, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
But as I said, bit by bit things changed. However, this had one advantage: we were too much outside of life. So there were a number of problems which had never arisen but which would have suddenly surged up the moment we wanted a complete manifestation. We took on all these problems a little prematurely, but it gave us the opportunity to solve them. In this way we learned many things and surmounted many difficulties, only it complicated things considerably. And in the Present situation, given such a large number of elements who havent even the slightest idea why theyre here (!) well, it demands a far greater effort on the disciples part than before.
Before, when there were we started with 35 or 36 people but even when it got up to 150, even with 150it was as if they were all nestled in a cocoon in my consciousness: they were so near to me that I could constantly guide ALL their inner or outer movements. Day and night, at each moment, everything was totally under my control. And naturally, I think they made a great deal of progress at that time: it is a fact that I was CONSTANTLY doing the sadhana2 for them. But then, with this baby boom The sadhana cant be done for little sprouts who are 3 or 4 or 5 years old! Its out of the question. The only thing I can do is wrap them in the Consciousness and try to see that they grow up in the best of all possible conditions. However, the one advantage to all this is that instead of there being such a COMPLETE and PASSIVE dependence on the disciples part, each one has to make his own little effort. Truly, thats excellent.
0 1957-07-03, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
So to help you understand this enigma, let me tell you that the mother is physical Nature as she is, and the daughter is the new creation. The manageress is the worlds organizing mental consciousness as Nature has developed it thus far, that is, the most advanced organizing sense to have manifested in the Present state of material Nature. This is the key to the vision.
Naturally, when I awoke, I immediately knew what could resolve this problem which appeared so absolutely insoluble. The vanishing of the manageress and her key was an obvious sign that she was altogether incapable of leading what could be called the creative consciousness of the new world to its true place.
0 1958-06-06 - Supramental Ship, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
This morning while I was on the balcony, I had an interesting experience: the experience of mans effort, in all its forms and through all the ages, to approach the Divine. And I seemed to be growing wider and wider so that all the forms and all the ways of approaching the Divine attempted by man would be contained in the Present Work.
It was represented by a kind of image in which I was as vast as the Universe, and each way of approaching the Divine was like a tiny image containing the characteristic form of this approach. And my impression was this: Why do people always limit, limit themselves? Narrow, narrow, narrow! They understand only when it is narrow.
0 1958-07-05, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
I have just explained to Z my program for getting out of the Present difficulties,1 and I think if he has not concluded that I am totally mad, it is because he has an immense respect for me! But as always in these cases, there is such a joy in me, such an exultation: all the cells are dancing. I understand why people begin singing, dancing, etc. It takes a formidable power to remain like that (gesture of solidity): there is such a desire in the throat to sing!
***
0 1960-07-18 - triple time vision, Questions and Answers is like circling around the Garden, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
Of course, were dating all these old Questions and Answers, but not everyone pays attention to dates. How can those old ones be mixed with the Present things which are on an altogether different plane?
There is an experience in which one is entirely outside of time that is, ahead, behind, above, below, all these things are one and the same. And at the very moment the identification takes place, there is no longer any past, present or future. And really, its the only way to know.
0 1960-10-30, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
And the experience just now (during meditation) was somehow mixed with what I usually see at night (it was not a combinationor maybe it was a combination ), for it had that same light It was a kind of powdering, even finer than tiny dotsa powdering like an atomic dust, but with an EXTREMELY intense vibration but without any shifting of place. And yet its in constant motion Something shifting about within something that vibrates on the same spot without moving (something does move, but its subtler, like a current of tremendous power which passes through a milieu that doesnt move at all: rather, it vibrates on the same spot with an extreme intensity). But I dont exactly know how it is different from the Present experience It becomes less golden at night, the gold is less visible, whereas the other colorswhite, blue and a sort of pinkare much more visible.
Oh, now I remember! It was PINK during the second phase, just afterwards, after Egypt! Oh, it was like like at the end of a sunrise when it gets very clear and luminous. A magnificent color. And it kept coming down and down, in a flood that part was new. Its something I see very rarely. It was not there at all the last time we meditated together. And it came filled with such a joy! Oh! It was absolutely ecstatic. It lasted quite a long time. And from there I went into this trance where I saw (laughing) that man congratulating you! I heard him say (his voice is what roused me from my trance, and then I saw him), Congratulations, its a great success! (Mother laughs)
0 1960-11-08, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
How strange it is! You have the feeling of ascending, of a progress in consciousness, and everything, all the events and circumstances of life follow one another with an unquestioning logic. You see the Divine Will unfolding with a wonderful logic. Then, from time to time, there appears a little set of circumstances (either isolated or repeated), which are like snags on the way; you cant explain them, so you put them aside for later on. Some such accidents have been quite significant, but they dont seem to follow this ascending line of the Present individuality. Theyre scattered along the way, sometimes repeated, sometimes only once, and then they vanish. And when you go through such an experience, you sense that they are things put aside for later on. And then, all of a sudden (especially during these last two years when I have again descended to take all that up), all of a sudden, one after another, all these snags return. And they dont follow the same curve; rather, its as if suddenly you reach a certain state and a certain impersonal breadth that far surpasses the individual, and this new state enters into contact with one of those old accidents that had remained in the deepest part of the subconscientand that makes it rise up again, the two meet in an explosion of light. Everything is explained, everything is understood, everything is clear! No explanation is needed: it has become OBVIOUS.
This is entirely another way of understandingits not an ascent, not even a descent nor an inspiration it must be what Sri Aurobindo calls a revelation. Its the meeting of this subconscious notationthis something which has remained buried within, held down so as not to manifest, but which suddenly surges forth to meet the light streaming down from above, this very vast state of consciousness that excludes nothing and from it springs forth a lightoh, a resplendence of light!like a new explanation of the world, or of that part of the world not yet explained.
0 1960-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
So I understood that this must correspond to a certain realm of experience; I understood all those who say, If it has to be like this, if it can never be otherwise, then (this opposition, this abyss between a TRUE life, a TRUE consciousness, a TRUE activity, something living, powerful, fulfilling and life as it now is), if there must always be this difference between the physical expression as it is or as it can be in the Present circumstances, and the true life, then For if despite everythingdespite this tremendous distance Ive covered in my life (these memories go back more than sixty years) and all the evolutionary effort upwards I have made since that time IN MATTER (Im not speaking of leaving Matter behind, but IN MATTER, IN action)if that doesnt further reduce this gap between the true consciousness and the possible material realization, then I understand I understand why people say, Its hopeless. (Of course, this hopeless is meaningless to me.)
But I (how can I put this?) I lived their experience, I lived it; and even events which seem quite extraordinary when seen from afar, which is the way they appear to most people, even historical things which have furthered the earths transformation and its upheavals the crucial events, the great works, you might sayare woven from the SAME fabric, they are the SAME thing! When you look at all this from afar, on the whole it can make an impression, but the life of each minute, of each hour, of each second is woven from this SAME fabric, drab, dull, insipid, WITHOUT ANY TRUE LIFEa mere reflection of life, an illusion of lifepowerless, void of any light or anything that resembles joy in the least. Oh! if it has always to remain like that, then we dont want any of it.
0 1961-01-12, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You have this experience when for some reason or other, depending on the case, you come into contact with the universal consciousness not in its limitless essence but on any level of Matter. There is an atomic consciousness, a purely material consciousness and an even more generally prevailing psychological consciousness. When, through interiorization or a sort of withdrawal from the ego you enter into contact with that zone of consciousness we can call psychological terrestrial or human collective (there is a difference: human collective is restricted, while terrestrial includes many animal and even plant vibrations; but in the Present case, since the moral notion of guilt, sin and evil belongs exclusively to human consciousness, let us simply say human collective psychological consciousness); when you contact that through identification, you naturally feel or see or know yourself capable of any human movement whatsoever. To some extent, this constitutes a Truth-Consciousness, or at such times the egoistical sense of what does or doesnt belong to you, of what you can or cannot do, disappears; you realize that the fundamental construction of human consciousness makes any human being capable of doing anything. And since you are in a truth-consciousness, you are aware at the same time that to feel judgmental or disgusted or revolted would be an absurdity, for EVERYTHING is potentially there inside you. And should you happen to be penetrated by certain currents of force (which we usually cant follow: we see them come and go but we are generally unaware of their origin and direction), if any one of these currents penetrates you, it can make you do anything.
If one always remained in this state of consciousness, keeping alive the flame of Agni, the flame of purification and progress, then after some time, not only could one prevent these movements from taking an active form in oneself and becoming expressed physically, but one could act upon the very nature of the movement and transform it. Needless to say, however, that unless one has attained a very high degree of realization it is virtually impossible to keep this state of consciousness for long. Almost immediately one falls back into the egoistic consciousness of the separate self, and all the difficulties return: disgust, the revolt against certain things and the horror they create in us, and so on.
0 1961-02-11, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You see, theres a curious fluctuation possibly indicating that your dream is part of the Present attack which continues with such violence. The night before last, between midnight and half-past, there was a formidable attack. When I emerged from it, I felt that something had lifted, a victory had been won and that the bodys condition had improved. It happens like that, the horizon clears and this Certainty comes with. (The presence is always hereSri Aurobindo and I are together almost every night but the night when I saw that formation, the illness spell over the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo was quite sick in his bed, just as I saw him in 1950.) So when it lifts, all is well: once again there is harmony, there is joy, there is force and again the whole thing continues, the effort continues, consciously. Yet there is a kind of fluctuation: it will go on like that for a few moments or a few hours and then suddenly everything becomes muddled again and I am beset by a fatigue. A fatigue which is I cant say almost unbearable, because nothing in the consciousness feels it to be unbearable but it makes me like this (Mother clenches her fist tightly in a tension to hold on).
For example, at five-thirty in the evening, after Ive spent an hour and a half here with people, its a labor to climb the stairs; and by the time I get upstairs, I feel strained to the breaking point. Then I begin to walk (I dont stop, I dont rest), I immediately begin to walk with my japa, and within half an hour, pfft! it has lifted.
--
In the Present case, of course, the body is always saying, I am ready for everything I will do anything at all; yet I still cant say that it has this. Its trying to be completely pure according to the spiritual conceptit doesnt sense its separate personality. More and more, year after year, it has been striving to feel only the divine Presence, the divine Life, the divine Force and the divine Will, all within itself; and to feel that without them it is nothing, it doesnt exist. This is fully realized in its consciousness (the conscious part). In the subconscient and inconscient,5 obviously it is not realized otherwise, logically, it shouldnt be ill.
The whole disorder evidently originates from the subconscient and inconscient; all the more so as it came with various indications (sent by the hostile forces but this can always be useful, provided you are careful) saying, Yes, everything is going well in your higher centers, but(because the different points of attack have clearly followed the order of the centers). Four or five days ago, or maybe a week, before this latest difficulty occurred, I saw little beings coming out of the subconscient and saying, Ah! Your legs havent had any trouble for a long time! Its the turn of the lower centers! I swept it all away, of course, but.
0 1961-03-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its not that I was disappointed by his way of being, certainly not; but it has suddenly confronted me with a terrible problem: Is it impossible to live a truth in material consciousness? Is it really impossible? An absolute, I mean an absolute truthnot something entirely subjective and relative, each one living his own truth in his own manner. Will one person always be like this and the other like that and the third like something else? So that only by putting all the pieces together do we actually amount to anything and yet to what?! Is it completely impossible for absolute truth to manifest in the Present state of Matter? This is the problem that has seized me.
Why? Probably because I was ready to face it. But it has been posed so intensely. It was so intense that it was painful.
0 1961-04-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What we really have to do is come alive from minute to minute, living always in the Present moment, stubbornly, like this (Mother puts a fist on the arm of her chair, then another, and so on, in a slow, dogged, unrelenting march).,
Yet Sri Aurobindo seemed to say that things would be easier once the Supermind came down.
0 1961-04-29, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have seen other things but I have rarely seen anything favorable in churches. Here, I remember going to M I was taken inside and received there in quite an unusual waya highly respected person introduced me as a great saint! They led me up to the main altar where people are not usually allowed to go, and what did I see there! An asura (oh, not a very high-ranking one, more like a rakshasa4), but such a monster! Hideous. So I went wham! (gesture of giving a blow) I thought something was going to happen. But this being left the altar and came over to try to intimidate me; of course, he saw it was useless, so he offered to make an alliance: If you just keep quiet and dont do anything, I will share all I get with you. Well, I sent him packing! The head of this Math5. It was a Math with a monastery and temple, which means a substantial fortune; the head of the Math has it all at his disposal for as long as he holds the position and he is appointed for life. But he has to name his successor and as a rule, his own life is considerably shortened by the successorthis is how it works. Everyone knew that the Present head had considerably shortened the life of his predecessor. And what a creature! As asuric as the god he worshipped! I saw some poor fellows throw themselves at his feet (he must have been squeezing them pitilessly), to beg forgiveness and mercyan absolutely ruthless man. But he received meyou should have seen it! I said nothing, not a word about their god; I gave no sign that I knew anything. But I thought to myself, So thats how it is!
Another thing happened to me in a fishing village near A., on the seashore, where there is a temple dedicated to Kalia terrible Kali. I dont know what happened to her, but she had been buried with only her head sticking out! A fantastic story I knew nothing about it at all. I was going by car from A. to this temple and halfway there a black form, in great agitation, came rushing towards me, asking for my help: Ill give you everything I haveall my power, all the peoples worshipif you help me to become omnipotent! Of course, I answered her as she deserved! I later asked who this was, and they told me that some sort of misfortune had befallen her and she had been buried with only her head above ground. And every year this fishing village has a festival and slaughters thousands of chickensshe likes chicken! Thousands of chickens. They pluck them on the spot (the whole place gets covered with feathers), and then, after offering the blood and making the sacrifice, the people, naturally, eat them all up. The day I came this had taken place that very morningfea thers littered everywhere! It was disgusting. And she was asking for my help!
0 1961-06-27, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Of course, one can conceive of a universe being thrown out of the Present manifestation that, yes; one can conceive of successive universes, with what was in the first universes no longer being in the othersits even obvious. One can imagine how a whole sum of falsity and untruth (what for us, NOW, is falsity and untruth) may come to no longer belong to the world in its future unfolding; one can comprehend all that. But destroy? Where can it go to be destroyed? When we say something is destroyed, its only a form which is destroyed (it may be a form of consciousness, it may not be a material form, but its always a form). But how can the formless be destroyed?
Therefore, to speak of an absolute falsehood disappearing would simply mean that a whole set of things will live eternally in the past but not belong to the coming manifestations, thats all.
--
I have had an oft repeated experience of reliving the past1 (its a phenomenon of consciousness, possible because everything is preserved and continues to exist somewhere), with a kind of willwhich would be the sign of a powerto change it. I dont know, but at the moment of reliving it, instead of reliving the past just as it had been preserved, a power to make it different was introduced. I am not speaking of the power to change the consequences of the past (that is obvious and functions all the time)it wasnt that; it was the power to change the circumstances themselves (circumstances not quite material but of the subtle physical, with a predominantly psychological content). And since the will was there, from the standpoint of consciousness it actually happened that is, instead of circumstances developing in one direction, they developed in another. So it must correspond to something real, otherwise I would not have had the experience. It wasnt a product of the imagination; it wasnt something one thinks of and would really like to be differentit wasnt that; it was a phenomenon of consciousness: my consciousness was reliving certain circumstances (which are still quite living and obviously continue to exist within their own domain), but reliving them with the power and the knowledge acquired between that past moment and the Present, and with a power to change the past moment. A new power entered the scene and turned the circumstance being relived in a new direction. I have had this experience many times and it has always surprised meits not a phenomenon of mental imagination, which is something else entirely.
It opens the door to everything.
0 1961-07-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Note that modern astronomy is divided between the theory of endless phases of contraction-explosion-expansion, and the theory of a universe in infinite expansion starting with a 'Big Bang,' which seems quite as catastrophic, since the universe is then plunging at vertiginous speed into an increasingly cold, empty, and fatal infinity, like a bullet released from all restraints of gravity, until... until what? According to astronomers, an exact measurement of the quantity of matter in a cubic meter of the Present universe (one atom for every 400 liters of space) should enable us to decide between these two theories and learn which way it will be best for us to die. If there is more than one atom per 400 liters of space, this quantity of matter will create sufficient gravitation to halt the Present expansion of galaxies and induce a contraction, ending with an explosion within an infinitesimal space. If there is less than one atom per 400 liters of space, the quantity of matter and thus the gravitational effect will be insufficient to retain the galaxies within their invisible net, and everything will spin off endlesslyunless we discover, with Mother, a third position, that of a 'progressive equilibrium,' in which the quantity of matter in the universe proves in fact to be a quantity of consciousness, whose contraction or expansion will be regulated by the laws of consciousness.
When the veil of falsehood has gone: the supramental consciousness.
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So it all keeps circling round and round in the earths atmosphere. But compared to the universe, the earths atmosphere is a very tiny thing. Well, all this keeps circling around within it. And in fact, because of the movement of evolution, there is a progress. the Present Inconscient is not as unconscious as the initial Inconscient, and the Present Subconscient is not as subconscious nor as generalized as it was at the beginning. This is the meaning of terrestrial evolution.
But if, as you say, it keeps circling around in the earths atmosphere, doesnt this mean that vibrations are ceaselessly re-created?
--
Yes perhaps not in the Present state of disorder! But in principle.
Every conscious being?
--
It was only (how can I put it?) a participation from Krishna. It made no difference for Sri Aurobindo personally: it was a formation from the past that accepted to participate in the Present creation, nothing more. It was a descent of the Supreme, from some time back, now consenting to participate in the new manifestation.
Shiva, on the other hand, refused. No, he said, I will come only when you have finished your work. I will not come into the world as it is now, but I am ready to help. He was standing in my room that day, so tall (laughing) that his head touched the ceiling! He was bathed in his own special light, a play of red and gold magnificent! Just as he is when he manifests his supreme consciousnessa formidable being! So I stood up and (I too must have become quite tall, because my head was resting on his shoulder, just slightly below his head) then he told me, No, Im not tying myself to a body, but I will give you ANYTHING you want. The only thing I said (it was all done wordlessly, of course) was: I want to be rid of the physical ego.
0 1961-10-30, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I seemed to be looking back into the Present from some thousands of years ahead (its no longer now, but as if I were propelled somewhere several thousand years ahead, looking backwards) and its the beginning of the legend.
And the photo adopted by the legend is this full-face one of him as a young man. It was made in France from an old snapshot (a poor one, and only the bust was kept); that photo of me wearing a veil was done at the same time.
--
But he was there the whole time you were reading (and now again its the same thing, he is there). In his consciousness, all this was already past I was transported forward, the Present moment was behind meand then, Ah, here is the beginning of the legend.
So there will be a legend.
0 1961-11-07, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am telling you this because, as soon as I got your letter, I replied with what Ill read to you now; then I was immediately faced with something I couldnt formulate, the kind of thing that gives you the feeling of the unknown (all I knew was my own experience). So I did the usual thingbecame blank, turned towards the Truth; and I questioned Sri Aurobindo and beyondasking, if there were something to be known, that it be told to me. Then I dropped it, I paid no more attention. And only as I was coming here today was I told I cant really use the word told, but anyway, what was communicated to me concerning your question was that the difference between the two processes [the Rishis and the Present one] is purely subjective, depending upon the way the experience is registered. I dont know if I can make myself clear. There is something which is the experience and which will be the Realization; and what appears to be a different, if not opposite, process is simply a subjective mental notation of one SINGLE experience. Do you follow?
Thats what I was told.
--
It is by rising to the summit of consciousness through a progressive ascent (thats what I meant just now by leaving the body, but without going into details), that one unites with the Supermind. But as soon as the union is achieved, one knows and one sees that the Supermind exists in the heart of the Inconscient as well. When one is in that state, there is neither high nor low. But GENERALLY, (I emphasized this to make it clear that I am not making an absolute assertion) it is by REDESCENDING through the levels of the being with a supramentalized consciousness that one can accomplish the permanent transformation of physical nature. (This can be experienced in all sorts of ways, but what WE want and what Sri Aurobindo spoke of is a change that will never be revoked, that will persist, that will be as durable as the Present terrestrial conditions. That is why I put permanent.) There is no proof that the Rishis used another method, although, to effect this transformation (if they ever did) they must necessarily have fought their way through the powers of inconscience and obscurity.
Yes, the Rishis give an absolutely living description of what you experience and experience continuallyas soon as you descend into the Subconscient: all these battles with the beings who conceal the Light and so on. I experienced these things continually at Tlemcen and again with Sri Aurobindo when we were doing the Workits raging quite merrily even now!
0 1961-12-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I suppose you can return their money and cancel the contract but reserve the right to print the book yourself, changing the Presentation to avoid any confusion with their collection.
***
0 1962-02-03, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There has been a kind of perception of a variety of bodily activities, a whole series of them, having to do exclusively (or so it seems) with the maintenance of the body. Some are on the borderlinesleep, for instance: one portion of it is necessary for good maintenance of the body, and another portion puts it in contact with other parts and activities of the being; but one portion of sleep is exclusively for maintaining the bodys balance. Then there is food, keeping clean, a whole range of things. And according to Sri Aurobindo, spiritual life shouldnt suppress those things; whatever is indispensable for the bodys well-being must be kept up. For ordinary people, all other bodily activities are used for personal pleasure and benefit. The spiritual man, on the other hand, has given his body to serve the Divine, so that the Divine may use it for His work and perhaps, as Sri Aurobindo said, for His joyalthough given the Present state of Matter and the body, that seems to me unlikely or at best very intermittent and partial, because this body is much more a field of misery than a field of joy. (None of this is based on speculation, but on personal experience I am relating my personal experience.) But with work, its different: when the body is at work, its in full swing. Thats its joy, its needto exist only to serve Him. To exist only to serve. And of course, to reduce maintenance to a bare minimum while trying to find a way for the Divine to participate in the very restricted, limited and meager possibilities of joy this maintenance may give. To associate the Divine with all those movements and things, like keeping clean, sleeping (although sleep is different, its already a lot more interesting); but especially with personal hygiene, eating and other absolutely indispensable things, the attempt is to associate them with the Divine Presence so that they may be as much an expression of divine joy as possible. (This is realized to a certain extent.)
Now where does japa fit into all this?
0 1962-02-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When one is identified with the Supreme, there is a place where all is unequivocally known: in the past, in the Present, in the future and everywhere. But when they return, those who go there usually forget what they have seen. A particularly strict discipline is needed to remember. Thats the only realm where you cant be mistaken.
But the links of communication are seldom all there, so one rarely remembers.
0 1962-05-08, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
2) That he has understood: it has come to his [inner] knowledge that the Present period is terrible.
What am I to tell him or give him to understand when I meet him at the station?
0 1962-05-13, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then a Voice was explaining everything to me (not exactly a Voice, but something that was Sri Aurobindos origin, like the most recent gust from the Origin). As the experience unfolded, this Voice explained each gust to me, each span of the universe; and then it explained how it all became like this (Mother makes a gesture of reversal): the distortion of the universe. And I was wondering how it was possible, with that Consciousness, that supreme Consciousness, to relate to the Present, distorted universe. How to make the connection without losing that Consciousness? A relationship between the two seemed impossible. And thats when that sort of Voice reminded me of my promise, that I had promised to do the Work on earth and it would be done. I promised to do the Work and it will be done.
Then began the process of descent,1 and the Voice was explaining it to me I lived through it all in detail, and it wasnt pleasant. It took an hour and a half to change from that true Consciousness to the individual consciousness. Because throughout the experience this present individuality no longer existed, this body no longer existed, there were no more limits, I was no longer herewhat was here was THE PERSON. An hour and a half was needed to return to the body-consciousness (not the physical consciousness but the body-consciousness), to the individual body-consciousness.
0 1962-06-02, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, it has effectsfar and near. The people nearest to me dont seem to be the most receptive; but with them the action is much more complex and SOLIDI mean instead of a sudden experience thats almost, as I said, out of proportion to their normal condition, something is being progressively BUILT. I constantly find myself in the midst of constructions, immense constructions in the making. It was like that last night; I had to flounder about in something like cement, a kind of batter. And then I meet all sorts of people who are also more or less symbolic, but who sometimes have the features of a specific person. Its a whole WORLD of circumstances, symbolic down to the most minute details. I remember everything, but I would have to describe a whole world and an apparently uninteresting world, at that (outwardly uninteresting, I mean); but it gives me the key, from every point of view, to the Present state of things, to the world now in the making.
Last night I spent almost all my time in such a building. And all the people who help the work were symbolized there but its always a material help, either work or money or. I remember being particularly struck by one character last night. (Again, there were a lot of aggravations, but someone or something was always on the scene when I arrived and it all sorted itself outit was the exact opposite of the dreams I was talking about the other day: all the difficulties sorted themselves out when I arrived.) Then I came to a rather difficult place to cross (you had to flounder about on slippery scaffoldings) and suddenly, facing me, there was a man (of course, it was probably a symbol rather than a man, but it might really be someone physical). He was one of the workers, a master mason (when I woke up this morning, I thought of the symbolism of Freemasonry and wondered if it might give a clue to the experience). Nearby, people were coming to supervise, observe, direct, people who thought themselves highly superior but they were never any help in solving practical problems! They were creating more problems than they were helping to solve. Anyway, this master mason appeared to be around fifty, with a beautiful facea workers face, beautiful and concentrated. There was a difficult place to cross, and he had worked the thing out very efficiently, with a lot of care. Then, when it was all done and I was able to go on my way, I felt a great surge of love go out to him, with neither gesture nor word and he received it, he felt and received it. His face lit up and he implored me, with wonderful humility, Never let me forget this moment, the most beautiful moment of my life. (I dont know what language he used because it didnt come to me in words.) It was such an intense experience. His humility, his receptivity, his response were all so beautiful and pure that when I woke upwhen I came out of the experience, at any rate I was left with a most delightful impression.
0 1962-06-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because everything changes, but nothing disappears. You know, thinking the way we commonly do, it seems to us that the Present state of the world will change and be replaced by something else. And on the other hand, we know from experience that whatever exists, exists eternally. So then what?
(long silence)
0 1962-06-20, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Pavitra was telling me the other day that, according to the latest scientific discoveries, matter in its present state can be immortal. Theres no reason that it couldnt change (for it changes all the time) enough to avoid decay. Nothing in matters composition stands in the way of its immortalityimmortality of form, I mean. If science simply follows its own course (and does not suddenly find itself confronted with something beyond its grasp), theres no reason it should not provide people who dont have a mystical or occult turn of mind with a way to use the Present substance in imperishable forms, without recourse to anything from other realms.
This is a great support for practical-minded people.
0 1962-06-27, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Before I met Sri Aurobindo they would come and come and come to me, night after night and sometimes during the daya mass of things! Afterwards I told Sri Aurobindo about it, and he explained to me that it was quite natural. And indeed, it is quite natural: with the Present incarnation of the Mahashakti (as he described it in Savitri), whatever is more or less bound up with Her wants to take part, thats quite natural. And its particularly true for the vital: there has always been a preoccupation with organizing, centralizing, developing and unifying the vital forces, and controlling them. So theres a considerable number of vital beings, each with its own particular ability, who have played their role in history and now return.
But this one [the tall white Being] is not of human origin; it was not formed in a human life: it is a being that had already incarnated, and is one of those who presided over the formation of this present being [Mother]. But, as I said, I saw it: it was sexless, neither male nor female, and as intrepid as the vital can be, with a calm but absolute power. Ah, I found a very good description of it in one of Sri Aurobindos plays, when he speaks of the goddess Athena (I think its in Perseus, but I am not sure); she has that kind of its an almighty calm, and with such authority! Yes, its in Perseuswhen she appears to the Sea-God and forces him to retreat to his own domain. Theres a description there that fits this Being quite well.3
--
If I didnt tell these things to you, they would all vanish, and thats a fact. Because I have no opportunity to tell them to anyone elseas you can well imagine! Tomorrow there will be something else and something else again the day after, and it all recedes into the past and has none of the relevance the Present has for me.
Yes, for YOU it has no relevance but what about the rest of us!
0 1962-06-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"They were all emanations, right from the beginning. So we have to say: 'With the Present incarnation.'"
I.e., with the psychic being or soul IN MAN, the direct incarnation of the Supreme in man: "This has come with humankind."
--
But supposing one of those gods were to incarnate in the Present world ... well, it wouldn't be much funhe would suffocate.
Fun?... No, you see, they extend sufficiently beyond the limits of their bodies so as not to be suffocated.
0 1962-07-18, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its like an image. You see, the body is stretched out here on the chaise longue. You know how it is when experiments are done on animals? Its something like that the body is there as the subject of an experiment. Then theres my consciousness, the part focused on the earthly experience and the Present transformation (its what I mean when I say I). And then the Lord. I say the Lord Ive adopted that because its the best way of putting it and the easiest for me, but I never, NEVER think of a being. For me, its a simultaneous contact with the Eternal, the Infinite, the Vast, the Totality of everything the totality of everything: all that is, all that has been, all that will be, everything. Words spoil it, but its like thatautomaticallywith consciousness, sweetness and SOLICITUDE. With all the qualities a perfect Personality can offer (I dont know if you follow me, but thats the way it is). And That (I use all these words to say it, and three-fourths is left out) is a spontaneous, constant, immediate experience. So the I I spoke of asks that the body may have the experience, or at least an initial taste, even a shadow of the experience of this Love. And each time its asked for, it comes INSTANTLY. Then I see the three together1in my consciousness and perception the three are together and I see that this Love is dosed out and maintained in exact proportion to what the body can bear.
The body is aware of this and is a little sad about it. But immediately comes something soothing, calming, making it vast. The body instantly senses the immensity and regains its calm.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What I am aiming at is not a society like the Present rooted in division. What I have in view is a Samgha [community] founded in the spirit and in the image of its oneness. It is with this idea that the name Deva Samgha has been given the commune of those who want the divine life is the Deva Samgha. Such a Samgha will have to be established in one place at first and then spread all over the country. But if any shadow of egoism falls over this endeavor, then the Samgha will change into a sect. The idea may very naturally creep in that such and such a body is the one true Samgha of the future, the one and only centre, that all else must be its circumference, and that those outside its limits are not of the fold or even if they are, have gone astray, because they think differently.
You may say, what need is there of a Samgha? Let me be free and live in every vessel; let all become one without form and let whatever must be happen in the midst of that vast formlessness. There is a truth there, but only one side of the truth. Our business is not with the formless Spirit alone; we have also to direct the movement of life. And there can be no effective movement of life without form. It is the Formless that has taken form and that assumption of name and form is not a caprice of Maya. Form is there because it is indispensable. We do not want to rule out any activity of the world as beyond our province. Politics, industry, society, poetry, literature, art will all remain, but we must give them a new soul and a new form.
0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the gods belong to the Present curve. The overmind belongs to this curve.
Those gods are all very nice! For some people theyre unbearable at times (Mother laughs), but theyre really very nice! They have their faults, they have their good points, but with me they have always been very nice!
0 1962-11-17, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I know its the will of that Asura Ive mentioned to you several times, the Lord of Falsehood who was born the Lord of Truth, and who knows that his hour is at hand (at hand relative to that world there) and has declared he will cause as much havoc as he can before disappearing. Quite recently, just before the Present conflict broke out, I went to a realm in the vital world which is right above the earth, like a platform (not a mountain top, but a spot where you get an overall view, like the bridge of a ship, for instance, where the captain stands; it was a place like that in the vital world, overlooking all terrestrial life). I went there it was rather dark, very dark in factand that tall being was there (hes quite tall, higher than this roomMo ther looks up at the ceilinghe likes to look tall). Hes very tall and all black. (Thats more or less his natural state; he appears to humans blazing with light, but that doesnt fool someone with inner vision: its an icy light. But some people are fooled and take him for the supreme God. Anyway, thats an aside.) So he was there and I went to himnot to him: I went to that place and found him there. He was gloating and told me to take a look around.
From there you had a panoramic view of everything. And no sooner did I arrive than a storm broke outa terrible storm. I kept watching, and then I saw in this direction (I dont know whether it was north, south or west, but it was this direction: Mother points to the north), I saw two nearly simultaneous flashes of lightning. The first one (I was looking north, I was quite conscious of facing north) the first one, a terrific bolt, came and fell from the east; and just a moment after, very soon after, another came from the west. The two didnt come together, but they fell on the same spotthey didnt meet but they fell on the same spot. It was pitch dark, the earth and everything was dark, you couldnt see a thing, and suddenly those two flashes of lightning lit up the area where they fell, making a dreadful din, and (my field of vision was confined to that area; all the rest was in darkness, you see) it burst into flames! Everything was set ablaze. In the lightning flashes you could distinguish the tops of monuments, houses, all sorts of things, and then everything burst into flames: a dreadful conflagration.
--
And then there have been certain political problems2all this making for a bit of work, which turned out rather well. But its always mixed, never the full thing; theres always a result, but not THE result. I dont think the result is possible with the Present conditions on earth: it would be a miracle, upsetting too many things. The consequences would be worse than.
Well, then.
0 1963-02-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was really very interesting. Afterwards its just a memory, no longer the thing. It concerned the creation of the material world, the material universe, in the light of the conception of the Supreme in love with His emanation. But the vision was all-embracing, as if I were on the other side the side of the Supreme, not of the creation and saw the creation as a whole, with the true sense of progress, the true sense of advance, of movement, and the true way in which all that doesnt belong to the future creation will disappear in a kind of pralaya1 (it cant really disappear but it will be withdrawn from the Manifestation). And it was very interesting: all that doesnt collaborate (in the sense that it is a sufficient experience, an experience that has come to its end) was reabsorbed. It was like the true vision of what was rendered as the Last Judgment. It is something going on constantly, that mighty gust of manifestation, and there are things that have been, according to our vision of time, but that live on, that continue to exist in the future; there are things that exhaust themselves (thats in the Present), and there are things that have no more purpose, that cannot keep pace with the movement (I dont know how to explain this) and enter the Non-Being the pralaya, the Non-Being, the unmanifestof course, not in their forms but in their essence; that is to say, the Supreme in them remains the Supreme but unmanifest.
But it was all a living, palpable experience which lasted for a day and a half. The entire universal movement was LIVED and sensed. Not merely seen but lived and in what light! What stupendous power! With that kind of certitude at the core of everything something very odd. Its very difficult to express. But the experience lasted so long that it became perfectly familiar. To translate it into words I might say: it is the Supremes way of seeingof feeling, of living. I was living things the way He does. And it gives a power of certitude of realization. In the sense that what we are heading for is already here; the road we look back on, the road we have traveled and the road yet to travel, it all lives simultaneously. And with such logic! An eternal, wonderful superlogic which makes it obviousness itselfeverything is obviousness itself. Struggle, effort, fear, all of that, oh, absolutely, absolutely nonexistent. And together with this, the explanation of the feeling we have of not wanting certain things any more: they leave the Manifest. You see, its like a sieve into which everything is thrown and where He to Him, everything, but everything is the same, but there is the vision of what He wants, and also of what is useless for what He wants or would prevent the fullness and totality of what He wants (contradictions of sorts, I dont know how to explain it)so with that He just goes this way (gesture of reswallowing) and it goes out of the Manifestation.
--
I have made some experiments with French too. I wrote something: Pour chacun, le plus important est de savoir si on appartient au passe qui se perpetue, au present qui sepuise, lavenir qui veut natre. [The most important point for everyone is to know whether he belongs to the past perpetuating itself, to the Present exhausting itself, or to the future trying to be born.] I gave it to Zhe didnt understand. So I told him, It doesnt mean our past, our present or our future. I wrote this when I was in that state [the experience Mother told at the beginning of this conversation], and it was in connection with a very sweet old lady who has just left her body. This is what I said to her. Everybody had been expecting her departure for more than a month or two, but I said, You will see, she is going to last; she will last for at least another month or two. Because she knows how to live within, outside her body, and the body lives on out of habit, without jerks and jolts. That was her condition, and it could last a very long time. They had announced she would leave within two days, but I said, Its not true. I know her well, in the sense that she had come out of her body and there was a link with me. And I said to her, What do you care! (though she wasnt at all worried, she was staying peacefully with me), The whole point is to know whether one belongs to the past perpetuating itself, to the Present exhausting itself, or to the future trying to be born. Sometimes what WE call the past is right here, its the future trying to be born; sometimes what WE call the Present is something in advance, something that came ahead of time; but sometimes also its something that came late, that is still part of all that is to disappear I saw it all: people, things, circumstances, everything through that perception, the vibration that would go on transforming itself, the vibration that would exhaust itself and disappear, the vibration that, though manifested for a long time, would be entitled to continue, to persist that changes all notions! It was so interesting! So I wrote it down as it waswithout any explanations (you dont feel much like explaining in such a case, the thing is so self-evident!). Poor Z, he stared at meall at sea! So I told him, Dont try to understand. I am not speaking of the past, present and future as we know them, its something else. (Mother laughs)
But its amusing because I had never paid much attention to that [the questions of language], the experience is novel, almost the discovery of the truth behind expression. Before, my concern was to be as clear, exact and precise as possible; to say exactly what I meant and put each word in its proper place. But thats not it! Each word has its own life! Some are drawn together by affinity, others repel each other its very funny!
0 1963-02-23, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
We have a great mathematician here who comes from Madras regularly, Dr. V. (you know him, dont you?), and for my birthday,1 he played around with the figures of my date of birth and made up with them a square with small compartments (what a painstaking work it must be!): any way you read it, it always adds up to the same figure. Admirable. The figure is 116. Heavenly mathematics, all that (!) and it is supposed to be my number of years. But I find it a little on the short side. Because if the Present pace is any indication, 116 doesnt leave me many years, thirty years or so yes, some thirty years, thats all. What can you achieve in thirty years?! The way things are moving, oh! When Sri Aurobindo said three hundred years, I think he gave the minimum figure.
Well see.
0 1963-03-16, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And it happened the same way every time.1 But it may take years to turn into a conscious power. And IN the Present CASE, the conscious power would mean the power to give or prevent death equally; to effect the necessary movement of forcesalmost almost an action on the cells, a mechanical action on the cells. With that power, you can give death, you can prevent death.
But there is NO LONGER any of that sensation people have of a brutal clash between life and its opposite, deathdeath is not the opposite of life! At that moment I understood, and I never forgot: death is NOT the opposite of life, it is not the opposite of life.2
0 1963-04-06, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Which means the body has got its own difficulties (no aggregate of cells is free from difficulties in the Present conditions of life), and I think that its capacity to keep still (to an extent) is its only safeguard but that doesnt reduce the difficulties at all, since the contact doesnt even depend on the physical presence!1 But then what tremendous, prodigious power has to be EMBODIED in the physical cells to withstand all that!
But there too, a shift is taking place (what I told you once: those abrupt experiences that do not settle in but are first contacts2). After the lesson was drawn from this story, suddenly something arose in the body consciousness which isnt ONE bodys consciousness but a general body consciousnessan aspiration, something so pure, so sweet so sweet something like an entreaty that Truth and Light may at last be manifested here, in this. Not here in this (Mother touches her own body): it was everywhere.
0 1963-06-22, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo came with the notion, or the Command, or the conviction that it was in the Present. But to what extent is the transformation present? And what does present mean? What span of time does it cover?
There is such a certitudesuch a certitude that the thing is ALREADY there, but thats when you see it from the other end. Seen from this end here When you see it on the scale of human beings and world events, how much time will it take? I dont know. And how far have we traveled, where are we on the road? I dont know.
0 1963-06-29, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo seems to have taken interest in the Popes successor because two nights ago (not in the night, at four in the morning), I was with him I spent a half hour with him (a half hour of OUR time, which is very long), he had just returned from a tour, in Italy especially. We didnt directly talk about it, but some people were there (there were all kinds of things, many things), and from his comments to this or that person, or on this or that, I knew he was returning from Italy, where he had gone for the nomination of the new Pope. And he said something like: Its the best that could be done under the Present circumstances. That is, he appeared satisfied on the whole.
I told you, didnt I, that I saw the death of Pope [John XXIII] without even knowing he was ill? One night, I suddenly saw in the mental atmosphere of the EARTH quite an awesome movement, that is to say, quite global: there were great mental waves (nothing but mental), great waves of anxiety, as though all human thought were very upset; but it wasnt the anxiety of the believers, it was a very global movement the earths mental atmosphere was stirring with great movements of upheaval and anxiety (Mother draws waves in the air). I thought, Whats happening? Whats happening that can so upset men? (as would happen, for instance, with a world war or events of that kind), Whats happening that can draw the attention of the whole earths atmosphere, its mental atmosphere? And the next day, I was told that just at that time, the Pope died. So I thought, Indeed!
--
(Mother nods her head) Sri Aurobindo used something like these words: It is all that can be done in the Present circumstances.
Which means it seemed to be the man of his choice, because he certainly went to the conclave and saw the situation, thats how he workedhe influenced the vote. Among all those people ([laughing] there are eighty of them, mon petit!), among all those people, this one was probably the one the most likely to do what we want him to.
He may do it for unavowed reasons, but anyway It generally happens that way in the Present state of the earth: peoples motives for doing things should not be taken too seriouslywhats important is what they do. And if you look at things from a certain height (where everything is DECIDED, you understand), people and things are COMPELLED to act in a certain way, but the conscious human motives that determine their actions are irrelevantirrelevant in the sense that theyre not always to put it more clearly: you VERY rarely do things from the TRUE motive.
At any rate, Sri Aurobindo is interested in world events, which means he considers the Popes election has a certain importance.
0 1963-07-10, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And that gives a clear sense of Unreality and Unconsciousness and of all the consequent disorder. Because there is a CONSTANT Reality, a CONSTANT divine Order, and its only the incapacity to perceive it that makes the Present Disorder and Falsehood.
The experiences go on multiplying. But then, outwardly, everyone seems to start squabbling and quarreling with each other (laughing) much more than before, even (!), over the most futile things in the world and most unnecessarily, without any ground, just like that. And then, to me the two sides become visible at once: the true thing and its deformation; the event as it should occur and its deformation. Yet the event REMAINS THE SAMEthe deformation is merely a sort of excrescence added on to it, which is absolutely unnecessary and complicates things atrociously, for no reason. And also which gives a strong impression of Falsehood (in the English sense of falsehood, not lie1): something without meaning or purpose, absolutely unnecessary and perfectly idiotic then why is it there?? Seized and twistedeverything is seized and twisted. Where does that habit of twisting things come from? I dont know.
0 1963-07-20, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sometimes I catch it (that must be something quite common among human beings) in a sort of hastea haste, a kind of impatience, and also, I cant say fear or anxiety, but a sense of uncertainty. The two together: impatience to get out of the Present moment to the immediately next, and at the same time uncertainty as to what that immediately next moment is going to bring. The whole thing makes a vibration of restlessnesswhats the word in French?
Febrility, agitation?
Thats too muchagitation is too much, its rather a lack of rest. Not agitation really, but something that lacks the rest of certainty. I constantly catch my cells being like that. Naturally I react, but for them its a very normal state: always straining after the next moment, never the quietude of the Present moment. The result (the words I use give a very concrete character to something rather fluid), the result is the feeling that you have to bear or endure, and the haste to get out of that enduring, along with the hope (a very faint and flimsy hope) that the next moment will be better. Thats how it is from moment to moment, from moment to moment, from moment to moment. As soon as the Consciousness comes (gesture of descent) and concentrates, as soon as I bring the Consciousness into the Present moment, everything becomes quiet, immobile, eternal. But if I am not CONSTANTLY attentive, the other condition [of restlessness] comes almost as a subconsciousness: its always there. And VERY tiringit must be one of the most important sources of fatigue in mankind. Especially here (Mother touches her forehead and temples), its very tiring. Only when you can live in the eternity of the Present minute does it all stopeverything becomes white, immobile, calm, everything is fine.
But it means constant vigilanceconstant. Its infinitely more difficult than when one worked even in the vital; in the vital, its nothing, its childs play in comparison. But here, phew! Because, you see, in the mind or the vital, its all movements of organization, of action, of choice, of decisionits very easy to decide, to rule! But that cellular tension is there EVERY SECOND: its the activity inherent in material existence. Its only when you go into samadhi that it stops. That is, when outwardly you are in trance. Then it stops.
0 1963-07-24, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
About the Present civilisation, it is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine or in the way that they imagine. the Present must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater Truth, is the issue. The Mother has left (Mother laughs) this question hanging and I can only do the same.
(September 1945)
--
We find it worthwhile to publish here a letter Mother wrote (in English) to Prithwi Singh, Sujata's father, just a few days before Sri Aurobindo's letter published at the beginning of this conversation, on August 30, 1945: "I do not see that the Supramental will act in the way you expect from It. Its action will be to effectuate the Divine's Will upon earth whatever that may be. On men Its action will be to turn their will consciously or unconsciously on their part towards the way in which the Divine's Will wants them to go. But I cannot promise you that the Divine's will is to preserve the Present human civilisation."
***
0 1963-08-24, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And I must say that the state of consciousness that rapture gives would be dangerous in the Present state of the world. Because it has almost absolute reactions I can see that that state of rapture has an OVERWHELMING power. But I insist on the word overwhelming, in the sense that its intolerant of, or intolerable to (yes, intolerable to) all thats unlike it! Its the same thing, or almost (not quite the same but almost), as supreme divine Love: the vibration of that ecstasy or rapture is a first hint of the vibration of divine Love, and thats absolutely yes, there is no other word, intolerant, in the sense that it doesnt brook the presence of anything contrary to it.
So that would have frightening results for the ordinary consciousness. I can see that very well, because at times that Power comes the Power comes and you feel as if everything is about to explode. Because it can tolerate only union, it can tolerate only an accepting responsereceiving and accepting. And not from any arbitrary will: from the VERY FACT of its existence, an all-powerful existenceall-powerful not in the way man understands allpowerfullness: really an all-powerfulness. That is, entirely, totally and exclusively existing. It contains everything, but what is contrary to its vibration is forced to change, you see, since nothing can disappear; but then that immediate, brutal, so to say, and absolute change is, in the world as it is, a catastrophe.
0 1963-08-28, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had already told you about my misgivings.1 As to the motives for the decision, it always boils down to the same point: a sincere (though ambiguous) will of ecumenism, a broad rather than deep intellectual curiosity, permit mentalities such as those that give our firm its orientation and public image to pay some attention to academic essays regarded (wrongly so in the Present instance) as dealing with the famous Eastern spirituality. But as soon as the essays are lived from within, the goodwill withdraws into its shell. The reaction is even worse if the author is a renegade, a Westerner who has gone over to the enemy side. (I can vouch for that!2) I must emphasize that this whole process is not only unintentional but, more than that, unconscious (which is not an excuse but an aggravating circumstance). The opposition put up against your first manuscript3 rather hardened with the second, a much more personal book, I mean less detached, still less objective than the firstand more ample. Through the medium of literature, you were able to convey whatever you liked. Through a direct essay, you will reach and so much the worse, or so much the betteronly those who seek. Our firm and its public do not belong, for that matter, to the category of those who seek.
Hes conscious!
0 1963-10-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yesterday (this is an example I give you, but in all three domains its similar), yesterday it was a question of money. The question of money, for more than twelve years, has been a problemgrowing increasingly acute because the expenses are increasing fantastically while the income is decreasing! (laughing) So the two things together make the problem very acute. It results in things to be paid but no money, which means that the cashier (the poor cashier, it does him a lot of good from the yogic viewpoint: he has acquired a calm that he never had before! But still he is the one who has to stand the greatest tension), the cashier spends money and I cannot reimburse him. Very well. And then its not for me to run about, look for money, arrange things, discuss with people, of course, that wouldnt be proper (!), and those who do it for me have in them a rather sizable amount of tamas, which I cannot yet shake up. Anyway, yesterday they proposed something absurd to me (I dont want to go into the details, it doesnt matter), but their proposal was absurd and put me in a totally unacceptable situation. In other words, it might have brought a legal action against me, I might have been summoned before the court, anyway, all kinds of inadmissible thingsnot that I care personally, but theyre inadmissible. When they proposed their idea to me, I looked and saw it was silly; I was very quiet, when, suddenly, there came into me a Power (I told you it happens now and then) like this (massive gesture). When it comes, you feel as though you could destroydestroy everything with it you see, its too awesome for the Present state of the earth. So I answered very quietly that it was unacceptable, I said why, and I returned the paper. Then something COMPELLED me to add: If I am here, it is not because of any necessity or obligation; it is not a necessity from the past, not a karma, not any obligation, any attraction, any attachment, but only, solely and absolutely because of the Lords Grace. I am here because He keeps me here, and when He no longer keeps me here, when He considers I am not to stay any longer, I wont stay. And I added (I was speaking in English), As for me (as for me [gesture upward] that is, not this [gesture to the body]), as for Me, I consider that the world isnt ready: its way of responding inwardly and outwardly, even visibly in those around me, proves that the world isnt ready something must happen for it to be ready. Or else it will take QUITE SOME TIME for it to be prepared. Its all the same to me: whether it is ready or not makes no difference. And everything could collapse, Icouldntcareless. And with what force I said that! My arm rose, my fist banged on the tablemon petit, I thought I was going to break everything!
I was watching the scene, thinking, Why the devil am I made to do this?! These people are, apparently, quite devoted, quite surrendered and intimate enough not to be afraid. (I dont know what effect it had on them, but it must have had some effect.) As soon as it was over, I started working again, looking into affairs and so on. Afterwards, once I was alone, I wondered, Why did that come into me? And in the evening, I had the solution to the situation: its here (Mother takes an envelope on the table). I didnt even look at it (Mother opens the envelope and looks at the amount of a check).
0 1963-12-14, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If the expression becomes clear enough to be understandable, the Present phase of the experience may be interesting for others, no? I have the feeling it could help break a few limits.
Certainly.
0 1964-01-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yet this dream is on the way to becoming a reality, and it is what we are endeavoring to do at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, on a very small scale and in proportion to our limited means. The achievement is indeed far from being perfect but it is progressive; little by little we are moving towards our goal, which, we hope, we shall one day be able to show to the world as a practical and effective means of emerging from the Present chaos to be born to a new life, more harmonious and truer.
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
0 1964-01-28, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(B.) I am going to Calcutta. There they will ask me one question regarding the Present situationcommunal riots.1 What is the solution?
The solution is, of course, the change of consciousness. I know those other people [in Pakistan] behaved badly, like animalseven animals are better than human beings but if people here also do the same, they would be playing in the hands of the forces that make people do evil and would only streng then the hold of these forces. Retaliation like this is no remedy.
0 1964-03-11, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All our endeavour is to make this consciousness and this will govern our lives and action and organise all our activities. It is the way in which the Ashram has been created. Since 1926 when Sri Aurobindo retired and gave me full charge of it (at that time there were only two rented houses and a handful of disciples) all has grown up and developed like the growth of a forest, and each service was created not by any artificial planning but by a living and dynamic need. This is the secret of constant growth and endless progress. the Present difficulties come chiefly from psychological resistances in the disciples who have not been able to follow the rather rapid pace of the sadhana and the yielding to the intrusion of mental methods which have corrupted the initial working.
A growth and purification of the consciousness is the only remedy.
0 1964-07-22, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And That is I dont know if this world (I am not talking of the earth alone, but of the Present universe), if this world will be followed by others or if it will itself go on, or if but That, which I am talking about and calling Love, is the Master of this world.
The day when the earth (because we were promised it, and they arent vain promises), the day the earth manifests That, it will be a glory.
0 1964-08-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Silence, silence. This is a time for gathering energies and not for wasting them away in useless and meaningless words. Anyone who proclaims loudly his opinions on the Present situation of the country, must understand that opinions are of no value and cannot in the least help Mother India to come out of her difficulties. If you want to be useful, first control yourself and keep silentsilence, silence, silence. It is only in silence that anything great can be done.
That was just when the war began; people were criticizing the government as if To one of them I wrote personally: If you were up there, would you know what has to be done? No. So if you dont know, you have no right to say anythingkeep silent.
--
So there are two possibilities: violence, or Transformation. Violence means invasion or revolutionits hanging in the air, it could break out any moment. The government Nehru wasnt worth much, but still for the masses he represented a certain ideal (which he was quite incapable of living up to, but anyway). After him, its finished; the Present Prime Minister is a man with great goodwill, who has no character, to such a point that in the presence of difficulties he falls illhes ill! Ill, he cant work! Thats where we are.2
Here, in Pondicherry, its the same muddle.
--
Indira Gandhi will come to power in early 1966, after the death of the Present Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri.
***
0 1964-09-16, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That is why some have preached that the only important moment is the Present momentwhich isnt true in practice, but from the psychological point of view, it should be true. In other words, let us live every minute to the utmost of our possibility, without foreseeing or wanting or expecting or preparing the next minute. Because we are forever in a hurry-hurry-hurry and we do everything wrong. We live in an inner tension which is totally falsetotally false.
All those who tried to be wise have always said it (the Chinese have preached it, the Indians have preached it): live with the sense of Eternity. In Europe, too, they said you should contemplate the sky, the stars, identify with their infinitudeall of which makes you wide and peaceful.
0 1964-10-07, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then (Mother points to her own body), this seems to be the lesson for these aggregates (bodies, you know, seem to me to be simply aggregates). And as long as there is, behind, a will to keep this together for some reason or other, it stays together, but These last few days (yesterday or the day before), there was this: a sort of completely decentralized consciousness (I am always referring to the physical consciousness, of course, not at all to the higher consciousness), a decentralized consciousness that happened to be here, there, there, in this body, that body (in what people call this person and that person, but that notion doesnt quite exist anymore), and then there was a kind of intervention of a universal consciousness in the cells, as though it were asking these cells what their reason was for wanting to retain this combination (if we may say so) or this aggregate while in fact making them understand or feel the difficulties that come, for example, from the number of years, wear and tear, external difficultiesfrom all the deterioration caused by friction, wear and tear. But they seemed to be perfectly indifferent to that! The response of the cells was interesting enough, in the sense that they seemed to attach importance ONLY TO THE CAPACITY TO REMAIN IN CONSCIOUS CONTACT WITH THE HIGHER FORCE. It was like an aspiration (not formulated in words, naturally), and like a what in English they call yearning, a longing for that Contact with the divine Force, the Force of Harmony, the Force of Truth and the Force of Love, and [the cells response was] that because of that, they valued the Present combination.
It was an altogether different point of view.
0 1964-10-17, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Maybe its into the past that I wander? It may be into the past, it may be into the future, it may be in the Present. I have noticed that the costumes arent at all like todays or like anything we know. But when I am there, in the activity, its perfectly natural, you dont notice it: its like something you see every day, you dont notice it. Only when I come back and objectify a little do I say to myself, Well, how odd! (for myself and for others). And I am not at all as I am now, not at all. Moreover, I think I have been what is called different persons at different times. There was even a time when I looked to see if it wasnt that I was identifying with different persons, but there is no identification, I dont feel I am entering someone, nothing like that. But in appearance, I am not always the same person: sometimes I am very tall, sometimes I am small, sometimes I am young, sometimes I am not old but grownup. Very, very different. But there is always the same central consciousness, there is always (Mother collects herself) the Witness who watches on behalf of the Lord and decides on behalf of the Lord. This is the attitude: the Witness who watches that is to say, who sees everything, observes everything, and who decides, either for himself or for others (indifferently), always. That is the fixed point. On behalf of of the something thats eternaleternal, eternally true, eternally powerful and eternally knowing. That is there, through everything. Otherwise, there are different things all the time, different circumstances, different surroundings; there are ways of life that are very, very different. And also, if I wake up at the beginning of the night, its one particular type of thing; if I wake up in the middle of the night, its another type of thing; if I wake up wake up, lets be clear, it isnt coming out of sleep, its returning to the Present consciousness. And every time, its different, like coming from different worlds, different times, different activities.
And its clear that one doesnt expect me to remember that doesnt matter at all. It is an ACTION. Its an action, it isnt a knowledge I am givenan action. I am working. Is it I have worked? Is it I am going to work? Is it I am working? I dont know. Probably all three.
0 1964-10-24a, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the true version is this one (I replaced sapprochent with viennent and dispose with dtiens, and I put the Present tense), its from the last sedimentation:
Ceux qui viennent a moi avec
--
And I replaced the future tense with the Present, deliberately too, because it isnt something new: it has always been that way; it isnt that I now announce they will be disappointed they have always been disappointed. And asserting this fact is what had the power of dispelling a whole mass of formations: not only formations of beings of the vital or hostile beings, but the false mental formations of human beings.
And here, I wrote: Je ne dtiens pas de pouvoirs [I possess no powers], which is better than Je ne dispose pas de pouvoirs [I have no powers at my disposal]. I had chosen the word dispose in French (chosen, I mean, not mentally), but the word dispose came along with the meaning that the power wasnt at my disposal there is a nuance. I mean that if, by some aberration (it would really be an aberration), if by some aberration I had the desire to work a miracle, I wouldnt be able toit would be contrary to the supreme Will. It isnt that I am deliberately making the choice, No, I wont work miracles I cant, thats not the way, it MUST NOT be like that.
0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But the glimpses of the True Thing, all of a sudden, are so wonderful that Only, the gap between the Present state and THAT is still wide, and it seems that for THAT to settle in once and for all, It must become natural.
Voil.
0 1964-11-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Hitler asserted that Falsehood should govern the world and that it was governing it. And he was very conscious of being the instrument of the Asura who had himself called the Lord of Nations, who is precisely the Present, current representation of the Asura of Falsehood (the one who was born the Lord of Trutha lovely story).
Thats why Sri Aurobindo clearly and openly took the side of the Alliesit wasnt out of love for the British!
0 1964-11-21, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So the answer comes (not from me, it comes from very far and its quite ABSOLUTE as a vibration): Its no solution. It means it isnt, in the Present case, considered to be the solution.
There must be another one.
--
You have categorically refused the experiences that consist in going out of the Present existence in search of anotheryou havent come for that and you dont want that. What you want is something very concreteits a little bit more difficult to have. But it will come.
I am not telling you this to comfort you, but because I SEE it this way: it will come. And whats interesting is that there is an identity in the movement:3 what has happened to you lately, that thinning down, is yet another example; thats precisely what Ive been preoccupied with these last few days that means something.
0 1965-01-12, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
They generally did it only partially, through an emanation, not through a complete descent. It is said, for instance, that Vivekananda was an incarnation (a vibhuti) of Shivas; but Shiva himself I have had a very close relationship with him and he clearly expressed the will to come down on earth only with the supramental world. When the earth is ready for supramental life, he will come. And almost all those beings will manifest they are waiting for that moment, they do not want the Present struggle and darkness.
And, certainly, Narada was among those who used to come here. After all, it was fun! He would play a lot with circumstances. But he didnt have the knowledge of the psychic being and that must have prevented him from recognizing the psychic being when he found himself in its presence.
0 1965-03-20, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats the Present progress.
The first result is the creation of a general malaise they feel as if the earth theyre standing on isnt steady anymore: it quakes. They find it uncomfortable.
0 1965-04-17, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But as things are at present, it would seem there is a transitional period in which the consciousness has to switch from this body to another, better prepared bodybetter prepared outwardly, physically (not inwardly); outwardly, I mean, having acquired certain aptitudes through the Present development, which this body doesnt have, of the four qualitieswhich it doesnt have in sufficient amount and completeness. That is to say, those four qualities must be in perfect accord and in sufficient amount to be able to bear the work of transformation.
I dont know if I can make myself understood.
0 1965-04-21, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This, in particular: The difference between the Present human body and the supramental creation is so considerable, the substance must be so different
Of course.
0 1965-06-02, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I dont notice a great change in this domain because it had already been cultivated very much, while my eyes are much more (how can I put it?) ahead, in the sense that there is already a much greater difference between the old habit of seeing and the Present one. I seem to be behind a veil thats really the feeling: a veil; and then, suddenly, something lives with the true vibration. But thats rare, its still rare. Probably (laughing) there arent many things worth seeing!
Oh, listen, it was Y.s birthday the other day. I told her to come. She came: her face was exactly like her monkeys! She sat down in front of me, we exchanged a few words, then I concentrated and closed my eyes, and then I opened my eyesshe had the face of the ideal madonna! So beautiful! And as I had seen the monkey (the monkey wasnt ugly, but it was a monkey, of course), and then that, Ah! it struck me, I thought, What wonderful plasticity. A face oh, a truly beautiful face, perfectly harmonious and pure, with such a lovely aspirationoh, a beautiful face! Then I looked a few times: it was no longer one or the other, it was it was something (what she usually is, I mean), and it was behind the veil. But those two visions were without the veil.
0 1965-07-31, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now, the Italians worship the Virgin a lot, its a lot in their makeup, and through that they would understand (those who are intelligent and see the symbol behind the story). There was a Pope (not the Present one or the previous one, but the one before1) who did remarkable things because he was in touch with the Virgin; he was a worshipper of the Virgin and that really put him on the right path. So I think that if they want a small book (it is a small book, you can even put it in your pocketpeople are afraid of big books, they dont have time), there are lots of things in that small book, The Mother, lots of things. But the part on the four aspects of the Mother can really be felt only by Indians; those who have a Christian education (laughing) must find it very frightening (!) But we could omit that chapter. You see, the book was made from letters, so each piece is a whole; it wasnt at all composed as one piece: we arranged it as it is following the instructions Sri Aurobindo gave. But that last chapter (the biggest, besides) is mostly for India. It can be omitted.
So you can say this to N.: a biographical note in dictionary style to announce the publication of your book.
0 1965-08-07, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the Present reality is a big falsehoodhiding an eternal truth.
3) What, according to you, are the three main barriers that stand between the vision and the reality?
--
For what Sri Aurobindo represents in the worlds history is not a teaching, not even a revelation: it is an action.5 Sri Aurobindo is not a thinker or a sage, not a mystic or a dreamer. He is a force of the future that takes hold of the Present and leads us towards,
The miracle for which our life was made.6
0 1965-09-25, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The whole night (not last night, the night before) was very, very critical, and with such a clear perception of the futility of the Present procedure and of this slavery that comes from a habit several thousand years old and more.2
There was in fact in the body a struggle between the two tendencies: one that was by habit subject to the old movement, and one that was trying to drop that habit, with the perception of the new way. It was it was extremely painful, difficult and absolutely grotesque all at once. And then, this body found itself to be a sort of battlefield, and that wasnt pleasant.
0 1965-11-23, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When things are put mentally, all those who have tried to explain things mentally have made an opposition, and so people imagine that one is the very opposite of the other [the True Thing and its distortion]; in that case it would be so easy to discern. But thats not at all how it is! I am now studying the way in which Matter, the body, can be in constant harmony with the divine Presence. And its so interesting: its not at all an opposition, its a tiny little microscopic distortion. For instance, there is this frequent experience (and generally people dont know why it is sonow I know): on some days or at certain times all the gestures you make are harmonious, all the things you touch seem to respond harmoniously to the will that touches them, everything works out (I am talking about the very small things of lifeof everyday life), each thing seems to be in its place or to find its place naturally: if you fold a paper, it folds itself as though spontaneously, as it should; if you look for something, you seem to spontaneously find the thing you need; you never knock against anything, never upset anythingeverything seems harmonious. And then, without any appreciable difference in the overall state of consciousness, at other times, its the exact opposite: if you want to fold a paper, you fold it the wrong way; if you want to touch some object, you drop iteverything seems disharmonized or off balance or bad-willed. You are yourself more or less in the same state. But now, with the Present keen and fine observation, I see that in one case, there is a sort of inner silence in the cells, a PROFOUND quietude, which doesnt prevent movement, even rapid movement, but the movement seems to be founded on an eternal vibration; and in the other case, there is that inner precipitation (gesture of tremor), that inner vibration, that inner restlessness, that haste to go from one moment to the next, that constant hurry (why? Theres no knowing why), always, always hurrying and scurrying; and everything you do is wrong. And in the other case, with that inner serenity and peace, everything is done harmoniously, and MUCH FASTER in material time: there is no time lost.
And thats why its so difficult to know how one should be. Because in thought you can be in the same constant state, even in aspiration you can be in the same constant state, in the general goodwill, even in surrender to the Divine, it all can be the same thing, in the same stateits in here (Mother touches her body), and this makes the whole difference. I can very well conceive that there may be people in whom this opposition persists in the mind and the vital, but there its so obvious. But I am talking of something absolutely material. Some people say and think, How come? I have such goodwill, such a desire to do the right thing, and then nothing works, everything jarswhy? I am so good (!) and yet things dont respond. Or those who say, Oh, I have made my surrender, I have such goodwill, I have an aspiration, I want nothing but the Truth and the Good, and yet I am ill all the timewhy am I ill? And naturally, one small step more, and you begin to doubt the Justice that rules the world, and so on. Then you fall into a hole. But thats not it, thats not what I mean. Its much simpler and much more difficult at the same time, because it isnt blatant, it isnt evident, its not an opposition from which you can choose, its truly, totally and integrally leaving the entire responsibility to the Lord.
0 1965-12-07, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(There follows a long and habitual discussion on the problem of the publication of Mothers words. As usual, Mother wants to cut everything out I dont want any Iand as usual Satprem literally has to fight to salvage a few fragments here and there. the Present instance concerns the Notes on the Way.)
But I can see, lots of people read the Bulletin, and we have to be careful of what we print. So well have to go over this carefully.
0 1965-12-10, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Truly, even materially and even in the Present state of the world, nothing is impossible. All that is needed is the Lords Sanction (sanction in the English sense of the word). And it was He who wanted it, it was He who willed it. I, who cant remain standing for more than ten minutes without my head whirling, stayed there half an hour MOTIONLESS: I didnt feel anything, I was quite beyond all karmas! It took half an hour for everything to come to a stop, and it was clearly a momentary effect, meaning that it could have lasted one hour, two hours, I dont know, but with the inner vibrations of his being (lack of faith and so on) it could only be momentary.
But it happened. And it wasnt through an imposition: it was through a relaxation, with the Force descending like a mass, brrf! Tremendous, mon petit! Two or three times there was a loosening [in the doctor], then it resumed: it was as if driven out of the brain, and it came back into the brain; I drove it out and back it came. And the last time, there was a relaxation. Then I said, Thank You, Lord, I thank You.
0 1966-01-08, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its the perfect answer to the Present condition.
Thats the point, isnt it: it touches on the very crux of the difficulty (Mother pinches something tiny and very hard between her fingers). Despite everything, even though you may give everything, surrender everything, there is something (same gesture), and that something always remains there, behind.
0 1966-04-13, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
That, mon petit, for me is the key. The key that solves all problems for me. I am not saying it will eternally be like that; it isnt the supreme truth, but for my present experience of the Present time, its the key.
This book should normally have been written four or five years earlier, and at the time Satprem saw it in the form of a Greek tragedy.
0 1966-05-25, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the Present way of being is a past that really should no longer exist. While the other way, ah, at last! At last! Thats why there is a world.
And everything remains just as concrete and just as realit doesnt become misty. Its just as concrete, just as real, but it becomes divine, because because it IS the Divine. Its the Divine playing.
0 1966-06-08, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This Talk of April 19, 1951 interests me immensely. Its exactly the same focus as the Present effort.
This constant correlation between the inner and the outer work is very interesting, like the preparation of this Bulletin,1 for instance. I can clearly see that the initial cause always comes from outside (outside with regard to this body), in the sense that the focus of the effort depends on the state of health of the people around me, on a certain set of circumstances, and also on an intellectual work (like this Bulletin); those are the causes. Because here (gesture to the forehead), theres really a tranquil and silent stillness. So theres only what comes from outside.
0 1966-08-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats how the Present moment is: the will may be like this (Mother raises a finger upward), or it may be like that (finger downward). Like that, it means dissolution; like this, it means continuation and progresscontinuation with the necessity of progress. There is something which is the consciousness of the cells (a consciousness that observes, and which, when it is awakened, is a wonderful witness), and that consciousness is the one which goes like this (same gesture) or like that. This is expressed by a will to endure or to last, or by a need for the annihilation of rest. And then, when these cells are full of that light that golden light, that splendor of divine Lovethere is a sort of thirst, a need to participate in That, which takes away all that is or can be difficult in the endurance: that disappears, it becomes a glory. Then
Thats what is being learned.
0 1966-09-21, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Unfortunately, following the Present tendencies, for Auroville they are trying to get UNESCOS support (!) I, of course, knew beforeh and that those [UNESCO] people couldnt understand, but they are trying. Because everywhere people (its a sort of superstition), everywhere people say, No, Ill open my purse strings only with UNESCOs approval and encouragement I am talking about those whose contri bution matters, lots of people, so
Only, to me, all this is the crust, the quite superficial experience the crust; and things have to happen underneath, beneath that crust. Its just an appearance.
0 1966-09-30, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But I can very well see it as a sort of luminous blossoming: the Light must have that force. And it doesnt destroy anything in the Present structure.
But visible, that can be touched?
0 1966-11-03, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its generally fragmentsfragments of life that were individualized, and when in the Present life you follow a normal development with the [various beings] gathering around the central consciousness, all those elements come back to gather together. They come back, each with its own memories. For instance, I had a memory like that (I tell you, Ive had hundreds of them) when I was very young (I must have been twenty or so). It wasnt at night, but I was lying down, resting: suddenly I felt myself riding a horse, with tremendous warlike power and the sense a will for victory and the POWER of victory. And I felt as if I was riding a horse: I saw a white horse, I saw my legs, with riding breeches, you understand, and a red velvet costume. And there I was, at a gallop. I couldnt tell what the head was like or anything, naturally! And also, the crowd, the armies, and the rising sun. It was so strong, the sense that it was the sense of the will for victory and the POWER of victory. It came just like that. Then, sometime later, I read somewhere the story of Murat (I forget I think his victory was Magenta3 I no longer remember all that), and I immediately understood that my vision was at the moment of launching the battle: he had an inner call to a Power, so there was an identification [with Mothers power], and thats what I remembered and what came back. If I said (as the Theosophists tell you), I was Murat, it would be stupid. But it was a consciousness coming back. It was so strong! The impression lasted long enough, with the sense of the battle but above all the sense of that POWER making you invincible. It was interesting, because at the time (it was just in the beginning, I was beginning to take interest in these things and I had just come across the Cosmic teaching), I was convinced that a womans psychic being was always reincarnated in a woman and a mans psychic being was always reincarnated in a man (many schools teach that; Thon too believed so, he insisted on it). So it came as a surprise, because it wasnt in conformity with what I thought (!). Afterwards (long afterwards), I realized that naturally all those dogmas were nonsense, but
It fits with what I told you last time: the STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS are what reincarnate, evolving, developing, growing more perfect. Thats rather how it was, thats how that memory came. Its like that with many memories. And I know that to say states of consciousness are what reincarnate, to adopt that as the sole explanation would be incorrectits absolutely incorrect but its one way of looking at the question beyond the sense of the little personality. It broadens the consciousness: one has in oneself things far more universal and far less limited than personal experiences. Just as in life some people have an exceptional life, in the same way they also have exceptional moments in their life, when they no longer are one single little person: they are a force in action. Thats how it is.
0 1966-12-20, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the few pages you read to me (except perhaps for the description of the dream), I clearly saw this struggle between the past and the Present states.
Correcting the book will still be the continuation of this sadhana, but seen from that angle the labor will be less painful and much more interesting.
0 1967-02-18, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I am absolutely (a word skipped here) to have missed seeing you. Yesterday evening nobody came to tell me. And when they brought the Presents for Thoth from You they didnt tell me anything either.
Sweet Mother, since yesterday morning big S.3 wanted to see you, and now that they say its too late and I feel that Ill miss seeing You, big S. is sad and I dont want that.
0 1967-02-25, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But it means an intensity of faith which, compared to the Present state of mankind, may be regarded as miraculous.
And the acceptance of illness is the acceptance of the usual end, which is generally called death (that doesnt mean anything), but anyway, it means that the aggregate is unable to be transformed and is dissolved.
0 1967-03-02, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some of the things I said in the Talk youve just read to me today, were true at the time, are still true for the majority of people, but are no longer true for me.1 To the Present vision, there is nothing that isnt willed and doesnt come purposely (not exactly deliberately, but with a precise aim in view), and it is AT THE SAME TIME a complete, multifaceted and integral whole (which is why its very difficult to grasp). But now the thing is very clearly felt. And that is since two or three days, following a very minute observationprecise and minute The centre of consciousness is fairly high up (gesture far above the head); in the past it was always there (gesture near the top of the head) and it would see things around and inside, but it seems to have ascended and the field of the consciousness is much vaster. Also, the body has become transparent, so to speak, and almost nonexistent; I dont know how to put it it doesnt obstruct the vibrations: all vibrations can go through. For example (Ill give an example to make myself understood, omitting details deliberately), I was asked for a certain amount of money, an increase. (On the material level a certain number of things are controlledby Motherfrom here, and which I have to pay for regularly.) So then, an increase was asked for. Not that the request was unreasonable, thats not it (it was an increase for something special, a daily increase), but I dont know why (because heregesture to the foreheadnothing happens, I am absolutely, not only blank, but transparent, and everything is allowed to go through unobstructed), when I had to take the decision, there was immediately a vision (but a vision, as I said, from above, which sees over a much larger field), of conflict, battle, and to the observation there was something (in Mother) very much displeased, like a protest. I wondered why. If it had been translated into words, there would have been indignation at that request (without there being in the consciousness the least reason for this indignation: it all becomes very, very impersonalvery impersonal). I went on looking with the vision of the consciousness, and then, as if automatically, through this mouth I asked how much this increase would amount to per week (because even the mental state that enables you to calculate isnt there at all: its only a question of consciousness). I asked someone who was there, and he told me. Then, there immediately came the decision: I will give so much once a week. And everything calmed down. Why and how and who? I havent the faintest idea.
So I am forced to conclude that its a highly superior consciousness which sees things with reasons that completely elude us, sees how things must be done and sets them in motion (global gesture to indicate the play of forces) until they are done as they must be done. And where there was a person, it no longer exists there are no more persons: there are forces in movement that bring about certain material actions, but no more persons.
0 1967-05-24, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I know it is the Russian explanation of the recent trend to spirituality and mysticism that it is a phenomenon of capitalist society in its decadence. But to read an economic cause, conscious or unconscious, into all phenomena of mans history is part of the Bolshevik gospel born of the fallacy of Karl Marx. Mans nature is not so simple and one-chorded as all thatit has many lines and each line produces a need of his life. The spiritual or mystic line is one of them and man tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant religionism, by spiritism, demonism and what not, in his more enlightened parts by spiritual philosophy, the higher occultism and the rest, at his highest by the union with the All, the Eternal or the Divine. The tendency towards the search of spirituality began in Europe with a recoil from the nineteenth centurys scientific materialism, a dissatisfaction with the pretended all-sufficiency of the reason and the intellect and a feeling out for something deeper. That was a pre-war [of 1914] phenomenon, and began when there was no menace of Communism and the capitalistic world was at its height of insolent success and triumph, and it came rather as a revolt against the materialistic bourgeois life and its ideals, not as an attempt to serve or sanctify it. It has been at once served and opposed by the post-war disillusionmentopposed because the post-war world has fallen back either on cynicism and the life of the senses or on movements like Fascism and Communism; served because with the deeper minds the dissatisfaction with the ideals of the past or the Present, with all mental or vital or material solutions of the problem of life has increased and only the spiritual path is left. It is true that the European mind having little light on these things dallies with vital will-o-the-wisps like spiritism or theosophy or falls back upon the old religionism; but the deeper minds of which I speak either pass by them or pass through them in search of a greater Light. I have had contact with many and the above tendencies are very clear. They come from all countries and it was only a minority who hailed from England or America. Russia is differentunlike the others it has lingered in mediaeval religionism and not passed through any period of revoltso when the revolt came it was naturally anti-religious and atheistic. It is only when this phase is exhausted that Russian mysticism can revive and take not a narrow religious but the spiritual direction. It is true that mysticism revers, turned upside down, has made Bolshevism and its endeavour a creed rather than a political theme and a search for the paradisal secret millennium on earth rather than the building of a purely social structure. But for the most part Russia is trying to do on the communistic basis all that nineteenth-century idealism hoped to get atand failedin the midst of or against an industrial competitive environment. Whether it will really succeed any better is for the future to decide for at present it only keeps what it has got by a tension and violent control which is not over.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1967-06-17, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The safest and most healthy attitude of the mind is like this one: we have been told in a positive and definite way that the supramental creation will follow the Present one, so, whatever is in preparation for the future must be the circumstances needed for the advent whatever they are. And as we are unable to foresee correctly what these circumstances are, it is better to keep silent about them.
I wanted to tell you that I saw V. a few days ago, and he said that according to what he had felt or seen, he was ninety-five percent certain that a new conflict will break out around September or October, probably in the direction of Pakistan or China: between Pakistan and India or between China and India.
--
But a few years ago, you said that the fate of the Present civilization will be settled in 1967. You used the word settled.3 Well, the impression is that if the future is to be really settled, a great many things, a great many latent diseases are yet to come out, arent they?
Yes Yes (Mother nods her head several times and remains silent).
--
A disciple asked Mother in March, 1963: "Mother, on 30th August 1945, you had said: 'I cannot promise you that the Divine's Will is to preserve the Present human civilisation.' Can you NOW say that the Divine has decided to preserve the Present human civilisation?" Mother answered: "It will be SETTLED in 1967."
Darjeeling, in the Himalayas, is near the border between Sikkim and Nepal, not far from China.
0 1967-06-21, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, he ended his letter with: This conflict which must decide the Present civilization 1 So my last sentence is in answer to that.
Yes, thats not where the issue is being played out.
--
One sentence in the Mothers reply in connection with the Israeli-Arab war seems to me to be very ominous: This is not the conflict that will decide the future of our civilisation. Does it mean that there will be another bigger conflict in which the Present civilisation will be destroyed though the world will be saved? Or does it mean that there may not be any war at all and the fate of our civilisation may be decided by natural evolution of consciousness? But the last one seems very unlikely except that the complete transformation of the Mothers physical will produce such tremendous effect everywhere that disharmony will become impossible.
(July 19, 1967)
--
If, as Sri Aurobindo announced, the supramental Power is to enter a realizing phase in 1967 and if, as Mother said, the fate of the Present civilization is to be settled in 1967, it is clear that the earths many latent diseases must come out in the open and find a focus somewhere, as an abscess is the focal point for the disease of the body, our earth body.
There are no catastrophes. The Supramental is a force of order and harmony. Thus what may seem to us at first glance to be a catastrophe is bound to actually put things in order, work in every way and every detail towards putting the earth in order.
0 1967-07-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh! Thats a remarkable thing: in every age, and probably on the contrary, the farther you go into the past, theres a jumble, a clutter of quite uninteresting thingswhich disappear. They disappear, they are destroyed. There only remains what had an interesting inner life. So the past seems to us much more interesting than the Present, but from our age all the clutter will also disappear and be dissolved in the same way, and only the best will remain, except if they use mechanical means to preserve lots of recordings of lots of stupidities. But otherwise.
I have, for instance, an impression (a strong impression) that in the Assyrian age they had a means, they had found a means to record and preserve sound. It must have been destroyed, it disappeared. But its a very strong impression, linked to certain memories and (psychic) impressions like the ones I said: they arent ideas, but [vibrations]. There was a capacity to make the invisible speak, you understand. They had a machine. It must have been destroyed with the rest?
0 1967-08-19, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
By a rather striking "coincidence," since Mother's vision of July 29 ("Christianity deifies suffering"), Christianity was going to crowd in on Mother in succession: monks, bishops etc., including the Present lady who will figure in the Agenda on several occasions. Which goes to show that Mother's "visions" are in reality actions.
***
0 1967-08-26, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats one of the things that was seen very clearly the other day, when there was that Knowledge-Consciousness: when the Manifestation has sufficiently emerged from the Inconscient so that the whole necessity of struggle created by the presence of the Inconscient becomes progressively and increasingly pointless, it will disappear quite naturally, and progress, instead of taking place in effort and struggle will begin to take place harmoniously. Thats what the human consciousness envisions as a divine creation on earthit will still be only a stage. But to the Present stage, its a sort of harmonious culmination that will change universal progress (which is constant) from a progress in struggle and suffering into a progress in joy and harmony. But what was seen was that this sense of inadequacy, of something incomplete and imperfect, can be expected to exist for a very long time (if the notion of time remains the same I dont know about that?). But any change implies time, doesnt it? We cant express it in terms of time as we know it, but it implies a succession.
All those so-called problems (I constantly receive questions and more questions and problems of the mindall the problems of Ignorance) are problems of earth-worms. As soon as you emerge above, that type of problem no longer exists. There are no contradictions either. Contradictions always arise from the inadequacy of vision and the incapacity to see something from all standpoints at once.
0 1967-11-29, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont know, but at each darshan I feel as if I am a different person, and when I see myself like this, objectively, indeed I see a different person every time. Sometimes an old Chinese! Other times a sort of transposition of Sri Aurobindo, a veiled Sri Aurobindo; and then sometimes, a person I am very familiar with, but not the Present one: a person I was just ONCE. That has happened several times.
But here too, I get an impression of someone Its very different from you as you are usually.
0 1968-02-03, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But when the body is ready, it will be able to let itself go like that WITHOUT BEING DISSOLVED. And thats the work of preparation. The movement, yes, is to let oneself melt entirely. But the result is the egos abolition, that is to say, an UNKNOWN state, you understand, which we may call physically unrealized, because all those who sought Nirvana did so by giving up their body, whereas our work is to make the body, the material substance, capable of melting; but then, the principle of individualization remains, and all the egos drawbacks disappear. Thats the Present attempt. How to keep the form without the egos presence?thats the problem. Well, thats how it takes place, little by little, little by little. Thats why it takes time: each element is taken up again, transformed. Thats the marvel, that is it (for the ordinary consciousness, its a miracle): its keeping the form while entirely losing the ego. For the vital and the mind, its easier to understand (for most people its very difficult, but still for those who are ready, its easy to understand, and then the action can be much more rapid), but HERE, this (Mother points to her body), for it not to be dissolved by this movement of fusion? Well, thats precisely the experience, thats it. And there is a slight movement of patience, a movement of its really the deep essence of compassion: the minimum wastage for the maximum effect. That is, one goes as fast as one can, but delays arise from the need to prepare the various elements.
Thats precisely the so interesting curve at present unfolding. At times, you feel as if everything, everything is dissolving, getting disorganized; and I have observed closely: at first the physical consciousness wasnt sufficiently enlightened, and when those inner preparations took place, it would feel, Ah, this must be what heralds death; then, little by little, came the knowledge that it wasnt that at all, it was only the inner preparation to be capable, capable of identification. And then, on the contrary, the very clear vision of this plasticity so particular, this suppleness so extraordinary that if it were realized once its realized, it obviously means the abolition of the necessity of death.
0 1968-02-28, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It has been coming little by little, little by little. I told you what Sri Aurobindo revealed to me about Indias condition, which was the symbolic representation of the Present condition of mankind; and thats why, Sri Aurobindo told me, thats why Auroville has been created.2 Then I understood. Since then, it has become very clearclear, I mean he seems to have made it spread and people seem to begin to understand.
So there.
0 1968-03-16, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These last few days, seen again in the Present imperfect consciousness, there repeatedly came (but its all methodical and organized by an overall organization infinitely superior to anything we can imagine) a state which is the state causing a break in the equilibrium, that is, the dissolution of the formwhats usually called death. And that state went up to the extreme limit, like a demonstration, with at the same time the state (not a perception the state) that prevents the break in the equilibrium and allows progress to go on without break. The result, in the body consciousness, is the simultaneous perception (so to speak simultaneous) of what we might describe as the extreme anguish of dissolution (though its not quite that, but anyway) and the extreme Ananda of union the two simultaneously.
So if you translate it into ordinary words: the extreme fragility (more than fragility) of the form, and the eternity of the form.
0 1968-04-06, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But this (Mother points to her note) is a concession to the Present state of mankind, because, to tell the truth, in Auroville there should only be individual cases. What I mean is this: there may be people who get drunk and are nonetheless fit to live in Auroville. So we cant make a general rule. But if we dont make a general rule, on what ground can we say to someone (whos been accepted, thats the difficulty), No, you must changeei ther you stop this, or else you cant stay in Auroville?
What is said of alcohol can be said of drugs; and it can be said of many other things.
0 1968-05-29, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If we consider that a child must only learn, know and be aware of what can keep him pure of all lower, crude, violent and degrading movements, then we should eliminate at one stroke the entire contact with the rest of mankind, beginning with all those accounts of wars, murders, conflicts and deceits that are called History; we should eliminate the Present contact with family, parents and friends; and we should constantly control the childs contact with all the vital impulses of his own being.
This idea is what led to monastic life shut in a convent, or to ascetic life in the cave or the forest.
0 1968-06-15, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Like this fact that I am increasingly stooped (although its neither the result of fatigue nor the result of a lack of equilibrium, nor it has no material cause), my impression is that the Present part of the body (or rather the part belonging to the past) is shrinking, while I myself, my consciousness, I am so vast and on the contrary so large and so powerful, but at a distance, you understand! I dont know how to explain, its a strange sensation. Its as if you were still dragging some old baggage along.2 But its not that it isnt willing. Its more or less difficult, you understand, so it takes more or less time. Its like elements lagging behind.
But the new way of being would only be visible to someone who himself or herself had the supramental vision. I MATERIALLY see all sorts of things, which arent visible to others (Mother looks around Satprem). But its materially.
0 1968-12-21, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Once or twice, when its what we might call its anguish of knowing was very intense, when it had the full sense of the Presence the sense of the Presence everywhere, within, everywhere (Mother touches her face and hands)it wondered how (not even why, no such curiosity), HOW COME the Present disorder? Well, when that was very intense, very intense, once or twice it got the impression: once that is found, it means immortality.
So its constantly pushing, pushing like that to catch hold of the secret; you feel youre about to find it, and then Then theres a sort of lull in the aspiration: peace, peace, peace. You know, once or twice, the impression: Ah! Its going to be understood (understood, that is, LIVED; its not understood with the thoughtlived), and then (gesture of eluding). And a Peace coming down.
0 1968-12-25, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And then You know that from every side Ive been trying to get Sri Aurobindo published [in France], in particular The Human Cycle. At last I got a letter from a certain J. B., who writes: For a long time now, a publisher (F.) has been asking me to create a collection in his publishing house. I thought of a few books, mostly foreign ones, grouped around a title such as Towards the spiritual mutation and focused on the Present researches, individual and clumsy, often dangerous, but sincere and undertaken in a spirit quite different from that of the former generation, the spirit of a certain youth I am in contact with. The idea is to show these young people that their attempts and aspirations are legitimate, even if they have discovered them through drugs, since in many cases drugs alone have been able to unmoor them from the Cartesian rationalist bedrock, to put before them experiences that, at least, are positive, and to offer them directions and models. In other words, the aspect of amateurism and exoticism found in Z [another publisher] would be replaced here by a practical and technical side, wide open to all spiritual researches, whatever they may be, to all duly controlled metapsychical experiments, serious psychedelic experiments (I have T. Leary in mind, for instance), new theologies Naturally, there would be room, a major place, for the Oriental endeavor. In sum, it would involve all researches and attempts to crack open that sort of corset within which the Western mind has been going in circles for such a long time. That does not in the least rule out, on the contrary, certain scientific worksof pure sciencein which, out of intrinsic necessity, this Cartesianism has already been singularly shaken. Of course, all that would make for quite an ill-assorted backdrop for Sri Aurobindos thought, a backdrop you will regard as unworthy of it. The planned Collection might be called Spiritual Adventures.
We can try.
0 1969-01-01, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Certainly, according to the Present experience, the majority the vast majorityof illnesses and bodily disorganizations come from the vital and the mind, from their influence.
(silence)
0 1969-01-29, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
So all these embellishments of the Present are uninteresting, I find.
Exactly And the whole day long, from morning to night, they pester me with fuss of this sort (Mother points to the brochure).
0 1969-02-01, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body,for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentified with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come. I speak of course of yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the Present consciousness in the Present body Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functionings it would be a very small gain.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1969-02-08, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This morning, it went on for three hours like that. In reality, it stopped only when I started seeing people, because naturally And in the night its the same thing, it goes on. Its like a supereducation of the body, of the bodys CONSCIOUSNESS, with illustrations. This story Ive told of Bluebeard, its like an illustration to make the body understand clearly, because it then FELT the state of consciousness it was in at the time. And having felt that, it understoodit was as if put in front of an abyss. It said, How?! An abyss of unconsciousness. And its very general. So then, there was the vision of the past, the vision of the Present condition, and a beginning of (gesture like a curve forward), the DIRECTION in which were moving, and a sort of opening (gesture in the distance). A vision ahead, far ahead, of the Harmony, here, which will manifest.
But then, at a certain point, the body wondered, Who or what is it that takes pleasure in this immense unfolding which started with something so obscure and moves towards something so luminous? All of a sudden, the body wondered, Why? And then (Mother holds her hands open upward, in suspense) there was no answer In fact, it was made to feel, Not yet. You arent yet ready, not yet. You cant understand.
--
2) What should the nature of this organization be? In the Present and in the Future.
Organization is a discipline of action, but for Auroville we aspire to go beyond organizations, which are arbitrary and artificial. We want an organization that is the expression of a higher consciousness working for the manifestation of the Truth of the Future.
0 1969-05-24, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body doesnt even worry about its purification. I dont know how to explain. Its night and day, ceaselessly, What You will, Lord, what You will. You understand, what You will in the future, instead of what You want in the Present, because its not only like this (gesture inward), but also like that (gesture outward, spread out). What You will, what You want. Thats all. And thats its perpetual state.
(silence)
0 1969-05-28, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
"That" seems to refer to the difficulty of the Present situation, but Mother may also be alluding to Pavitra's departure.
***
0 1969-06-25, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Working at a hastened pace. The body doesnt complain. It doesnt complain because There are two things at the same time. It has increasingly and in an increasingly precise way the full perception of its to use the exact word, its nothingness (that goes without saying, and without even a shadow of regret, because theres the full awareness that it cant be otherwise; in the Present state of matter, it cant be otherwise). Theres an interesting process of development through which the body sees IN DETAILin detail, in every detailhow the Force of Consciousness acts, and what to put things simply, what we turn it into. Its very interesting. For everything, you know, the details of every minute: how the Force of Consciousness acts, and what we turn it into. With, from time to time, a marvelous key for certain problems, and a chance given to apply the key to see how it worksit works admirably!
But all that you understand, its like a few drops in an ocean of work. Thats how it is. The work is terrestrial, of coursemore and more terrestrial, even the body has a connection with the whole and therefore rather tremendous. But the sense of limitlessness in regard to the Force (not only the Consciousness, but the Force), the sense of limitlessness is becoming more and more permanent. The scale of the work in proportion with the form [Mothers body] is very perceptible, and perceptible in a very keen way, but there is the sense of the inanity of this formnot even its relative character: almost its inexistence, something like the sense of a continuing illusion. And then, quite concretely, the wonderful allpowerfulness of the Consciousness-Force; that comes with the impression that so-called miracles are nothing at all, a natural working. But you understand, the work has the proportion of the Consciousness, and it has to be done on (laughing) on the scale of the body. So that gives a sort of perception of an immensity that has to worked out on one point. I cant express it, its something inexpressible with words. But I need to have some peace.
0 1969-08-23, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
You know that the [presidential] elections have taken place, and that there were three candidates. Among the three, one1 had seemed to me the most apt to give India her true place among the nations of the earth I was immediately told that it was phantasmagoric and quite impossible. I didnt insist. They told me, Here are the three candidates (I told you last time), so I had only one solution, only one way, that was to concentrateconcentrate with an aspiration and ask for the best to happen for the country. Thats the message I sent to Delhi; I said to them, I have received the assurance that what would happen would be the best for the country (in the Present conditions). Thus there was one man of worth and no chance; another man, very old,2 and a third man,3 upright and capable, with some qualities, but a little behind the times, that is to say, clinging to the past, and quite appalled by the decisions Indira had made.4 So officially, he was against her way of governing. That man sent me his photos, asking for my blessings; I wrote, Blessings on one of the photos,5 gave it to L. and told him (you know that he left for Delhi), While you are there, if you see the possibility, meet that man and give him the photo, saying, Here, Mother sends you her blessings, but she warns you that she stands behind Indiras way of acting. I dont know what happened, but on the day of the election I was like that, with No active thought, simply, The best for the country, the best for the country and its the old one who made it!6 Not only did he make it, he also sent me a telegram to thank me! So you understand, it precisely shows where things stand. Thats how it is.
Actively, outwardly, I would never have been able to say, Choose this man. I only said, The best for the country. I dont know why or how, because because, mon petit, our human consciousness is SO SMALL! Even when we identify with the general Consciousness, we feel so small, so microscopic in comparison with the true, all-containing Consciousness. We cant contain all! Even, even when we identify with this Consciousness, we become like this (gesture showing emptiness at the forehead level), absolutely silent and still, with only a luminous Vibration, IMMENSE, you know, infinite, and an infinite power, too, but (same gesture to the forehead) no translation of any sort, nothing like a thought. So then, if we want to intervene between That and circumstances, we are OBLIGED to make mistakes, we cant do otherwise! So the only way is to stay like this (still gesture, turned upward). Thats why I am like this, silent. You told me, I dont understand your way of acting in Auroville: its nothing but that. Its because our thought limits, opposeseven, even the vastest consciousness, you understand, is only a TERRESTRIAL consciousness, a terrestrial consciousness, and its very small. Very small. And very small especially from the point of view of consequences, of the sequence of circumstances (Mother draws a curve), of how this will bring about thatwe dont see. So one must be like this (gesture turned upward), and simply let this Consciousness act. And there was the result: it is the third man who made it. I found it quite amusing. Quite amusing. I thought, There you are!
0 1969-08-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had yesterday a long and interesting conversation with a nineteen-year-old boy who took part in the May revolution in Paris;2 he was one of the students Communist leaders. He read that little text I wrote, which I called The Great Sense, in which I try to say the true sense of things, which is neither in violence nor in nonviolence, but something else. He is a Communist, but he was very moved, he was deeply touched and called everything into question. So I tried to explain to him what you once told me, that idea of a silent, immobile revolution:3 hundreds of thousands of students who refuse, who dont move and say, Weve had enough of degrees, enough of the Present structure of society, enough of being engineers or doctors or anythingwe want something else.
Did he understand?
0 1969-09-03, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I just saw that this morning in relation to someone for whom this is the first incarnation (!) And all those stories you know, the theosophical stories, Ive always thought they were cock-and-bull stories, but that was not a thought, nothing at all: the person was here, seated next to me, and she went into a very deep meditation; I looked (she had her head here [near Mothers knees]), I looked, and suddenly I lost all contact with the Present life, and I found myself there and saw that. And I saw it for a long while, not in a flash: a long while, several minutes. And I saw it moving: it was living, it wasnt a picture I saw them move, come, arrive from every side of the lake, or crossing the lake! And it was like a big mass, with a beautiful fur shining in the sunlightit was as lovely as can be!
And already there was an atom of consciousness.
0 1969-11-15, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo is in no way bound by the Present worlds institutions or current ideas whether in political, social or economic field; it is not necessary for him either to approve or disapprove of them. He does not regard either capitalism or orthodox socialism as the right solution for the worlds future; nor can he admit that the admission of private enterprise by itself makes the society capitalistic, a socialistic economy can very well admit some amount of controlled or subordinated private enterprise as an aid to its own working or a partial convenience without ceasing to be socialistic. Sri Aurobindo has his own views as to how far Congress economy is intended to be truly socialistic or whether that is only a cover, but he does not care to express his views on that point at present.
April 15, 1949
0 1969-11-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have something for next February: I received certain things regarding money and whats going on there, in Delhi.1 The government is shaky; so far, things are all right. Everything tends towards the dissolution of the Congress, but that was foreseen and willed. But then, the Congress president2 is on one side and the prime minister is on the other, each looking at the other Anyway, I think things will work out. But all that is mostly because of money: the most powerful party against the Present government, against Indira, is that of financiers. Theyre furious. So then, in this connection, I took up again what I had said long ago:
Money is not meant to make money, money is meant to prepare the earth for the new creation.
0 1969-12-13, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its amusing because it doesnt correspond (I cant say to what I think, because, to tell the truth, I no longer think) to my experience, but to the OTHER persons need. The answer is dictated FOR the other person. Words, expressions, the turn of phrase, the Presentation vary completely according to the person its written to. And this consciousness [of Mother] which is there (gesture above) has nothing to do with it at all. It just receives. It receives, and then it comes down and goes like this (hammering gesture) until Ive written! It wont go away until its written down. Thats very amusing . That way, one can do a lot of work without getting tired!
Id like to take a leaf out of your book!
0 1970-01-28, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo leads us to a twofold discovery which we urgently need if we want not only to find a way out of our suffocating chaos, but also to transform our world. By following him step by step in his prodigious explorationhis technique of inner spaces, if we may say sowe are led to the most important discovery of all times, to the threshold of the Great Secret which is to change the face of this world, namely, that consciousness is power. Hypnotized as we are by the Present inescapable scientific conditions in which we were born, we seem to find hope only in an ever more enormous proliferation of machines, which will see better than we do, hear better than we do, calculate better than we do, heal better than we doand finally perhaps live better than we do.
(Mother laughs)
0 1970-02-25, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I spent the whole of last night with Sri Aurobindo, but with a WORLD of explanations. He made me understand lots of things, but quite well, extraordinary. And practical: on the Present state of things. Shouldnt speak, thats why I am coughing, its on purpose (!)
Its extraordinarily interesting.
0 1970-03-18, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its in the direction of Matters perfect obedience to the Consciousness (the higher Consciousness); to the Present experience, its the divine consciousness, but its very probably what Sri Aurobindo called the supramental consciousness. Because there must be (gesture in gradations) an indefinite ascent.
Its a consciousness in which the sense of ego completely disappears, it does not exist. There isnt a person in front of others, you understand, receiving and sending influencesits no longer like that at all. Its a general play of forces (Mother makes a vast, fluid gesture) in which everyone spontaneously plays his part.
0 1970-06-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
In the ideal order, the first condition is to need something other than the Present world and human conditions.
That goes without saying.
0 1971-04-03, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
No, Mother. If its for the Presentation, people wont see the difference.
Thats true!
0 1971-05-08, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All the youth, those who are 16, 17 or 20 now, who seem to be going completely mad, well, in reality, all those young people NO LONGER WANT the Present Machinery they dont want it anymore. So they do foolish things.
Oh!
0 1971-09-22, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Malraux acknowledged, of course, that India had been created by nonviolence, but in the Present case, that kind of tactics is not possible. You are facing a Vietnam. Either you fight and you will have the whole world on your side, or you dont fight and the cause is lost.
While intellectuals are signing petitions in good faith, the Pakistanis are throwing tanks into the battle. Consequently, the only serious thing is the defense of Bengal. Do it intellectually if you like, but with the support of combat.
0 1971-10-02, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The problem is deeper, of course, as you well know. What is at stake at the end of the Present mental cycle is the creation of a new man that is what we are trying to do here with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Great Forces are at work here, in a humble way. And I am happy that Supermanhood did not leave you insensitive. Indeed, its cry needs you and your capacity to grasp the profound Sense of our human crisis.
May the Force of Sri Aurobindo and Mother be with you.
0 1971-10-16, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The body is in a state in which it sees that everything depends only on how it is tuned in to the Divineon its state of receptive surrender. I had the experience again a few days ago (I told you the last time, but I had it again in a very precise way): the same thing that causes much more than a discomforta suffering, an almost unbearable conditiondisappears immediately with just a change into a blissful state. I had the experience several times. And for me it is only a question of a certain sincerity having to do with intensity in the realization that everything is the work of the Divine and His action is moving towards the swiftest realization possible, given the Present conditions. Something like that.
What was his question?
0 1971-10-20, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Because I know this very well, I am content to work still on the spiritual and psychic plane, preparing there the ideas and forces, which may afterwards at the right moment and under the right conditions precipitate themselves into the vital and material field, and I have been careful not to make any public pronouncement as that might prejudice my possibilities of future action. What that will be will depend on developments. the Present trend of politics may end in abortive unrest, but it may also stumble with the aid of external circumstances into some kind of simulacrum of self-government. In either case the whole real work will remain to be done. I wish to keep myself free for it in either case.
Aurobindo
0 1971-11-24, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Yes, I have seen it, but I dont think it can be published in its present form as it prolongs the political Aurobindo of that time into the Sri Aurobindo of the Present time. You even assert that I have thoroughly revised the book and these articles are an index of my latest views on the burning problems of the day and there has been no change in my views in 27 years (which would surely be proof of a rather unprogressive mind). How do you get all that? My spiritual consciousness and knowledge at that time was as nothing to what it is nowhow would the change leave my view of politics and life unmodified altogether?
21 April 1937
0 1971-12-04, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It seems to me that, given the Present circumstances, your letter ought to be published.
I could have written it now.
--
Mother, is the Present upheaval going to affect your work of personal transformation?
That, I dont know.
0 1971-12-11, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Sri Aurobindo is this vision and this power of precipitating the future into the Present. What he saw in an instant the ages and millions of men will unwittingly accomplish. Unknowingly they will seek the new imperceptible quiver that has entered the earths atmosphere. From age to age great beings come amongst us to hew a great opening of Truth in the sepulchre of the past. And in actuality, these beings are the great destroyers of the past. They come with the sword of Knowledge to shatter our fragile empires.
This year, we are celebrating Sri Aurobindos Birth Centenary. He is known to barely a handful of men and yet his name will resound when the great men of today or yesterday are buried under their own debris. His work is discussed by philosophers, praised by poets, people acclaim his sociological vision and his yoga but Sri Aurobindo is a living ACTION, a Word becoming real, and every day in the thousand circumstances that seem to want to rend the earth and topple its structures we can witness the first reflux of the Force he has set in motion. At the beginning of this century, when India was still struggling against British domination, Sri Aurobindo asserted: It is not a revolt against the British Government [that is needed]. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature.2
0 1972-01-08, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its in the consciousness of the physical body, you know. A sort of not even an alternation of states, its as if both were constantly together: the sense that you know nothing and are completely impotent in terms of, well, the Present way of doing and knowing things; and at the same timeat the very same time (not even one behind the other, or one in the other or beside the other; I just dont know how to put it in words)at the same time, the sense of an absolute knowledge, an absolute power. And the two states are not in one another, not behind one another, or beside one another, theyre I dont know. Both are there (simultaneous gesture).
I could almost say that it depends on whether I am according to others (by I, I mean this body), according to other human beings, or according to the Divine. Thats it. And both states are (same simultaneous gesture).
0 1972-02-16, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its very interesting, you know, the greater part live in the past; a good number (they are more interesting) live in the Present; and just a few, an infinitesimal number, live in the future. Thats true.
Whenever I look at people and things I always get the feeling of going backwards! (gesture of turning around and looking behind) I know (its not even I know, or I feel, its none of that), I AMI am ahead. In consciousness, I am in the year 2000. So I know how things will be, and (Mother laughs) its very interesting!
0 1972-04-15, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Will some reach a similar stateat least similar or at any rate precursor to the supramental? Such seems to be the Present attempt, what is taking place now. And so you are no longer on this side, not yet on the otheryou are (suspended gesture). Rather a precarious condition.
Obviously, for all those who are born now and are here now have asked to participate in this, they have prepared for it in previous lives. From the standpoint of global knowledge, it would be interesting to know whats happening and how its happening. But from the individual standpoint, its not exactly pleasant(!), the period is difficult: you are no longer on this side, not yet on the otherjust in between. There we stand.
0 1972-06-28, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Whats the use? How much would anybody understand? Besides the Present business is to bring down and establish the Supermind, not to explain it. If it establishes itself, it will explain itselfif it does not, there is no use in explaining it. I have said some things about it in past writings, but without success in enlightening anybody. So why repeat the endeavor?
October 8, 1935
0 1973-02-08, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Normally it takes an entire lifetime, or even several lives in some cases. But here, in the Present conditions, you can do it in a few months. Those who have an ardent aspiration can do it in a few MONTHS.
(Mother remains concentrated for a few moments)
0 1973-02-17, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Oh! I have to cope with everything that contradicts the Divine in the past and the Present, and its. In this body. I mean, all the past is surging up from the subconscient, and now even everything that was repressed. It isnt something I feel or experience, but its a perception. The perception yes, of how all our notions of good and evil, right and wrong are futile for the Divine vision, absolutely futileunreal.
All human notions are so narrow and limited, so partial and tinged with moral preferences.
0 1973-03-10, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And also: Without You, its death; with You, its life. By death, I dont mean physical deathit might happen, it might be that if I lost the contact now, it would be the end but thats impossible! I feel that I AM THATWith some resistances the Present consciousness may still have, thats all.1
And when I see somebody (Mother opens her hands as if she were offering that person to the Light), regardless of who it is: like this (same gesture).
0 1973-04-14, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thus she was alone among themshe was soon to be truly alone, from May 19 onward, exactly thirty-five days after the Present conversation. I still hear Mothers son artlessly asking me, a few days after that May 19, How will we communicate with Mother now? There will be NO MORE communication, I replied. He was flabbergastednot I. WHO could she communicate with? But as I said, I was positive that the experience would continue with or without communication: Mother was going to sever the nutrient link to the old physiology they did not let her. There remained cataleptic trance, the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty they did not want it. I can still hear the voice of the Brute: No, I dont want to.
So?
02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This drive of evolution is a constant and permanent fact of Nature and she is in travail to bring about higher and higher stages of material transformation. It may not be easy to forecast from the Present status what the future mode or modes of Matter would be like, even as it was surely impossible to forecast mentalised Matter or living Matter, but that does not make the thing less inevitable.
The inevitability arises from the very fact of this evolutionary urge that a stage will come when Matter will undergo another, more radical and crucial change; it will be taken up by a higher reality than mind and suffused with a light and power belonging to that reality: a spiritual consciousness will emerge and with it spiritualised Matter, even as a mental consciousness emerged and mentalised (however inadequately) Matter, and yet anterior to that a vital consciousness emerged and vitalised Matter. There cannot be a limit to the degree of spiritualisation also; for the degree of the Spirit that Nature manifests in an earthly body will also be the measure to which the body itself is spiritualised. A perfectly dynamic spiritual consciousness will have the power to perfectly spiritualise the body and life and mind. And this grade and power of the supreme Spirit Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind.
02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now, it is precisely with the Asura that we have to deal in the Present war. This is not like other warsit is not a war of one country with another, of one group of Imperialists with another, nor is it merely the fierce endeavour of a particular race or nation for world-domination: it is something more than all that. This war has a deeper, a more solemn, almost a grim significance. Some thinkers in Europe, not the mere political leaders, but those who lead in thought and ideas and ideals, to whom something of the inner world is revealed, have realised the true nature of the Present struggle and have expressed it in no uncertain terms. Here is what Jules Romains, one of the foremost thinkers and litterateurs of contemporary France, says:
"Since the end of the Middle Ages, conquerors did harm perhaps to civilization, but they never claimed to bring it into question. They ascribed their excesses and crimes to motives of necessity, but never dreamed for a moment to hold them up as exemplary actions on which subject nations were called upon to fashion their morality, their code, their gospel.. . Since the dawn of modern times the accidents of military history in Europe have never meant for her the end of her most precious spiritual and moral values and a sudden annulment of all the work done by the past generations in the direction of mutual respect, equity, goodwillor, to put all into a single word, in the direction of humanity."
Modern thinkers do not speak of the Asura the Demon or the Titanalthough the religiously minded sometimes refer to the Anti-Christ; but the real, the inner significance of the terms, is lost to a mind nurtured in science and empiricism; they are considered as more or less imaginative symbols for certain undesirable qualities of nature and character. Yet some have perceived and expressed the external manifestation and activities of the Asura in a way sufficient to open men's eyes to the realities involved. Thus they have declared that the Present war is a conflict between two ideals, to be sure, but also that the two ideals are so different that they do not belong to the same plane or order; they belong to different planes and different orders. On one side the whole endeavour is to bring man down from the level to which he has arisen in the course of evolution to something like his previous level and to keep him imprisoned there. That this is really their aim, the protagonists and partisans themselves have declared frankly and freely and loudly enough, without any hesitation or reservation. Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' has become the Scripture of the New Order; it has come with a more categorical imperative, a more supernal authority than the Veda, the Bible or the Koran.
When man was a dweller of the forest,a jungle man,akin to his forbear the ape, his character was wild and savage, his motives and impulsions crude, violent, egoistic, almost wholly imbedded in, what we call, the lower vital level; the light of the higher intellect and intelligence had not entered into them. Today there is an uprush of similar forces to possess and throw man back to a similar condition. This new order asks only one thing of man, namely, to be strong and powerful, that is to say, fierce, ruthless, cruel and regimented. Regimentation can be said to be the very characteristic of the order, the regimentation of a pack of wild dogs or wolves. A particular country, nation or raceit is Germany in Europe and, in her wake, Japan in Asiais to be the sovereign nation or master race (Herrenvolk); the rest of mankindo ther countries and peoplesshould be pushed back to the status of servants and slaves, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. What the helots were in ancient times, what the serfs were in the mediaeval ages, and what the subject peoples were under the worst forms of modern imperialism, even so will be the entire mankind under the new overlordship, or something still worse. For whatever might have been the external conditions in those ages and systems, the upward aspirations of man were never doubted or questioned they were fully respected and honoured. The New Order has pulled all that down and cast them to the winds. Furthermore in the new regime, it is not merely the slaves that suffer in a degraded condition, the masters also, as individuals, fare no better. The individual here has no respect, no freedom or personal value. This society or community of the masters even will be like a bee-hive or an ant-hill; the individuals are merely functional units, they are but screws and bolts and nuts and wheels in a huge relentless machinery. The higher and inner realities, the spontaneous inspirations and self-creations of a free soulart, poetry, literaturesweetness and light the good and the beautifulare to be banished for ever; they are to be regarded as things of luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life.
--
As we see it we believe that the whole future of mankind, the entire value of earthly life depends upon the issue of the Present deadly combat. The path that man has followed so long tended steadily towards progress and evolutionhow-ever slow his steps, however burdened with doubt and faintness his mind and heart in the ascent. But now the crucial parting of the ways looms before him. The question is, will the path of progress be closed to him for ever, will he be compelled to revert to a former unregenerate state or even something worse I than that? Or will he remain free to follow that path, rise gradually and infallibly towards perfection, towards a purer, I fuller, higher and vaster luminous life? Will man come down' to live the life of a blind helpless slave under the clutches of I the Asura or even altogether lose his soul and become the legendary demon who carries no head but only a decapitated trunk?
We believe that the war of today is a war between the Asura and men, human instruments of the gods. Man certainly is a weaker vessel in comparison with the Asuraon this material plane of ours; but in man dwells the Divine and against the divine force and might, no asuric power can ultimately prevail. The human being who has stood against the Asura has by that very act sided with the gods and received the support and benediction of the Divine. The more we become conscious about the nature of this war and consciously take the side of the progressive force, of the divine force supporting it, the more will the Asura be driven to retire, his power diminished, his hold relaxed. But if through ignorance and blind passion, through narrow vision and obscurant prejudice we fail to distinguish the right from the wrong side, the dexter from the sinister, surely we shall invite upon mankind utter misery and desolation. It will be nothing less than a betrayal of the Divine Cause.
The fate of India too is being decided in this world-crisison the plains of Flanders, on the steppes of Ukraine, on the farthest expanses of the Pacific. The freedom of India will become inevitable and even imminent in proportion as she becomes cognizant of the underlying character and significance of the Present struggle, deliberately takes the side of the evolutionary force, works for the gods, in proportion as she grows to be an instrument of the Divine Power. The instrument that the Divine chooses is often, to all appearances, faulty and defective, but since it has this higher and mightier support, it will surely outgrow all its drawbacks and lapses, it will surmount all dangers and obstacles and become unconquerable. Thisis what the spiritual seeker means by saying that the Divine Grace can make the lame leap across the mountain. India's destiny today hangs in the balance; it lies in the choice of her path.
A great opportunity is offered to India's soul, a mighty auspicious moment is come, if she can choose. If she chooses rightly, then can she arrive at the perfect fulfilment of her agelong endeavour, her life mission. India has preserved and fostered through the immemorial spiritual living of her saints and seers and sages the invaluable treasure, the vitalising, the immortalising power of spirituality, so that it can be placed at the service of terrestrial life for the deliverance of mankind, for the transfiguration of the human type. It is this for which India lives; by losing this India loses all her reason of existenceraison d'tre the earth and humanity too lose all significance. Today we are in the midst of an incomparable ordeal. If we know how to take the final and crucial step, we come out of it triumphant, a new soul and a new body, and we make the path straight for the Lord. We have to recognise clearly and unequivocally that victory on' one side will mean that the path of the Divineof progress and evolution and fulfilmentwill remain open, become wider and smoother and safer; but if the victory is on the other side, the path will be closed perhaps for ever, at least for many ages and even then the travail will have to be undergone again under the most difficult conditions and circumstances. Not with a political shortsightedness, not out of -the considerations of convenience or diplomacy, of narrow parochial interests, but with the steady vision of the soul that encompasses the supreme welfare of humanity, we have to make our choice, we have to go over to the right side and oppose the wrong one with all the integrity of our life and being. The Allies, as they have been justly called, are really our allies, our friends and comrades, in spite of their thousand faults and defects; they have stood on the side of the Truth whose manifestation and triumph is our goal. Even though they did not know perhaps in, the beginning what they stood for, even though perhaps as yet they do not comprehend the full sense and solemnity of the issues, still they have chosen a side which is ours, and we have to stand by them whole-heartedly in an all-round comradeship if we want to be saved from a great perdition.
02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Thus we see that evolution, the unfolding of consciousness follows exactly the line of its involution, only the other way round: the mounting consciousness re-ascends step by step the same gradient, retraces the same path along which it had descended. The descending steps are broadly speaking (I) Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, (2) Supermind and its secondary form Overmind, (3) Mind(i) mind proper and (ii) the intermediary psyche, (4) Life, (5) Matter. The ascending consciousness starting from Matter rises into Life, passes on through Life and Psyche into Mind, driving towards the Supermind and Sachchidananda. At the Present stage of evolution, consciousness has arrived at the higher levels of Mind; it is now striving to cross it altogether and enter the Overmind and the Supermind. It will not rest content until it arrives at the organisation in and through the Supermind: for that is the drive and purpose of Nature in the next cycle of evolution.
Physical Science speaks of irreversibility and entropy in Nature's process. That is to say, it is stated that Nature is rushing down and running down: she is falling irrevocably from a higher to an ever lower potential of energy. The machine that Nature is, is driven by energy made available by a break-up of parts and particles constituting its substance. This katabolic process cannot be stopped or retraced; it can end only when the break-up ceases at dead equilibrium. You cannot lead the river up the channel to its source, it moves inevitably, unceasingly towards the sea in which it exhausts itself and finds its last repose andextinction. But whatever physical Science may say, the science of the spirit declares emphatically that Nature's process is reversible, that a growing entropy can be checked and countermanded: in other words, Nature's downward current resulting in a continual loss of energy and a break-up of substance is not the only process of her activity. This aspect is more than counterbalanced by another one of upward drive and building up, of re-energisation and re-integration. Indeed, evolution, as we have explained it, is nothing but such a process of synthesis and new creation.
02.03 - An Aspect of Emergent Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Professor Alexander spoke of the emergence of deities who would embody emergent properties other than those manifest in the Mind of man. Morgan asks whether there is not also a Deityor the Deityin the making. He establishes the logical necessity of such a consummation in this way: the evolutionary urge (or nisus, as it has been called) in its upward drive creates and throws up on all sides, at each stage, forms of the new property or principle of existence that has come into evidence. These multiple forms may appear anywhere and everywhere; they are strewn about on the entire surface of Nature. These are, however, the branchings of the evolutionary nisus which has a central line of advance running through the entire gradation of emergents; it is, as it were, the central pillar round which is erected a many-storeyed edifice. The interesting point is this, that at the Present stage of emergence, what the central line touches and arrives at is the Deity. Or, again, the thing can be viewed in another way. At the bottom the evolutionary movement is broad-based on Matter but as it proceeds upward its extent is gradually narrowed down;
Life is less extensive than Matter and Mind is still less extensive than Life. Thus the scheme of the movement can be figured as a pyramid the base of the pyramid represents Matter, but the apex where the narrowing sides converge is what is called the Deity.
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In Indian terminology, it would be the advent of the Purna Bhagavan in the human bodymnusm tanumsritam. All previous Avatars are only a preparation for the coming of this Supreme Divine. It is said also that the Present epoch marks a crucial turn and transition. We await the Kalki Avatar who will wipe off the past, the Iron Age, and bring in the Golden Age, Satya Yuga.
A question inevitably arises herewhat next? Once the evolutionary movement has reached the apex, does it stop there? After the apex, the Void? I t need not be so. The completion of the pyramid would mean simply the end of a particular order of creation, the creation in Ignorance. This is, indeed, what Sri Aurobindo envisages in his conception of the creation in supramental Gnosis. The evolutionary nisus, on its arrival at the apex, according to him crosses a borderland, leaps into another order of the world, of infinite Truth-Consciousness. Thereafter another new creation starts the building perhaps of another pyramid (if we want to continue the metaphor). The progression Of the evolutionary course is naturally expected to be an unending series. The pyramids rise tier upon tier ad infinitum. Only it is to be noted that in the basic pyramid the evolution starts from inconscience and moves from more ignorance to less ignorance through a gradually lessening density of darkness until the apex is reached where all shade of darkness is eliminated for ever. Beyond there is no mixture, however thin and diluted: it is a movement from light to light, from one expression of it to another, perhaps richer, but of the same quality.
This, however, is an aspect of the problem with which we are not immediately concerned. There is one question with which we have omitted to deal but which is nearer to us and touches present actualities. We spoke of the emergence of the Deity and of the Supreme Deityafter Mind. The question is, how long after? I do not refer to the duration of time needed, but to the steps or the stages that have to be passed. For between Mind and Deity, certainly between Mind and the Supreme Deity (Purushottama, as we would say), there may presumably still lie a course of graded emergence. In fact, Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Overmind and the Supermind, as farther steps of the evolutionary progress coming after Mind. He says that Mind closes the interior hemisphere of man's nature and consciousness; with Overmind man enters into the higher sphere of the Spirit. In this view, the religious feeling or perception or conduct would be but an intermediary stage between Mind and Overmind. They are not really emergent properties, but reflections, faint echoes and promises of what is to come, mixed up with attributes of the Present mentality. The Overmind brings in a true emergence.
Still Overmindwhose characteristic is a cosmic consciousness and a transcendence of all ego-senseis not the firm basis on which a new terrestrial organisation can stand and endure. It is still a basis of unstable equilibrium. For it is not the supernal light and, although it transcends all ignorance, yet does not possess that absolute synthetic unity, that transcendent power of consciousness which is at once the cosmic and the individual. That is the domain of the Supermind.
02.03 - National and International, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have just passed through another, a far greater, a catastrophic Kurukshetra, the last Act (Shanti Parvam) of which we are negotiating at the Present moment. The significance of this cataclysm is clear and evident if we only allow ourselves to be led by the facts and not try to squeeze the facts into the groove of our past prejudices and set notions. All the difficulties that are being encountered on the way to peace and reconstruction arise mainly out of the failure to grasp what Nature has forced upon us. It is as simple as the first axiom of Euclid: Humanity is one and all nations are free and yet interdependent members of that one and single organism. No nation can hope henceforth to stand in its isolated grandeurnot even America or Russia. Subject or dependent nations too who are struggling to be free will be allowed to work out their freedom and independence, on condition that the same is worked out in furtherance and in collaboration with the ideal of human unity. That ideal has become dynamic and insistent the more man refuses to accept it, the more he will make confusion worse confounded.
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02.04 - The Kingdoms of the Little Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Absorbed in the Present act, the fleeting days,
None thought to look beyond the hour's gains,
02.05 - Federated Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The last great war, out of its bloody welter, threw up a mantra for the human consciousness to contemplate and seize and realise: it was self-determination. the Present world-war has likewise cast up a mantra that is complementary. The problem of the unification of the whole human race has engaged the attention of seers and sages, idealists and men of action, since time immemorial; but only recently its demand has become categorically imperative for a solution in the field of practical politics. Viewed from another angle, one can say that it is also a problem Nature has set before herself, has been dealing with through the ages, elaborating and leading to a final issue.
The original unit of the human aggregate is the family; it is like the original cell which lies at the back of the entire system that is called the human body or, for that matter, any organic body. A living and stable nucleus is needed round which a crystallisation and growth can occur. The family furnished such a nucleus in the early epochs of humanity. But with the growth of human life there came a time when, for a better and more efficient organization in collective life, larger units were needed. The original unit had to be enlarged in order to meet the demands of a wider and more complex growth. Also it is to be noted that the living body is not merely a conglomeration of cells, all more or less equal and autonomous something like a democratic or an anarchic organization; but it consists of a grouping of such cells in spheres or regions or systems according to differing functions. And as we rise in the scale of evolution the grouping becomes more and more complex, well-defined and hierarchical. Human collectivity also shows a similar development in organization. The original, the primitive unit the familywas first taken up into a larger unit, the clan; the clan, in its turn, gave place to the tribe and finally the tribe merged into the nation. A similar widening of the unit can also be noticed in man's habitat, in his geographical environment. The primitive man was confined to the village; the village gradually grew into the township and the city state. Then came the regional unit and last of all we arrived at the country.
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the Present war puts the problem in the most acute way. Shall it be still a nation or shall it be a "commonwealth" that must henceforth be the dynamic unit? Today it is evident, it is a fact established by the sheer force of circumstances that isolated, self-sufficient nations are a thing of the past, even like the tribes of the Hebrews or the clans of the Hittites. A super-nation, that is to say, a commonwealth of nations is the larger unit that Nature is in travail to bring forth and establish. That is the inner meaning of the mighty convulsions shaking and tearing humanity today. The empire of the pastan empire of the Roman type and patternwas indeed in its own way an attempt in the direction of a closely unified larger humanity; but it was a crude and abortive attempt, as Nature's first attempts mostly are. For the term that was omitted in that greater synthesis was self-determination. Centralisation is certainly the secret of a large organic unity, but not over-centralisation; for this means the submission and sacrifice of all other parts of at! organism to the undue demands and interests of only one organ which is considered as the centre, the metropolis. Such a system dries up in the end the vitality of the organism: the centre, sucking in all nourishment from the outlying members suffers from oedema and the whole eventually decays and disintegrates. That is the lesson the Roman Empire teaches us.
The autocratic empire is dead and gone: we need not fear its shadow or ghostly regeneration. But the ideal which inspired it in secret and justified its advent and reign is a truth that has still its day. The drive of Nature, of the inner consciousness of humanity was always to find a greater and larger unit for the collective life of mankind. That unit today has to be a federation of free peoples and nations. In the place of nations, several such commonwealths must now form the broad systems of the body politic of human collectivity. That must give the pattern of its texture, the outline of its configuration the shape of things to come. Such unit is no longer a hypothetical proposition, a nebula, a matter of dream and imagination. It has become a practical necessity; first of all, because of the virtual impossibility of any single nation, big or small, standing all by itself alonemilitary and political and economic exigencies demand inescapable collaboration with others, and secondly, because of the still stricter geographical compulsion the speed and ease of communication has made the globe so small and all its parts so interdependent that none can possibly afford to be exclusive and self-centred.
02.06 - Boris Pasternak, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
That is why even when Pasternak speaks of social progress, a better humanity, we are not sure. For what matters is the Present. A brave new world in the offing, yes. But how to take life in the meanwhile? Evidently, it is the life of the cross, you have to choose that or it is imposed upon you. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you and in spite of what the world and life are, you can create within you, possess in your inner consciousness something of the divine element, the peace that passeth understanding, the purity and freedom and harmony with oneself and with the entire creation, including even one's neighbours.
Inner divinity does not save you from an outer calvary. But you know how to accept it and go through it, not only patiently but gladly, for thereby you take upon yourself the burden of sorrow that is humanity's share in the life here below. I referred at the beginning to the tragedy of a sensitive soul; I may turn the phrase and speak of the sensitivity of a tragic soul. There are souls that are tragic in the very grain it is that which gives an unearthly beauty, nobilityindeed the martyr's aureole. It is not only that our sweetest songs arise out of our saddest thought, but that, as our poet says,
02.09 - The Way to Unity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have said, however, time and again, that the Present war is a great opportunity offered by Nature and Providence, opportunity that comes only once in a way; it is precisely the field of which we speak, the field par excellence, which can compel all centrifugal elements to come together, labour together, enjoy and suffer together and turn and transmute them into the very strongest centripetal components.
"Dans le pass, un hritage de gloire et de regrets partager, dans l'avenir un mme programme raliser; avoir souffert, joui, espr ensemble, voil ce qui vaut mieux que des douanes communes et des frontires conformes aux ides stratgiques: voil ce que l'on comprend malgr leg diversits de race et de langue. Je disais tout l'heure: "avoir souffert ensemble"; oui, la souffrance en commun unit plus que la joie. En fait de souvenirs nationaux, les deuils valent mieux que leg triomphes.. . "
02.10 - Independence and its Sanction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Precisely, the Present war brings to our door the opportunity most suited to the acquisition and development of this power and strength. The very things the Indian temperament once had in abundance but now lacks most and has to recoverdiscipline, organization, impersonality and objectivity in work, hard and patient labour, skill of execution in minute detailsqualities by virtue of which power is not only acquired, but maintained and fosteredare now made more easily available. These qualities cannot be mastered and developed with such facility and swiftness as under the pressure of the demands of a war. This does not mean that we have got to be militarists. But the world is such that if we wish to live and prosper we must know how to make use of the materials and conditions that are given to us. Many good things are imbedded among bad ones, and wisdom and commonsense do not advise us to throw out the baby with the bath-water. That is another matter, however.
If we had joined hands with the British in the war-work on their own termsto try to compel them to our terms is to put the cart before the horsewe would have seen that as we proceeded with the work, more and more of it came automatically under our charge, however small or slight it might have looked in the beginning. In the end or very soon we would have found that our possession of the field was an accomplished fact, there could be no question of denying or refusing, the fact had to be acceptedadmitted and ratified. It is the well-known policy of the camel which Aesop described in one of his Fables. We have to establish the inexorable logic of events which definitively solves the riddle, cuts the Gordian knot as it were. A theoretical, that is to say, a moral and legal pact or understanding is but a dam of sands.
02.11 - New World-Conditions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We do not doubt that it is the deliberate policy of these 'vampires' to keep us Indians down eternally as their serfs and slaves. But whatever be the truth of the fact in the past, it is a pity we do not see that things have changed a good deal and are changing steadily and profoundly and inexorably. It is not, as it is so often demanded, that there has been a change of, heart, in the sense that one has become saintly, self-forgetful, self-sacrificing, altruistic. We, on our part, have not become so and it is idle to expect of others to be so. What has happened is a physical change, a change, almost a revolution in the external conditions of life in the world, in the geographical and economic conditions, for example. The geographical revolution is this that all the nations and peoples of the earth have been thrown together to intermingle, have been forced to come into close and inextricable communion with one another: all barriers of distance and physical inaccessibility have been removed and practically eliminated. The universe may be expanding, but the earth has shrunk and has become very small indeed. A signal example of the kind of blunder that one could commit in this respect was that of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who said, not knowing what he said on the eve of the Present war, that Czechoslovakia was a far-off foreign country whose fate is of no concern or consequence to the British. Well, Time-Spirit must have had a hearty laughter over the wisdom of the statesman: it did not take long for the British to see that Czechoslovakia is dangerously near, indeed, it touches the very frontier of the British Isles. We have flown over the mighty "humps" that separated countries and continents and levelled them and made of the earth one even continuous plain, as it were. Neither the Poles nor the peaks of the Himalayas can hide any longer their millennial secrets from man's newly acquired Argus eye. The span and accuracy of our flying capacity have left no corner of the earth to lie in quiet and splendid isolation.
The geographical revolution has led inevitably to the economic revolution which is not less momentous, pregnant with prophecies of brave new things. We all know that the modern world was ushered in with the industrial revolution. As a result of this new dispensation, world and society gradually divided into two camps: on one side, the industrialists and on the other the agriculturists, or, in a general way, the possessors of raw materials. The Imperialists formed the first group, while the latter, dominated by these, belonged to the Colonies. The "backward" countries and people who could not take to industry, but continued the old system became a helpless prey to the industrial nations. Africa and Asia and the South American countries came under the domination of European nations, rather the West European Nations: they became the suppliers of raw materials and also the market for finished products. Also within the same country occupying the imperial status, there came a division, a class division, as it is called. A few industrial magnates or trusts (France had its famous Two-Hundred Families) monopolised all the wealth, became the top-dog, the "Haves", the others were mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, serfs and slaves, the "Have-Nots". Exploitation was-the motto of the age. The "exploiters" and the "exploited", this trenchant duality was the whole truth of the social scheme and that summed up the entire malady of the collective life. Then came the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution which brought to a head the great crisis and initiated the change-over to new conditions. The French Revolution called up from the rear of social ranks and set in front the Third Estate and gradually formed and crystallised, with the aid of the Industrial Revolution, what is known as the Bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution went a step farther. It dislodged the bourgeoisie and installed the Fourth Estate, the proletariate, as the head and front of society, its centre of power and governmental authority. In the meantime there was developing in the bourgeois society, too, a kind of socialism which aimed at the uplift and remoulding of the working class into a total social power. But the process could not, go far enough. The Industrial League, no doubt, began to release some of its monopolies, delegate some of its power and authority to the Proletariate and sought an armistice and entente; but still it is they who wielded the real power and gave to society the tone and impress of their characteristic authority. The Russian experiment made a bold departure and attempted to build up a new society from the very bottom: the manual labourers, they who produce with the sweat of their brow and make a society living and prosperous must also be its rulers. Now whatever the success or failure in regard to the perfect ideal, the thing achieved is solid; certain forces have been released that are working inexorably in and through even contrary appearances, they have come to stay and cannot be negatived. The urge, for example, towards a more equitable distribution of wealth and wealth-producing implements; an even balancing of economic values has been growing and gathering strength: it has become an asset of the body social. Instead of an unfettered competition between rival agencies, the mad drive for a jealous and closely guarded appropriation (rather, mis-appropriation) by private cartels, there has arisen an inevitable need for a unitary or co-operative control under a common direction, whether it be that of the state or some other body equally representing the common interest. In other words, the principle of co-operation has now become a living reality, a thing of practical politics. All effort towards progress and amelioration, cure of social ills and regaining of health and strength must lie in that direction: anything going the contrary way shall perforce be out of tune with the Time-Spirit and can cause only confusion, bring in stagnation or even regression.
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With this perspective in view, keeping always in front the probable shape of things to come, one must learn to consider the Present, look for those forces that make for the new world and thus help the course of evolution and progress. Nature does not care for her past formations, she is not bound to them; she is always throwing up chances and opportunitiesvariations-for new developments. Nature red in tooth and claw is only one side of the shield; and the picture is not as true today as it was even a few hundred years ago, in spite of the spells of devastating carnage she still allows in her surface movements. It may be that the very pressure and insistence of an inner harmony has brought to the fore, made acute difficulties and contraries that have to be met and solved for good.
International co-operation has become a thing of immediate necessity, of practical utility. We met in San Francisco, not out of the spirit of sheer idealism or altruism but because we were forced to it. Circumstances have come to such a pass that even local needs, natural aspirations can be best met and served in and through international understanding. It is the solution of international problems, the amelioration of international relations first that would more easily lead to the solution of national problems than the other way round, which was perhaps the normal direction of the world-forces even a decade or two ago. Such world-organisations as the UNRRA or even the Red Cross, although they do not go deep enough into the root problems and are not powerful enough to mould or control world-forces, appearing more or less as charitable institutions, are still concrete expressions of an urgent immediate demand for mutuality and solidarity among the nations, even between warring nations.
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India should consider the Present situation with calmness, detachment and wisdom, not hark back to the past, brooding over the mistakes and misdeeds of her erstwhile masters they are no longer masters; yes, forgiving and forgetting, one must face squarely the new situation and make the best use of it. India, that claims a spiritual heritage and a high and hoary civilisation, can afford to be idealistic even and envisage a deeper and higher law of Nature, of universal harmony and solidarity, of conscious co-operation. Apart from that, if as practical men, we look to our self-interest, then also it will be wise for us to take up the same line of procedure, viz., what idealism demands. A nation too, like the individual, can be swayed by pride, prejudice, passion, a false sense of prestige and a spirit of vengeance. However natural these reactions may seem to be, in view of the conditions of their incidence, they possess, more often than not, the property of the boomerang, they hit back the originating source itself. It has been said, for example, that the origin of the Present war the rise of Hitleris due to the Versailles Treaty that ended the last war, which was, in its turn a war of revenge having its origin on the field of Sedan; this campaign of 1870 again was the natural and inevitable outcome of the Napoleonic conquest. Thus there has been a seesaw movement in national relations without a definite issue. And pessimists of today aver that we are not come to the end of the spiral.
But we do not subscribe to such prognostics. There is no inevitability of the kind. "Time must have a stop." The two lower limbs of the dialectic must be rounded in then by a higher reality. For two reasons. First of, all, Nature herself moves towards synthesis and harmonydiscord and difference are part only of the process working for that eventual consummation. Secondly, the human spirit is there, with the urge of its inevitable destiny, to create its power in the vision and consciousness of the hidden truth and reality which 'surface contingencies seem often to deny.
02.12 - Mysticism in Bengali Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
For in the Present epoch we are rising on a new crest and everywhere, in all literatures, signs are not lacking of a supremely significant spiritual poetry being born among us.
In order to give you a taste of what this poetry is and how it evolved I shall cite samples of the various waves at their crest as they rose from epoch to epoch till today.
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The significance of the human personality, the role of the finite in the play of the infinite and universal, the sanctity of the material form as an expression and objectification of the transcendent, the body as a function of Consciousness-Force Delight are some of the very cardinal and supreme experiences in Bengali mysticism from its origin down to the Present day.
A mysticism that evokes the soul's delights and experiences in a language that has so transformed itself as to become the soul's native utterance is the new endeavour of the poet's Muse.
02.13 - On Social Reconstruction, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is the thing in human society which makes it valuable, worthy of humanity, gives it a place of honour and the right to live and continue to live? It is its culture and civilisation, as everyone knows. Greece or Rome, China or India did not attain, at least according to modern conceptions, a high stage in economic evolution: the production and distribution of wealth, the classification and organization of producers and consumers, their relation and functions were, in many respects, what is called primitive. An American of today would laugh at their uncouth simplicity. And yet America has to bow down to those creators of other values that are truly valuable. And the values are the creations of the great poets, artists, philosophers, law-givers; sages and seers. It is they who made the glory that was Greece or Rome or China or India or Egypt. Indeed they are the builders of Culture, culture which is the inner life of a civilisation. The decline of culture and civilisation means precisely the displacement of the "cultured" man by the economic man. In the Present age when economic values have been grossly exaggerated holding the entire social fabric in its stifling grip, the culture spirit has been pushed into the background and made subservient to economic and other cruder forces. That was what Julien Benda, the famous French critic and moralist, once stigmatised as "La Trahison des Clercs"; only, the "clercs" did not voluntarily betray, but circumstanced as they were they could do no better. The process reached its climaxperhaps one should say the very nadirin the Nazi experiment and something of it still continues in the Russian dispensation. There the intellectuals or the intelligentsia are totally harnessed to the political machine, their capacities are prostituted in the service of a socio-economic plan. Poets and artists and thinkers are made to be protagonists and propagandists of the new order. It is a significant sign of the times how almost the whole body of scientists the entire Brain Trust of mankind today, one might sayhave been mobilised for the fabrication of the Atom Bomb. Otherwise they cannot subsist, they lose all economic status.
In the older order, however, a kindlier treatment was meted out to this class, this class of the creators of values. They had patrons who looked after their physical well-being. They had the necessary freedom and leisure to follow their own bent and urge of creativity. Kings and princes, the court and the nobility, in spite of all the evils ascribed to them, and often very justly, have nevertheless been the nursery of art and culture, of all the art and culture of the ancient times. One remembers Shakespeare reading or enacting his drama before the Great Queen, or the poignant scene of Leonardo dying in the arms of Francis the First. Those were the truly great classical ages, and art or man's creative genius hardly ever rose to that height ever since. The downward curve started with the advent and growth of the bourgeoisie when the artist or the creative genius lost their supporters and had to earn their own living by the sweat of their brow. Indeed the greatest tragedies of frustration because of want and privation, occur, not as much among the "lowest" classes who are usually considered as the poorest and the most miserable in society, but in that section from where come the intellectuals, "men of light and leading," to use the epithet they are honoured with. For very few of this group are free to follow their inner trend and urge, but have either to coerce and suppress them or stultify them in the service of lesser alien duties, which mean "forced labour." The punishment for refusing to be drawn away and to falsify oneself is not unoften the withdrawal of the bare necessities of life, in certain cases sheer destitution. A Keats wasting his energies in a work that has no relation to his inner life and light, or a Madhusudan dying in a hospital as a pauper, are examples significant of the nature of the social structure man lives in.
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If it is said that the proletarian the manual laboureris given economic freedom not for the sake of that freedom merely, but for the sake of the cultural opportunity also that he will have in that way. None can demur to this noble and generous ideal, but- what must not be forgotten in that preoccupation is the fact that there exists already a culturally predisposed class in the Present society who also require immediate care and nourishment so that they may grow and flourish as they should. In our eagerness to take up the enterprise and adventure of reclaiming deserts and heaths and moorlands, there is a chance of our losing sight of the precious fertile lands, rich in possibilities that we already possess. The economic status has to be improved for all who are adversely placed in the modern system, certainly; but for a real improvement based upon just and true needs, for an adjustment that will make for the highest good of the society, what is first required is to ascertain the psychological status which should alone, at least chiefly, determine the economic status.
In the old Indian social organisation there was at the basis such a psychological pattern and that must have been the reason why the structure lasted through millenniums. It was a hierarchical system but based upon living psychological forces. Each group or section or class in it had inevitably its appropriate function and an assured economic status. The Four Orders the Brahmin (those whose pursuit was knowledgeacquiring and giving knowledge), the Kshattriya (the fighters, whose business it was to give physical protection), the Vaishya (traders and farmers who were in charge of the wealth of the society, its production and distribution) and the Sudra (servants and mere labourers )are a natural division or stratification of the social body based upon the nature and function of its different members. In the original and essential pattern there is no sinister mark of inferiority branded upon what are usually termed as the lower orders, especially the lowest order. If some are considered higher and are honoured and respected as such, it meant simply that the functions and qualities they stand for constitute in some way higher values, it did not mean that the others have no value or are to be spurned or neglected. The brain must be given a higher place than the stomach, although all its support and nourishment come from there. Hierarchy means, in modern terms, that the essential services must pass first, should have certain priorities. And according to the older view-point, the Brahmin, being the emblem and repository of knowledge, was considered as the head of the social body. He is the fount and origin of a culture, the creator of a civilisation; the others protect, nourish and serve, although all are equally necessary for the common welfare.
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As already stated, the remedy is to be sought in the salvage of the individual. the Present trend of social forces is towards movements in the mass. That was necessary perhaps; for larger, wider, indeed world-wide unities have to be found and established for the unification of the whole of humanity. But in the drive towards that-goal Nature seems to have overlooked for the moment the case of the individual, and naturally, man has been blind and one-sided in his attempts to reform and rebuild society and the world. This neglected thread has to be taken up again and put back into the web of social life. The value of the individual, the worth and speciality of each person has to be found and recognised; indeed it is round that centre that society can best be reformed and remade. And this can only be done by a spiritual outlook. For, the true individual is founded in the spirit, the spiritual consciousness; so long as man is limited to his body, life and mind, and his functions are solely determined by his earthly nature, so long he must needs be taken as a mere element in the mass, the cosmic mass. The true individual or person emerges only when something of man's spiritual being finds expression in these lower elements of his nature. And when man totally transcends his inferior sphere of existence and rises into his divine status where things are marshalled and organised through each individual truth-centre, then only there is the chance of a perfect social system descending upon earthly life.
Perhaps this is a far cry from the level of our normal humanity. But things have to be regarded and moulded from the highest heights; otherwise there will be no real solution, there can be only a temporary make-believe and a final frustration.
02.14 - Panacea of Isms, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, Nationalism is also not the summum bonum of collective living. The nation has emerged out of the family and the tribe as a greater unit of the human aggregate. But this does not mean that it is the last word on the subject, that larger units are not to be found or formed. In the Present-day juncture it is nationalism that has become a stumbling-block to a fairer solution of human problems. For example, India, Egypt, Ireland, even Poland, whatever may be the justifying reasons, are almost exclusively, chauvinistically, nationalistic. They believe that the attainment of their free, unfettered, separate national existence first will automatically bring in its train all ideal results that have been postponed till now. They do not see, however, that in the actual circumstances an international solution has the greater chance of bringing about a happier solution for the nation too, and not the other way round. The more significant urge today is towards this greater aggregationPan-America, Pan-Russia, Pan-Arabia, a Western European Block and an Eastern European Block are movements that have been thrown up because of 'a greater necessity in human life and its evolution. Man's stupidity, his failure to grasp the situation, his incapacity to march with Nature, his tendency always to fall back, to return to the outdated past may delay or cause a turn or twist in this healthy movement, but it cannot be permanently thwarted or denied for long. Churchill's memorable call to France, on the eve of her debacle, to join and form with Britain a single national union, however sentimental or even ludicrous it may appear to some, is; as we see it, the cry of humanity itself to transcend the modern barriers of nationhood and rise to a higher status of solidarity and collective consciousness.
Internationalism
03.01 - The Malady of the Century, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We have sought to increase our consciousness, but away from the centre of consciousness; so what we have actually gained is not an increase, in the sense of a growth or elevation of consciousness, but an accumulation of consciousnesses, that is to say, many forms and external powers or applications of consciousness. A multiplicity of varied and independent movements of consciousness that jostle and hurt and limit one another, because they are not organized round a fundamental unity, forms the personality of the modern man, which is therefore tending to become on the whole more and more ill-balanced and neuras thenic and attitudinizing, in comparison with the simpler and less equivocal temperament that mankind had in the past. And a good part of the catholicity or liberalism or toleration that appears to be more in evidence in the Present-day human consciousness is to be attributed not so much to the sense of unity or identity, that is the natural and inevitable outcome of a real growth in consciousness, but rather to the doubt and indecision and hesitation, to the agnosticism and dilettantism and cynicism of a pluralistic consciousness.
Cut away from the soul, from the central fount of its being, the human consciousness has been, as it were, desiccated and pulverized; it has been thrown wholly upon its multifarious external movements and bears the appearance of a thirsty shifting expanse of desert sands.
03.01 - The New Year Initiation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The scope of this New Year Prayer does not limit itself only to our individual sadhanait embraces also the collective consciousness which is specially the field of its application. It is the muffled voice of entire humanity in its secret aspiration that is given expression here. It is by the power of this mantra, protected by this invulnerable armour,if we choose to accept it as such,that the collective life of man will attain its fulfilment. We have often stated that the outstanding feature of the modern world is that it has become a Kurukshetra of Gods and Titans. It is no doubt an eternal truth of creation, this conflict between the divine and the anti-divine, and it has been going on in the heart of humanity since its advent upon earth. In the inner life of the world this is a fact of the utmost importance, its most significant principle and mystery. Still it must be said that never in the annals of the physical world has this truth taken such momentous proportions as in the grim present. It is pregnant with all good and evil that may make or mar human destiny in the near future. Whether man will transcend his half-animal state and rise to the full height of his manhood, nay even to the godhead in him, or descend back to the level of his gross brute naturethis is the problem of problems which is being dealt with and solved in the course of the mighty holocaust of the Present World War.
In her last year's message1 the Mother gave a clear warning that we must have no more hesitation, that we must renounce one side, free ourselves from all its influence and embrace the other side without hesitation, without reservation. At the decisive moment in the life of the world and of mankind, one must definitely, irrevocably choose one's loyalty. It will not do to say, like the over-wise and the over-liberal, that both sides the Allies and the Axis Powersare equalequally right or equally wrong and that we can afford to be outside or above the prejudices or interests of either. There is no room today for a neutral. He who pretends to be a neutral is an enemy to the cause of truth. Whoever is Dot with us is against us.
03.02 - Aspects of Modernism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The scientific spirit, in one word, is rationalisationrationalisation of Mind as well as of Life. With regard to Mind, rationalisation means to get knowledge exclusively on the data of the senses; it is the formulation, in laws and principles, of facts observed by the physical organs, these laws and principles being the categories of the arranging, classifying, generalising faculty, called reason; its methodology also demands that the laws are to be as few as possible embracing as many facts as possible. Rationalisation of life means the government of life in accordance with these laws, so that the wastage in natural life due to the diversity and disparity off acts may be eliminated, at least minimised, and all movements of life ordered and organised in view of a single and constant purpose (which is perhaps the enhancement of the value of life). This rationalisation means further, in effect, mechanisation or efficiency, as its protagonists would prefer to call it. However, mechanistic efficiency, whether in the matter of knowledge or of lifeof mind or of morals was the motto of the early period of the gospel of science, the age of Huxley and Haeckel, of Bentham and the Mills. The formula no longer holds good either in the field of pure knowledge or in its application to life; it does not embody the aspiration and outlook of the contemporary mind, in spite of such inveterate rationalists as Russell and Wells or even Shaw (in Back to Methuselah, for example), who seem to be already becoming an anachronism in the Present age.
The contemporary urge is not towards rationalisation, but rather towards irrationalisation. Orthodox science itself is taking greater and greater cognisance today of the irrational movements of nature, even of physical nature. Intuition and instinct are now welcomed as surer and truer instruments of knowledge and action than reason.
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We spoke of the extreme atomism of modern Science that has thrown into the background the solid unity of creation and is laying emphasis for the moment more upon the division and scattering of forces than upon the cohesiveness and identity of the substratum; still that unity has not been abrogated but has been maintained on the whole, even if as an underlying note. Not only so, the reign of multiplicity, by a curious detour, is working towards a discovery of enhanced unity. The plurality of the modern consciousness is moving towards a richer and intenser unity; it is not a static, but a dynamic unitya unity that does not suppress or merely transcend the diversity and disparity of its components but holds them together as an immanent force, and brings forth out of each its fullness of individuality. In the same way the Present-day movement towards internationalism or supra-nationalism has produced a rebound towards regionalism or infra-nationalism. And the voice of anarchism tends to be as insistent as that of collectivism.
The consciousness of yesterday was a unilateral movement. It rose up high and descended deep into the truth of things, but mostly along a single line. In the horizontal direction also, when it travelled, it effected a linear movement. The consciousness of today is complex and composite; it has lost much of the vertical movement; it does not very easily soar or dive, precisely because it has spread itself out in a multitude of horizontal movements. Our modern consciousness is outward gazing and extensive; it has not the in-gathering and intensive character of the old-world consciousness; but what it has lost in depth and height, it has sought to make up in width.
Simplicity and intensity, sublimity and profundity were the most predominant qualities of man's achievement in the past; what characterises human endeavour in the Present is its wideness, richness, complexity. It can also be noted that the corruptions of these qualities likewise mark out their respective ages. Fanaticism, for example, the corruption of a good and noble thing, fidelity, means a unilateral mind carried to its extreme; it is a characteristic product of the middle ages in the West as in the East. The modern world in its stead has given us dilettantism and cynicism, corruption of largeness and catholicity.
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.
03.02 - Yogic Initiation and Aptitude, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The question, however, can be raised the moderns do raise it and naturally in the Present age of science and universal educationwhy should not all men equally have the right to spiritual sadhana? If spirituality is the highest truth for man, his greatest good, his supreme ideal, then to deny it to anyone on the ground, for example, of his not being of the right caste, class, creed, or sex, to keep anyone at a distance on such or similar grounds is unreasonable, unjust, reprehensible. These notions, however, are born of a sentimental or idealistic or charitable disposition, but unfortunately they do not stand the impact of the realities of life. If you simply claim a thing or even if you possess a lawful right to a worthy object, you do not acquire thereby the capacity to enjoy it. Were it so, there would be no such thing as mal-assimilation. In the domain of spiritual sadhana there are any number of cases of defective metabolism. Those that have fallen, strayed from the Path, become deranged or even have had to leave the body, make up a casualty list that is not small. They were misfits, they came by their fate, because they encroached upon a thing they were not actually entitled to, they were dragged into a secret, a mystery to which their being was insensible.
In a general way we may perhaps say, without gross error, that every man has the right to become a poet, a scientist or a politician. But when the question rises in respect of a particular person, then it has to be seen whether that person has a natural ability, an inherent tendency or aptitude for the special training so necessary for the end in view. One cannot, at will, develop into a poet by sheer effort or culture. He alone can be a poet who is to the manner born. The same is true also of the spiritual life. But in this case, there is something more to take into account. If you enter the spiritual path, often, whether you will or not, you come in touch with hidden powers, supra-sensible forces, beings of other worlds and you do not know how to deal with them. You raise ghosts and spirits, demons and godsFrankenstein monsters that are easily called up but not so easily laid. You break down under their impact, unless your adhr has already been prepared, purified and streng thened. Now, in secular matters, when, for example, you have the ambition to be a poet, you can try and fail, fail with impunity. But if you undertake the spiritual life and fail, then you lose both here and hereafter. That is why the Vedic Rishis used to say that the ear then vessel meant to hold the Soma must be properly baked and made perfectly sound. It was for this reason again that among the ancients, in all climes and in all disciplines, definite rules and regulations were laid down to test the aptitude or fitness of an aspirant. These tests were of different kinds, varying according to the age, the country and the Path followedfrom the capacity for gross physical labour to that for subtle perception. A familiar instance of such a test is found in the story of the aspirant who was asked again and again, for years together, by his Teacher to go and graze cows. A modern mind stares at the irrelevancy of the procedure; for what on earth, he would question, has spiritual sadhana to do with cow-grazing? In defence we need not go into any esoteric significance, but simply suggest that this was perhaps a test for obedience and endurance. These two are fundamental and indispensable conditions in sadhana; without them there is no spiritual practice, one cannot advance a step. It is absolutely necessary that one should carry out the directions of the Guru without question or complaint, with full happiness and alacrity: even if there comes no immediate gain one must continue with the same zeal, not giving way to impatience or depression. In ancient Egypt among certain religious orders there was another kind of test. The aspirant was kept confined in a solitary room, sitting in front of a design or diagram, a mystic symbol (cakra) drawn on the wall. He had to concentrate and meditate on that figure hour after hour, day after day till he could discover its meaning. If he failed he was declared unfit.
03.04 - Towardsa New Ideology, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Russia has her Sovietic Communism, Germany, for the Present at least, her Nazidom, Italy her totalitarian Fascism, old England her Parliamentarianism and France her Bureaucratism; each nation finds the norm and scheme of self-rule that suits its temperament and character and changes and modifies that also in its own characteristic manner. Even so India must find her own scheme of Swarajya. If she is to live and be great and contri bute something to the enrichment and glory of human civilisation, she must look to herself, enter into herself and know and bring out what lies there buried. It is a grievous blunder to try to transplant a Mussolinian or Leninian or a Hitlerian gospel on an Indian soil. It is not desirable nor is it truly possible.
If, however, we take a right about turn and look away from the West to the Far East, we already see in Japan a different type of national self-government. It is based on an altogether different basis which may appear even novel to the modern and rationalistic European mentality. I am referring to the conception of duty which moulds and upholds the Japanese body politic and body social, as opposed to the conception of right obtaining royal rule in the Occident.
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On the other hand, although difficult, it may not prove impossible to cast the nature, character and reactions of the aggregate into the mould prepared out of spiritual realities by those who have realised and lived them. Some theocratic social organisations, at least for a time, during the period of their apogee illustrate the feasibility of such a consummation. Only, in the Present age, when all foundations seem to be shaking, when all principles on which we stood till now are crumbling down, when even fundamentalsthose that were considered as suchcan no more give assurance, well, in such a revolutionary age, one has perforce to be radical and revolutionary to the extreme: we have to go deep down and beyond, beyond the shifting sands of more or less surface realities to the un-shaking bed-rock, the rock of ages.
And India is pre-eminently fitted to discover this pattern of spiritual values and demonstrate how our normal lifeindividual and collectivecan be moulded and built according to that pattern. It has been India's special concern throughout the millenaries of her history to know and master the one thing needful (tamevaikam jnatha tmnam any vaco vimucatha), knowing which one knows all (tasmin vijte sarvam vijtam). She has made countless experiments in that line and has attained countless achievements. Her resurgence can be justified and can be inevitable only if she secures the poise and position which will enable her to impart to the world this master secret of life, this art of a supreme savoir vivre. A new India in the old way of the nations of the world, one more among the already too many has neither sense nor necessity. Indeed, it would be the denial of what her soul demands and expects to be achieved and done.
03.07 - The Sunlit Path, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Like the individual, nations too have their sunlit path and the path of the doldrum as well. So long as a nation keeps to the truth of its inner being, follows its natural line of development, remains faithful to its secret godhead, it will have chosen that good part which will bring it divine blessings and fulfilment. But sometimes a nation has the stupidity to deny its self, to run after an ignis fatuus, a mymrga, then grief and sorrow and frustration lie ahead. We are afraid India did take such a wrong step when she refused to see the great purpose behind the Present war and tried to avoid contri buting her mite to the evolutionary Force at work. On the other hand Britain in a moment of supreme crisis, that meant literally life or death, not only to herself or to other nations, but to humanity itself, had the good fortune to be led by the right Inspiration, the whole nation rose as one man and swore allegiance to the cause of humanity and the gods. That was how she was saved and that was how she acquired a new merit and a fresh lease of life. Unlike Britain, France bowed down and accepted what should not have been accepted and cut herself adrift from her inner life and truth, the result was five years of hell. Fortunately, the hell in the end proved to be a purgatory, but what a purgatory! For there were souls who were willing to pay the price and did pay it to the full cash and nett. So France has been given the chance again to turn round and take up the thread of her life where it snapped.
Once more another crisis seems to be looming before the nations, once more the choice has to be made and acted upon. In our weakness it is natural and easy to invoke God, to feel the presence of a higher Guidance, to trust in a heavenly light; but it is in our strength that we must know whose strength it is, and in whose strength it is that we conquer.
If the Present war has any meaning, as we all declare it has, then we must never lose sight of that meaning. And our true victory will come only in the process of the realisation of that meaning. That is the sunlit path we refer to here which the nations have to follow in their mutual dealings. It is the path of the evolutionary call to which we say we have responded and to which we must remain loyal and faithful in thought, in speech and in deed. If we see dark and ominous clouds gathering round us, dangers and difficulties suddenly raising their heads, then we must look about and try honestly to find out whether we have not strayed away from the sunlit path.
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03.10 - The Mission of Buddhism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
These are the two primarytruthsrya saryawhichBuddha's illumination meant and for which he has become one of the great divine leaders of humanity. First, he has discovered man's rationality, and second, he has discovered man's humanity. Since his advent two thousand and five hundred years ago till the Present day, in this what may pertinently be called the Buddhist age of humanity, the entire growth, development and preoccupation of mankind was centred upon the twofold truth. Science and religion today are the highest expressions of that achievement.
They speak of the coming of a new Buddha (Maitreya) with the close of the cycle now, ushering another cycle of new growth and achievement. It is said also that humanity has reached its apex, a great change-over is inevitable: seers and savants have declared that man will have to surpass himself and become superman in order to fulfil what was expected of him since his advent upon earth. If we say that the preparation for such a consummation was taken up at the last stage by the Buddha and Buddhism, and the Buddhistic inspiration, we will not be wrong. It was a cycle of ascending tapasya for the human vehicle: it was a seeking for the pure spirit which meant a clearance of the many ignorances that shrouded it. It was also an urge of the spirit to encompass in its fold a larger and larger circle of humanity: it meant that the spiritual consciousness is no more an aristocratic or hermetic virtue, but a need in which the people, the large mass, have also their share, maybe in varying degrees.
03.11 - Modernist Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is a simple truth that we state and it is precisely this that we have missed in the Present age. Chaucer created a new poetic world, Shakespeare created another, Milton yet a third, the RomanticsWordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byroneach of them has a whole world to his credit. But this they achieved, not because of any theory they held or did not hold, but because each of them delved deep and struck open an unfathomed and unspoilt Pierian spring. And this is how it should be. In this age, even in this age of modernism, a few poets have actually shown how or what that can be,a Tagore, a Yeats or A.E., by the bulk of their work, others of lesser envergure, in brief scattered strophes and stanzassuch lines, for example, from Eliot
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
03.11 - The Language Problem and India, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But this is judging the Present or the future by the past. Mankind is no longer exclusively or even mainly national inits outlook; it cannot remain so if it is to progress, to take the next step in evolution. We say if mankind overpasses the nationalistic stage and attains something of the international consciousness and disposition, it would be possible and even natural for a few at least among the educated to express themselves in and through the wider world language, not merely as an instrument of business deal, but as a vehicle of literary and aesthetic creation.
There are certain externalsocial and politicalcircumstances in existence today and will be more and more in evidence perhaps with the lapse of time which tend to corroborate and streng then that possibility. A language learnt for commercial or diplomatic transaction cannot remain limited to that function. Those who intend merely to learn may end very probably by cultivating it. And then it has been suggested that in the march of evolution towards world unity, there is likely to be an intermediate stage or rung where nations with special affinities or common interests will group together forming larger collectivities: there will be free associations of free nations, the Commonwealth as it has been termed. If India is to link herself specially to the English-speaking group, the English language will not cease to be an acquaintance but continue to be or develop into a very good friend.
03.13 - Human Destiny, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
On a comparatively shorter view of the human evolution we observe as, for example, Spengler has shown, a serial or serials of the rise and fall of races and nations and cultures. Is that a mere repetition, more or less of the same or very similar facts of life, or is there a running thread that points to a growth, at least a movement towards some goal or purpose to attain and fulfil? the Present cycle of humanity, which we may call and is usually called the historic age, dates from the early Egyptians and, in India, from the ancestral Vedic sages (prve pitra). On a longer outlook, what has been the nature of man's curve of life since then to the Present day? Races and cultures have risen and have perished, but they have been pursuing one line, moving towards one direction the growth of homo fabricus the term coined by NietzscheMan the artisan. Man has become man through the discovery and use of toolsfrom tools of stone to tools of iron, that marks his growth from primitiveness to civilisation. And the degree of civilisation, the distance he has travelled from his origins is measured precisely by the development of his tools in respect of precision, variety, efficiency, serviceability. Viewed from that standpoint the modern man has travelled indeed very far and has civilised himself consummately. For the tools have become the whole man; man has lost his human element and almost become a machine. A machine cannot run indefinitely, it has got to stop when life is not there. So it is often prognosticated now that man is at the end of his career. He is soon going to be a thing of the past, an extinct racelike one of the prehistoric species that died out because they could not change with the circumstances of life, because they became unchanging, hard and brittle, soto say, and fell to pieces, or otherwise they continued to exist but in a degraded, a mere vegetative form.
But, as we have said, man seems to have yet retained his youthfulness. He always just falls short of the perfect perfection, that is to say, in any single form or expression of life. Life did become stereotyped, mechanised, and therefore fossilised, more or less, in Egypt of the later Dynasties; in India too life did not become less inert and vegetative during two long periods, once just preceding the advent of the Buddha,.
03.15 - Origin and Nature of Suffering, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Suffering there is, some say, because the soul takes delight in it: if there was not the soul's delight behind, there would not be any suffering at all. There are still two other positions with regard to suffering which we do not deal with in the Present context, namely, (1) that it does not exist at all, the absolute Ananda of the Brahman being the sole reality, suffering, along with the manifested world of which it is a part, is illusion pure and simple, (2) that suffering exists, but it comes not from soul or God but from the Anti-divine: it is at the most tolerated by God and He uses it as best as He can for His purpose. That, however, is not our subject here. We ask then what delight can the soul take when the body is suffering, say, from cancer. If it is delight, it must be of a perverse variety. Is it not the whole effort of mankind to get rid of pain and suffering, make of our life and of the world, if possible, a visible play of pure and undefiled Ananda?
On the other hand, we do find that suffering is not always mere suffering, that it can be turned into a thing of joy; it is a fact proved in the lives of many a martyr and many a saint. Many indeed are those who have not only borne suffering passively but have welcomed it and courted it with happiness and delight. If it is said it is a perverse kind of pleasure, and if one wishes to hang it by calling it masochism, well, we do not solve the problem in that way, we seek to hide it behind a big word; it is at the most a point of view. What agrees with one's temperament (or prejudices) one calls natural and what one does not like appears to him perverse. Another person may have a different temperament and accordingly a different vocabulary.
03.15 - Towards the Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This world, this material existence is to be transmuted the portion of earthly human existence at least, with which we are most concerned. It is at present made of ignorance and sorrow and incapacity-composed of the particles of these entities; poor and sorry as they are, these have to be replaced by entities of light and joy and love, of peace and strength and wideness. Well, it is a transmutation or transubstantiation of the kind which Nature has already attempted as an experiment; I am referring to the alchemy of fossilisation. the Present human formation must be dipped and soaked-and held under high pressure in an environment of the desired material or materials that one has in view.
Such an environment does exist. It is pressing from within or from above and is heading towards a resultant material action. It is an awakened dynamic spiritual reality which awaits and is working for its supreme and inevitable destiny.
04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
One can answer, however, that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the Present cycle, the civilised or cultural life of humanity has not changed much, this does not mean that it cannot, will not change. The paleolithic age, it appears, covered a period of thirty to forty thousand years; the neolithic age also must have lasted some fifteen thousand years. The metal age is now not more than ten thousand years. So it does not seem to be too late; perhaps it is just time for another radical and crucial change to come as the chronological scheme would seem to demand.
We propose, however, to reopen the question and enquire if there has not been some kind of radical change or progress in the make-up of human nature and civilisation even within the span of historical times. This reminds us of the remarkable conclusion or discovery made by the much maligned and much adulated Psycho-analysts.
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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.
This super consciousness is based upon a double movement of sublimation and integration which are precisely the two things basically aimed at by present-day psychology to meet the demands of new facts of consciousness. The rationalisation, specialisation or foreshortening of consciousness, mentioned above, is really an attempt at sublimation of the consciousness, its purification and ascension from baseranimal and vegetalconfines: only, ascension does not mean alienation, it must mean a gathering up of the lower elements also into their higher modes. Integration thus involves a descent, but it has to be pointed out, not merely or exclusively that, as Jung and his school seem to say. Certainly one has to see and recognise the aboriginal, the infra-rational elements imbedded in our nature and consciousness, the roots and foundations that lie buried under the super-structure that Evolution has erected. But that recognition must be accompanied by an upward look and sense: indeed it is healthy and fruitful only on condition that it occurs in a consciousness open to an infiltration of light coming from summits not only of the mind but above the mind. If we go back, it must be with a light that is ahead of us; that is the sense of evolution.
04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
So far so good. But two things are to be taken note of. First of all, the resolution of the normal conflict in man's consciousness, the integration of his personality, is not wholly practicable within the scope of the Present nature and the field of the actual forces at play. That can give only a shadow of the true resolution and integration. A conscious envisaging of the conflicting forces, a calm survey of the submerged or side-tracked libidos in their true nature, a voluntary acceptance, of these dark elements as a part of normal human nature, does not automatically make for their sublimation and purification or transformation. The thing is possible only through another force and on another level, by the intervention and interfusion precisely of the superconsciousness. And here comes the second point to note. For it is this superconsciousness towards which all the strife and struggle of the under-consciousness are turned and directed. The yearning and urge in the subconsciousness to move forward, to escape outside into the light does not refer merely to the march towards normal awareness and consciousness: it has a deeper direction and a higher aimit seeks that of which it is an aberration and a deformation, the very origin and source, the height from which it fell.
This superconsciousness has a special mode of its quintessential energy which is omnipotent in action, immediate in effectivity. It is pure as the purest incandescent solar light and embodies the concentrated force of consciousness. It is the original creative vibration of the absolute or supreme Being. Sri Aurobindo calls this supreme form of superconscient consciousness-energy, the Supermind. There are of course other layers and strata of superconsciousness leading up to the super-mind which are of various potentials and embody different degrees of spiritual power and consciousness.
04.04 - A Global Humanity, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Man, individually and collectively, has passed and is passing through these steps of evolution. The last one is his goal at the Present stage. To be a saint, seer or sage is not enough for man. He must be a god. Indeed when he has succeeded to be a god then only would it be possible for him to become what a saint or a seer or sage has to be in order to fulfil himself totally and integrally. The human race as a whole is progressing along the same line towards the same consummation. That is the secret purpose and end of Nature, to evolve a growing developing material form housing, embodying higher and wider ranges of consciousness, integrating all elements into a more and more intimate and inviolable unity and harmony.
This progress towards ever higher and wider consciousness means also in man's social or collective life the formation of larger and larger aggregates, unification of mankind in ever widening groups. From man the solitary animal, through the family, the clan, the tribe to the nation the race has been increasing the circle of its sympathy and kinship. The birth of the modern nation out of regional and local groupings is a triumph of the emerging consciousness in humanity pointing to another signal and supreme triumph, the emergence of the global sense hi man that is to bind humanity as a single indissoluble indivisible unity in actual life.
The aggregates are meant to express, apart from the growing unity, a diversity of achievements in the collective consciousness marking and enriching that unity. The highest, the largest aggregate attained at the Present moment is as I have said, that of the nation, the lower and lesser aggregates have been subsumed under it. The principle of integration in its graded course is precisely this that the new unity absorbs the lesser units as its components, some find their place in it in a transmuted form and functionthose that are of use in the new dispositiono thers that had truth only for the past disappear or remain as vestiges of an extinct reality. The clan and the tribe have practically disappeared as living realities; the family has been maintaining itself still as a functioning unit, but it has considerably changed its features and in recent times it has been undergoing revolutionary transmutations. The rigours of the system prevailing in the old world have all but gone, they have been reduced to the minimum; the system has become more or less a mere outline, the substance and the details have become very vague and fluid. It may come out with quite a new connotation in the not very distant future. The nation, then, as the living unit of aggregation today, is on the move again towards a yet more enlarged aggregate. Empire was a blind and violent attempt at this greater aggregation. The Commonwealth of more recent times was a conscious, deliberate and healthier endeavour towards the same goal. The various trials with regard to a league of nations is also a conscious and deliberate, although somewhat groping experiment in the same line.
Man's attempt to surpass himself and establish a superhuman race is a conscious and deliberate process and the attempt can be successful only through such an willed discipline, sdhan. In the same way, a supranational human unity will be possible as a parallel eventuality to the same process of individual discipline.
04.04 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the idea is that the fundamental spiritual realisation remains the same always and everywhere: the name and the form only vary according to the age and the surroundings. The one reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when was the first dawn! the Present dawn has followed the track of the infinite series that has gone by and is the first of the I infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi Kanwa. For the core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness, attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God by the theist or Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One) by the Positivist (spiritual). But the essential experience of a cosmic and transcendental reality does not differ very much. So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways which one has to follow if one is to move in the right direction, advance smoothly and attain infallibly: but these have been well marked out, surveyed and charted and do not admit of serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual aspiration is a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is also a definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The spiritual is a typal domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforeseen variation or growth or evolution.
Is it so in fact? For, if one admits and accepts the evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the outlook becomes somewhat different. According to this view, human civilisation is seen as moving through progressive stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in and occupied with his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purua; then he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a prnamaya purua; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became a maomaya purua; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according to the central character, the lawdharmaof that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of growth and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual seekers and accordingly three types or lines of spiritual discipline: the animal (pau bhva), the heroic (vra bhva) and the godly or divine (deva bhva). The classification is not merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in character.
--
But once there is the possibility gained of a more normalised, familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the human being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner that makes it inevitable for him to overpass to a higher status and live there habitually, then it becomes an urgent matter of concern to know and find out where one goes exactly, on which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting inquiry, a good part speculative and theoretical; it had not the reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out an almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness, of the lower hemisphereof course, so far as it is possible for such a science to be exhaustive moving in the light of the partial and inferior consciousness. In the same way we need at the Present hour a complete and precise science of the Divine Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the Present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
This means to say that with the knowledge that is given us today, one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the Present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the Present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind to the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
A progressive revelation of higher and higher and more integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seersdivine men of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened a veil, wall of separation between the two. The veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into play. The call of the Present age is just to do away with this veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity, a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.
***
04.05 - The Immortal Nation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It may be argued that all nations and peoples are a mixture of various races and foreign strands which are gradually, soldered and unified together in course of time. The British nation, for example, is built upon a base of Celtic blood and culture (the original Briton), to which were added one by one the German (Angles and the Saxon), the Danish, the French. But what is to be noted is that the resultant is at the end some-thing very different from the start something unrecognisable when compared with the original pattern and genius. The resultant seems to be arrived at not by a gradual evolution and continuous transformation but by disparate echelons or , breaks, as it were, in the line. In France also or in Italy the growth and the unification were achieved through violent revolutions, eruptions and irruptions. In the former, a Gaelic and Iberian base and in the latter an Etruscan were all but swept off by the Roman rule which again saw its end at the hand of the Barbarians. The history of Greece offers a typical picture of the destiny of these peoples. Her life-line is sundered completely at three different epochs giving us not one but three different personalities or peoples: at the outset there was the original classical Greece, then the first and milder although sufficiently serious break came with the Roman conquest; the second catastrophic change was wrought by the Goths and Vandals which was stabilised in the Byzantine Empire and the third avatar appeared with the Turkish regime. At the Present time, she is acquiring another life and body.
Indeed, viewed from this angle, the whole conscious personality of Europe seems to have been cut across by such hiatuses, two or three of them of a serious kind. Upon a primitive and mythologic stratum was laid the Grco-Roman and then there was a strong Hebraic or Old Testament influence, finally the known Christian or New Testament element; to that must be added the modern New Enlightenment, that is to say, of Science and Rationalism and Materialism. These several strands have not been welded or harmonised together very well. They are very often at variance with each other and combating each other. It is this schizophrenia that lies at the bottom of European malady. Europe has not been able to develop a wholly unified or one-pointed spiritual personality. On the other hand, it has developed very well-defined and sharply separated nations in its bosom, a sign and resultant of the lack of complete integration. India has some-times been spoken of as a continent consisting of many and varied nations, and not as a unified nation, she being more like Europe than a particular nation like England or France. We may answer that India possesses a more unified soul than Europe and that is why her sub-nations do not stand out in any intransigent separativeness like the nations in Europe. Even Asia possesses a more unified and integrated soul-personality than Europe; for, as I have said, her peoples stand upon a deeper strand of life and consciousness, something that is in contact with and is inspired by the Spiritual truth and reality. It is more so in India, where one has the very emblem and exemplar of this spiritual unity and the spiritual personality that derives from there.
04.06 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the idea is that the fundamental spiritual realisation remains the same always and everywhere: the name and the form only vary according to the age and the surroundings. The one Reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when was the first dawn! the Present dawn has followed the track of the infinite series that has gone by and is the first of the infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi Kanwa. For the core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness, attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God by the theist or Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One) by the Positivist (spiritual). But the essential experience, of a cosmic and transcendental reality, does not differ very much. So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways which one has to follow if one is to move in the right direction, advance smoothly and attain infallibly: but these have been well marked out, surveyed and charted and do not admit of serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual aspiration is a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is also a definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The spiritual is a type domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforeseen variation or growth or evolution.
Is it so in fact? For if one admits and accepts the evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the outlook becomes somewhat different. According to this view, human civilisation is seen as moving through progressive stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in and occupied with his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purua; then he raised himself and was centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pramaya purua ; next the climbed into the mental consciousness and became the manomaya purua; from that level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned' according to the central character, the lawdharmaof that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these planes, representing various degrees of grow and evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual seekers and accordingly three types or lines of spiritual discipline: the animal (pau bhva) the heroic (Vra bhva) and the godly or divine (deva bhva). The classification is not merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in character.
--
But once there is the possibility gained of a more normalised, familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the human being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner that makes it inevitable for him to overpass to a higher status and live there habitually, then it becomes an urgent matter of concern to know and find out where one goes exactly, on which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting enquiry, a good part speculative and theoretical; it had not the reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out an almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness, of the lower hemisphereof course, so far as it is possible for such a science to be exhaustive moving in the light of the partial and inferior consciousness. In the same way we need at the Present hour a complete and precise science of the Divine Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the Present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
This means that with the knowledge that is given us today one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the Present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the Present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind, the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
A progressive revelation of higher and higher and more integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seersdivine menof all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened a veil, a wall of separation between the two. The veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into play. The call of the Present age is just to do away with this veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity, a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.
***
04.09 - Values Higher and Lower, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
To the spiritual seeker the higher values are the first things that come first: to the ordinary man it is otherwise, lower values come first and claim topmost priority. To the experience of the spiritual seeker one should give greater value, for he has the experience of both the values, while the ordinary man knows only of one variety. Naturally, as we have said, there is synthesis, a fusion of the two values; but that is elsewhere for the Present, not actually here and now.
II
05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Matter or the physical body is not by itself the centre of gravity of the human consciousness; it is not that that pins the soul or the self to the life of pain and misery and incapacity and death. Matter is not the Evil, nor made up of Evil; it contains or harbours evil under the Present circumstances, even as dross is mixed up, inextricably as it appears, with the noble metal in the natural ore; but the dross can be eradicated and the free metal brought out, pure- and noble in its own true nature. It is, as Rumi, the Persian mystic, says in his famous imagery, like a piece of iron, dull and dismal to look at, but when put into fire slowly acquires the quality of fire, turning into a glowing and radiant beauty, yet maintaining its original form and individuality and concrete, even material reality. Now, the crust or dross that has to be eliminated in Matter is called by Sri Aurobindo "Inconscience". Matter is inconscient, therefore it is unconscious and ignorant. Make it conscious, it will be radiant and full of knowledge. That is the great transformation needed, the only way to true and total reformation. The Divine descends into Matter precisely to work out that transformation.
It is a long dredging process, tedious and arduous, requiring the utmost patience and perseverance, even to the absolute degree. For Inconscience, in essence, although a contingent reality, local and temporal, and therefore transient, is nonetheless the hardest, most obdurate and resistant reality: it lies thick and heavy upon the human vehicle. It is massed layer upon layer. Its first formation in the higher altitudes of the mind is perhaps like a thin fluid deposit; it begins as anindividualised separative consciousness stressing more and more its exclusiveness. Through the lower ranges of the mind and the vitality it crystallises and condenses gradually; in the worlds of thinking and feeling, enjoying and dynamic activity, it has still a malleable and mixed consistency, but when it reaches and possesses the physical being, it becomes the impervious solid obscurity that Matter presents.
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Sri Aurobindo aims at a power of consciousness, a formulation of the divine being that is integral. It takes up the whole man and it embraces all men: it works on a cosmic scale individually and collectively. That force of consciousness identifies itself with each and every individual being in all its parts and limbs; establishing itself in and working through their normal and habitual functionings, it moulds and refashions the earthly vessel. It is a global power, first of all, because it is the supreme creative Power, the original energy of consciousness that brought out this manifested universe, the matrix or the nodus that holds together and in an inviolable unity and harmony the fundamental truth-aspects of the' one and indivisible Reality. This luminous source and substance of all created things consists of their basic true truths which assume disguised and deformed appearances under the Present conditions of the world. It is therefore, in the second instance, the secret power in created things which manifests in them as the evolutionary urge, which drives them to rediscover their reality and re-form the appearance as the direct expression and embodiment of this inner soul.
The Divine incarnates, as an individual in the concrete material actuality, this double aspect of the utter truth and reality. There are, what may be called, intermediary incarnations, some representing powersaspects of the Divinein the higher mental or overmental levels of consciousness, others those of the inner heart, yet others again those of the dynamic vital consciousness. But the integral Divine, he who unites and reconciles in his body the highest height and the lowest depth, who has effectuated in him something like the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" is an event of the futureeven perhaps of the immediate future. The descent into hell is an image that has been made very familiar to man, but all its implications have not been sounded. For what we were made familiar with was more or less an image of hell, not hell itself, a region or experience in the vital (may be even in the mental): real hell is not the mass of desires or weaknesses of the flesh, not "living flesh", but dead Matter whose other name is Inconscience. In the older disciplines the central or key truth, the heart of reality where the higher and the lowerBrahman and Maya, the Absolute and the Contingency, the One and the Many, God and the Worldmet and united in harmony was bypassed: one shot from below right into the supreme Absolute; the matrix of truth-creation was ignored. Even so, at the other end, the reality of brute matter was not given sufficient weight, the spiritual light disdained to reach it (vijigupsate).
The integral Divine not merely suffers (as in the Christian tradition) a body material, He accepts it in his supernal delight, for it is his own being and substance: it is He in essence and it will become He in actuality. When he comes into the world, it is not as though it were a foreign country; he comes to his own,only he seeks to rebuild it on another scale, the scale of unity and infinity, instead of the Present scale of separativism and finiteness. He comes among men not simply because he is' moved by human miseries; he is no extra-terrestrial person, a bigger human being, but is himself this earth, this world, all these miseries; he is woven into the fabric of the universe, he is the warp and woof that constitute creation. It is not a mere movement of sympathy or benevolence that actuates him, it is a total and absolute identification that is the ground and motive of his activity. When he assumes the frame of mortality, it is not that something outside and totally incongruous is entering into him, it is part and parcel of himself, it is himself in one of his functions and phases. Consequently, his work in and upon the material world and life may be viewed as that of self-purification and self-illumination, self-discipline and selfrealisation. Also, the horrors of material existence, being part of the cosmic play and portion of his infinity, naturally find shelter in the individual divine incarnation, are encompassed in his human embodiment. It is the energy of his own consciousness that brought out or developed even this erring earth from within it: that same energy is now available, stored up in the individual formation, for the recreation of that earth. The advent and acceptance of material existence meant, as a kind of necessity in a given scheme of divine manifestation, the appearance and play of Evil, the negation of the very divinity. Absolute Consciousness brought forth absolute unconsciousness the inconscientbecause of its own self-pressure, a play of an increasingly exclusive concentration and rigid objectivisation. That same consciousness repeats its story in the individual incarnation: it plunges into the material life and matter and identifies itself with Evil. But it is then like a pressed or tightened spring; it works at its highest potential. In other words, the Divine in the body now works to divinise the body itself, to make of the negation a concrete affirmation. The inconscient will be embodied consciousness.
The humanist said, Nothing human I reckon foreign to me," In a deeper and more absolute sense the divine Mystic of the integral Yoga says the same. He is indeed humanity incarnate, the whole mankind condensed and epitomised in his single body. Mankind as imbedded in ignorance and inconscience, the conscious soul lost in the dark depths of dead matter, is he and his whole labour consists in working in and through that obscure "gravitational" mass, to evoke and bring down the totality of the superconscient force, the creative delight which he is essentially in his inmost and topmost being. The labour within himself is conterminous with the cosmic labour, and the change effected in his being and nature means a parallel change in the world outside, at least a ready possibility of the change. All the pains and weaknesses normal humanity suffers from, the heritage of an inconscient earthly existence, the Divine takes into his incarnated bodyall and more and to the highest degreeinto a crucible as it were, and works out there the alchemy. The natural man individually shares also each other's burden in some way, for all are interconnected in lifeaction at one point has a reaction at all other points: only the sharing is done unconsciously and is suffered or imposed than accepted and it tends to be at a minimum. An ordinary mortal would break under a greater pressure. It is the Avatar who comes forward and carries on his shoulders the entire burden of earthly inconscience.
05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and parcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separatesome grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness,of form and function,attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the Present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.
There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodiments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and development are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is eachthus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartmentsapart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz.,spiritual.
05.03 - Of Desire and Atonement, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
As the consciousness rises upwards from the Present and broadens out, it not only creates the Future but also recreates the Past.
Years are not needed to undo the sins of years-a single moment can efface an age.
05.07 - Man and Superman, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
When we speak of the superman we refer to a new racealmost a new species that will appear on earth as the inevitable result of Nature's evolution. The new race will be developed out of the Present humanity, there seems to be no doubt about that; it does not mean however that the whole of humanity will be so changed. As a matter of fact, humanity in general does not ask for such a catastrophic change in itself or for itself. But Supermanhood does mean a very radical change: it means giving up altogether many and some very basic human qualities and attributes. It does not aim merely at a moral uplift, that is to say, a shedding of the bad qualities, what are considered, for example, as predominantly animal and brutish in man; it signifies also a shedding of some at least of the good qualities or what are considered as such. The superman is not a purified moralised man, even as he is not a magnified glorified animal man; he is a man of a different type, qualitatively different. Let us take an analogy. What was the situation at the crisis when man was about to come out of (or be superimposed upon) an ape race? We can imagine a good part of that old race quite unwilling to go in for the new type that would appear to them queer, outlandish, even if not inferior on the whole or in some respects at least. They would not envisage with equanimity the disappearance of many of their cherished characteristics and powers: the glory of the tail, for example, the infinite capacity to swing and jump, the strength to crack a nut with the sheer force of the jaws. And who knows whether they would not consider their intelligence sharper and more efficacious than the type of reason, dull and slow, displayed before them by man! They would lose much to gain little. That would most probably be the general verdict.
Even so mankind, at the crucial parting of the ways, would very naturally look askance at the diminished value of many of its qualities and attri butes in the new status to come. First of all, as it has been pointed out, the intellect and reasoning power will have to surrender and abdicate. The very power by which man has attained his present high status and maintains it in the world has to be sacrificed for something else called intuition or revelation whose value and efficacy are unknown and have to be rigorously tested. Anyhow, is not the known devil by far and large preferable to the unknown entity? And then the zest of life, peculiar to man, that works through contradictionsdelight and suffering, victory and defeat, war and peace, doubt and knowledge, all the play of light and shade, the spirit of adventure, of combat and struggle and heroic effort, will have to go and give place to something, peaceful and harmonious perhaps but monotonous, insipid, unprogressive. The very character of human life is its passion to battle through, even if it is not always through. For it is often said that the end or goal does not matter, the goal is always something uncertain; it is the way, the means, the immediate action that is of supreme consequence: for it is that that tests man's manhood, gives him the value he may have. And above all man is asked to give up the very thing which he has laboured to build up through millenniums of his terrestrial life, his individuality, his personality, for the demand is that he must lose his ego in order to attain the superhuman status.
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In spite of all the achievements he has had in the past, and in spite of the cul-de-sac or the blind alley into which he seems now to be stagnating, there is yet possibility enough for man to progress further, that is to say, even as a human being without taking the more audacious jump into supermanhood. the Present miseries of human society, the maldistribution of the necessities of life, the ravages of illness and disease, the prevalence of ignorance, are not and need not after all be a permanent and irrevocable feature of human organisation. They can be remedied to a large extent, and society made more decent to live in, even though it may not be transfigured into the City of God. Man, without foregoing his present human nature, can yet be a more humane and humanistic creature, that is to say, more truly human and less animal and demoniac that he is trying to be. To this end the advent and the presence of the divine race will surely contri bute in a large measure. The influence which the individuals of such a race will exert by the force of their luminous consciousness and the impact of their purified living, the sympathy and knowledge and comprehension which their very presence carries, will materially alter the nature and composition of the normal man and his society. There will emerge a sort of higher humanityan intermediary between the Present more or less animal, degraded humanity and the divine humanity of the future. The two humanities may very well live amicably together and be of help and service to each other.
We may mention here the other extreme possibility also. If, for example, the old humanity in a body rejects the New Man and will not allow him an inch of ground on the earth which it holds now as its fief and domainas it may very well doin view of the evidence that we have of the envy, jealousy, hatred, incomprehension moving normal men when they come in contact with men who do not follow their mode of life, who seem to pursue avocations that are meaningless and even perhaps injurious to them; if such is the case, then, we say, it would mean either the end of humanity, in the same way as some species have become in fact extinct, or its reversion to a wild savage state, something like that (or perhaps worse) out of which it came.
05.07 - The Observer and the Observed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the old world, before Science was born, sufficient distinction or discrimination was not made between the observer and the observed. The observer mixed himself up or identified himself with what he observed and the result was not a scientific statement but a poetic description. Personal feelings, ideas, judgments entered into the Presentation of facts and the whole mass passed as truth, the process often being given the high-sounding name of Intuition, Vision or Revelation but whose real name is fancy. And if there happened to be truth off act somewhere, it was almost by chance. Once we thought of the eclipse being due to the greed of a demon, and pestilence due to the evil eye of a wicked goddess. The universe was born out of an egg, the cosmos consisted of concentric circles of worlds that were meant to reward the virtuous and punish the sinner in graded degrees. These are some of the very well-known instances of pathetic fallacy, that is to say, introducing the element of personal sentiment in our appreciation of events and objects. Even today Nazi race history and Soviet Genetics carry that unscientific prescientific tradition.
Science was born the day when the observer cut himself aloof from the observed. Not only so, not only he is to stand aside, outside the field of observation and be a bare recorder, but that he must let the observed record itself, that is, be its own observer. Modern Science means not so much the observer narrating the story of the observed but the observed telling its own story. The first step is well exemplified in the story of Galileo. When hot discussion was going on and people insisted on sayingas Aristotle decided and common sense declared that heavier bodies most naturally fall quicker from a height, it was this prince of experimenters who straightaway took two different weights, went up the tower of Pisa and let them drop and astounded the people by showing that both travel with equal speed and fall to the ground at the same time.
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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.
05.09 - The Changed Scientific Outlook, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
There is, of course, more than one line of scientific outlook at the Present day. It is well known that continental scientists generally and Marxist scientists in particular belong to a different category from Jeans and Eddington. But the important point is this: a considerable body of scientists frankly hold the "idealist" view, and these come from the very front rank quascientists. Discussion arises when it is seriously put forward that Eddington and Jeans are not authorities in science equalling any other great names; as if it is contended that because a scientist holds the idealist view, ergo, he is a pseudo-scientist, a third-degree luminary, a back-bencher, a mediaevalist. The Marxists also declare, we may recall in this connection, that the bourgeois cannot be a true poet, in order to be a poet one must be a proletarian.
There is a scientific obscurantism, which is not less obscure because it is scientific, and one must guard against it with double care and watchfulness. It is the mentality of the no-changer whose motto seems to be: plus a change, plus a reste le mme.. Let me explain. The scientist who prefers still to be called a materialist must remember that the (material) ground under his feet has shifted considerably since the time he first propounded his materialistic position: he does not stand in the same place (or plane?) as he did even twenty years ago. The change has been basic and fundamentalfundamental, because the very definitions and postulates with which we once started have been called in question, thrown overboard or into the melting-pot.
05.14 - The Sanctity of the Individual, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The sanctity of the individual, the value of the human person is one of the cardinal articles of faith of the modern consciousness. Only it has very many avatars. One such has been the characteristic mark of the group of philosophers (and mystics) who are nowadays making a great noise under the name of Existentialists. The individual personality exists, they say, and its nature is freedom. In other words, it chooses, as it likes, its course of life, at every step, and Creates its destiny. This freedom, however, may lead man and will inevitably lead him, according to one section of the group, to the perception and realisation of God, an infinite in which the individual finite lives and moves and has his being; according to others, the same may lead to a very different consummation, to Nothingness, the Great Void, Nihil. All existence is bounded by something unknown and intangible which differs according to your luck or taste,one would almost say to your line of approach, put philosophically, according either to the positive pole or the negative, God or Non-existence. The second alternative seems to be an inevitable corollary of the particular conception of the individual that is entertained by some, viz.,the individual existing only in relation to individuals. Indeed the leader of the French school, Jean-Paul Sartrenot a negligible playwright and novelistseems to conceive the individual as nothing more than the image formed in other individuals with whom he comes in contact. Existence literally means standing out or outside (ex+sistet), coming out of one-self and living in other's consciousnessas one sees one's exact image in another's eye. It is not however the old-world mystic experience of finding one's self in other selves. For here we have an exclusively level or horizontal view of the human personality. The personality is not seen in depth or height, but in line with the normal phenomenal formation. It looks as though, to save personality from the impersonal dissolution to which all monistic idealism leads, the Present conception seeks to hinge all personalities upon each other so that they may stand by and confirm each other. But the actual result seems to have been not less calamitous. When we form and fashion each other, we are not building with anything more substantial than sand. Personalities are thus mere eddies in the swirl of cosmic life, they rise up and die down, separate and melt into each other and have no consistency and no reality in the end. The freedom too which is ascribed to such individuals, even when they feel it so, is only a sham and a make-believe. Within Nature nothing is free, all is mechanical lawKarma is supreme. The Sankhya posits indeed many Purushas, free, lodged in the midst of Prakriti, but there the Purusha is hardly an active agent, it is only an inactive, passive, almost impotent, witness. The Existentialist, on the contrary, seeks to make of the individual an active agent; he is not merely being, imbedded or merged in the original Dasein, mere existence, but becoming, the entity that has come out, stood out in its will and consciousness, articulated itself in name and form and act. But the person that stands out as part and parcel of Prakriti, the cosmic movement, is, as we have said, only an instrument, a mode of that universal Nature. The true person that informs that apparent formulation is something else. .
To be a person, it is said, one must be apart from the crowd. A person is the "single one", one who has attained his singularity, his individual wholeness. And the life's work for each individual person is to make the crowd no longer a crowd, but an association of single ones. But how can this be done? It is not simply by separating oneself from the crowd, by dwelling upon oneself that one can develop into one's true person. The individuals, even when perfect single ones, do not exist by themselves or in and through one another. The mystic or spiritual perception posits the Spirit or God, the All-self as the background and substance of all the selves. Indeed, it is only when one finds and is identified with the Divine in oneself that one is in a position to attain one's true selfhood and find oneself in other selves. And the re-creation of a crowd into such divine individuals is a cosmic work in which the individual is at best a collaborator, not the master and dispenser. Anyway, one has to come out of the human relationship, rise above the give-and-take of human individualshowever completely individual each one may beand establish oneself in the Divine's consciousness which is the golden thread upon which is strung all the assembly of individuals. It is only in and through the Divine, the Spiritual Reality and Person, that one enters into true relation and dynamic harmony with others.
05.18 - Man to be Surpassed, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But there was danger in individualism too: and the Greek polity suffered from it. For individualism meant clash of personalities: indeed rivalry, ambition, intolerance, arrogance, all the violent or vulgar movements of egoism occupy a good part of the life story of the old-world peoples trained in the classical culture. On the other hand, modern collectivism tends towards a uniform levelling down of all individual eccentricity. But dangers apart, the truth of either conception, ingrained in human nature, has to be recognised and accepted. A humanity, composed of developed and formed individuals living in broad commonalty that is the highest achievement the Present author holds before mankind.
Mr. Kahler does not define very clearly the nature and function of this commonalty: but it almost borders on what I may call human humanism, something in the manner of the other modern humanist Albert Schweitzer. Two types of humanism have been distinguished: man-centred humanism and God-centred humanism. Kahler's (and even Schweitzer's) humanism belongs, very much to the first category. He does not seem to believe in any transcendent Spirit or God apart from the universal totality of existence, the unitary life of all, somewhat akin to the Vie Unanime of Jules Romains.
05.20 - The Urge for Progression, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the process of the expression and embodiment of this innermost truth, the first necessary condition is, as we have said, sincerity, that is to say, a constant reference to the demand of that truth, putting everything and judging everything in the light of that truth, a vigilant wakefulness to it. The second condition is progression. It is the law of the Truth that it is expressing itself, seeking to express itself continually and continuously in the march of life; it is always unfolding new norms and forms of its light and power, ever new degrees of realisation. The individual human consciousness has to recognise that progressive flux and march along with it. Human consciousness, the complex of external mind and life and body consciousness, has the habit of halting, clinging to the forms, experiences and gains of the past, storing them in memory, agreeing to a minimum change only just to be able to pour the new into the old. But this conservatism, which is another name for tamasis fatal to the living truth within. Even like the lan vitalso gloriously hymned by Bergson, the inmost consciousness, the central truth of being, the soul lanhas always a forward-looking reference. And it is precisely because the normal instrument of the body and life and mind has always a backward reference, because it slings ,back and cannot keep pace with the march of the soul-consciousness that these members stagnate, wear away, decay and death ends it all. The past has its utility: it marks the stages of progress. It means assimilation, but must not mean stagnation. It may supply the Present basis but must always open out to what is coming or may come. If one arrives at a striking realisation, a light is revealed, a Voice, a mantra heard, a norm disclosed, it is simply to be noted, taken in the stuff of the being, made part and parcel of the consciousness; you leave it at that and pass and press on. You must not linger at wayside illuminations however beautiful or even useful some may be. The ideal of the paryataka the wanderermay be taken as a concrete symbol of this principle. The Brahmanas described it graphically in the famous phrase, caraivete, "move on". The Vedic Rishi sang of it in the memorable hymn to Dawn, the goddess who comes today the last of a succession of countless dawns in the immemorial past and the first of a never-ending series of the future. The soul is strung with a golden chain to the Great Fulfilment that moves ahead: even when fulfilled the soul does not rest or come to the end of its mission, it continues to be an ever new expression or instrumentation of the Infinite.
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05.28 - God Protects, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Have life and property then no value in the eye of God? To the divine consciousness are these things mere my, transient objects of ignorance, ties that bind the soul to earth and have to be cut away and thrown behind? We at least do not hold that opinion. We hold that life and property are valuable, they are significant: they become so in reference to the individual who has them. The life that is dedicated to the Divine, the life that is in some way connected with the higher consciousness, through which something of the world of light and delight comes down into our mortality acquires a special worth and naturally calls for divine protection. Likewise the property placed at the service of the Divine, which is used as an instrument for the Divine's own work upon earth, the Divine will surely protect, for it is then part of his grandeur and glory, aishwarya. Life and property become indeed sacred and inviolable when they are put at the disposal of the Divine for his use in the fulfilment of the cosmic design. As we know, life and property under present conditions upon earth are possessions of the undivine forces, they are weapons through which God's enemies hold sway over earth. Therefore life and property that seek to be on God's side run a great risk, they are in the domain of the hostiles and therefore need special protection. The Divine extends that protection, but under conditions for his rule in the material field is not yet absolute. The Asura too extends his protection to his agents, and his protection appears sometimes, if not often, more effective; for the Present world is under his domination and all forces and beings obey him; God and the godly have to admit his terms and work out their design on that basis.
The conditions under which the Divine's protection can come are simple enough, but difficult to fulfil completely and thoroughly. The ideal conditions that ensure absolute safety are an absolute trust and reliance on the Divine Force, a tranquillity and fearlessness that nothing shakes, .whatever the appearances at the moment, the spirit and attitude of an unreserved self-giving that whatever one is and one has is God's. Between that perfect state at the peak of consciousness and the doubting and hesitant and timid mind at the lower end that of St. Peter, forexample, at his weakest moment there are various gradations of the conditions fulfilled and the protection given is variable accordingly. Not that the Divine Grace acts or has to act according to any such hard and fast rule of mechanics, there is no such mathematical Law of Protection in the scheme of Providence. And yet on the whole and generally speaking Providence, Divine Intervention, acts more or less successfully according to the degree of the soul's wakefulness on the plane that needs and possesses the protection.
05.31 - Divine Intervention, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What we have named Intervention is also known popularly as Providence. It is the element of the incalculable and the unforeseen in Nature. Nature, in one respect, seems to be a closed circle: it is a rigid mechanism and its movements are very definite and absolutely fixed admitting of no change or variation whatsoever. That was the idea which governed our earlier scientists when they spoke or the Law of Nature. Law of Nature was to them, in the great Sophoclean phrase, something indelible and inviolable, immemorially the same which no man or god dare alter or disobey. Laplace, one of the pioneers of the scientific outlook, said, in fact, that he could very well imagine a mathematician recording and calculating all the forces that act and react in the world and from the Present position of things foretell the time and place of each and every event in the cosmic field. The idea of Karma, or Kismet, is a parallel conception in the domain of human nature and character. The chain reaction of cause and effect" is rigorous and absolute, follows a single line of movement and possesses a rigidly predetermined disposition. The principle is equally applicable either to a phenomenon of the physical world or to that of man's inner consciousness.
But we have arrived today at a stage when this old-world view has perforce to be discarded. We can no longer take Laplace seriously: for scientists themselves have established as a fact in physical Nature the indeterminacy of her movements, the impossibility of foretelling a laLaplace, not because of any deficiency in the human instrument but because of the very nature of things. Science is of course at a loss to explain the why or even the how of this indeterminacy. We say, however, that it is nothing but the intrusion of another, a different kind of force in the field of the forces actually at play. That force comes from a higher, a subtler level. Things and forces move in their ordinary round, according to the normal laws, bound ,within their present frame: but always there drops in from elsewhere an unknown element, a force or energy or impulse of another quality, which causes a shift of emphasis in the actual, brings about a change unaccountable and unforeseen. This is what is called miracle: the imposition of a higher law, a generic law governing subtler forms and forces upon an inferior and grosser sphere. And the higher or subtler the plane from which the new force descends the plane can be anything between the one nearest to the material, the subtle physical or ethereal, and the one nearest to the other extreme, the spiritual the greater will be the change in nature, quality and extent in the lower order. Such miracles, interventions, providential happenings are not rare. They are always occurring, only they do not attract attention. For it is these phenomena that are the real causes of all progresscosmic as well as individual. Evolution is based upon this truth of Nature.
Man is not bound to the Present pattern or complex of his nature and character: he is not irrevocably fixed to the framea Procrustean bedgiven by the parallelogram of actual forces in or around him. Always he can call down forces or forces can descend into him from otherwhere and bring about a change, even a revolution in the mode and make-up of his character and nature and life. What we call "opening" in our. Sadhana refers to this factor in our consciousness. It means the possibility of the descent of a higher force in our normal nature. Nature is not such a solid stream-lined structure as not to admit of any interstices in it. We know of the comparatively vast spaces that separate atom from atom, the immense emptiness across which even the ultimate nuclear particles have to act upon each other. These are the loop-holes in the great net and it is precisely through them that other forces percolate.
Man or Nature does not mark time; they are always on the march. The march would have been a thrice vicious circle, a mere issueless repetition of the old and the agelong but for this stress of a higher destiny behind. Great souls, Vibhutis, Avatars themselves are incarnations of such descents of higher and other forces from toprung sources.
05.33 - Caesar versus the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now there are several things to be distinguished here. First of all, even if it is accepted as true that in the past it is worldly men alone who were dynamically active in the world and that spiritual men were men of inaction whose role was to withdraw from the world, at least to be passive and indifferent with regard to mundane activities, that does not prove that it is an eternal truth and it is bound to be so ever and always. We must remember, if we admit the evolutionary character of Nature, of man and his growth and fulfilment, that spirituality in one of its forms at an early stage is and should be a movement of withdrawal, of diminishing dynamism in the sense of an "introversion". For when man still lives mostly in the vital domain and is full of the crude life urge, when the animal is still dominant in him (as the Tantrik discipline also points out), then a rigorous asceticism and self-denial is needed for the purification and sublimation of the nature. At that stage powers and dynamic capacities that often develop in the course of such discipline should also be carefully avoided and discarded; for they are more likely to bring down the consciousness to the ordinary level. But if that were the procedure and principle in the past, one need not eternise it into the Present and the future. We Believe mankinda good part of mankind in its inner consciousness has advanced sufficiently on the vital level as to be able to give a new turn to his life and follow a different course of development. If he has not totally outgrown the animal, at least some higher element has been superimposed on it or infused into it and he can very well find the fulcrum of his nature in this superior station and order a new pattern of values and way of becoming. In other words, he need no longer altogether shun or avoid the so-called inferior forces the physico-vitalin him, but try to control and utilise them for higher diviner purposes in the world, upon the earth. For the earth embodies after all the crucial complex. Whatever is to be done in the end has to be done here, effected and established here. The withdrawal was needed for a purification and husbanding of the forces so that they may be brought forth and applied at the proper time and place, it is reculer pour mieux sauter, to fall back in order to leap forward all the better.
In reality, however, to a vision that sees behind and beyond the appearances, spirituality the force of the Spiritis ever dynamic: the spiritual soul, even when it appears passive and inert, is most active not merely in the subtle psychological domain, but also in the material field. To the gross pragmatic eye Ramakrishna, for example, appears as a less dynamic personality, a less strong and heroic, if not positively weaker character than Vivekananda. Well, that is only face-value reading. Vivekananda himself knew and felt and said that he was only one of hundreds of Vivekanandas that his simple and, modest-looking Guru could create if he chose. Even so a Ramdas. Ramdas was not merely a spiritual adviser to Shivaji, concerned chiefly with the inner salvation and development of his disciple, and only secondarily with the gross material activities, the things of Caesar. The two domains are not separate at least in this case: the spiritual here directly and dynamically affects the physical. The spiritual guide is the dynamo the matrixof the power, the power spiritual; he wields and marshals the hidden, the secret forces that are behind the outward forms and movements. And the disciple by his attitude of obeisance and receptivity becomes all the better a channel and instrument for the actual play and fulfilment of that force. A Govind Singh is another instance of spiritual power made dynamic in mundane things. And we always have the classical instance of Rajarshi Janaka.
06.01 - The End of a Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The world has been going down in its course of degradation with an increased momentum since the very beginning of the Present century. One of the great symptoms of the decline is the prevalence of wars. It can be said in fact that there has been no real peace or even truce upon earth since the century opened with the Russo-Japanese War. Wars have continued since then uninterruptedly: some part or other of the world has always been involved. Indeed one can say it has been a single war carried on on many fronts, breaking out at different times. Another noticeable thing about these wars is their nature; with the lapse of time they have become more and more extensive and more and more devastating. It is no longer now simply a clash of armies or professionals, of that section of society whose business it is to fight. Whole nationsliterally the whole of a people including men, women, children of all agesare now mobilised, have to take part in the fight and share the same danger.
Naturally, war meant always killing; but the nature of killing has changed and even the motive too. Killing is now attended with cruelty, done with methods terribly atrocious and revoltingly ingenious. And this has affected the very consciousness and morale of man. Not only there is no decency or decorum, not to speak of magnanimity and nobility of attitude and behaviouronce familiar things in stories of the Kshatriya, the Samurai, the Knights of oldthere has come into the field a phenomenon for which it has itself found a name, sadism, wanton violence and on a mass scale. Man seems to have thrown off all mask, all the rules of civilised social life and has become worse than the animal: he is now the Pisacha, the ghoul and the demon. He seems to have reached the bottom of the pit.
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And yet if the civilisation really goes, it will not be a small thing, even when measured on the cosmic scale. A civilisation is to be judged and valued not at its nadir, but at its zenith, in its total effect and not by a temporary phase in its course. Civilisation really means preparation of the instrument: the human instrument that is to express the Divine. The purpose of creation, we have often said, is the establishment of the highest spiritual consciousness in the embodied life on earth. The embodied life means man's body and life and mind; individually and socially these constitute the instrument through which the higher light is to manifest itself. The instrument has to be prepared, made ready for the purpose; Actually it is obscure, ignorant, narrow, weak; at the outset and for a long time it expresses only or mainly the inferior animal nature. Civilisation is an attempt to raise this inferior nature, to refine, enlarge and heighten it, to cultivate and increase its potentialities and capacities. the Present civilisation, we have said, is a growth of thousands of years-at least five thousand years according to the most modest archaeological computation. In this period man has developed his brain, his rational intelligence, has unravelled some of the great mysteries of nature; he has controlled and organised life to an extent that has opened new possibilities of growth and achievement; even with respect to the body he has learnt to treat it with greater skill and endowed it with finer and more potent efficiencies. There have been aberrations and misuses, no doubt; but the essence of things achieved still remains and is always an invaluable asset: that must not be allowed to go.
If the civilisation goes, it means the instrument is gone, the basis on which the edifice for the Divine Consciousness is to be raised is removed, nothing remains to stand firmly on. So the labour has to start again: one must begin from the beginning. The work has to be done and will be done, it cannot be allowed to terminate into a labour of Sisyphus.
Look at the individual. Why is there in him the life-urge to persist, to endure, to survive? If life had no other meaning than mere living, then the best thing would have been to drop the body as soon as it is badly damaged or incapacitated, through illness, accident or old age. Instead, why this attempt to prolong it, to refuse to accept the Present difficulties and disadvantages? The reason is that life requires time to grow in consciousness, to acquire experiences, to assimilate and utilise them so as to transform them into powers of being, time, that is to say, to build and forge the instrument so that it may house the higher consciousness and existence. In the Present make-up, the body, at a certain stage has to be given up; for the frame becomes too rigid and stiff to keep pace with the growing and fast moving inner consciousness. The thread is taken up again in another life; but there is always a considerable reduplication in this natural process, one has to repeat the stage of babyhood and immaturity, a retempering of the instrument till it is capable of newer uses. True, some-thing of the experiences, their essence, is stored up somewhere in the depth of the being; but it is not utilised fully, it is not an effective element in the normal consciousness. And although one always bases oneself upon one's past, the edifice constructed seems new every time. Yoga in the individual seeks to eliminate this element of repetition and unconsciousness and delay in the process of growth and evolution: its aim is to complete the cycle of individual growth in a single life.
Now the same principle can be extended to the wider collective development. Civilisation has reached a status today when the next higher status can be and must be at-tempted. Man has risen to a considerable height in the mental sphere; the time and occasion are now here to step beyond into the supramental, the dynamically spiritual. Dangers are ahead, even around and close: all the forces of the infra-human, the submerged urges of animal atavism are pushing and pulling man down to a regression, to a reversion to type. The choice is indeed crucial. If the civilisation is to perish, it means mankind has to start over again its life course, begin, that is to say, at the baby stage, once more to go through the slow process of centuries to acquire the mastery that has been attained in the physical, the vital and the mental domains. Already there have been such lost periods in man's evolution now submerged in his consciousness and their gains are being with difficulty recovered. But a landslide at this critical hour will be a colossal catastrophehumanly speaking, something almost irremediable.
For here is the sense of the crisis. The mantra given for the new age is that man shall be transcended and in the process, man, as he is, shall go. Man shall go, but something of the vehicle that the Present cycle has prepared will remain. For, that precisely has been the function of the passing civilisation, especially in its later stages, viz, to build up a terrestrial temple for the Lord. The aberration and deformation, rampant today, mean only an excess of stress upon this aspect, upon the external presentation which was ignored or not sufficiently considered in the earlier and higher curves of the Present civilisation. The spiritual values have gone down, because the material values came to be regarded as valueless and this upset the economy or balance in Nature. It is true that we have gone far, too far in our revanche. And the problem that faces us today is this: whether mankind will be able to change sufficiently and grow into the higher being that shall inhabit the earth as its crown in the coming cycle or, being unable, will go totally, disappear altogether or be relegated to the backwater of earthly life, somewhat like the aboriginal tribes of today.
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06.03 - Types of Meditation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The first is to think on one subject in a continuous logical order. When, for example, you have to find the solution of a problem, you go step by step from one operation to another in a chain till you finally arrive at the conclusion. The thought is withdrawn from all other objects and is canalised along a single line. This is a kind of meditation, although it may not be usually known by that name. It marks a progress in the make-up of the human consciousness. For normally the mind moves at random, thoughts run about on many subjects, various, contrary and contradictory, from moment to moment. There is neither direction, consistency nor organisation: it is a confused mass of incomplete, inchoate thoughts. The control and organisation of this mass, to start with, in a limited sphere and in a definite direction, the rejection of the unnecessary and the irrelevant and the marshalling and ordering of the required elements form the first exercise towards mental growth. All high intelligence, all effective wielding of thought power needs this discipline. Under the Present circumstances of the world the school-life gives the best opportunity for this development. This is a meditation that should be obligatory and universal.
The next type we may call concentration, instead of meditation. Here we do not pursue a thought-line, but fix the thought upon one object unmoved. It means a further process of withdrawing the consciousness from its habitual outgoing and dispersive movement. The thought is held at a point and attention is focussed upon it: it is continuous and unbroken attention, for example, upon an idea, a phrase (mantra) or an image. One can concentrate also upon a physical point, say, fixing the gaze upon the tip of one's nose, or on a luminous point outside etc. In this discipline the whole mind is gathered together and focussed: or, everything else is shut out leaving only one thing upon which all the light of the consciousness is directed. It is a standstill consciousness, like a flame erect and immobile in a windless place.
06.12 - The Expanding Body-Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the Present case, the phenomenon happened automatically without any premeditation on the part of the persons concerned; because the sympathy between the two was so strong, other considerations did not weigh in the balance against it. Needless to say, if one wishes to obtain conscious mastery of this occult power, one will have to go through a long and arduous discipline. But, if difficult, the thing is not impossible. In the matter of physical feats, for example, a particular development may seem for the moment beyond your reach; but with practice and perseverance, stubborn will and wise guidance, you can not only arrive at your immediate end but do much more. The story of many who have broken Olympic records is revealing in this respect. In the same way, one can master the subtle forces, if one goes about the thing earnestly and in the right way. It is more difficultmuch more perhaps but the way is there provided the will is there.
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06.23 - Here or Elsewhere, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the same way, there are souls that have emerged out of the fire of earthly life and are enjoying the safety and security of the heavens; but they have been called to come back into the world, add to the experience of the tranquil above the experience of the trouble below. Surely it increases the scope of their consciousness. But to turn upon the world means also to re-enter into ignorance, for this world means ignorance, as it is, it is nothing but ignorance. The role then of one who returns is once more to embrace ignorance, but with a view to bringing into it the light and bliss that he gained from above, permeating the stuff of the Present world with the substance of the higher consciousness. It is a sacrifice demanded of him, thus to abandon the eternal felicity of the high heavens the unbroken union with the Divine above and to enter into the depths of this great perilous world: but this is a privilege too, to bring solace to the afflicted, the transforming light to obscure souls, the radiant energy to inert earth. It is a high privilege for which the luminous soul is thankful: he modestly accepts a gift of grace from the Supreme. He accepts the Ignorance and offers it: he lays it at the feet of the Supreme so that it may be transmuted into lightlight here below. His own role is that of a modest intermediary.
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06.27 - To Learn and to Understand, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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?
For example, you read and hear much and constantly of the Divine. What is He or It to you in reality? Something vague, misty, wordy. The perception is not concrete to you. You can doubt, deny, refuse credence as you like. But if you once experience it, hold it in your inner being and consciousness, in however small a way, however little of it, if you get the direct contact in whatever mannerwell, the thing is unforgettable, it lives, lives for ever. If the whole world denies and scoffs, you are unshaken, you smile at the world, for you know what you know.
06.35 - Second Sight, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
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.
We will now better understand the process of contact in sense perception. The purely material contact, physical vibration touching the physical nerves of the particular organ is an instance of the physical physical perception: the dog smelling or the elephant hearing at extraordinary distances. We have heard of men who, by putting their ear upon the ground, are able to catch sounds coming from a great distance and practically inaudible to others standing by. But there is another class where the material vibration is not at issue, it is the vital vibration in the physical touching the vital physical of the receiver. The elephant finding the water or sensing the hollow road is an instance in point. The mental physical, the last of the three is a kind of intuition in the physical, that is what is usually called instinct. A cat, for example, put in a sack and banished miles away from its home, will find its way back; a dog will go round the world almost and find and recognise its master even many years after (the first to recognise Ulysses was his dog). In man too the vital physical, more especially the mental physical not unoften finds room for play, although his physical physical i.e. purely material sensibility is extremely limited. This limitation of the physical sensibility in general, to whatever sphere it may belong, is due to the intellectual or rational bias that has developed in him. In the more unsophisticated races or types the sensibility is still maintained. Man can, however, cultivate, consciously develop these faculties: it then becomes what is called a system of Yoga. A familiar example of the mental physical action as cultivated in man is offered by the water diviner or dowser, as he is called. But, as I have said, the normal effect of human rationality is to inhibit the spontaneous action of the senses as it is natural with the animal.
08.13 - Thought and Imagination, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
First of all, you must know how to get beyond the terrestrial manifestation, in order to be able to imagine a new thing in it. And (or how many millions of years has earth existed! What has been the output of new things there? Countless, for no two things upon earth are exactly the same, although they may be very similar. It is not easy with your mind to get out of the earthly atmosphere. But if you have succeeded in doing that, you have to get out of the universal life. To enter into contact with all that has been here upon earth since the beginning of its appearance till the Present day and then to enter into contact with the universal of which the earth forms only a tiny particle from its beginning to its formulation todaythis is not sufficient. You have still to go beyond, beyond the universal, into the transcendent, the unmanifest. Then you can think of imagining and bringing down something new into the manifestation and upon earth. Not that one cannot do this. But it is not so easy.
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08.16 - Perfection and Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Perfection is a relative term. A thing may be perfect in relation to the Present or the past; it may not be so in relation to what is to come. Creation is a perpetual movement, a perpetual progression. Each time a new consciousness manifested upon earth, it was very natural for men of the epoch to have the impression that it was the final definitive realisation, at least a very great progress.
Still we must note that even for an animal, say an elephant or a dog, human capacities appear as marvellous; they feel, the dogs do, that man possesses almost divine powers. So men too from the stage where they are have a hint of things beyond; that is why we are not wholly satisfied, we have the feeling in spite of all things achieved that there is something else which eludes, indeed the true thing eludes, we turn around it, but never touch it. It means that man is ready for a further progress. If it were not so, if he were satisfied only with what he can do, he would try to do that alone, better and better perhaps, but in the same groove. However, it is not that: he seeks something else, something quite different, which is truly true, on which one can count, which does not crash down when one props oneself upon it, something durable, permanent, the Rock of Ages. This need of eternity, of an absolute good and absolute beauty awakens exactly at the moment when one is ready to receive a new consciousness.
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In any case, that is what I mean by sincerity. That is to say, if you regard the new realisation as the only thing truly worth living for, if what is is intolerable, not only for oneself, perhaps not so much for oneself as for the whole world, one feels the need of it if one is not small and egoistic; one feels that the Present has lasted too long and one can do nothing but take up all that one is, all that one can do and hurl oneself completelyhead foremost, without looking backward, without considering what may happen or notinto the adventure. It is far better to jump into the abyss, than to stand on the brink shivering.
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08.19 - Asceticism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is a psychological problem. It depends upon the region where there is the sense of beauty. There may be a physical sense of beauty, a vital sense of beauty and a mental sense of beauty. If you have the moral sense of beauty, that is to say, a sense of decency and nobility, you can never be cruel. You will be always generous; your movements will consist of fine gestures. But, as I say often, man is composed of many different bits pieced together. For example, I frequented very much the artists. I knew all the great artists of the end of the last century and the beginning of the Present. I lived among them. They had really a great sense of beauty. But morally some were very cruel. It is because when you see an artist in his study at work you find him living in an atmosphere of great beauty, but when you see the gentleman at home, he is a different person, having very little contact with the artist he was. Here he becomes vulgar and commonplace. Many of them are indeed like that. But there are always exceptions. Some have a unified personality, that is to say, they live their art and are truly generous, fine.
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08.34 - To Melt into the Divine, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
At the Present moment in the actual state of things what one can give to the Divine is one's body. But that is precisely the thing that one does not give. Yes, try to consecrate your work, your bodily labour; even there, there are so many things that are not true or correct.
You may naturally ask how to melt the body in the Divine? You say you understand somewhat melting the mind, melting the vital, thoughts and emotions, ideas and aspirations into the Divine, but the body? It cannot be melted as in a cauldron! And yet that is the only thing upon which you can put your personal namealthough that too is only a convention and say this is I. Of course if you look at yourself in a mirror, you see clearly you are not what you were twenty years ago, you are now quite different, quite unrecognisable. Still you have the perception that it is the same person, yourself. You can begin your giving by that which is most formed, most known to you as yourself.
09.08 - The Modern Taste, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
From the standpoint of artistic and literary taste and culture, the Present world is a thing of extremes. On one side, it is trying hard to discover something very noble, and on the other, it is sinking into a vulgarity which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, of two or three centuries ago. In those times people who were not cultured were crude, but their crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much perversion in itthere was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, perversion also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, remains on level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that is to say, it is not only ignorant or stupid, it is ugly, dirty, repulsive, it is deformed, it is vile, it is extremely low. What makes it so is the wrong use of the mind. If there were no mind, this perversion would not exist. Now what is ugly is ugly from all points of view.
There are things that are considered beautiful these days. I have seen photographs and reproductions which are frightfully vulgar in the perverted sense, and yet people are uproarious about them and find them beautiful. That means there is something there which has not only no culture and development, but has developed in the wrong way, that is to say, is deformed, which is worse, for it is much more difficult to straighten a perverted and deformed object than to enlighten that which is merely ignorant or without education.
09.10 - The Supramental Vision, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
But as soon as you want to explain or describe it, you are obliged to come down to a lower level. Sri Aurobindo calls it the Mind of Light. Here things have to be said or even thought or expressed and realised in action one after another in a certain order, in a certain relation to each other. Therefore the simultaneity disappears; for, in the Present condition of our way of expression it is impossible to say everything at once outright. We are obliged to veil a portion of what we see and know in order to bring it out little by little. Sri Aurobindo therefore calls it a transparent veil; for you see all, you know all at the same time, you have the entire or total knowledge of a thing, but you cannot express it whole and entire at one stroke.
There are no words, no possible modes of expression for the supramental vision, so long as we are what we are. We have to use an inferior procedure to express ourselves, and yet we possess at the same time the full knowledge. It is because of the necessity of transferring this knowledge into words that we are compelled, so to say, to hold back a part of what we know, letting it come out step by step in a succession. It is the veil of expression that suits our need both for utterance and understanding. The knowledge is there, really there, we have not got to search for it and we have not got to express it as we go on finding it; no, it is there in its totality, only the necessity of expression makes us say things one after another, and that naturally diminishes the omnipotence ascribed by Sri Aurobindo to the vision. For what is omnipotent is the total vision expressing itself totally. Omniscience is there, in principle, it is perceptible; but this omniscience cannot act in its full power, for it has to come down a step to be able to express itself.
10.01 - Cycles of Creation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
the Present cycle of creation has for its goal the advent of the Supermind, the coming of a supramental race of beings.
The world, it seems, moves in cycles. There are periods of creation with a hiatus or a gap in between of dissolution. Present-day science too speaks of the universe proceeding in pulsations, that is to say, alternate expansion and contraction. Indian mythology speaks of alternate 'Pralaya' and 'Srishti'. The Indian system speaks also of 'Mahpralaya', utter dissolution or 'Yoganidr' of the Supreme. In other words, there are periods when the universe retires altogether into its origin and when it comes out it manifests itself in an entirely new way. In a given creation between two major dissolutions, 'Mahpralaya', that is to say, in a major cycle, there are minor cycles (epicycles) marked by minor dissolutions, 'Khandapralaya'.
the Present major cycle aims, as I have said, at the manifestation of the Supermind and the installation of the supramental race. The cycle started, one does not know when, billions of years ago perhaps, but the principle of the creation seems to be clear enough. It has matter for its base, earth as its centre and man as its dynamic agent. For all we know there may be, there are other principles and modalities of creation. One may well conceive of air, for example, as the basis of creation and some other heavenly body, an airy globe in a far-off galaxy, for example, being the basis of creation and an airy creature as the vehicle for the play based upon that principle. Even fire may be the basic principle of another creation and salamander-like beings its natural inhabitants. There may be quite other principles or modes of creation conceivable or inconceivable by the human mind. However, we speak now of the Present terrestrial creation of which we human beings are representative participants.
the Present cycle, the great cycle that is to say, has, as I have said, for its ultimate motive and purpose the advent and reign of the Supermind. But this proceeds through stages, each stage forming a minor or lesser cycle. The stages of these cycles are the different degrees of what is called evolution. The evolution starts upon the basis of an apparently simple substance and goes on unfolding gradually an inherent complexity. As we know, the different cycles of evolution in the past were at the outset a purely material universe of inorganic elements, then came the cycle of organic combinations, then the manifestation of life and next the mind and at present the mind at its peak capacity, which means the advent of the strange creature that has a miraculous destiny to accomplish. And that is to bring forth out of him the achievement and fulfilment of the next cycle. For the mind is there to bring forth, to usher in the Supermind and man is there as the laboratory and the vanguard as well of the Supermind.
At the Present time the human consciousness in general has been so prepared and its dwelling and playfield the earth consciousness made ready to such a degree that it has been possible for the still secreted higher perfection to enter into the arena. The evolution, the growth has been a gradual expression and revelation of the light, the consciousness in a higher and higher degree of purity and potency through an encasement hard and resistant at first but gradually yielding to the impact of the higher status and even transforming itself so as to become its instrument and embodiment. We speak of the Present situation, we are concerned with man and what he is to grow into or bring out of himself. Here also there seem to be stages or cycles of creation leading to the final achievement. The whole burden of the Present endeavour is how to transcend, transform or modify the animalhood which is the basis of humanity even now and in and through which man is growing and seeking to manifest and incarnate his superior potencies. Man's supramental destiny means that he totally outgrows the animal, outgrows even his manhood in so far as it is merely human; for he has to incorporate the principle of the supramental which wholly transcends the mental.
The first step in this momentous movement has been taken, the first act achieved, for the supramental is now here established in the earth's atmosphere and is already percolating into general human consciousness. It is no longer a far-off object residing away in its own home, its higher transcendent status, but a concrete reality as something like earth's own. It is at work in this material envelope, this animal encasing of humanity and is vigorously transforming, demolishing and building, preparing the new structure.
10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And all the Present loves as new-revealed
And all the hopes the future brings had failed
1.008 - The Principle of Self-Affirmation, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
But more difficult than the work of wiping out past memories is the adjustment of oneself with present conditions. We shall not think now about what is ahead of us in the future. the Present condition is a reality more vehement than the past memories because we see it with our eyes, and nothing can be worse than that. These things which we see with our eyes every day and with which we have some sort of connection or the other, at least remotely, have some say in the matter of our own personal lives. They have to be harnessed for the purpose of the practice of yoga, harnessed in the sense that they should be made contri butory in some way or the other to the aim before us.
It is also necessary here to make a distinction between the necessary and the unnecessary aspects of life, or the essentials and the non-essentials, we may say. We have umpteen kinds of perceptions and relationships in life. I see a tree in front of me, I see the Ganga flowing, I see the sun rising these are all perceptions. But I need not worry too much about these perceptions since they are indeterminate to a large extent, and except for the fact that they are cognitions and perceptions of certain facts outside, they do not mean much in my personal emotional life or volitional undertakings. In two important sutras, Patanjali draws a distinction between 'indeterminate perceptions' and 'determinate perceptions'. The determinate ones are those which have a direct connection with our daily life we cannot avoid them, and they control us to a large extent. The indeterminate ones are like the tree in front, for example. It is merely a perception and a knowledge of something that is there, but it is not going to harass us or control us in any visible or palpable manner.
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This is the argument of the central principle of individuality called the ego, or the asmita or ahamkara. The protection of this ego is the main function of our psychophysical individuality. Its existence and its operation have two sides or aspects of emphasis a like for certain things, and a dislike for certain other things. We may be wondering why it is that we like certain things and dislike certain things. Is there any reason behind it? The reason is not easily available, though it is available if we go a little deeper. A like, a want, a love or an affection is that pattern of the movement of our consciousness towards an external object, whose characteristics are observed by the mind for the time being to be the counterpart, the correlative of the Present condition of one's individuality so much so that when the condition of our personality changes, our like or love will also change. We cannot go on loving the same thing for eternity, nor can we hate a thing for eternity.
Loves and hatreds change when our condition changes, so that likes and dislikes, loves and hatreds are the reactions set up in respect of certain external objects by the changing pattern of our own personality or individuality. If it is summer, I like to drink water; if it is winter, I like to drink hot tea. My liking for hot tea or for cold water has some connection with what is taking place inside me in my biological and psychological personality. When there is drying up of the system due to heat, there is a need for water I would like to drink cold water. But when it is freezing cold due to the wintry atmosphere, I would like to have hot tea. So our like of hot tea and dislike of cold water in winter is caused by a peculiar condition of our body coupled with the condition of the mind, of course. In summer we would not like to drink hot tea. We would like a soda or cold water, etc., and dislike anything that is hot; we would not like to have hot coffee or hot tea in such climate. "Oh, it is so hot. I will take cold water." We dislike during summer that very thing which we liked in winter. What has happened to us? Why did we like it that day and today we dislike it? It is not because there is something wrong with tea or something wrong with water. They are the same things; nothing has happened to them. But something has happened to us. So today I like that which I disliked the other day, and today I dislike that which I liked the other day. What is the reason? The reason is us only. What has happened to us? Something has happened to us. If one can very carefully go into the deepest recesses of one's nature, one would know why loves and hatreds arise in one's mind. We project upon others, by a peculiar process called a defense-mechanism in psychoanalysis, the counterpart of our own nature. That which will not fit into our present condition is not liked by us. By 'present condition' I mean physical, biological, psychological, social everything. Anything that will fit into our present physical, biological, psychological and social condition is liked or loved by us. Anything that is outside the need of this condition is disliked; it becomes an obstacle. "I don't like it," we say. Why don't we like it? We do not know. "I don't like it; that is all." But if we are good physicians of the mind we will know why it is that we like it, and why it is that we do not like it.
1.009 - Perception and Reality, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Now, analogically speaking, if the one has become two, and two has become four, four has become eight, etc., so that we are today what we are, in this condition, the reverse process of returning to the original unity would be by a successive recession of the very same process, stage by stage, missing not a single link. These are the stages of yoga. The steps in yoga, or the stages of knowledge, are the process of the recession of the effect into the cause, the condition of the effect in which one is 'A' or 'B' or 'XYZ'. So we have to determine our present condition, and from that condition we must retrace our steps back not suddenly to the topmost unity, but to the immediately-above condition. The step that is next to us, the condition above us, the stage ahead of us, is our goal for the Present or the time being, with which we have to get united in meditation, in yoga. And that second step would effect a further stage ahead, and so on and so forth, until the final unity is achieved.
So, it would not be judicious on the part of any individual to vehemently assert that the physical perceptions of the world are all-in-all. The materialist's conception is, therefore, not correct, because this conception arises on account of a miscalculated attitude towards everything. This is the reason why, in the practice of yoga, expert guidance is called for, because we are dealing with matters that are super-intellectual, super-rational. Here our own understanding is not of much use, nor are books of any use, because we are treading on dangerous ground which the mind has not seen and cannot contemplate. We are all a wonder, says the scripture. This is a mystery, a wonder. It is a wonder because it is not capable of intellectually being analysed. The scripture proclaims that the subject is a great mystery, a great wonder and marvel; and one who teaches it is also a marvel, and the one who receives this knowledge, who understands it the disciple is also a wonder, indeed, because though the broadcasting station is powerful, the receiver-set also must be equally powerful to receive the message. The bamboo stick will not receive the message of the BBC. So the disciple is also a wonder to receive this mysterious knowledge, as the teacher himself is a wonder; and the subject is a marvel by itself.
1.00a - DIVISION A - THE INTERNAL FIRES OF THE SHEATHS., #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The Lord of Cosmic Love now seeks union with His Brother, and, in point of time, embodies all the Present. He is the sumtotal of all that is embodied; He is conscious Existence. He is the Son divine and His life and nature evolve through every existent form. The Lord of Cosmic Will holds hid the future within His plans and consciousness. They are all three the Sons of one Father, all three the aspects of the One God, all three are Spirit, all three are Soul, and all three are Rays emanating from one cosmic centre. All three are substance, but in the past one Lord was the elder Son, in the Present another Lord comes to the fore, and in the future still another. But this is so only in Time. From the standpoint of the Eternal Now, none is greater nor less than another, for the last shall be first, and the first last. Out of manifestation time is not, and freed from objectivity states of consciousness are not.
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.
1.00a - Introduction, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
It seems to me that you should confine yourself very closely to the actual work in front of you. At the Present moment, of course, this includes a good deal of general study; but my point is that the terms employed in that study should always be capable of precise definition. I am not sure whether you have my Little Essays Toward Truth. The first essay in the book entitled "Man" gives a full account of the five principles which go to make up Man according to the Qabalistic system. I have tried to define these terms as accurately as possible, and I think you will find them, in any case, clearer than those to which you have become accustomed with the Eastern systems. In India, by the way, no attempt is ever made to use these vague terms. They always have a very clear idea of what is meant by words like "Buddhi," "Manas" and the like. Attempts at translation are very unsatisfactory. I find that even with such a simple matter as the "Eight limbs of Yoga," as you will see when you come to read my Eight Lectures.
I am very pleased with your illustrations; that is excellent practice for you. Presently you have to make talismans, and a Lamen for yourself, and even to devise a seal to serve as what you might call a magical coat-of-arms, and all this sort of thing is very helpful.
1.00b - Introduction, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Therefore only people endowed with exceptional faculties, a poor preferred minority seemed to be able to gain this sublime knowledge. Thus a great many of serious seekers of the truth had to go through piles of books just to catch one pearl of it now and again. The one, however, who is earnestly interested in his progress and does not pursue this sacred wisdom from sheer curiosity or else is yearning to satisfy his own lust, will find the right leader to initiate him in this book. No incarnate adept, however high his rank may be, can give the disciple more for his start than the Present book does. If both the honest trainee and the attentive reader will find in this book all they have been searching for in vain all the years, then the book has fulfiled its purpose completely.
The Author.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
A further link in this chain which is offered for consideration lies in the fact that the four rays of mind (which concern the karma of the four planetary Logoi) in their totality hold in their keeping the Present evolutionary process for Man, viewing him as the Thinker. These four, with the karmic four, work in the closest co-operation. Therefore, we have the following groups interacting:
First. The four Maharajahs, the lesser Lipika Lords, [li]49 who apply past karma and work it out in the Present.
Second. The four Lipikas of the second group, referred to by H. P. B. as occupied in applying future karma, and wielding the future destiny of the races. The work of the first group of four cosmic Lipika Lords is occult and is only revealed somewhat at the fourth Initiation (and even then but slightly) so it will not be touched upon here.
--
A further chain of ideas may be followed up in the remembrance that the fourth ether is even now being studied and developed by the average scientist, and is already somewhat harnessed to the service of man; that the fourth subplane of the astral plane is the normal functioning ground of the average man and that in this round escape from the etheric vehicle is being achieved; that the fourth subplane of the mental plane is the Present goal of endeavor of one-fourth of the human family; that the fourth manvantara will see the solar ring-pass-not offering avenues of escape to those who have reached the necessary point; that the four planetary Logoi will perfect Their escape from Their planetary environment, and will function with greater ease on the cosmic astral plane, paralleling on cosmic levels the achievement of the human units who are the cells in Their bodies.
Our solar Logos, being a Logos of the fourth order, will begin to co-ordinate His cosmic buddhic body, and as He develops cosmic mind He will gradually achieve, by the aid of that mind, the ability to touch the cosmic buddhic plane.
--
First, that this static condition is only so when viewed from the standpoint of man at the Present time, and is [116] only termed so in order to make plainer the changes that must be effected and the dangers that must be offset. Evolution moves so slowly from man's point of view that it seems to be almost stationary, especially where etheric evolution is concerned.
Second, that we are only concerning ourselves with the physical etheric body and not with its correspondences on all planes. This is because our system is on the cosmic etheric levels, and hence is of prime importance to us.
--
For the sake of those who read this treatise, and because the sequential repetition of fact makes for clarity, let us here briefly tabulate certain fundamental hypotheses that have a definite bearing upon the matter in hand, and which may serve to clear up the Present existing confusion concerning the matter of the solar system. Some of the facts stated are already well known, others are inferential, while some are the expression of old and true correspondences couched in a more modern form.
a. The lowest cosmic plane is the cosmic physical, and it is the only one which the finite mind of man can in any way comprehend.
--
f. Hence this fourth cosmic etheric plane forms the meeting ground for the past and the future, and is the Present.
g. Therefore, also, the buddhic or intuitional plane (the correspondence in the system of this fourth cosmic ether) is the meeting ground, or plane of union, for that which is man and for that which will be superman, and links the past with that which is to be.
--
It is not our purpose to give facts for verification by science, or even to point the way to the next step onward for scientific investigators; that we may do so is but incidental and purely secondary. What we seek mainly is to give indications of the development and correspondence of the threefold whole that makes the solar system what it is the vehicle through which a great cosmic ENTITY, the solar Logos, manifests active intelligence with the purpose in view of demonstrating perfectly the love side of His nature. Back of this design lies a yet more esoteric and ulterior purpose, hid in the Will Consciousness of the Supreme Being, which perforce will be later demonstrated when the Present objective is attained. The dual alternation of objective manifestation and of subjective obscuration, the periodic out-breathing, followed by the in-breathing of all that has been carried forward through evolution embodies in the system one of the basic cosmic vibrations, and the key-note of that cosmic ENTITY whose body we are. The heart beats of the Logos (if it might be so inadequately expressed) are the source of all cyclic evolution, and hence the importance attached to that aspect of development called the "heart" or "love aspect," and the interest that is awakened by the study of rhythm. This is true, not only cosmically and macrocosmically, but likewise in the study of the human unit. Underlying all the physical sense attached to rhythm, vibration, cycles and heart-beat, lie their subjective analogieslove, feeling, emotion, desire, harmony, synthesis and ordered sequence, and back of these analogies lies the source of all, the identity of that Supreme Being Who thus expresses Himself.
Therefore, the study of pralaya, or the withdrawal of the life from out of the etheric vehicle will be the same [129] whether one studies the withdrawal of the human etheric double, the withdrawal of the planetary etheric double, or the withdrawal of the etheric double of the solar system. The effect is the same and the consequences similar.
1.00c - INTRODUCTION, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
than reason, where alone the explanation of the Present state is
to be found. This is the value of the study of something that
1.00e - DIVISION E - MOTION ON THE PHYSICAL AND ASTRAL PLANES, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
The first Logos embodies the "will to live" and it was through His instrumentality that the Manasaputras came into objective existence in relation to the human and deva hierarchies. In this system, the blending of the Divine Ray of Wisdom and the Primordial Ray of intelligent matter forms the great dual evolution; back of both these cosmic Entities stands another Entity Who is the embodiment of Will, and Who is the utiliser of formsthough not the forms of any other than the Greater Building devas and the human hierarchies in time and space. He is the animating principle; the will-to-live aspect of the seven Hierarchies. Nevertheless these seven Hierarchies are (as says H. P. B.) the sevenfold ray of wisdom, the dragon in its seven forms. [lxviii]66, [lxix]67, [lxx]68 This is a [147] deep mystery, and only a clue to it all can be found at this time by man in the contemplation of his own nature in the three worlds of his manifestation. Just as our Logos is seeking objectivity through His solar system in its threefold form of which the Present is the second, so man seeks objectivity through his three bodiesphysical, astral and mental. At this time he is polarised in his astral body, or in his second aspect in like manner as the undifferentiated Logos is polarised in His second aspect. In time and space as we now conceive it, the sum total of jivas are governed by feeling, emotion, and desire, and not by the will, yet at the same time the will aspect governs manifestation, for the Ego who is the source of personality shows in manifestation the will to love.
The difficulty lies in the inability of the finite mind to grasp the significance of this threefold manifestation, but by thoughtful brooding over the Personality and its relation to the Ego, who is the love aspect and who nevertheless in relation to manifestation in the three worlds is the will aspect likewise, will come some faint light upon the same problems raised to Deity, or expanded from microcosmic to macrocosmic spheres.
--
b. The Grand Man of the Heavens. The seven Heavenly Men are the seven centres in the body of the Logos, bearing to Him a relationship identical with that borne by the Masters and Their affiliated groups, to some planetary Logos. Systemic kundalini goes forward to the vivification of these centres, and at this stage of development certain centres are more closely allied than others. Just as in connection with our planetary Logos, the three etheric planets of our chainEarth, Mercury and Mars [lxxix]77form a triangle of rare importance, so it may be here said that at the Present point in evolution of the logoic centres, Venus, Earth and Saturn form one triangle of great interest. It is a triangle that is at this time undergoing vivification [182] through the action of kundalini; it is consequently increasing the vibratory capacity of the centres, which are becoming slowly fourth-dimensional. It is not yet permissible to point out others of the great triangles, but as regards the centres, we may here give two hints:
First. Venus corresponds to the heart centre in the body logoic, and has an inter-relationship therefore with all the other centres in the solar system wherein the heart aspect is the one of greater prominence.
--
Each of the five senses, when coupled with manas, develops within the subject a concept embodying the past, the Present and the future. Therefore when a man is very highly evolved, has transcended time (as known in the three worlds), and can therefore look at the three lower planes from the standpoint of the Eternal Now, he has superseded the senses by full active consciousness. He knows, and needs not the senses to guide him any longer to knowledge. But in time, and in the three worlds, each sense on each plane is employed to convey to the Thinker some aspect of the not-self, and by the aid [194] of mind, the Thinker can then adjust his relationship thereto.
Hearing gives him an idea of relative direction, and enables a man to fix his place in the scheme and to locate himself.
--
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.
1.00g - Foreword, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"This plan has been put into action; the idea has been to cover the subjects from every possible angle. The style has been colloquial and fluent; technical terms have either been carefully avoided or most carefully explained; and the letter has not been admitted to the series until the querent has expressed satisfaction. Some seventy letters, up to the Present have been written, but still there seem to be certain gaps in the demonstration, like those white patches on the map of the World, which looked so tempting fifty years ago.
"This memorandum is to ask for your collaboration and support. A list, indicating briefly the subject of each letter already written, is appended. Should you think that any of those will help you in your own problems, a typed copy will be sent to you at once ... Should you want to know anything outside the scope, send in your question (stated as fully and clearly as possible) ... The answer should reach you, bar accidents, in less than a month ... It is proposed ultimately to issue the series in book form."
1.00 - Introduction to Alchemy of Happiness, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Mohammedan scholars of the Present day still hold him in such high respect, that his name is never mentioned by them without some such distinctive epithet, as the "Scientific [6] Imaum," or "Chief witness for Islamism." His rank in the eastern world, as a philosopher and a theologian, had naturally given his name some distinction in our histories of philosophy, and it is enumerated in connection with those of Averroes (Abu Roshd) and Avicenna (Abu Sina) as illustrating the intellectual life and the philosophical schools of the Mohammedans. Still his writings were less known than either of the two others. His principal work, The Destruction of the Philosophers, called forth in reply one of the two most important works of Averroes entitled The Destruction of the Destruction. Averroes, in his commentary upon Aristotle, extracts from Ghazzali copiously for the purpose of refuting bis views. A short treatise of his had been published at Cologne, in 1506, and Pocock had given in Latin his interpretation of the two fundamental articles of the Mohammedan creed. Von Hammer printed in 1838, at Vienna, a translation of a moral essay, Eyuha el Weled, as a new year's token for youth.
It has been reserved to our own times to obtain a more intimate acquaintance with Ghazzali, and this chiefly by means of a translation by M. Pallia, into French, of his Confessions, wherein he announces very clearly his philosophical views; and from an essay on his writings by M. Smolders. In consequence, Mr. Lewes, who in his first edition of the Biographical History of Philosophy, found no place for Ghazzali, is induced in his last edition, from the evidenee which that treatise contains that he was one of the controlling minds of his age, to devote an entire section to an exhibition of his opinions in the same series with Abclard and Bruno, and to make him the typical figure to represent Arabian philosophy. For a full account of Ghazzali's [7] school of philosophy, we refer to his history and to the two essays, just mentioned. We would observe, very briefly however, that like most of the learned Mohammedans of his age, he was a student of Aristotle. While they regarded all the Greek philosophers as infidels, they availed themselves of their logic and their principles of philosophy to maintain, as far possible, the dogmas of the Koran. Ghazzali's mind possessed however Platonizing tendencies, and he affiliated himself to the Soofies or Mystics in his later years. He was in antagonism with men who to him appeared, like Avicenna, to exalt reason above the Koran, yet he himself went to the extreme limits of reasoning in his endeavors to find an intelligible basis for the doctrines of the Koran, and a philosophical basis for a holy rule of life. His character, and moral and intellectual rank are vividly depicted in the following extract from the writings of Tholuck, a prominent leader of the modern Evangelical school of Germany.
--
This treatise on the Alchemy of Happiness, or Kimiai Saadet, seems well adapted to extend our knowledge of the writings of Ghazzali and of the opinions current then and now in the Oriental world. Although it throws no light on any questions of geography, philology or political history, objects most frequently in view in translations from the Oriental languages, yet a book which exhibits with such plainness the opinions of so large a portion of the human race as the Mohammedans, on questions of philosophy, practical morality and religion, will always be as interesting to the general reader and to a numerous class of students, as the facts that may be elicited to complete a series of kings in a dynasty or to establish the site of an ancient city can be to the historian or the geographer. I translate it from an edition published in Turkish in 1845 (A. H., 1260), at the imperial printing press in Constantinople. [9] As no books are allowed to be printed there which have not passed under the eyes of the censor, the doctrines presented in the book indicate, not only the opinions of eight hundred years since, but also what views are regarded as orthodox, or tolerated among the orthodox at the Present day. It has been printed also in Persian at Calcutta.
In form, the book contains a treatise on practical piety, but as is the case with a large proportion of Mohammedan works, the author, whatever may be his subject, finds a place for observations reaching far wide of his apparent aim, so our author is led to make many observations which develop his notions in anatomy, physiology, natural philosophy and natural religion. The partisans of all sorts of opinions will be interested in finding that a Mohammedan author writing so long since in the centre of Asia, had occasion to approve or condemn so many truths, speculations or fancies which are now current among us with the reputation of novelty. Many of the same paradoxes and problems that startle or fascinate in the nineteenth century are here discussed. He came in contact, among his contemporaries, with persons who made the same general objections to natural and revealed religion, as understood by Mohammedans, as are in our days made to Christianity, or who perverted and abused the religion which they professed for their own ends, in the same manner as Christianity is abused among us. And he engaged with earnestness now truthfully, and now erroneously, in refuting these men. His usual stand-point in discussion is equally removed from the most extravagant mysticism, and literal and formal orthodoxy. He attempts a dignified blending of reason [10] and faith, requiring of his fellow men unfeigned piety in the temper and tone of an evangelical Christian. He reminds his readers, in these discourses, that they are not Mussulmans if they are satisfied with merely a nominal faith, and treats with scorn those who are spiritualists only in language and dress.
1.00 - PREFACE, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
namely, that consciousness is power. Hypnotized as we are by the "inescapable" scientific conditions of the Present world, we have come to believe that our hope lies in an ever greater proliferation of machines, which will see better than we do, hear better than we do,
calculate better than we do, heal better than we do and finally,
1.00 - Preliminary Remarks, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
No religion has failed hitherto by not promising enough; the Present breaking up of all religions is due to the fact that people have asked to see the securities. Men have even renounced the important material advantages which a wellorganised religion may confer upon a State, rather than acquiesce in fraud or falsehood, or even in any system which, if not proved guilty, is at least unable to demonstrate its innocence.
Being more or less bankrupt, the best thing we can do is to attack the problem afresh without preconceived ideas. Let us begin by doubting every statement. Let us find a way of subjecting every statement to the test of experiment. Is there any truth at all in the claims of various religions? Let us examine the question.
1.00 - The Constitution of the Human Being, #Theosophy, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
should not for the time being read anything into this fact, but merely take it as it presents itself. It makes it evident that man has three sides to his nature. This and nothing else will for the Present be indicated here by the three words body, soul, and spirit. He who connects any preconceived meanings, or even hypotheses, with these three words will necessarily misunderstand the following explanations. By body is here meant that by which the things in the environment of a man reveal themselves to him, as in the example just cited, the flowers of the meadow. By the word soul is signified that by which he links the things to his own being, through which he experiences pleasure and displeasure, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow. By spirit is meant that which becomes manifest in him when, as Goe the expressed it, he looks at things as "a so-to-speak divine being." In this sense the human being consists of body, soul, and spirit.
Through his body man is able to place himself for the time being in connection with the things; through his soul he retains in himself the impressions which they make on him; through his spirit there reveals itself to him
1.012 - Sublimation - A Way to Reshuffle Thought, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
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
The term 'indriya nigrah' means sense-control; 'atma nigrah' means self-control. Both these terms are often thought of as having a synonymous meaning and are used as such, but the term 'self' has a larger connotation than 'sense', as we already know. So the term 'self-control' should mean something much more than what is indicated by the term 'sense-control', because the senses are only a few of the functions of the self and not all the functions, while self-control implies a restriction imposed upon every function of the self, meaning thereby the lower self, which has to be regulated by the principle of the higher self. The self that has to be controlled is any self which is lower than the Universal Self. The degrees of self gradually go on increasing in their comprehensiveness as we rise higher and higher, so that it becomes necessary that at every step the immediately succeeding stage, which is more comprehensive, acts as the governing principle of the category of self just below. An analogy would be the syllabi or curricula of education we do not suddenly jump into the topmost level of studies. There is always a governing principle exercised by systems of education, wherein the immediately succeeding stage determines the needs of the immediately preceding condition. The self, as far as we are concerned at the Present moment, can be regarded as that principle of individuality which comprehends all that we regard as 'we', or connected with us.
The control of the self is, therefore, the refining of the individual personality in its manifold aspects, together with anything that may appear to belong to it, including taking into consideration all of its external relationships. Our individual existence is not limited to the physical body. It also includes its physical relationships - such as the family, for example. The members of a family are not visibly or physically attached to any individual in the family, not even to the head of the family, but there is an attachment psychologically; and the self is, therefore, to take note of that aspect of its individual existence. Both the internal structure and the external relationship are to be taken into consideration, because they are inseparable. We cannot say which precedes and which succeeds, or which has to come first and which later. They have to be taken into consideration simultaneously, almost.
1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
biological sciences in the Present day. With Darwin the bio-
logical sciences have tried to adapt their findings to the ma-
1.01 - A NOTE ON PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
dead matter and the Present spread of the living. Gazing upward,
toward the space held in readiness for new creation, he dedicates
1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
li Cf. my papers on the divine child and the Kore in the Present volume, and
Kernyi's complementary essays in Essays on [or Introduction to] a Science of
1.01 - Economy, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the Present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting. So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, mans body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, _animal life_, is nearly synonymous with the expression, _animal heat_; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us,and Fuel serves only to prepare that
Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without,Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the _heat_ thus generated and absorbed.
--
Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the Present day, and in this country, as I find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,that is, keep comfortably warm, and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course _ la mode_.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.
--
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live,if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the Present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers,and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not;but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the Present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most mens, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint No Admittance on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
--
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the Present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well off as before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boys play. Certainly no nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am
1.01 - Foreward, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
to here, is reproduced in Part One of the Present volume. - Ed.
22
1.01 - Fundamental Considerations, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
the Present book is, in fact, the account of the nascence of a new world and a new consciousness. It is based not an ideas or speculations but on insights into mankinds mutations from its primordial beginnings up to the Present - on perhaps novel insights into the forms of consciousness manifest in the various epochs of mankind: insights into the powers behind their realization as manifest between origin and the Present, and active in origin and the Present.
And as the origin before all time is the entirety of the very beginning, so too is the Present the entirety of everything temporal and time-bound, including the effectual reality of all time phases: yesterday, today, tomorrow, and even the pre-temporal and timeless.
The structuration we have discovered seems to us to reveal the bases of consciousness, thereby enabling us to make a contri bution to the understanding of mans emergent consciousness. It is based on the recognition that in the course of mankinds history - and not only Western mans - clearly discernable worlds stand out whose development or unfolding took place in mutations of consciousness. This, then, presents the task of a cultural-historical analysis of the various structures of consciousness as they have proceeded from the various mutations.
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By returning to the very sources of human development as we observe all of the structures of consciousness, and moving from there toward our present day and our contemporary situation and consciousness, we can not only discover the past and the Present moment of our existence but also gain a view into the future which reveals the traits of a new reality amidst the decline of our age.
It is our belief that the essential traits of a new age and a new reality are discernible in nearly all forms of contemporary expression, whether in the creations of modern art, or in the recent findings of the natural sciences, or in the results of the humanities and sciences of the mind. Moreover we are in a position to define this new reality in such a way as to emphasize one of its most significant elements. Our definition is a natural corollary of the recognition that mans coming to awareness is inseparably bound to his consciousness of space and time.
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When we have grasped this it is at once apparent that we can extricate ourselves from our dangerous situation only by ordering ou relationships to ourselves, to our I or Ego, and not just our relationships with others, to the Thou, that is to God, the world, our fellow man and neighbor. That seems possible only if we are willing to assimilate the entirety of our human existence into our awareness. This means that all of our structures of awareness that form and support our present consciousness structure will have to be integrated into a new and more intensive form, which would in fact unlock a new reality. To that end we must constantly relive and re-experience in a decisive sense the full depth of our past. The adage that anyone who denies and condemns his past also abnegates his future is valid for the individual as well as for mankind. Our plea for an appropriate ordering and conscious realization of our relationships to the I as well as the Thou chiefly concerns the ordering and conscious recognition of our origin, and of all factors leading to the Present. It is only in terms of man in his entirety that we shall achieve the necessary detachment from the Present situation, Le., from both our unperspectival ties to the group or collective, and our perspectival attachment to the separated, individual Ego. When we become aware of the exhausted residua of past or passing forms of our understanding of reality we will recognize more clearly the signs of the inevitable new. We will also sense that there are new sources which can be tapped: the sources of the aperspectival world that can liberate us from the two exhausted and deficient forms which have become almost completely invalid and are certainly no longer all-inclusive or decisive.
It is our task in this book to work out this aperspectival basis. Our discussion will rely more an the evidence presented in the history of thought than on the findings of the natural sciences as is the case with the authors Transformation of the Occident. Among the disciplines of historical thought the investigation of language will form the predominant source of our insight since it is the preeminent means of reciprocal communication between man and the world.
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It will be our task to demonstrate that the first stirrings of the new can be found in all areas of human expression, and that they inherently share a common character. This demonstration can succeed only if we have certain knowledge about the manifestations of both our past and our present. Consequently, the task of the Present work will be to work out the foundations of the past and the Present which are also the basis of the new consciousness and the new reality arising therefrom. It will be the task of the second part to define the new emergent consciousness structure to the extent that its inceptions are already visible.
We shall therefore beginwith the evidence and not with idealistic constructions; in the face of present-day weapons of annihilation, such constructions have less chance of survival than ever before. But as we shall see, weapons and nuclear fission are not the only realities to be dealt with; spiritual reality in its intensified form is also becoming effectual and real. This new spiritual reality is without question our only security that the threat of material destruction can be averted. Its realization alone seems able to guarantee mans continuing existence in the face of the powers of technology, rationality, and chaotic emotion. If our consciousness, that is, the individual persons awareness, vigilance, and clarity of vision, cannot master the new reality and make possible its realization, then the prophets of doom will have been correct. Other alternatives are an illusion; consequently, great demands are placed on us, and each one of us have been given a grave responsibility, not merely to survey but to actually traverse the path opening before us.
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What is of interest to us within the Present context is not the historical predicament occasioned by the collision of peoples of differing might, but rather the supersession of the magic group-consciousness and its most potent weapon, spell-casting, by rational, ego-consciousness. Today this rational consciousness, with nuclear fission its strongest weapon, is confronted by a similar catastrophic situation of failure; consequently, it too can be vanquished by a new consciousness structure. We are convinced that there are powers arising from within ourselves that are already at work overcoming the deficiency and dubious nature of our rational ego-consciousness via the new aperspectival awareness whose manifestations are surging forth everywhere. The aperspective consciousness structure is a consciousness of the whole, an integral consciousness encompassing all time and embracing both mans distant past and his approaching future as a living present. The new spiritual attitude can take root only through an insightful process of intensive awareness. This attitude must emerge from its present concealment and latency and become effective, and thereby prepare the transparency of the world and man in which spirituality can manifest itself.
The first part of the Present work, which is devoted to the foundations of the aperspectival world, is intended to furnish convincing evidence for this new spiritual attitude. This evidence rests an two guiding principles whose validity will gradually become clear:
1) Latency - what is concealed - is the demonstrable presence of the future. It indudes everything that is not yet manifest, as well as everything which has again returned to latency. Since we are dealing here primarily with phenomena of consciousness and integration, we will also have to investigate questions of history, the soul and the psyche, time, space, and the forms of thought.
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Our concern is to render transparent everything latent behind and before the world - to render transparent our own origin, our entire human past, as well as the Present, which already contains the future. We are shaped and determined not only by today and yesterday, but by tomorrow as well. The author is not interested in outlining discrete segments, steps or levels of man, but in disclosing the transparency of man as a whole and the interplay of the various consciousness structures which constitute him. This transparency or diaphaneity of our existence is particularly evident during transitional periods, and it is from the experiences of man in transition, experiences which man has had with the concealed and latent aspects of his dawning future as he became aware of them, that will clarify our own experiencing of the Present.
It is perhaps unnecessary to reiterate that we cannot employ the methods derived from and dependent an our present consciousness structure to investigate different structures of consciousness, but will have to adapt our method to the specific structure under investigation. Yet if we relinquish a unitary methodology we do not necessarily regress to an unmethodological or irrational attitude, or to a kind of conjuration or mystical contemplation. Contemporary methods employ predominantly dualistic procedures that do not extend beyond simple subject-object relationships; they limit our understanding to what is commensurate with the Present Western mentality. Even where the measurements of contemporary methodologies are based primarily an quantitative criteria, they are all vitiated by the problem of the antithesis between measure and mass (as we will discuss later in detail). Our method is not just a measured assessment, but above and beyond this an attempt at diaphany or rendering transparent. With its aid, whatever lies behind (past) and ahead of (future) the currently dominant mentality becomes accessible to the new subject-object relationship. Although this new relationship is no longer dualistic, it does not threaten man with a loss of identity, or with his being equated with an object.
Although this new method is still in its infancy, we are nevertheless compelled to make use of it.
In summary, it should be said that our description does not deal with a new image of the world, nor with a new Weltanschauung, nor with a new conception of the world. A new Image would be no more than the creation of a myth, since all imagery has a predominantly mythical nature. A new Weltanschauung wouldbe nothing else than a new mysticism and irrationality, as mythical characteristics are inherent in all contemplation to the extent that it is merely visionary; and a new conception of the world would be nothing else than yet another standard rationalistic construction of the Present, for conceptualization has an essentially rational and abstract nature.
Our concern is with a new reality - a reality functioning and effectual integrally, in which intensity and action, the effective and the effect co-exist; one where origin, by virtue of presentiation, blossoms forth anew; and one in which the Present is all-encompassing and entire. Integral reality is the worlds transparency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both.
1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Universe, the Soul and its transmigrations, and its final return to the Source of All. The new era in the history of the Qabalah created by the appearance of this storehouse of legend, philosophy, and anecdote, has continued right down to the Present day. Yet nearly every writer who has since espoused the doctrines of the Qabalah has made the
Zohar his principal textbook, and its exponents have applied themselves assiduously to commentaries, epitomes, and translations - missing, however, with only a few exceptions, the real underlying possibilities of the Qabalistic
1.01 - How is Knowledge Of The Higher Worlds Attained?, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
to you as long as you, at the Present stage of your evolution, are not competent to receive it into your soul in the right way.
The methods by which a student is prepared for the reception of higher knowledge are minutely prescribed. The direction he is to take is traced with unfading, everlasting letters in the worlds of the spirit where the initiates guard the higher secrets. In ancient times, anterior to our history, the temples of the spirit were also outwardly visible; today, because our life has become so unspiritual, they are not to be found in the world visible to external sight; yet they are present spiritually everywhere, and all who seek may find them.
1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
may be those of the past, the Present, or the future, and may be static or dynamic in nature: a good scientific
theory allows for prediction and control of becoming (of transformation) as well as being. However, the
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conceptualized in relationship to the Present, which serves at least as a necessary point of contrast and
comparison. To get somewhere in the future presupposes being somewhere in the Present; furthermore, the
desirability of the place travelled to depends on the valence of the place vacated. The question of what
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3) how should we therefore act? what is the nature of the specific processes by which the Present state
might be transformed into that which is desired?
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interpretation of the emotional acceptability of the Present that comprises our answer to the question what
is? [what is the nature (meaning, the significance) of the current state of experience?].
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motivational significance of the Present, experienced in relation to some identifiable desired future, and
allow us to construct and interpret appropriate patterns of action, from within the confines of that schema.
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of the motivational significance of the Present, and reconsideration of the ideal nature of the future. This is
a radical, even revolutionary transformation, and it is a very complex process in its realization but mythic
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moving? and, finally, what are the processes by which the Present state might be transformed into that
which is desired?] The four classes include:
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about the Present, the future, and the mode of transforming one into the other are initially constructed, and
then reconstructed, in their entirety, when that becomes necessary. The traditional Christian (and not just
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because what we understand about the Present is not always necessarily sufficient to deal with the future.
This means that we have to be able to modify what we understand, even though to do so is to risk our own
1.01 - Newtonian and Bergsonian Time, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
the past into the Present in such a way that I fix certain quanti-
ties and have a reasonable right to assume that certain other
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plete collection of data for the Present and the past is not suf-
ficient to predict the future more than statistically. It is thus not
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to the Present time, the central field of engineering has been
the study of prime movers. Heat has been converted into usable
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constitute the age of steam engines, the Present time is the age
of communication and control. There is in electrical engineer-
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pursued in the past as it is at the Present day.
At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexan-
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anisms, or servomechanisms, and the Present age is as truly
the age of servomechanisms as the nineteenth century was the
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To sum up: the many automata of the Present age are coupled
to the outside world both for the reception of impressions and
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
The most wonderful thing of all is, that there is a window in the heart from whence it surveys the world. This is called the invisible world, the world of intelligence, [23] or the spiritual world. People in general look only at the visible world, which is called also the Present world, the sensible world and the material world; their knowledge of it also is trivial and limited. And there is also a window in the heart from whence it surveys the intelligible world. There are two arguments to prove that there are such windows in the heart. One of the arguments is derived from dreams. When an individual goes to sleep, these windows remain open and the individual is able to perceive events which will befall him from the invisible world or from the hidden table of decrees,1 and the result corresponds exactly with the vision. Or he sees a similitude, and those who are skilled in the science of interpretation of dreams understand the meaning. But the explanation of this science of interpretation would be too long for this treatise. The heart resembles a pure mirror, you must know, in this particular, that when a man falls asleep, when his senses are closed, and when the heart, free and pure from blameable affections, is confronted with the preserved tablet, then the tablet reflects upon the heart the real states and hidden forms inscribed upon it. In that state the heart sees most wonderful forms and combinations. But when the heart is not free from impurity, or when, on waking, it busies itself with things of sense, the side towards the tablet will be obscured, and it can view nothing. For, although in sleep the senses are blunted, the imaginative faculty is not, but preserves the forms reflected upon the mirror of the heart. But as the perception does not take place by means of the external senses, but only in the imagination, the heart does not see them with absolute clearness, but sees only a phantom. But in death, as the senses are completely separated and the veil of the body is removed, the heart can contemplate the invisible [24] world and its hidden mysteries, without a veil, just as lightning or the celestial rays impress the external eye.
The second proof of the existence of these windows in the heart, is that no individual is destitute of these spiritual susceptibilities and of the faculty of thought and reflection. For instance every individual knows by inspiration, things which he has neither seen nor heard, though he knows not from whence or by what means he understands them. Still, notwithstanding the heart belongs to the invisible world, so long as it is absorbed in the contemplation of the sensible world, it is shut out and restrained from contemplating the invisible and spiritual world.
1.01 - On renunciation of the world, #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
Offer to Christ the labours of your youth, and in your old age you will rejoice in the wealth of dispassion. What is gathered in youth nourishes and comforts those who are tired out in old age. In our youth let us labour ardently and let us run vigilantly, for the hour of death is unknown. We have very evil and dangerous, cunning, unscrupulous foes, who hold fire in their hands and try to burn the temple of God with the flame that is in it. These foes are strong; they never sleep; they are incorporeal and invisible. Let no one when he is young listen to his enemies, the demons, when they say to him: Do not wear out your flesh lest you make it sick and weak. For you will scarcely find anyone, especially in the Present generation, who is determined to mortify his flesh, although he might deprive
1 Psalm cxl, 4. The meaning is that in the midst of his sins he makes excuses for not becoming a monk. The excuses are not for his sins, but his sins are his excuses.
1.01 - SAMADHI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
this. Before his mind, the past, the Present, and the future, are
alike one book for him to read; he does not require to go
1.01 - Soul and God, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
He who lives life in the Present is developed.
If you thus live all that you can live, you are developed.
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In the Present section we shall confine our attention to but a single feature of this traditional psychology the most important, the most emphatically insisted upon by all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy and, we may add, the least psychological. For the doctrine that is to be illustrated in this section belongs to autology rather than psychologyto the science, not of the personal ego, but of that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground. Based upon the direct experience of those who have fulfilled the necessary conditions of such knowledge, this teaching is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (That art thou); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being is to discover the fact for himself, to find out Who he really is.
The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without.
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In regard to no twentieth-century primitive society can we rule out the possibility of influence by, or borrowing from, some higher culture. Consequently, we have no right to argue from the Present to the past. Because many contemporary savages have an esoteric philosophy that is monotheistic with a monotheism that is sometimes of the That art thou variety, we are not entitled to infer offh and that neolithic or palaeolithic men held similar views.
More legitimate and more intrinsically plausible are the inferences that may be drawn from what we know about our own physiology and psychology. We know that human minds have proved themselves capable of everything from imbecility to Quantum Theory, from Mein Kampf and sadism to the sanctity of Philip Neri, from metaphysics to crossword puzzles, power politics and the Missa Solemnis. We also know that human minds are in some way associated with human brains, and we have fairly good reasons for supposing that there have been no considerable changes in the size and conformation of human brains for a good many thousands of years. Consequently it seems justifiable to infer that human minds in the remote past were capable of as many and as various kinds and degrees of activity as are minds at the Present time.
It is, however, certain that many activities undertaken by some minds at the Present time were not, in the remote past, undertaken by any minds at all. For this there are several obvious reasons. Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present. For long periods of history and prehistory it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems, which their descendants found absorbingly interesting. For example, there is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horses foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where theres a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained. It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their predecessors. Consequently the very means for thinking clearly and fruitfully about those things remained uninvented, not merely during prehistoric times, but even to the opening of the modern era.
The lack of a suitable vocabulary and an adequate frame of reference, and the absence of any strong and sustained desire to invent these necessary instruments of though there are two sufficient reasons why so many of the almost endless potentialities of the human mind remained for so long unactualized. Another and, on its own level, equally cogent reason is this: much of the worlds most original and fruitful thinking is done by people of poor physique and of a thoroughly unpractical turn of mind. Because this is so, and because the value of pure thought, whether analytical or integral, has everywhere been more or less clearly recognized, provision was and still is made by every civilized society for giving thinkers a measure of protection from the ordinary strains and stresses of social life. The hermitage, the monastery, the college, the academy and the research laboratory; the begging bowl, the endowment, patronage and the grant of taxpayers moneysuch are the principal devices that have been used by actives to conserve that rare bird, the religious, philosophical, artistic or scientific contemplative. In many primitive societies conditions are hard and there is no surplus wealth. The born contemplative has to face the struggle for existence and social predominance without protection. The result, in most cases, is that he either dies young or is too desperately busy merely keeping alive to be able to devote his attention to anything else. When this happens the prevailing philosophy will be that of the hardy, extraverted man of action.
1.01 - The Four Aids, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
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.
10:By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and type of the individual's acceptance of the Universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition for the full spiritual life in man. Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion, when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each mall is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its upsurging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation.
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20:The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga, lord, light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort, is of the utmost importance in the path of integral perfection. It is immaterial whether he is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom, Love and Power behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting in. the relative and attracting it, as one's highest Self and the highest Self of all, as a Divine Person within us and in the world, in one of his -- or her -- numerous forms and names or as the ideal which the mind conceives. In the end we perceive that he is all and more than all these things together- The mind's door of entry to the conception of him must necessarily vary according to the past evolution and the Present nature.
21:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being (caitya guru or antaryamin), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
1.01 - The Ideal of the Karmayogin, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
European education, European machinery, European organisation and equipment we should reproduce in ourselves European prosperity, energy and progress. We of the twentieth century reject the aims, ideals and methods of the Anglicised nineteenth precisely because we accept its experience. We refuse to make an idol of the Present; we look before and after, backward to the mighty history of our race, forward to the grandiose destiny for which that history has prepared it.
We do not believe that our political salvation can be attained by enlargement of Councils, introduction of the elective principle, colonial self-government or any other formula of European politics. We do not deny the use of some of these things as instruments, as weapons in a political struggle, but we deny their sufficiency whether as instruments or ideals and look beyond to an end which they do not serve except in a trifling degree. They might be sufficient if it were our ultimate destiny to be an outlying province of the British Empire or a dependent adjunct of European civilisation. That is a future which we do not think it worth making any sacrifice to accomplish.
1.01 - The Path of Later On, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The wild grasses around him whisper in his ear, "Later." Later, yes, later. Ah, how pleasant it is to brea the the scented breeze, while the sun warms the air with its fiery rays. Later, later. And the traveller walks on; the path widens. Voices are heard from afar, "Where are you going? Poor fool, don't you see that you are heading for your ruin? You are young; come, come to us, to the beautiful, the good, the true; do not be misled by indolence and weakness; do not fall asleep in the Present; come to the future." "Later, later," the traveller answers these unwelcome voices. The flowers smile at him and echo, "Later." The path becomes wider and wider. The sun has reached its zenith; it is a glorious day. The path becomes a road.
The road is white and dusty, bordered with slender birchtrees; the soft purling of a little stream is heard; but in vain he looks in every direction, he can see no end to this interminable road.
1.01 - The Unexpected, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Now, as far as I was concerned, I was face to face with a disquieting situation. Dr. Manilal was to depart. He had come on a short leave for the Darshan and had made quite a long stay. He could not further extend his holidays, nor was it necessary, he said. For everything was running well, "according to schedule"; the critical period had been tided over. We had only to follow the Present regime almost blindfold, and there would be no trouble that he could foresee. Besides, Sri Aurobindo's force was there constantly at our call. The doctor assured us that he would come again when the limb was released from the plaster. But I could not be so easily persuaded. I was most reluctant to take the divine burden on my shoulders, frail as they were, and poor as I was in knowledge, strength and experience. True, things appear simple enough in the presence of a superior authority, but troubles gather as soon as he turns his back, for the adverse forces try to test, as it were, the novice, the uninitiated. So I clung to him like a child and entreated him not to leave me in mid-stream. The Mother also pleaded on my behalf with the result that he stayed for a few days more. Sri Aurobindo was witnessing the scene silently. Then, after cheering me up, Dr. Manilal left to resume his post and to look after his family who felt helpless without him and were pressing him to come back. My dark forebodings were however set at rest by the Grace that always helps one who relies upon its power, and there was no cause for anxiety. The Divine took good care of himself. Only once as I was taking an afternoon nap did a call come down. When I ran up, Sri Aurobindo said with an almost apologetic smile, "Oh, it is nothing much! the knee has been paining for some time, perhaps the position has got disturbed." I tried to set it right, it wouldn't work. But fortunately some readjustment of the slings put the matter right and I heaved a sigh of relief when he said, "It is all right now." But the pain could not have been "nothing much", for he would not have "troubled" me for a trivial discomfort.
Things were moving quite well. No more shadows to overcast our days. We were as merry and buoyant as the spring, our faces shining and hearts singing in the bliss of the divine company and laughing with the delightful humour of the evening talks. We were now looking forward to the day when the splints would be removed. People started asking if there was any chance of a Darshan in February. They would sorely miss it. The specialist had advised, because of the seriousness of the case and the advanced age of the patient, to keep the plaster on for ten weeks. Dr. Rao, on the other hand wanted for the same reasons, to cut the period to six weeks, for, he said, firm bony union must have already taken place and the very age of the patient should militate against a long static condition in bed, as bed-sores and congestion of the lungs might set in. In fact, these had appeared and cleared up. So a comedy ensued on the proverbial difference between doctors. Dr. Rao visited us frequently and insisted every time that these splints be removed. It pained him, he said, to see the Master being confined unnecessarily for such a long wearisome period, and he said he had raised the matter with the specialist but they agreed to differ! He quoted his own hospital experiences in his favour. Though ten weeks was too long a period, none of us were willing to take the risk. "What risk is there?" he argued. "Besides, Sri Aurobindo is an extraordinary patient; we can expect him to take good care of himself." As a result of his repeated insistence, the Mother at last asked Sri Aurobindo to adjudicate. He replied, "If I am an extraordinary patient, I must take extraordinary precaution too. The forces are quite active. I can't trust that I won't make some awkward movement in sleep. Between ten weeks and six, let us come to a compromise and put it to eight weeks." Dr. Rao was apparently satisfied. "Doctors differ" became henceforth a savoury gibe! In view of the complications that followed later on I am inclined to believe that Dr. Rao, was right in his opinion, but his rather ebullient personality failed to carry weight.
1.01 - What is Magick?, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
In the Present state of our knowledge and power some changes are not possible in practice; we cannot cause eclipses, for instance, or transform lead into tin, or create men from mushrooms. But it is theoretically possible to cause in any object any change of which that object is capable by nature; and the conditions are covered by the above postulate.)
III. THEOREMS:
1.01 - Who is Tara, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
Buddhas of the past, and the blossoming lotus is the Buddhas of the Present.
On Taras crown is Amitabha Buddha, peaceful and smiling. As Taras spiritual mentor, he represents the importance of having a fully qualied, wise,
1.02.3.3 - Birth and Non-Birth, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
in the body. He is liberated from birth as soon as the Present
impulse of Nature which continues the action of the mind and
10.23 - Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
This is the second status of the Mother's being, the first is the personal and individual, the second is this collective and universal being. But she is not merely the universe, she is the Mother of the universe. Hers is not merely earth's prayer, but the prayer of the Mother of the earth. It is not merely the prayer of the universe but the prayer of the Universal Mother to the Supreme Lord for the deliverance of the universe, for the re-creation of the earth Indeed, for the deliverance of herself for the re-creation of herself out of the Present ignorant manifestation:
O Mre, douce Mre que je suis, Tu es la fois ce qui dtruit et ce qui rige.
1.024 - Affiliation With Larger Wholes, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
Thus, any further comparison to a still higher degree of reality superior to the waking one is unthinkable to us human beings. But we sometimes find ourself in moods which give us inklings of the fact that there are things higher than what we see with our eyes. If there are not things higher than what we experience through the senses, why is it that we feel restlessness in our life? Why are we not content with things in this world? What is it that makes us feel that there should be something else, something different than what we are experiencing at present? The universal restlessness and anxiety, and the hope that is experienced by every human mind should be indicative of the presence and the possibility of something superior to the Present sensory experiences.
There cannot be hope or aspiration if something higher does not exist. It is the existence of something higher than all empirical life that draws us towards itself in a process called psychological aspiration or expectation of a better condition. Every day we expect a better state. Even a person sunk in sorrow imagines that tomorrow will be better, and that his condition may perhaps improve. It is rare to find people who are so pessimistic as to think that everything is dead wrong, and tomorrow will perhaps be worse than today. There is always a hope: "After all, tomorrow will be better. Conditions will improve, things will be better and I shall be happier." This hope is but a symbol, a significance of the existence of a condition superior to the Present one. That superior condition is naturally inclusive of all the lower values. When we get something higher, we do not think of the lower not because we have lost the lower, but because in the higher we have found all that was in the lower.
For the purpose of controlling the mind, we have to adjust ourself to the concept of a higher reality. That is what is meant by ekatattva abhyasah, by which there is pratisedha or checking of the modifications of the mind. The introduction of the concept of a higher reality into the mind can be done either by logical analysis or by reliance upon scriptural statements. Great texts like the Upanishads, the Vedas and such other mystical texts, proclaim the existence of a Universal Reality which can be reached through various grades of ascent into more and more comprehensive levels. The happiness of the human being is not supposed to be complete happiness.
--
If we are not possessed of even the least tendency to recognise a higher value of life, we will be happy we will be perfectly contented. It is the impact of a higher state of life upon the Present condition of existence that is the cause for our unhappiness and restlessness. If that impact were not to be there at all, there would be no contact between the Present state of existence and the future possible state. When this contact is not there, there will be no asking for it, no aspiration for it, no feeling about it and, therefore, no unhappiness about the Present state of affairs. So, we should be perfectly contented, but we are not; we are unhappy. We do not want the Present condition to continue because we feel that there is inadequacy, shortcoming and all sorts of ugliness which we want to overcome and rectify, but which we cannot execute and achieve unless a higher condition does exist, and becomes practicable.
This is the conclusion arrived at by certain faculties of prehension which are operating in the subtle layers of the mind, invisible even to the mind itself in its conscious level. In our own six-foot bodily individuality, we have possibilities of the whole cosmic experience in a minute, microscopic form. The seeds of universal powers and achievements are hiddenly present in the cells of our own individual body. The vast tree of cosmic experience, the blossoming of universal realisation, is latent as a seed in the very fibre of our present individual existence. It is this that occasionally makes us brood over the possibilities of higher achievements in life and never allows us to rest contented with what we are at present. So, by these methods of self-analysis and study of scriptures, etc., we should be able to bring the mind back from its concentration on diverse realities of the sense-world and fix it upon a higher reality so that its distractions get lessened as much as possible.
10.25 - How to Read Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
At least such should be the basis of approach to the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. You may have possessed a rich intellectual apparatus, you may have all the information that sciences and philosophies have gathered, you may have perused the whole story of the evolution of human knowledge up to the Present time, all these are lesser lights, they do not illuminate the light before which you stand. That light is shown and recognised by its own reflection or emanation in you, the little light that is in you, your soul.
Indeed, there have been instances where great intellectuals, famed savants found themselves bewildered before the simplest magic phrases of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. On the other hand, simpler minds with no burden of learning, nor pride of pedantry, with their pure streak of light in the depth of their consciousness were able to seize and unveil the secret sense.
1.025 - Sadhana - Intensifying a Lighted Flame, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
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.
I can give you examples of quantitative systems which we create in our practical daily life for the purpose of overcoming the urges of the ego and connecting it with wider or larger wholes. A physical individual, or a bodily person, is the lowest unit of reality as far as our experience goes. An utterly selfish individual is one who looks upon the body as the ultimate reality, and the only reality there is nothing else. Now, this is the grossest form of egoism, where the bodily individuality is regarded as the only reality and everything else is completely ignored. This is the animal's way of thinking, to some extent. The tiger has no concern for anything except its own personal existence, and it can pounce on anyone for the sake of its own security and existence.
The animalistic way of thinking persists in the human level also, and often many times, in fact the urge to assert one's bodily individuality vehemently gains the upper hand, though rationally it would not be possible for anyone to justify the exclusive reality of a bodily personality. Such was the primitive condition of people in prehistoric times, or Paleolithic times, as they say, when human beings were not yet evolved to the Present condition of social understanding. In the biological history of mankind, right from creation as far as the mind can go, it is said that the evolution of the human individual, right from the lowest levels, included certain conditions of human existence which were inseparable from animal life. The caveman, the Neanderthal man and such other primitive types of existence point to an animal mind operating through a human body, where cannibalism was not unfamiliar. One could eat another, because the animal mind was not completely absent even in the human body, and there was insecurity on account of it being possible for one man to eat another man. As history tells us, it took ages for the primitive mind to realise the necessity for individuals to come into agreement among themselves for the purpose of security. If I start jumping upon you and you start jumping upon me, both of us will be unhappy and insecure, and you would not know whether you will be safe and I cannot know if I will be safe. This sort of thing would be most undesirable.
It is said by anthropologists, historian's of mankind's evolution, and political historians, that a state was reached when it was felt necessary to organise people into groups, and this was the beginning of the governmental system. A government is nothing but an agreement among people in order that there may not be warfare among individuals and attacks every day. Otherwise there would be chaos and confusion, and anyone could attack at any moment, for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, an agreement was made, an organisation was set up, a rule was framed and a system was brought forth under which it was obligatory on the part of individuals to obey certain principles laid down by groups, of which some people were made leaders. It does not mean that these leaders were kings or autocrats; they were the governors of law, the dispensers of justice, and the instruments for the maintenance of order in the group of people who found it necessary to bring about this system.
--
Even when we think of the Creator as a transcendent father, the anthropomorphic idea still persists and stultifies the aim at introducing a higher quality of thought into the concept of God. That is why we are unhappy even in meditation, even in our highest spiritual exalted moods. Even when we are exalted, we are quantitatively exalted; qualitatively, we are very poor. We are unhappy in some way or the other, and no one can make us happy. A tremendous effort is necessary to introduce a superior quality in the concept of reality. The difficulty lies in the mind being the only instrument that we have for doing anything whatsoever, and who is it who will introduce a higher order of value or a greater quality into this concept, other than the mind itself? But how can we expect the mind to conceive of a higher quality of reality other than the one in which it has found itself at the Present moment? How can we jump over our own skin? Is it possible? How can we expect the mind to think of a reality superior in quality to the one in which it is living at present, and with which it is identified wholly? An immediate answer to this question cannot be given. However, there is an answer.
Sadhana is a very mysterious process. It is not like the ordinary efforts that we put forth into our workaday life. Every effort, even the first effort in the practice of sadhana, brings about an improvement. The impetus that is created by the first step that we take will carry us forward with a greater impetus towards the next step by the generation of a force which is superior to the powers of the mind in its ordinary operations. Also, there is a peculiar something in human nature which is called 'aspiration'. It is difficult to understand what it actually means. It is not merely a hoping for something in the ordinary sense. It is a surge of the soul's force from within, and we must underline these words, 'soul's force', for it is not merely the mental faculties. The soul's force rises up, wells up within us in a totality of action, drawing forth the whole value that we are at present, and pointing to something which is wholly other than the Present whole from which the soul is being drawn.
The meritorious deeds that we performed in previous lives, the good karmas of our past produce a force called 'apurva' in Mimamsa parlance. The good karmas of the past are present in the mind even now as a kind of prarabdha, and when the prarabdha is of a sattvic nature, it permits the rise of a novel type of asking by the soul, which is called spiritual aspiration. It is this peculiar context - which is inscrutable, of course, to anyone's mind which brings a person in contact with a Guru. How we come in contact with a Guru cannot be understood. It is worked up by mysterious forces from within that are associated with the good deeds of our past lives, etc., and which permit good actions in this present birth. Such forces make it possible for us to think divine thoughts and to take the initial step in the practice of yoga. It is this initial step, as mentioned, which is capable of generating a peculiar potency, enough to carry us forward to the next step. Like the chain reaction of an atomic bomb burst, every step is automatically an urge towards another step.
1.02 - Groups and Statistical Mechanics, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
At about the beginning of the Present century, two scientists,
one in the United States and one in France, were working along
1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
consists of our models of the emotional significance of the Present, defined in opposition to an idealized,
hypothetical or fantasied future state. We evaluate the unbearable present in relationship to the ideal
--
When our attempts to transform the Present work as planned, we remain firmly positioned in the domain
of the known (metaphorically speaking). When our behaviors produce results that we did not want,
--
contrast them against the Present that makes human beings capable of using their cognitive systems to
modulate their affective reactions. 28
--
appropriate. the Present discussion has been designed to rectify that situation, and to expand upon
Sokolovs initial ideas, to the degree that is presently empirically and theoretically justifiable. What
--
You also have a model of the Present, constantly operative. You understand your (somewhat
subordinate) position within the corporation, which is your importance relative to others above and below
--
transform the Present, as you currently understand it, into the future, as you hope it will be. Your actions
are designed to produce your ideal designed to transform the Present into something ever more closely
resembling what you want. Your are confident in your model of reality, in your story; when you put it into
--
future on the basis of his understanding of the Present who is hurt when someone less deserving is
promoted before him ( one is best punished, after all, for ones virtues35). The man whose expectations
--
conceived of in relationship to a model of the significance of the Present) that provides a good part of the
framework determining the motivational significance of ongoing current events. The individual uses his or
--
affairs is conceptualized, in fantasy, and then used as a target point for operation in the Present. Such
operations may be conceived of as links, in a chain (with the end of the chain anchored to the desirable
--
undermine our ability to believe that our conceptualizations of the Present are valid and that our goals are
appropriate. Such occurrences disturb our belief in our ends (and, not infrequently, in our starting points).
--
we compare our interpretation of the world as it unfolds in the Present to the desired world, in imagination,
not to mere expectation; we compare what we have (in interpretation) to what we want, rather than to what
--
two fundamental and mutually interdependent poles, one present, the other, future. the Present is sensory
experience as it is currently manifested to us as we currently understand it granted motivational
--
perfection, to which we compare the Present, insofar as we understand its significance. Wherever there
exists a mismatch between the two, the unexpected or novel occurs (by definition), grips our attention, and
--
been presented with incontrovertible evidence that your characterizations of the Present and of the ideal
future are seriously perhaps irreparably flawed. Your presumptions about the nature of the world are in
--
complete breakdown and reformulation: is occasionally interrupted by re-constitution of what the Present is
and what the future should be. The ascent of the individual, so to speak, is punctuated by periods of
--
animal; analogous to the old determinist claim that if you knew the Present position and momentum of
every particle in the universe, you could determine all future positions and momenta. You cant know all
--
reframe our contexts of evaluation (our goals and our interpretations of the Present), so that they no longer
produce paradoxical implications, with regards to the significance of a given situation. These processes of
--
One may summarize the cognitive conditions that evoke the N2/P3 as being the Presentation of stimuli
that are novel or that are signals for behavioral tasks, and thus need to be attended to, and processed.
--
hippocampus appears particularly specialized for comparing the (interpreted) reality of the Present, as it
manifests itself in the subjective sphere, with the fantasies of the ideal future constructed by the pre-motor
--
goal is the production of a solution to the Present dilemma; (2) alternative conceptualizations of the desired
goal; or (3) re-evaluation of the motivational significance of current state. This means (1) that a new
--
that constitute the Present mode of being. This telescoping is the mythologization of history and is very
useful, from the perspective of efficient storage. We learn to imitate (and to remember) not individual
--
still-too-illiterate you of the Present time). This story might have a conceived duration of, say, ten
minutes; in addition, it occupies a universe defined by the presence of a half-dozen relevant objects (a
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comprehend context of the Present, will produce the results desired in the future. The affective
significance of the phenomena that comprise explored territory have been mapped. This map takes the
--
serves to undergird the idea of lawful authority, to the Present day. The Mesopotamian emperors
identification with the most divine of all the deities (according to the judgment and election of those
--
embodiment of past wisdom, is insufficient to deal with the challenges of the Present). This idea is
developed much more explicitly by the Egyptians, as we shall see. Back to Eliades story:
--
hard-won wisdom of the past (that is, of the dead) with the adaptive capacity of the Present (that is, of the
living). The (re)establishment and improvement of the domain of order is schematically represented in
--
father, he is capable of dealing with the problems of the Present (that is, with the emergent evil represented
by his uncle). Victorious over his uncle, he is nonetheless incomplete, as his youthful spirit lacks the
--
uncomprehended; without embodiment or incarnation (in action) in the Present. Horus unites himself with
his father, and becomes the ideal ruler the consciousness of present youthful life, conjoined with the
--
understood in the Present day. Mythic imagination, willing to sacrifice discriminatory clarity for
inclusive phenomenological accuracy, provided the necessary developmental bridge. The earliest
--
will return if the Present schema of adaptation (the ruling king) is sufficiently altered (that is, destroyed
and regenerated). An individual stripped of his identification with what he previously valued is
--
pattern of presumptions underlying the internal model of the Present and the desired future remain
essentially intact. This form of re-adaptation might be described as normal creativity, and constitutes the
--
We use stories to regulate our emotions and govern our behavior; use stories to provide the Present we
inhabit with a determinate point of reference the desired future. The optimal desired future is not a
--
and used to govern action in the Present are very similar to those posed by the existence of others, whose
affective responses are equally hypothetical (as they cannot be experienced, directly, but only inferred).
--
existence of that other as a guide to proper action and interpretation in the Present. This means that for
the social being all individual actions come to evaluated with regards to their likely current and future
--
Motivational states compete for predominance in the Present, in the purely subjective and interpersonal
spheres, and also compete across time. What is fear-provoking now may be tolerated because it means less
--
god and, on the other hand, explain the Present structure of the world and the actual condition of
humanity.338
--
considered desirable; if she is the Presently-somewhat-too-intoxicated wife of a large and dangerous man,
by contrast, she may be placed in the category of something best run away from quickly.
--
Korea, from 4000 B.C. to the Present day.340 The megaliths, like the modern necropolis or cemetery, are
cities of the dead, monuments and aid to memory and the continuity of culture. Eliade states:
--
all those whose exisence preceded the Present time. The past, made metaphorically present in the form of
stone, is the mythical ancestor-hero is Osiris, the founder of the community. In traditional communities,
--
the force of the past it is that force, as it is exists and is represented in the Present. What is remembered
takes on representation as a pattern as that pattern of behavior characteristic of the culture-creating
--
past, whose adoption by those in the Present allows for control and safety. He is a house with doors; a
structure that shelters, but does not stifle; a master who teaches and disciplines but does not indoctrinate or
--
The Great Father is order, vs chaos; the past, vs the Present; the old, vs the young. He is the ancestral
spirit whose force extends beyond the grave, who must be kept at bay with potent and humble ritual. He is
1.02 - Meditating on Tara, #How to Free Your Mind - Tara the Liberator, #Thubten Chodron, #unset
by bringing the Tara we will become in the future into the Present moment
and imagining being that Tara. This plants the seeds for us to actually become
1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Beloved, in proportion as a man analyzes the nature of his body and the variety of uses of its several members, his reverence and love for its Creator and Maker will increase. Let a man observe, for example, that his hands are made like columns and separated from the body, to serve as an instrument to seize, or take hold of, or to defend it from an enemy. At the extremity of the hands are five fingers, four of which are in a row, and some long and some short, SO that when they take hold of anything, they may come equally together in the palm of the hand. The thumb, which is opposite to the four fingers, is shorter than any of them and stronger, that it may be a help to the whole and render them capable of retaining and grasping. The four fingers have three joints each, and the thumb has but two, that when contracted they may become like the bowl of a spoon or ladle, and that when open they may become like a plate, and so discharge an infinity of services. The front teeth were formed sharp, to cut and separate the food : the side teeth were formed broad to mash and grind the food. The tongue was formed like a spoon to throw the food into the throat. There is, also, under the tongue, an organ by which water is poured out, and the food is made of the consistence of dough, that it may be more easily swallowed and digested. All the organs, in short, have been devised with the best arrangement and form for use, and each one of them is punctual day and night in discharging its function. Think not, that they are lazy or sleeping. If the minds of the intelligent, the science of the learned, and the wisdom of the sage had been united and had been employed since the beginning of the world, in reflection and contrivance, they could not have discovered anything more excellent than the Present arrangement, [44] nor any forms more useful and beautiful. If the eye had been attached to the top of the head, or the ear to the nape of the neck, or the mouth to the back of the body, or if three fingers had been given instead of four, it is plain to a person of intelligence that the existing advantages would not have been secured, and the Present beauty of form and appearance would have been imperfect.
Let us notice, also, the daily necessities of man, his need of food, of clothing and of a dwelling; his need of rain, clouds, wind, heat and cold : and that he needs the weaver, the cotton-spinner, the clothier and the fuller to provide him with clothing; and that each one of these has need of so many instruments, and of so many trades, like those of the blacksmith, the farmer, the carpenter, the dyer, and the tanner; and besides, their need of iron, lead, wood and the like. Notice at the same time, the adaptation of these workmen to their instruments, and of the instruments to the trades, and how each art has given rise to several others, and the mind is astonished and distracted. The adaptation of all these instruments comes from the pure grace and perfect mercy of God, and from the fountain of his benevolence. Moreover, God's creating prophets, sending them to us, and leading us to their law and to love them, is a perfume of His universal beneficence. He proclaims himself, "My mercy surpasses my anger," and the Prophet has said: "Verily, God is more full of compassion to his servants, than the affectionate mother to her nursing child."
1.02 - SADHANA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
working out now in the Present, and some is waiting to bear
fruit in the future. That which we have worked out already is
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
4:But this is not always the manner of the commencement. The Sadhaka is often led gradually and there is a long space between the first turning of the mind and the full assent of the nature to the thing towards which it turns. There may at first be only a vivid intellectual interest, a forcible attraction towards the idea and some imperfect form of practice. Or perhaps there is an effort not favoured by the whole nature, a decision or a turn imposed by an intellectual influence or dictated by personal affection and admiration for someone who is himself consecrated and devoted to the Highest. In such cases, a long period of preparation may be necessary before there comes the irrevocable consecration; and in some instances it may not come. There may be some advance, there may be a strong effort, even much purification and many experiences other than those that are central or supreme; but the life will either be spent in preparation or, a certain stage having been reached, the mind pushed by an insufficient driving-force may rest content at the limit of the effort possible to it. Or there may even be a recoil to the lower life, -- what is called in the ordinary parlance of Yoga a fall from the path. This lapse happens because there is a defect at the very centre. The intellect has been interested, the heart attracted, the will has strung itself to the effort, but the whole nature has not been taken captive by the Divine. It has only acquiesced in the interest, the attraction or the endeavour. There has been an experiment, perhaps even an eager experiment, but not a total self-giving to an imperative need of the soul or to an unforsakable ideal. Even such imperfect Yoga has not been wasted; for no upward effort is made in vain. Even if it fails in the Present or arrives only at some preparatory stage or preliminary realisation, it has yet determined the soul's future.
5:But if we desire to make the most of the opportunity that this life gives us, if we wish to respond adequately to the call we have received and to attain to the goal we have glimpsed, not merely advance a little towards it, it is essential that there should be an entire self-giving. The secret of success in Yoga is to regard it not as one of the aims to be pursued in life, but as the whole of life.
1.02 - Skillful Means, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
O riputra! All the Buddha Bhagavats of the Present, in immeasurable hundreds of thousands of myriads of kois of buddha worlds of the ten directions, teach the Dharma to sentient beings using incalculable and innumerable skillful means with various explanations and illustrations to benet many of them and cause them to feel at peace. These Dharmas are all of the single buddha vehicle. All the sentient beings who hear the Dharma from these buddhas will ultimately attain omniscience.
O riputra! These buddhas lead and inspire only bodhisattvas, because they want to teach sentient beings with the wisdom and insight of the Buddha, to enlighten sentient beings with the wisdom and insight of the Buddha, and to cause sentient beings to enter the path of the wisdom and insight of the
1.02 - SOCIAL HEREDITY AND PROGRESS, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
In the Present day human education is spreading its net over
the earth on an unprecedented scale and by means of unprece-
1.02 - The Age of Individualism and Reason, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But, most important of all, the individualistic age of Europe has in its discovery of the individual fixed among the idea-forces of the future two of a master potency which cannot be entirely eliminated by any temporary reaction. The first of these, now universally accepted, is the democratic conception of the right of all individuals as members of the society to the full life and the full development of which they are individually capable. It is no longer possible that we should accept as an ideal any arrangement by which certain classes of society should arrogate development and full social fruition to themselves while assigning a bare and barren function of service alone to others. It is now fixed that social development and well-being mean the development and well-being of all the individuals in the society and not merely a flourishing of the community in the mass which resolves itself really into the splendour and power of one or two classes. This conception has been accepted in full by all progressive nations and is the basis of the Present socialistic tendency of the world. But in addition there is this deeper truth which individualism has discovered, that the individual is not merely a social unit; his existence, his right and claim to live and grow are not founded solely on his social work and function. He is not merely a member of a human pack, hive or ant-hill; he is something in himself, a soul, a being, who has to fulfil his own individual truth and law as well as his natural or his assigned part in the truth and law of the collective existence.2 He demands freedom, space, initiative for his soul, for his nature, for that puissant and tremendous thing which society so much distrusts and has laboured in the past either to suppress altogether or to relegate to the purely spiritual field, an individual thought, will and conscience. If he is to merge these eventually, it cannot be into the dominating thought, will and conscience of others, but into something beyond into which he and all must be both allowed and helped freely to grow. That is an idea, a truth which, intellectually recognised and given its full exterior and superficial significance by Europe, agrees at its root with the profoundest and highest spiritual conceptions of Asia and has a large part to play in the moulding of the future.
We already see a violent though incomplete beginning of this line of social evolution in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia. The trend is for more and more nations to accept this beginning of a new order, and the resistance of the old order is more passive than activeit lacks the fire, enthusiasm and self-confidence which animates the innovating Idea.
1.02 - The Child as growing being and the childs experience of encountering the teacher., #The Essentials of Education, #unset, #Zen
Between the previous earthly life and the Present one, this being passed through a long period of existence from the previous death to rebirth; it had experiences in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, just as on Earth, between birth and death, we have bodily experiences communicated through the senses, intellect, feelings, and will. Together with its experiences in the spiritual world, this entity descends, unites at first only loosely with the physical body during the embryonic period, and hovers around the person, lightly and externally like an aura, during the first period of childhood between birth and the change of teeth. This being of spirit and soul who comes down from the spiritual worlda being just as real as the one who comes from the body of the motheris more loosely connected with the physical body than it is later in human life. This is the why the child lives much more outside the body than an adult does.
This is only another way of expressing what I said in yester- days lecture, namely, that during the first period of life the child is in the highest degree and by its whole nature a being of sense. The child is like a sense organ. The surrounding impressions ripple, echo and sound through the whole organism because the child isnt so inwardly bound up with the body as is the case in later life, but lives in the environment with its freer spiritual and soul nature. Hence the child is receptive to all the impressions coming from the environment.
1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
XLIV (1936/37), 46-49, 64-66. the Present version has been slightly revised by
the author and edited in terminology. Editors.]
1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
rial ... In the Present time itself, after an age of triumphant
intellectuality and materialism, we can see evidence of this
--
in the confusing phenomena of the Present, perceptible for
those who, as recommended by the Mother, have develop
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
In Eckharts phrase, God, the creator and perpetual re-creator of the world, becomes and disbecomes. In other words He is, to some extent at least, in time. A temporal God might have the nature of the traditional Hebrew God of the Old Testament; or He might be a limited deity of the kind described by certain philosophical theologians of the Present century; or alternatively He might be an emergent God, starting unspiritually at Alpha and becoming gradually more divine as the aeons rolled on towards some hypothetical Omega. (Why the movement should be towards more and better rather than less and worse, upwards rather than downwards or in undulations, onwards rather than round and round, one really doesnt know. There seems to be no reason why a God who is exclusively temporala God who merely becomes and is ungrounded in eternityshould not be as completely at the mercy of time as is the individual mind apart from the spirit. A God who becomes is a God who also disbecomes, and it is the disbecoming which may ultimately prevail, so that the last state of emergent deity may be worse than the first.)
The ground in which the multifarious and time-bound psyche is rooted is a simple, timeless awareness. By making ourselves pure in heart and poor in spirit we can discover and be identified with this awareness. In the spirit we not only have, but are, the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.
--
Coming as it does from a devout Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, this statement may seem somewhat startling. But we must remember that Olier (who was a man of saintly life and one of the most influential religious teachers of the seventeenth century) is speaking here about a state of consciousness, to which few people ever come. To those on the ordinary levels of being he recommends other modes of knowledge. One of his penitents, for example, was advised to read, as a corrective to St. John of the Cross and other exponents of pure mystical theology, St. Gertrudes revelations of the incarnate and even physiological aspects of the deity. In Oliers opinion, as in that of most directors of souls, whether Catholic or Indian, it was mere folly to recommend the worship of God-without-form to persons who are in a condition to understand only the personal and the incarnate aspects of the divine Ground. This is a perfectly sensible attitude, and we are justified in adopting a policy in accordance with itprovided always that we clearly remember that its adoption may be attended by certain spiritual dangers and disadvantages. The nature of these dangers and disadvantages will be illustrated and discussed in another section. For the Present it will suffice to quote the warning words of Philo: He who thinks that God has any quality and is not the One, injures not God, but himself.
Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness.
--
Whenever, for any reason, we wish to think of the world, not as it appears to common sense, but as a continuum, we find that our traditional syntax and vocabulary are quite inadequate. Mathematicians have therefore been compelled to invent radically new symbol-systems for this express purpose. But the divine Ground of all existence is not merely a continuum, it is also out of time, and different, not merely in degree, but in kind from the worlds to which traditional language and the languages of mathematics are adequate. Hence, in all expositions of the Perennial Philosophy, the frequency of paradox, of verbal extravagance, sometimes even of seeming blasphemy. Nobody has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus, in terms of which we may talk coherently about the divine Ground and of the world conceived as its manifestation. For the Present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in terms of a symbol-system, whose relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order.
So far, then, as a fully adequate expression of the Perennial Philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble. The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations. Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about. Consider, for example, those negative definitions of the transcendent and immanent Ground of being. In statements such as Eckharts, God is equated with nothing. And in a certain sense the equation is exact; for God is certainly no thing. In the phrase used by Scotus Erigena God is not a what; He is a That. In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities. This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge. Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the thou from the That.
1.02 - The Stages of Initiation, #Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, #Rudolf Steiner, #Theosophy
For the Present, only these two examples can be given to show how enlightened insight into human nature may be achieved; they will at least serve to point out the way to be taken. By gaining the inner tranquility and repose indispensable for such observation, the student will have undergone a great inner transformation. He will then soon reach the point where this enrichment of his inner self will lend confidence and composure to his outward demeanor. And this transformation of his outward demeanor will again react favorably on his soul. Thus he will be able to help himself further along the road. He will find ways and means of penetrating more and more into the secrets of human nature which are hidden from our external senses, and he will then also become ripe for a deeper insight into the mysterious connections between human nature and all else that exists in the universe. By following this path the student approaches closer and closer to the moment when he can effectively take the first steps of initiation. But before these can be taken, one
p. 74
1.02 - The Three European Worlds, #The Ever-Present Origin, #Jean Gebser, #Integral
Restricting ourselves here primarily to the art of the Christian era, we can distinguish two major self-contained epochs among the many artistic styles, followed today by an incipient third. The first encompasses the era up to the Renaissance, the other, now coming to a close, extends up to the Present. The decisive and distinguishing characteristic of these epochs is the respective absence or presence of perspective; consequently we shall designate the first era as the "unperspectival," the second as the "perspectival," and the currently emerging epoch as the "aperspectival."'
As we shall see, these designations are valid not only with respect to art history, but also to aesthetics, cultural history, and the history of the psyche and the mind. The achievement of perspective indicates man's discovery and consequent coming to awareness of space, whereas the unrealized perspective indicates that space is dormant in man and that he is not yet awakened to it. Moreover, the unperspectival world suggests a state in which man lacks self-identity: he belongs to a unit, such as a tribe or communal group, where the emphasis is not yet on the person but on the impersonal, not an the "I" but on the communal group, the qualitative mode of the collective. The illuminated manuscripts and gilt ground of early Romanesque painting depict theunperspectival world that retained the prevailing constitutive elements of Mediterranean antiquity. Not until the Gothic, the forerunner of the Renaissance was there a shift in emphasis. Before that space is not yet our depth-space, rather a cavern (and vault), or simply an in-between space; in both instances it is undifferentiated space. This situation bespeaks for us a hardly conceivable enclosure in the world, an intimate bond between outer and inner suggestive of a correspondence only faintly discernible between soul and nature. This condition was gradually destroyed by the expansion and growing strength of Christianity whose teaching of detachment from nature transforms this destruction into an act of liberation.
--
Although then unaware of its full significance, the Present writer saw the mountain years ago and sensed its attraction. Certainly this attraction must have been sensed by others as well; it is no accident that Petrarch's discovery of landscape occurred precisely in this region of France. Here, the Gnostic tradition had encouraged investigation of the world and placed greater emphasis on knowledge than on belief; here, the tradition of the Troubadours, the Cathari, and the Albigensi remained alive. This is not to say that the affinity makes Petrarch a Gnostic, but merely points to the Gnostic climate of this part of douce France which is mentioned in the opening lines of France's first major poetic work, the Chanson de Roland (verse16): "Li empereres Carles de France dulce."
Petrarch's letter is in the nature of a confession; it is addressed to the Augustinian professor of theology who had taught him to treasure and emulate Augustine's Confessions. Now, a person makes a confession or an admission only if he believes he has transgressed against something; and it is this vision of space, as extended before him from the mountain top, this vision of space as a reality, and its overwhelming impression, together with his shock and dismay, his bewilderment at his perception and acceptance of the panorama, that are reflected in his letter. It marks him as the first European to step out of the transcendental gilt ground of the Siena masters, the first to emerge from a space dormant in time and soul, into "real" space where he discovers landscape.
--
The full outlines of the aperspectival world can emerge only gradually. It is our hope that it will take on shape and contour as we have occasion to treat its "past prefigurations and contexts; an object becomes clearly visible and distinct, after all, only when placed against a background or substratum which furnishes sufficient contrast to prevent its being misconstrued. Although that requirement may not yet be fulfilled at this stage of our discussion, it would seem to us necessary here to outline the basic nature of aperspectivity in order to indicate how it came to be expressed. Whether this "indication" is understood as a thesis or merely as a point of departure, it will be convincing only when we contrast the recent forms of expression in painting, as in the other arts, with the background which remains to be described in the course of the Present work.
Let us then select and examine from the many new forms of expression a particularly vivid example from the pictorial arts as a first step toward clarifying our intention. During recent decades, both Picasso and Braque have painted several works that have been judged, it would seem, from a standpoint which fails to do them justice. As long as we consider a drawing like the one by Picasso reproduced here (fig.1) in purely aesthetic terms, its multiplicity of line, even where the individual lines appear "beautiful" in themselves, will seem confusing rather than beautiful. And, as we have been taught to believe, beauty is a traditional category for evaluating a work of art. Yet such pictures or drawings as this demand more of the viewer than aesthetic contemplation based an criteria of beauty; and the relationship of the two is palpably evident, in German at least, from the previously overlooked root kinship of the words schn (beautiful) and schauen (to view, contemplate).
--
In this drawing, however, space and body have become transparent. In this sense the drawing is neither unperspectival, i.e. a two-dimensional rendering of a surface in which the body is imprisoned, nor is it perspectival, i.e., a three-dimensional visual sector cut out of reality that surrounds the figure with breathing space. The drawing is "aperspectival" in our sense of the term; time is no longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension. By this means it renders the whole visible to insight, a whole which becomes visible only because the previously missing component, time, is expressed in an intensified and valid form as the Present. It is no longer the moment, or the "twinkling of the eye" - time viewed through the organ of sight as spatialized time - but the pure present, the quintessence of time that radiates from this drawing.
Every body, to the extent that it is conceived spatially, is nothing but solidified, crystallized, substantivated, and materialized time that requires the formation and solidification of space in order to unfold. Space represents a field of tension; and because of its latent energy, it is an agent of the critical or acute energy of time. Thus both energetic principles, the latency of space as well as the acuteness of time, are mutually dependent. When we formulate this thought in advance of our discussion, it is to emphasize the basic import that we accord to the Present, for both space and time exist for the perceptual capacities of our body only in the Present via presentiation. the Presentiation or making present evident in Picassos drawing was possible only after he was able to actualize, that is, bring to consciousness, all of the temporal structures of the past latent in himself (and in each of us) during the course of his preceding thirty years of painting in a variety of earlier styles.
This process was unique and original with Picasso. By drawing on his primitive, magic inheritance (his Negroid period), his mythical heritage (his Hellenistic-archaistic period), and his classicistic, rationally-accentuated formalist phase (his Ingres period), Picasso was able to achieve the concretion of time (or as we would like to designate this new style which he and his contemporaries introduced in painting, "temporic concretion"). Such temporic concretion is not just a basic characteristic of this particular drawing, but is in fact generally valid: Only where time emerges as pure present and is no longer divided into its three phases of past, present and future, is it concrete. To the extent that Picasso from the outset reached out beyond the Present, incorporating the future into the Present of his work, he was able to "presentiate" or make present the past. Picasso brought to the awareness of the Present everything once relegated to the dormancy of forgetfulness, as well as everything still latent as something yet to come; and this temporal wholeness realized in spatiality and rendered visible and transparent in a depiction of a human form, is the unique achievement of this temporic artist.
We shall in consequence designate as "temporic" artists those painters of the two major artistic generations since 1880 (i.e., following the classicistic, romantic and naturalistic movements) who were engaged - doubtless unintentionally in concretizing time. From this point of view, all of the attempts by the various "movements" - expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and even tachism - show as their common trait this struggle to concretize and realize time. Understandably, such experimentation resulted in numerous faulty solutions; but as we noted earlier, such faults were equally unavoidable during the search for perspective and spatial realization.
--
In Picasso's roof the dislocation and layered arrangement of the shadows mirror the natural movement of time; he has rendered the landscape by audaciously incorporating all of the changes of illumination (visible in the shifts of shadow and shading), the temporal motions brought on by the altered positions of the sun during the time when he was painting. This capturing of the Present as it affects nature could not have been bolder, precisely because of its simplicity. What is here visible in this unique painting is not the spatializing temporal moment. It is the Present emerging in its transparent entirety - the Present corresponding in its indispensable accidentals to our notion of eternity; for neither can be conceptualized or imagined. In Picasso's paintings both the Present and the eternity are rendered transparent and thus ever-present, evident, and concrete.
Aperspectivity, through which it is possible to grasp and express the new emerging consciousness structure, cannot be perceived in all its consequences be they positive or negative unless certain still valid concepts, attitudes, and forms of thought are more closely scrutinized and clarified. Otherwise we commit the error of expressing the "new" with old and inadequate means of statement. We will, for example, have to furnish evidence that the concretion of time is not only occurring in the previously cited examples from painting, but in the natural sciences and in literature, poetry, music, sculpture, and various other areas. And this we can do only after we have worked out the new forms and modes necessary for an understanding of aperspectivity.
1.02 - The Vision of the Past, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
chemistry and of Life. At the Present time I can see no more
satisfactory solution of the enigma presented to us by the
1.02 - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the Mill-dam go to? If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place in his description. Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the Present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.
Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.
1.03 - A Parable, #The Lotus Sutra, #Anonymous, #Various
Immeasurable buddhas in the Present and future
Will also teach this Dharma
--
Whether of the past or the Present,
And those acquired in meeting the Buddha,
--
The Tathgatas see all sentient beings burning in the re of birth, old age, illness, and death, anxiety, sorrow, suffering, and distress. Because of the desires of the ve senses and the desire for monetary prot they also experience various kinds of suffering. Because of their attachment and pursuits they experience various kinds of suffering in the Present; and in the future they will suffer in the states of existence of hell, animals, and hungry ghosts (pretas). If they are born in the heavens or in the human world they will experience a variety of sorrows such as suffering from poverty and destitution, separation from loved ones, or suffering from encounters with those they dislike.
Although sentient beings are immersed in such sorrows, they rejoice and play. They are not aware, shocked, startled, or disgusted nor do they seek release. Running around in the burning house of the triple world, they experience great suffering and yet they do not realize it.
1.03 - APPRENTICESHIP AND ENCULTURATION - ADOPTION OF A SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated in the Present instance, without the
childs dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this obsession with
--
The properly structured patriarchal system fulfills the needs of the Present, while taking into account
those of the future; simultaneously, satisfies the demands of the self with those of the other. The suitability
--
course of socially-mediated human cognitive evolution. Nonetheless even at the Present it is very
difficult to determine and explicitly state just what virtuous behavior consists of; to describe, with accuracy,
--
human development. the Present consists in large part of new problems, and reliance on the wisdom of the
dead no matter how heroic eventually compromises the integrity of the living. The well-trained
1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954), from which version the Present translation is made.
Editors.] 2 Elemente der Psychophysik (i860).
--
in the Present state of our knowledge, is our ignorance of the
nature of the psyche. There is thus no ground at all for regard-
--
be regarded for the Present as an autonomous reality of enig-
matic character, primarily because, judging from all we know,
1.03 - Invocation of Tara, #Tara - The Feminine Divine, #unset, #Zen
realization of nonduality and the Present state in
which all our experience is lived in a constant
1.03 - Measure of time, Moments of Kashthas, etc., #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
Measure of time. Moments or Kāṣṭhās, &c.; day and night; fortnight, month, year, divine year: Yugas, or ages: Mahāyuga, or great age: day of Brahmā: periods of the Manus: a Manvantara: night of Brahmā, and destruction of the world: a year of Brahmā: his life: a Kalpa: a Parārrdha: the past, or Pādma Kalpa: the Present, or Vārāha.
Maitreya said:-
--
ga Purāṇa, and others of the Saiva division, above thirty Kalpas are named, and some account given of several, but they are evidently sectarial embellishments. The only Kalpas usually specified are those which follow in the text: the one which was the last, or the Pādma, and the Present p. 26 or Vārāha. The first is also commonly called the Brāhma; but the Bhāgavata distinguishes the Brāhma, considering it to be the first of Brahmā's life, whilst the Pādma was the last of the first Parārddha. The terms Manā, or great Kalpa, applied to the Padma, is attached to it only in a general sense; or, according to the commentator, because it comprises, as a minor Kalpa, that in which Brahmā was born from a lotus. Properly, a great Kalpa is not a day, but a life of Brahmā; as in the Brahma Vaivartta: 'Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the life of Brahmā. Minor Kalpas, as Samvartta and the rest, are numerous.' Minor Kalpas here denote every period of destruction, or those in which the Samvartta wind, or other destructive agents, operate. Several other computations of time are found in different Purāṇas, but it will be sufficient to notice one which occurs in the Hari Vaṃśa, as it is peculiar, and because it is not quite correctly given in M. Langlois' translation. It is the calculation of the Mānava time, or time of a Menu.
1.03 - Meeting the Master - Meeting with others, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: In Europe they have always tried for democracy. Real democracy has always failed, and failed because it is against human nature. There are certain men who are bound to govern. One must be prepared to face facts. Even in the democracies those men manage to rule, and one knows only too well the villagers do not. Only, those people govern in their name, and it sometimes makes them more free and reckless. In Russia one does not know the exact situation the attempt was for creating real rule of the people, i.e. of the village. You see in what it has ended? It has established again an oligarchy of the Lenin-party. One may even ask: What has Russia created? It has tried to destroy capital and thus tried to destroy and perhaps succeeded in destroying city life. It is trying mechanically to equalise men. But it is not a success. The Western social life rests on interests and rights. It depends upon the vitalistic existence of man which is largely governed by his rational mind helped by scientific inventions. Reason gives man the rigid methods of classification and mental construction and theory to justify his interests and rights, and science gives him the required efficiency, force and power. Thus he is sure of his goal. But one may say that, though organised and effective, European life is not organic. The view that it takes of man is a very imperfect view, and the ideal it sets before man an incomplete ideal. That is why you find there class-war and struggle for rights governed by the rational intellect. European life is very powerful because it can put the whole force of its life at once in operation by a coordination of all its members. In old times the ideal was different. They the ancients based their society on the structure of religion. I do not mean narrow religion but the highest law of our being. The whole social fabric was built up to fulfil that purpose. There was no talk in those days of individual liberty in the Present sense of the term. But there was absolute communal liberty. Every community was completely free to develop its own Dharma, the law of its being. Even the selection of the line was a matter of free choice for the individual.
I do not believe that because a man is governed by another man, or one class by another class, there is always oppression; for instance, the Brahmins never ruled but they were never oppressed by others, rather they oppressed other people. The government becomes useless and bad when one class or one nation keeps another down and governs it for its own benefit and does not allow the class or nation to follow its own Dharma.
In ancient times each community had its own Dharma and within itself it was independent. Every village, every city had its own organisation quite free from all political control and within that every individual was free free to change and take up another line for his development. But all this was not put into a definite political unit. There were, of course, attempts at that kind of expression of life but they were only partially successful. The whole community in India was a very big one and the community-culture based on Dharma was not thrown into a kind of organisation which would resist external aggression; and ultimately we were brought to the Present stage.
Now the problem is how to organise the future life of the country. I myself am a communist in a certain sense but I cannot agree with the Russian method. One may ask: After all what has Russia created? Even among our present workers in India there is a lack of that definite idea as to what they are about and what kind of thing they want. That is the reason why men like Dr. Bhagwandas propose some mental constructions like asking men to go in for politics after 50 years of age and so on. That does not seem to me to be the correct method, and I believe whoever pursues it will encounter complete failure.
Question: Anything would be better than the Present condition.
Sri Aurobindo: That is of course the common ground of agreement.
--
Sri Aurobindo: We are not concerned with that at all primarily. What one puts forth generally outside in the form of action is what one internally is. Our first aim is not to work for humanity in the current sense of the term, but to found life on a Higher Consciousness than the Present ignorant and limited consciousness of Mind, Life and Body. At present, man I mean the average man is physical and vital in his nature, using mind for satisfying his vital being. We want to leave mind and intellect behind and find a Higher Consciousness. You may call it Nirvana, Passive Brahman, Sachchidananda or Higher Power or by any name.
So, our first task is to find God and base life on that Consciousness; In that process what is necessary for humanity will naturally be done. But that is not our direct aim. Ours is a tremendous task. It is an adventure in which one must be prepared to leave behind his desires and passions, intellectual preferences and mental constructions in order to enable the Higher Power to do its work. You have to see whether you can give your consent to the radical transformation that is inevitable.
--
Sri Aurobindo: You need not do it now; it is a thing guaranteed. But you cannot make even that a condition for entering this Yoga. It is a high adventure, as I told you. It is not like the other yogic systems where you get some touch of the Higher Reality and leave the rest untransformed. My Yoga makes demands that have to be met, it is a radical transition from the Present state of human consciousness. We accept life but that does not mean that in this Yoga there is no renunciation. It only means we do not annul any of the faculties of the human being. What we put forth is not something mental, vital or physical but that which comes from the Supramental.
Athavale: I would do as you suggest; but at present I do not know any working higher than the Mind. What is to be done till then?
1.03 - PERSONALITY, SANCTITY, DIVINE INCARNATION, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
What is the nature of this stinking lump of selfness or personality, which has to be so passionately repented of and so completely died to, before there can be any true knowing of God in purity of spirit? The most meagre and non-committal hypodiesis is that of Hume. Mankind, he says, are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. An almost identical answer is given by the Buddhists, whose doctrine of anatta is the denial of any permanent soul, existing behind the flux of experience and the various psycho-physical skandhas (closely corresponding to Humes bundles), which constitute the more enduring elements of personality. Hume and the Buddhists give a sufficiently realistic description of selfness in action; but they fail to explain how or why the bundles ever became bundles. Did their constituent atoms of experience come together of their own accord? And, if so, why, or by what means, and within what kind of a non-spatial universe? To give a plausible answer to these questions in terms of anatta is so difficult that we are forced to abandon the doctrine in favour of the notion that, behind the flux and within the bundles, there exists some kind of permanent soul, by which experience is organized and which in turn makes use of that organized experience to become a particular and unique personality. This is the view of the orthodox Hinduism, from which Buddhist thought parted company, and of almost all European thought from before the time of Aristotle to the Present day. But whereas most contemporary thinkers make an attempt to describe human nature in terms of a dichotomy of interacting psyche and physique, or an inseparable wholeness of these two elements within particular embothed selves, all the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy make, in one form or another, the affirmation that man is a kind of trinity composed of body, psyche and spirit. Selfness or personality is a product of the first two elements. The third element (that quidquid increatum et increabile, as Eckhart called it) is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being. Mans final end, the purpose of his existence, is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. And this identification of self with spiritual not-self can be achieved only by dying to selfness and living to spirit.
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
--
Can the many fantastic and mutually incompatible theories of expiation and atonement, which have been grafted onto the Christian doctrine of divine incarnation, be regarded as indispensable elements in a sane theology? I find it difficult to imagine how anyone who has looked into a history of these notions, as expounded, for example, by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, by Athanasius and Augustine, by Anselm and Luther, by Calvin and Grotius, can plausibly answer this question in the affirmative. In the Present context, it will be enough to call attention to one of the bitterest of all the bitter ironies of history. For the Christ of the Gospels, lawyers seemed further from the Kingdom of Heaven, more hopelessly impervious to Reality, than almost any other class of human beings except the rich. But Christian theology, especially that of the Western churches, was the product of minds imbued with Jewish and Roman legalism. In all too many instances the immediate insights of the Avatar and the theocentric saint were rationalized into a system, not by philosophers, but by speculative barristers and metaphysical jurists. Why should what Abbot John Chapman calls the problem of reconciling (not merely uniting) Mysticism and Christianity be so extremely difficult? Simply because so much Roman and Protestant thinking was done by those very lawyers whom Christ regarded as being peculiarly incapable of understanding the true Nature of Things. The Abbot (Chapman is apparently referring to Abbot Marmion) says St John of the Cross is like a sponge full of Christianity. You can squeeze it all out, and the full mystical theory (in other words, the pure Perennial Philosophy) remains. Consequently for fifteen years or so I hated St John of the Cross and called him a Buddhist. I loved St Teresa and read her over and over again. She is first a Christian, only secondarily a mystic. Then I found I had wasted fifteen years, so far as prayer was concerned.
Now see the meaning of these two sayings of Christs. The one, No man cometh unto the Father but by me, that is through my life. The other saying, No man cometh unto me except the Father draw him; that is, he does not take my life upon him and follow after me, except he is moved and drawn of my Father, that is, of the Simple and Perfect Good, of which St. Paul saith, When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.
1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
causes the Present unprecedented upheavals on our globe,
resulting in an almost total disorientation among humans,pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
--
tal premise of the Upanishads then the Present vortices in
humanity are also That, and the most secure foothold must
--
relevant to support an open attitude towards the Present
conditions in a rapidly changing world and the dramatic
--
world. If in the Present crisis atmosphere we want to find
some solid ground, we must not turn to science but inwards
--
Mother, the perennial philosophy worded for the Present
times. The knowledge of this revelation should not result
1.03 - .REASON. IN PHILOSOPHY, #Twilight of the Idols, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
with reverence and gratitude, is, for the Present, the most finely
adjusted instrument at our disposal: it is able to register even such
--
record. Our scientific triumphs at the Present day extend precisely
so far as we have accepted the evidence of our senses,--as we have
1.03 - Supernatural Aid, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the Present and stands
in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha);
--
Ghost. Goe the Presents the masculine guide in Faust as
Mephistophelesand not infrequently the dangerous aspect of
1.03 - Sympathetic Magic, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
of adopting children was practised by the barbarians. At the Present
time it is said to be still in use in Bulgaria and among the Bosnian
1.03 - The Coming of the Subjective Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is this principle and necessity that justify an age of individualism and rationalism and make it, however short it may be, an inevitable period in the cycle. A temporary reign of the critical reason largely destructive in its action is an imperative need for human progress. In India, since the great Buddhistic upheaval of the national thought and life, there has been a series of re current attempts to rediscover the truth of the soul and life and get behind the veil of stifling conventions; but these have been conducted by a wide and tolerant spiritual reason, a plastic soul-intuition and deep subjective seeking, insufficiently militant and destructive. Although productive of great internal and considerable external changes, they have never succeeded in getting rid of the predominant conventional order. The work of a dissolvent and destructive intellectual criticism, though not entirely absent from some of these movements, has never gone far enough; the constructive force, insufficiently aided by the destructive, has not been able to make a wide and free space for its new formation. It is only with the period of European influence and impact that circumstances and tendencies powerful enough to enforce the beginnings of a new age of radical and effective revaluation of ideas and things have come into existence. The characteristic power of these influences has been throughoutor at any rate till quite recentlyrationalistic, utilitarian and individualistic. It has compelled the national mind to view everything from a new, searching and critical standpoint, and even those who seek to preserve the Present or restore the past are obliged un consciously or half-consciously to justify their endeavour from the novel point of view and by its appropriate standards of reasoning. Throughout the East, the subjective Asiatic mind is being driven to adapt itself to the need for changed values of life and thought. It has been forced to turn upon itself both by the pressure of Western knowledge and by the compulsion of a quite changed life-need and life-environment. What it did not do from within, has come on it as a necessity from without and this externality has carried with it an immense advantage as well as great dangers.
The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has overlaid, defaced or distorted; but from that first step it must proceed to others and in the end to a general questioning of the foundations of thought and practice in all the spheres of human life and action. A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny.
1.03 - THE GRAND OPTION, #The Future of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
Mankind to have attained at the Present time, in comparison with
the other branches surrounding us on the tree of life?
--
the tasks and difficulties of the Present day by no means signify
that we have come to an impasse in our evolution. Their faith in
--
termingled in the Present world, at the heart of human freedom.
c Plurality or Unity? As we have shown, the subdivision of what
--
It truly seems that for Man this is the greatness of the Present
moment. Further ideological clashes and moral dissensions lie in
1.03 - The Phenomenon of Man, #Let Me Explain, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the lowest to the highest, in the Present and the past of a
universe in which a generalized physics succeeds in embrac-
1.03 - The Uncreated, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
It is not then in the past that we must seek for the key to the mystery. The initial act,if there was one,is of no greater importance than the smallest initiative of the Present.
All birth is at the same time a genesis and a prolongation, a passage from one mode of universal being to another, each of these modes having its origin in that which preceded.
And when we can ascend no farther in the infinite chain of causes, then we confound the last that we reach with the eternal Absolute, although that Absolute can be no nearer to the remotest past than it is to the Present hour. That which appears to us, at the extreme limit of all that we can discern, the first cause, is only the last effect of causes even more transcendent than itself.
Why should we demand from the past what the Present equally contains?
Nothing is more vain than this seeking after what has been; for what has been is what is. All things carry in themselves their own history. The problem of the beginning is, in fact, only the problem of the perpetual development of things,the how of each existence.
1.03 - Time Series, Information, and Communication, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
class. In other words, given the entire history up to the Present
of a time series known to belong to an ensemble in statistical
--
point is the Present, we shall in general know the latter from the
past, and our knowledge of the Present will contain an infinite
amount of information.
--
Up to the Present, we have considered Brownian motions x(t,
α) where t is positive. If we put
1.03 - To Layman Ishii, #Beating the Cloth Drum Letters of Zen Master Hakuin, #unset, #Zen
maintained without alteration or diminution to the Present day. Even students who have broken free of the adamantine cage and negotiated their way through the thicket of razor-edged briars, unless they also encounter a genuine teacher along the way and receive his personal instruction, they will be unable to grasp this matter even in their dreams. Why is that? Because from the very beginning, the sage teachers have been like celestial dragons grasping the precious night-shining gem tightly in their claws, not allowing turtles, sea urchins, fish, or other inhabitants of the deep to observe it. They are like venerable dragons, masters of the clouds and rain, whose essential role is totally beyond the ken of frogs and earthworms and other denizens of the waters. I speak of Zen masters like Nan-ch'uan,
Ch'ang-sha, Huang-po, Su-shan, Tz'u-ming, Shao-shih, Chen-ching, Hsi-keng, Dai, and Wu-hsueh
--
(1743). Several passages in the Present letter appear almost verbatim in the printed version of the
Talks, and since the preface to that work states that Hakuin stayed at Ishii's private retreat for over a month while he was drafting the Talks, it is not difficult to imagine Ishii urging his friend to include portions of this letter in the Talks so they might be shared with others.
--
Buddha Dharma, the transmission could not have lasted down to the Present day." Indignant, Hsuantse left the monastery, but on his way down the mountain he reflected, "The master is known throughout the land as a great teacher. He has over five hundred disciples. There must be some merit to his words." Returning penitently to the monastery, he performed his bows before Fa-yen, and asked, "What is the self of a Buddhist monk?" "Ping-ting t'ung-tzu comes for fire," the master replied.
At the words, Hsuan-tse attained great enlightenment (Records of the Lamp, ch. 17).
1.03 - YIBHOOTI PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
to the Present time is change as to time. To be able to make
the mind-stuff go to the past forms giving up the Present even,
is change as to state. The concentrations taught in the
1.04 - BOOK THE FOURTH, #Metamorphoses, #Ovid, #Poetry
And now the Present deity they dread.
Strange to relate! Here ivy first was seen,
1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
You all have a share in the murder. 94 In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. The peoples demonstrate this at the Present time in unforgettable acts, that will be written with blood in unforgettable books for eternal memory. 95
But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother.
1.04 - Feedback and Oscillation, #Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, #Norbert Wiener, #Cybernetics
of the Present chapter, we are dealing precisely with those mat-
ters for which the symbolism of mathematics is the appropriate
1.04 - KAI VALYA PADA, #Patanjali Yoga Sutras, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
the most wonderful medicines of the Present day we owe to
the Rasayamas, notably the use of metals in medicine.
--
it; the Present alone exists, the past and future are lost. This
stands controlled, and all knowledge is there in one second.
1.04 - Magic and Religion, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
disappointment in the Present by their endless promises of the
future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain
--
contumacious. Similarly in India at the Present day the great Hindoo
trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is subject to the
--
peasantry at the Present day. With regard to ancient India we are
told by an eminent Sanscrit scholar that "the sacrificial ritual at
--
Europe at the Present day, and it crops up on the surface in the
heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent of a
--
humble student of the Present and the past. Here we are only
concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the universality, and the
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The Crossing ::: TV-PG | 42min | Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi | TV Series (2018) Episode Guide 11 episodes The Crossing Poster -- Refugees from a war-torn country 180 years in the future start showing up in the present to seek asylum in an American town. Creators: Jay Beattie, Dan Dworkin
The Crossing ::: TV-PG | 42min | Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi | TV Series (2018) -- Refugees from a war-torn country 180 years in the future start showing up in the present to seek asylum in an American town. Creators: Jay Beattie, Dan Dworkin
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Ankoku Shinwa -- -- Ajia-Do -- 2 eps -- Manga -- Demons Fantasy Horror Mystery Psychological Supernatural -- Ankoku Shinwa Ankoku Shinwa -- Long ago there were fierce gods of legends who shook the earth to its foundation with their power. There are now prehistoric rivals from the primitive times in Japan, that fought to protect their secrets in the present day. The God of Darkness Susanoah-oh is now sleeping in the shadows of the underworld waiting for his rebirth. However his coming hasn't gone unoticed. There are agents from the Kikuchi Clan (descendants of Japans first inhabitants) who have seen the warning signs of the spreading of darkness's bringing. These investigators are armed with ancient knowledge and artifacts who are willingly prepared to face the God of Darkness. Now they must fight the assembled spirits of hell to find the one young boy who is chosen by fate to grasp the chaotic might of the deadly Gods. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Manga Entertainment -- OVA - Jan 26, 1990 -- 2,338 4.18
Arata naru Sekai: World's/Start/Load/End -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- - -- Sci-Fi -- Arata naru Sekai: World's/Start/Load/End Arata naru Sekai: World's/Start/Load/End -- Four high school girls in uniforms walk silently on the barren earth. These girls are time travelers who had been sent 6000 years into the future, from their present in which the same day is endlessly repeated, in order to evade human extinction. -- -- They studied time travel in school, were examined by the aptitude test, and were sent to the future as told. What should they do now? They had no idea. The only thing they could take with them from the present was a light, toy-like cellphone. Of course, it receives no signal here. -- -- As the girls are walking, they see strange birds flying in the sky, and a discolored river in the distance. -- -- Then, one girl finds an abandoned house, and recognizes the name inscribed on the front gates. -- OVA - Oct 20, 2012 -- 18,568 6.30
Asu no Yoichi! -- -- AIC -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Harem Comedy Romance Ecchi Martial Arts Shounen -- Asu no Yoichi! Asu no Yoichi! -- Yoichi Karasuma has spent all of his life in the mountains, training in the Soaring Wind, Divine Wind swordsmanship style. Under his father’s guidance, he is able to master the technique at the age of 17. With nothing left to learn, Yoichi is sent to a new dojo located in the city so he can continue to train and gain an understanding of modern society. -- -- Unfortunately, Yoichi has no idea how to act or speak to anyone in the present day and acts like a samurai, complete with odd speech and traditional clothing. As he goes to live with the Ikaruga sisters at the dojo, Yoichi, clueless on how to interact with others, is constantly hurtled in hilarious misunderstandings. Asu no Yoichi! follows Yoichi as he stumbles through his new life and tries to learn how to live in the modern world with his new family. -- -- 178,864 6.77
Bakukyuu Hit! Crash B-Daman -- -- SynergySP -- 50 eps -- - -- Game Adventure Kids -- Bakukyuu Hit! Crash B-Daman Bakukyuu Hit! Crash B-Daman -- Hitto Tamaga, an 11-year-old boy, lives in some town in Japan. He is a very unfortunate boy, whose only asset is brightness. He lives only with his father who is a Bedaman researcher, but he left home several months ago, and he's been missing since then. He is living alone in a hut built on a relative’s land. Nobody celebrates his 11th birthday...except his cousin Nana who lives in the same land. One day, Hitto receives a present from the lost father, and he is very grad to know that his father remembers his birthday. It is “Crash Bedaman” that he longed for. After he puts them together to complete Crash Bedaman, he brings it to Bee Park, or a battle field of Beedaman. A battle there shows him a new way he should go. -- -- There is a message from his father with the present. -- -- “Overcome the difficulties”. -- -- Putting this word in his mind, he beats the enemies one after another with his Bedaman. With the encounter of partners and rivals, the mystery of Bedaman, a shadow organization, and the reason of the missing of his father gradually come to light. Defeating various obstacles in his way, he’s growing up. (Source: AnimeNFO) -- 1,562 6.04
Boku dake ga Inai Machi -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Mystery Psychological Supernatural Seinen -- Boku dake ga Inai Machi Boku dake ga Inai Machi -- When tragedy is about to strike, Satoru Fujinuma finds himself sent back several minutes before the accident occurs. The detached, 29-year-old manga artist has taken advantage of this powerful yet mysterious phenomenon, which he calls "Revival," to save many lives. -- -- However, when he is wrongfully accused of murdering someone close to him, Satoru is sent back to the past once again, but this time to 1988, 18 years in the past. Soon, he realizes that the murder may be connected to the abduction and killing of one of his classmates, the solitary and mysterious Kayo Hinazuki, that took place when he was a child. This is his chance to make things right. -- -- Boku dake ga Inai Machi follows Satoru in his mission to uncover what truly transpired 18 years ago and prevent the death of his classmate while protecting those he cares about in the present. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 1,470,810 8.35
Boku no Tonari ni Ankoku Hakaishin ga Imasu. -- -- EMT Squared -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Slice of Life Comedy School Josei -- Boku no Tonari ni Ankoku Hakaishin ga Imasu. Boku no Tonari ni Ankoku Hakaishin ga Imasu. -- In the distant past, Miguel, the God of Destruction, was sealed inside the knight who ruled over light and darkness, Sturmhurt. Alongside the knight was Gestöber, who accompanied him through countless battles. In the present day, destiny causes them to reincarnate as Kabuto Hanadori and Seri Koyuki, two classmates. -- -- Their reunion should be a joyous moment, if not for the fact that these fantasied heroes are just products of Kabuto's delusions. As the fictional "Gestöber," Seri finds himself in various embarrassing situations due to Kabuto's antics that sometimes grow out of his control. Moreover, his classmate Utsugi Tsukimiya joins the fray with his absurdly accurate mind-reading abilities, slowly destroying Seri's social life. -- -- Seri tries hard to stay away from them, refusing to acknowledge their shenanigans, however with Kabuto's chuunibyou and Utsugi's unpredictability, he is only bound to be swept by the craziness coming his way. -- -- 40,259 6.65
Bungou Stray Dogs 2nd Season -- -- Bones -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Mystery Super Power Supernatural Seinen -- Bungou Stray Dogs 2nd Season Bungou Stray Dogs 2nd Season -- Despite their differences in position, three men—the youngest senior executive of the Port Mafia, Osamu Dazai; the lowest ranking member, Sakunosuke Oda; and the intelligence agent, Angou Sakaguchi—gather at the Lupin Bar at the end of the day to relax and take delight in the company of friends. -- -- However, one night, Ango disappears. A photograph taken at the bar is all that is left of the three together. -- -- Fast forward to the present, and Dazai is now a member of the Armed Detective Agency. The Guild, an American gifted organization, has entered the fray and is intent on taking the Agency's work permit. They must now divide their attention between the two groups, the Guild and the Port Mafia, who oppose their very existence. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Crunchyroll, Funimation -- 529,838 8.20
Bungou Stray Dogs 3rd Season -- -- Bones -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Mystery Seinen Super Power Supernatural -- Bungou Stray Dogs 3rd Season Bungou Stray Dogs 3rd Season -- Following the conclusion of the three-way organizational war, government bureaucrat Ango Sakaguchi recalls an event that transpired years ago, after the death of the former Port Mafia boss. Osamu Dazai, still a new recruit at the time, was tasked with investigating rumors related to a mysterious explosion that decimated part of the city years ago—and its connection to the alleged reappearance of the former boss. -- -- Due to circumstances out of his control, he is partnered with Chuuya Nakahara, the gifted yet impulsive leader of a rival clan known as the ''Sheep,'' to uncover the truth behind the case and shine a light on the myth of Arahabaki—the god of fire who might just lead Dazai to the case's solution. -- -- Meanwhile, in the present day, it is business as usual once again for the Armed Detective Agency. Their peaceful break will not last for long, however, as enemies old and new gather their strength and prepare for another face-off. -- -- 337,692 8.18
Cybersix -- -- Telecom Animation Film -- 13 eps -- Other -- Action Adventure Romance Sci-Fi -- Cybersix Cybersix -- Anime based upon the original Argentine graphic novel series of the same name. -- -- The story follows the titular character who is a genetically engineered super-soldier; one of the creations of Dr. Von Reichter's diabolic experiments. (The fictional) Von Reichter is actually a former Nazi who conducted horrendous experiments during the second world war. He flees to South America where he continues his experiments which culminate in the creation of the "Cybers," one of which happens to be Cybersix. However, since the Cybers exhibit free will at an young age (an undesired trait), Von Reichter destroys all the Cybers to prevent a rebellion. -- -- In the present day, Cybersix is one of the Cybers who managed to escape and is living a quiet life under the alias of "Adrian Seidelman"; however, she finds out that her survival is dependent on a special substance that Von Reichter created and thus she is forced to hunt down the "Technos," a newer generation of super-soldiers created by him, in order to survive. Unintentionally, in the process, Cybersix becomes a superhero protecting the world from Dr. Von Reichter's creations and his evil plans. -- -- Licensor: -- Discotek Media -- 7,462 7.23
Dies Irae -- -- A.C.G.T. -- 11 eps -- Visual novel -- Action Military Super Power Magic -- Dies Irae Dies Irae -- On May 1, 1945 in Berlin, as the Red Army raises the Soviet flag over the Reichskanzlei, a group of Nazi officers conduct a ritual. For them, the slaughter in the city is nothing but the perfect ritual sacrifice in order to bring back the Order of the 13 Lances, a group of supermen whose coming would bring the world's destruction. Years later, no one knows if this group of officers succeeded, or whether they lived or died. Few know of their existence, and even those who knew began to pass away as the decades passed. -- -- Now in December in the present day in Suwahara City, Ren Fujii spends his days at the hospital. It has been two months since the incident that brought him to the hospital: a fight with his friend Shirou Yusa where they almost tried to kill each other. He tries to value what he has left to him, but every night he sees the same dream: a guillotine, murderers who hunt people, and the black clothed knights who pursue the murderers. He is desperate to return to his normal, everyday life, but even now he hears Shirou's words: "Everyone who remains in this city eventually loses their minds." -- -- (Source: ANN) -- 115,820 5.37
Dies Irae -- -- A.C.G.T. -- 11 eps -- Visual novel -- Action Military Super Power Magic -- Dies Irae Dies Irae -- On May 1, 1945 in Berlin, as the Red Army raises the Soviet flag over the Reichskanzlei, a group of Nazi officers conduct a ritual. For them, the slaughter in the city is nothing but the perfect ritual sacrifice in order to bring back the Order of the 13 Lances, a group of supermen whose coming would bring the world's destruction. Years later, no one knows if this group of officers succeeded, or whether they lived or died. Few know of their existence, and even those who knew began to pass away as the decades passed. -- -- Now in December in the present day in Suwahara City, Ren Fujii spends his days at the hospital. It has been two months since the incident that brought him to the hospital: a fight with his friend Shirou Yusa where they almost tried to kill each other. He tries to value what he has left to him, but every night he sees the same dream: a guillotine, murderers who hunt people, and the black clothed knights who pursue the murderers. He is desperate to return to his normal, everyday life, but even now he hears Shirou's words: "Everyone who remains in this city eventually loses their minds." -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Crunchyroll, Funimation -- 115,820 5.37
Digimon X-Evolution -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Fantasy Sci-Fi -- Digimon X-Evolution Digimon X-Evolution -- A virtual world was created by the present-day network called the "Digital World." The "Digital Monster," which is a digital life object, was born, and the host computer Yggdrasil managed the different Digital World areas. However, it developed the X Program of fear to eliminate all Digimon in the old world and develop a new Digital World for only certain Digimon... Now, the greatest crisis ever approaches the Digital World. -- -- The X-Digimon, a new type of Digital Monster, is hunted by the Royal Knights who protect the Digital Worlds. Their master, the network overseer Yggdrasil, seeks to set in motion Project Ark to renew the Digital Worlds and create new Digimon, but at the cost of all other digital life. This new X-Digimon will seek out the answers to its own existence as it tries to protect the life of all Digimon, and in the process it will change the Digital Worlds forever. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- Movie - Jan 3, 2005 -- 18,291 7.10
Doraemon (2005) -- -- Shin-Ei Animation -- ? eps -- Manga -- Sci-Fi Comedy Kids Shounen -- Doraemon (2005) Doraemon (2005) -- Doraemon (2005) is the most recent anime series based on Fujiko Fujio's manga of the same name. -- -- It is the 2005 version of 1979 series, with certain changes in the animation and other things. -- -- Doraemon is a cat-like robot who appears in the present to steer Nobita/Noby, who is a dumb, naive and clumsy boy on the right path in order to secure his future. Nobita's love interest is Shizuka Minamoto/Sue, his frenemies are Takeshi Goda/Big G and Suneo/Sneech. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- 12,791 7.54
Doukyuusei (Movie) -- -- A-1 Pictures -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Slice of Life Romance School Shounen Ai -- Doukyuusei (Movie) Doukyuusei (Movie) -- Hikaru Kusakabe is a normal, carefree boy in a rock band who is always focused on the present. During the summer, his entire class is forced to participate in an upcoming chorus festival. By coincidence, he discovers his classmate Rihito Sajou—known for being an honor student with excellent grades—practicing his singing alone. Sajou just cannot seem to get their class' song right, and Kusakabe, delighted at seeing a new side of his straight-laced classmate, offers to help him prepare for the event. -- -- Although their lives and personalities are total opposites, they begin to grow closer as time progresses. But with the pressure of an unknown future, what will become of them and their growing relationship? -- -- Movie - Feb 20, 2016 -- 172,090 8.32
ef: A Tale of Melodies. -- -- Shaft -- 12 eps -- Visual novel -- Mystery Supernatural Drama Romance -- ef: A Tale of Melodies. ef: A Tale of Melodies. -- In a story set years in the past, Himura Yuu is a studious and diligent young man intent solely on maintaining his top academic position at Otowa Academy. One day, he meets a mysterious girl named Amamiya Yuuko, who, to his surprise, recognizes him. Memories of a distant childhood, memories rather left forgotten... meeting Yuuko again will force Yuu to confront the regrets and sorrows of their collective pasts and presents. -- -- In the present, Kuze Shuuichi may seem like a womanizer, but upon closer inspection, is a man who would rather be left alone. Hayama Mizuki, however, is not the type of girl who would let him be, especially after hearing the beautiful sounds of his violin performance. As Mizuki attempts to become closer to him, Kuze attempts to push her away—the tale of their budding relationship is darkened with undertones of an imminent tragedy. -- -- 148,230 8.04
ef: A Tale of Melodies. -- -- Shaft -- 12 eps -- Visual novel -- Mystery Supernatural Drama Romance -- ef: A Tale of Melodies. ef: A Tale of Melodies. -- In a story set years in the past, Himura Yuu is a studious and diligent young man intent solely on maintaining his top academic position at Otowa Academy. One day, he meets a mysterious girl named Amamiya Yuuko, who, to his surprise, recognizes him. Memories of a distant childhood, memories rather left forgotten... meeting Yuuko again will force Yuu to confront the regrets and sorrows of their collective pasts and presents. -- -- In the present, Kuze Shuuichi may seem like a womanizer, but upon closer inspection, is a man who would rather be left alone. Hayama Mizuki, however, is not the type of girl who would let him be, especially after hearing the beautiful sounds of his violin performance. As Mizuki attempts to become closer to him, Kuze attempts to push her away—the tale of their budding relationship is darkened with undertones of an imminent tragedy. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 148,230 8.04
Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya 3rei!! -- -- SILVER LINK. -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Comedy Fantasy Magic -- Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya 3rei!! Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya 3rei!! -- Waking up to find herself in a parallel version of Fuyuki City, Illyasviel "Illya" von Einzbern is lost and alone. She discovers her home in ruins, with a massive crater lying in the center of her hometown. With snow falling in the middle of summer, confusion consumes the young elementary schooler, who has no knowledge of where her friends or her wand Ruby may be. -- -- Making it to the remains of her house, she is suddenly tackled by an amnesiac girl. Wearing a gym uniform as the icy temperature sets in, the mysterious girl has no idea of where she is or why she showed up. However, this stranger, known as Tanaka, apparently has information about the location of Rin Toosaka, Miyu Edelfelt, and the rest of Illya's missing friends. -- -- Fleeing from agents of the Ainsworth family—those in control of this parallel realm—where will these two end up, and how will Illya restore the present back to the world she once knew? -- -- 96,521 7.55
Giniro no Kami no Agito -- -- Gonzo -- 1 ep -- Original -- Adventure Drama Fantasy Romance Sci-Fi -- Giniro no Kami no Agito Giniro no Kami no Agito -- Three hundred years ago, a genetic experiment gone wrong caused the mutation of all forests on Earth. Armed with consciousness, the vegetation sought to destroy all of humankind, and the war that ensued turned the planet into a hellish dystopia. -- -- In the present day, Agito, a young boy, lives with his father in Neutral City—a village maintaining an uneasy truce with the neighboring forest. One day, Agito, on his way to collect water, becomes separated from his friend and stumbles upon a relic of the past: a girl sleeping in a mysterious machine. -- -- Agito awakens the girl, Toola Cm Sacl, and introduces her to the village. But outside forces have ulterior motives for the girl, who holds the key to restore the Earth. Misguided by Shunack, a soldier from the old world hellbent on destroying the forest, Toola follows him despite Agito's warning. Determined to save Toola and unify humankind with the forest, Agito borrows the power of the forest and pursues her. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Jan 7, 2006 -- 64,100 7.10
Giniro no Kami no Agito -- -- Gonzo -- 1 ep -- Original -- Adventure Drama Fantasy Romance Sci-Fi -- Giniro no Kami no Agito Giniro no Kami no Agito -- Three hundred years ago, a genetic experiment gone wrong caused the mutation of all forests on Earth. Armed with consciousness, the vegetation sought to destroy all of humankind, and the war that ensued turned the planet into a hellish dystopia. -- -- In the present day, Agito, a young boy, lives with his father in Neutral City—a village maintaining an uneasy truce with the neighboring forest. One day, Agito, on his way to collect water, becomes separated from his friend and stumbles upon a relic of the past: a girl sleeping in a mysterious machine. -- -- Agito awakens the girl, Toola Cm Sacl, and introduces her to the village. But outside forces have ulterior motives for the girl, who holds the key to restore the Earth. Misguided by Shunack, a soldier from the old world hellbent on destroying the forest, Toola follows him despite Agito's warning. Determined to save Toola and unify humankind with the forest, Agito borrows the power of the forest and pursues her. -- -- Movie - Jan 7, 2006 -- 64,100 7.10
Grisaia no Meikyuu: Caprice no Mayu 0 -- -- 8bit -- 1 ep -- Visual novel -- Drama -- Grisaia no Meikyuu: Caprice no Mayu 0 Grisaia no Meikyuu: Caprice no Mayu 0 -- Having attended Mihama Academy for about a year, Yuuji Kazami has seemingly found his place within the school, but he suddenly decides to pursue a promotion in CIRS. After consulting JB about his intentions, they both thoroughly examine Yuuji's documents and dissect the events of his upbringing to determine if the job is fit for him. -- -- Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the two, the girls of Mihama uncover some torn documents in Yuuji's room. After restoring the papers, they discover the story that has formed—or perhaps broken—Yuuji into the man he is today. However, what was thought to be history has haunted him to the present, and the chains of the past begin to drag him back into the darkness... -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- Special - Apr 12, 2015 -- 184,573 7.90
Groove Adventure Rave -- -- Studio Deen -- 51 eps -- Manga -- Adventure Comedy Fantasy Romance Shounen -- Groove Adventure Rave Groove Adventure Rave -- Fifty years ago, malevolent stones known as Dark Brings brought about the "Overdrive," a calamitous event that destroyed one-tenth of the world. In the present day, the nefarious organization Demon Card seeks the Dark Brings' power for their all but innocent intentions. -- -- Haru Glory, a sword-wielding silver-haired teenager, inherits the title of Rave Master: the person who wields the power of the legendary Rave Stones, artifacts capable of destroying the Dark Brings. However, the many Rave Stones were scattered across the globe as a result of the Overdrive, allowing Demon Card to continue their malpractices. -- -- Groove Adventure Rave follows Haru, his strange dog Plue, the fiery blonde Ellie, and the infamous thief Musica, as they embark on a great journey that will take them around the vast world, searching for the Rave Stones that will finally end Demon Card's injustice. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Tokyopop -- TV - Oct 13, 2001 -- 85,990 7.26
Groove Adventure Rave -- -- Studio Deen -- 51 eps -- Manga -- Adventure Comedy Fantasy Romance Shounen -- Groove Adventure Rave Groove Adventure Rave -- Fifty years ago, malevolent stones known as Dark Brings brought about the "Overdrive," a calamitous event that destroyed one-tenth of the world. In the present day, the nefarious organization Demon Card seeks the Dark Brings' power for their all but innocent intentions. -- -- Haru Glory, a sword-wielding silver-haired teenager, inherits the title of Rave Master: the person who wields the power of the legendary Rave Stones, artifacts capable of destroying the Dark Brings. However, the many Rave Stones were scattered across the globe as a result of the Overdrive, allowing Demon Card to continue their malpractices. -- -- Groove Adventure Rave follows Haru, his strange dog Plue, the fiery blonde Ellie, and the infamous thief Musica, as they embark on a great journey that will take them around the vast world, searching for the Rave Stones that will finally end Demon Card's injustice. -- -- TV - Oct 13, 2001 -- 85,990 7.26
Hello World -- -- Graphinica -- 1 ep -- Original -- Sci-Fi Drama Romance -- Hello World Hello World -- The year is 2027, and the city of Kyoto has undergone tremendous technological advancement. Within the city lives Naomi Katagaki, a socially awkward and introverted boy with a love for books, and Ruri Ichigyou, a girl with a cold personality who is often blunt with people, but shares his love for reading. Despite having similar interests, Naomi is afraid to approach Ruri due to her unfriendly nature. -- -- One day, as Naomi goes out for a walk, a crimson aurora pierces through the sky for a brief moment before vanishing. Shortly after, he sees a three-legged crow and a mysterious hooded man who reveals himself to be Naomi from 10 years in the future, explaining that he has come to change an imminent tragic event that happens to Ruri shortly after they start dating. Initially taking his words with a grain of salt, present-day Naomi follows his future self's instructions and starts getting closer to Ruri, determined to save her. -- -- Hello World focuses on the present Naomi alongside himself from 10 years into the future. With the help of his future self, Naomi begins his preparations to save Ruri. Will he be able to change the future? -- -- Movie - Sep 20, 2019 -- 121,677 7.58
Hitsugi no Chaika -- -- Bones -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Adventure Comedy Romance Fantasy -- Hitsugi no Chaika Hitsugi no Chaika -- For 500 years, the Taboo Emperor, Arthur Gaz, ruled the Gaz Empire with an iron fist and conducted inhumane experiments on his own people. But his reign came to an end five years ago, when mighty warriors—later known as the Eight Heroes—defeated him in a battle for the capital. His death ended the 300-yearlong war between the Gaz Empire and the alliance of six nations. -- -- In the present day, Tooru Acura is a former saboteur from the war who has difficulty settling into the peaceful world, as he cannot find a job where he can put his fighting skills to use. An opportunity appears before him, however, when he meets a white-haired Wizard named Chaika Trabant. With a coffin on her back, she is searching for the scattered remains of her father in order to give him a proper burial, and she hires Tooru and his adoptive sister Akari to help her. However, the six nations alliance, which have now formed the Council of Six Nations, dispatches Albéric Gillette and his men from the Kleeman Agency to pursue and apprehend the late Emperor Gaz's daughter—Chaika. -- -- With the shocking revelation of Chaika's identity, the Acura siblings must choose between helping her gather the remains of the tyrannical emperor and upholding the peace the continent strives to maintain. -- -- 317,823 7.27
Hitsugi no Chaika -- -- Bones -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Adventure Comedy Romance Fantasy -- Hitsugi no Chaika Hitsugi no Chaika -- For 500 years, the Taboo Emperor, Arthur Gaz, ruled the Gaz Empire with an iron fist and conducted inhumane experiments on his own people. But his reign came to an end five years ago, when mighty warriors—later known as the Eight Heroes—defeated him in a battle for the capital. His death ended the 300-yearlong war between the Gaz Empire and the alliance of six nations. -- -- In the present day, Tooru Acura is a former saboteur from the war who has difficulty settling into the peaceful world, as he cannot find a job where he can put his fighting skills to use. An opportunity appears before him, however, when he meets a white-haired Wizard named Chaika Trabant. With a coffin on her back, she is searching for the scattered remains of her father in order to give him a proper burial, and she hires Tooru and his adoptive sister Akari to help her. However, the six nations alliance, which have now formed the Council of Six Nations, dispatches Albéric Gillette and his men from the Kleeman Agency to pursue and apprehend the late Emperor Gaz's daughter—Chaika. -- -- With the shocking revelation of Chaika's identity, the Acura siblings must choose between helping her gather the remains of the tyrannical emperor and upholding the peace the continent strives to maintain. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- 317,823 7.27
Kindan no Mokushiroku: Crystal Triangle -- -- animate Film -- 1 ep -- Original -- Adventure Military Demons Mystery -- Kindan no Mokushiroku: Crystal Triangle Kindan no Mokushiroku: Crystal Triangle -- In times of olde, God gave mankind the ten commandments, and a message that has been lost to the centuries. In the present, Koichiro Kamishiro is a modern day Indiana Jones who scours (and often destroys) ruins for hints of the past, until one day he runs across a box filled with two crystal triangles. Having inadvertently run across the key to God's lost message, Kamishiro suddenly has a lot to deal with including assassination attempts by the KGB and the CIA, aliens hell-bent on destroying the Earth and the love of several women! -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media -- OVA - Jul 22, 1987 -- 1,914 4.56
Majin Bone -- -- Toei Animation -- 52 eps -- Game -- Game -- Majin Bone Majin Bone -- Anime adaptation of Majin Bone, a digital card game project. -- -- Majin, the creator of the Universe, has been resurrected in the present day. Shougo Ryuujin, an ordinary high school student who transforms into the Bone Fighter Dragonbone with the Bone Card in order to save Earth. Together, with the other White Bone warriors take a stand against the Dark Bone, a foe that has appeared from darkness to devastate Earth. However, "could the true enemy be ourselves?" -- -- (Source: ANN) -- TV - Apr 1, 2014 -- 8,833 6.66
Maryuu Senki -- -- AIC -- 3 eps -- Original -- Fantasy Horror -- Maryuu Senki Maryuu Senki -- Once upon a time, there was a certain family having strong influence on the rule of the Imperial Court. They had their own might called "Kidou" and yet got hated because of the might itself. At last, the patriarch of the family was entrapped to his death, and all the family was doomed to ruin... The present day — the survived descendants of this family, now calling themselves "Kidousyuu" schemed to resurrect their murdered patriarch once again, and the ferocious evil spell went into action. -- -- (Source: BakaBT) -- OVA - Mar 5, 1987 -- 2,215 5.21
Nanatsu no Taizai: Kamigami no Gekirin -- -- Marvy Jack, Studio Deen -- 24 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Supernatural Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Nanatsu no Taizai: Kamigami no Gekirin Nanatsu no Taizai: Kamigami no Gekirin -- After saving the Kingdom of Liones from the 10 Commandments, Meliodas and the Seven Deadly Sins are enjoying their time off. However, things aren't as peaceful as they seem, as the Sins are put through various trials to become strong enough to defeat the 10 Commandments and to overcome their past trauma. -- -- With help from past figures, the Sins are tasked with defeating the 10 Commandments and putting an end to their evil plans that began ten thousand years ago. The Sins begin to uncover the truth about each other, as well as those who stood before them. With this knowledge in hand, the battle against the 10 Commandments has only just begun. -- -- Nanatsu no Taizai: Kamigami no Gekirin continues to follow the Seven Deadly Sins and those that they meet on their journey. Through their adventures, they realize that their actions have had greater consequences on the present than they could have ever expected. -- -- 455,812 6.42
Naruto: Shippuuden Movie 4 - The Lost Tower -- -- Studio Pierrot -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Comedy Martial Arts Shounen Super Power -- Naruto: Shippuuden Movie 4 - The Lost Tower Naruto: Shippuuden Movie 4 - The Lost Tower -- Led by Yamato, Naruto Uzumaki, Sakura Haruno, and Sai are assigned to capture Mukade, a rogue ninja who is pursuing the ancient chakra Ryuumyaku located underneath the Rouran ruins. While the Ryuumyaku has been sealed by the Fourth Hokage, the group fails to prevent Mukade from releasing its power. Consequently, a strong energy burst engulfs both Naruto and Yamato before they can escape. -- -- As he awakens in a magnificent yet hostile kingdom, Naruto meets its young queen Saara and three Konohagakure ninjas on a top-secret mission. They reveal to him that he has time-traveled to Rouran 20 years into the past! To make matters worse, Mukade has already infiltrated the royal court, becoming the naive queen's most trusted minister under the alias Anrokuzan. -- -- Joining forces with the three ninjas, Naruto must protect Saara's life without fail to stop the villain's plans and return to the present. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- Movie - Jul 31, 2010 -- 180,781 7.41
Naruto: Shippuuden Movie 4 - The Lost Tower -- -- Studio Pierrot -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Comedy Martial Arts Shounen Super Power -- Naruto: Shippuuden Movie 4 - The Lost Tower Naruto: Shippuuden Movie 4 - The Lost Tower -- Led by Yamato, Naruto Uzumaki, Sakura Haruno, and Sai are assigned to capture Mukade, a rogue ninja who is pursuing the ancient chakra Ryuumyaku located underneath the Rouran ruins. While the Ryuumyaku has been sealed by the Fourth Hokage, the group fails to prevent Mukade from releasing its power. Consequently, a strong energy burst engulfs both Naruto and Yamato before they can escape. -- -- As he awakens in a magnificent yet hostile kingdom, Naruto meets its young queen Saara and three Konohagakure ninjas on a top-secret mission. They reveal to him that he has time-traveled to Rouran 20 years into the past! To make matters worse, Mukade has already infiltrated the royal court, becoming the naive queen's most trusted minister under the alias Anrokuzan. -- -- Joining forces with the three ninjas, Naruto must protect Saara's life without fail to stop the villain's plans and return to the present. -- -- Movie - Jul 31, 2010 -- 180,781 7.41
Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyou -- -- Studio Deen -- 24 eps -- Manga -- Action Demons Shounen Supernatural -- Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyou Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyou -- Long before Rikuo Nura was born, the legendary youkai Nurarihyon, leader of a "Night Parade of One Hundred Demons," fell in love with a human woman. Though the two would initially find happiness, a threat from the terrifying fox-demon Hagoromo Gitsune would get in the way of their relationship. -- -- In the present, Rikuo has taken his rightful place as the heir to the Nura Clan. While he has accepted his youkai side, he must continue to maintain the secret of youkai, a difficult task when faced with the Keikain onmyouji clan and his youkai-obsessed friend, Kiyotsugu. Even so, Rikuo will do what he must to protect those important to him. -- -- The reappearance of the sinister Hagoromo Gitsune marks the start of Rikuo's most fearsome trial yet. The frightening creature bears a personal vendetta against his family and will stop at nothing to see her dream come to fruition. The world stands at a precipice, an all-out war that will drag Rikuo centerstage. -- -- 138,898 7.99
Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyou -- -- Studio Deen -- 24 eps -- Manga -- Action Demons Shounen Supernatural -- Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyou Nurarihyon no Mago: Sennen Makyou -- Long before Rikuo Nura was born, the legendary youkai Nurarihyon, leader of a "Night Parade of One Hundred Demons," fell in love with a human woman. Though the two would initially find happiness, a threat from the terrifying fox-demon Hagoromo Gitsune would get in the way of their relationship. -- -- In the present, Rikuo has taken his rightful place as the heir to the Nura Clan. While he has accepted his youkai side, he must continue to maintain the secret of youkai, a difficult task when faced with the Keikain onmyouji clan and his youkai-obsessed friend, Kiyotsugu. Even so, Rikuo will do what he must to protect those important to him. -- -- The reappearance of the sinister Hagoromo Gitsune marks the start of Rikuo's most fearsome trial yet. The frightening creature bears a personal vendetta against his family and will stop at nothing to see her dream come to fruition. The world stands at a precipice, an all-out war that will drag Rikuo centerstage. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- 138,898 7.99
Oushitsu Kyoushi Heine -- -- Bridge -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Slice of Life Comedy Historical Shounen -- Oushitsu Kyoushi Heine Oushitsu Kyoushi Heine -- Equally charming and stern, Heine Wittgenstein is a brilliant man who commands respect, despite his short, childlike stature. Thus, the king of Grannzreich has called upon Heine to undertake a daunting task that has driven away many before him—become the new royal tutor to four princes who are in line for the throne. -- -- The four heirs each have very distinct and troublesome personalities: Licht, the flirtatious youngest prince; his immature older brother Leonhard; Bruno the studious third prince; and Kai, the oldest of the four and the most reserved. Hilarity ensues as Heine attempts to connect with each of the princes in order to groom them for the throne. However, Heine's mysterious past and dark undercurrents in the present may threaten the harmony within the kingdom. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 107,415 7.47
Owarimonogatari 2nd Season -- -- Shaft -- 7 eps -- Light novel -- Mystery Comedy Supernatural Vampire -- Owarimonogatari 2nd Season Owarimonogatari 2nd Season -- Following an encounter with oddity specialist Izuko Gaen, third-year high school student Koyomi Araragi wakes up in a strange, deserted void only to be greeted by a joyfully familiar face in an alarmingly unfamiliar place. -- -- Araragi, with the help of his girlfriend Hitagi Senjougahara, maneuvers through the webs of his past and the perplexities of the present in search of answers. However, fate once again delivers him to the eccentric transfer student Ougi Oshino, who brings forth an unexpected proposal that may unearth the very foundation to which he is anchored. As Araragi peels back the layers of mystery surrounding an apparition, he discovers a truth not meant to be revealed. -- -- 286,343 8.92
Owarimonogatari 2nd Season -- -- Shaft -- 7 eps -- Light novel -- Mystery Comedy Supernatural Vampire -- Owarimonogatari 2nd Season Owarimonogatari 2nd Season -- Following an encounter with oddity specialist Izuko Gaen, third-year high school student Koyomi Araragi wakes up in a strange, deserted void only to be greeted by a joyfully familiar face in an alarmingly unfamiliar place. -- -- Araragi, with the help of his girlfriend Hitagi Senjougahara, maneuvers through the webs of his past and the perplexities of the present in search of answers. However, fate once again delivers him to the eccentric transfer student Ougi Oshino, who brings forth an unexpected proposal that may unearth the very foundation to which he is anchored. As Araragi peels back the layers of mystery surrounding an apparition, he discovers a truth not meant to be revealed. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America -- 286,343 8.92
Seiken Tsukai no World Break -- -- Diomedéa -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Fantasy Harem Romance School Supernatural -- Seiken Tsukai no World Break Seiken Tsukai no World Break -- Seiken Tsukai no World Break takes place at Akane Private Academy where students who possess memories of their previous lives are being trained to use Ancestral Arts so that they can serve as defenders against monsters, called Metaphysicals, who randomly attack. Known as saviors, the students are broken up into two categories: the kurogane who are able to use their prana to summon offensive weapons and the kuroma who are able to use magic. -- -- The story begins six months prior to the major climax of the series during the opening ceremonies on the first day of the school year. After the ceremony is over, the main character, Moroha Haimura, meets a girl named Satsuki Ranjou who reveals that she was Moroha's little sister in a past life where Moroha was a heroic prince capable of slaying entire armies with his sword skills. Soon afterwards he meets another girl, Shizuno Urushibara, who eventually reveals that she also knew Moroha in an entirely different past life where he was a dark lord capable of using destructive magic but saved her from a life of slavery. Can those whose minds live in both the present and the past truly reach a bright future? Delve into the complex world of Seiken Tsukai no World Break to find out! -- 244,980 6.88
Seiken Tsukai no World Break -- -- Diomedéa -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Fantasy Harem Romance School Supernatural -- Seiken Tsukai no World Break Seiken Tsukai no World Break -- Seiken Tsukai no World Break takes place at Akane Private Academy where students who possess memories of their previous lives are being trained to use Ancestral Arts so that they can serve as defenders against monsters, called Metaphysicals, who randomly attack. Known as saviors, the students are broken up into two categories: the kurogane who are able to use their prana to summon offensive weapons and the kuroma who are able to use magic. -- -- The story begins six months prior to the major climax of the series during the opening ceremonies on the first day of the school year. After the ceremony is over, the main character, Moroha Haimura, meets a girl named Satsuki Ranjou who reveals that she was Moroha's little sister in a past life where Moroha was a heroic prince capable of slaying entire armies with his sword skills. Soon afterwards he meets another girl, Shizuno Urushibara, who eventually reveals that she also knew Moroha in an entirely different past life where he was a dark lord capable of using destructive magic but saved her from a life of slavery. Can those whose minds live in both the present and the past truly reach a bright future? Delve into the complex world of Seiken Tsukai no World Break to find out! -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 244,980 6.88
Sennen Joyuu -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Drama Fantasy Historical Romance -- Sennen Joyuu Sennen Joyuu -- At the turn of the millennium, Ginei Studio's dilapidated buildings are set to be demolished. Ex-employee and filmmaker Genya Tachibana decides to honor this occasion with a commemorative documentary about the company's star actress: Chiyoko Fujiwara, the reclusive sweetheart of Shouwa Era cinema. Having finally obtained permission to interview the retired starlet, an enamored Genya drags along cynical cameraman Kyouji Ida to meet her, ready to put his lifelong idol back in the spotlight once more. -- -- Hidden in this secluded mountain retreat is a thousand years of history condensed into one lifetime, waiting to be narrated. Chiyoko's recollections take them on an illusionary journey through Japanese cinematic history that transcends the boundaries of reality; the saga of her acting career intertwines with her filmography, the actors in her life blend seamlessly with the characters on screen, and the present melds with the past. Though the actress may have retired at the height of her career 30 years ago, the curtain on her life's stage has yet to fall. -- -- -- Licensor: -- DreamWorks, Eleven Arts -- Movie - Sep 14, 2002 -- 131,992 8.27
Shikioriori -- -- CoMix Wave Films -- 3 eps -- Original -- Drama Romance Slice of Life -- Shikioriori Shikioriori -- The rigorous city life of China, while bustling and unforgiving, contains the everlasting memories of days past. Three stories told in three different cities, Shikioriori follows the loss of youth and the daunting realization of adulthood. -- -- Though reality may seem ever changing, unchangeable are the short-lived moments of one's childhood days. A plentiful bowl of noodles, the beauty of family and the trials of first love endure the inevitable flow of time, as three different characters explore the strength of bonds and the warmth of cherished memories. Within the disorder of the present world, witness these quaint stories recognize the comfort of the past, and attempt to revive the neglected flavors of youth. -- -- Movie - Aug 4, 2018 -- 107,420 7.15
Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul -- -- MAPPA -- 24 eps -- Card game -- Action Adventure Demons Supernatural Magic Fantasy -- Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul -- A decade ago, humans, gods, and demons joined forces to stand against the threat of the colossal dragon, Bahamut. -- -- Now, in the present, humans living in the capital city of Anatae have been enjoying lavish and prosperous lives. Their progress is largely due to the administration of the newly appointed king, Charioce XVII, who has stolen a power from the gods and allowed for the abuse and slavery of the demon race in the capital. As humans continue to immorally exploit demons, a sense of hostility against humans begins to build up within demon communities, threatening a revolt. Meanwhile, an atmosphere of uneasiness is spreading among the gods, as they scramble to regain their lost power. -- -- Amidst it all, Nina Drango, a cheerful young bounty hunter, has arrived at the Royal Capital with hopes of settling down and earning a living. However, her peaceful life in the capital is quickly thrown into chaos when she crosses paths with the ominous Rag Demon who is determined to seek revenge against humans, and Kaisar Lidfard, a noble knight battling an internal moral conflict. -- -- Shingeki no Bahamut: Virgin Soul continues the tale of the social and moral conflict between humans, gods, and demons, and their struggle for survival and dominance. -- -- 194,817 7.46
Steins;Gate 0 -- -- White Fox -- 23 eps -- Visual novel -- Sci-Fi Psychological Drama Thriller -- Steins;Gate 0 Steins;Gate 0 -- The eccentric, self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintarou Okabe has become a shell of his former self. Depressed and traumatized after failing to rescue his friend Makise Kurisu, he has decided to forsake his mad scientist alter ego and live as an ordinary college student. Surrounded by friends who know little of his time travel experiences, Okabe spends his days trying to forget the horrors of his adventures alone. -- -- While working as a receptionist at a college technology forum, Okabe meets the short, spunky Maho Hiyajo, who -- later turns out to be the interpreter at the forum's presentation, conducted by Professor Alexis Leskinen. In front of a stunned crowd, Alexis and Maho unveil Amadeus—a revolutionary AI capable of storing a person's memories and creating a perfect simulation of that person complete with their personality and quirks. Meeting with Maho and Alexis after the presentation, Okabe learns that the two were Kurisu's colleagues in university, and that they have simulated her in Amadeus. Hired by Alexis to research the simulation's behavior, Okabe is given the chance to interact with the shadow of a long-lost dear friend. Dangerously tangled in the past, Okabe must face the harsh reality and carefully maneuver around the disastrous consequences that come with disturbing the natural flow of time. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 622,458 8.51
Steins;Gate Movie: Fuka Ryouiki no Déjà vu -- -- White Fox -- 1 ep -- Visual novel -- Sci-Fi Drama -- Steins;Gate Movie: Fuka Ryouiki no Déjà vu Steins;Gate Movie: Fuka Ryouiki no Déjà vu -- After a year in America, Kurisu Makise returns to Akihabara and reunites with Rintarou Okabe. However, their reunion is cut short when Okabe begins to experience recurring flashes of other timelines as the consequences of his time traveling start to manifest. These side effects eventually culminate in Okabe suddenly vanishing from the world, and only the startled Kurisu has any memory of his existence. -- -- In the midst of despair, Kurisu is faced with a truly arduous choice that will test both her duty as a scientist and her loyalty as a friend: follow Okabe's advice and stay away from traveling through time to avoid the potential consequences it may have on the world lines, or ignore it to rescue the person that she cherishes most. Regardless of her decision, the path she chooses is one that will affect the past, the present, and the future. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Apr 20, 2013 -- 463,060 8.49
Super Robot Taisen OG The Animation -- -- Brain's Base -- 3 eps -- Game -- Mecha Sci-Fi Shounen Space -- Super Robot Taisen OG The Animation Super Robot Taisen OG The Animation -- Dr. Jurgen of DC developed a global defense system to combat potential alien threats. This system has two elements. First is the VTX-001 Vartoul unmanned anti alien PT. Governing these drones is the ODE worldwide network system. However, this system has a noteworthy secret. A living human is needed to control the ODE core. Furthermore, the ODE core needs human organs to support itself. At the present day, the drone have gone on a mass abduction spree. Kyosuke and co has been sent in to take care of the problem. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Bandai Entertainment, Bandai Visual USA, Media Blasters -- OVA - May 27, 2005 -- 3,541 6.66
Terra Formars -- -- LIDENFILMS -- 13 eps -- Manga -- Action Sci-Fi Space Horror Drama Seinen -- Terra Formars Terra Formars -- During the 21st century, humanity attempted to colonize Mars by sending two species which could endure the harsh environment of the planet to terraform it—algae and cockroaches. However, they did not anticipate the species' remarkable ability to adapt. Now in the 26th century, a lethal disease known as the Alien Engine Virus has arrived on Earth, and the cure is suspected to be found only on Mars. The problem is, Mars in the present is overrun by creatures known as "Terraformars," incredibly powerful and intelligent humanoid cockroaches that mutated from those originally sent to the planet. -- -- The Annex I team, consisting of a hundred men and women genetically enhanced with characteristics of powerful organisms from earth, has been sent to Mars on a mission to find the cause of the Alien Engine Virus and to help cure humanity—signalling the start of the crew's fight for survival. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- 190,503 7.03
Trigun: Badlands Rumble -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Drama Sci-Fi Shounen -- Trigun: Badlands Rumble Trigun: Badlands Rumble -- Vash the Stampede is a contradiction. He has a notorious reputation as "The Humanoid Typhoon," laying anything he comes across to waste on the desolate planet of Gunsmoke. However, Vash is in fact very non-confrontational and kind-hearted, living by a code of pacifism. -- -- Twenty years ago, a high-profile bank heist went sour. The ringleader, Gasback Gallon Getaway, swore to get back at his backstabbing crew and the man who stopped him from killing them: Vash the Stampede. In the present day, the traitorous crew has been living the good life as successful entrepreneurs and politicians. Although two decades have passed, Gasback's bitterness has not waned as he aims to take them down one by one, by any means necessary. -- -- Just in time to foil Gasback's plot, Vash has arrived in Macca City. Teaming up with the mysterious Amelia Ann McFly, along with the insurance agents Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe, Vash is ready to rumble. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Apr 2, 2010 -- 114,200 7.97
Trigun: Badlands Rumble -- -- Madhouse -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Drama Sci-Fi Shounen -- Trigun: Badlands Rumble Trigun: Badlands Rumble -- Vash the Stampede is a contradiction. He has a notorious reputation as "The Humanoid Typhoon," laying anything he comes across to waste on the desolate planet of Gunsmoke. However, Vash is in fact very non-confrontational and kind-hearted, living by a code of pacifism. -- -- Twenty years ago, a high-profile bank heist went sour. The ringleader, Gasback Gallon Getaway, swore to get back at his backstabbing crew and the man who stopped him from killing them: Vash the Stampede. In the present day, the traitorous crew has been living the good life as successful entrepreneurs and politicians. Although two decades have passed, Gasback's bitterness has not waned as he aims to take them down one by one, by any means necessary. -- -- Just in time to foil Gasback's plot, Vash has arrived in Macca City. Teaming up with the mysterious Amelia Ann McFly, along with the insurance agents Milly Thompson and Meryl Stryfe, Vash is ready to rumble. -- -- Movie - Apr 2, 2010 -- 114,200 7.97
W: Wish -- -- Picture Magic, Trinet Entertainment -- 13 eps -- Visual novel -- Drama Harem Romance School Slice of Life -- W: Wish W: Wish -- Based on a game by Princess Soft -- -- The main character, Junna has a twin sister Senna. He is an ordinal student of an elite school. However, in the past, a traffic accident deprived him of his parents and his memory. Junna survived the accident, and he has lived only with his sister though he has been looked after by his relatives. -- -- And present... -- The life with Senna in the same high school is so pleasant that he can forget the severe past. Because he has been in the world where there is only Senna, his lives in this town, such as the beginning of a new life, new environments, and the meetings, are so refreshing. -- -- However, he begins to recall the memories he lost in the accident. Though he enjoys happy and pleasant days, he is tossed by the past, the present, and the future. What is the truth hidden in his memory? -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- TV - Oct 3, 2004 -- 13,847 6.18
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_account_of_the_most_important_and_interesting_religious_events,_which_have_transpired_from_the_commencement_of_the_Christian_era_to_the_present_time;_(IA_accountofmostimp00barb).pdf
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A History of Monmouthshire from the Coming of the Normans into Wales down to the Present Time
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