TERMS STARTING WITH
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1. The state or quality of being divine. 2. A deity, such as a god or goddess; the Supreme Being. 3. The nature of a deity or the state of being divine. 4. A being having divine attributes, ranking below God but above humans. divinity"s, divinities.
Acosmism: The doctrine that the external, physical world is non-existent, unreal, a mere appearance (maya) of the Supreme Being, who is the only reality.
Adi-buddha (Sanskrit) Ādi-buddha [from ādi first, original + the verbal root budh to awaken, perceive, know] First or primeval buddha; the supreme being above all other buddhas and bodhisattvas in the later Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, Nepal, Java, and Japan. In theosophical writings, the highest aspect or subentity of the supreme Wondrous Being of our universe, existing in the most exalted dharmakaya state.
Aeon: According to the Gnostics a being regarded as a subordinate heavenly power derived from the Supreme Being by a process of emanation. The totality of aeons formed the spiritual world which was intermediary between the Deity and the material world of sensible phenomena, which was held to be evil. -- J.J.R.
Ahamgraha Upasana: A kind of meditation in which the aspirant identifies himself with Brahman or the Supreme Being. This is the Vedantic form of worship.
allah ::: n. --> The name of the Supreme Being, in use among the Arabs and the Mohammedans generally.
Antaryamin: Inner ruler; the Supreme Being present in every creation which guides all creatures.
. a (para purusha; parapurusha; para purushah) ::: the highest Soul (purus.a), the supreme Being, a "Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not"; same as purus.ottama.
A Platonic deity who orders or fashions the material world out of chaos. 2. (in Gnostic and some other philosophies) The creator of the universe, supernatural but subordinate to the Supreme Being. Demiurges.
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brahmanishtha. ::: remaining steadfast in the Absolute; one who is firmly established in the supreme being, in the direct knowledge of the absolute Reality
brahman ::: [Ved.]: the sacred or inspired word, expression of the heart or soul; heart; the Vedic word or mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of the intuition arising out of the depths of the soul or being; the Soul that emerges out of the subconscient in Man and rises towards the superconscient and also word of creative Power welling upward out of the soul. [Vedanta]: the Reality; the Eternal; the Absolute; the Spirit; the Supreme Being; the One besides whom there is nothing else existent; in relation to the universe [cf. atman] the Supreme is brahman, the one Reality which is not only the spiritual, material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe, but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracosmic Spirit. ::: brahma [nominative] ::: brahmana [instrumental], by the hymn. ::: brahmani [locative], into the brahman. [cf. Brahma]
Brahma-sakti: The power of the Supreme Being.
Caodaism: An esoteric religion and mystery cult founded in Indo-China in the 1920’s, claiming to have received its teaching from the Supreme Being (Cao Dai) through spiritualistic implements. It honors Christ, Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tzu as saviors sent by the same deity. It teaches the existence of the soul, reincarnation and the law of Karma.
Cartesianism: The philosophy of the French thinker, Rene Descartes (Cartesius) 1596-1650. After completing his formal education at the Jesuit College at La Fleche, he spent the years 1612-1621 in travel and military service. The reminder of his life was devoted to study and writing. He died in Sweden, where he had gone in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina. His principal works are: Discours de la methode, (preface to his Geometric, Meteores, Dieptrique) Meditationes de prima philosophia, Principia philosophiae, Passions de l'ame, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Le monde. Descartes is justly regarded as one of the founders of modern epistemology. Dissatisfied with the lack of agreement among philosophers, he decided that philosophy needed a new method, that of mathematics. He began by resolving to doubt everything which could not pass the test of his criterion of truth, viz. the clearness and distinctness of ideas. Anything which could pass this test was to be readmitted as self-evident. From self-evident truths, he deduced other truths which logically follow from them. Three kinds of ideas were distinguished: innate, by which he seems to mean little more than the mental power to think things or thoughts; adventitious, which come to him from without; factitious, produced within his own mind. He found most difficulty with the second type of ideas. The first reality discovered through his method is the thinking self. Though he might doubt nearly all else, Descartes could not reasonably doubt that he, who was thinking, existed as a res cogitans. This is the intuition enunciated in the famous aphorism: I think, therefore I am, Cogito ergo sum. This is not offered by Descartes as a compressed syllogism, but as an immediate intuition of his own thinking mind. Another reality, whose existence was obvious to Descartes, was God, the Supreme Being. Though he offered several proofs of the Divine Existence, he was convinced that he knew this also by an innate idea, and so, clearly and distinctly. But he did not find any clear ideas of an extra-mental, bodily world. He suspected its existence, but logical demonstration was needed to establish this truth. His adventitious ideas carry the vague suggestion that they are caused by bodies in an external world. By arguing that God would be a deceiver, in allowing him to think that bodies exist if they do not, he eventually convinced himself of the reality of bodies, his own and others. There are, then, three kinds of substance according to Descartes: Created spirits, i.e. the finite soul-substance of each man: these are immaterial agencies capable of performing spiritual operations, loosely united with bodies, but not extended since thought is their very essence. Uncreated Spirit, i.e. God, confined neither to space nor time, All-Good and All-Powerful, though his Existence can be known clearly, his Nature cannot be known adequately by men on earth, He is the God of Christianity, Creator, Providence and Final Cause of the universe. Bodies, i.e. created, physical substances existing independently of human thought and having as their chief attribute, extension. Cartesian physics regards bodies as the result of the introduction of "vortices", i.e. whorls of motion, into extension. Divisibility, figurability and mobility, are the notes of extension, which appears to be little more thin what Descartes' Scholastic teachers called geometrical space. God is the First Cause of all motion in the physical universe, which is conceived as a mechanical system operated by its Maker. Even the bodies of animals are automata. Sensation is the critical problem in Cartesian psychology; it is viewed by Descartes as a function of the soul, but he was never able to find a satisfactory explanation of the apparent fact that the soul is moved by the body when sensation occurs. The theory of animal spirits provided Descartes with a sort of bridge between mind and matter, since these spirits are supposed to be very subtle matter, halfway, as it were, between thought and extension in their nature. However, this theory of sensation is the weakest link in the Cartesian explanation of cognition. Intellectual error is accounted for by Descartes in his theory of assent, which makes judgment an act of free will. Where the will over-reaches the intellect, judgment may be false. That the will is absolutely free in man, capable even of choosing what is presented by the intellect as the less desirable of two alternatives, is probably a vestige of Scotism retained from his college course in Scholasticism. Common-sense and moderation are the keynotes of Descartes' famous rules for the regulation of his own conduct during his nine years of methodic doubt, and this ethical attitude continued throughout his life. He believed that man is responsible ultimately to God for the courses of action that he may choose. He admitted that conflicts may occur between human passions and human reason. A virtuous life is made possible by the knowledge of what is right and the consequent control of the lower tendencies of human nature. Six primary passions are described by Descartes wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sorrow. These are passive states of consciousness, partly caused by the body, acting through the animal spirits, and partly caused by the soul. Under rational control, they enable the soul to will what is good for the body. Descartes' terminology suggests that there are psychological faculties, but he insists that these powers are not really distinct from the soul itself, which is man's sole psychic agency. Descartes was a practical Catholic all his life and he tried to develop proofs of the existence of God, an explanation of the Eucharist, of the nature of religious faith, and of the operation of Divine Providence, using his philosophy as the basis for a new theology. This attempted theology has not found favor with Catholic theologians in general.
Cosmic: Relating to or originating from the cosmos.—In Rosicrucian usage, Cosmic is used as a noun as well as an adjective. Used as a noun, it means “the Universe as a harmonious relation of all natural and spiritual laws. As used in a Rosicrucian sense, the Divine, Infinite Intelligence of the Supreme Being permeating everything, the creative forces of God” (Rosicrucian Manual). (Cf. Kosmos, kosmic.)
cretor ::: n. --> One who creates, produces, or constitutes. Specifically, the Supreme Being.
deesis ::: n. --> An invocation of, or address to, the Supreme Being.
deity ::: 1. A god or goddess. 2. Divine character or nature, esp. that of the Supreme Being; divinity. deities. ::: the Deity. God, Supreme Being. **Deity"s.
deity ::: n. --> The collection of attributes which make up the nature of a god; divinity; godhead; as, the deity of the Supreme Being is seen in his works.
A god or goddess; a heathen god.
demiurge ::: n. --> The chief magistrate in some of the Greek states.
God, as the Maker of the world.
According to the Gnostics, an agent or one employed by the Supreme Being to create the material universe and man.
demiurges ::: 1. A Platonic deity who orders or fashions the material world out of chaos. 2. (in Gnostic and some other philosophies) The creator of the universe, supernatural but subordinate to the Supreme Being. ::: Demiurges.
divine ::: adj. **1. Of or pertaining to God or the Supreme Being. 2. Of, relating to, emanating from, or being the expression of a deity. 3. Being in the service or worship of a deity; sacred. 4. Heavenly, celestial. 5. Supremely good or beautiful; magnificent. diviner, divinest, divinely, half-divine. v. 6. To perceive by intuition or insight. divines, divined, divining.**
divine ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Divine is the Supreme Truth because it is the Supreme Being from whom all have come and in whom all are.” *Letters on Yoga
Divine (the) ::: the Supreme Being from which all comes and in which all lives. In its supreme Truth the Divine is absolute and infinite peace, consciousness, existence, power and delight. The Transcendent, the Cosmic (Universal) and the Individual are three powers of the Divine, overarching, underlying and penetrating the whole of manifestation.
Divine ::: “The Divine is the Supreme Truth because it is the Supreme Being from whom all have come and in whom all are.” Letters on Yoga
divinity ::: a. --> The state of being divine; the nature or essence of God; deity; godhead.
The Deity; the Supreme Being; God.
A pretended deity of pagans; a false god.
A celestial being, inferior to the supreme God, but superior to man.
Something divine or superhuman; supernatural power or virtue; something which inspires awe.
Dvaita (Sanskrit) Dvaita Duality; applied to a Vedanta sect, also called Madhvas after their founder, Madhva (born c. 1200). The chief doctrine of this school is duality, standing in opposition to the teachings of Sankaracharya, whose system is known as the Advaita (non-duality). The Dvaita Vedantists assert that there are two principles in the universe: the supreme Being, and the innumerable multitudes of other beings among which are mankind — and that these are distinct one from the other. See also RAMANUJACHARYA.
elohist ::: n. --> The writer, or one of the writers, of the passages of the Old Testament, notably those of Elohim instead of Jehovah, as the name of the Supreme Being; -- distinguished from Jehovist.
father. ::: 1. The Supreme Being and Creator; God. 2. The First Person of the Trinity. Father"s.
god ::: a. & n. --> Good. ::: n. --> A being conceived of as possessing supernatural power, and to be propitiated by sacrifice, worship, etc.; a divinity; a deity; an object of worship; an idol.
The Supreme Being; the eternal and infinite Spirit, the
godhead ::: n. --> Godship; deity; divinity; divine nature or essence; godhood.
The Deity; God; the Supreme Being.
A god or goddess; a divinity.
Hiranyagarbha: Cosmic intelligence; the Supreme Lord of the universe; also called Brahma, cosmic Pran Sutratma, Apara-brahma, Maha-brahma or Karya-brahma; Samashti-sukshma-sarira-abhimani (the sum-total of all the subtle bodies); the highest created being through whom the Supreme Being projects the physical universe; cosmic mind.
homage ::: n. --> A symbolical acknowledgment made by a feudal tenant to, and in the presence of, his lord, on receiving investiture of fee, or coming to it by succession, that he was his man, or vassal; profession of fealty to a sovereign.
Respect or reverential regard; deference; especially, respect paid by external action; obeisance.
Reverence directed to the Supreme Being; reverential worship; devout affection.
impiety ::: n. --> The quality of being impious; want of piety; irreverence toward the Supreme Being; ungodliness; wickedness.
An impious act; an act of wickednes.
impious ::: a. --> Not pious; wanting piety; irreligious; irreverent; ungodly; profane; wanting in reverence for the Supreme Being; as, an impious deed; impious language.
In the field of the philosophy of religion, Platonism becomes obscure. There is little doubt that Plato paid only lip-service to the anthropomorphic polytheism of Athenian religion. Many of the attributes of the Idea of the Good are those of an eternal God. The Republic (Book II) pictures the Supreme Being as perfect, unchangeable and the author of truth. Similar rationalizations are found throughout the Laws. Another current of religious thought is to be found m the Timaeus, Politicus and Sophist. The story of the making of the universe and man by the Demiurgus is mythic and yet it is in many points a logical development of his theory of Ideas. The World-Maker does not create things from nothing, he fashions the world out of a pre-existing chaos of matter by introducing patterns taken from the sphere of Forms. This process of formation is also explained, in the Timaeus (54 ff), in terms of various mathematical figures. In an early period of the universe, God (Chronos) exercised a sort of Providential care over things in this world (Politicus, 269-275), but eventually man was left to his own devices. The tale of Er, at the end of the Republic, describes a judgment of souls after death, their separation into the good and the bad, and the assignment of various rewards and punishments. H. Stephanus et J. Serranus (ed.), Platonis Opera (Paris, 1578), has provided the standard pagination, now used in referring to the text of Plato, it is not a critical edition. J. Burnet (ed.), Platonis Opera, 5 vol. (Oxford, 1899-1907). Platon, Oeuvres completes, texte et trad., Collect. G. Bude (Paris, 1920 ff.). The Dialogues of Plato, transl. B. Jowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1920). W. Pater, Plato and Platonism (London, 1909). A. E. Taylor, Plato, the Man and his Work (N. Y., 1927). P. Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago, 1933). A. Dies, Autour de Platon, 2 vol. (Paris, 1927). U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Platon, 2 vol. (Berlin, 1919). John Burnet, Platonism (Berkeley, 1928). Paul Elmer More, Platonism (Oxford, 1931). Constantm Ritter, Essence of Plato's Philosophy (London, 1933). Leon Robin, Platon (Paris, 1935). Paul Shorey, Platonism, Ancient and Modern (Berkeley, 1938). A. E. Taylor, Platontsm and Its Influence (London, 1924). F. J. E. Woodbridge, The Son of Apollo (Boston, 1929). C. Bigg, The Christian Platomsts of Alexandria (Oxford, 1913). T. Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists (Cambridge, 1918, 2nd ed ). John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Angle-Saxon Philosophy (New York, 1931). F. J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (Boston, 1927). -- V.J.B.
In the Hi-ts’ze (or so-called Appendices to the work) the universe is described as a living organism called T’ai-ch’i (the supreme being, or most ultimate). The processes of birth and rebirth, or the production of life, are due to the manifestations of tao by means of the yang and yin. “To Yang belong the numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9; to Yin belong the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. There are then five celestial and five terrestrial numbers; these rows of five operate upon each other, and each number has one with which it corresponds. The sum of the celestial numbers is twenty-five. It is in accordance with these factors that the processes of the Universe are effected, and the kwei and the shen do their work” (Hi-ts’ze).
invisible ::: a. --> Incapable of being seen; not perceptible by vision; not visible. ::: n. --> An invisible person or thing; specifically, God, the Supreme Being.
A Rosicrucian; -- so called because avoiding declaration
invoke ::: v. t. --> To call on for aid or protection; to invite earnestly or solemnly; to summon; to address in prayer; to solicit or demand by invocation; to implore; as, to invoke the Supreme Being, or to invoke His and blessing.
isvara (ishwara; iswara) ::: lord; the supreme Being (purus.ottama) isvara as the Lord, "the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler" who by his conscious Power (sakti) "manifests himself in Time and governs the universe", ruling his self-creation with "an all-consciousness in which he is aware of the truth of all things and aware of his own all-wisdom working them out according to the truth that is in them"; identified with Kr.s.n.a; the individual soul (purus.a or jiva) as the master of its own nature.
“It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind’s highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.” The Life Divine
Jehovah: (From the Hebrew Yahveh, of doubtful origin and meaning.) Personal name of God or the supreme being in Hebrew theological and philosophical writings, common only since the 14th century; the national god of Israel since Mosaic times. Neither name was originally pronounced as written on account of its holiness, but was replaced by Elohim and Adonai.
Jehovah: (Hebrew Yahveh, of doubtful origin and meaning) Personal name of God or the supreme being in Hebrew theological and philosophical writings, common only since the 14th century; the national god of Israel since Mosaic times. Neither name was originally pronounced as written on account of its holiness, but was replaced by Elohim and Adonai. -- K.F.L.
jehovah ::: n. --> A Scripture name of the Supreme Being, by which he was revealed to the Jews as their covenant God or Sovereign of the theocracy; the "ineffable name" of the Supreme Being, which was not pronounced by the Jews.
jehovist ::: n. --> One who maintains that the vowel points of the word Jehovah, in Hebrew, are the proper vowels of that word; -- opposed to adonist.
The writer of the passages of the Old Testament, especially those of the Pentateuch, in which the Supreme Being is styled Jehovah. See Elohist.
jnana ::: knowledge, wisdom; supreme self-knowledge; the essential aspect [cf. vijnana] of the true unifying knowledge, the direct spiritual awareness of the supreme Being. ::: jnanam [nominative]
lila &
maya ::: (in the Veda) "originally a formative power of knowledge, maya the true magic of the supreme Mage, the divine Magician, but . . . also used for the adverse formative power of a lower knowledge, the deceit, illusion and deluding magic of the Rakshasa"; measuring and limiting consciousness, "a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality" (brahman); the power of phenomenal creation by which "out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight"; illusion, "a bewildering partial consciousness which loses hold of the complete reality, lives in the phenomenon of mobile Nature [prakr.ti] and has no sight of the Spirit [purus.a] of which she is the active Power".
Mukhyasamanyadhikarana: The great Vedantic text "Aham Brahmasmi: I am Brahman" teaches the identity of the individual soul and the Supreme Being. Here the soul designated as "I", the doer and the enjoyer is not one with Brahman, but it is the noumenal Self Who is the basis of that "I" that is identical with Brahman. Thus "I" is to be deprived of its fictitious environments before establishing its identity with Brahman; the main common substratum. To illustrate the matter, let us take an ordinary instance of a rectified error. "That which was thought to be a pillar is a man." Here the proposition does not mean that the pillar is one with the man. But, it simply teaches us that knowledge of the man dispels the notion of the pillar, and residuum of that idea of pillar is the same as man. In o words, the relation of subject and predicate is not based up direct identity (Mukhyasamanyadhikarana) but upon sublation of the falsity of the subject as such (Badhasamanyadhikarana).
. ottama-paraprakr.ti (purushottama-paraprakriti)—the supreme Being one with his supreme Nature; the "biune" duality of purus.a and prakr.ti on the highest plane of existence. puru visva
Our notion of free will is apt to be tainted with the excessive individualism of the human ego and to assume the figure of an independent will acting on its own isolated account, in a complete liberty without any determination other than its own choice and single unrelated movement. This idea ignores the fact that our natural being is a part of cosmic Nature and our spiritual being exists only by the supreme Transcendence. Our total being can rise out of subjection to fact of present Nature only by an identification with a greater Truth and a greater Nature. The will of the individual, even when completely free, could not act in an isolated independence, because the individual being and nature are included in the universal Being and Nature and dependent on the all-overruling Transcendence. There could indeed be in the ascent a dual line. On one line the being could feel and behave as an independent self-existence uniting itself with its own impersonal Reality; it could, so self-conceived, act with a great force, but either this action would be still within an enlarged frame of its past and present self-formation of power of Nature or else it would be the cosmic or supreme Force that acted in it and there would be no personal initiation of action, no sense therefore of individual free will but only of an impersonal cosmic or supreme Will or Energy at its work. On the other line the being would feel itself a spiritual instrument and so act as a power of the Supreme Being, limited in its workings only by the potencies of the Supernature, which are without bounds or any restriction except its own Truth and self-law, and by the Will in her. But in either case there would be, as the condition of a freedom from the control of a mechanical action of Nature-forces, a submission to a greater conscious Power or an acquiescent unity of the individual being with its intention and movement in his own and in the world’s existence.” The Life Divine
para bhava ::: the supreme being (of the Divine), the Highest; the ultimate becoming (of the soul). ::: param bhavam [accusative] ::: paro bhavah [nominative]
PARABRAHMAN. ::: The supreme being; the supracosmic
petition ::: n. --> A prayer; a supplication; an imploration; an entreaty; especially, a request of a solemn or formal kind; a prayer to the Supreme Being, or to a person of superior power, rank, or authority; also, a single clause in such a prayer.
A formal written request addressed to an official person, or to an organized body, having power to grant it; specifically (Law), a supplication to government, in either of its branches, for the granting of a particular grace or right; -- in distinction from a
Philo of Alexandria: (30 B.C.- 50 A.D.) Jewish theologian and Neo-Platonic philosopher. He held that Greek thought borrowed largely from Mosaic teachings and therefore justified his use of Greek philosophy for the purpose of interpreting Scripture in a spiritual sense. For Philo, the renunciation of self and, through the divine Logos in all men, the achievement of immediate contact with the Supreme Being, is the highest blessedness for man. -- M.F Philosopheme: (Gr. philosophema) An apodictic syllogism (Aristotle). -- G.R.M.
piety ::: n. --> Veneration or reverence of the Supreme Being, and love of his character; loving obedience to the will of God, and earnest devotion to his service.
Duty; dutifulness; filial reverence and devotion; affectionate reverence and service shown toward parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc.
pray ::: n. & v. --> See Pry. ::: v. i. --> To make request with earnestness or zeal, as for something desired; to make entreaty or supplication; to offer prayer to a deity or divine being as a religious act; specifically, to address the Supreme Being with adoration, confession, supplication, and
Purusha: The Supreme Being; a Being that lies in the city (of the heart of all beings). The term is applied to the Lord. The description applies to the Self which abides in the heart of all things. To distinguish Bhagavan or the Lord from the Jivatma, He is known as Parama (Highest) Purusha or the Purushottama (the best of the Purushas).
purusottama (Purushottama) ::: the Supreme divine Person; the Supreme Being who is superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable; the Divine Being
quote :::The Supreme Being has been called by various names in different languages, but the mystics have known him as Hu, the natural name, not man-made, the only name of the Nameless, which all nature constantly proclaims.
Shaivism (Shivaism, Sivaism): One of the three great divisions of modern Hinduism (the other two being Vishnuism and Shaktism); the Shaivas identify Shiva—rather than Brahma and Vishnu —with the Supreme Being, and are exclusively devoted to his worship, regarding him as the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the universe.
&
. s.n.a-Narayan.a (Krishna-Narayana; Krishna Narayana) ::: Kr.s.n.a, the supreme Being (para purus.a), seen revealing himself as Narayan.a,"the God in man who is also the Lord in the universe"; a bhava of brahmadarsana in which Kr.s.n.a is perceived as "the Purushottama, the supreme Divinity who becomes manifest within us as Narayana,Lord of all our being and action seated secret in our hearts for ever", regarded as superior to a vision of the universal Narayan.a not accompanied by a sense of the transcendental personality of Kr.s.n.a.
Sri Aurobindo: "It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind"s highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.” The Life Divine
"The Spirit is the supreme Being in his infinite consciousness and the supreme Nature is the infinity of power or will of being of the Spirit, . . .” *Essays on the Gita
“The Spirit is the supreme Being in his infinite consciousness and the supreme Nature is the infinity of power or will of being of the Spirit, …” Essays on the Gita
“This is the Logos (the first), or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha (also called Dorjechang). As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest, but sends into the world of manifestation his heart — the ‘diamond heart,’ Vajrasattva (Dorjesempa)” (SD 1:571). Adi-buddha is the individualized monadic focus of adi-buddhi, primordial cosmic wisdom or intelligence, synonymous with mahabuddhi or mahat (universal mind). Otherwise expressed, adi-buddha is the supreme being heading the hierarchy of compassion and our solar universe; the fountain of light running through all subordinate hierarchies and thus the supreme lord and initiator of the wisdom side of our universe.
Universal mind: The consciousness of the Supreme Being, which pervades and permeates the entire universe. (See also: World Soul.)
uttama ::: highest; the supreme Being (purus.ottama), "the supreme Brahman, the supreme Self, who possesses both the immutable unity and the mobile multiplicity", the Lord (isvara) who "by a large .... mobility and action of His nature, His energy, His will and power . . . manifests Himself in the world and by a greater stillness and immobility of His being . . . is aloof from it". uttama uttamam
Viracocha (Peruvian) Foam of the sea; the supreme being or cosmic hierarch of the ancient Peruvians. It brings to mind Venus and other divinities mythologically alleged to have been born of the sea foam or of the waters of cosmic space.
Vishnuism: One of the three great divisions in modern Hinduism (the other two are Shaivism and Shaktism); its followers identify Vishnu—rather than Brahma and Shiva—with the Supreme Being, and are exclusively devoted to his worship, regarding him as the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the universe.
Vishnuism: (Visnuism) One of the major philosophico-religious groups into which Hinduism has articulated itself. It glorifies Vishnu as the supreme being who creates and maintains the world periodically by means of his bhuti and kriya saktis (q.v.) or powers of becoming and producing, corresponding to the causae materialis et efficiens. The place of man's soul in this development is explained variously depending on the relation it maintains to the world-ground conceived in Vishnuite fashion. -- K.F.L.
will, free ::: Sri Aurobindo: Our notion of free will is apt to be tainted with the excessive individualism of the human ego and to assume the figure of an independent will acting on its own isolated account, in a complete liberty without any determination other than its own choice and single unrelated movement. This idea ignores the fact that our natural being is a part of cosmic Nature and our spiritual being exists only by the supreme Transcendence. Our total being can rise out of subjection to fact of present Nature only by an identification with a greater Truth and a greater Nature. The will of the individual, even when completely free, could not act in an isolated independence, because the individual being and nature are included in the universal Being and Nature and dependent on the all-overruling Transcendence. There could indeed be in the ascent a dual line. On one line the being could feel and behave as an independent self-existence uniting itself with its own impersonal Reality; it could, so self-conceived, act with a great force, but either this action would be still within an enlarged frame of its past and present self-formation of power of Nature or else it would be the cosmic or supreme Force that acted in it and there would be no personal initiation of action, no sense therefore of individual free will but only of an impersonal cosmic or supreme Will or Energy at its work. On the other line the being would feel itself a spiritual instrument and so act as a power of the Supreme Being, limited in its workings only by the potencies of the Supernature, which are without bounds or any restriction except its own Truth and self-law, and by the Will in her. But in either case there would be, as the condition of a freedom from the control of a mechanical action of Nature-forces, a submission to a greater conscious Power or an acquiescent unity of the individual being with its intention and movement in his own and in the world"s existence.” *The Life Divine
worship ::: a. --> Excellence of character; dignity; worth; worthiness.
Honor; respect; civil deference.
Hence, a title of honor, used in addresses to certain magistrates and others of rank or station.
The act of paying divine honors to the Supreme Being; religious reverence and homage; adoration, or acts of reverence, paid to God, or a being viewed as God.
Obsequious or submissive respect; extravagant admiration;
Yoga: (lit.) Union; abstract meditation or union with the Supreme Being; the name of the philosophy by the sage Patanjali, teaching the process of union of the individual with the Universal Soul: union with God; any course that makes for such union; unruffled state of mind under all conditions. Yoga is mainly of four types: Karma, Bhakti, Raja and Jnana.
KEYS (10k)
4 Sri Ramakrishna
2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 S T Coleridge
1 Sri Aurobindo?
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
4 Thomas Jefferson
4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
4 Ralph Waldo Emerson
3 Mike Huckabee
3 Immanuel Kant
2 Gustave Flaubert
2 George Washington
2 Dwight D Eisenhower
2 David Hume
2 Avicenna
2 Anne Sexton
1:All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
2:In the Bhagavata it is said that the Incarnations of Vishnu or the Supreme Being are innumerable. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
3:In the Bhagavata, it is said that the Incarnations of Vishnu or the Supreme Being are innumerable. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
4:You are the supreme being, and yet thinking yourself to be separate from It, you strive to be united with It. What is stranger than this? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
5:When the supreme being is inactive, he is styled as God the absolute. When creating, he is styled as Sakti or the personal God. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
6:To say God is devoid of love and joy is an absurdity, which proves one has never realized the Supreme Being, the fountain of eternal love. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
7:The Self alone exists; and the Self alone is real. Verily the Self alone is the world, the I-I and God. All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
8:Then will the other great Bible of God, the Book of Nature, become transparent to us, when we regard the forms of matter as words, as symbols, valuable only as being the expression, an unrolled but yet a glorious fragment, of the wisdom of the Supreme Being. ~ S T Coleridge, #KEYS
9:Brahman: the Reality; the Eternal; the Absolute; the Spirit; the Supreme Being; the One besides whom there is nothing else existent; in relation to the universe [cf. atman] the Supreme is brahman, the one Reality which is not only the spiritual, material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe, but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracosmic Spirit. God.
~ Sri Aurobindo?,#KEYS
10:Talk 15.
A question was asked about the Upanishadic passage, "The Supreme Spirit is subtler than the subtlest and larger than the largest."
M.: Even the structure of the atom has been found by the mind. Therefore the mind is subtler than the atom. That which is behind the mind, namely the individual soul, is subtler than the mind.
Further, the Tamil saint Manickavachagar has said of the specks dancing in a beam of sunlight, that if each represents a universe, the whole sunlight will represent the Supreme Being. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramanasramam,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:I am the supreme being, conscious through ‘Tim’ ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 2:of the Supreme Being than I have, nor thinks His aid more necessary." ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 3:Serve everyone always with the feeling that one is serving the Supreme Being. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 4:To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 5:Let us therefore rely on the goodness of the cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble actions. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 6:The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove 7:Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God's help, it will continue to be. ~ dwight-eisenhower, @wisdomtrove 8:If the goal is to realize the Supreme Being, you should become egoless. That requires self-effort. The sadhak should work hard. He should pray sincerely for the removal of the negative tendencies. This prayer is not to achieve anything or to fulfill any desires. It is to go beyond all achievements. It is to transcend all desires. ~ mata-amritanandamayi, @wisdomtrove 9:No Man has a more perfect reliance on the all-wise and powerful dispensations of the Supreme Being than I have, nor thinks his aid more necessary... The man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the American Revolution without feeling the warmest gratitude towards the great Author of the Universe whose divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf... .In war He directed the sword, and in peace, He has ruled in our councils. ~ george-washington, @wisdomtrove 10:We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space. ~ immanuel-kant, @wisdomtrove 11:When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive neither creating nor preserving nor destroying-, I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active-creating, preserving, destroying-, I call Him Shakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and the Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion. Iit is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove 12:Just as fire burns away all dross and rubbish, so the three fold suffering purges man's heart from all impurity and results in a growing single mindedness in his search after Truth. When he becomes deeply conscious of his weakness and tormented by the thoughts of his undesirable impulses and distressing characteristics, when afflictions like poverty, bereavement or humiliation make him feel his life is futile, then and then only does he develop real faith and religious fervor, and becomes anxious to surrender himself at the feet of the Supreme Being. Suffering should therefore be welcomed. Never does the soft moonlight appear more soothing than after the scorching heat of a summer day. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
2:All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
3:The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
4:Recognition of the Supreme Being was the first - the most basic - expression of Americanism. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
5:The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the supreme being. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
6:Far from it be the notion that the Supreme Being is corporeal, having a material form. ~ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), #NFDB
7:A human being is a creature, a being whose very existence from moment to moment depends on the power of the Supreme Being. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
8:As rivers flow into the sea and so lose name and form, attains the Supreme Being, the Self-Luminous, the Infinite. ~ Gideon Lewis Kraus, #NFDB
9:It's more like I was daydreaming when the Supreme Being told me what I should do with my life, and it's too late to ask what it was. ~ Tim Tharp, #NFDB
10:If you're claiming to be the Supreme Being (even if you're not doing a very good job at it), I wish you were a bit more mentally mature. ~ Carlo Zen, #NFDB
11:The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being ~ Igor Stravinsky, #NFDB
12:People are my most important asset. Faith in the supreme being, trust, credibility and performance are the things that have brought me to the top. ~ Don King, #NFDB
13:To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
14:You are the Supreme Being, and yet thinking yourself to be separate from it, you strive to become united with it. What is stranger than this? ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
15:We always imagine that the Supreme Being is very far away -many, many millions of light years away- yet It is very near, in our throat itself. ~ Krishnananda Saraswati, #NFDB
16:The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset nature on our behalf. ~ Baron de Montesquieu, #NFDB
17:The French people recognizes the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The first day of every month is to be dedicated to the eternal. ~ Louis Antoine de Saint Just, #NFDB
18:I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
19:Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man. The pig is taught by sermons and epistles / To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles. ~ Ambrose Bierce, #NFDB
20:Let us therefore rely on the goodness of the cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble actions. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
21:The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being. ~ Lyndon B Johnson, #NFDB
22:It was ordained.
Just as the fates deal out
the plague with a tarot card.
Just as the Supreme Being drills
holes in our skulls to let
the Boston Symphony through. ~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
23:Religion is another name for the realization of Truth. It consists in becoming and being one with the Supreme Being. Doctrines and dogmas are only details of a secondary nature. ~ Narayanananda Swami, #NFDB
24:In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism. ~ Paula Gunn Allen, #NFDB
25:The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
26:The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. ~ Thomas Jefferson, #NFDB
27:It's time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and we change the policy to be pro-life and protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they're parts to a Buick. ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
28:True religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. Its noblest influence consists in making us more and more partakers of the Divinity. ~ William Ellery Channing, “Likeness to God” (1828), #NFDB
29:Those who call me God, will fall into the deep pit of hell. Regard me as one of his slaves and have no doubt whatever about it. I am a servant of the Supreme Being; and have come to behold the wonderful drama of life. ~ Guru Gobind Singh, #NFDB
30:We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance. ~ Joseph de Maistre, #NFDB
31:An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation. ~ Andre Malraux, #NFDB
32:The essence of things is not altered by their external relations, and that which, abstracting from these, alone constitutes the absolute worth of man is also that by which he must be judged, whoever the judge may be, and even by the Supreme Being. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
33:As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves--a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
34:But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;-and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber which thou sittest. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
35:In our laws...by the oath which they prescribe, we appeal to the Supreme Being so to deal with us hereafter as we observe the obligation of our oaths. The Pagan world...are without the mighty influence of this principle which is proclaimed in the Christian system. ~ Rufus King, #NFDB
36:No one questioned the Machine’s powers. Religion had been re-established with the Machine as the Supreme Being. Everyone yielded to ‘some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. ~ John N Gray, #NFDB
37:I am constrained to express my adoration of the Supreme Being, the Author of my existence, in full belief of His providential goodness and His forgiving mercy revealed to the world through Jesus Christ, through Whom I hope for never-ending happiness in a future state. ~ Robert Treat Paine, #NFDB
38:From the purest principles of reason, as well as from the fountain of revealed truth, he demonstrates that the chief and ultimate end of the Supreme Being, in the works of creation and providence, was the manifestation of his own glory in the highest happiness of his creatures. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
39:I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that - the supreme of the courts. It is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God. When it comes to prayer, when it comes to life, and when it comes to the sanctity of marriage, the court cannot change what God has created. ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
40:Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God's help, it will continue to be. ~ Dwight D Eisenhower, #NFDB
41:Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two... ~ Richard Russo, #NFDB
42:Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. 'The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two. ~ Sherwood Anderson, #NFDB
43:In the farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, ‘The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
44:Beloved ones of God, you may belong to any race, cast, creed, or nation, still you are all impartially beloved by God. You may be a believer or an unbeliever in the supreme Being, but He cares not. His mercy and grace flow through all His powers, without distinction of friend or foe. ~ Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, #NFDB
45:God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints. ~ Avicenna, #NFDB
46:Thus she says: “I am seated on the seat which is between the individual will of beings and the universal will of the supreme Being. I am the guardian of equilibrium between the individual and the universal. I have the power to re-establish it each time that it is violated. I am order, health, harmony, justice. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
47:The notion that the Supreme Court comes up with the ruling and that automatically subjects the two other branches to following it defies everything there is about the three equal branches of government. The Supreme Court is not the supreme branch. And for God's sake, it isn't the Supreme Being. It is the Supreme Court. ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
48:If the goal is to realize the Supreme Being, you should become egoless. That requires self-effort. The sadhak should work hard. He should pray sincerely for the removal of the negative tendencies. This prayer is not to achieve anything or to fulfill any desires. It is to go beyond all achievements. It is to transcend all desires. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi, #NFDB
49:No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity … Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius. ~ Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Smith (1822), #NFDB
50:God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints. ~ Avicenna, as quoted in 366 Readings From Islam (2000), edited by Robert Van der Weyer, #NFDB
51:My passion today is not only justice for the Black man and woman of America, but for all those who cry out to the Supreme Being for justice in their lives - and that's Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and White, for the whole of humanity has been deprived of that which The Creator has ordered for us, and that is freedom, justice, equality, and submission to the Will of Allah. ~ Louis Farrakhan, #NFDB
52:Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety. ~ Alexander Hamilton, #NFDB
53:We have been saying, Lucy, that 'tis the strangest thing in the world people should quarrel about religion, since we undoubtedly all mean the same thing; all good minds in every religion aim at pleasing the Supreme Being; the means we take differ according to where we are born, and the prejudices we imbibe from education; a consideration which ought to inspire us with kindness and indulgence to each other. ~ Frances Brooke, #NFDB
54:If men of wisdom and knowledge, of moderation and temperance, of patience, fortitude and perseverance, of sobriety and true republican simplicity of manners, of zeal for the honour of the Supreme Being and the welfare of the commonwealth; if men possessed of these other excellent qualities are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation. ~ Samuel Adams, #NFDB
55:Brahman: the Reality; the Eternal; the Absolute; the Spirit; the Supreme Being; the One besides whom there is nothing else existent; in relation to the universe [cf. atman] the Supreme is brahman, the one Reality which is not only the spiritual, material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe, but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracosmic Spirit. God.
~ Sri Aurobindo?,#NFDB
56:No Man has a more perfect reliance on the all-wise and powerful dispensations of the Supreme Being than I have, nor thinks his aid more necessary...The man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the American Revolution without feeling the warmest gratitude towards the great Author of the Universe whose divine interposition was so frequently manifested in our behalf....In war He directed the sword, and in peace, He has ruled in our councils. ~ George Washington, #NFDB
57:It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping GOD in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship. ~ John Adams, #NFDB
58:We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
59:IRENE observes, ‘That the Supreme Being will accept of virtue, whatever outward circumstances it may be accompanied with, and may be delighted with varieties of worship: but is answered, that variety cannot affect that Being, who, infinitely happy in his own perfections, wants no external gratifications; nor can infinite truth be delighted with falsehood; that though he may guide or pity those he leaves in darkness, he abandons those who shut their eyes against the beams of day. ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
60:Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;--and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
61:And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding...
{Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823} ~ Thomas Jefferson,#NFDB
62:The song that I will sing is an old song, so old that none knows who made it. It has been handed down through generations and was taught to me when I was but a little lad. It is now my own song. It belongs to me. This is a holy song (medicine-song), and great is its power. The song tells how, as I sing, I go through the air to a holy place where Yusun (The Supreme Being) will give me power to do wonderful things. I am surrounded by little clouds, and as I go through the air I change, becoming spirit only. ~ Geronimo, #NFDB
63:In writing, they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being by any special name. He is symbolized by what may be termed the heiroglyphic of a pyramid, /\. In prayer they address Him by a name which they deem too sacred to confide to a stranger, and I know it not. In conversation they generally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good. The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said so much; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton, #NFDB
64:As man’s distinction consists in a property which no other creature on earth possesses, viz., intellectual perception, in the exercise of which he does not employ his senses, nor move his hand or his foot, this perception has been compared—though only apparently, not in truth—to the Divine perception, which requires no corporeal organ. On this account, i.e., on account of the Divine intellect with which man has been endowed, he is said to have been made in the form and likeness of the Almighty, but far from it be the notion that the Supreme Being is corporeal, having a material form. ~ Maim nides, #NFDB
65:Talk 15.
A question was asked about the Upanishadic passage, "The Supreme Spirit is subtler than the subtlest and larger than the largest."
M.: Even the structure of the atom has been found by the mind. Therefore the mind is subtler than the atom. That which is behind the mind, namely the individual soul, is subtler than the mind.
Further, the Tamil saint Manickavachagar has said of the specks dancing in a beam of sunlight, that if each represents a universe, the whole sunlight will represent the Supreme Being. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramanasramam,#NFDB
66:The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter, but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this, the most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (April 11, 1823) ~ Thomas Jefferson,#NFDB
67:In the aftermath of Jesus and his cross, we should never again define God’s sovereignty or supremacy by analogy to the kings of this world who dominate, oppress, subordinate, exploit, scapegoat and marginalize.3 Instead, we have migrated to an entirely new universe, or, as Paul says, “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) in which old ideas of supremacy are subverted. If this is true, to follow Jesus is to change one’s understanding of God. To accept Jesus and to accept the God Jesus loved is to become an atheist in relation to the Supreme Being of violent and dominating power. We are not demoting God to a lower, weaker level; we are rising to a higher and deeper understanding of God as pure light, with no shadow of violence, conquest, exclusion, hostility, or hate at all. ~ Brian D McLaren, #NFDB
68:and it was a testimony to me, how the mere notions of nature, though they will guide reasonable creatures to the knowledge of a God, and of a worship or homage due to the supreme being of God, as the consequence of our nature, yet nothing but divine revelation can form the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of redemption purchased for us; of a Mediator of the new covenant, and of an Intercessor at the footstool of God’s throne; I say, nothing but a revelation from Heaven can form these in the soul; and that, therefore, the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I mean the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, promised for the guide and sanctifier of His people, are the absolutely necessary instructors of the souls of men in the saving knowledge of God and the means of salvation. ~ Daniel Defoe, #NFDB
69:The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath.
The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience. ~ George Lakoff,#NFDB
70:Captain Orlando Killion
Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,
You dauntless fledglings
Who pass by my headstone,
Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army
And my faith in God!
They are not denials of each other.
Go by reverently, and read with sober care
How a great people, riding with defiant shouts
The centaur of Revolution,
Spurred and whipped to frenzy,
Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea
Over the precipice they were nearing,
And fell from his back in precipitate awe
To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.
Moved by the same sense of vast reality
Of life and death, and burdened as they were
With the fate of a race,
How was I, a little blasphemer,
Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood,
To remain a blasphemer,
And a captain in the army?
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
71:I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
72:People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?
And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.
So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
73:I have a religion, my own religion, and I even have more religion than all of them, with their mummery and hocus-pocus. I adore God! I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever He is, it doesn't matter to me, who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and as fathers; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates and empty my pocket to fatten a lot of humbugs who are better fed than we are! For one can honor Him just as well in the woods, in a field, or even by contemplating the vault of the heavens, as the ancients did. My personal God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, Voltaire, and Béranger. I'm for the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar and the immoral principles of '89! So I don't admit any old codger of a God who walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a groan and comes to life at the end of three days: absurdities in themselves and, furthermore, completely opposed to all physical laws; which proves, by the way, that the priests have always beens sunk in a mire of ignorance in which they force the populace to wallow with them. ~ Gustave Flaubert, #NFDB
74:English version by Keith Dowman The Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness! I have vanished into fields of lotus-light, the plenum of dynamic space, To be born in the inner sanctum of an immaculate lotus; Do not despair, have faith! When you have withdrawn attachment to this rocky defile, This barbaric Tibet, full of war and strife, Abandon unnecessary activity and rely on solitude. Practice energy control, purify your psychic nerves and seed-essence, And cultivate mahamudra and Dsokchen. The Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness! Attaining humility, through Guru Pema Jungne's compassion I followed him, And now I have finally gone into his presence; Do not despair, but pray! When you see your karmic body as vulnerable as a bubble, Realising the truth of impermanence, and that in death you are helpless, Disabuse yourself of fantasies of eternity, Make your life a practice of sadhana, And cultivate the experience that takes you to the place where Ati ends. [1484.jpg] -- from The Shambhala Anthology of Women's Spiritual Poetry, Edited by Aliki Barnstone
~ Yeshe Tsogyal, The Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness!
,#NFDB
75:God GOD, noun [Saxon god; German gott; Dutch god; Swedish and Danish gud; Gothic goth or guth; Pers. goda or choda; Hindoo, khoda, codam. As this word and good are written exactly alike in Saxon, it has been inferred that God was named from his goodness. But the corresponding words in most of the other languages, are not the same, and I believe no instance can be found of a name given to the Supreme Being from the attribute of goodness. It is probably an idea too remote from the rude conceptions of men in early ages. Except the word Jehovah, I have found the name of the Supreme Being to be usually taken from his supremacy or power, and to be equivalent to lord or ruler, from some root signifying to press or exert force. Now in the present case, we have evidence that this is the sense of this word, for in Persic goda is rendered dominus, possessor, princeps, as is a derivative of the same word. See Cast. Lex. Col. 231.] 1. The Supreme Being; Jehovah; the eternal and infinite spirit, the creator, and the sovereign of the universe. God is a spirit; and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4. 2. A false god; a heathen deity; an idol. Fear not the gods of the Amorites. Judges 6. 3. A prince; a ruler; a magistrate or judge; an angel. Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people. Exodus 22. Psalm 97. [Gods here is a bad translation.] 4. Any person or thing exalted too much in estimation, or deified and honored as the chief good. Whose god is their belly. Philippians 3. ~ Noah Webster, #NFDB
76:All the sentiments of the human mind, gratitude, resentment, love, friendship, approbation, blame, pity, emulation, envy, have a plain reference to the state and situation of man, and are calculated for preserving the existence and promoting the activity of such a being in such circumstances. It seems, therefore, unreasonable to transfer such sentiments to a supreme existence or to suppose him actuated by them; and the phenomena, besides, of the universe will not support us in such a theory. All our ideas derived from the senses are confessedly false and illusive, and cannot therefore be supposed to have place in a Supreme Intelligence. And as the ideas of internal sentiment, added to those of the external senses, compose the whole furniture of human understanding, we may conclude that none of the materials of thought are in any respect similar in the human and in the Divine Intelligence. Now, as to the manner of thinking, how can we make any comparison between them or suppose them anywise resembling? Our thought is fluctuating, uncertain, fleeting, successive, and compounded; and were we to remove these circumstances, we absolutely annihilate its essence, and it would in such a case be an abuse of terms to apply to it the name of thought or reason. At least, if it appear more pious and respectful (as it really is) still to retain these terms when we mention the Supreme Being, we ought to acknowledge that their meaning, in that case, is totally incomprehensible; and that the infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas which in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the Divine Attributes. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
77:The year 1789 does not yet affirm the divinity of man, but the divinity of the people, to the degree in
which the will of the people coincides with the will of nature and of reason. If the general will is freely
expressed, it can only be the universal expression of reason. If the people are free, they are infallible.
Once the King is dead, and
the chains of the old despotism thrown off, the people are going to express what, at all times and in all
places, is, has been, and will be the truth. They are the oracle that must be consulted to know what the
eternal order of the world demands. Vox populi, vox naturae. Eternal principles govern our conduct:
Truth, Justice, finally Reason. There we have the new God. The Supreme Being, whom cohorts of young
girls come to adore at the Feast of Reason, is only the ancient god disembodied, peremptorily deprived of
any connection with the earth, and launched like a balloon into a heaven empty of all transcendent
principles. Deprived of all his representatives, of any intercessor, the god of the lawyers and philosophers
only has the value of a demonstration. He is not very strong, in fact, and we can see why Rousseau, who
preached tolerance, thought that atheists should be condemned to death. To ensure the adoration of a
theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well. But that will only
come later. In 1793 the new faith is still intact, and it will suffice, to take Saint-Just's word, to govern
according to the dictates of reason. The art of ruling, according to him, has produced only monsters
because, before his time, no one wished to govern according to nature. The period of monsters has come
to an end with the termination of the period of violence. "The human heart advances from nature to
violence, from violence to morality." Morality is, therefore, only nature finally restored after centuries of
alienation. Man only has to be given law "in accord with nature and with his heart," and he will cease to
be unhappy and corrupt. Universal suffrage, the foundation of the new laws, must inevitably lead to a
universal morality. "Our aim is to create an order of things which establishes a universal tendency toward
good. ~ Albert Camus,#NFDB
78:The Frog Prince
Frau Doktor,
Mama Brundig,
take out your contacts,
remove your wig.
I write for you.
I entertain.
But frogs come out
of the sky like rain.
Frogs arrive
With an ugly fury.
You are my judge.
You are my jury.
My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I’ll take a knife
and chop up frog.
Frog
Frog
Frog
Frog
Frog
has not nerves.
is as old as a cockroach.
is my father’s genitals.
is a malformed doorknob.
is a soft bag of green.
The moon will not have him.
The sun wants to shut off
like a light bulb.
At the sight of him
the stone washes itself in a tub.
The crow thinks he’s an apple
and drops a worm in.
At the feel of frog
the touch-me-nots explode
like electric slugs.
Slime will have him.
Slime has made him a house.
Mr. Poison
263
is at my bed.
He wants my sausage.
He wants my bread.
Mama Brundig,
he wants my beer.
He wants my Christ
for a souvenir.
Frog has boil disease
and a bellyful of parasites.
He says: Kiss me. Kiss me.
And the ground soils itself.
Why
should a certain
quite adorable princess
be walking in her garden
at such a time
and toss her golden ball
up like a bubble
and drop it into the well?
It was ordained.
Just as the fates deal out
the plague with a tarot card.
Just as the Supreme Being drills
holes in our skulls to let
the Boston Symphony through.
But I digress.
A loss has taken place.
The ball has sunk like a cast-iron pot
into the bottom of the well.
Lost, she said,
my moon, my butter calf,
my yellow moth, my Hindu hare.
Obviously it was more than a ball.
Balls such as these are not
for sale in Au Bon Marché.
I took the moon, she said,
between my teeth
264
and now it is gone
and I am lost forever.
A thief had robbed by day.
Suddenly the well grew
thick and boiling
and a frog appeared.
His eyes bulged like two peas
and his body was trussed into place.
Do not be afraid, Princess,
he said, I am not a vagabond,
a cattle farmer, a shepherd,
a doorkeeper, a postman
or a laborer.
I come to you as a tradesman.
I have something to sell.
Your ball, he said,
for just three things.
Let me eat from your plate.
Let me drink from your cup.
Let me sleep in your bed.
She thought, Old Waddler,
those three you will never do,
but she made the promises
with hopes for her ball once more.
He brought it up in his mouth
like a tricky old dog
and she ran back to the castle
leaving the frog quite alone.
That evening at dinner time
a knock was heard on the castle door
and a voice demanded:
King’s youngest daughter,
let me in. You promised;
now open to me.
I have left the skunk cabbage
and the eels to live with you.
The kind then heard her promise
and forced her to comply.
The frog first sat on her lap.
265
He was as awful as an undertaker.
Next he was at her plate
looking over her bacon
and calves’ liver.
We will eat in tandem,
he said gleefully.
Her fork trembled
as if a small machine
had entered her.
He sat upon the liver
and partook like a gourmet.
The princess choked
as if she were eating a puppy.
From her cup he drank.
It wasn’t exactly hygienic.
From her cup she drank
as if it were Socrates’ hemlock.
Next came the bed.
The silky royal bed.
Ah! The penultimate hour!
There was the pillow
with the princess breathing
and there was the sinuous frog
riding up and down beside her.
I have been lost in a river
of shut doors, he said,
and I have made my way over
the wet stones to live with you.
She woke up aghast.
I suffer for birds and fireflies
but not frogs, she said,
and threw him across the room.
Kaboom!
Like a genie coming out of a samovar,
a handsome prince arose in the
corner of her bedroom.
He had kind eyes and hands
and was a friend of sorrow.
Thus they were married.
After all he had compromised her.
266
He hired a night watchman
so that no one could enter the chamber
and he had the well
boarded over so that
never again would she lose her ball,
that moon, that Krishna hair,
that blind poppy, that innocent globe,
that madonna womb.
~ Anne Sexton,#NFDB
17 Integral Yoga
6 Hinduism
3 Poetry
2 Yoga
2 Occultism
1 Theosophy
1 Philosophy
1 Kabbalah
1 Christianity
1 Baha i Faith
34 Sri Aurobindo
6 Vyasa
6 Nolini Kanta Gupta
4 The Mother
4 Sri Ramana Maharshi
3 Satprem
2 William Wordsworth
2 Sri Ramakrishna
10 The Synthesis Of Yoga
7 The Life Divine
7 Talks
6 Vishnu Purana
5 Essays On The Gita
2 Wordsworth - Poems
2 The Secret Doctrine
2 Letters On Yoga II
2 Letters On Yoga I
2 Isha Upanishad
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
2 Agenda Vol 11
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive — neither creating nor preserving nor destroying —, I call Him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active — creating, preserving, and destroying —, I call Him Sakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and the Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion. It is impossible to conceive of the one without the other. The Divine Mother and Brahman are one."
After the departure of Totapuri, Sri Ramakrishna remained for six months in a state of absolute identity with Brahman. "For six months at a stretch", he said, "I remained in that state from which ordinary men can never return; generally the body falls off, after three weeks, like a sere leaf. I was not conscious of day and night. Flies would enter my mouth and nostrils just as they do a dead body's, but I did not feel them. My hair became matted with dust."
0 1963-10-05, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It wasnt in the vital the Supreme Beings of the vital?
No, no!
0 1970-01-03, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
All that is certainly the consciousness of what Sri Aurobindo called the supramental:1 the being to come after man. How will he be? I havent yet seen I havent yet seen that. I did see, I did have perceptions of the superman, the intermediary being, but you clearly feel its only an intermediary being. What will that being be like who will come after the superman? I dont know. Because we are still much too human; when we visualize the Supreme Consciousness in a form, the Supreme Being and so on the Supremewe tend to give it a form similar to the human one, but thats our old habit. I saw that future being (I saw it many years ago): it was clearly a far more harmonious and expressive form than the human one, but there was a likeness, it was still a human form, that is to say, with a head and arms and legs and Will it be that? I dont know. There will necessarily be that as an intermediarynecessarily. There were all those kinds of apes which acted as intermediaries between the animal and man. But lightness, invulnerability, moving about at will, luminosity at willall that goes without saying, its part of supramental qualities, but Oh, yes, also clothing at will: its not something foreign added on, its the substance that takes on certain forms. All that I had seen, and I told Sri Aurobindo about it, and Sri Aurobindo himself gave me certain demonstrations (I see him sometimes and he shows me). He simply said what the intermediary step will be. But all descriptions are worthless. And when I see him at night (sometimes I spend hours with him), its so natural and spontaneous that I am not even observing, This is like this, that is like thatno. In the morning, with a concentration, the impression remains very strong, but as for the details as we here understand them, you cant say.
Similarly, that sort of thing (Sri Aurobindo too calls it perception), that perception which replaces vision and all the rest is very strong at night. Its hard to say. You have an impression of it when you wake up, but not the capacity; the full capacity is not there.
0 1970-05-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
What will that being be like who will come after the superman? I dont know. Because we are still much too human; when we visualize the Supreme Consciousness in a form, the Supreme Being and so on the Supremewe tend to give it a form similar to the human one, but thats our old habit. I saw that being
So here, are you referring to the supramental being, or to the being intermediary between man and the supramental? You say:
02.02 - Rishi Dirghatama, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
About the Word, the mystery which Dirghatama unveils is an extraordinary revelationso curious, so illuminating. In later times many lines of spiritual discipline have adopted his scheme and spread it far and wide. Dirghatama himself was an uncommon wizard of words. The truths he saw and clothed in mantras have attained, as I have already said, general celebrity. He says: "The Word is off our categories. It has four stations or levels or gradations." The Rishi continues: "Three of them are unmanifested, unbodied; only the fourth one is manifest and bodied, on the tongue of man." This terminology embodying a fundamental principle has had many commentaries and explanations. Of these the most well-known is that given by the Tantras. They have named the fourfold words as (1) par, supreme; (2) payant, the seeing one; (3) madhyam, the middle one or the one within and (4) vaikhar, the articulate word. In modern language we may say that the first one is the self-vibration of the Supreme Being or Consciousness; the second is the vibration of the higher-mind or the pure intelligence; the third is the vibration of the inner heart; and the fourth the vibration of physical sound, of voice. In philosophical terms of current English we may name these as (1) revelatory, (2) intuitive, (3) inspirational and (4) vocal.
Now in conclusion I will just speak of the fundamental vision of the rishi. His entire realisation, the whole Veda of his life, he has, it appears, pressed into one single k We have heard it said that the entire range of all scriptures is epitomised in the Gita and the Gita' itself is epitomised in one slokasarvadharmn parityajya... Even so we may say that Rishi Dirghatama has summarised his experience, at least the fundamental basic one, and put it into a sutra. It is the famous k with which he opens his long hymn to Surya:
--
This is again a sphinx puzzle indeed. But what is the meaning? The universe, the creation has its fundamental truth in a Trinity: Agni (the Fire-god) upon earth, Vayu (the Wind-god) in the middle regions and in heaven the Sun. In other words, breaking up the symbolism we may say that the creation is a triple reality, three principles constitute its nature. Matter, Life and Consciousness or status, motion and Light. This triplicity however does not exhaust the whole of the mystery. For the ultimate mystery is imbedded within the heart of the third brother, for our rishis saw there the Universal Divine Being and his seven sons. In our familiar language we may say it is the Supreme Being, God himself (Purushottama) and his seven lines of self-manifestation. We have often heard of the seven worlds or levels of being and consciousness, the seven chords of the Divine Music. In more familiar terms we say that body and life and mind form the lower half of the cosmic reality and its upper half consists of Sat-Chit-Ananda (or Satya- Tap as-Jana). And the link, the nodus that joins the two spheres is the fourth principle (Turya), the Supermind, Vijnana. Such is the vision of Rishi Dirghatama, its fundamental truth in a nutshell. To know this mystery is the whole knowledge and knowing this, one need know nothing else.
A word is perhaps necessary to complete the sense of the commentary. Agni has been called old and ancient (Palita), but why? Agni is the first among the gods. He has come down upon earth, entered into matter with the very creation of the material existence. He is the secret energy hidden in the atom which is attracting, invoking all the other gods to manifest themselves. It is he who drives the material consciousness in its evolutionary re-course upward towards the radiant fullness in the solar Supra-Consciousness at the summit. He is however not only energy, he is also delight (vma). For he is the Soma, the nectarous flow, occult in the Earth's body. For Earth is the storehouse of the sap of Life, the source of the delightful growths of Life here below.
1.00c - DIVISION C - THE ETHERIC BODY AND PRANA, #A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, #Alice Bailey, #Occultism
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.
1.013 - Defence Mechanisms of the Mind, #The Study and Practice of Yoga, #Swami Krishnananda, #Yoga
This is the sort of attitude we have to adopt in respect of the Supreme Absolute. We run to it for every little thing, even if it is such a silly thing as a small need of our physical body. We cry only before that, and we do not ask for anything anywhere else. This sort of utter and total dependence on the Supreme Being for everything, at all times and all places, is called brahmabhyasa. This will cut at the root of all misconceptions of the mind. But this is a very difficult practice that is meant for very advanced seekers, and not for beginners.
Hence, the Yoga Vasishtha prescribes other psychological methods of mind-control apart from this utter dependence on the Absolute, which is meant only for very advanced practioners. Psychological techniques of mind-control are of various types. We have to determine the weaknesses of the mind first. The weak spots and the vulnerable areas of the mind have to be detected before we tackle the mind's functions in respect of objects. Everyone has some weaknesses, and if we touch a weak spot, the person automatically becomes different from his usual self. But in the ordinary course, these weaknesses are always covered over by the veneer of social activity and public etiquette, etc. There is no one without some sort of a vulnerable spot, and that spot is the essential point to be tackled not only in our workaday life, but also in our spiritual life.
1.01 - Maitreya inquires of his teacher (Parashara), #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[1]: An address of this kind, to one or other Hindu divinity, usually introduces Sanscrit compositions, especially those considered sacred. The first term of this mantra or brief prayer, Om or Omkāra, is well known as a combination of letters invested by Hindu mysticism with peculiar sanctity. In the Vedas it is said to comprehend all the gods; and in the Purāṇas it is directed to be prefixed to all such formulæ as that of the text. Thus in the Uttara Khaṇḍa of the Pādma Purāṇa: 'The syllable Om, the mysterious name, or Brahma, is the leader of all prayers: let it therefore, O lovely-faced, (Śiva addresses Durgā,) be employed in the beginning of all prayers:' According to the same authority, one of the mystical imports of the term is the collective enunciation of Viṣṇu expressed by A, of Srī his bride intimated by U, and of their joint worshipper designated by M. A whole chapter of the Vāyu Purāṇa is devoted to this term. A text of the Vedas is there cited: 'Om, the monosyllable Brahma;' the latter meaning either the Supreme Being or the Vedas collectively, of which this monosyllable is the type. It is also said to typify the three spheres of the world, the three holy fires, the three steps of Viṣṇu, &c.-Frequent meditation upon it, and repetition of it, ensure release from worldly existence. See also Manu, II. 76. Vāsudeva, a name of Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa, is, according to its grammatical etymology, a patronymic derivative implying son of Vasudeva. The Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas, however, devise other explanations: see the next chapter, and again, b. VI. c. 5.
[2]: In this stanza occurs a series of the appellations of Viṣṇu: 1. Puṇḍarīkākṣa, having eyes like a lotus, or heart-pervading; or Puṇḍarīka is explained supreme glory, and Akṣa imperishable: the first is the most usual etymon. 2. Vīswabhāvana, the creator of the universe, or the cause of the existence of all things. 3. Hṛṣīkeśa, lord of the senses. 4. Mahā puruṣa, great or supreme spirit; puruṣa meaning that which abides or is quiescent in body (puri sété), 5. Pūrvaja, produced or appearing before creation; the Orphic πρωτογόνος. In the fifth book, c. 18, Viṣṇu is described by five appellations, which are considered analogous to these; or, 1. Bhūtātmā, one with created things, or Puṇḍarīkākṣa; 2. Pradhānātmā, one with crude nature, or Viśvabhāvana; 3. Indriyātmā, one with the senses, or Hṛṣikeśa; 4. Paramātmā, supreme spirit, or Mahāpuruṣa; and Ātmā, soul; living soul, animating nature and existing before it, or Pūrvaja.
1.02.9 - Conclusion and Summary, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
4. What then of the Quiescence of the Supreme Being and how
is persistence in the Movement compatible with that Quiescence
1.02 - Prayer of Parashara to Vishnu, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
kara Siva. The Viṣṇu who is the subject of our text is the Supreme Being in all these three divinities or hypostases, in his different characters of creator, preserver and destroyer. Thus in the Mārkaṇḍeya: 'Accordingly, as the primal all-pervading spirit is distinguished by attributes in creation and the rest, so he obtains the denomination of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. In the capacity of Brahmā he creates the worlds; in that of Rudra he destroys them; in that of Viṣṇu he is quiescent. These are the three Avasthās (ht. hypostases) of the self-born. Brahmā is the quality of activity; Rudra that of darkness; Viṣṇu, the lord of the world, is goodness: so, therefore, the three gods are the three qualities. They are ever combined with, and dependent upon one another; and they are never for an instant separate; they never quit each other.' The notion is one common to all antiquity, although less philosophically conceived, or perhaps less distinctly expressed, in the passages which have come down to us. The τρεῖς ἀρχικὰς ὑποστάσεις of Plato are said by Cudworth (I. 111), upon the authority of Plotinus, to be an ancient doctrine, παλαιὰ δόξα: and he also observes, "Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato have all of them asserted a trinity of divine hypostases; and as they unquestionably derived much of their doctrine from the Egyptians, it may reasonably be suspected that the Egyptians did the like before them." As however the Grecian accounts, and those of the Egyptians, are much more perplexed and unsatisfactory than those of the Hindus, it is most probable that we find amongst them the doctrine in its most original as well as most methodical and significant form.
[2]: This address to Viṣṇu pursues the notion that he, as the Supreme Being, is one, whilst he is all: he is Avikāra, not subject to change; Sadaikarūpa, one invariable nature: he is the liberator (tāra), or he who bears mortals across the ocean of existence: he is both single and manifold (ekānekarūpa): and he is the indiscrete (avyakta) cause of the world, as well as the discrete (vyakta) effect; or the invisible cause, and visible creation.
[3]: Jaganmaya, made up, or consisting substantially of the world. Maya is an affix denoting 'made' or 'consisting of,' as Kāṣṭha maya, 'made of wood.' The world is therefore not regarded by the Pauranics as an emanation or an illusion, but as consubstantial with its first cause.
--
[13]: The creation of the world is very commonly considered to be the Lilā, sport or amusement, of the Supreme Being.
[14]: The attributes of Pradhāna, the chief (principle or element), here specified, conform generally to those ascribed to it by the Sā
--
ga, it is Śiva: in the Brahma-vaivartta it is Kṛṣṇa. The identification of one of the hypostases with the common source of the triad was an incongruity not unknown to other theogonies; for Cneph, amongst the Egyptians, appears on the one hand to have been identified with the Supreme Being, the indivisible unity, whilst on the other he is confounded with both Emeph and Ptha, the second and third persons of the triad of hypostases. Cudworth, I. 4. 18.
[34]: 'The world that is termed spirit;' explained by the commentator, 'which indeed bears the appellation spirit;' conformably to the text of the Vedas, 'this universe is indeed spirit.' This is rather Vedānta than Sā
1.02 - The Divine Teacher, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
name and form. But it is a veiled manifestation and there is a gradation between the Supreme Being1 of the Divine and the consciousness shrouded partly or wholly by ignorance of self in the finite. The conscious embodied soul2 is the spark of the divine Fire and that soul in man opens out to self-knowledge as it develops out of ignorance of self into self-being. The Divine also, pouring itself into the forms of the cosmic existence, is revealed ordinarily in an efflorescence of its powers, in energies and magnitudes of its knowledge, love, joy, developed force of being,3 in degrees and faces of its divinity. But when the divine
Consciousness and Power, taking upon itself the human form and the human mode of action, possesses it not only by powers and magnitudes, by degrees and outward faces of itself but out of its eternal self-knowledge, when the Unborn knows itself and acts in the frame of the mental being and the appearance of birth, that is the height of the conditioned manifestation; it is the full and conscious descent of the Godhead, it is the Avatara.
1.04 - The Core of the Teaching, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Others again speak of the Gita as if the doctrine of devotion were its whole teaching and put in the background its monistic elements and the high place it gives to quietistic immergence in the one self of all. And undoubtedly its emphasis on devotion, its insistence on the aspect of the Divine as Lord and Purusha and its doctrine of the Purushottama, the Supreme Being who is superior both to the mutable Being and to the Immutable and who is what in His relation to the world we know as God, are the most striking and among the most vital elements of the Gita.
Still, this Lord is the Self in whom all knowledge culminates and the Master of sacrifice to whom all works lead as well as the
Lord of Love into whose being the heart of devotion enters, and the Gita preserves a perfectly equal balance, emphasising now knowledge, now works, now devotion, but for the purposes of the immediate trend of the thought, not with any absolute separate preference of one over the others. He in whom all three meet and become one, He is the Supreme Being, the Purushottama.
But at the present day, since in fact the modern mind began to recognise and deal at all with the Gita, the tendency is to subordinate its elements of knowledge and devotion, to take advantage of its continual insistence on action and to find in it a scripture of the Karmayoga, a Light leading us on the path of action, a Gospel of Works. Undoubtedly, the Gita is a Gospel of Works, but of works which culminate in knowledge, that is, in spiritual realisation and quietude, and of works motived by devotion, that is, a conscious surrender of one's whole self first into the hands and then into the being of the Supreme, and not at all of works as they are understood by the modern mind, not at all an action dictated by egoistic and altruistic, by personal,
1.05 - The Universe The 0 = 2 Equation, #Magick Without Tears, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
"Reality" for them consists solely of Brahman, the Supreme Being "without quantity or quality." They are compelled to deny him all attributes, even that of Existence; for to do so would instantly limit them, and so hurl them headlong back in to Dualism. All that of which we are aware must obviously possess limits, or it could have no intelligible meaning for us; if we want "pork," we must specify its qualities and quantities; at the very least, we must be able to distinguish it from "that-which-is-not-pork."
But one moment, please!
1.06 - Origin of the four castes, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
gu is the seventh, and kulattha, pulse, the eighth: the others are, Syāmāka, a sort of panic; Nīvāra, uñcultivated rice; Jarttila, wild sesamum; Gavedukā (coix); Markata, wild panic; and (a plant called) the seed or barley of the Bambu (Venu-yava). These, cultivated or wild, are the fourteen grains that were produced for purposes of offering in sacrifice; and sacrifice (the cause of rain) is their origin also: they again, with sacrifice, are the great cause of the perpetuation of the human race, as those understand who can discriminate cause and effect. Thence sacrifices were offered daily; the performance of which, oh best of Munis, is of essential service to mankind, and expiates the offences of those by whom they are observed. Those, however, in whose hearts the dross of sin derived from Time (Kāla) was still more developed, assented not to sacrifices, but reviled both them and all that resulted from them, the gods, and the followers of the Vedas. Those abusers of the Vedas, of evil disposition and conduct, and seceders from the path of enjoined duties, were plunged in wickedness[8]. The means of subsistence having been provided for the beings he had created, Brahmā prescribed laws suited to their station and faculties, the duties of the several castes and orders[9], and the regions of those of the different castes who were observant of their duties. The heaven of the Pitris is the region of devout Brahmans. The sphere of Indra, of Kṣetriyas who fly not from the field. The region of the winds is assigned to the Vaisyas who are diligent in their occupations and submissive. Śūdras are elevated to the sphere of the Gandharvas. Those Brahmans who lead religious lives go to the world of the eighty-eight thousand saints: and that of the seven Ṛṣis is the seat of pious anchorets and hermits. The world of ancestors is that of respectable householders: and the region of Brahmā is the asylum of religious mendicants[10]. The imperishable region of the Yogis is the highest seat of Viṣṇu, where they perpetually meditate upon the Supreme Being, with minds intent on him alone: the sphere where they reside, the gods themselves cannot behold. The sun, the moon, the planets, shall repeatedly be, and cease to be; but those who internally repeat the mystic adoration of the divinity, shall never know decay. For those who neglect their duties, who revile the Vedas, and obstruct religious rites, the places assigned after death are the terrific regions of darkness, of deep gloom, of fear, and of great terror; the fearful hell of sharp swords, the hell of scourges and of a waveless sea[11].
Footnotes and references:
1.1.01 - The Divine and Its Aspects, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Divine is the Supreme Truth because it is the Supreme Being from whom all have come and in whom all are.
*
1.10 - Theodicy - Nature Makes No Mistakes, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
11 To Plato the Good was synonymous with the Supreme Being.
This adjective, with its ethical associations, applied to God has caused
1.13 - The Divine Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
9:This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of Maya. Maya meant for them the power of infinite consciousness to comprehend, contain in itself and measure out, that is to say, to form - for form is delimitation - Name and Shape out of the vast illimitable Truth of infinite existence. It is by Maya that static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being - or, to put it in more metaphysical language, out of the Supreme Being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight. This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence. Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the supramental play or the truth of Maya where the "each" and the "all" coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol. The lower, present and deluding mental Maya has first to be embraced, then to be overcome; for it is God's play with division and darkness and limitation, desire and strife and suffering in which He subjects Himself to the Force that has come out of Himself and by her obscure suffers Himself to be obscured. That other Maya concealed by this mental has to be overpassed, then embraced; for it is God's play of the infinities of existence, the splendours of knowledge, the glories of force mastered and the ecstasies of love illimitable where He emerges out of the hold of Force, holds her instead and fulfils in her illumined that for which she went out from Him at the first.
10:This distinction between the lower and the higher Maya is the link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist philosophies miss or neglect. To them the mental Maya, or perhaps an Overmind, is the creatrix of the world, and a world created by mental Maya would indeed be an inexplicable paradox and a fixed yet floating nightmare of conscious existence which could neither be classed as an illusion nor as a reality. We have to see that the mind is only an intermediate term between the creative governing knowledge and the soul imprisoned in its works. Sachchidananda, involved by one of His lower movements in the self-oblivious absorption of Force that is lost in the form of her own workings, returns towards Himself out of the self-oblivion; Mind is only one of His instruments in the descent and the ascent. It is an instrument of the descending creation, not the secret creatrix, - a transitional stage in the ascent, not our high original source and the consummate term of cosmic existence.
1.17 - Legend of Prahlada, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[2]: The Purāṇas teach constantly incompatible doctrines. According to this passage, the Supreme Being is not the inert cause of creation only, but exercises the p. 128 functions of an active Providence. The commentator quotes a text of the Veda in support of this view: 'Universal soul entering into men, governs their conduct.' Incongruities, however, are as frequent in the Vedas as in the Purāṇas; but apparently the most ancient parts of the Hindu ritual recognised an active ruler in the Creator of the universe; the notion of abstract deity originating with the schools of philosophy.
[3]: This is the purport of the sentence apparently, and is that which the comment in part confirms. Literally it is, 'A blow is the pleasure of those whose eyes are darkened by ignorance, whose limbs, exceedingly benumbed, desire pleasure by exercise: The commentator divides the sentence, however, and reads it, 'As fatigue would be like pleasure to paralyzed limbs; and a blow is enjoyment to those who are blinded by delusion; that is, by love; for to them a slap, or even a kick, from a mistress would be a favour.' It is not improbably an allusion to some such venerable pastime as blindman's buff. This interpretation, however, leaves the construction of the first half of the sentence imperfect, unless the nominative and verb apply to both portions.
1.19 - Dialogue between Prahlada and his father, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
[7]: The preceding passage was addressed to the Puruṣa, or spiritual nature, of the Supreme Being: this is addressed to his material essence, his other energy, that is, to Pradhāna,
[8]: Or rather, woven as the warp and woof; ###-### meaning 'woven by the long threads,' and ### 'by the cross threads.'
1.22 - Dominion over different provinces of creation assigned to different beings, #Vishnu Purana, #Vyasa, #Hinduism
There are two states of this Brahma; one with, and one without shape; one perishable, and one imperishable; which are inherent in all beings. The imperishable is the Supreme Being; the perishable is all the world. The blaze of fire burning on one spot diffuses light and heat around; so the world is nothing more than the manifested energy of the supreme Brahma: and inasmuch, Maitreya, as the light and heat are stronger or feebler as we are near to the fire, or far off from it, so the energy of the supreme is more or less intense in the beings that are less or more remote from him. Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Śiva are the most powerful energies of god; next to them are the inferior deities, then the attendant spirits, then men, then animals, birds, insects, vegetables; each becoming more and more feeble as they are farther from their primitive source. In this way, illustrious Brahman, this whole world, although in essence imperishable and eternal, appears and disappears, as if it was subject to birth and death.
The supreme condition of Brahma, which is meditated by the Yogis in the commencement of their abstraction, as invested with form, is Viṣṇu, composed of all the divine energies, and the essence of Brahma, with whom the mystic union that is sought, and which is accompanied by suitable elements, is effected[7] by the devotee whose whole mind is addressed to that object. This Hari, who is the most immediate of all the energies of Brahma, is his embodied shape, composed entirely of his essence; and in him therefore is the whole world interwoven; and from him, and in him, is the universe; and he, the supreme lord of all, comprising all that is perishable and imperishable, bears upon him all material and spiritual existence, identified in nature with his ornaments and weapons.
--
[4]: The question, according to the commentator, implies a doubt how the Supreme Being, who is without qualities, can be subject to specific variety, or to existence in divided and different conditions.
[5]: Of Brahmabhūta; of him who, or that which, becomes identified with the supreme spirit, which is the same respectively with absolute wisdom, Jñāna, and discriminative wisdom, Vijñāna; leading to felicity, or the condition of Brahma, expressed by the words, p. 156 Sat chit ānandam, 'entire tranquillity of mind,' or 'internal enjoyment:' the same also with the combination of wisdom and tranquillity, which the devotee believes to exist in Adwaita, 'non- duality,' or unity of god and himself: and finally, the same with the aggregate of these three processes, or the conviction that spirit is one, universal, and the same.
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Is it not better to say I am the Supreme Being than ask Who am I?
M.: Who affirms? There must be one to do it. Find that one.
--
D.: Is the thought I am God or I am the Supreme Being helpful?
M.: I am that I am. I am is God - not thinking, I am God. Realise
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Is it not better to say 'I am the Supreme Being' than ask 'Who am I?'
M.: Who affirms? There must be one to do it. Find that one.
--
D.: Is the thought "I am God" or "I am the Supreme Being" helpful?
M.: "I am that I am." "I am" is God - not thinking, "I am God". Realise
1.400 - 1.450 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
(like akasvani); if on the other hand he mutters words incoherently like a lunatic, it is because his experience is inexpressible like the words of lovers in embrace. If his words are many and fluent like those of an orator, they represent the recollection of his experience, since he is the unmoving non-dual One without any desire awaiting fulfilment. Although he may appear grief-stricken like any other man in bereavement, yet he evinces just the right love of and pity for the senses which he earlier controlled before he realised that they were mere instruments and manifestations of the Supreme Being. When he seems keenly interested in the wonders of the world, he is only ridiculing the ignorance born of superimposition. If he appears indulging in sexual pleasures, he must be taken to enjoy the ever-inherent Bliss of the Self, which, divided Itself into the Individual
Self and the Universal Self, delights in their reunion to regain Its original
14.03 - Janaka and Yajnavalkya, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is difficult to locate or identify the Upanishadic worlds or explain their gradations; evidently they are symbolical. But for us it is sufficient if we know that they are mounting steps, higher and higher tiers of being and consciousness leading to the Supreme Being and Consciousness, the Brahman.
Poems of Imaginations, "To a Skylark".
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
(like akasvani); if on the other hand he mutters words incoherently like a lunatic, it is because his experience is inexpressible like the words of lovers in embrace. If his words are many and fluent like those of an orator, they represent the recollection of his experience, since he is the unmoving non-dual One without any desire awaiting fulfilment. Although he may appear grief-stricken like any other man in bereavement, yet he evinces just the right love of and pity for the senses which he earlier controlled before he realised that they were mere instruments and manifestations of the Supreme Being. When he seems keenly interested in the wonders of the world, he is only ridiculing the ignorance born of superimposition. If he appears indulging in sexual pleasures, he must be taken to enjoy the ever-inherent Bliss of the Self, which, divided Itself into the Individual
Self and the Universal Self, delights in their reunion to regain Its original
--
D.: The knowledge of the Supreme Being is after transcending the individual self. This is jnana. Where is the need for surrender?
M.: Quite so. There is no difference between jnana and surrender. (Smile).
--
What does it all mean? Although the sun and the other luminaries are said to be self luminous, yet they do not shine forth of themselves but they shine by the light of the Supreme Being. (na tatra suryo....vibhati). So long as they are said to be separate from Brahman their Self-luminosity is the luminosity of Brahman. All these mantras mentioning the sun, etc., speak only of Brahman.
Talk 469.
--
The latter is the Supreme Reality whereas the former is the ego. It is to be overcome before the Truth is realised. the Supreme Being is unmanifest and the first sign of manifestation is Aham Sphurana (light of I). The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says Aham nama abhavat (He became I named). That is the original name of the Reality.
The Pandit asked about the operation of Grace. Is it the mind of the
--
Being? Being is the core - the Heart. How then is the Supreme Being to be contemplated and glorified? Only to remain as the Pure Self is the auspicious beginning. This speaks of attributeless Brahman according to the jnana marga (method of knowledge).
2. The second stanza is in praise of God with attri butes. In the foregoing, to be as one Self is mentioned; in the present one, surrender to the Lord of all.
--
You think that bhakti is meditation on the Supreme Being. So long
as there is vibhakti (the sense of separateness), bhakti (reunion)
1.450 - 1.500 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: The knowledge of the Supreme Being is after transcending the individual self. This is jnana. Where is the need for surrender?
M.: Quite so. There is no difference between jnana and surrender. (Smile).
--
What does it all mean? Although the sun and the other luminaries are said to be self luminous, yet they do not shine forth of themselves but they shine by the light of the Supreme Being. (na tatra suryo....vibhati). So long as they are said to be separate from Brahman their 'Self-luminosity' is the luminosity of Brahman. All these mantras mentioning the sun, etc., speak only of Brahman.
457
1.550 - 1.600 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Being? Being is the core - the Heart. How then is the Supreme Being to be contemplated and glorified? Only to remain as the Pure Self is the auspicious beginning. This speaks of attributeless Brahman according to the jnana marga (method of knowledge).
2. The second stanza is in praise of God with attri butes. In the foregoing, to be as one Self is mentioned; in the present one, surrender to the Lord of all.
17.04 - Hymn to the Purusha, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
He has a thousand heads, the Supreme Being, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet.
He has covered the entire extended universe and exceeded it by the measure often fingers. [1]
--
All this is His mightiness and even greater than all this is the Supreme Being.
All the worlds are His feet, His other three steps are the Immortality in heaven. [3]
the Supreme Being with his three steppings went upwards, He came down again in his fourth stepping:
And then spread Himself out variously towards the living and the non-living (that which eats and that which does not eat). [4]
--
Through the Supreme Being the Gods make the offering and accomplish the sacrifice.
The Spring is its first primal offering, Summer is its fuel and Autumn the final giving. [6]
the Supreme Being took birth in the forefront, He is the sacrifice, Him they sanctified seated on the altar.
Through Him they accomplish the sacrifice, the Gods, the demi-gods and the Rishis. [7]
1951-02-17 - False visions - Offering ones will - Equilibrium - progress - maturity - Ardent self-giving- perfecting the instrument - Difficulties, a help in total realisation - paradoxes - Sincerity - spontaneous meditation, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Once you have understood this, many worries come to an end and you are very happy, very happy. If one finds one has very black holes, one says, This shows I can rise very high, if the abyss is very deep, I can climb very high. It is the same from the universal point of view; to use the Hindu terminology so familiar to you, it is the greatest Asuras who are the greatest beings of Light. And the day these Asuras are converted, they will be the Supreme Beings of the creation. This is not to encourage you to be asuric, you know, but it is like thatthis will widen your minds a little and help you to free yourself from those ideas of opposing good and evil, for if you abide in that category, there is no hope.
If the world was not essentially the opposite of what it has become, there would be no hope. For the hole is so black and so deep, and the inconscience so complete, that if this were not the sign of the total consciousness, well, there would be nothing more to do but pack up ones kit and go away. Men like Shankara, who did not see much further than the end of their nose, said that the world was not worth the trouble of living in, for it was impossible, that it was better to treat it as an illusion and go away, there was nothing to be done with it. I tell you, on the contrary, that it is because the world is very bad, very dark, very ugly, very unconscious, full of misery and suffering, that it can become the supreme Beauty, the supreme Light, the supreme Consciousness and supreme Felicity.
1.ww - The Excursion- X- Book Ninth- Discourse of the Wanderer, and an Evening Visit to the Lake, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
Wanderer asserts that an active principle pervades the Universe, its noblest seat the human soul--How lively this principle is in Childhood--Hence the delight in old Age of looking back upon Childhood--The dignity, powers, and privileges of Age asserted-- These not to be looked for generally but under a just government-- Right of a human Creature to be exempt from being considered as a mere Instrument--The condition of multitudes deplored--Former conversation recurred to, and the Wanderer's opinions set in a clearer light--Truth placed within reach of the humblest-- Equality--Happy state of the two Boys again adverted to--Earnest wish expressed for a System of National Education established universally by Government--Glorious effects of this foretold--Walk to the Lake--Grand spectacle from the side of a hill--Address of Priest to the Supreme Being--In the course of which he contrasts with ancient Barbarism the present appearance of the scene before him--The change ascribed to Christianity--Apostrophe to his flock, living and dead--Gratitude to the Almighty--Return over the Lake-- Parting with the Solitary--Under what circumstances.
"TO every Form of being is assigned,"
1.ww - To The Supreme Being From The Italian Of Michael Angelo, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
object:1.ww - To the Supreme Being From The Italian Of Michael Angelo
author class:William Wordsworth
1.yt - The Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness!, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
object:1.yt - the Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness!
author class:Yeshe Tsogyal
--
English version by Keith Dowman the Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness! I have vanished into fields of lotus-light, the plenum of dynamic space, To be born in the inner sanctum of an immaculate lotus; Do not despair, have faith! When you have withdrawn attachment to this rocky defile, This barbaric Tibet, full of war and strife, Abandon unnecessary activity and rely on solitude. Practice energy control, purify your psychic nerves and seed-essence, And cultivate mahamudra and Dsokchen. the Supreme Being is the Dakini Queen of the Lake of Awareness! Attaining humility, through Guru Pema Jungne's compassion I followed him, And now I have finally gone into his presence; Do not despair, but pray! When you see your karmic body as vulnerable as a bubble, Realising the truth of impermanence, and that in death you are helpless, Disabuse yourself of fantasies of eternity, Make your life a practice of sadhana, And cultivate the experience that takes you to the place where Ati ends. [1484.jpg] -- from The Shambhala Anthology of Women's Spiritual Poetry, Edited by Aliki Barnstone <
2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And yet the universe exists. What then is it that creates this contradiction, is able to effect the impossible, bring this insoluble riddle of self-division into existence? A Power of some kind it must be, and since the Absolute is the sole reality, the one origin of all things, this Power must proceed from it, must have some relation with it, a connection, a dependence. For if it is quite other than the supreme Reality, a cosmic Imagination imposing its determinations on the eternal blank of the Indeterminable, then the sole existence of an absolute Parabrahman is no longer admissible; there is then a dualism at the source of things not substantially different from the Sankhya dualism of Soul and Nature. If it is a Power, the sole Power indeed, of the Absolute, we have this logical impossibility that the existence of the Supreme Being and the Power of his existence are entirely opposite to each other, two supreme contradictories; for Brahman is free from all possibility of relations and determinations, but Maya is a creative Imagination imposing these very things upon It, an originator of relations and determinations of which Brahman must necessarily be the supporter and witness, - to the logical reason an inadmissible formula. If it is accepted, it can only be as a suprarational mystery, something neither real nor unreal, inexplicable in its nature, anirvacanya. But the difficulties are so great that it can be accepted only if it imposes itself irresistibly as the inevitable ultimate, the end and summit of metaphysical inquiry and spiritual experience. For even if all things are illusory creations, they must have at least a subjective existence and they can exist nowhere except in the consciousness of the Sole Existence; they are then subjective determinations of the Indeterminable. If, on the contrary, the determinations of this Power are real creations, out of what are they determined, what is their substance? It is not possible that they are made out of a Nothing, a Non-Existence other than the Absolute; for that will erect a new dualism, a great positive Zero over against the greater indeterminable x we have supposed to be the one Reality. It is evident therefore that the Reality cannot be a rigid Indeterminable. Whatever is created must be of it and in it, and what is of the substance of the utterly Real must itself be real: a vast baseless negation of reality purporting to be real cannot be the sole outcome of the eternal Truth, the Infinite Existence. It is perfectly understandable that the Absolute is and must be indeterminable in the sense that it cannot be limited by any determination or any sum of possible determinations, but not in the sense that it is incapable of self-determination.
The Supreme Existence cannot be incapable of creating true self-determinations of its being, incapable of upholding a real self-creation or manifestation in its self-existent infinite.
--
It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the Supreme Being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind's highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.
2.01 - The Two Natures, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Nature. There is then nothing else here left to be known, because all is that Divine Existence. It is only because our view here is not thus integral, because it rests on the dividing mind and reason and the separative idea of the ego, that our mental perception of things is an ignorance. We have to get away from this mental and egoistic view to the true unifying knowledge, and that has two aspects, the essential, jnana, and the comprehensive, vijnana, the direct spiritual awareness of the Supreme Being and the right intimate knowledge of the principles of his existence, Prakriti,
Purusha and the rest, by which all that is can be known in its divine origin and in the supreme truth of its nature. That integral knowledge, says the Gita, is a rare and difficult thing; "among thousands of men one here and there strives after perfection, and of those who strive and attain to perfection one here and there knows me in all the principles of my existence, tattvatah.."
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Nature is the power involved and inherent in unmanifest Spirit or Self out of which cosmos comes and into which it returns. It is that, but it is much more; for that is only one of its spiritual states. It is the integral conscious-power of the Supreme Being,
268
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"I" here is the Purushottama, the Supreme Being, the supreme
Soul, the transcendent and universal Spirit. The original and eternal nature of the Spirit and its transcendent and originating
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I am the birth of the world and its dissolution, it is evident that it is this Para Prakriti, supreme Nature, of his being which is both these things. The Spirit is the Supreme Being in his infinite consciousness and the supreme Nature is the infinity of power or will of being of the Spirit, - it is his infinite consciousness in its inherent divine energy and its supernal divine action. The birth is the movement of evolution of this conscious Energy out of the Spirit, para prakr.tir jvabhuta, its activity in the mutable universe; the dissolution is the withdrawing of that activity by involution of the Energy into the immutable existence and selfga thered power of the Spirit. That then is what is initially meant by the supreme Nature.
The supreme Nature, para prakr.tih., is then the infinite timeless conscious power of the self-existent Being out of which all existences in the cosmos are manifested and come out of timelessness into Time. But in order to provide a spiritual basis for this manifold universal becoming in the cosmos the supreme
2.02 - Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Self, or to the too anthropomorphic character our conceptions attach to the Supreme Being as Ruler. It is evident that we are looking at an Infinite of which the Self-Power is capable of many movements, all of them valid. If we look again more largely and take account of both the impersonal and the personal truth of things as one truth, if in that light, the light of personality in impersonality, we see the biune aspect of Self and Self-Power, then in the Person Aspect a dual Person emerges, Ishwara-Shakti, the Divine Self and Creator and the Divine Mother and Creatrix of the universe; there becomes apparent to us the mystery of the masculine and feminine cosmic Principles whose play and interaction are necessary for all creation. In the superconscient truth of the Self-Existence these two are fused and implied in each other, one and indistinguishable, but in the spiritual-pragmatic truth of the dynamism of the universe, they emerge and become active; the Divine Mother Energy as the universal creatrix, Maya, Para-Prakriti, Chit-Shakti, manifests the cosmic Self and Ishwara and her own self-power as a dual principle; it is through her that the Being, the Self, the Ishwara, acts and he does nothing except by her; though his Will is implicit in her, it is she who works out all as the supreme Consciousness-Force who holds all souls and beings within her and as executive Nature; all exists and acts according to Nature, all is the Consciousness-Force manifesting and playing with the Being in millions of forms and movements into which she casts his existence. If we draw back from her workings, then all can fall into quiescence and we can enter into the silence, because she consents to cease from her dynamic activity; but it is in her quiescence and silence that we are quiescent and cease. If we would affirm our independence of
Nature, she reveals to us the supreme and omnipresent power of the Ishwara and ourselves as beings of his being, but that power is herself and we are that in her supernature. If we would realise a higher formation or status of being, then it is still through her, through the Divine Shakti, the Consciousness-Force of the Spirit that it has to be done; our surrender must be to the Divine Being through the Divine Mother for it is towards or into the supreme Nature that our ascension has to take place and it can only be done by the supramental Shakti taking up our mentality and transforming it into her supramentality. Thus we see that there is no contradiction or incompatibility between these three aspects of Existence, or between them in their eternal status and the three modes of its Dynamis working in the universe. One Being, one Reality as Self bases, supports, informs, as Purusha or Conscious Being experiences, as Ishwara wills, governs and possesses its world of manifestation created and kept in motion and action by its own Consciousness-Force or Self-Power, - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti.
2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
phenomena enveloped with the presence of the Supreme Being
and existing in Him and by Him only. Not I but He, for He
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do or think. It is in other words the Supreme Being not in His
aspect as the actionless, unknowable Parabrahman, transcendental and beyond realization by senses, mind or speech; it is
--
identifies the visible Universe with the Supreme Being. It is true
that He is both the final and material Cause of the universe,
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and ineffable than the Supreme Being, - this our Self too is
Brahman. The Karmayogin who has realised it, must hold all
2.07 - The Supreme Word of the Gita, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The Transcendent knows and originates these things, but is not caught as in a web in that diversified knowledge and is not overcome by his creation. We must observe here the emphatic collocation of the three words from the verb bhu, to become, bhavanti, bhavah., bhutanam. All existences are becomings of the Divine, bhutani; all subjective states and movements are his and their psychological becomings, bhavah.. These even, our lesser subjective conditions and their apparent results no less than the highest spiritual states, are all becomings from the Supreme Being,4 bhavanti matta eva. The Gita recognises and stresses the distinction between Being and becoming, but does
3 prabhava, bhava, pravr.tti.
2.08 - ALICE IN WONDERLAND, #God Exists, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
Now we are facing the third principle of the ultimate reality of the cosmos, call it the Absolute, call it Satchidananda, God, Isvara, Hiranyagarbha, Virat, whatever it is. Here, true religion begins. Real religion is an awareness of the presence of the Supreme Being. Therefore, it is well said that religion begins where intellect ends, where reasons fails. When religion begins controlling your life, you cease to be a mere intellectual or a scientist or a philosopher. You are no more a thinker, but a person who lives reality.
Religion is living reality and not merely thinking reality or academic analysing. All this is over already in our earlier lessons. We have thought enough philosophically, academically and hope we shall not touch this subject again. We shall enter into true religion which is God-consciousness itself in some proportion, in some measure, in a modicum.
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I have been telling you sometimes that there is some secret meaning behind the last words in the Eleventh Chapter of the Gita where we are told that Bhakti is supreme. The Bhakti that Sri Krishna speaks of here is not ordinary obeisance to an idol. It is not a mass that you perform in the church. It is a melting of your being before the Absolute. Therefore Bhagavan Sri Krishna says, Not charity, not philanthropy, not study, not austerity, is capable of bringing about this great vision that you had, Arjuna! Only by devotion can I be seen, contacted. Only by devotion am I capable of being known, seen and entered into. These three words are used in the Bhagavad Gita at the end of the Eleventh Chapterknowing, seeing, and entering. Arjuna knew and saw, but never entered into It. Therefore, he was the same Arjuna after the Bhagavad Gita also. He never merged into the Supreme Being.
Now, religion is knowing, seeing and entering into. Knowing is considered by such thinkers like Ramanuja, the great propounder of the Visishtadvaita philosophy, as inferior to devotion. I am now digressing a little bit from the point, into another thing altogether, which is also interesting.
2.11 - The Vision of the World-Spirit - The Double Aspect, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
it is possible to be one with all, yet above all, to exceed world and yet embrace the whole nature at once of the cosmic and the supracosmic Godhead. This is difficult indeed for limited man imprisoned in his mind and body: but, says the Godhead, "be a doer of my works, accept me as the Supreme Being and object, become my bhakta, be free from attachment and without enmity to all existences; for such a man comes to me." In other words superiority to the lower nature, unity with all creatures, oneness with the cosmic Godhead and the Transcendence, oneness of will with the Divine in works, absolute love for the One and for God in all, - this is the way to that absolute spiritual self-exceeding and that unimaginable transformation.
2.12 - The Origin of the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
his existence. But it is clear that Brahman the Supreme Being must be aware both of the passivity and the activity and regard them not as his absolute being, but as opposite, yet mutually satisfying terms of his universalities. It cannot be true that Brahman, by an eternal passivity, is unaware, entirely separated from his own activities; free, he contains them in himself, supports them with his eternal power of calm, initiates them from his eternal poise of energy. It must be equally untrue that Brahman in his activity is unaware of or separated from his passivity; omnipresent, he is there supporting the action, possesses it always in the heart of the movement and is eternally calm and still and free and blissful in all the whirl of its energies. Nor in either silence or action can he be at all unaware of his absolute being, but knows that all he expresses through them draws its value and power from the power of that absolute existence. If it seems otherwise to our experience, it is because we identify with one aspect and by that exclusiveness fail to open ourselves to the integral Reality.
There necessarily follows an important first result, already arrived at from other view-points, that the Ignorance cannot have the origin of its existence or the starting-point of its dividing activities in the absolute Brahman or in integral Sachchidananda; it belongs only to a partial action of the being with which we identify ourselves, just as in the body we identify ourselves with that partial and superficial consciousness which alternates between sleep and waking: it is indeed this identification putting aside all the rest of the Reality behind us that is the constituting cause of the Ignorance. And if Ignorance is not an element or power proper to the absolute nature of the Brahman or to Its integrality, there can be no original and primal Ignorance. Maya, if it be an original power of the consciousness of the Eternal, cannot itself be an ignorance or in any way akin to the nature of ignorance, but must be a transcendent and universal power of self-knowledge and all-knowledge; ignorance can only intervene as a minor and subsequent movement, partial and relative. Is it then something inherent in the multiplicity of souls? Does it come into being immediately Brahman views himself in the
2.15 - The Cosmic Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By entering into the cosmic consciousness we participate in that all-vision and see everything in the values of the Infinite and the One. Limitation itself, ignorance itself change their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particular action of divine knowledge, strength and weakness and incapacity into a free putting forth and holding back various measures of divine Force, joy and grief, pleasure and pain into a mastering and a suffering of divine delight, struggle into a balancing of forces and values in the divine harmony. We do not suffer by the limitations of our mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these but in the infinity of the Spirit, and these we view in their right value and place and purpose in the manifestation, as degrees of the Supreme Being, conscious-force and delight of Sachchidananda veiling and manifesting Himself in the cosmos. We cease to judge men and things by their outward appearances and are delivered from hostile and contradictory ideas and emotions; for it is the soul that we see, the Divine that we seek and find in every thing and creature, and the rest has only a secondary value to us in a scheme of relations which exist now for us only as self-expressions of the Divine and not as having any absolute value in themselves. So too no event can disturb us, since the distinction of happy and unhappy, beneficent and maleficent happenings loses its force, and all is seen in its divine value and its divine purpose. Thus we arrive at a perfect liberation and an infinite equality. It is this consummation of which the Upanishad speaks when it says "He in whom the self has become all existences, how shall he have delusion, whence shall he have grief who knows entirely397 and sees in all things oneness."
But this is only when there is perfection in the cosmic consciousness, and that is difficult for the mental being. The mentality when it arrives at the idea or the realisation of the Spirit, the Divine, tends to break existence into two opposite halves, the lower and the higher existence. It sees on one side the Infinite, the Formless, the One, the Peace and Bliss, the Calm and Silence, the Absolute, the Vast and Pure; on the other it sees the finite, the world of forms, the jarring multiplicity, the strife and suffering and imperfect, unreal good, the tormented activity and futile success, the relative, the limited and vain and vile. To those who make this division, this opposition, complete liberation is only attainable in the peace of the One, the featurelessness of the Infinite, the non-becoming of the Absolute which is to them the only real being; to be free all values must be destroyed, all limitations not only transcended but abolished. They have the liberation of the divine rest, but not the liberty of the divine action; they enjoy the peace of the Transcendent, but not the cosmic bliss of the Transcendent. Their liberty depends upon abstention from the cosmic movement, it cannot dominate and possess cosmic existence itself. But it is also possible for them to realise and participate in the immanent as well as the transcendent peace. Still the division is not cured. The liberty they enjoy is that of the silent unacting Witness, not the liberty of the divine Masterconsciousness which possesses all things, delights in all, casts itself into all forms of existence without fear of fall or loss or bondage or stain. All the rights of the spirit are not yet possessed; there is still a denial, a limitation, a holding back from the entire oneness of all existence. The workings of Mind, Life, Body are viewed from the calm and peace of the spiritual planes of the mental being and are filled with that calm and peace; they are not possessed by and subjected to the law of the allmastering Spirit.
2.16 - The 15th of August, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
This Supreme Being that we want to realize is not an impersonal Infinite but a Divine Personality; and in order to realize Him we have to grow conscious of our own true personality. You must know your own inner being. This Personality is not the inner mental, the inner vital and the inner physical being and its consciousness, as is many times wrongly described, but it is your true Being which is in direct communication with the Highest. Man grows by gradual growth in Nature and each has to realize his own Divine Person which is in the Supermind. Each is one with the Divine in essence, but in nature each is a partial manifestation of the Supreme Being.
Such being the aim of our Yoga we want to return upon life and transform it. The old Yogas failed to transform life because they did not go beyond mind. They used to catch at mental experiences, but when they came to apply them to life they reduced it to a mental formula. For example, the mental experience of the Infinite or the application of the principle of universal Love.
2.22 - Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
On the contrary, a system of rewards and punishments debases at once the ethical values of good, turns virtue into selfishness, a commercial bargain of self-interest, and replaces the right motive of abstinence from evil by a baser motive. Human beings have erected the rule of reward and punishment as a social necessity in order to restrain the doing of things harmful to the community and encourage what is helpful to it; but to erect this human device into a general law of cosmic Nature or a law of the Supreme Being or the supreme law of existence is a procedure of doubtful value. It is human, but also puerile, to impose the insufficient and narrow standards of our own Ignorance on the larger and more intricate operations of cosmic Nature or on the action of the supreme Wisdom and supreme Good which draws or raises us towards itself by a spiritual power working slowly in ourselves through our inner being and not by a law of temptation and compulsion upon our outer vital nature. If the soul is passing through an evolution by a many-sided and complex experience, any law of Karma or return to action and output of Energy, if it is to fit itself into that experience, must also be complex and cannot be of a simple and exiguous texture or rigid and one-sided in its incidence.
At the same time, a partial truth of fact, not of fundamental or general principle, may be admitted for this doctrine; for although the lines of the action of energy are distinct and independent, they can act together and upon each other, though not by any rigidly fixed law of correspondence. It is possible that in the total method of the returns of Nature there intervenes a strand of connection or rather of interaction between vital-physical good and ill and ethical good and ill, a limited correspondence and meeting-point between divergent dualities not amounting to an inseparable coherence. Our own varying energies, desires, movements are mixed together in their working and can bring about a mixed result: our vital part does demand substantial and external rewards for virtue, for knowledge, for every intellectual, aesthetic, moral or physical effort; it believes firmly in punishment for sin and even for ignorance. This may well either create or else reply to a corresponding cosmic action; for Nature takes us as we are and to some extent suits her movements to our need or our demands on her. If we accept the action of invisible Forces upon us, there may be also invisible Forces in Life-Nature that belong to the same plane of Consciousness-Force as this part of our being, Forces that move according to the same plan or the same power-motive as our lower vital nature. It can be often observed that when a self-assertive vital egoism goes on trampling on its way without restraint or scruple all that opposes its will or desire, it raises a mass of reactions against itself, reactions of hatred, antagonism, unease in men which may have their result now or hereafter, and still more formidable adverse reactions in universal Nature. It is as if the patience of Nature, her willingness to be used were exhausted; the very forces that the ego of the strong vital man seized and bent to its purpose rebel and turn against him, those he had trampled on rise up and receive power for his downfall: the insolent vital force of Man strikes against the throne of Necessity and is dashed to pieces or the lame foot of Punishment reaches at last the successful offender. This reaction to his energies may come upon him in another life and not at once, it may be a burden of consequence he takes up in his return to the field of these Forces; it may happen on a small as well as a large scale, to the small vital being and his small errors as well as in these larger instances.
2.23 - A Virtuous Woman is a Crown to Her Husband, #General Principles of Kabbalah, #Rabbi Moses Luzzatto, #Kabbalah
of the Supreme Being.
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2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Our notion of free will is apt to be tainted with the excessive individualism of the human ego and to assume the figure of an independent will acting on its own isolated account, in a complete liberty without any determination other than its own choice and single unrelated movement. This idea ignores the fact that our natural being is a part of cosmic Nature and our spiritual being exists only by the supreme Transcendence. Our total being can rise out of subjection to fact of present Nature only by an identification with a greater Truth and a greater Nature. The will of the individual, even when completely free, could not act in an isolated independence, because the individual being and nature are included in the universal Being and Nature and dependent on the all-overruling Transcendence. There could indeed be in the ascent a dual line. On one line the being could feel and behave as an independent self-existence uniting itself with its own impersonal Reality; it could, so self-conceived, act with a great force, but either this action would be still within an enlarged frame of its past and present self-formation of power of Nature or else it would be the cosmic or supreme Force that acted in it and there would be no personal initiation of action, no sense therefore of individual free will but only of an impersonal cosmic or supreme Will or Energy at its work. On the other line the being would feel itself a spiritual instrument and so act as a power of the Supreme Being, limited in its workings only by the potencies of the Supernature, which are without bounds or any restriction except its own Truth and self-law, and by the Will in her. But in either case there would be, as the condition of a freedom from the control of a mechanical action of Nature-forces, a submission to a greater conscious Power or an acquiescent unity of the individual being with its intention and movement in his own and in the world's existence.
For the action of a new power of being in a higher range of consciousness might, even in its control on outer Nature, be extraordinarily effective, but only because of its light of vision and a consequent harmony or identification with the cosmic and transcendent Will; for it is when it becomes an instrumentation of a higher instead of a lower Power that the will of the being becomes free from a mechanical determinism by action and process of cosmic Mind-Energy, Life-Energy, Matter-Energy and an ignorant subjection to the drive of this inferior Nature. A power of initiation, even of an individual overseeing of world-forces could be there; but it would be an instrumental initiation, a delegated overseeing: the choice of the individual would receive the sanction of the Infinite because it was itself an expression of some truth of the Infinite. Thus the individuality would become more and more powerful and effective in proportion as it realised itself as a centre and formation of the universal and transcendent Being and Nature. For as the progression of the change proceeded, the energy of the liberated individual would be no longer the limited energy of mind, life and body, with which it started; the being would emerge into and put on - even as there would emerge in him and descend into him, assuming him into it - a greater light of Consciousness and a greater action of Force: his natural existence would be the instrumentation of a superior Power, an overmental and supramental Consciousness-Force, the power of the original Divine Shakti. All the processes of the evolution would be felt as the action of a supreme and universal Consciousness, a supreme and universal Force working in whatever way it chose, on whatever level, within whatever self-determined limits, a conscious working of the transcendent and cosmic Being, the action of the omnipotent and omniscient World-Mother raising the being into herself, into her supernature. In place of the Nature of Ignorance with the individual as its closed field and unconscious or half-conscious instrument, there would be a Super-Nature of the divine Gnosis and the individual soul would be its conscious, open and free field and instrument, a participant in its action, aware of its purpose and process, aware too of its own greater Self, the universal, the transcendent Reality, and of its own Person as illimitably one with that and yet an individual being of Its being, an instrument and a spiritual centre.
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It follows that the psychic and the spiritual transformation must be far advanced, even as complete as may be, before there can be any beginning of the third and consummating supramental change; for it is only by this double transmutation that the self-will of the Ignorance can be totally altered into a spiritual obedience to the remoulding truth and will of the greater Consciousness of the Infinite. A long, difficult stage of constant effort, energism, austerity of the personal will, tapasya, has ordinarily to be traversed before a more decisive stage can be reached in which a state of self-giving of all the being to the Supreme Being and the Supreme Nature can become total and absolute. There has to be a preliminary stage of seeking and effort with a central offering or self-giving of the heart and soul and mind to the Highest and a later mediate stage of total conscious reliance on its greater Power aiding the personal endeavour; that integral reliance again must grow into a final complete abandonment of oneself in every part and every movement to the working of the higher Truth in the nature.
The totality of this abandonment can only come if the psychic change has been complete or the spiritual transformation has reached a very high state of achievement. For it implies a giving up by the mind of all its moulds, ideas, mental formations, of all opinion, of all its habits of intellectual observation and judgment to be replaced first by an intuitive and then by an overmind or supramental functioning which inaugurates the action of a direct Truth-consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There is demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires, emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become an instrument and an epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment. Our physical part has to give up its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments, settled grooves of nature, its doubt and disbelief in all that is beyond itself, its faith in the inevitability of the fixed functionings of the physical mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and force of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscient in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit. These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance. The admission of such a change can only be brought about by a full emergence of the soul and inner being, the dominance of the psychic and spiritual will and a long working of their light and power on the parts of the being, a psychic and spiritual remoulding of the whole nature.
2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It would have the joy of action and result but would be free from all ego claim, attachment to action or demand of result; it would do what it saw had to be done and was moved to do. In mental nature there can be an opposition or disparity between self-effort and obedience to the Higher Will, for there the self or apparent person sees itself as different from the Supreme Being,
Will or Person; but here the person is being of the Being and the opposition or disparity does not arise. The action of the person is the action of the Ishwara in the person, of the One in the many, and there can be no reason for a separative assertion of self-will or pride of independence.
2.3.02 - The Supermind or Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Purushottama of the Gita is the Supreme Being; the supermind is a power of the Supreme - or proceeding from him, if you like.
Supermind is not the Purushottama consciousness, it is a
3.04 - The Way of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is the ordinary movement by which what may be at first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes on the hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga, the inner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual source of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the sentiment and passion, all the moods and experiences of love concentrated on a supreme object of desire and intensified a hundredfold beyond the highest acme of intensity possible to a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life, the illumination by an unseized vision, the unsatisfied yearning for a single object of the heart's desire, the intense impatience of all that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the obstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of all beauty and delight in a single form. And there are all the many moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation, the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of the inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly an intense spiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding lotus of the spirit. And as the intensity of its seeking is beyond the highest power of the normal human emotions, so also the delight and the final ecstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination and beyond expression by speech. For this is the delight of the Godhead that passes human understanding. Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form of the Supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any and all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which admit the greatest intensity, are always those by which he can be most intensely pursued and possessed with the profoundest ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart and therefore apart from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being in the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other than its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.
3.1.01 - Distinctive Features of the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
One thing I feel I must say in connection with your remark about the soul of India and Xs observation about this stress on this-worldliness to the exclusion of other-worldliness. I do not quite understand in what connection his remark was made or what he meant by this-worldliness, but I feel it necessary to state my own position in the matter. My own life and my Yoga have always been, since my coming to India, both this-worldly and other-worldly without any exclusiveness on either side. All human interests are, I suppose, this-worldly and most of them have entered into my mental field and some, like politics, into my life, but at the same time, since I set foot on Indian soil on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, I began to have spiritual experiences, but these were not divorced from this world but had an inner and intimate bearing on it, such as a feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting material objects and bodies. At the same time I found myself entering supraphysical worlds and planes with influences and an effect from them upon the material plane, so I could make no sharp divorce or irreconcilable opposition between what I have called the two ends of existence and all that lies between them. For me all is the Brahman and I find the Divine everywhere. Everyone has the right to throw away this-worldliness and choose other-worldliness only and if he finds peace by that choice he is greatly blessed. I, personally, have not found it necessary to do this in order to have peace. In my Yoga also I found myself moved to include both worlds in my purview, the spiritual and the material, and to try to establish the divine Consciousness and the divine Power in mens hearts and in earthly life, not for personal salvation only but for a life divine here. This seems to me as spiritual an aim as any and the fact of this life taking up earthly pursuits and earthly things into its scope cannot, I believe, tarnish its spirituality or alter its Indian character. This at least has always been my view and experience of the reality and nature of the world and things and the Divine: it seemed to me as nearly as possible the integral truth about them and I have therefore spoken of the pursuit of it as the integral Yoga. Everyone is, of course, free to reject and disbelieve in this kind of integrality or to believe in the spiritual necessity of an entire other-worldliness excluding any kind of this-worldliness altogether, but that would make the exercise of my Yoga impossible. My Yoga can include indeed a full experience of the other worlds, the plane of the supreme Spirit and the other planes in between and their possible effects upon our life and material world; but it will be quite possible to insist only on the realisation of the Supreme Being or Ishwara even in one aspect, Shiva, Krishna as Lord of the world and Master of ourselves and our works or else the universal Sachchidananda, and attain to the essential results of this Yoga and afterwards to proceed from them to the integral results if one accepted the ideal of the divine life and this material world conquered by the Spirit. It is this view and experience of things and of the truth of existence that enabled me to write The Life Divine and Savitri. The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve him with ones works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.
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31.10 - East and West, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In this new epoch our aspiration should be for the self-realisation of the East and for this we have first to realise the basic reality of all things and constantly live therein, but not by severing ourselves from the world and its objects. We shall not remain satisfied with the realisation of the Formless alone, because each and every manifestation of the formless Self can yield some special kind of delight and fulfilment. This truth we need must be learnt from the West. Also we have to learn that this limited delight too does not really belong to the finite, it is derived from the Infinite and has its final fulfilment in the Infinite. We are not going to merge everything into the indeterminate Eternal, but we shall enrich the delight we experience in the Formless Divine by the perception of the same and equal Divinity in all the diverse forms and objects in the manifestation. We do not propose to lose the earthly joy in the bliss of the indeterminate Absolute. We shall give full importance to every one of the infinite activities of life, but like the West we shall not consider any of them, in their present make-up, as the one thing needful. We shall see the Supreme Being surrounded with all His powers and beauties. The ten-armed Goddess Durga will spread out her ten arms in ten different directions.
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3.2.05 - The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I do not know that there is anything like a Purushottama consciousness which the human being can attain or realise for himself,for, in the Gita, the Purushottama is the Supreme Lord, the Supreme Being who is beyond the Immutable and the Mutable and contains both the One and the Many. Man, says the Gita, can attain the Brahmic consciousness, realise himself as an eternal portion of the Purushottama and live in the Purushottama. The Purushottama consciousness is the consciousness of the Supreme Being and man by loss of ego and realisation of his true essence can live in it.
***
32.07 - The God of the Scientist, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
We do not know how many have given due regard to this remarkable fact that the rational mind of modern times, inspired by the spirit of science which has turned towards spirituality for whatever reason, is often attracted to the pure Vedanta or the Buddhistic philosophy of India. The chief reason for this appears to me to be this that the truth and the essence of religion are looked upon as anthropomorphic by the scientist. The scientist can hardly accept this position. For, the very speciality of the scientific procedure is to keep aside the human factor from human knowledge. A particular knowledge bears the stamp of the knower, but science aims at knowledge independent of its knower. Now the scientific attitude from its summit declares, I do not know the unknown and the unknowable that is beyond. This learned ignorance which is called agnosticism, and is, in a little altered form, known as scepticism - that is the legitimate consummation of scientific rationalism. But when one looks upon this unknown and unknowable with religious reverence, one says, "Therefrom speech returns baffled along with the mind." This is verily the Brahman, beyond speech and mind; and its other name is then Nihil.. Mind can understand mind or its absence or disintegration. It is extremely difficult for it to comprehend anything that is apart from these two extreme terms. It is not so difficult for the rational mind to accept the spiritual doctrine of 'not this, not this'; but the other aspects of spirituality - the truth about divine Forms and Incarnations, about Purushottama, the Supreme Being, even the transmigration of the soul, - all these are senseless enigmas to reason-bound mind. The triune principle of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss of the Vedanta is such a general, neutral and indefinite principle that it seems to be intuited and felt by the pure intellect when it climbs up to its acme. In other words, at the highest level of the brain, as it were, there takes place the first revelation of spirituality, a glow and reflection amounting to the perception of a formless infinite, whose true nature is separately or simultaneously an existence, consciousness and bliss or a non-Being pregnant with all the essence of Being.
The scientific intellect has thus reached a certain theism and the poet and the artist also have reached similar levels through different ways of approach. The aesthetic taste of the artist, the sense of intense delight in the beauty of the cosmic creation is not born of the intellect but is allied to it, and falls within the category of the mind - it is a thing that belongs to this side of the boundary of consciousness, which we have to cross to attain to the true spiritual world. The twilight consciousness is, as it were, on the border-line; it belongs in its rhythm, gesture, gait and expression still to this shore-land rather than the other, howsoever may the artist aspire for the shore beyond. No doubt, I speak of the creations of artists in general. There are rare artists whose creation embodies genuine spiritual experience and realisation. But that is a different matter - it concerns the purely spiritual art. Ordinary works of art do not belong to that category and derive their inspiration from a different source. With regard to philosophy something similar might be said. Most of the Indian philosophies, such as the philosophies of Shankara, Ramanuja, the sage Kapila and Patanjali are but intellectual expressions of different spiritual visions and realisations. If it be so, then is it not possible for science also to become a vehicle or expression of spiritual realisations? This may not have materialised up till now; generally or to a large degree perhaps an attempt of the kind was made in the line that is known as occultism, and which was called alchemy by the ancients, but the effort ended in a spurious system of rites and ceremonies. No doubt this knowledge, even at its best, falls short of the Higher Knowledge, Para Vidya; still there was a time when the Inferior Knowledge, Apara Vidya, was accepted as a stepping-stone to the Higher. "Exceeding death by Avidya (Ignorance) one has to enjoy immortality through Vidya (Knowledge)" - "Avidyaya mrtyum tirtva vidyaya amrtam asnute."
36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Zen
The ancient seers dealt with supraphysical truths. Modern science and philosophy deal with abstract concepts. But these concepts are born of the rational intellect. We may call them theories, well-arranged and systematised; hence nothing extraordinary. But the ancient seers realised and tried to express the transcendental Truth and its Power. There is a play of Power behind the world of phenomena which at once resolves itself into more and more subtle forms and evolves from the deepest level to the grosser manifestations. The seers of yore were wont to study the origin and nature of all the different stages. of subtle forms knitting them into a system. By virtue of their spiritual insight they discovered that the world consists of different levels of existence sphere after sphere ranging from the gross to the subtle, peak after peak in an ascending order. One existence runs through them all. the Supreme Being is there in each part. The Power of the self-same Being works in each and every part, differing in form and function in different levels of manifestation. Nevertheless there is a symmetry due to the fact that all becomings and their dynamis proceed from one fundamental Being. Again, the truth in one level is reflected on other levels, for it is the same Power of the Supreme Being that travels from the most subtle to the most gross manifestation. So there is a parallelism in the nature of all the levels of existence.
As for instance, when the Vedic seers speak of fire, they mean something of which the gross form is fire and which itself is tejas (luminous energy) in its subtle form. In the spiritual world, in its subtler form it is called energising consciousness. Likewise the sun is, serially and simultaneously, light, the power of revelation and knowledge. When the Vedic seers say, idam srestham jyotisam... (This is the Light, the highest of all lights; it has come; the Supreme knowledge, beautiful and diverse, vast and all-pervading, has taken birth), they make use of the gross dawn to hint at some subtle dawn. They could visualise the entire creation in its wholeness. That is why their realisations had the stamp of wholeness which can be applied to all the levels and phases of creation. We, the modernists, look upon truth as something entirely comprehensible by the intellect. We put it syllogistically and understand it part by part separately. The ancients used to grasp the truth through the fullness of their heart, the inner being. So it could manifest as an indivisible embodiment of mundane forms and supraphysical concepts. To us the truth has three distinct forms: in the material, vital and mental worlds. Each is different from the other, having a definition of its own. But the angle of vision of the ancient seers was not of such an analytical type. Their synthetic realisation revealed such mantras as comprised the essence of all the levels.
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There are four Vedas and each Veda consists of several parts. The principal parts of each Veda are known as the Samhitas and the Brahmanas. The Samhitas are the collection of the mantras, the Veda proper. The Brahmanas are the commentaries, interpretations or new suggestions. Again the Brahmanas are divided into the Brahmanas proper, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads. The Samhitas comprise the general Vedic experiences and the mantras necessary for the propitiation and manifestation of the gods. And the Brahmanas provide all the details connected with the ceremonies, sacrificial rites, etc. The Upanishads are the repository of the knowledge of the Supreme Being divested of ceremonies and allegories. The Samhitas have laid stress on the forms of religious culture, while the Upanishads on the spirit of it. In a way, the Aranyakas combined in themselves both the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. To sum up, the first and foremost part of the Vedas are the Samhitas which are immediately followed by the Brahmanas culminating in the Aranyakas which in their turn terminate in the Upanishads. But there are exceptions. For example, the Aitareya Aranyaka introduces the Rigveda Samhita, while the Brihadaranyaka itself is an Upanishad.
These four divisions of the Veda are said to correspond to the four stages of human life. In the first stage, the foremost duty of a Brahmachari (a student practising celibacy) is to recite the mantras of the Samhitas which contain the quintessence of the ideal of life. In the next stage, on entering upon household life one has to practise ceremonies and sacrificial rites and thus the stress is laid on the Brahmanas. In the third stage of life, when one renounces the household life and retires into the forest one has to practise all those sacrificial rites and ceremonies symbolically as a part of one's spiritual discipline following the teachings of the Aranyakas. In the fourth and final stage, one gives up all one's earlier practices and in conformity with the guidance of the Upanishads one takes to the contemplation of the supreme Truth which cannot be attained by reasonings and discussions (naisa tarkena matiraPaneya). ow we may say that the Samhitas, the Brahmanas and the Upanishads indicate changes in the practice of the Vedic truth undergone with the march of time. The spiritual discipline of the Samhitas has for its aim the attainment of Godhood which is an aspect of the cosmic manifestation of the transcendental triune principle, Existence-Consciousness. Bliss. The discipline of the Brahmanas tries to manifest the spirit of the former through external practice. And the spiritual discipline of the Upanishads does not concern itself so much with the manifestation of the gods as it does with getting absorbed in the ultimate Source from whence the gods originated. In other words, the aim of the Upanishadic truth is to indicate how the light of consciousness dwelling in the heart of everyone like a steady flame of the size of the thumb can be merged into the boundless ocean of the transcendental consciousness.
3.7.1.01 - Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Obviously, this scheme of things is only a variation of the old spiritual-material bribe and menace, the bribe of a Heaven of fat joys for the good and the threat of a hell of eternal fire or bestial tortures for the wicked. The idea of the Law of the world as primarily a dispenser of rewards and punishments is cognate to the idea of the Supreme Being as a judge, father and school-master who is continually rewarding with lollipops his good boys and continually caning his naughty urchins. It is cognate also to the barbarous and unthinking system of sometimes savage and always degrading punishment for social offences on which human society, unable still to find out or organise a more satisfactory way, is still founded. Man insists continually on making God in his own image instead of seeking to make himself more and more in the image of God, and all these ideas are the reflection of the child and the savage and the animal in us which we have still failed to transform or outgrow. We should be inclined to wonder how these fancies of children found their way into such profound philosophical religions as Buddhism and Hinduism, if it were not so patent that men will not deny themselves the luxury of tacking on the rubbish from their past to the deeper thoughts of their sages.
No doubt, since these ideas were so prominent, they must have had their use in training humanity. Perhaps even it is true that the Supreme deals with the child soul according to its childishness and allows it to continue its sensational imaginations of heaven and hell for a time beyond the death of the physical body. Perhaps both these ideas of after-life and of rebirth as fields of punishment and reward were needed because suited to our half-mentalised animality. But after a certain stage the system ceases to be really effective. Men believe in Heaven and Hell but go on sinning merrily, quit at last by a Papal indulgence or the final priestly absolution or a death-bed repentance or a bath in the Ganges or a sanctified death at Benares,such are the childish devices by which we escape from our childishness! And in the end the mind grows adult and puts the whole nursery nonsense away with contempt. The reward and punishment theory of rebirth, if a little more elevated or at least less crudely sensational, comes to be as ineffective. And it is good that it should be so. For it is intolerable that man with his divine capacity should continue to be virtuous for a reward and shun sin out of terror. Better a strong sinner than a selfish virtuous coward or a petty hucksterer with God; there is more divinity in him, more capacity of elevation. Truly the Gita has said well, kpa phalahetava. And it is inconceivable that the system of this vast and majestic world should have been founded on these petty and paltry motives. There is reason in these theories? then reason of the nursery, puerile. Ethics? then ethics of the mud, muddy.
3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
to the Supreme Being, Parameshwara, who governs the universe
as the Master of Nature, the Disposer of its Laws, the Almighty
4.02 - The Integral Perfection, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential. condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the Supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings. A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible. But this unity will not be an inmost spiritual oneness qualified, so long as the human life lasts, by a separative existence in mind, life and body; the full perfection is a possession, through this spiritual unity, of unity too with the universal Mind, the universal Life, the universal Form which are the other constant terms of cosmic being. Moreover, since human life is still accepted as a self-expression of the realised Divine in man, there must be an action of the entire divine nature in our life; and this brings in the need of the supramental conversion which substitutes the native action of spiritual being for the imperfect action of the superficial nature and spiritualises and transfigures its mental, vital and physical parts by the spiritual ideality. These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being.
author class:Sri Aurobindo
4.11 - The Perfection of Equality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect equality. Perfection in the sense in which we use it in Yoga, means a growth out of a lower undivine into a higher divine nature. In terms of knowledge it is a putting on the being of the higher self and a casting away of the darker broken lower self or a transforming of our imperfect state into the rounded luminous fullness of our real and spiritual personality. In terms of devotion and adoration it is a growing into a likeness of the nature or the law of the being of the Divine, to be united with whom we aspire, -- for if there is not this likeness, this oneness of the law of the being, unity between that transcending and universal and this individual spirit is not possible. The supreme divine nature is founded on equality. This affirmation is true of it whether we look on the Supreme Being as a pure silent Self and Spirit or as the divine Master of cosmic existence. The pure Self is equal, unmoved, the witness in an impartial peace of all the happenings and relations of cosmic existence. While it is not averse to them, -- aversion is not equality, nor, if that were the attitude of the Self to cosmic existence, could the universe come at all into being or proceed upon its cycles, -- a detachment, the calm of an equal regard, a superiority to the reactions which trouble and are the disabling weakness of the soul involved in outward nature, are the very substance of the silent Infinite's purity and the condition of its impartial assent and support to the many-sided movement of the universe. But in that power too of the Supreme which governs and develops these motions, the same equality is a basic condition.
The Master of things cannot be affected or troubled by the reactions of things; if he were, he would be subject to them, not master, not free to develop them according to his sovereign will and wisdom and according to the inner truth and necessity of what is behind their relations, but obliged rather to act according to the claim of temporary accident and phenomenon. The truth of all things is in the calm of their depths, not in the shifting inconstant wave form on the surface. The supreme conscious Being in his divine knowledge and will and love governs their evolution -- to our ignorance so often a cruel confusion and distraction -- from these depths and is not troubled by the clamour of the surface. The divine nature does not share in our gropings and our passions; when we speak of the divine wrath or favour or of God suffering in man, we are using a human language which mistranslates the inner significance of the movement we characterise. We see something of the real truth of them when we rise out of the phenomenal mind into the heights of the spiritual being. For then we perceive that whether in the silence of self or in its action in the cosmos, the Divine is always Sachchidananda, an infinite existence, an infinite consciousness and self-founded power of conscious being, an infinite bliss in all his existence. We ourselves begin to dwell in an equal light, strength, joy-the psychological rendering of the divine knowledge, will and delight in self and things which are the active universal outpourings from those infinite sources. In the strength of that light, power and joy a secret self and spirit within us accepts and transforms always into food of its perfect experience the dual letters of the mind's transcript of life, and if there were not the hidden greater existence even now within us, we could not bear the pressure of the universal force or subsist in this great and dangerous world. A perfect equality of our spirit and nature is a means by which we can move back from the troubled and ignorant outer consciousness into this inner kingdom of heaven and possess the spirit's eternal kingdoms, rajyam samrddham, of greatness, joy and peace. That self-elevation to the divine nature is the complete fruit and the whole occasion of the discipline of equality demanded from us by the self-perfecting aim in Yoga.
4.17 - The Action of the Divine Shakti, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The shakti in this higher status reveals itself as the presence or potentiality of the infinite existence, consciousness, will, delight and when it is so seen and felt, the being turns towards it in whatever way, with its adoration or its will of aspiration or some kind of attraction of the lesser to the greater, to know it, to be full of and possessed by it, to be one with it in the sense and action of the whole nature. But at first while we still live in the mind, there is a gulf of division or else a double action. The mental, vital and physical energy in us and the universe is felt to be a derivation from the supreme shakti, but at the same time an inferior, separated and in some sense another working. The real spiritual force may send down its messages or the light and power of its presence above us to the lower levels or may descend occasionally and even for a time possess, but it is then mixed with the inferior workings and partially transforms and spiritualises them, but is itself diminished and altered in the process. There is an intermittent higher action or a dual working of the nature. Or we find that the shakti for a time raises the being to a higher spiritual plane arid then lowers it back into the inferior levels. These alternations must be regarded as the natural vicissitudes of a process of transformation from the normal to the spiritual being. The transformation, the perfection cannot for the integral Yoga be complete until the link between the mental and the spiritual action is formed and a higher knowledge applied to all the activities of our existence. That link is the supramental or gnostic energy in which the incalculable infinite power of the Supreme Being, consciousness, delight formulates itself as an ordering divine will and wisdom, a light and power in the being which shapes all the thought, will, feeling, action and replaces the corresponding individual movements.
This supramental shakti may form itself as a spiritualised intuitive light and power in the mind itself, and that is a great but still a mentally limited spiritual action. Or it may transform altogether the mind and raise the whole being to the supramental level. In any case this is the first necessity of this part of the Yoga, to lose the ego of the doer, the ego-idea and the sense of one's own power of action and initiation of action and control of the result of action and merge it in the sense and vision of the universal shakti originating, shaping, turning to its ends the action of ourselves and others and of all the persons and forces of the world. And this realisation can become absolute and complete in all the parts of our being only if we can have that sense and vision of it in all its forms, on all the levels of our being and the world being, as the material, vital, mental and supramental energy of the Divine, but all these, all the powers of all the planes must be seen and known as self-formulations of the one spiritual shakti, infinite in being, consciousness and Ananda. It is not the invariable rule that this power should first manifest itself on the lower levels in the lower forms of energy and then reveal its higher spiritual nature. And if it does so come, first in its mental, vital or physical universalism, we must be careful not to rest content there. It may come instead at once in its higher reality, in the might of the spiritual splendour. The difficulty then will be to bear and hold the Power until it has laid powerful hands on and transformed the energies of the lower levels of the being. The difficulty will be less in proportion as we have been able to attain to a large quiet and equality, samata, and either to realise, feel and live in the one tranquil immutable self in all or else to make a genuine and complete surrender of ourselves to the divine Master of the Yoga.
4.26 - The Supramental Time Consciousness, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
our present sense and intelligence to which only phenomena are concrete and real, but to the supramental being always and absolutely and intimately present and real. This indeed is that which to its knowledge, sense, vision, idea, feeling is most concretely real and the phenomena which are now so close and all-important to us, are to it less concrete, not self-existent at all but dependent on the support of the infinite consciousness and its force of presentation: there is thus a complete reversal of the order in the conception of realities. It is not that the phenomena in their turn become abstract, unreal, unsubstantial creations of consciousness, - that is only the result of a certain exclusive realisation, when there is an identification with the essence of absolute being to the exclusion of its power, - but that they are felt as existing here only in a certain movement of the infinite, real only because they are made, as it were, out of the substance of infinite being. That which determines them, the truth of their essence and nature, svarupa, svabhava, that which gives them the power to be, is not originally here, but above in the Supreme Being and consciousness of the infinite. All their true truth, all their real reality is there in that supreme consciousness and here only hidden in the inmost heart of their existence, guhayam, but not fully expressed in their overt outward phenomena. Therefore to know them only through the externals or through superficial inner movements which is all that our mind now does, is to miss their true truth and reality and to know them only with a partial and mistaken knowledge subject to the limitations, errors, incapacities of the mental ignorance.
All that determines their manifestation in our time and space is also beyond and here only in the hidden secrecy within them, and therefore the mind following their line of manifestation misses that which determines them and can only see a part of the actually present outward executive play of forces that help to give them their immediate character and direction. It is only the consciousness that reigns above, that of the supreme Ishwara, and is present in their secret heart, hr.ddese tis.t.hati, that knows and determines all their true truth and their manifestation in eternal time.
5.4.01 - Notes on Root-Sounds, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
the Supreme Being.
to be lord, take possession of .. to invigorate .. (to force, compel).
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the Supreme Being
sunshine, heat.. refulgence .. *wonder
BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
each of them illuminating his works one by another.* the Supreme Being of Heaven, or
of all that is comprehended under this name, is Zeus, for it is by Heaven that Zeus gives
life to all things. the Supreme Being of the Sun is Light, for it is by the disk of the Sun
that we receive the benefit of the light. The thirty-six horoscopes of the fixed stars have
BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
branches below (ch. xv.). The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the LOGOS; but one
has to go beyond those roots to unite oneself with Krishna, who, says Arjuna (XI.), is "greater than
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"The Puranas constantly teach incompatible doctrines! According to this passage, the Supreme Being
is not the inert cause of creation only, but exercises the functions of an active providence. The
BOOK XII. - Of the creation of angels and men, and of the origin of evil, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
This may be enough to prevent any one from supposing, when we speak of the apostate angels, that they could have another nature, derived, as it were, from some different origin, and not from God. From the great impiety of this error we shall disentangle ourselves the more readily and easily, the more distinctly we understand that which God spoke by the angel when He sent Moses to the children of Israel: "I am that I am."[522] For since God is the supreme existence, that is to say, supremely is, and is therefore unchangeable, the things that He made He empowered to be, but not to be supremely like Himself. To some He communicated a more ample, to others a more limited existence, and thus arranged the natures of beings in ranks. For as from sapere comes sapientia, so from esse comes essentia,a new word indeed, which the old Latin writers did not use, but which is naturalized in our day,[523] that our language may not want an equivalent for the Greek . For this is expressed word for word by essentia.[Pg 484] Consequently, to that nature which supremely is, and which created all else that exists, no nature is contrary save that which does not exist. For nonentity is the contrary of that which is. And thus there is no being contrary to God, the Supreme Being, and Author of all beings whatsoever.
3. That the enemies of God are so, not by nature but by will, which, as it injures them, injures a good nature; for if vice does not injure, it is not vice.
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Thus the true cause of the blessedness of the good angels is found to be this, that they cleave to Him who supremely is. And if we ask the cause of the misery of the bad, it occurs to us, and not unreasonably, that they are miserable because they have forsaken Him who supremely is, and have turned to themselves who have no such essence. And this vice, what else is it called than pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin."[525] They were unwilling, then, to preserve their strength for God; and as adherence to God was the condition of their enjoying an ampler being, they diminished it by preferring themselves to Him. This was the first defect, and the first impoverishment, and the first flaw of their nature, which was created, not indeed supremely existent, but finding its blessedness in the enjoyment of the Supreme Being; whilst by abandoning Him it should become, not indeed no nature at all, but a nature with a less ample existence, and therefore wretched.
If the further question be asked, What was the efficient cause of their evil will? there is none. For what is it which makes the will bad, when it is the will itself which makes the action bad? And consequently the bad will is the cause of the bad action, but nothing is the efficient cause of the bad will. For if anything is the cause, this thing either has or has not a will. If it has, the will is either good or bad. If good, who is so left to himself as to say that a good will[Pg 488] makes a will bad? For in this case a good will would be the cause of sin; a most absurd supposition. On the other hand, if this hypothetical thing has a bad will, I wish to know what made it so; and that we may not go on for ever, I ask at once, what made the first evil will bad? For that is not the first which was itself corrupted by an evil will, but that is the first which was made evil by no other will. For if it were preceded by that which made it evil, that will was first which made the other evil. But if it is replied, "Nothing made it evil; it always was evil," I ask if it has been existing in some nature. For if not, then it did not exist at all; and if it did exist in some nature, then it vitiated and corrupted it, and injured it, and consequently deprived it of good. And therefore the evil will could not exist in an evil nature, but in a nature at once good and mutable, which this vice could injure. For if it did no injury, it was no vice; and consequently the will in which it was, could not be called evil. But if it did injury, it did it by taking away or diminishing good. And therefore there could not be from eternity, as was suggested, an evil will in that thing in which there had been previously a natural good, which the evil will was able to diminish by corrupting it. If, then, it was not from eternity, who, I ask, made it? The only thing that can be suggested in reply is, that something which itself had no will, made the will evil. I ask, then, whether this thing was superior, inferior, or equal to it? If superior, then it is better. How, then, has it no will, and not rather a good will? The same reasoning applies if it was equal; for so long as two things have equally a good will, the one cannot produce in the other an evil will. Then remains the supposition that that which corrupted the will of the angelic nature which first sinned, was itself an inferior thing without a will. But that thing, be it of the lowest and most earthly kind, is certainly itself good, since it is a nature and being, with a form and rank of its own in its own kind and order. How, then, can a good thing be the efficient cause of an evil will? How, I say, can good be the cause of evil? For when the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evilnot because that is evil to which it turns, but because the[Pg 489] turning itself is wicked. Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil, but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring an inferior thing. For if two men, alike in physical and moral constitution, see the same corporal beauty, and one of them is excited by the sight to desire an illicit enjoyment, while the other stedfastly maintains a modest restraint of his will, what do we suppose brings it about, that there is an evil will in the one and not in the other? What produces it in the man in whom it exists? Not the bodily beauty, for that was presented equally to the gaze of both, and yet did not produce in both an evil will. Did the flesh of the one cause the desire as he looked? But why did not the flesh of the other? Or was it the disposition? But why not the disposition of both? For we are supposing that both were of a like temperament of body and soul. Must we, then, say that the one was tempted by a secret suggestion of the evil spirit? As if it was not by his own will that he consented to this suggestion and to any inducement whatever! This consent, then, this evil will which he presented to the evil suasive influence,what was the cause of it, we ask? For, not to delay on such a difficulty as this, if both are tempted equally, and one yields and consents to the temptation, while the other remains unmoved by it, what other account can we give of the matter than this, that the one is willing, the other unwilling, to fall away from chastity? And what causes this but their own wills, in cases at least such as we are supposing, where the temperament is identical? The same beauty was equally obvious to the eyes of both; the same secret temptation pressed on both with equal violence. However minutely we examine the case, therefore, we can discern nothing which caused the will of the one to be evil. For if we say that the man himself made his will evil, what was the man himself before his will was evil but a good nature created by God, the unchangeable good? Here are two men who, before the temptation, were alike in body and soul, and of whom one yielded to the tempter who persuaded him, while the other could not be persuaded to desire that lovely body which was equally before the eyes of both. Shall we say of the successfully tempted man that he[Pg 490] corrupted his own will, since he was certainly good before his will became bad? Then, why did he do so? Was it because his will was a nature, or because it was made of nothing? We shall find that the latter is the case. For if a nature is the cause of an evil will, what else can we say than that evil arises from good, or that good is the cause of evil? And how can it come to pass that a nature, good though mutable, should produce any evil that is to say, should make the will itself wicked?
Meno, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Plato's doctrine of ideas has attained an imaginary clearness and definiteness which is not to be found in his own writings. The popular account of them is partly derived from one or two passages in his Dialogues interpreted without regard to their poetical environment. It is due also to the misunderstanding of him by the Aristotelian school; and the erroneous notion has been further narrowed and has become fixed by the realism of the schoolmen. This popular view of the Platonic ideas may be summed up in some such formula as the following: 'Truth consists not in particulars, but in universals, which have a place in the mind of God, or in some far-off heaven. These were revealed to men in a former state of existence, and are recovered by reminiscence (anamnesis) or association from sensible things. The sensible things are not realities, but shadows only, in relation to the truth.' These unmeaning propositions are hardly suspected to be a caricature of a great theory of knowledge, which Plato in various ways and under many figures of speech is seeking to unfold. Poetry has been converted into dogma; and it is not remarked that the Platonic ideas are to be found only in about a third of Plato's writings and are not confined to him. The forms which they assume are numerous, and if taken literally, inconsistent with one another. At one time we are in the clouds of mythology, at another among the abstractions of mathematics or metaphysics; we pass imperceptibly from one to the other. Reason and fancy are mingled in the same passage. The ideas are sometimes described as many, coextensive with the universals of sense and also with the first principles of ethics; or again they are absorbed into the single idea of good, and subordinated to it. They are not more certain than facts, but they are equally certain (Phaedo). They are both personal and impersonal. They are abstract terms: they are also the causes of things; and they are even transformed into the demons or spirits by whose help God made the world. And the idea of good (Republic) may without violence be converted into the Supreme Being, who 'because He was good' created all things (Tim.).
It would be a mistake to try and reconcile these differing modes of thought. They are not to be regarded seriously as having a distinct meaning. They are parables, prophecies, myths, symbols, revelations, aspirations after an unknown world. They derive their origin from a deep religious and contemplative feeling, and also from an observation of curious mental phenomena. They gather up the elements of the previous philosophies, which they put together in a new form. Their great diversity shows the tentative character of early endeavours to think. They have not yet settled down into a single system. Plato uses them, though he also criticises them; he acknowledges that both he and others are always talking about them, especially about the Idea of Good; and that they are not peculiar to himself (Phaedo; Republic; Soph.). But in his later writings he seems to have laid aside the old forms of them. As he proceeds he makes for himself new modes of expression more akin to the Aristotelian logic.
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
come with a weight of authority derived from the Supreme Being Himself. Our excuse for writing the
following brief life-sketch of his as an Introduction to this edition of his sayings is, that there may be
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of what he was saying. He had never realized the Supreme Being, Who is the very fountain of eternal
love, wisdom and joy.
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my Guru. When I sit in contemplation of the Supreme Being, let me follow your example and not attend
to anything else before finishing my meditation. "
--
which makes us realise that we are really sons of the Supreme Being of Whom all that can be said is that
He exists, that He is Knowledge itself in the highest sense, and that He is the eternal fountain of love and
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853. When the Supreme Being is thought of as actionlessnei ther creating, sustaining nor
destroying I call Him by the name of Brahman or Purusha. But when I think of Him as activecreating,
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865. It is a case of involution and evolution. You go backward to the Supreme Being and your personality
becomes lost in that of Histhis is Samadhi. Then, with this higher personality, you retrace your steps
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1001. I do see the Supreme Being as the veritable Reality with my very eyes! Why then should I reason? I
do actually see that it is the Absolute Who has become all things around us; it is He who appears as the
Talks 001-025, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Further, the Tamil saint Manickavachagar has said of the specks dancing in a beam of sunlight, that if each represents a universe, the whole sunlight will represent the Supreme Being.
19th January, 1935
Talks 051-075, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
It refers to them. They say that there is God; the man must worship and meditate; ultimately the jiva merges into God. Others say that the Supreme Being and the jiva are always apart and never merge into each other. Howsoever it may be at the end, let us not trouble ourselves about it now. All are agreed that the jiva IS. Let the man find out the jiva, i.e., his Self. Then there will be time to find out if
the Self should merge in the Supreme, is a part thereof, or remains different from it. Let us not forestall the conclusion. Keep an open mind, dive within and find out the Self. The truth will itself dawn upon you. Why should you determine beforeh and if the finality is unity absolute or qualified, or duality? There is no meaning in it. The ascertainment is now made by logic and by intellect. The intellect derives light from the Self (the Higher Power). How can the reflected and partial light of the intellect envisage the whole and the original Light? The intellect cannot reach the Self and how can it ascertain its nature?
Talks 176-200, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Is the Supreme Being with or without attributes?
M.: Know first if you are with or without attri butes.
Talks 500-550, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The latter is the Supreme Reality whereas the former is the ego. It is to be overcome before the Truth is realised. the Supreme Being is unmanifest and the first sign of manifestation is Aham Sphurana (light of 'I'). The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says Aham nama abhavat (He became 'I' named). That is the original name of the Reality.
The Pandit asked about the operation of Grace. Is it the mind of the
Talks 600-652, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
You think that bhakti is meditation on the Supreme Being. So long as there is vibhakti (the sense of separateness), bhakti (reunion)
630
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
SRI AUROBINDO: As they say in the Upanishad, the Supreme Being with the
golden beard, etc.
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SRI AUROBINDO: They are directed by the universal or the Supreme Being.
The consciousness comes from the universal which is ultimately directed by
The Book of Certitude - P2, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Verily He Who is the Day-star of Truth and Revealer of the Supreme Being holdeth, for all time, undisputed sovereignty over all that is in heaven and on earth, though no man be found on earth to obey Him. He verily is independent of all earthly dominion, though He be utterly destitute. Thus We reveal unto thee the mysteries of the Cause of God, and bestow upon thee the gems of divine wisdom, that haply thou mayest soar on the wings of renunciation to those heights that are veiled from the eyes of men.
Wikipedia - Cult of the Supreme Being -- State religion during the French Revolution
Wikipedia - Shaivism -- One of the major traditions within Hinduism, and reveres Shiva as the Supreme Being
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Masonry#The_Supreme_Being_and_the_Volume_of_Sacred_Law
https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being_(Day_of_Glory)
Cult of the Supreme Being
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