TERMS STARTING WITH
thinker ::: n. --> One who thinks; especially and chiefly, one who thinks in a particular manner; as, a close thinker; a deep thinker; a coherent thinker.
TERMS ANYWHERE
2. In the Veda, the All-pervading Godhead, the Eternal Personality of Consciousness, the wide-moving One, that which has gone abroad triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker, and Former in the superconscient Bliss.
Abhidharmadīpa. In Sanskrit, "Lamp of ABHIDHARMA"; an Indian scholastic treatise probably composed between 450 and 550 CE. Only fragments of the treatise (sixty-two of 150 folios) are extant; these were discovered in Tibet in 1937. The treatise is composed of two parts-the Abhidharmadīpa, written in verse (kArikA), and a prose autocommentary, the VibhAsAprabhAvṛtti-both of which were probably composed by the same anonymous author. The author, who refers to himself merely as the "DīpakAra" ("author of the Dīpa") may be Vimalamitra (d.u.), an otherwise-unknown disciple of SAMGHABHADRA. The structure of the text is modeled on that of the influential ABHIDHARMAKOsABHAsYA, and almost half of the kArikA verses included in the Abhidharmadīpa are virtually identical to those found in the Abhidharmakosa. Although borrowing freely from the Kosa, the DīpakAra launches a harsh critique of VASUBANDHU's (whom he calls the "KosakAra," or "author of the Kosa") AbhidharmakosabhAsya, from the standpoint of SARVASTIVADA abhidharma. Vasubandhu is criticized for the SAUTRANTIKA tendencies betrayed in his doctrinal analyses and also for being a MahAyAnist adherent of the teachings of the "three natures" (TRISVABHAVA). As such, the Abhidharmadīpa's author seems to have been a follower of SAMGHABHADRA's *NYAYANUSARA, and the text helps to clarify the positions of SaMghabhadra and the orthodox VAIBHAsIKAs. The DīpakAra shares the latter's concern with providing both a systematic exegesis of abhidharma theory and a vigorous polemical defense of SarvAstivAda doctrinal positions. Since it presents theories of other thinkers not covered in the AbhidharmakosabhAsya, the Abhidharmadīpa serves as an important source for studying the history of Indian abhidharma. For example, in his discussion of the eponymous SarvAstivAda position that "everything exists" throughout all three time periods (TRIKALA) of past, present, and future, the DīpakAra also critiques three rival positions: the VIBHAJYAVADA and DArstAntikas, who maintain that only "part" exists (viz., the present); the Vaitulika and AyogasunyatAvAda, who say that nothing exists; and the PUDGALAVADA, who presume that existence is indeterminate (AVYAKṚTA).
Absolute ::: A term which unfortunately is much abused and often misused even in theosophical writings. It is aconvenient word in Occidental philosophy by which is described the utterly unconditioned; but it is apractice which violates both the etymology of the word and even the usage of some keen and carefulthinkers as, for instance, Sir William Hamilton in his Discussions (3rd edition, p.13n), who apparentlyuses the word absolute in the exactly correct sense in which theosophists should use it as meaning"finished," "perfected," "completed." As Hamilton observes: "The Absolute is diametrically opposed to,is contradictory of, the Infinite." This last statement is correct, and in careful theosophical writings theword Absolute should be used in Hamilton's sense, as meaning that which is freed, unloosed, perfected,completed.Absolute is from the Latin absolutum, meaning "freed," "unloosed," and is, therefore, an exact Englishparallel of the Sanskrit philosophical term moksha or mukti, and more mystically of the Sanskrit term socommonly found in Buddhist writings especially, nirvana -- an extremely profound and mysticalthought.Hence, to speak of parabrahman as being the Absolute may be a convenient usage for Occidentals whounderstand neither the significance of the term parabrahman nor the etymology, origin, and proper usageof the English word Absolute -- "proper" outside of a common and familiar employment.In strict accuracy, therefore, the student should use the word Absolute only when he means what theHindu philosopher means when he speaks of moksha or mukti or of a mukta -- i.e., one who has obtainedmukti or freedom, one who has arrived at the acme or summit of all evolution possible in any onehierarchy, although as compared with hierarchies still more sublime, such jivanmukta is but a merebeginner. The Silent Watcher in theosophical philosophy is an outstanding example of one who can besaid to be absolute in the fully accurate meaning of the word. It is obvious that the Silent Watcher is notparabrahman. (See also Moksha, Relativity)
According to the common teaching of the Schoolmen, philosophy is able to demonstrate the existence of God, though any statement of his essence is at best only analogical. See Analogy. Aquinas formulated the famous five ways by which to demonstrate God's existence, as prime motor, first cause, pure act to be assumed because there has to be act for anything to come into existence at all, necessary being in which existence and essence aie one, as set over against contingent beings which may be or not be, as summit of the hierarchy of beings. A basic factor in these demonstrations is the impossibility of infinite regress. God is conceived as the first cause and as the ultimate final cause of all beings. He is pure act, ens realissimum and summum bonum. Thomism and later Scholasticism denied that any adequate statement can be made on God's essence; but earlier thinkers, especially Anselm of Canterbury indulged in a so-called "Christian Rationalism" and believed that more can be asserted of God by '"necessary reasons". Anselm's proof of God's existence has been rejected by Aquinas and Kant. See Ontologtcal argument. -- R.A.
advanced ::: imp. & p. p. --> of Advance ::: a. --> In the van or front.
In the front or before others, as regards progress or ideas; as, advanced opinions, advanced thinkers.
Far on in life or time.
aladinist ::: n. --> One of a sect of freethinkers among the Mohammedans.
Alexander, Samuel: (1859-1938) English thinker who developed a non-psychic, neo-realistic metaphysics and synthesis. He makes the process of emergence a metaphysical principle. Although his inquiry is essentially a priori, his method is empirical. Realism at his hands becomes a quasi-materialism, an alternative to absolute idealism and ordinary materialism. It alms to combine the absoluteness of law in physics with the absolute unpredictability of emergent qualities. Whereas to the ancients and in the modern classical conception of physical science, the original stuff was matter and motion, after Minkowski, Einstein, Lorenz and others, it became indivisible space-time, instead of space and time.
Al Kindi, Al Farabi, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) were the first great philosophers who made large use of Aristotelian books. Their writings are of truly encyclopedic character and comprise the whole edifice of knowledge in their time. Their Aristotelianism is, however, mainly Neo-Platonism with addition of certain peripatetic notions. Avicenna is more of an Aristotelian than his predecessors. Al Farabi, e.g., held that cognition is ultimately due to an illumination, whereas Avicenna adopted a more Aristotelian theory. While these thinkers had an original philosophy, Averroes (Ibn Roshd) endeavored to clarify the meaning of the Aristotelian texts by extensive and minute commentaries. Translations from these writings first made known to medieval philosophy the non-logical works of the "Philosopher", although there existed, at the same time, some translations made directly from Greek texts.
All Indian doctrines orient themselves by the Vedas, accepting or rejecting their authority. In ranging from materialism to acosmism and nihilism, from physiologism to spiritualism, realism to idealism, monism to pluralism, atheism and pantheism, Hindus believe they have exhausted all possible philosophic attitudes (cf. darsana), which they feel supplement rather than exclude each other. A unnersal feature is the fusion of religion, metaphysics, ethics and psychology, due to the universal acceptance of a psycho-physicalism, further exemplified in the typical doctrines of karma and samsara (q.v.). Rigorous logic is nevertheless applied in theology where metaphvsics passes into eschatology (cf., e.g., is) and the generally accepted belief in the cyclic nature of the cosmos oscillating between srsti ("throwing out") and pralaya (dissolution) of the absolute reality (cf. abhasa), and in psychology, where epistemology seeks practical outlets in Yoga (q.v.). With a genius for abstraction, thinkers were and are almost invariably hedonistically motivated by the desire to overcome the evils of existence in the hope of attaining liberation (cf. moksa) and everlasting bliss (cf. ananda, nirvana). -- K.F.L.
All vibrational activity of whatever rate, intensity, or attributive characteristic is always an effect, although always capable of becoming in its turn a cause producing effects of its own type. In other words, there is always the originating or causal agent for any specific instance of vibration; thus the thinker produces mental vibrational activity which we call thinking or thoughts, or emotion or feeling.
Almost all Jewish philosophers with the exception of Gabirol, ha-Levi, and Gersonides produce proofs for the existence of God. These proofs are based primarily on principles of physics. In the case of the Western philosophers, they are Aristotelian, while in the case of the Eastern, they are a combination of Aristotelian and those of the Mutazilites. The Eastern philosophers, such as Saadia and others and also Bahya of the Western prove the existence of God indirectly, namely that the world was created and consequently there is a creator. The leading Western thinkers, such as Ibn Daud (q.v.) and Maimonides employ the Aristotelian argument from motion, even to positing hypothetically the eternity of the world. Ha-LevI considers the conception of the existence of God an intuition with which man is endowed by God Himself. Crescas, who criticized Aristotle's conception of space and the infinite, in his proof for the existence of God, proves it by positing the need of a being necessarily existent, for it is absurd to posit a world of possibles.
Also a materialistic philosopher whose doctrines are said to be imbodied in the Barhaspatya-sutras; a “denier of all but matter, who if he could come back to life, would put shame to all the ‘Free thinkers’ and ‘Agnostics’ of the day. He lived before the Ramayanic period, but his teachings and school have survived to this day, and he has even now followers, who are mostly to be found in Bengal” (ibid.).
Anaximander: (6th Cent. B.C.) With Thales and Anaximenes he formed the Milesian School of Greek Philosophy; with these and the other thinkers of the cosmological period he sought the ground of the manifold processes of nature in a single world-principle or cosmic stuff which he identified with "the Infinite". He was the first to step out of the realm of experience and ascribed to his "Infinite" the attributes of eternity, imperishability and inexhaustability. Cf. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy; Diels, Frag. d. i Vorsokr. -- M.F.
Animalculists Thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries who taught that the all future human offspring were carried in the male reproductive plasm of the earliest human ancestor or ancestors. The animalcule was the tiny human offspring thought to reside already completely formed in each human sperm. (MIE 213)
Aristotle ::: Aristotle was a famous Greek thinker (died in 322 B.C.E.), a student of Plato, whose interpretation of what constitutes reality (metaphysics, ontology) and of how reality is organized was widely influential both in ancient times and in the “medieval” period of Judaism and Christianity, influenced by the “classical” period of Islamic learning. See e.g., scholasticism.
(a) Speculative philosophy is commonly considered to embrace metaphysics (see Metaphysics) and epistemology as its two coordinate branches or if the term metaphysics be extended to embrace the whole of speculative philosophy, then epistemology and ontology become the two main subdivisions of metaphysics in the wide sense. Whichever usage is adopted, epistemology as the philosophical theory of knowledge is one of the two main branches of philosophy. The question of the relative priority of epistemology and metaphysics (or ontology) has occasioned considerable controversy: the dominant view fostered by Descartes, Locke and Kant is that epistemology is the prior philosophical science, the investigation of the possibility and limits of knowledge being a necessary and indispensible preliminary to any metaphysical speculations regarding the nature of ultimate reality. On the other hand, strongly metaphysical thinkers like Spinoza and Hegel, and more recently S. Alexander and A. N. Whitehead, have first attacked the metaphvsical problems and adopted the view of knowledge consonant with their metaphysics. Between these two extremes is the view that epistemology and metaphysics are logically interdependent and that a metaphysically presuppositionless epistemology is as unattainable as an epistemologically presuppositionless metaphysics.
"As soon as we become aware of the Self, we are conscious of it as eternal, unborn, unembodied, uninvolved in its workings: it can be felt within the form of being, but also as enveloping it, as above it, surveying its embodiment from above, adhyaksa; it is omnipresent, the same in everything, infinite and pure and intangible for ever. This Self can be experienced as the Self of the individual, the Self of the thinker, doer, enjoyer, but even so it always has this greater character; its individuality is at the same time a vast universality or very readily passes into that, and the next step to that is a sheer transcendence or a complete and ineffable passing into the Absolute. The Self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe. The realisation of the Self is the straight and swift way towards individual liberation, a static universality, a Nature-transcendence. At the same time there is a realisation of Self in which it is felt not only sustaining and pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and identified in a free identity with all its becomings in Nature. Even so, freedom and impersonality are always the character of the Self. There is no appearance of subjection to the workings of its own Power in the universe, such as the apparent subjection of the Purusha to Prakriti. To realise the Self is to realise the eternal freedom of the Spirit.” The Life Divine
“As soon as we become aware of the Self, we are conscious of it as eternal, unborn, unembodied, uninvolved in its workings: it can be felt within the form of being, but also as enveloping it, as above it, surveying its embodiment from above, adhyaksa; it is omnipresent, the same in everything, infinite and pure and intangible for ever. This Self can be experienced as the Self of the individual, the Self of the thinker, doer, enjoyer, but even so it always has this greater character; its individuality is at the same time a vast universality or very readily passes into that, and the next step to that is a sheer transcendence or a complete and ineffable passing into the Absolute. The Self is that aspect of the Brahman in which it is intimately felt as at once individual, cosmic, transcendent of the universe. The realisation of the Self is the straight and swift way towards individual liberation, a static universality, a Nature-transcendence. At the same time there is a realisation of Self in which it is felt not only sustaining and pervading and enveloping all things, but constituting everything and identified in a free identity with all its becomings in Nature. Even so, freedom and impersonality are always the character of the Self. There is no appearance of subjection to the workings of its own Power in the universe, such as the apparent subjection of the Purusha to Prakriti. To realise the Self is to realise the eternal freedom of the Spirit.” The Life Divine
A thought entertained by one person may pass inwardly through planes of consciousness until it reaches a point where minds are no longer separate, and from thence it may travel outwardly to the brain of another person. It may even be said that what we require is not so much an explanation of thought transference as an explanation of why thoughts are so seldom transferred — why our minds are so separate; and the explanation is the concentration of each individual’s normal daily consciousness upon affairs immediately concerning himself. This clothes the individual in a mental shell of interests, around which rush the radiatory influences emanating from the thinker. Universality of sympathy therefore is the key to successful telepathic communication.
Attribute: Commonly, what is proper to a thing (Latm, ad-tribuere, to assign, to ascribe, to bestow). Loosely assimilated to a quality, a property, a characteristic, a peculiarity, a circumstance, a state, a category, a mode or an accident, though there are differences among all these terms. For example, a quality is an inherent property (the qualities of matter), while an attribute refers to the actual properties of a thing only indirectly known (the attributes of God). Another difference between attribute and quality is that the former refers to the characteristics of an infinite being, while the latter is used for the characteristics of a finite being. In metaphysics, an attribute is what is indispensable to a spiritual or material substance; or that which expresses the nature of a thing; or that without which a thing is unthinkable. As such, it implies necessarily a relation to some substance of which it is an aspect or conception. But it cannot be a substance, as it does not exist by itself. The transcendental attributes are those which belong to a being because it is a being: there are three of them, the one, the true and the good, each adding something positive to the idea of being. The word attribute has been and still is used more readily, with various implications, by substantialist systems. In the 17th century, for example, it denoted the actual manifestations of substance. [Thus, Descartes regarded extension and thought as the two ultimate, simple and original attributes of reality, all else being modifications of them. With Spinoza, extension and thought became the only known attributes of Deity, each expressing in a definite manner, though not exclusively, the infinite essence of God as the only substance. The change in the meaning of substance after Hume and Kant is best illustrated by this quotation from Whitehead: "We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions and within actual occasions" (Process and Reality, p. 471).] The use of the notion of attribute, however, is still favoured by contemporary thinkers. Thus, John Boodin speaks of the five attributes of reality, namely: Energy (source of activity), Space (extension), Time (change), Consciousness (active awareness), and Form (organization, structure). In theodicy, the term attribute is used for the essential characteristics of God. The divine attributes are the various aspects under which God is viewed, each being treated as a separate perfection. As God is free from composition, we know him only in a mediate and synthetic way thrgugh his attributes. In logic, an attribute is that which is predicated or anything, that which Is affirmed or denied of the subject of a proposition. More specifically, an attribute may be either a category or a predicable; but it cannot be an individual materially. Attributes may be essential or accidental, necessary or contingent. In grammar, an attribute is an adjective, or an adjectival clause, or an equivalent adjunct expressing a characteristic referred to a subject through a verb. Because of this reference, an attribute may also be a substantive, as a class-name, but not a proper name as a rule. An attribute is never a verb, thus differing from a predicate which may consist of a verb often having some object or qualifying words. In natural history, what is permanent and essential in a species, an individual or in its parts. In psychology, it denotes the way (such as intensity, duration or quality) in which sensations, feelings or images can differ from one another. In art, an attribute is a material or a conventional symbol, distinction or decoration.
Aufklärung: In general, this German word and its English equivalent Enlightenment denote the self-emancipation of man from mere authority, prejudice, convention and tradition, with an insistence on freer thinking about problems uncritically referred to these other agencies. According to Kant's famous definition "Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority, which is the incapacity of using one's understanding without the direction of another. This state of minority is caused when its source lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another" (Was ist Aufklärung? 1784). In its historical perspective, the Aufklärung refers to the cultural atmosphere and contrlbutions of the 18th century, especially in Germany, France and England [which affected also American thought with B. Franklin, T. Paine and the leaders of the Revolution]. It crystallized tendencies emphasized by the Renaissance, and quickened by modern scepticism and empiricism, and by the great scientific discoveries of the 17th century. This movement, which was represented by men of varying tendencies, gave an impetus to general learning, a more popular philosophy, empirical science, scriptural criticism, social and political thought. More especially, the word Aufklärung is applied to the German contributions to 18th century culture. In philosophy, its principal representatives are G. E. Lessing (1729-81) who believed in free speech and in a methodical criticism of religion, without being a free-thinker; H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768) who expounded a naturalistic philosophy and denied the supernatural origin of Christianity; Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who endeavoured to mitigate prejudices and developed a popular common-sense philosophy; Chr. Wolff (1679-1754), J. A. Eberhard (1739-1809) who followed the Leibnizian rationalism and criticized unsuccessfully Kant and Fichte; and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) who was best as an interpreter of others, but whose intuitional suggestions have borne fruit in the organic correlation of the sciences, and in questions of language in relation to human nature and to national character. The works of Kant and Goethe mark the culmination of the German Enlightenment. Cf. J. G. Hibben, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1910. --T.G. Augustinianism: The thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, and of his followers. Born in 354 at Tagaste in N. Africa, A. studied rhetoric in Carthage, taught that subject there and in Rome and Milan. Attracted successively to Manicheanism, Scepticism, and Neo-Platontsm, A. eventually found intellectual and moral peace with his conversion to Christianity in his thirty-fourth year. Returning to Africa, he established numerous monasteries, became a priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo in 395. Augustine wrote much: On Free Choice, Confessions, Literal Commentary on Genesis, On the Trinity, and City of God, are his most noted works. He died in 430. St. Augustine's characteristic method, an inward empiricism which has little in common with later variants, starts from things without, proceeds within to the self, and moves upwards to God. These three poles of the Augustinian dialectic are polarized by his doctrine of moderate illuminism. An ontological illumination is required to explain the metaphysical structure of things. The truth of judgment demands a noetic illumination. A moral illumination is necessary in the order of willing; and so, too, an lllumination of art in the aesthetic order. Other illuminations which transcend the natural order do not come within the scope of philosophy; they provide the wisdoms of theology and mysticism. Every being is illuminated ontologically by number, form, unity and its derivatives, and order. A thing is what it is, in so far as it is more or less flooded by the light of these ontological constituents. Sensation is necessary in order to know material substances. There is certainly an action of the external object on the body and a corresponding passion of the body, but, as the soul is superior to the body and can suffer nothing from its inferior, sensation must be an action, not a passion, of the soul. Sensation takes place only when the observing soul, dynamically on guard throughout the body, is vitally attentive to the changes suffered by the body. However, an adequate basis for the knowledge of intellectual truth is not found in sensation alone. In order to know, for example, that a body is multiple, the idea of unity must be present already, otherwise its multiplicity could not be recognized. If numbers are not drawn in by the bodily senses which perceive only the contingent and passing, is the mind the source of the unchanging and necessary truth of numbers? The mind of man is also contingent and mutable, and cannot give what it does not possess. As ideas are not innate, nor remembered from a previous existence of the soul, they can be accounted for only by an immutable source higher than the soul. In so far as man is endowed with an intellect, he is a being naturally illuminated by God, Who may be compared to an intelligible sun. The human intellect does not create the laws of thought; it finds them and submits to them. The immediate intuition of these normative rules does not carry any content, thus any trace of ontologism is avoided. Things have forms because they have numbers, and they have being in so far as they possess form. The sufficient explanation of all formable, and hence changeable, things is an immutable and eternal form which is unrestricted in time and space. The forms or ideas of all things actually existing in the world are in the things themselves (as rationes seminales) and in the Divine Mind (as rationes aeternae). Nothing could exist without unity, for to be is no other than to be one. There is a unity proper to each level of being, a unity of the material individual and species, of the soul, and of that union of souls in the love of the same good, which union constitutes the city. Order, also, is ontologically imbibed by all beings. To tend to being is to tend to order; order secures being, disorder leads to non-being. Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal each to its own place and integrates an ensemble of parts in accordance with an end. Hence, peace is defined as the tranquillity of order. Just as things have their being from their forms, the order of parts, and their numerical relations, so too their beauty is not something superadded, but the shining out of all their intelligible co-ingredients. S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Migne, PL 32-47; (a critical edition of some works will be found in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna). Gilson, E., Introd. a l'etude de s. Augustin, (Paris, 1931) contains very good bibliography up to 1927, pp. 309-331. Pope, H., St. Augustine of Hippo, (London, 1937). Chapman, E., St. Augustine's Philos. of Beauty, (N. Y., 1939). Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's "City of God", (London, 1921). --E.C. Authenticity: In a general sense, genuineness, truth according to its title. It involves sometimes a direct and personal characteristic (Whitehead speaks of "authentic feelings"). This word also refers to problems of fundamental criticism involving title, tradition, authorship and evidence. These problems are vital in theology, and basic in scholarship with regard to the interpretation of texts and doctrines. --T.G. Authoritarianism: That theory of knowledge which maintains that the truth of any proposition is determined by the fact of its having been asserted by a certain esteemed individual or group of individuals. Cf. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent; C. S. Peirce, "Fixation of Belief," in Chance, Love and Logic, ed. M. R. Cohen. --A.C.B. Autistic thinking: Absorption in fanciful or wishful thinking without proper control by objective or factual material; day dreaming; undisciplined imagination. --A.C.B. Automaton Theory: Theory that a living organism may be considered a mere machine. See Automatism. Automatism: (Gr. automatos, self-moving) (a) In metaphysics: Theory that animal and human organisms are automata, that is to say, are machines governed by the laws of physics and mechanics. Automatism, as propounded by Descartes, considered the lower animals to be pure automata (Letter to Henry More, 1649) and man a machine controlled by a rational soul (Treatise on Man). Pure automatism for man as well as animals is advocated by La Mettrie (Man, a Machine, 1748). During the Nineteenth century, automatism, combined with epiphenomenalism, was advanced by Hodgson, Huxley and Clifford. (Cf. W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, ch. V.) Behaviorism, of the extreme sort, is the most recent version of automatism (See Behaviorism). (b) In psychology: Psychological automatism is the performance of apparently purposeful actions, like automatic writing without the superintendence of the conscious mind. L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, N. Y., 1941. --L.W. Automatism, Conscious: The automatism of Hodgson, Huxley, and Clifford which considers man a machine to which mind or consciousness is superadded; the mind of man is, however, causally ineffectual. See Automatism; Epiphenomenalism. --L.W. Autonomy: (Gr. autonomia, independence) Freedom consisting in self-determination and independence of all external constraint. See Freedom. Kant defines autonomy of the will as subjection of the will to its own law, the categorical imperative, in contrast to heteronomy, its subjection to a law or end outside the rational will. (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, § 2.) --L.W. Autonomy of ethics: A doctrine, usually propounded by intuitionists, that ethics is not a part of, and cannot be derived from, either metaphysics or any of the natural or social sciences. See Intuitionism, Metaphysical ethics, Naturalistic ethics. --W.K.F. Autonomy of the will: (in Kant's ethics) The freedom of the rational will to legislate to itself, which constitutes the basis for the autonomy of the moral law. --P.A.S. Autonymy: In the terminology introduced by Carnap, a word (phrase, symbol, expression) is autonymous if it is used as a name for itself --for the geometric shape, sound, etc. which it exemplifies, or for the word as a historical and grammatical unit. Autonymy is thus the same as the Scholastic suppositio matertalis (q. v.), although the viewpoint is different. --A.C. Autotelic: (from Gr. autos, self, and telos, end) Said of any absorbing activity engaged in for its own sake (cf. German Selbstzweck), such as higher mathematics, chess, etc. In aesthetics, applied to creative art and play which lack any conscious reference to the accomplishment of something useful. In the view of some, it may constitute something beneficent in itself of which the person following his art impulse (q.v.) or playing is unaware, thus approaching a heterotelic (q.v.) conception. --K.F.L. Avenarius, Richard: (1843-1896) German philosopher who expressed his thought in an elaborate and novel terminology in the hope of constructing a symbolic language for philosophy, like that of mathematics --the consequence of his Spinoza studies. As the most influential apostle of pure experience, the posltivistic motive reaches in him an extreme position. Insisting on the biologic and economic function of thought, he thought the true method of science is to cure speculative excesses by a return to pure experience devoid of all assumptions. Philosophy is the scientific effort to exclude from knowledge all ideas not included in the given. Its task is to expel all extraneous elements in the given. His uncritical use of the category of the given and the nominalistic view that logical relations are created rather than discovered by thought, leads him to banish not only animism but also all of the categories, substance, causality, etc., as inventions of the mind. Explaining the evolution and devolution of the problematization and deproblematization of numerous ideas, and aiming to give the natural history of problems, Avenarius sought to show physiologically, psychologically and historically under what conditions they emerge, are challenged and are solved. He hypothesized a System C, a bodily and central nervous system upon which consciousness depends. R-values are the stimuli received from the world of objects. E-values are the statements of experience. The brain changes that continually oscillate about an ideal point of balance are termed Vitalerhaltungsmaximum. The E-values are differentiated into elements, to which the sense-perceptions or the content of experience belong, and characters, to which belongs everything which psychology describes as feelings and attitudes. Avenarius describes in symbolic form a series of states from balance to balance, termed vital series, all describing a series of changes in System C. Inequalities in the vital balance give rise to vital differences. According to his theory there are two vital series. It assumes a series of brain changes because parallel series of conscious states can be observed. The independent vital series are physical, and the dependent vital series are psychological. The two together are practically covariants. In the case of a process as a dependent vital series three stages can be noted: first, the appearance of the problem, expressed as strain, restlessness, desire, fear, doubt, pain, repentance, delusion; the second, the continued effort and struggle to solve the problem; and finally, the appearance of the solution, characterized by abating anxiety, a feeling of triumph and enjoyment. Corresponding to these three stages of the dependent series are three stages of the independent series: the appearance of the vital difference and a departure from balance in the System C, the continuance with an approximate vital difference, and lastly, the reduction of the vital difference to zero, the return to stability. By making room for dependent and independent experiences, he showed that physics regards experience as independent of the experiencing indlvidual, and psychology views experience as dependent upon the individual. He greatly influenced Mach and James (q.v.). See Avenarius, Empirio-criticism, Experience, pure. Main works: Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; Der menschliche Weltbegriff. --H.H. Averroes: (Mohammed ibn Roshd) Known to the Scholastics as The Commentator, and mentioned as the author of il gran commento by Dante (Inf. IV. 68) he was born 1126 at Cordova (Spain), studied theology, law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, became after having been judge in Sevilla and Cordova, physician to the khalifah Jaqub Jusuf, and charged with writing a commentary on the works of Aristotle. Al-mansur, Jusuf's successor, deprived him of his place because of accusations of unorthodoxy. He died 1198 in Morocco. Averroes is not so much an original philosopher as the author of a minute commentary on the whole works of Aristotle. His procedure was imitated later by Aquinas. In his interpretation of Aristotelian metaphysics Averroes teaches the coeternity of a universe created ex nihilo. This doctrine formed together with the notion of a numerical unity of the active intellect became one of the controversial points in the discussions between the followers of Albert-Thomas and the Latin Averroists. Averroes assumed that man possesses only a disposition for receiving the intellect coming from without; he identifies this disposition with the possible intellect which thus is not truly intellectual by nature. The notion of one intellect common to all men does away with the doctrine of personal immortality. Another doctrine which probably was emphasized more by the Latin Averroists (and by the adversaries among Averroes' contemporaries) is the famous statement about "two-fold truth", viz. that a proposition may be theologically true and philosophically false and vice versa. Averroes taught that religion expresses the (higher) philosophical truth by means of religious imagery; the "two-truth notion" came apparently into the Latin text through a misinterpretation on the part of the translators. The works of Averroes were one of the main sources of medieval Aristotelianlsm, before and even after the original texts had been translated. The interpretation the Latin Averroists found in their texts of the "Commentator" spread in spite of opposition and condemnation. See Averroism, Latin. Averroes, Opera, Venetiis, 1553. M. Horten, Die Metaphysik des Averroes, 1912. P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin, 2d ed., Louvain, 1911. --R.A. Averroism, Latin: The commentaries on Aristotle written by Averroes (Ibn Roshd) in the 12th century became known to the Western scholars in translations by Michael Scottus, Hermannus Alemannus, and others at the beginning of the 13th century. Many works of Aristotle were also known first by such translations from Arabian texts, though there existed translations from the Greek originals at the same time (Grabmann). The Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle was held to be the true one by many; but already Albert the Great pointed out several notions which he felt to be incompatible with the principles of Christian philosophy, although he relied for the rest on the "Commentator" and apparently hardly used any other text. Aquinas, basing his studies mostly on a translation from the Greek texts, procured for him by William of Moerbecke, criticized the Averroistic interpretation in many points. But the teachings of the Commentator became the foundation for a whole school of philosophers, represented first by the Faculty of Arts at Paris. The most prominent of these scholars was Siger of Brabant. The philosophy of these men was condemned on March 7th, 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, after a first condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1210 had gradually come to be neglected. The 219 theses condemned in 1277, however, contain also some of Aquinas which later were generally recognized an orthodox. The Averroistic propositions which aroused the criticism of the ecclesiastic authorities and which had been opposed with great energy by Albert and Thomas refer mostly to the following points: The co-eternity of the created word; the numerical identity of the intellect in all men, the so-called two-fold-truth theory stating that a proposition may be philosophically true although theologically false. Regarding the first point Thomas argued that there is no philosophical proof, either for the co-eternity or against it; creation is an article of faith. The unity of intellect was rejected as incompatible with the true notion of person and with personal immortality. It is doubtful whether Averroes himself held the two-truths theory; it was, however, taught by the Latin Averroists who, notwithstanding the opposition of the Church and the Thomistic philosophers, gained a great influence and soon dominated many universities, especially in Italy. Thomas and his followers were convinced that they interpreted Aristotle correctly and that the Averroists were wrong; one has, however, to admit that certain passages in Aristotle allow for the Averroistic interpretation, especially in regard to the theory of intellect. Lit.: P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme Latin au XIIIe Siecle, 2d. ed. Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristotelesübersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster 1916 (Beitr. z. Gesch. Phil. d. MA. Vol. 17, H. 5-6). --R.A. Avesta: See Zendavesta. Avicehron: (or Avencebrol, Salomon ibn Gabirol) The first Jewish philosopher in Spain, born in Malaga 1020, died about 1070, poet, philosopher, and moralist. His main work, Fons vitae, became influential and was much quoted by the Scholastics. It has been preserved only in the Latin translation by Gundissalinus. His doctrine of a spiritual substance individualizing also the pure spirits or separate forms was opposed by Aquinas already in his first treatise De ente, but found favor with the medieval Augustinians also later in the 13th century. He also teaches the necessity of a mediator between God and the created world; such a mediator he finds in the Divine Will proceeding from God and creating, conserving, and moving the world. His cosmogony shows a definitely Neo-Platonic shade and assumes a series of emanations. Cl. Baeumker, Avencebrolis Fons vitae. Beitr. z. Gesch. d. Philos. d. MA. 1892-1895, Vol. I. Joh. Wittman, Die Stellung des hl. Thomas von Aquino zu Avencebrol, ibid. 1900. Vol. III. --R.A. Avicenna: (Abu Ali al Hosain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) Born 980 in the country of Bocchara, began to write in young years, left more than 100 works, taught in Ispahan, was physician to several Persian princes, and died at Hamadan in 1037. His fame as physician survived his influence as philosopher in the Occident. His medical works were printed still in the 17th century. His philosophy is contained in 18 vols. of a comprehensive encyclopedia, following the tradition of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Logic, Physics, Mathematics and Metaphysics form the parts of this work. His philosophy is Aristotelian with noticeable Neo-Platonic influences. His doctrine of the universal existing ante res in God, in rebus as the universal nature of the particulars, and post res in the human mind by way of abstraction became a fundamental thesis of medieval Aristotelianism. He sharply distinguished between the logical and the ontological universal, denying to the latter the true nature of form in the composite. The principle of individuation is matter, eternally existent. Latin translations attributed to Avicenna the notion that existence is an accident to essence (see e.g. Guilelmus Parisiensis, De Universo). The process adopted by Avicenna was one of paraphrasis of the Aristotelian texts with many original thoughts interspersed. His works were translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus (Gondisalvi) with the assistance of Avendeath ibn Daud. This translation started, when it became more generally known, the "revival of Aristotle" at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. Albert the Great and Aquinas professed, notwithstanding their critical attitude, a great admiration for Avicenna whom the Arabs used to call the "third Aristotle". But in the Orient, Avicenna's influence declined soon, overcome by the opposition of the orthodox theologians. Avicenna, Opera, Venetiis, 1495; l508; 1546. M. Horten, Das Buch der Genesung der Seele, eine philosophische Enzyklopaedie Avicenna's; XIII. Teil: Die Metaphysik. Halle a. S. 1907-1909. R. de Vaux, Notes et textes sur l'Avicennisme Latin, Bibl. Thomiste XX, Paris, 1934. --R.A. Avidya: (Skr.) Nescience; ignorance; the state of mind unaware of true reality; an equivalent of maya (q.v.); also a condition of pure awareness prior to the universal process of evolution through gradual differentiation into the elements and factors of knowledge. --K.F.L. Avyakta: (Skr.) "Unmanifest", descriptive of or standing for brahman (q.v.) in one of its or "his" aspects, symbolizing the superabundance of the creative principle, or designating the condition of the universe not yet become phenomenal (aja, unborn). --K.F.L. Awareness: Consciousness considered in its aspect of act; an act of attentive awareness such as the sensing of a color patch or the feeling of pain is distinguished from the content attended to, the sensed color patch, the felt pain. The psychologlcal theory of intentional act was advanced by F. Brentano (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte) and received its epistemological development by Meinong, Husserl, Moore, Laird and Broad. See Intentionalism. --L.W. Axiological: (Ger. axiologisch) In Husserl: Of or pertaining to value or theory of value (the latter term understood as including disvalue and value-indifference). --D.C. Axiological ethics: Any ethics which makes the theory of obligation entirely dependent on the theory of value, by making the determination of the rightness of an action wholly dependent on a consideration of the value or goodness of something, e.g. the action itself, its motive, or its consequences, actual or probable. Opposed to deontological ethics. See also teleological ethics. --W.K.F. Axiologic Realism: In metaphysics, theory that value as well as logic, qualities as well as relations, have their being and exist external to the mind and independently of it. Applicable to the philosophy of many though not all realists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to G. E. Moore, A. N. Whitehead, and N, Hartmann. --J.K.F. Axiology: (Gr. axios, of like value, worthy, and logos, account, reason, theory). Modern term for theory of value (the desired, preferred, good), investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. Had its rise in Plato's theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good); was developed in Aristotle's Organon, Ethics, Poetics, and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). Stoics and Epicureans investigated the summum bonum. Christian philosophy (St. Thomas) built on Aristotle's identification of highest value with final cause in God as "a living being, eternal, most good." In modern thought, apart from scholasticism and the system of Spinoza (Ethica, 1677), in which values are metaphysically grounded, the various values were investigated in separate sciences, until Kant's Critiques, in which the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values were examined. In Hegel's idealism, morality, art, religion, and philosophy were made the capstone of his dialectic. R. H. Lotze "sought in that which should be the ground of that which is" (Metaphysik, 1879). Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics subjected value experience to empirical analysis, and stress was again laid on the diversity and relativity of value phenomena rather than on their unity and metaphysical nature. F. Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) aroused new interest in the nature of value. F. Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (1889), identified value with love. In the twentieth century the term axiology was apparently first applied by Paul Lapie (Logique de la volonte, 1902) and E. von Hartmann (Grundriss der Axiologie, 1908). Stimulated by Ehrenfels (System der Werttheorie, 1897), Meinong (Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie, 1894-1899), and Simmel (Philosophie des Geldes, 1900). W. M. Urban wrote the first systematic treatment of axiology in English (Valuation, 1909), phenomenological in method under J. M. Baldwin's influence. Meanwhile H. Münsterberg wrote a neo-Fichtean system of values (The Eternal Values, 1909). Among important recent contributions are: B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912), a free reinterpretation of Hegelianism; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918, 1921), defending a metaphysical theism; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1920), realistic and naturalistic; N. Hartmann, Ethik (1926), detailed analysis of types and laws of value; R. B. Perry's magnum opus, General Theory of Value (1926), "its meaning and basic principles construed in terms of interest"; and J. Laird, The Idea of Value (1929), noteworthy for historical exposition. A naturalistic theory has been developed by J. Dewey (Theory of Valuation, 1939), for which "not only is science itself a value . . . but it is the supreme means of the valid determination of all valuations." A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) expounds the view of logical positivism that value is "nonsense." J. Hessen, Wertphilosophie (1937), provides an account of recent German axiology from a neo-scholastic standpoint. The problems of axiology fall into four main groups, namely, those concerning (1) the nature of value, (2) the types of value, (3) the criterion of value, and (4) the metaphysical status of value. (1) The nature of value experience. Is valuation fulfillment of desire (voluntarism: Spinoza, Ehrenfels), pleasure (hedonism: Epicurus, Bentham, Meinong), interest (Perry), preference (Martineau), pure rational will (formalism: Stoics, Kant, Royce), apprehension of tertiary qualities (Santayana), synoptic experience of the unity of personality (personalism: T. H. Green, Bowne), any experience that contributes to enhanced life (evolutionism: Nietzsche), or "the relation of things as means to the end or consequence actually reached" (pragmatism, instrumentalism: Dewey). (2) The types of value. Most axiologists distinguish between intrinsic (consummatory) values (ends), prized for their own sake, and instrumental (contributory) values (means), which are causes (whether as economic goods or as natural events) of intrinsic values. Most intrinsic values are also instrumental to further value experience; some instrumental values are neutral or even disvaluable intrinsically. Commonly recognized as intrinsic values are the (morally) good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Values of play, of work, of association, and of bodily well-being are also acknowledged. Some (with Montague) question whether the true is properly to be regarded as a value, since some truth is disvaluable, some neutral; but love of truth, regardless of consequences, seems to establish the value of truth. There is disagreement about whether the holy (religious value) is a unique type (Schleiermacher, Otto), or an attitude toward other values (Kant, Höffding), or a combination of the two (Hocking). There is also disagreement about whether the variety of values is irreducible (pluralism) or whether all values are rationally related in a hierarchy or system (Plato, Hegel, Sorley), in which values interpenetrate or coalesce into a total experience. (3) The criterion of value. The standard for testing values is influenced by both psychological and logical theory. Hedonists find the standard in the quantity of pleasure derived by the individual (Aristippus) or society (Bentham). Intuitionists appeal to an ultimate insight into preference (Martineau, Brentano). Some idealists recognize an objective system of rational norms or ideals as criterion (Plato, Windelband), while others lay more stress on rational wholeness and coherence (Hegel, Bosanquet, Paton) or inclusiveness (T. H. Green). Naturalists find biological survival or adjustment (Dewey) to be the standard. Despite differences, there is much in common in the results of the application of these criteria. (4) The metaphysical status of value. What is the relation of values to the facts investigated by natural science (Koehler), of Sein to Sollen (Lotze, Rickert), of human experience of value to reality independent of man (Hegel, Pringle-Pattlson, Spaulding)? There are three main answers: subjectivism (value is entirely dependent on and relative to human experience of it: so most hedonists, naturalists, positivists); logical objectivism (values are logical essences or subsistences, independent of their being known, yet with no existential status or action in reality); metaphysical objectivism (values --or norms or ideals --are integral, objective, and active constituents of the metaphysically real: so theists, absolutists, and certain realists and naturalists like S. Alexander and Wieman). --E.S.B. Axiom: See Mathematics. Axiomatic method: That method of constructing a deductive system consisting of deducing by specified rules all statements of the system save a given few from those given few, which are regarded as axioms or postulates of the system. See Mathematics. --C.A.B. Ayam atma brahma: (Skr.) "This self is brahman", famous quotation from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 2.5.19, one of many alluding to the central theme of the Upanishads, i.e., the identity of the human and divine or cosmic. --K.F.L.
avyAkṛta. (P. avyAkata; T. lung du ma bstan pa/lung ma bstan; C. wuji; J. muki; K. mugi 無). In Sanskrit, "indeterminate" or "unascertainable"; used to refer to the fourteen "indeterminate" or "unanswered" questions (avyAkṛtavastu) to which the Buddha refuses to respond. The American translator of PAli texts HENRY CLARKE WARREN rendered the term as "questions which tend not to edification." These questions involve various metaphysical assertions that were used in traditional India to evaluate a thinker's philosophical lineage. There are a number of versions of these "unanswerables," but one common list includes fourteen such questions, three sets of which are framed as "four alternatives" (CATUsKOtI): (1) Is the world eternal?, (2) Is the world not eternal?, (3) Is the world both eternal and not eternal?, (4) Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?; (5) Is the world endless?, (6) Is the world not endless?, (7) Is the world both endless and not endless?, (8) Is the world neither endless nor not endless?; (9) Does the tathAgata exist after death?, (10) Does the tathAgata not exist after death?, (11) Does the tathAgata both exist and not exist after death?, (12) Does the tathAgata neither exist nor not exist after death?; (13) Are the soul (jīva) and the body identical?, and (14) Are the soul and the body not identical? It was in response to such questions that the Buddha famously asked whether a man shot by a poisoned arrow would spend time wondering about the height of the archer and the kind of wood used for the arrow, or whether he should seek to remove the arrow before it killed him. Likening these fourteen questions to such pointless speculation, he called them "a jungle, a wilderness, a puppet-show, a writhing, and a fetter, and is coupled with misery, ruin, despair, and agony, and does not tend to aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and nirvAna." The Buddha thus asserted that all these questions had to be set aside as unanswerable for being either unexplainable conceptually or "wrongly framed" (P. thapanīya). Questions that were "wrongly framed" inevitably derive from mistaken assumptions and are thus the products of wrong reflection (AYONIsOMANASKARA); therefore, any answer given to them would necessarily be either misleading or irrelevant. The Buddha's famous silence on these questions has been variously interpreted, with some seeing his refusal to answer these questions as deriving from the inherent limitations involved in using concepts to talk about such rarified existential questions. Because it is impossible to expect that concepts can do justice, for example, to an enlightened person's state of being after death, the Buddha simply remains silent when asked this and other "unanswerable" questions. The implication, therefore, is that it is not necessarily the case that the Buddha does not "know" the answer to these questions, but merely that he realizes the conceptual limitations inherent in trying to answer them definitively and thus refuses to respond. Yet other commentators explained that the Buddha declined to answer the question of whether the world (that is, SAMSARA) will ever end because the answer ("no") would prove too discouraging to his audience.
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb: (1714-1762) A German thinker of the pre-Kantian period and disciple of Christian Wolff whose encyclopaedic work he tried to continue. Among his works the best known is Aesthetica in which he analyzes the problem of beauty regarded by him as recognition of perfection by means of the senses. The name of aesthetics, as the philosophy of beauty and art, was introduced by him for the first time. -- R.B.W.
(b) Deism is a term referring collectively and somewhat loosely to a group of religious thinkers of the 17th (and 18th) century in England and France who in attempting to justify religion, particularly Christianity, began by establishing the harmony of reason and revelation and developed what, in their time, was regarded as extreme views: assaults upon traditional supernaturalism, external revelation and dogmas implying mysteries, and concluding that revelation is superfluous, that reason is the touchstone to religious validity, that religion and ethics are natural phenomena, that the traditional God need hardly be appealed to since man finds in nature the necessary guides for moral and religious living. Not all deists, so called, went toward the more extreme expressions. Among the more important English deists were Toland, Collins, Tindal, Chubb and Morgan. Voltaire (1694-1778) influenced by English thought is the notable example of deism in France. On the whole the term represents a tendency rather than a school. -- V.F.
Being: In early Greek philosophy is opposed either to change, or Becoming, or to Non-Being. According to Parmenides and his disciples of the Eleatic School, everything real belongs to the category of Being, as the only possible object of thought. Essentially the same reasoning applies also to material reality in which there is nothing but Being, one and continuous, all-inclusive and eternal. Consequently, he concluded, the coming into being and passing away constituting change are illusory, for that which is-not cannot be, and that which is cannot cease to be. In rejecting Eleitic monism, the materialists (Leukippus, Democritus) asserted that the very existence of things, their corporeal nature, insofar as it is subject to change and motion, necessarily presupposes the other than Being, that is, Non-Being, or Void. Thus, instead of regarding space as a continuum, they saw in it the very source of discontinuity and the foundation of the atomic structure of substance. Plato accepted the first part of Parmenides' argument. namely, that referring to thought as distinct from matter, and maintained that, though Becoming is indeed an apparent characteristic of everything sensory, the true and ultimate reality, that of Ideas, is changeless and of the nature of Being. Aristotle achieved a compromise among all these notions and contended that, though Being, as the essence of things, is eternal in itself, nevertheless it manifests itself only in change, insofar as "ideas" or "forms" have no existence independent of, or transcendent to, the reality of things and minds. The medieval thinkers never revived the controversy as a whole, though at times they emphasized Being, as in Neo-Platonism, at times Becoming, as in Aristotelianism. With the rise of new interest in nature, beginning with F. Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, the problem grew once more in importance, especially to the rationalists, opponents of empiricism. Spinoza regarded change as a characteristic of modal existence and assumed in this connection a position distantly similar to that of Pinto. Hegel formed a new answer to the problem in declaring that nature, striving to exclude contradictions, has to "negate" them: Being and Non-Being are "moments" of the same cosmic process which, at its foundation, arises out of Being containing Non-Being within itself and leading, factually and logically, to their synthetic union in Becoming. -- R.B.W.
Beneke, Friedrich Eduard: (1798-1854) A German thinker of Kantian tradition modified by empiricism; his doctrines exerted considerable influence upon the psychology and educational theory of the 19th century. Main works: Erfahrungseelenlehre, 1820; Physik d. Sitten, 1822; Metaphysik, 1822; Logik als Kunstlehre des Denkens, 1832; Lehrbuch d. Psych. als Naturwiss., 1833; Erziehungslehre, 1833; Pragmatische Psychol., 1850. -- R.B.W.
Brentano, Franz: (1838-1917) Who had originally been a Roman Catholic priest may be described as an unorthodox neo-scholastic. According to him the only three forms of psychic activity, representation, judgment and "phenomena of love and hate", are just three modes of "intentionality", i.e., of referring to an object intended. Judgments may be self-evident and thereby characterized as true and in an analogous way love and hate may be characterized as "right". It is on these characterizations that a dogmatic theory of truth and value may be based. In any mental experience the content is merely a "physical phenomenon" (real or imaginary) intended to be referred to, what is psychic is merely the "act" of representing, judging (viz. affirming or denying) and valuing (i.e. loving or hating). Since such "acts" are evidently immaterial, the soul by which they are performed may be proved to be a purely spiritual and imperishable substance and from these and other considerations the existence, spirituality, as also the infinite wisdom, goodness and justice of God may also be demonstrated. It is most of all by his classification of psychic phenomena, his psychology of "acts" and "intentions" and by his doctrine concerning self-evident truths and values that Brentano, who considered himself an Aristotelian, exercised a profound influence on subsequent German philosophers: not only on those who accepted his entire system (such as A. Marty and C. Stumpf) but also those who were somewhat more independent and original and whom he influenced either directly (as A. Meinong and E. Husserl) or indirectly (as M. Scheler and Nik. Hartmann). Main works: Psychologie des Aristoteles, 1867; Vom Dasein Gottes, 1868; Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874; Vom Ursprung sittliches Erkenntnis, 1884; Ueber die Zukunft der Philosophie, 1893; Die vier Phasen der Philos., 1895. -- H.Go. Broad, C.D.: (1887) As a realistic critical thinker Broad takes over from the sciences the methods that are fruitful there, classifies the various propositions used in all the sciences, and defines basic scientific concepts. In going beyond science, he seeks to reach a total view of the world by bringing in the facts and principles of aesthetic, religious, ethical and political experience. In trying to work out a much more general method which attacks the problem of the connection between mathematical concepts and sense-data better than the method of analysis in situ, he gives a simple exposition of the method of extensive abstraction, which applies the mutual relations of objects, first recognized in pure mathematics, to physics. Moreover, a great deal can be learned from Broad on the relation of the principle of relativity to measurement.
thinker ::: n. --> One who thinks; especially and chiefly, one who thinks in a particular manner; as, a close thinker; a deep thinker; a coherent thinker.
BuddhadAsa. (1906-1993). Prominent Thai monk, Buddhist reformer, teacher of meditation, and ecumenical figure. Born the son of a merchant in the village of Pum Riang in southern Thailand, he was educated at Buddhist temple schools. It was customary for males in Thailand to be ordained as Buddhist monks for three months at the age of twenty and then return to lay life. BuddhadAsa decided, however, to remain a monk and quickly gained a reputation as a brilliant thinker, meditator, and teacher. He dwelled for several years in the Thai capital of Bangkok to further his studies but grew disillusioned with the prevailing practices of the SAMGHA in the city, which he perceived to be lax and corrupt. In 1932, he returned home to an abandoned monastery near his native village to live a simple life, practice meditation, and teach the dharma. He named his monastery Wat Suan MokkhabalArAma (Garden of the Power of Liberation), which is usually abbreviated to Suan Mokkh, the Garden of Liberation. The monastery became one of the first VIPASSANA (S. VIPAsYANA) (insight meditation) centers in southern Thailand. BuddhadAsa spent most of his life at this forest monastery overlooking the sea. Although his formal scholastic training was limited, BuddhadAsa studied PAli scriptures extensively, in particular the SUTTAPItAKA, to uncover their true meaning, which he felt had become obscured by centuries of commentarial overlays, ritual practices, and monastic politics. A gifted orator, his numerous sermons and talks were transcribed and fill an entire room of the National Library in Bangkok. In his writings, many of which are his transcribed sermons, he eschewed the formal style of traditional scholastic commentary in favor of a more informal, and in many ways controversial, approach in which he questioned many of the more popular practices of Thai Buddhism. For example, he spoke out strongly against the practice of merit-making in which lay people offer gifts to monks in the belief that they will receive material reward in their next life. BuddhadAsa argued that this traditionally dominant form of lay practice only keeps the participants in the cycle of rebirth because it is based on attachment, whereas the true form of giving is the giving up of the self. Instead, BuddhadAsa believed that, because of conditioned origination (PRATĪTYASAMUTPADA), people are naturally connected through a shared environment and are in fact capable of living harmoniously together. The hindrance to such a harmony comes from attachments to "I" and "mine," which must therefore be severed. Modern and ecumenical in perspective, BuddhadAsa sought to strip traditional Buddhism of what he regarded as obscurantism and superstition, and present the Buddha's teachings in a rational scientific idiom that acknowledged kindred teachings in other religions. BuddhadAsa's interpretations of the dharma have had a great impact on contemporary Buddhist thought in Thailand and are especially influential among the urban intelligentsia, social reformers, and environmentalists. His teachings are often cited as foundational by advocates of engaged Buddhism. The monastery he founded has become a venue for the training of foreign monks and nuns and for interfaith dialogue between Buddhists of different traditions, as well as between Buddhists and adherents of other religions.
By way of connoting different types of society, many contemporary Marxists, especially in the U.S.S.R., building upon Marx's analysis of the two phases of "communist society" ("Gotha Program") designate the first or lower phase by the term socialism, the second or higher by the term communism (q.v.). The general features of socialist society (identified by Soviet thinkers with the present phase of development of the U.S.S.R.) are conceived as follows: Economic collective ownership of the means of production, such as factories, industrial equipment, the land, and of the basic apparatus of distribution and exchange, including the banking system; the consequent abolition of classes, private profit, exploitation, surplus value, (q.v.) private hiring and firing and involuntary unemployment; an integrated economy based on long time planning in terms of needs and use. It is held that only under these economic conditions is it possible to apply the formula, "from each according to ability, to each according to work performed", the first part of which implies continuous employment, and the second part, the absence of private profit. Political: a state based upon the dictatorship of the proletariat (q.v.) Cultural the extension of all educational and cultural facilities through state planning; the emancipation of women through unrestricted economic opportunities, the abolition of race discrimination through state enforcement, a struggle against all cultural and social institutions which oppose the socialist society and attempt to obstruct its realization. Marx and Engels held that socialism becomes the inevitable outgrowth of capitalism because the evolution of the latter type of society generates problems which can only be solved by a transition to socialism. These problems are traced primarily to the fact that the economic relations under capitalism, such as individual ownership of productive technics, private hiring and firing in the light of profits and production for a money market, all of which originally released powerful new productive potentialities, come to operate, in the course of time, to prevent full utilization of productive technics, and to cause periodic crises, unemployment, economic insecurity and consequent suffering for masses of people. Marx and Engels regarded their doctrine of the transformation of capitalist into socialist society as based upon a scientific examination of the laws of development of capitalism and a realistic appreciation of the role of the proletariat. (q.v.) Unlike the Utopian socialism (q.v.) of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen (q.v.) and others, their socialism asserted the necessity of mass political organization of the working classes for the purpose of gaining political power in order to effect the transition from capitalism, and also foresaw the probability of a contest of force in which, they held, the working class majority would ultimately be victorious. The view taken is that Marx was the first to explain scientifically the nature of capitalist exploitation as based upon surplus value and to predict its necessary consequences. "These two great discoveries, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production by means of surplus value we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science . . ." (Engels: Anti-Dühring, pp. 33-34.) See Historical materialism. -- J.M.S.
Cambridge Platonists: A small group of 17th century Cambridge thinkers whose views represented a kind of revival of Platonism. Esp. Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. Remembered chiefly, perhaps, for holding that ethics rests on certain absolute and self-evident truths. -- W.K.F.
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.
catuskoti. (T. mu bzhi; C. siju fenbie; J. shiku funbetsu; K. sagu punbyol 四句分別). In Sanskrit, "four antinomies" or "four alternatives"; a dialectical form of argumentation used in Buddhist philosophy to categorize sets of specific propositions, i.e., (1) A, (2) B, (3) both A and B, (4) neither A nor B; or (1) A, (2) not A, (3) both A and not A, 4) neither A nor not A. For instance, something may be said to (1) exist, (2) not exist, (3) both exist and not exist, and (4) neither exist nor not exist. Or, 1) everything is one, (2) everything is many, (3) everything is both one and many, 4) everything is neither one nor many. In the sutra literature, the catuskoti is employed to categorize the speculative philosophical propositions of non-Buddhists (TĪRTHIKA) in a list of fourteen "indeterminate" or "unanswered" (AVYAKṚTA) questions to which the Buddha refused to respond. These questions involve various metaphysical assertions that were used in traditional India to evaluate a thinker's philosophical pedigree. In the case of ontology, for example: (1) Is the world eternal? (2) Is the world not eternal? (3) Is the world both eternal and not eternal? (4) Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal? Or, in the case of soteriology, for a TATHAGATA, or an enlightened person: (1) Does the tathAgata exist after death? (2) Does the tathAgata not exist after death? (3) Does the tathAgata both exist and not exist after death? (4) Does the tathAgata neither exist nor not exist after death? Because of the conceptual flaws inherent in any prospective answer to these sets of questions, the Buddha refused to answer them and his silence is sometimes interpreted to mean that his teachings transcend conceptual thought (PRAPANCA). This transcendent quality of Buddhist philosophy is displayed in the MADHYAMAKA school, which seeks to ascertain the conceptual flaws inherent in any definitive philosophical proposition and show instead that all propositions-even those made by Buddhists-are "empty" (sunya). NAGARJUNA, the founder of the Madhyamaka school, analyzes many philosophical positions in terms of a catuskoti to demonstrate their emptiness. In analyzing causality, for example, NAgArjuna in the opening lines of his MuLAMADHYAMAKAKARIKA analyzes the possible philosophical positions on the connection between cause (HETU) and effect (PHALA) as a catuskoti: (1) cause and effect are identical, as the SAMkhya school claims; (2) cause and effect are different, as the Buddhists propose; (3) cause and effect are both identical and different, and thus the effect is both continuous with as well as emergent from the cause, as the JAINA school claims; (4) cause and effect are neither identical nor different, and thus things occur by chance, as the materialists and skeptics advocate. NAgArjuna instead reveals the absurd consequences inherent in all of these positions to show that the only defensible position is that cause and effect are "empty"; thus, all compounded things are ultimately unproduced (ANUTPADA) and empty of intrinsic existence (NIḤSVABHAVA). Classifications of teachings using the catuskoti are widely found in Buddhist literature of all traditions.
CAUSAL SELF Monad that has its most important kind of subjective and objective self-consciousness in atomic world 47:1 and molecular world 47:2,3 within the solar system. Causal selves belonging to mankind are at the stage of ideality and have consciousness in 47:2,3, causal selves in the fifth natural kingdom have consciousness in
47:1.
The causal self is able to study all its previous lives as a man, is able independently and quickly to acquire the facts necessary to comprehend all realities in the worlds of man, achieving more in one hour (in 47:1) than the most efficient mental thinker could manage in one hundred years. Fictions are precluded. K 1.20.10
The causal self can ascertain that the esoteric world view and life view agrees with facts in the five worlds of man (47- 49). (K 4.11.8)
Cause: (Lat. causa) Anything responsible for change, motion or action. In the history of philosophy numerous interpretations were given to the term. Aristotle distinguished among the material cause, or that out of which something arises, the formal cause, that is, the pattern or essence determining the creation of a thing, the efficient cause, or the force or agent producing an effect; and the final cause, or purpose. Many thinkers spoke also of the first cause, usually conceived as God. During the Renaissance, with the development of scientific interest in nature, cause was usually conceived as an object. Today, it is generally interpteted as energy or action, whether or not connected with matter. According to Newton, "to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes." But J. S. Mill contended, in his doctrine of the plurality of causes, that an effect, or a kind of effect (e.g. heat or death) may be produced by various causes. The first clear formulation of the principle was given by Leukippus "Nothing happens without a ground but everything through a cause and of necessity." -- R.B.W.
Cleanthes: (c. 310-230 B.C.) Zeno's disciple and one of the most prominent thinkers of the Stoic School. Of his writings only a hymn to Zeus is extant. -- R.B.W.
Clement of Alexandria: (150-217) An early Christian thinker and theologian who attempted to raise the attitude of faith to the level of knowledge; he was influenced by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Philo Judaeus. -- R.B.W.
coherent ::: a. --> Sticking together; cleaving; as the parts of bodies; solid or fluid.
Composed of mutually dependent parts; making a logical whole; consistent; as, a coherent plan, argument, or discourse.
Logically consistent; -- applied to persons; as, a coherent thinker.
Suitable or suited; adapted; accordant.
Common Sense Realism: A school of Scottish thinkers founded by Thomas Reid (1710-96) which attempted to set up a theory of knowledge which would support the realistic belief of the man on the street. (See Naive Realism.) The school began a movement of protest against Locke's theory which led to an eventual subjective idealism and skepticism. -- V.F.
Communism ::: A theoretical system of social organization and a political movement based on common ownership of the means of production. As a political movement, communism seeks to establish a classless society. A major force in world politics since the early 20th century, modern communism is generally associated with The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, according to which the capitalist profit-based system of private ownership is replaced by a communist society in which the means of production are communally owned, such as through a gift economy. Often this process is said initiated by the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie (see Marxism), passes through a transitional period marked by the preparatory stage of socialism (see Leninism). Pure communism has never been implemented, it remains theoretical: communism is, in Marxist theory, the end-state, or the result of state-socialism. The word is now mainly understood to refer to the political, economic, and social theory of Marxist thinkers, or life under conditions of Communist party rule.[4]
considerer ::: n. --> One who considers; a man of reflection; a thinker.
Credo ut intelligam: Literally, I believe in order that I may understand. A principle which affirms that after an act of faith a philosophy begins, held by such thinkers as Augustine, Anselm, Duns Scotus and many others. -- V.F.
Crescas, Don Hasdai: (1340-1410) Jewish philosopher and theologian. He was the first European thinker to criticize Aristotelian cosmology and establish the probability of the existence of an infinite magnitude and of infinite space, thus paving the way for the modern conception of the universe. He also took exception to the entire trend of the philosophy of Maimonides, namely its extreme rationalism, and endeavored to inject the emotional element into religious contemplation, and make love an attribute of God and the source of His creative activity. He also expressed original views on the problems of freedom and creation. He undoubtedly exerted influence on Spinoza who quotes him by name in the formulation of some of his theories. See Jewish Philosophy. Cf. H. A. Wolfson, Crescas' Critique of Aristotle, 1929. -- M.W.
(c) The traditional problem of the origin of knowledge, viz. By what faculty or faculties of mind is knowledge attainable? It gave rise to the principal cleavage in modern epistemology between rationalism and empiricism (q.v.) though both occur in any thinker. The rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) rely primarily -- though not exclusively -- on reason as the source of genuine knowledge, and the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley and Hume) rely mainly on experience. A broadly conceived empiricism such as Locke's which acknowledges the authenticity of knowledge derived both from the inner sense (see Reflection; Introspection), and the outer senses, contrasts with that type of sensationalism (q.v.) which is empiricism restricted to the outer senses. Various attempts, the most notable of which is the critical philosophy of Kant, have been made to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by assigning to reason and experience their respective roles in the constitution of knowledge. Few historical or contemporary epistemologists would subscribe either to a rationalism or an empiricism of an exclusive and extreme sort.
Darsana (Sanskrit) Darśana [from the verbal root dṛs to see, perceive] Seeing, vision, view, doctrine, philosophical opinion. In the plural, it refers particularly to the six schools (Shad-darsana) of ancient Hindu philosophy: 1) the Nyaya (Logical School); 2) the Vaiseshika (Atomistic School); 3) the Sankhya; 4) the Yoga; 5) the Purva-Mimamsa (First Vedantic School); and 6) the Uttara-Mimamsa (Latter or Superior Vedantic School). These are connected together by intimate links of philosophical principles and postulates, so that to understand accurately the full nature of the universe and of the entire human constitution as an entity, as elaborated by the great Indian thinkers who founded these six schools, one should study all six. The different systems of these schools comprise expositions, according to the ideas of the respective founders, of the mysteries of cosmic and human nature, from the spiritual to the physical, explained and philosophically illustrated.
dbu ma chen po. (uma chenpo) [alt. dbu ma pa chen po]. In Tibetan, "great MADHYAMAKA"; a term central to the "self empty, other empty" (RANG STONG GZHAN STONG) debate in Tibetan Buddhism, on the question of which Indian masters are the true representatives of the Madhyamaka. According to the DGE LUGS view, among the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma as described in the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA, the second wheel, generally identified with the view of emptiness as set forth in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ sutras and propounded by the Madhyamaka, is definitive (NĪTĀRTHA), while the third wheel, generally identified with YOGĀCĀRA and TATHĀGATHAGARBHA teachings, is provisional (NEYĀRTHA). Other sects, most notably the JO NANG PA, as well as certain BKA' BRGYUD and RNYING MA thinkers, especially of the so-called RIS MED movement, disagreed, asserting that the third wheel is the definitive teaching while the second wheel is provisional. (Both agree that the first wheel, setting forth the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS to sRĀVAKAs, is provisional.) For the Dge lugs pas, the highest of all Buddhist doctrines is that all phenomena in the universe are empty of an intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA); emptiness is the lack of any substantial existence. The Dge lugs pas are therefore proponents of "self-emptiness" (rang stong), arguing that that each object of experience is devoid of intrinsic nature; the unenlightened wrongly believe that such a nature is intrinsic to the object itself. In reality, everything, from physical forms to the omniscient mind of a buddha, is equally empty, and this emptiness is a nonaffirming negation (PRASAJYAPRATIsEDHA), an absence with nothing else implied in its place. Furthermore, this emptiness of intrinsic nature is the ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA). The Jo nang pa's look to the third wheel, especially to those statements that describe the nonduality of subject and object to be the consummate nature (PARINIsPANNA) and the understanding of that nonduality as the highest wisdom, described as eternal, self-arisen, and truly established. This wisdom exists autonomously and is thus not empty in the way that emptiness is understood by the Dge lugs. Instead, this wisdom consciousness is empty in the sense that it is devoid of all defilements and conventional factors, which are extraneous to its true nature. Hence, the Jo nang pas speak of "other emptiness" (gzhan stong) the absence of extrinsic and extraneous qualities. For the Dge lugs pas, the supreme interpreter of the doctrine of emptiness (as they understand it) is CANDRAKĪRTI. The Jo nang pas do not dispute the Dge lugs reading of Candrakīrti but they deny Candrakīrti the rank of premier expositor of NĀGĀRJUNA's thought. For them, Candrakīrti teaches an emptiness that is a mere negation of intrinsic existence, which they equate with nihilism. They also do not deny that such an exposition is found in Nāgārjuna's philosophical treatises (YUKTIKĀYA). However, they claim that those works do not represent Nāgārjuna's final view, which is expressed instead in his devotional corpus (STAVAKĀYA), notably the DHARMADHĀTUSTAVA, and, according to some, in the works of VASUBANDHU, the author of two defenses of the prajNāpāramitā sutras. Those who would deny the ultimate existence of wisdom, such as Candrakīrti, are classed as "one-sided Madhyamakas" (phyogs gcig pa'i dbu ma pa) as opposed to the great Madhyamakas among whom they would include the Nāgārjuna of the hymns and ĀRYADEVA as well as thinkers whom the Dge lugs classify as Yogācāra or SVĀTANTRIKA MADHYAMAKA: ASAnGA, Vasubandhu, MAITREYANĀTHA, and sĀNTARAKsITA.
deist ::: n. --> One who believes in the existence of a God, but denies revealed religion; a freethinker.
dhairya (dhairya; dhairyam) ::: steadiness, calmness, patience; the temperament of the thinker (dhira); an attribute of the brahman.a.
Dhanus (Sanskrit) Dhanus Bow; the ninth zodiacal sign, Sagittarius. According to some Hindu mystical thinkers, this sign represents the nine Brahmas or prajapatis who assisted in building the material universe. Nine is the number of becoming or change.
Dharmakīrti. (T. Chos kyi grags pa; C. Facheng; J. Hosho; K. Popch'ing 法稱) (c. 600-670 CE). Indian Buddhist logician, who was one of the most important and influential figures in the history of Buddhist philosophy. Dharmakīrti was the author of a series of seminal works building on his predecessor DIGNĀGA's PRAMĀnASAMUCCAYA ("Compendium on Valid Knowledge"), defending it against criticism by Brahmanical writers and explaining how accurate knowledge could be gleaned (see PRAMĀnA). His "seven treatises on pramāna" (T. TSHAD MA SDE 'DUN) are the PRAMĀnAVĀRTTIKA ("Commentary on Valid Knowledge") and PRAMĀnAVINIsCAYA ("Determination of Valid Knowledge"), as well as the NYĀYABINDU ("Drop of Reasoning"), the Hetubindu ("Drop of Reasons"), the Sambandhaparīksā ("Analysis of Relations"), the SaMtānāntarasiddhi ("Proof of Other Mental Continuums"), and the Vādanyāya ("Reasoning for Debate"). Dharmakīrti proposed a causal efficacy connecting the sense object and sensory perception as the basis of reliable perception (PRATYAKsA), thereby attempting to remove the potential fallacy in Dignāga's acceptance of the infallibility of sense data themselves. Dharmakīrti wrote explanations of many of his own works, and DHARMOTTARA, sākyamati, PRAJNĀKARAGUPTA, and Manorathanandin, among others, wrote detailed commentaries on his works. He had a profound influence on the exchange between subsequent Indian Buddhist writers, such as sĀNTARAKsITA, KAMALAsĪLA, and HARIBHADRA, and contemporary Brahmanical Naiyāyika and MīmāMsaka thinkers. His work subsequently became the focus of intense study in Tibet, first in GSANG PHU NE'U THOG monastery where RNGOG BLO LDAN SHES RAB and later PHYWA PA CHOS KYI SENG GE established through their commentaries on the PRAMĀnAVINIsCAYA an influential tradition of interpretation; it was questioned by SA SKYA PAndITA in his TSHAD MA RIGS GTER, giving rise to a second line of interpretation more in line with Dharmakīrti's original works. There is a question of Dharmakīrti's philosophical affiliation, with elements in his works that reflect both SAUTRĀNTIKA and YOGĀCĀRA doctrinal positions.
dhira ::: steady, calm, patient; the calm and wise mind, "the thinker dhira who looks upon life steadily and does not allow himself to be disturbed and blinded by his sensations and emotions". dhir m dhir manusa
Dhyana: Sanskrit for meditation or the full accord of thinker and thought without interference and without being merged as yet; the seventh of the eight stages of Yoga.
Dhyana: (Skr.) Meditation or the full accord of thinker and thought without interference and without being merged as yet, the last but one stage in the attainment of the goals of Yoga (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
Dialectical materialism: The school of philosophy founded by Marx and Engels and developed by many subsequent thinker.
Divine providence is admitted by all Jewish philosophers, but its extent is a matter of dispute. The conservative thinkers, though admitting the stability of the natural order and even seeing in that order a medium of God's providence, allow greater latitude to the interference of God in the regulation of human events, or even in disturbing the natural order on occasion. In other words, they admit a frequency of miracles. The more liberal, though they do not deny the occurrence of miracles, attempt to limit it, and often rationalize the numerous miraculous events related in the Bible and bring them within the sphere of the rational order. Typical and representative is Maimonides' view of Providence. He limits its extent in the sublunar world to the human genus only on account of its possession of mind. As a result he posits a graded Providence, namely, that the one who is more intellectually perfect receives more attention or special Providence. This theory is also espoused, with certain modifications, by Ibn Daud and Gersonides. Divine providence does by no means impair human freedom, for it is rarely direct, but is exerted through a number of mediate causes, and human choice is one of the causes.
Eclecticism: The principle, tendency, or practice of combining, or drawing upon, various philosophical or theological doctrines. In its passive form, it is found in many thinkers of no great originality. In its more active form, as a deliberate attempt to create unity among discordant schools of philosophy, eclecticism was practised by the Alexandrien School (q.v.), where the Oriental and Occidental thought mingled, and, more recently, by V. Cousin (q.V.). -- R.B.W.
Effectiveness: See Logistic system, and Logic, formal, § 1. Effluvium: See Effluxes, Theory of. Effluxes, Theory of: (Lat. efflux, from effluere, to flow out) Theory of early Greek thinkers that perception is mediated by effluvia or simulacra projected by physical objects and impinging upon the organs of sense. Thus Empedocles developed the theory of effluxes in conjunction with the principle that "like perceives only like" (similia similibus percipiuntur); an element in the external world can only be perceived by the same element in the body. (See Aristotle, De Gen. et Corr. I, 8, 324b26; Theophrastus, De Sens. 7.) Democritus' theory of images is a form of the theory of effluxes. -- L.W.
Effluvium theory; efflux theory: A theory of early Greek thinkers that perception is mediated by effluvia or simulacra projected by physical objects and impinging upon the organs of sense. Thus Empedocles developed the theory of effluxes in conjunction with the principle that “like perceives only like” (similia similibus percipiuntur ), that an element in the external world can only be perceived by the same element in the body.
Empiricists: (Early English) By the beginning of the 17th century, the wave of search for new foundations of knowledge reached England. The country was fast growing in power and territory. Old beliefs seemed inadequate, and vast new information brought from elsewhere by merchants and scholars had to be assimilated. The feeling was in the air that a new, more practicable and more tangible approach to reality was needed. This new approach was attempted by many thinkers, among whom two, Bacon and Hobbes, were the most outstanding. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), despite his busy political career, found enough enthusiasm and time to outline requirements for the study of natural phenomena. Like Descartes, his younger contemporary in France, he felt the importance of making a clean sweep of countless unverified assumptions obstructing then the progress of knowledge. As the first pre-requisite for the investigation of nature, he advocated, therefore, an overthrow of the idols of the mind, that is, of all the preconceptions and prejudices prevalent in theories, ideas and even language. Only when one's mind is thus prepared for the study of phenomena, can one commence gathering and tabulating facts. Bacon's works, particularly Novum Organum, is full of sagacious thoughts and observations, but he seldom goes beyond general advice. As we realize it today, it was a gross exaggeration to call him "the founder of inductive logic". Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an empiricist of an entirely different kind. He did not attempt to work out an inductive method of investigation, but decided to apply deductive logic to new facts. Like Bacon, he keenly understood the inadequacy of medieval doctrines, particularly of those of "form" and "final cause". He felt the need for taking the study of nature anew, particularly of its three most important aspects, Matter, Man and the State. According to Hobbes, all nature is corporeal and all events have but one cause, motion. Man, in his natural state, is dominated by passion which leads him to a "war of all against all". But, contrary to animals, he is capable of using reason which, in the course of time, made him, for self-protection, to choose a social form of existence. The resulting State is, therefore, built on an implicit social contract. -- R.B.W.
Enlightenment: When Kant, carried by the cultural enthusiasm of his time, explained "enlightenment" as man's coming of age from the state of infancy which rendered him incapable of using his reason without the aid of others, he gave only the subjective meaning of the term. Objectively, enlightenment is a cultural period distinguished by the fervent efforts of leading personalities to make reason the absolute ruler of human life, and to shed the light of knowledge upon the mind and conscience of any individual. Such attempts are not confined to a particular time, or nation, as history teaches; but the term is generally applied to the European enlightenment stretching from the early 17th to the beginning of the 19th century, especially fostered by English, Dutch, French, and German philosophers. It took its start in England from the empiricism of F. Bacon, Th. Hobbes, J. Locke, it found a religious version in the naturalism of Edw. H. Cherbury, J. Toland, M. Tindal, H. Bolingbroke, and the host of "freethinkers", while the Earl of Shaftesbury imparted to it a moral on the "light of reason". Not so constructive but radical in their sarcastic criticism of the past were the French enlighteners, showing that their philosophy got its momentum from the moral corruption at the royal court and abuse of kinglv power in France. Descartes' doctrine of the "clear and perspicuous ideas," Spinoza's critical attitude towards religion, and Leibniz-Wolff's "reasonable thinking" prepared the philosophy of P. Bayle, Ch. Montesquieu, F. M. Voltaire, and J. J. Rousseau. The French positive contribution to the subject was the "Encyclopedie ou Dictionaire raisonne des sciences, arts et metiers", 1751-72, in 28 volumes, edited by Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, Holbach, J. L. Lagrane, etc. What, in England and France, remained on the stage of mere ideas and utopic dreams became reality in the new commonwealth of the U.S.A. The "fathers of the constitution" were enlightened, outstanding among them B. Franklin, Th. Jefferson, J. Adams, A. Hamilton, and Th. Paine their foremost literary propagandist.
Epimetheus (Greek) The after-thinker; a titan, the brother of Prometheus (the fore-thinker), husband of Pandora and creator of the animals while Prometheus created humankind. Epimetheus stands for the lower aspect of human mind.
Feuerbach. Ludwig Andreas: (1804-1872) Was one of the earliest thinkers manifesting the trend toward the German materialism of the 19th century. Like so many other thinkers of that period, he started with the acceptance of Hegel's objective idealism, but soon he attempted to resolve the opposition of spiritualism and materialism. His main contributions lay in the field of the philosophy of religion interpreted by him as "the dream of the human spirit" essentially an earthly dream. He publicly acknowledged his utter disbelief in immortality, which act did not fail to provoke the ire of the authorities and terminated his academic career.
freethinker ::: n. --> One who speculates or forms opinions independently of the authority of others; esp., in the sphere or religion, one who forms opinions independently of the authority of revelation or of the church; an unbeliever; -- a term assumed by deists and skeptics in the eighteenth century.
ganying. (J. kanno; K. kamŭng 感應). In Chinese, "sympathetic resonance," or "stimulus and response," a seminal concept in traditional Chinese philosophy, which is appropriated in early Chinese Buddhism to explain the Buddhist concepts of action (KARMAN) and grace (i.e., the "response" of a buddha or BODHISATTVA to a supplicant's invocation, or "stimulus"). Ganying is a mode of seemingly spontaneous (although not "uncaused") response that occurs naturally in a universe conceived holistically in terms of pattern or "principle" (LI) and interdependent order. The notion itself is deceptively simple: objects belonging to the same category or class are conceived as resonating spontaneously with each other, just as would two identically tuned strings on a pair of zithers. The notion of resonance was used in traditional Chinese philosophy to explain or rationalize the mechanism behind the elaborate system of correlated categories generally known as five-phase (wuxing) thought-viz., the primary elements of metal, wood, water, fire, and soil. According to early Chinese cosmology, the underlying principles and patterns of the universe seemingly give rise to, or resonate spontaneously with, correlative manifestations in the physical world. The Chinese conception of the universe as an interconnected harmonious whole finds expression in theories concerning the cyclic progression of the five phases and yin (dark) and yang (light), as well as in elaborate prescriptions pertaining to the ritual life of the court. The universe, according to this view, is in a state of continual motion and flux. The patterns of change are the result of the cyclic interactions between the five phases and the forces (or vital energies, C. qi) of yin and yang, which tend naturally in the direction of rhythmic balance and harmony. Humans do not stand apart from the natural universe but rather constitute a fundamental and integral part of this whole. Early Buddhist thinkers in China adapted the mechanism of sympathetic resonance to explain in Chinese terms how an action (karman) performed in one time period could evoke a corresponding response, or fruition (VIPĀKA), in another. In addition, sympathetic resonance was used by early Chinese Buddhist thinkers to make sense of the notion of grace. In this later sense, sentient beings' faith (sRADDHĀ) and/or roots of virtue (KUsALAMuLA) would invoke a "sympathetic response" in the minds of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, which prompts them to respond accordingly with salvific grace. In the PURE LAND traditions, sentient beings' recitation of the name of AMITĀBHA (see NIANFO) creates a sympathetic response in the mind of that buddha, which prompts him in turn to bring them to his pure land, where they may become enlightened. The rubric of ganying is just as prevalent in popular religious tracts in China, where it refers to the principle of moral retribution-the belief that one's good and evil deeds will result in corresponding rewards and punishments. While the Chinese notion of moral retribution (bao) meted out in this life or the next was indebted to Buddhist notions of karman and rebirth, in the premodern period, such retribution emerged as a fundamental principle of Chinese popular religious belief and practice, irrespective of one's specific religious affiliation. This doctrine was propagated through innumerable tales of miraculous retribution-such as "numinous attestation" (lingyan), "responsive attestation" (yingyan), or "numinous response" (lingying), and so on-that "attested" (yan) to the reality of the "numinous" or "supernatural" (ling) and the inevitability of divine justice.
Gods ::: The old pantheons were builded upon an ancient and esoteric wisdom which taught, under the guise of apublic mythology, profound secrets of the structure and operations of the universe which surrounds us.The entire human race has believed in gods, has believed in beings superior to men; the ancients all saidthat men are the "children" of these gods, and that from these superior beings, existent in the azurespaces, men draw all that in them is; and, furthermore, that men themselves, as children of the gods, arein their inmost essence divine beings linked forever with the boundless universe of which each humanbeing, just as is the case with every other entity everywhere, is an inseparable part. This is a truly sublimeconception.One should not think of human forms when the theosophist speaks of the gods; we mean the arupa -- the"formless" -- entities, beings of pure intelligence and understanding, relatively pure essences, relativelypure spirits, formless as we physical humans conceive form. The gods are the higher inhabitants ofnature. They are intrinsic portions of nature itself, for they are its informing principles. They are as muchsubject to the wills and energies of still higher beings -- call these wills and energies the "laws" of higherbeings, if you will -- as we are, and as are the kingdoms of nature below us.The ancients put realities, living beings, in the place of laws which, as Occidentals use the term, are onlyabstractions -- an expression for the action of entities in nature; the ancients did not cheat themselves soeasily with words. They called them gods, spiritual entities. Not one single great thinker of the ancients,until the Christian era, ever talked about laws of nature, as if these laws were living entities, as if theseabstractions were actual entities which did things. Did the laws of navigation ever navigate a ship? Doesthe law of gravity pull the planets together? Does it unite or pull the atoms together? This word laws issimply a mental abstraction signifying unerring action of conscious and semi-conscious energies innature.
Google "web" The {web} {search engine} that indexes the greatest number of web pages - over two billion by December 2001 and provides a free service that searches this index in less than a second. The site's name is apparently derived from "{googol}", but note the difference in spelling. The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought's designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously foward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" {(http://google.com/)}. (2001-12-28)
guru-sisya (guru-shishya) ::: the teacher-disciple relation (bhava), in guru-sisya which the isvara is perceived as "the teacher and guide" who "leads us to knowledge; at every step of the developing inner light and vision, we feel his touch like that of the artist moulding our clay of mind, his voice revealing the truth and its word", until there is "a transformation of our mentality into his and more and more he becomes the thinker and seer in us"H
Haeberlin, Paul: (1878-) A well known Swiss thinker whose major contributions until recent years were in the field of education. In his hands phenomenology has become existential philosophy. A transcendental-idealistic tone pervades his philosophy. He combines in theory the advantages of existential phenomenology with those of psychologism. -- H.H.
Heidegger, Martin: (1889-) Trained in Husserl's radical structural analysis of pure consciousness, Heidegger shares with phenomenology the effort to methodically analyze and describe the conceptual meanings of single phenomena. He aimed at a phenomenological analysis of human existence in respect to its temporal and historical character. Concentrating on the Greek tradition, and endeavoring to open a totally different approach from that of the Greek thinkers to the problem of being, he seeks to find his way back to an inner independence of philosophy from the special sciences. Before a start can be made in the radical analysis of human existence, the road has to be cleared of the objections of philosophical tradition, science, logic and common sense. As the moderns have forgotten the truths the great thinkers discovered, have lost the ability to penetrate to the real origins, the recovery of the hard-won, original, uncorrupted insights of man into metaphysical reality, is only possible through a "destructive" analysis of the traditional philosophies. By this recovery of the hidden sources, Heidegger aims to revive the genuine philosophizing which, not withstanding appearances, has vanished from us in the Western world because of autonomous science serious disputing of the position of philosophy. As human reality is so structured that it discloses itself immediately, he writes really an idealistic philosophy of homo faber. But instead of being a rationalistic idealist reading reason into the structure of the really real, he takes a more avowedly emotional phenomenon as the center of a new solution of the Seinsfrage.
Hence in its widest sense Scholasticism embraces all the intellectual activities, artistic, philosophical and theological, carried on in the medieval schools. Any attempt to define its narrower meaning in the field of philosophy raises serious difficulties, for in this case, though the term's comprehension is lessened, it still has to cover many centuries of many-faced thought. However, it is still possible to list several characteristics sufficient to differentiate Scholastic from non-Scholastic philosophy. While ancient philosophy was the philosophy of a people and modern thought that of individuals, Scholasticism was the philosophy of a Christian society which transcended the characteristics of individuals, nations and peoples. It was the corporate product of social thought, and as such its reasoning respected authority in the forms of tradition and revealed religion. Tradition consisted primarily in the systems of Plato and Aristotle as sifted, adapted and absorbed through many centuries. It was natural that religion, which played a paramount role in the culture of the middle ages, should bring influence to bear on the medieval, rational view of life. Revelation was held to be at once a norm and an aid to reason. Since the philosophers of the period were primarily scientific theologians, their rational interests were dominated by religious preoccupations. Hence, while in general they preserved the formal distinctions between reason and faith, and maintained the relatively autonomous character of philosophy, the choice of problems and the resources of science were controlled by theology. The most constant characteristic of Scholasticism was its method. This was formed naturally by a series of historical circumstances, The need of a medium of communication, of a consistent body of technical language tooled to convey the recently revealed meanings of religion, God, man and the material universe led the early Christian thinkers to adopt the means most viable, most widely extant, and nearest at hand, viz. Greek scientific terminology. This, at first purely utilitarian, employment of Greek thought soon developed under Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origin, and St. Augustine into the "Egyptian-spoils" theory; Greek thought and secular learning were held to be propaedeutic to Christianity on the principle: "Whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us Christians." (Justin, Second Apology, ch. XIII). Thus was established the first characteristic of the Scholastic method: philosophy is directly and immediately subordinate to theology. Because of this subordinate position of philosophy and because of the sacred, exclusive and total nature of revealed wisdom, the interest of early Christian thinkers was focused much more on the form of Greek thought than on its content and, it might be added, much less of this content was absorbed by early Christian thought than is generally supposed. As practical consequences of this specialized interest there followed two important factors in the formation of Scholastic philosophy: Greek logic en bloc was taken over by Christians; from the beginning of the Christian era to the end of the XII century, no provision was made in Catholic centers of learning for the formal teaching of philosophy. There was a faculty to teach logic as part of the trivium and a faculty of theology. For these two reasons, what philosophy there was during this long period of twelve centuries, was dominated first, as has been seen, by theology and, second, by logic. In this latter point is found rooted the second characteristic of the Scholastic method: its preoccupation with logic, deduction, system, and its literary form of syllogistic argumentation. The third characteristic of the Scholastic method follows directly from the previous elements already indicated. It adds, however, a property of its own gained from the fact that philosophy during the medieval period became an important instrument of pedogogy. It existed in and for the schools. This new element coupled with the domination of logic, the tradition-mindedness and social-consciousness of the medieval Christians, produced opposition of authorities for or against a given problem and, finally, disputation, where a given doctrine is syllogistically defended against the adversaries' objections. This third element of the Scholastic method is its most original characteristic and accounts more than any other single factor for the forms of the works left us from this period. These are to be found as commentaries on single or collected texts; summae, where the method is dialectical or disputational in character. The main sources of Greek thought are relatively few in number: all that was known of Plato was the Timaeus in the translation and commentary of Chalcidius. Augustine, the pseudo-Areopagite, and the Liber de Causis were the principal fonts of Neoplatonic literature. Parts of Aristotle's logical works (Categoriae and de Interpre.) and the Isagoge of Porphyry were known through the translations of Boethius. Not until 1128 did the Scholastics come to know the rest of Aristotle's logical works. The golden age of Scholasticism was heralded in the late XIIth century by the translations of the rest of his works (Physics, Ethics, Metaphysics, De Anima, etc.) from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona, John of Spain, Gundisalvi, Michael Scot, and Hermann the German, from the Greek by Robert Grosseteste, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant. At the same time the Judae-Arabian speculation of Alkindi, Alfarabi, Avencebrol, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides together with the Neoplatonic works of Proclus were made available in translation. At this same period the Scholastic attention to logic was turned to metaphysics, even psychological and ethical problems and the long-discussed question of the universals were approached from this new angle. Philosophy at last achieved a certain degree of autonomy and slowly forced the recently founded universities to accord it a separate faculty.
Hierarchy ::: The word hierarchy merely means that a scheme or system or state of delegated directive power andauthority exists in a self-contained body, directed, guided, and taught by one having supreme authority,called the hierarch. The name is used by theosophists, by extension of meaning, as signifying theinnumerable degrees, grades, and steps of evolving entities in the kosmos, and as applying to all parts ofthe universe; and rightly so, because every different part of the universe -- and their number is simplycountless -- is under the vital governance of a divine being, of a god, of a spiritual essence; and allmaterial manifestations are simply the appearances on our plane of the workings and actions of thesespiritual beings behind it.The series of hierarchies extends infinitely in both directions. If he so choose for purposes of thought,man may consider himself at the middle point, from which extends above him an unending series of stepsupon steps of higher beings of all grades -- growing constantly less material and more spiritual, andgreater in all senses -- towards an ineffable point. And there the imagination stops, not because the seriesitself stops, but because our thought can reach no farther out nor in. And similar to this series, aninfinitely great series of beings and states of beings descends downwards (to use human terms) -downwards and downwards, until there again the imagination stops, merely because our thought can gono farther.The summit, the acme, the flower, the highest point (or the hyparxis) of any series of animate and"inanimate" beings, whether we enumerate the stages or degrees of the series as seven or ten or twelve(according to whichever system we follow), is the divine unity for that series or hierarchy, and thishyparxis or highest being is again in its turn the lowest being of the hierarchy above it, and so extendingonwards forever -- each hierarchy manifesting one facet of the divine kosmic life, each hierarchyshowing forth one thought, as it were, of the divine thinkers.Various names were given to these hierarchies considered as series of beings. The generalized Greekhierarchy as shown by writers in periods preceding the rise of Christianity may be collected andenumerated as follows: (1) Divine; (2) Gods, or the divine-spiritual; (3) Demigods, sometimes calleddivine heroes, involving a very mystical doctrine; (4) Heroes proper; (5) Men; (6) Beasts or animals; (7)Vegetable world; (8) Mineral world; (9) Elemental world, or what was called the realm of Hades. TheDivinity (or aggregate divine lives) itself is the hyparxis of this series of hierarchies, because each ofthese nine stages is itself a subordinate hierarchy. This (or any other) hierarchy of nine, hangs like apendant jewel from the lowest hierarchy above it, which makes the tenth counting upwards, which tenthwe can call the superdivine, the hyperheavenly, this tenth being the lowest stage (or the ninth, countingdownwards) of still another hierarchy extending upwards; and so on, indefinitely.One of the noblest of the theosophical teachings, and one of the most far-reaching in its import, is that ofthe hierarchical constitution of universal nature. This hierarchical structure of nature is so fundamental,so basic, that it may be truly called the structural framework of being. (See also Planes)
History. Inasmuch as pure or basic Materialism has been an infrequent doctrine among major thinkers, the history of philosophy broadly understood, is largely the history of Idealism.
"Human speech is only a secondary expression and at its highest a shadow of the divine Word, of the seed-sounds, the satisfying rhythms, the revealing forms of sound that are the omniscient and omnipotent speech of the eternal Thinker, Harmonist, Creator. The highest inspired speech to which the human mind can attain, the word most unanalysably expressive of supreme truth, the most puissant syllable or mantra can only be its far-off representation.” The Upanishads
“Human speech is only a secondary expression and at its highest a shadow of the divine Word, of the seed-sounds, the satisfying rhythms, the revealing forms of sound that are the omniscient and omnipotent speech of the eternal Thinker, Harmonist, Creator. The highest inspired speech to which the human mind can attain, the word most unanalysably expressive of supreme truth, the most puissant syllable or mantra can only be its far-off representation.” The Upanishads
IDEA—A thought which is conceived to be in a measure independent of the thinker, and, in a sense, self existent, "Thought" is used to name the presentation which is the direct product of the active mind and which would not and could not exist apart from the acting mind, while "idea" is used to name the presentation of the mind which is no longer considered as acting; a presentation which might even exist apart from, and independently of, a mind or its activities. A thought is felt to be peculiar to the one thinking it, while the idea is felt to be, in a measure, self-determined or due to the nature of that with which it is associated so that all minds would foam it the same; the term still feels the influence of Plato's conception of the ideas as the forms of fundamental reality.
inductivism ::: The philosophy that holds that scientific research is guided by the various observations and data produced by previous science experiments; In other words, that science progresses in a direction that has prior experimental data. It exists both in a classical naive version, which has been highly influential, and in various more sophisticated versions. The naive version, which trace back to thinkers such as Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī[15] and David Hume, says that general statements (theories) have to be based on empirical observations, which are subsequently generalized into statements that can be regarded as true or probably true.
In genera, Anglo-Catholic philosophy has been an incarnational or sacramental one, finding God in the Biblical revelation culminating in Christ, but unwilling to limit his self-disclosure to that series of events. Incarnationalism provides, it is said, the setting for the historic Incarnation; general revelation is on sacramental lines, giving meaning to the particular sacraments. For Anglo-Catholic philosophical theology, in its central stream, the key to dogma is the cumulative experience of Christian people, tested by the Biblical revelation as source and standard of that experience and hence "classical" in its value. Revelation is the ultimate authority; the Church possesses a trustworthiness about her central beliefs, but statement of these may change from age to age. Sometimes this main tendency of Anglo-Catholic thought has been sharply criticized by thinkers, themselves Anglicans (cf. Tennant's Philosophical Theology); but these have, in general, served as useful warnings rather than as normal expressions of the Anglican mind.
In the Veda, the All-pervading Godhead, the Eternal Personality of Consciousness, the wide-moving One, that which has gone abroad triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker, and Former in the superconscient Bliss.
it is hard to believe he was a clear thinker or accurate reporter, although he purports to have
"It is He that has gone abroad — That which is bright, bodi-less, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker,(1) the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal.” The Upanishads
“It is He that has gone abroad—That which is bright, bodi-less, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil. The Seer, the Thinker,(1) the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal.” The Upanishads
IV. First Decline. (14-16 cent.) St. Thomas' position in many points had been so radical a departure from the traditional thought of Christendom that many masters in the late XIII and early XIV centuries were led to reexamine philosophy in the light of Aristotle's works. This gave rise to a critical and independent spirit which multiplied systems and prepared for the individualism of the Renaissance. Noteworthy in this movement are James of Metz, Durand de St. Pourcain (+1334), Peter Aureoli (+1322) and Henry of Harclay (+1317). The greatest figure, however, is William of Occam (+1349), founder of modern thought, who renewed the Nominalism of the XI and XII cent., restricted the realm of reason but made it quite independent in its field. In reaction to this critical and independent movement, many thinkers gathered about the two great minds of the past century. Thomas and Duns Scotus, contenting themselves with merely reproducing their masters' positions. Thus Scholasticism broke up into three camps: Thomism, Scotism and Nominalism or Terminism; the first two stagnant, the third free-lance.
James, William: (1842-1910) Unquestionably one of the most influential of American thinkers, William James began his career as a teacher shortly after graduation (MD, 1870) from Harvard University. He became widely known as a brilliant and original lecturer, and his already considerable reputation was greatly enhanced in 1890 when his Principles of Psychology made its appearance. Had James written no other work, his position in American philosophy and psychology would be secure; the vividness and clarity of his style no less than the keenness of his analysis roused the imagination of a public in this country which had long been apathetic to the more abstract problems of technical philosophy. Nor did James allow this rising interest to flag. Turning to religious and moral problems, and later to metaphysics, he produced a large number of writings which gave ample evidence of his amazing ability to cut through the cumbersome terminology of traditional statement and to lay bare the essential character of the matter in hand. In this sense, James was able to revivify philosophical issues long buried from any save the classical scholars. Such oversimplifications as exist, for example, in his own "pragmatism" and "radical empiricism" must be weighed against his great accomplishment in clearing such problems as that of the One and the Many from the dry rot of centuries, and in rendering such problems immediately relevant to practical and personal difficulties. -- W.S.W.
Jesuit Thinkers of the Renaissance, ed. G. Smith, S.J., (Milwaukee, 1939). -- V.J.B.
Kaplan, Mordecai (1881-1983) ::: Founding dean of the Teachers' Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary, on whose faculty he served for more than 50 years; one of the leading thinkers of American Jewry in the 20th century and the founder of the Reconstructionist movement.
kavir manisi paribhuh svayambhuh ::: the Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere, the Self-existent. [Isa 8]
kavirmanisi ::: Seer and Thinker. [see the following]
Kierkegaard, Sören: (1813-1855) Danish religious thinker whose influence was largely limited to Scandinavian and German circles until recently. His works are now translated into English and his thought revived by contemporary social pessimists. Eternity, he held, is more important than time; sin is worse than suffering ; man is an egotist and must experience despair; God is beyond reason and man; Christianity stands opposed to this world and time and to man's reason; paradoxes are the inevitable result of man's reflections; Christian ethics realizable only in eternity. Kierkegaard was raised in a stern Christian environment; he reacted against orthodox religion and official philosophies (especially Hegelianism). An individualist, a sensitive, melancholic personality suffering intense frustrations. Cf. German ed. of K's writings: Sämmtliche Werke (1909-), and Eng. translations of Swenson (Post-Scientific Philosophy, etc.). -- V.F.
Kyoto school. An influential school of modern and contemporary Japanese philosophy that is closely associated with philosophers from Kyoto University; it combines East Asian and especially MAHĀYĀNA Buddhist thought, such as ZEN and JoDO SHINSHu, with modern Western and especially German philosophy and Christian thought. NISHIDA KITARo (1870-1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), and NISHITANI KEIJI (1900-1991) are usually considered to be the school's three leading figures. The name "Kyoto school" was coined in 1932 by Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), a student of Nishida and Tanabe, who used it pejoratively to denounce Nishida and Tanabe's "Japanese bourgeois philosophy." Starting in the late 1970s, Western scholars began to research the philosophical insights of the Kyoto school, and especially the cross-cultural influences with Western philosophy. During the 1990s, the political dimensions of the school have also begun to receive scholarly attention. ¶ Although the school's philosophical perspectives have developed through mutual criticism between its leading figures, the foundational philosophical stance of the Kyoto school is considered to be based on a shared notion of "absolute nothingness." "Absolute nothingness" was coined by Nishida Kitaro and derives from a putatively Zen and PURE LAND emphasis on the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), which Kyoto school philosophers advocated was indicative of a distinctive Eastern approach to philosophical inquiry. This Eastern emphasis on nothingness stood in contrast to the fundamental focus in Western philosophy on the ontological notion of "being." Nishida Kitaro posits absolute nothingness topologically as the "site" or "locale" (basho) of nonduality, which overcomes the polarities of subject and object, or noetic and noematic. Another major concept in Nishida's philosophy is "self-awareness" (jikaku), a state of mind that transcends the subject-object bifurcation, which was initially adopted from William James' (1842-1910) notion of "pure experience" (J. junsui keiken); this intuition reveals a limitless, absolute reality that has been described in the West as God or in the East as emptiness. Tanabe Hajime subsequently criticized Nishida's "site of absolute nothingness" for two reasons: first, it was a suprarational religious intuition that transgresses against philosophical reasoning; and second, despite its claims to the contrary, it ultimately fell into a metaphysics of being. Despite his criticism of what he considered to be Nishida's pseudoreligious speculations, however, Tanabe's Shin Buddhist inclinations later led him to focus not on Nishida's Zen Buddhist-oriented "intuition," but instead on the religious aspect of "faith" as the operative force behind other-power (TARIKI). Inspired by both Nishida and such Western thinkers as Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (with whom he studied), Nishitani Keiji developed the existential and phenomenological aspects of Nishida's philosophy of absolute nothingness. Concerned with how to reach the place of absolute nothingness, given the dilemma of, on the one hand, the incessant reification and objectification by a subjective ego and, on the other hand, the nullification of reality, he argued for the necessity of overcoming "nihilism." The Kyoto school thinkers also played a central role in the development of a Japanese political ideology around the time of the Pacific War, which elevated the Japanese race mentally and spiritually above other races and justified Japanese colonial expansion. Their writings helped lay the foundation for what came to be called Nihonjinron, a nationalist discourse that advocated the uniqueness and superiority of the Japanese race; at the same time, however, Nishida also resisted tendencies toward fascism and totalitarianism in Japanese politics. Since the 1990s, Kyoto school writings have come under critical scrutiny in light of their ties to Japanese exceptionalism and pre-war Japanese nationalism. These political dimensions of Kyoto school thought are now considered as important for scholarly examination as are its contributions to cross-cultural, comparative philosophy.
Levinthal, Israel H. (1888-1982) ::: Conservative Jewish rabbinic leader and thinker; United States.
Liberal ::: (from Latin, “free [thinker]”). A general term used in religion discussions to indicate a person or view that breaks significantly from the conservative traditional position(s). See also modernist.
li. (J. ri; K. i 理). In Chinese, "principle"; the fundamental "principle," general "pattern," or innate "quality" that governs reality. (The antiquated English rendering of li as "noumenon" is weighted down with Kantian connotations that are inappropriate in an East Asian philosophical context and is best avoided.) In ancient China, the term li was originally used as a noun to indicate the natural patterns that occurred on a piece of jade, although it could also be used as a verb referring to the carving that transforms a piece of raw jade into a refined cultural object. The term soon came to refer to the inner or outer patterns inherent in any kind of physical object. For example, in the section on "Jielao" ("Explaining Lao[zi]") from the Hanfeizi, compiled during the late second century BCE, li refers to either an object's overt quality or its hidden disposition to manifest certain qualities at a given time. XUANXUE (Dark Learning) scholars from the Wei-Jin period were among the first intellectuals to use the term in a philosophically meaningful way. In particular, Wang Bi (226-249) employed li as a synonym for his ontological concept of WU (nonbeing) to refer to a metaphysical principle that underlies all phenomena. Such usages of the term influenced early Buddhist thinkers in China. DAOSHENG (355-434), e.g., regarded li as an immutable, ultimate principle, often using it as a synonym for the buddha-nature (FOXING) or the true self (zhenwo). During the Tang dynasty, Huayan Buddhism (HUAYAN ZONG) employed the term in a philosophically sophisticated manner, although with varying meanings. For DUSHUN, the putative founder of the Huayan school, li represents not a substance or thing but, instead, a proposition that expresses the true identity of the phenomenal world. For example, li could refer to the principle that all phenomena (SHI) are empty (suNYATĀ), a proposition that is only understandable through practice. His successors in the Huayan school, such as FAZANG and CHENGGUAN, imbued the term with additional ontological connotations. Fazang identified li with the mind as suchness (TATHATĀ; BHuTATATHATĀ) described in the DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna"), which he considered to be synonymous with the TATHĀGATAGARBHA. Developing on Fazang's thought, Chengguan viewed li as the essential quality that pervades all four realms of reality (DHARMADHĀTU; SI FAJIE). During the Song dynasty, Neo-Confucian philosophers reinterpreted the term to fit a Confucian philosophical context. They interpreted li as an inherent principle within things that makes them what they are; when applied to human beings, li thus refers to the four inner moral essences of humaneness, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. Some aspects of these Neo-Confucian interpretations of the term li appear in the writings of such Song-dynasty Chan masters as DAHUI ZONGGAO.
liuxiang. (J. rokuso; K. yuksang 六相). In Chinese, "six aspects," "characteristics," or "signs" (LAKsAnA) inherent in all DHARMAs, according to the Huayan school (HUAYAN ZONG). Based on their reading of the AVATAMSAKASuTRA, Huayan thinkers delineated six "aspects" to all things (with two alternate analogies given for each aspect): (1) The general or generic aspect (zongxiang), e.g., the aggregates (SKANDHA) together make up an individual person, which is the general sum of its parts; alt., being a sentient being is the generic aspect of a person. (2) The constituent or particular aspect (biexiang), e.g., the individual is constituted from the aggregates, which are the constituent parts that make up the sum of the person; alt., the fact that people may be differentiated as wise or fools is their particular characteristic. (3) The identity aspect (tongxiang), e.g., though distinct from one another, the aggregates are all part of this same person; alt., that each person possesses the identical wisdom of the buddhas is their characteristic of identity. (4) The differentiated aspect (yixiang), e.g., though they are of the same person, the aggregates are still distinct from one another; alt., that people have their unique attachments and vices is their characteristic of difference. (5) The collective, or integrated, aspect (chengxiang), e.g., the aggregates function collectively in interdependence one with another, thereby forming an integrated whole, which is the person; alt., that all beings are reborn in congruity with the actions they perform is their characteristic of integration. (6) The instantiated, or destructive, aspect (huaixiang), e.g., though forming a unitary whole in their function, each aggregate functions within its own laws and operational parameters; alt., that the mind ultimately does not abide anywhere is the characteristic of destruction. According to Huayan analysis, the first dyad pertains to the "essence" (TI) of things, the second to their "characteristics" (xiang), and the third to their "function" (YONG). Huayan exegetes argued that, in the enlightened vision of reality, these six aspects of things were seen simultaneously and not as contradictory facets. This vision of the "consummate interfusion" (YUANRONG) of the six aspects is said to occur on the first BHuMI of the BODHISATTVA path (see BODHISATTVABHuMI). See also SHISHI WU'AI FAJIE; FAJIE YUANQI.
Locke also was a political, economic and religious thinker of note. A "latitudinarian" and broad churchman in theology and a liberal in politics, he argued against the divine right of kings and the authority of the Bible and the Church, and maintained that political sovereignty rests upon the consent of the governed, and ecclesiastical authority upon the consent of reason. He was also an ardent defender of freedom of thought and speech. Main works: Two Treatises on Gov't, 1689; Reasonableness in Christianity, 1695; Some Thoughts on Education, 1693; An Essay on Human Understanding, 1690. -- B.A.G.F.
logical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to logic; used in logic; as, logical subtilties.
According to the rules of logic; as, a logical argument or inference; the reasoning is logical.
Skilled in logic; versed in the art of thinking and reasoning; as, he is a logical thinker.
manis.i (manishi) ::: thinker. manisi
manisi (Manishi) ::: the thinker.
manu ::: 1. the thinker, the mental being, man. ::: 2. Manu: the father of man. ::: 3. the four Manus (catvaro manavah): the spiritual Fathers of every human mind and body. ::: 4. [one of the fourteen progenitors who preside successively over the fourteen manvantaras; to the first of these is attributed the Manava-dharmasastra; the manu of the present (seventh) manvantara is Vaivasvata].
manyamanah ::: the thinkers of the word. [Ved.]
Mendelssohn, Moses (1729-86) ::: Important German Jewish thinker whose ideas helped lay the base for reform Judaism (see haskalah).
Menzan Zuiho. (面山瑞方) (1683-1769). Japanese reformer of the SoToSHu of ZEN during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867), who is largely responsible for establishing DoGEN KIGEN (1200-1253) as the font of orthodoxy for the Soto school and, during the modern and contemporary periods, as an innovative religious thinker. Born in Higo province in the Kumamoto region, Menzan studied with MANZAN DoHAKU (1636-1715) and later Sonno Soeki (1649-1705). At a thousand-day retreat Menzan led following Sonno's death, Menzan read texts by Dogen that had been neglected for centuries and subsequently used them as the scriptural authority from which he forged an entirely new vision of the Sotoshu; he then deployed this revisioning of Dogen to justify a reformation of long-held practices within the school. Menzan was a prolific author, with over a hundred works attributed to him, sixty-five of which have been published in modern Soto school collections; these works include everything from detailed philological commentaries to extended discussions of monastic rules and regulations. He remains best known for his Shobogenzo shotenroku, an eleven-roll encyclopedic commentary to Dogen's magnum opus, the SHoBoGENZo.
Methodology: The systematic analysis and organization of the rational and experimental principles and processes which must guide a scientific inquiry, or which constitute the structure of the special sciences more particularly. Methodology, which is also called scientific method, and more seldom methodeutic, refers not only to the whole of a constituted science, but also to individual problems or groups of problems within a science. As such it is usually considered as a branch of logic; in fact, it is the application of the principles and processes of logic to the special objects of the various sciences; while science in general is accounted for by the combination of deduction and induction as such. Thus, methodology is a generic term exemplified in the specific method of each science. Hence its full significance can be understood only by analyzing the structure of the special sciences. In determining that structure, one must consider the proper object of the special science, the manner in which it develops, the type of statements or generalizations it involves, its philosophical foundations or assumptions, and its relation with the other sciences, and eventually its applications. The last two points mentioned are particularly important: methods of education, for example, will vary considerably according to their inspiration and aim. Because of the differences between the objects of the various sciences, they reveal the following principal methodological patterns, which are not necessarily exclusive of one another, and which are used sometimes in partial combination. It may be added that their choice and combination depend also in a large degree on psychological motives. In the last resort, methodology results from the adjustment of our mental powers to the love and pursuit of truth. There are various rational methods used by the speculative sciences, including theology which adds certain qualifications to their use. More especially, philosophy has inspired the following procedures: The Soctattc method of analysis by questioning and dividing until the essences are reached; the synthetic method developed by Plato, Aristotle and the Medieval thinkers, which involves a demonstrative exposition of the causal relation between thought and being; the ascetic method of intellectual and moral purification leading to an illumination of the mind, as proposed by Plotinus, Augustine and the mystics; the psychological method of inquiry into the origin of ideas, which was used by Descartes and his followers, and also by the British empiricists; the critical or transcendental method, as used by Kant, and involving an analysis of the conditions and limits of knowledge; the dialectical method proceeding by thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which is promoted by Hegelianlsm and Dialectical Materialism; the intuitive method, as used by Bergson, which involves the immediate perception of reality, by a blending of consciousness with the process of change; the reflexive method of metaphysical introspection aiming at the development of the immanent realities and values leading man to God; the eclectic method (historical-critical) of purposive and effective selection as proposed by Cicero, Suarez and Cousin; and the positivistic method of Comte, Spencer and the logical empiricists, which attempts to apply to philosophy the strict procedures of the positive sciences. The axiomatic or hypothetico-deductive method as used by the theoretical and especially the mathematical sciences. It involves such problems as the selection, independence and simplification of primitive terms and axioms, the formalization of definitions and proofs, the consistency and completeness of the constructed theory, and the final interpretation. The nomological or inductive method as used by the experimental sciences, aims at the discovery of regularities between phenomena and their relevant laws. It involves the critical and careful application of the various steps of induction: observation and analytical classification; selection of similarities; hypothesis of cause or law; verification by the experimental canons; deduction, demonstration and explanation; systematic organization of results; statement of laws and construction of the relevant theory. The descriptive method as used by the natural and social sciences, involves observational, classificatory and statistical procedures (see art. on statistics) and their interpretation. The historical method as used by the sciences dealing with the past, involves the collation, selection, classification and interpretation of archeological facts and exhibits, records, documents, archives, reports and testimonies. The psychological method, as used by all the sciences dealing with human behaviour and development. It involves not only introspective analysis, but also experimental procedures, such as those referring to the relations between stimuli and sensations, to the accuracy of perceptions (specific measurements of intensity), to gradation (least noticeable differences), to error methods (average error in right and wrong cases), and to physiological and educational processes.
Mind-body relation: Relation obtaining between the individual mind and its body. Theories of the mind-body relation are monistic or dualistic according as they identify or separate the mind and the body. Monistic theories include: the theory of mind as bodily function, advanced by Aristotle and adhered to by thinkers as divergent as Hobbes, Hegel, and the Behaviorists, the theory of body as mental appearance held by Berkeley, Leibniz, Schopenhauer and certain other idealists, the two-aspect theory of Spinoza and of recent neutral monism which considers mind and body as manifestations of a third reality which is neither mental nor bodily. The principal dualistic theories are: two sided interacti'onism of Descartes, Locke, James and others. See Interactionism. psycho-physical parallelism. See Parallelism, Psycho-physical. Epephenomenalism. See Epephenomenalism.
MORALS The terms morals (from Latin) and ethics (from Greek) through ignorance&
Moreover, it is a serious wide-spread error of interpretation to consider Bergson as an anti-intellectualist. His alleged anti-intellectualism should be considered as a protest against taking the static materialism and spatialization of Newton's conception of nature is being anything but a high abstraction, as a rejection of the extreme claims of mechanistic and materialistic science, as an effort of reason to transcend itself in harmony with the greatest idealistic thinkers, as an effort of thinkers to stress the dynamic nature of reality, and as a persistent criticism of reason, a continuation of the Kantian tradition. His much misread conception of intuition may be viewed as akin to Spinoza's intuitio, to wit: a completion rather than a rejection of reason. -- H.H.
muse ::: n. 1. A state of abstraction or contemplation; reverie. 2. The goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like. musings, musers. *v. 3. To be absorbed in one"s thoughts; engage in meditation. 4. To consider or say thoughtfully. mused, musing. adj. *mused. 5. Perplexed, bewildered, bemused. musing. 6. Being absorbed in thoughts; reflecting deeply; contemplating; engaged in meditation. muse-lipped.
Mysteries ::: The Mysteries were divided into two general parts, the Less Mysteries and the Greater.The Less Mysteries were very largely composed of dramatic rites or ceremonies, with some teaching; theGreater Mysteries were composed of, or conducted almost entirely on the ground of, study; and thedoctrines taught in them later were proved by personal experience in initiation. In the Greater Mysterieswas explained, among other things, the secret meaning of the mythologies of the old religions, as, forinstance, the Greek.The active and nimble mind of the Greeks produced a mythology which for grace and beauty is perhapswithout equal, but it nevertheless is very difficult to explain; the Mysteries of Samothrace and of Eleusis-- the greater ones -- explained among other things what these myths meant. These myths formed thebasis of the exoteric religions; but note well that exotericism does not mean that the thing which is taughtexoterically is in itself false, but merely that it is a teaching given without the key to it. Such teaching issymbolic, illusory, touching on the truth -- the truth is there, but without the key to it, which is theesoteric meaning, it yields no proper sense.We have the testimony of the Greek and Roman initiates and thinkers that the ancient Mysteries ofGreece taught men, above everything else, to live rightly and to have a noble hope for the life after death.The Romans derived their Mysteries from those of Greece.The mythological aspect comprises only a portion -- and a relatively small portion -- of what was taughtin the Mystery schools in Greece, principally at Samothrace and at Eleusis. At Samothrace was taught thesame mystery-teaching that was current elsewhere in Greece, but here it was more developed andrecondite, and the foundation of these mystery-teachings was morals. The noblest and greatest men ofancient times in Greece were initiates in the Mysteries of these two seats of esoteric knowledge.In other countries farther to the east, there were other Mystery schools or "colleges," and this wordcollege by no means necessarily meant a mere temple or building; it meant association, as in our modernword colleague, "associate." The Teutonic tribes of northern Europe, the Germanic tribes, whichincluded Scandinavia, had their Mystery colleges also; and teacher and neophytes stood on the bosom ofMother Earth, under Father Ether, the boundless sky, or in subterranean receptacles, and taught andlearned. The core, the heart, the center, of the teaching of the ancient Mysteries was the abstruseproblems dealing with death. (See also Guru-parampara)
Nānamoli, Bhikkhu. (1905-1960). A distinguished British THERAVĀDA monk and translator from Pāli. Born Osbert Moore, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. During World War II, he served as a staff officer in Italy, where he became interested in Buddhism after reading Julius Evola's The Doctrine of Awakening. He joined the BBC after the war. In 1949, he traveled to Sri Lanka with his friend Harold Musson. Together, they received lower ordination (P. pabbajjā; cf. S. PRAVRAJITA) as novices (P. sāmanera; S. sRĀMAnERA) at the Island Hermitage in Dodunduwa. They took higher ordination (UPASAMPADĀ) as monks (P. bhikkhu; S. BHIKsU) at Vajirarama Temple (Colombo) in 1950. Taking the ordination name Nānamoli, Moore spent the remainder of his life living as a monk at the Island Hermitage, translating Pāli texts into English. His magnum opus was his renowned translation of BUDDHAGHOSA's VISUDDHIMAGGA, rendered as The Path of Purification, in 1956. Other translations include the NETTIPPAKARAnA (published as The Guide) and the PAtISAMBHIDĀMAGGA (published as The Path of Discrimination), as well as most of the suttas of the MAJJHIMANIKĀYA and several from the SAMYUTTANIKĀYA. Other of his books include The Life of the Buddha and A Thinker's Note Book. He died suddenly of heart failure while on pilgrimage at Majo and was cremated at Vajirarama monastery.
Nimbarka: An Indian thinker and theologian of the 12th century A.D., of Vedantic (q.v.), Vishnuite persuasion, who assumed the world and the human soul to be essentially and eternally different from Vishnu, yet constituting a certain unity with him because of: complete dependence. -- K.F.L.
On the ambiguities of the term, as well as an analysis of one of its meanings as the characteristics of thought shared by some German thinkers from about 1790 to 1830, cf. A. O. Lovejoy, "Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas," Jour. Hist. Ideas (Jan. 1941), which refers also to Lovejoy's now famous articles on the subject. -- I.J.
On the whole, there can be distinguished two currents in the entire stream of Jewish philosophy which flowed for about five hundred years, the Oriental and the Occidental. The first was limited to the lands of the East, such as Babylonia and the neighboring countries, and the leading representatives of which were Saadia (q.v.) among the Rabbanites and Aaron ben Elijah (q.v.) among the Karaites. The second developed primarily in Spain and the Provence, and among its leading thinkers were Bahya (q.v.), Gabirol (q.v.), Maimonides (q.v.), Gersonides (q.v.) and Crescas (q.v.). Since Jewish philosophy, during a large part of its existence, was developed within the Arabic world, it consequently reflects the influence of the various systems of thought dominant within that sphere.
"Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed.” Letters on Yoga
“Ordinarily we mean by it [consciousness] our first obvious idea of a mental waking consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of his bodily existence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no man has yet measured or fathomed.” Letters on Yoga
otaniha. (大谷派). Also known as otanishu and Higashi Honganjiha, the second largest subsect of JoDO SHINSHu in the Japanese PURE LAND tradition. After SHINRAN's founding of Jodo Shinshu, the HONGANJI emerged as the dominant subsect and was administered by the descendants of Shinran's patriarchal line. During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) grew suspicious of Honganji, which during the fifteen and sixteenth centuries had not only grown to be the largest sect of Japanese Buddhism but also one of the largest landholding institutions in Japan. By involving himself in a succession dispute, the shogun was successfully able to blunt its power by causing a schism within the Honganji into east (higashi) and west (nishi) factions, with Kyonyo (1558-1614) heading the Higashi faction and Junnyo (1577-1631) leading the Nishi faction. Because the eastern faction maintained control of Shinran's mausoleum in the otani area of Kyoto, HIGASHI HONGANJI has also come to be called the otaniha. otani University developed from the Higashi Honganji seminary, which was founded in 1665. Several of the most important Buddhist thinkers of the Meiji period were affiliated with the otaniha, including NANJo BUN'Yu (1849-1927), Inoue Enryo (1858-1919), and KIYOZAWA MANSHI (1863-1903). DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI (1870-1966) founded the journal The Eastern Buddhist at otani University, and the author Kanamatsu Kenryo (1915-1986) was also affiliated with the otaniha. See also NISHI HONGANJIHA.
overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga
"The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga
"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine
"The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, — although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.” The Life Divine
"The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga
"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri
"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga
*Overmind"s.
Plekhanov, George Valentinovich: (1856-1918) Was a Russian Marxist who became the philosophical leader of the Menshevik faction of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, opposing Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik wing. In spite of what are regarded as his political errors, such as his support of the war of 1914-1918 and his negative attitude to the Revolution of October, 1917, contemporary Soviet thinkers regard Plekhanov's works as containing valuable expositions of Marxist philosophy. Among his writings in this field are, Our Disputes (1885), On the Problem of the Development of the Monistic View of History (1895), Essays on the History of Materilism (1896), On the Materialist Conception of History (1897), On the Problem of the Role of the Individual in History (1898).
poet ::: n. --> One skilled in making poetry; one who has a particular genius for metrical composition; the author of a poem; an imaginative thinker or writer.
Port Royal Logic: See Logic, traditional. Port Royalists: Name applied to a group of thinkers, writers, and educators, more or less closely connected with the celebrated Cistercian Abbey of Port Royal near Paris, which during the seventeenth century became the most active center of Jansenism and, to a certain extent, of Cartesianism in France. The Port Royalists were distinguished by the severity and austerity of their moral code and by their new educational methods which greatly promoted the advance of pedagogy. The most noted among them were Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint Cyran (1581-1643), Antoine-le grand Arnauld (1612-1694), and Pierre Nicole (1625-1695). Cf. Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal. -- J.J.R.
positivism ::: The philosophical position that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge. It is an approach to the philosophy of science, deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others). See also logical positivism.
pracetas ::: conscious thinker (seems to correspond to the Vedantic prajnana). [Ved.] ::: pracetah [nominative, feminine], she who has the perceptive knowledge.
Pragmatism: (Gr. pragma, things done) Owes its inception as a movement of philosophy to C. S. Peirce and William James, but approximations to it can be found in many earlier thinkers, including (according to Peirce and James) Socrates and Aristotle, Berkeley and Hume. Concerning a closer precursor, Shadworth Hodgson, James says that he "keeps insisting that realities are only what they are 'known as' ". Kant actually uses the word "pragmatic" to characterize "counsels of prudence" as distinct from "rules of skill" and "commands of morality" (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 40). His principle of the primacy of practical reason is also an anticipation of pragmatism. It was reflection on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which originally led Peirce to formulate the view that the muddles of metaphysics can be cleared up if one attends to the practical consequences of ideas. The pragmatic maxim was first stated by Peirce in 1878 (Popular Science Monthly) "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object". A clearer formulation by the same author reads: "In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception, and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception". This is often expressed briefly, viz.: The meaning of a proposition is its logical (or physical) consequences. The principle is not merely logical. It is also admonitory in Baconian style "Pragmatism is the principle that everv theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose onlv meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the impentive mood". (Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 5.18.) Although Peirce's maxim has been an inspiration not only to later pragmatists, but to operationalists as well, Peirce felt that it might easily be misapplied, so as to eliminate important doctrines of science -- doctrines, presumably, which hive no ascertainable practical consequences.
prathamo manota dhiyah ::: the first thinker of the Thought. [RV 6.1.1]
Preestablished Harmony: A theory expounded by Leibniz and adopted in modified form by other thinkers after him, to refute the theories of interactionism, occasionalism, and the parallel ism of the Spinozistic type, in psycho-physics. According to its dynamism, matter and spirit, body and soul, the physical and the moral, each a "windowless", perfect monad (q.v.) in itself, are once and for all not only corresponding realities, but they are also synchronized by God in their changes like two clocks, thus rendering the assumption of any mutual or other influences nugatory. -- K.F.L.
Principles of Man ::: The seven principles of man are a likeness or rather copy of the seven cosmic principles. They areactually the offspring or reflection of the seven cosmic principles, limited in their action in us by theworkings of the law of karma, but running in their origin back into THAT which is beyond: into THATwhich is the essence of the universe or the universal -- above, beyond, within, to the unmanifest, to theunmanifestable, to that first principle which H. P. Blavatsky enunciates as the leading thought of thewisdom-philosophy of The Secret Doctrine.These principles of man are reckoned as seven in the philosophy by which the human spiritual andpsychical economy has been publicly explained to us in the present age. In other ages these principles orparts of man were differently reckoned -- the Christian reckoned them as body, soul, and spirit,generalizing the seven under these three heads.Some of the Indian thinkers divided man into a basic fourfold entity, others into a fivefold. The Jewishphilosophy, as found in the Qabbalah which is the esoteric tradition of the Jews, teaches that man isdivided into four parts: neshamah, ruah, nefesh, and guf.Theosophists for convenience often employ in their current literature a manner of viewing man'scomposite constitution which is the dividing of his nature into a trichotomy, meaning a division intothree, being spirit, soul, and body, which in this respect is identical with the generalized Christianizedtheosophical division. Following this trichotomy, man's three parts, therefore, are: first and highest, thedivine spirit or the divine monad of him, which is rooted in the universe, which spirit is linked with theAll, being in a highly mystical sense a ray of the All; second, the intermediate part, or the spiritualmonad, which in its higher and lower aspects is the spiritual and human souls; then, third, the lowest partof man's composite constitution, the vital-astral-physical part of him, which is composed of material orquasi-material life-atoms. (See also Atman, Buddhi, Manas, Kama, Prana, Linga-sarira, Sthula-sarira)
Pudgala: (Skr. beautiful, lovely) The sou], or personal entity, admitted by some thinkers even though belonging to the schools of Buddhism (s.v.), they hold that at least a temporary individuality must be assumed as vehicle for karma (q.v.) -- K.F.L.
quote :::Deep thinkers in all ages have recognized the three-fold aspect of nature. Teachers have called these three aspects by different names according to their religious terminology, and they gave them an interpretation that suited the time and the place. Tracing back this idea, we find that it already existed among the Hindus in very ancient times; they called it Trimutri, and they personified these three aspects by giving them characters such as Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Mahesh or Shiva the Destroyer or Assimilator.
Ramanuja: A renowned Indian thinker and theologian of the 11th cent A.D. who restated within the tradition of Vishnuism (q.v.) the doctrines of the Vedanta (q.v.) in that he assumed world and soul to be a transformation of God variously articulated. -- K.F.L.
rang stong gzhan stong. (rang dong shen dong). In Tibetan, lit. "self-emptiness, other-emptiness," an important and persistent philosophical debate in Tibetan Buddhism, dating to the fifteenth century. The opposing factions are the DGE LUGS sect on one side and the JO NANG sect on the other, with support from certain BKA' BRGYUD and RNYING MA authors. The debate concerns issues fundamental to their understanding of what constituted enlightenment and the path to its achievement. For the Dge lugs, the most profound of all Buddhist doctrines is that all phenomena in the universe are empty of an intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA), that the constituents of experience are not naturally endowed with a defining characteristic. Emptiness (suNYATĀ) for the Dge lugs is the fact that phenomena do not exist in and of themselves; emptiness is instead the lack of intrinsic existence. The Dge lugs then, are proponents of "self-emptiness," and argue that the hypostatized factor that an object in reality lacks (i.e., is empty of) is wrongly believed by the unenlightened to be intrinsic to the object itself. Everything, from physical forms to the omniscient mind of the Buddha, is thus equally empty. This emptiness is described by the Dge lugs as a non-affirming or simple negation (PRASAJYAPRATIsEDHA), an absence with nothing else implied in its place. From this perspective, the Dge lugs judge the sutras of the second of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma as described in the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA, "the dharma wheel of signlessness" (ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA), to contain the definitive expression of the Buddha's most profound intention. By contrast, the Jo nang look for inspiration to the third turning of the wheel, "the dharma wheel for ascertaining the ultimate" (PARAMĀRTHAVINIsCAYADHARMACAKRA; see also *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA), especially to those statements that describe the nonduality of subject and object to be the consummate nature (PARINIsPANNA) and the understanding of that nonduality to be the highest wisdom. They describe this wisdom in substantialist terms, calling it eternal, self-arisen, and truly established. This wisdom consciousness exists autonomously and is thus not empty in the way that emptiness is understood by the Dge lugs. Instead, this wisdom consciousness is empty in the sense that it is devoid of all afflictions and conventional factors, which are extraneous to its true nature. Hence, the Jo nang speak of the "emptiness of the other," the absence of extrinsic and extraneous qualities. The Dge lugs cannot deny the presence of statements in the MAHĀYĀNA canon that speak of the TATHĀGATAGARBHA as permanent, pure, blissful, and endowed with self. But they argue that such statements are provisional, another example of the Buddha's expedient means of attracting to the faith those who find such a description appealing. The true tathāgatagarbha, they claim, is the emptiness of the mind; it is this factor, present in all sentient beings, that offers the possibility of transformation into an enlightened buddha. This is the view of CANDRAKĪRTI, they say, whom they regard as the supreme interpreter of the doctrine of emptiness. The Jo nang do not deny that this is Candrakīrti's view, but they deny Candrakīrti the rank of premier expositor of NĀGĀRJUNA's thought. For them, Candrakīrti teaches an emptiness which is a mere negation of true existence, which they equate with nihilism, or else a preliminary stage of negation that precedes an understanding of the highest wisdom. Nor do they deny that such an exposition is also to be found in Nāgārjuna's philosophical corpus (YUKTIKĀYA). But those texts, they claim, do not represent Nāgārjuna's final view, which is expressed instead in his devotional corpus (STAVAKĀYA), notably the DHARMADHĀTUSTAVA ("Praise of the Sphere of Reality"), with its more positive exposition of the nature of reality. Those who would deny its ultimate existence, such as Candrakīrti, they classify as "one-sided Madhyamakas" (phyogs gcig pa'i dbu ma pa) as opposed to the "great Madhyamakas" (DBU MA PA CHEN PO), among whom they would include the Nāgārjuna of the four hymns and ĀRYADEVA, as well as thinkers whom the Dge lugs classify as YOGĀCĀRA or SVĀTANTRIKA-MADHYAMAKA: e.g., ASAnGA, VASUBANDHU, MAITREYANĀTHA, and sĀNTARAKsITA. The Dge lugs attempt to demonstrate that the nature of reality praised by Nāgārjuna in his hymns is the same emptiness that he describes in his philosophical writings.
Reformation: The Protestant Reformation may be dated from 1517, the year Martin Luther (1483-1546), Augustinian monk and University professor in Wittenberg, publicly attacked the sale of indulgences by the itinerant Tetzel, Dominican ambassador of the Roman Church. The break came first in the personality of the monk who could not find in his own religious and moral endeavors to win divine favor the peace demanded by a sensitive conscience; and when it came he found to his surprise that he had already parted company with a whole tradition. The ideology which found a response in his inner experience was set forth by Augustine, a troubled soul who had surrendered himself completely to divine grace and mercy. The philosophers who legitimized man's endeavor to get on in the world, the church which demanded unquestioned loyalty to its codes and commands, he eschewed as thoroughly inconsonant with his own inner life. Man is wholly dependent upon the merits of Christ, the miracle of faith alone justifies before God. Man's conscience, his reason, and the Scriptures together became his only norm and authority. He could have added a fourth: patriotism, since Luther became the spokesman of a rising tide of German nationalism already suspect of the powers of distant Rome. The humanist Erasmus (see Renaissance) supported Luther by his silence, then broke with him upon the reformer's extreme utterances concerning man's predestination. This break with the humanists shows clearly the direction which the Protestant Reformation was taking: it was an enfranchised religion only to a degree. For while Erasmus pleaded for tolerance and enlightenment the new religious movement called for decision and faith binding men's consciences to a new loyalty. At first the Scriptures were taken as conscience permitted, then conscience became bound by the Scuptures. Luther lacked a systematic theology for the simple reason that he himself was full of inconsistencies. A reformer is often not a systematic thinker. Lutheran princes promoted the reconstruction of institutions and forms suggested by the reformer and his learned ally, Melanchthon, and by one stroke whole provinces became Protestant. The original reformers were reformed by new reformers. Two of such early reformers were Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) in Switzerland and John Calvin (1509-1564) who set up a rigid system and rule of God in Geneva. Calvinism crossed the channel under the leadership of John Knox in Scotland. The English (Anglican) Reformation rested on political rather than strictly religious considerations. The Reformation brought about a Counter-Reformation within the Roman Church in which abuses were set right and lines against the Protestants more tightly drawn (Council of Trent, 1545-1563). -- V.F.
Renouvier, Charles: (1818-1903) a thinker strongly influenced by Leibniz and Kant. His philosophy has been called 'phenomenological neo-criticism', and its peculiar feature is that it denies the existence of all transcendental entities, such as thing-in-itself, the absolute, and the noumenon. -- R.B.W.
sabda. (P. sadda; T. sgra; C. sheng; J. sho; K. song 聲). In Sanskrit, "sound," or "auditory object"; the object of the auditory consciousness and one of the five sense objects, the others being visible forms (RuPA), smells (GANDHA), tastes (RASA), and tangible objects (SPARsA). Sounds are the object of the auditory sense organ (sROTRENDRIYA) and lead to the production of auditory consciousness (sROTRAVIJNĀNA). In the ABHIDHARMAKOsABHĀsYA, sounds are categorized according to their source, being divided into those sounds caused by elements conjoined with consciousness (upāttamahābhutahetuka) and sounds caused by elements not conjoined with consciousness (anupāttamahābhutahetuka). The former would include the sound made by the clapping of hands or the vocalization of a human or animal; the latter would include sounds in the natural world, such as the sound of wind or water. Each of these two types is further subdivided into the articulate (sattvākhya, lit. "sentient being's utterance") and the inarticulate (asattvākhya, lit. "not a sentient being's utterance") based on whether or not the sound communicates meaning to a sentient being. Each of these is further divided into two types, the pleasant (yasa) and the unpleasant (ayasa), yielding eight types of sound. The nature of sound is an important point of controversy between Buddhist and Hindu thinkers in India, with Buddhists arguing that sound is impermanent (ANITYA) against MīmāMsakas who claim that the Vedas are eternal sounds that are not created by persons (apauruseya) and hence permanent.
Samadhi: The state of superconsciousness where Absoluteness is experienced attended with all-knowledge and joy; Oneness; here the mind becomes identified with the object of meditation; the meditator and the meditated, thinker and thought become one in perfect absorption of the mind.
samadhi. ::: transcendental awareness; the quiet state of blissful awareness; oneness; union with Brahman; the goal of all yogic practice, which is attained when the yogi constantly sees the supreme Self in his Heart; a direct but temporary absorption in the Self in which there is only the feeling "I am" and no thoughts; the state of superconsciousness where Reality is experienced attended with all-knowledge and joy &
sandi. (J. santai; K. samje 三諦). In Chinese, "three truths," "threefold truth," or "three judgments"; a tripartite exegetical description of reality as being empty, provisional, and their mean, used in both the SAN LUN ZONG and TIANTAI ZONG of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. The three truths are said to have been first taught by SŬNGNANG (c. 450-c. 520), whom tradition considers an important vaunt courier in the development of the Chinese San lun school, the Chinese counterpart of the MADHYAMAKA branch of Indian philosophical exegesis, and then developed by later thinkers in both the San lun and Tiantai traditions. This Chinese notion of three truths is said to derive from a verse appearing in the Chinese translation of NĀGĀRJUNA's MuLAMADHYAMAKAKĀRIKĀ (C. Zhong lun): "All phenomena that are produced from causes and conditions,/These in fact are empty. /They are also provisional names. /This as well is the meaning of the middle way." This account is then systematized by Chinese exegetes into: (1) the authentic truth of emptiness (kongdi), viz., all things are devoid of inherent existence and are empty in their essential nature: (2) the conventional truth of being provisionally real (jiadi), viz., all things are products of a causal process that gives them a derived reality; and (3) the ultimate truth of the mean (zhongdi), viz., all things, in their absolute reality, are neither real nor unreal, but simply thus. This three-truth schema may have been influenced by indigenous Chinese scriptures (see APOCRYPHA) such as the RENWANG JING and the PUSA YINGLUO BENYE JING. The Renwang jing, for example, discusses a three-truth SAMĀDHI (sandi sanmei), in which these three types of concentrations are named worldly truth (shidi), authentic truth (zhendi), and supreme-meaning truth (diyiyidi). In this treatment, worldly truth is the affirmation of the dualistic phenomena of ordinary existence, while authentic truth is presumed to be the denial of the reality of those phenomena; both are therefore aspects of what is typically called conventional truth (SAMVṚTISATYA) in the two-truth schema (see SATYADVAYA). The supreme-meaning truth transcends all dichotomies, including affirmation and negation, to provide an all-embracing perspective and corresponds to ultimate truth (PARAMĀRTHASATYA). This schema is peculiar, and betrays its Chinese origins, because "authentic truth" and "supreme-meaning truth" are actually just different Chinese renderings of the same Sanskrit term, paramāthasatya. Zhiyi also interprets the statement "neither the same nor different" in the SADDHARMAPUndARĪKASuTRA ("Lotus Sutra") as referring implicitly to the three-truth schema: "different" is the conventional truth of provisional reality, "same" is the authentic truth of emptiness, and the whole phrase is the ultimate truth of the mean. These presentations demonstrate that the Chinese were grappling with what they considered to be an unresolved internal tension in Indian presentations of conventional and ultimate truth and were exploring a three-truth schema as one means of resolving that tension.
sanmitsu. (C. sanmi, K. sammil 三密). In Japanese, "three secrets" or "three mysteries"; an esoteric Buddhist teaching that posits that the body, speech, and mind of sentient beings, which are understood to be the source of the three forms of KARMAN in standard Buddhist doctrine, abide in a nondual relationship with the body, speech, and mind of MAHĀVAIROCANA, the DHARMAKĀYA buddha. All speech is therefore in actuality the speech of this buddha, all forms are his body, and all mental formations are at their root the mind of Mahāvairocana. The doctrine of the three mysteries appears in various strata of MAHĀYĀNA materials, but is featured most prominently in esoteric literature. In China, TIANTAI thinkers such as TIANTAI ZHIYI and ZHANRAN argued that the Buddha taught via his NIRMĀnAKĀYA, SAMBHOGAKĀYA, or dharmakāya, depending on the capacities of his audience. On another level, however, these three bodies of the Buddha were said to be nondual. In Japan, KuKAI argued that all beings had the capacity to experience the teaching of the dharmakāya directly, a position that later Japanese TENDAI thinkers argued was implicit in the earlier Chinese Tiantai teachings on the three mysteries. Kukai's sanmitsu theory held that ordinary beings may rapidly realize their buddha-nature through ABHIsEKA, or ritual initiation, and ADHIstHĀNA, or ritual empowerment, which allowed for the efficacious performance of MUDRĀ, the chanting of MANTRA and DHĀRAnĪ, and the contemplation of the MAndALA of a chosen object of devotion. These forms of initiation and empowerment, when followed by these three modes of ritual comportment, were said to reveal that the sublime reality of buddhahood is alive within the mundane reality that beings ordinarily inhabit. Once the body, speech, and mind of beings and buddhas are recognized as nondual, an ordinary being is then able to acquire SIDDHI, or supernatural powers, which may be used to effect change in the world, up to and including achieving buddhahood in this very body (J. SOKUSHIN JoBUTSU; C. JISHEN CHENGFO).
Sat: (Skr.) Being, a metaphysical concept akin to Eleatic thinking, which a school of thinkers regards as fundamental, as in Chandogya Upanishad 6.2.1 "In the beginning . . . this world was just being, one only, without a second." It refutes the theory of non-being. (See asat). -- K.F.L.
Scepticism, Fourteenth Century: At the beginning of the 14th century, Duns Scotus adopted a position which is not formally sceptical, though his critical attitude to earlier scholasticism may contain the germs of the scepticism of his century. Among Scotistic pre-sceptical tendencies may be mentioned the stress on self-knowledge rather than the knowledge of extra-mental reality, psychological voluntarism which eventuallj made the assent of judgment a matter of will rather than of intellect, and a theory of the reality of universal essences which led to a despair of the intellect's capacity to know such objects and thus spawned Ockhamism. Before 1317, Henry of Harclay noticed that, since the two terms of efficient causal connection are mutually distinct and absolute things, God, by his omnipotent will, can cause anything which naturally (naturaliter) is caused by a finite agent. He inferred from this that neither the present nor past existence of a finite external agent is necessarily involved in cognition (Pelstex p. 346). Later Petrus Aureoli and Ockham made the sime observation (Michalski, p. 94), and Ockham concluded that natural knowledge of substance and causal connection is possible only on the assumption that nature is pursuing a uniform, uninterrupted course at the moment of intuitive cognition. Without this assumption, observed sequences might well be the occasion of direct divine causal action rather than evidence of natural causation. It is possible that these sceptical views were suggested by reading the arguments of certain Moslem theologians (Al Gazali and the Mutakallimun), as well as by a consideration of miracles. The most influential sceptical author of the fourteenth century was Nicholas of Autrecourt (fl. 1340). Influenced perhaps by the Scotist conception of logical demonstration, Nicholas held that the law of noncontradiction is the ultimate and sole source of certainty. In logical inference, certainty is guaranteed because the consequent is identical with part or all of the antecedent. No logical connection can be established, therefore, between the existence or non-existence of one thing and the existence or non-existence of another and different thing. The inference from cause to effect or conversely is thus not a matter of certainty. The existence of substance, spiritual or physical, is neither known nor probable. We are unable to infer the existence of intellect or will from acts of intellection or volition, and sensible experience provides no evidence of external substances. The only certitudes properly so-called are those of immediate experience and those of principles known ex terminis together with conclusions immediately dependent on them. This thoroughgoing scepticism appears to have had considerable influence in its time, for we find many philosophers expressing, expounding, or criticizing it. John Buridan has a detailed criticism in his commentary on Aristotle's Physics (in 1 I, q. 4), Fitz-Ralph, Jacques d'Eltville, and Pierre d'Ailly maintain views similar to Nicholas', with some modifications, and there is at least one exposition of Nicholas' views in an anonymous commentary on the Sentences (British Museum, Ms. Harley 3243). These sceptical views were usually accompanied by a kind of probabilism. The condemnation of Nicholas in 1347 put a damper on the sceptical movement, and there is probably no continuity from these thinkers to the French sceptics of the 16th century. Despite this lack of direct influence, the sceptical arguments of 14th century thinkers bear marked resemblances to those employed by the French Occasionalists, Berkeley and Hume.
Science ::: When the ancient thinkers of India set themselves to study the soul of man in themselves and others, they, unlike any other nation or school of early thought, proceeded at once to a process which resembles exactly enough the process adopted by modern science in its study of physical phenomena. For their object was to study, arrange and utilise the forms, forces and working movements of consciousness, just as the modern physical Sciences study, arrange and utilize the forms, forces and working movements of objective Matter. The material with which they had to deal was more subtle, flexible and versatile than the most impalpable forces of which the physical Sciences have become aware; its motions were more elusive, its processes harder to fix; but once grasped and ascertained, the movements of consciousness were found by Vedic psychologists to be in their process and activity as regular, manageable and utilisable as the movements of physical forces. The powers of the soul can be as perfectly handled and as safely, methodically and puissantly directed to practical life-purposes of joy, power and light as the modern power of electricity can be used for human comfort, industrial and locomotive power and physical illumination; but the results to which they give room and effect are more wonderful and momentous than the results of motorpower and electric luminosity. For there is no difference of essential law in the physical and the psychical, but only a difference and undoubtedly a great difference of energy, instrumentation and exact process.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 12, Page: 314
Scottish philosophy: Name applied to the current of thought originated by the Scottish thinker, Thomas Reid (1710-1796), and disseminated by his followers as a reaction against the idealism of Berkeley and empiricism and skepticism of Hume. Its most salient characteristic is the doctrine of common sense, a natural instinct by virtue of which men are prompted to accept certain fundamental principles as postulates without giving a reason for their truth. Reason is subordinated to the role of a servant or able assistant of common sense. Philosophy must be grounded on common sense, and skepticism is a consequence of abandoning its guidance. -- J.J.R.
Social Contract: The original covenant by which, according to certain philosophers of modern times -- Hooker, Hohbes, Althusius, Spinoza, Locke, Pufendorf, etc. -- individuals have united and formed the state. This theory was combined with the older idea of the governmental contract by which the people conferred the power of government upon a single person or a group of persons. This theory goes back to ancient philosophy and was upheld by medieval thinkers, suth as Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padova. Though most of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century realized that no such original compact as the idea of the Social Contract called for, had actually occurred, the idea, nevertheless, served as a criterion to determine whether any act of the government was just or not, i.e., whether the consent of the governed might be assumed (especially Rousseau, Kant). The theory of the Social Contract had a remarkable influence upon the political philosophy of the American colonies. See Political Philosophy. -- W.E.
srāvakayāna. (T. nyan thos kyi theg pa; C. shengwen sheng; J. shomonjo; K. songmun sŭng 聲聞乘). In Sanskrit, "vehicle of the disciples," in MAHĀYĀNA treatments of the path, one of the two constituents (along with PRATYEKABUDDHAYĀNA) of the so-called "lesser vehicle" (HĪNAYĀNA). These two vehicles (C. ER SHENG), together with the third vehicle of the BODHISATTVA, are the "three vehicles" (TRIYĀNA) often mentioned in Mahāyāna sutras. The proponents of the various Mahāyāna philosophical schools disagree as to whether or not the srāvakayāna is an expedient stratagem (UPĀYA), with the MADHYAMAKA arguing that it is and that all beings, including sRĀVAKAs, will eventually enter the Mahāyāna and achieve buddhahood, and the some YOGĀCĀRA thinkers holding that srāvakas will only become arhats and cannot go on to become buddhas.
St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) asserted that thought, and therefore the thinker, was the most certain of all things.
St. Thomas was a teacher and a writer for some twenty years (1254-1273). Among his works are: Scriptum in IV Libros Sententiarum (1254-1256), Summa Contra Gentiles (c. 1260), Summa Theologica (1265-1272); commentaries on Boethius. (De Trinitate, c. 1257-1258), on Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite (De Divinis Nominibus, c. 1261), on the anonymous and important Liber de Causis (1268), and especially on Aristotle's works (1261-1272), Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, On the Soul, Posterior Analytics, On Interpretation, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption; Quaestiones Disputatae, which includes questions on such large subjects as De Veritate (1256-1259); De Potentia (1259-1263); De Malo (1263-1268); De Spiritualibus Creaturis, De Anima (1269-1270); small treatises or Opuscula, among which especially noteworthy are the De Ente et Essentia (1256); De Aeternitate Mundi (1270), De Unitate Intellecus (1270), De Substantiis Separatis (1272). While it is extremely difficult to grasp in its entirety the personality behind this complex theological and philosophical activity, some points are quite clear and beyond dispute. During the first five years of his activity as a thinker and a teacher, St. Thomas seems to have formulated his most fundamental ideas in their definite form, to have clarified his historical conceptions of Greek and Arabian philosophers, and to have made more precise and even corrected his doctrinal positions, (cf., e.g., the change on the question of creation between In II Sent., d.l, q.l, a.3, and the later De Potentia, q. III, a.4). This is natural enough, though we cannot pretend to explain why he should have come to think as he did. The more he grew, and that very rapidly, towards maturity, the more his thought became inextricably involved in the defense of Aristotle (beginning with c. 1260), his texts and his ideas, against the Averroists, who were then beginning to become prominent in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris; against the traditional Augustinianism of a man like St. Bonaventure; as well as against that more subtle Augustinianism which could breathe some of the spirit of Augustine, speak the language of Aristotle, but expound, with increasing faithfulness and therefore more imminent disaster, Christian ideas through the Neoplatonic techniques of Avicenna. This last group includes such different thinkers as St. Albert the Great, Henry of Ghent, the many disciples of St. Bonaventure, including, some think, Duns Scotus himself, and Meister Eckhart of Hochheim.
Succession and Duration: These concepts are inseparable from the idea of 'flowing' time in which every event endures relatively to a succession of other events. In Leibniz's view, succession was the most important characteristic of time defined by him as "the order of succession." Some thinkers, notably H. Bergson, regard duration (duree) as the very essence of time, "time perceived as indivisible," in which the vital impulse (elan vital) becomes the creative source of all change comparable to a snow-ball rolling down a hill and swelling on its way. According to A. N. Whitehead, duration is 'a slab of nature' possessing temporal thickness, it is a cross-section of the world in its process, or "the immediate present condition of the world at some epoch." -- R.B.W.
sūri ::: illumined, luminous; an illumined thinker, a seer; any of the suri solar gods or powers of Sūrya2.
suri ::: the illumined thinker, seer. [Ved.]
Synderesis: (Late Gr. synteresis, spark of conscience, may be connected with syneidesis, conscience) In Scholastic philosophy: the habitus, or permanent, inborn disposition of the mind to think of general and broad rules of moral conduct which become the principles from which a man may reason in directing his own moral activities. First used, apparently, by St. Jerome (In Ezekiel., I, 4-15) as equivalent to the scintilla conscientiae (spark of conscience), the term became very common and received various interpretations in the 13th century. Franciscan thinkers (St. Bonaventure) tended to regard synderesis as a quality of the human will, inclining it to embrace the good-in-general. St. Thomas thought synderesis a habitus of the intellect, enabling it to know first principles of practical reasoning; he distinguished clearly between synderesis and conscience, the latter being the action of the practical intellect deciding whether a particular, proposed operation is good or bad, here and now. Duns Scotus also considered synderesis a quality belonging to intellect rather than will. -- V.J.B.
Thales: 6th Cent. B.C., of the Milesian School of Greek Philosophy, is said to have predicted the eclipse of 585; had probably been to Egypt and was proficient in mathematics and physics. Thales, along with the other cosmological thinkers of the Ionian school, presupposed a single elementary cosmic matter at the base of the transformations of nature and declared this to be water. -- M.F.
The diversity of concepts that Husserl himself expressed by the word "phenomenology" has been a source of diverse usages among thinkeis who came under his influence and are often referred to as "the phenomenological school." Husserl himself always meant by "phenomenology" a science of the subjective and its intended objects qua intentional; this core of sense pervades the development of his own concept of phenomenology as eidetic, transcendental, constitutive. Some thinkers, appropriating only the psychological version of this central concept, have developed a descriptive intentional psychology -- sometimes empirical, sometimes eidetic -- under the title "phenomenology." On the other hand, Husserl's broader concept of eidetic science based on seeing essences and essentially necessary relations -- especially his concept of material ontology -- has been not only adopted but made central by others, who define phenomenology accordingly. Not uncommonly, these groups reject Husserl's method of transcendental-phenomenological reduction and profess a realistic metaphysics. Finally, there are those who, emphasizing Husserl's cardinal principle that evidence -- seeing something that is itself presented -- is the only ultimate source of knowledge, conceive their phenomenology more broadly and etymologically, as explication of that which shows itself, whatever may be the latter 's nature and ontologicil status. -- D.C.
“The ‘First Cause’ had no name in the beginnings. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg becomes the Universe. Hence Brahm was called Kalahansa, ‘the swan in (Space and) Time.’ He became the ‘Swan of Eternity,’ who lays at the beginning of each mahamanvantara a ‘Golden Egg.’ It typifies the great Circle, or O, itself a symbol for the Universe and its spherical bodies” (SD 1:359).
"The freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity. Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, bâlavat, who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, râjyam samrddham, is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker, ``The kingdom is of the child."" Essays on the Gita
“The freedom of the Gita is that of the freeman, the true freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity. Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, bâlavat, who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All-beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, râjyam samrddham, is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker, ``The kingdom is of the child.’’ Essays on the Gita
The idea of the three essential modes of Nature is a creation of the ancient Indian thinkers and its truth is not at once obvious, because it was the result of long psychological experiment and profound internal experience. Th
refore without a long inner experience, without intimate self-observation and intuitive perception of the Nature-forces it is difficult to grasp accurately or firmly utilise. Still certain broad indications may help the seeker on the Way of Works to understand, analyse and control by his assent or
refusal the combinations of his own nature. These modes are termed in the Indian books qualities, gunas, and are given the names sattva, rajas, tamas. Sattwa is the force of equilibrium and translates in quality as good and harmony and happiness and light; rajas is the force of kinesis and translates in quality as struggle and effort, passion and action; tamas is the force of inconscience and inertia and translates in quality as obscurity and incapacity and inaction. Ordinarily used for psychological self-analysis, these distinctions are valid also in physical Nature. Each thing and every existence in the lower Prakriti contains them and its process and dynamic form are the result of the interaction of these qualitative powers.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 232-233
Theism: (Gr. theos, god) Is in general that type of religion or religious philosophy (see Religion, Philosophy of) which incorporates a conception of God as a unitary being; thus may be considered equivalent to monotheism. The speculation as to the relation of God to world gave rise to three great forms: God identified with world in pantheism (rare with emphasis on God); God, once having created the world, relatively disinterested in it, in deism (mainly an 18th cent, phenomenon); God working in and through the world, in theism proper. Accordingly, God either coincides with the world, is external to it (deus ex machina), or is immanent. The more personal, human-like God, the more theological the theism, the more appealing to a personal adjustment in prayer, worship, etc., which presuppose either that God, being like man, may be swayed in his decision, has no definite plan, or subsists in the very stuff man is made of (humanistic theism). Immanence of God entails agency in the world, presence, revelation, involvement in the historic process, it has been justified by Hindu and Semitic thinkers, Christian apologetics, ancient and modern metaphysical idealists, and by natural science philosophers. Transcendency of God removes him from human affairs, renders fellowship and communication in Church ways ineffectual, yet preserves God's majesty and absoluteness such as is postulated by philosophies which introduce the concept of God for want of a terser term for the ultimate, principal reality. Like Descartes and Spinoza, they allow the personal in God to fade and approach the age-old Indian pantheism evident in much of Vedic and post-Vedic philosophy in which the personal pronoun may be the only distinguishing mark between metaphysical logic and theology, similarly as in Hegel. The endowment postulated of God lends character to a theistic system of philosophy. Much of Hindu and Greek philosophy stresses the knowledge and ration aspect of the deity, thus producing an epistemological theism; Aristotle, in conceiving him as the prime mover, started a teleological one; mysticism is psychologically oriented in its theism, God being a feeling reality approachable in appropriate emotional states. The theism of religious faith is unquestioning and pragmatic in its attitude toward God; theology has often felt the need of offering proofs for the existence of God (see God) thus tending toward an ontological theism; metaphysics incorporates occasionally the concept of God as a thought necessity, advocating a logical theism. Kant's critique showed the respective fields of pure philosophic enquiry and theistic speculations with their past in historic creeds. Theism is left a possibility in agnosticism (q.v.). -- K.F.L.
The later thinkers commonly referred to in the histories as Hegelians fall mainly into two groups. One is the group more or less indifferent to the method of Hegel and interested primarily in the ramifications of his doctrine; the other is the group committed in principle to the method, to its "negativity" and not to its categories, and concerned by its means to build independently. The early Hegelians in Germany belong to the former group; outstanding representatives of the latter are the recent British and American philosophers sometimes called neo-Hegelians.
::: "The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; he is Space and all that is in Space; he is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe.” The Life Divine*
“The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; he is Space and all that is in Space; he is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe.” The Life Divine
The origin, nature, and the continued existence or immortality of the soul is widely discussed in Jewish philosophy. As to origin, Saadia believes that each individual soul is created by God -- considering, of course, creation a continuous process -- and that it is of a fine spiritual substance. As to its faculties, he accepts the Aristotelian-Platonic division of the soul into three parts, namely, the appetitive, emotional, and cognitive. Ibn Daud thinks that the soul exists prior to the body potentially, i.e., that the angels endow the body with form; he further considers it a substance but says that it undergoes a process of development. The more it thinks the more perfect it becomes, and the thoughts are called acquired reason, it is this acquired reason, or being perfected which remains immortal. Maimonides does not discuss the origin of the soul, but deals more with its parts. To the three of Saadia he adds the imaginative and the conative. Gersonides' view resembles somewhat that of Ibn Daud, except that he does not speak of its origin and limits himself to the intellect. The intellect, says he, is only a capacity residing in the lower soul, and that capacity is gradually developed by the help of the Active Intellect into an acquired and ultimately into an active reason. All thinkers insist on immortality, but with Saadia and ha-Levi it seems that the entire soul survives, while the Aristotelians assert that only the intellect is immortal. Maimonides is not explicit on the subject, yet we may surmise that even the more liberal thinkers did not subscribe to Averroes' theory of unitas intellectus, and they believed that the immortal intellect is endowed with consciousness of personality. To this trend of connecting immortality with rational reflection Crescas took exception, and asserts that it is not pure thought which leads to survival, but that the soul is immortal because it is a spiritual being, and it is perfected by its love for God and the doing of good.
“The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” Letters on Savitri
The philosophy of Aristotle was continued after his death by other members of the Peripatetic school, the most important of whom were Theophrastus, Eudemus of Rhodes, and Strato of Lampsacus. In the Alexandrian Age, particularly after the editing of Aristotle's works by Andronicus of Rhodes (about 50 B.C.), Aristotelianism was the subject of numerous expositions and commentaries, such as those of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius. With the closing of the philosophical schools in the sixth century the knowledge of Aristotle, except for fragments of the logical doctrine, almost disappeared in the west. It was preserved, however, by Arabian and Syrian scholars; from whom, with the revival of learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it passed again to western Europe and became in Thomas Aquinas the philosophical basis of Christian theology. For the next few centuries the prestige of Aristotle was immense; he was "the philosopher," "the master of those who know." With the rise of modern science his authority has greatly declined. Yet Aristotelianism is still a force in modern thought: in Neo-Scholasticism; in recent psychology, whose behavioristic tendencies are in part a revival of Aristotelian modes of thought; in the various forms of vitalism in contemporary biology; in the dynamism of such thinkers as Bergson; and in the more catholic naturalism which has succeeded the mechanistic materialism of the last century, and which, whether by appeal to a doctrine of levels or by emphasis on immanent teleology, seems to be striving along Aristotelian lines for a conception of nature broad enough to include the religious, moral and artistic consciousness. Finally, a very large part of our technical vocabulary, both in science and in philosophy, is but the translation into modern tongues of the terms used by Aristotle, and carries with it, for better or worse, the distinctions worked out in his subtle mind. -- G.R.M.
The planets are individual manifestations of conscious intelligences, their distances from the sun being generally in rhythmical progression and their motions directed by mind and volition, as Kepler declared in his doctrine of Rectors, following the ancient teachings. The nebular hypothesis, once so popular in European scientific thought and now more or less rejected, was first suggested by Swedish seer Swedenborg and German philosopher Kant, and around the beginning of the 19th century was worked out in mathematical detail by the Frenchman Laplace. Though the nebular hypothesis as scientifically presented was unacceptable to theosophical thinkers, it nevertheless was based upon facts of cosmic evolution accepted by the ancient wisdom-religion and approximated somewhat more closely to what theosophy teaches as the facts of cosmogony than do the later tidal or planetesimal theories.
The Pythagoreans regarded the number seven as a compound of three and four: “On the plane of the noumenal world, the triangle was, as the first conception of the manifested Deity, its image: ‘Father-Mother-Son’; and the Quaternary, the perfect number, was the noumenal, ideal root of all numbers and things on the physical planes” (SD 2:582). The early Pythagoreans regarded the number three mystically as the vehicle of deity. If the duad was considered by these and other thinkers to be the first numerical element in cosmic manifestation, so following the same line the triad or three was considered the first number with which began the emanative series of hierarchies building all the planes inner and outer of the manifested worlds. See also TRIAD
"The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge," says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâd rtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyad astîti vâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita*
“The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,’ says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâd rtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyad astîti vâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita
“The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,’ says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâdrtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyadastîtivâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heartof man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita
There are two major points of reference for tracing1 the path that Soviet philosophy has taken -- the successive controversies around the issues of mechanism and of idealism. The first began in the early twenties as a discussion centering on the philosophy of science, and eventually spread to all phases of philosophy. The central issue was whether materialism could be identified with mechanism. Those who answered in the affirmative, among them Timiriazev, Timinski, Axelrod and Stepanov, were called mechanistic materialists. Their position tended to an extreme empiricism which was suspicious of generalization and theory, saw little if any value in Hegel's philosophy, or in dialectical as distinguished from formal logic, and even went so far, in some cases, as to deny the necessity of philosophy in general, resting content with the findings of the specific sciences. It was considered that they tended to deny the reality of quality, attempting to reduce it mechanically to quantity, and to interpret evolution as a mere quantitative increase or decrease of limited factors, neglecting the significance of leaps, breaks and the precipitation of new qualities. In opposition to their views, a group of thinkers, led by Deborin, asserted the necessity of philosophic generalizition and the value of the dialectical method in Hegel as a necessary element in Marxian materialism. In 1929, at a conference of scientific institutions attended by 229 delegates from all parts of the country, the issues were discussed by both sides. A general lack of satisfaction with the mechanist position was expressed in the form of a resolution at the close of the conference. However, the Deborin group was also criticized, not only by the mechanists, but by many who were opposed to the mechanists as well. It was felt by Mitin, Yudin and a group of predominantly younger thinkers that neither camp was really meeting the obligations of philosophy. While they felt there was much that was valuable in Deborin's criticism of mechanism, it seemed to them that he had carried it too far and had fallen over backward into the camp of the idealists. They called his group menshevizing idealists, that is to say, people who talked like the Mensheviks, a pre-revolutionary faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. By this was meant that they were unduly abstract, vague and tended to divorce theory from practice. In particular, they seemed to accept Hegelian dialectics as such, overlooking the deeper implications of the materialist reconstruction of it which Marx insisted upon. Moreover, they had neglected the field of social problems, and consequently made no significant philosophic contribution to momentous social issues of the times such as collectivization of the land, abandonment of NEP, the possibility of a Five Year Plan. At a three day conference in 1930, the situation was discussed at length by all interested parties. Deborin, Karev and Sten leading the discussion on one side, Mitin and Yudin on the other. The sense of the meetings was that the criticisms made of the Deborin group were valid.
"There is a clear distinction in Vedic thought between kavi, the seer and manîshî, the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter, the labouring mentality, which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.” The Upanishads*
“There is a clear distinction in Vedic thought between kavi, the seer and manîshî, the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter, the labouring mentality, which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.” The Upanishads
The renewal of philosophy signalized by Descartes introduced a long line of personilistic thinkers in France who under various classifications offered the main opposition to naturalism, materialism and positivism. Among these were Geulincx (1625-1669), Occasionalism; Malebranche (1638-1715), Activism; de Lignac (1710-1769), Theistic Personalism; de Biran (1766-1824), Philosophy of Effort; Cournot (1801-1877), Probabilism, Vitalism; Ravaisson (1813-1900), Spiritual Realism; Renouvier (1815-1903), Neo criticism, Personalism; Lachelier (1832-1918), Spiritua] Realism; Boutroux (1845-1921), Philosophy of Discontinuity; Bergson (1859-1941), Philosophy of Chinge, Intuitionism.
The Seer, the Thinker, the Self-existent who becomes everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sempiternal. Isha Upanishad. (1) The Life Divine
::: "The silent mind is a result of yoga; the ordinary mind is never silent. . . . The thinkers and philosophers do not have the silent mind. It is the active mind they have; only, of course, they concentrate, so the common incoherent mentalising stops and the thoughts that rise or enter and shape themselves are coherently restricted to the subject or activity in hand. But that is quite a different matter from the whole mind falling silent.” Letters on Yoga
“The silent mind is a result of yoga; the ordinary mind is never silent. . . . The thinkers and philosophers do not have the silent mind. It is the active mind they have; only, of course, they concentrate, so the common incoherent mentalising stops and the thoughts that rise or enter and shape themselves are coherently restricted to the subject or activity in hand. But that is quite a different matter from the whole mind falling silent.” Letters on Yoga
"The supermind contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and even in its lower, limited or individualised forms has only to bring the latent truth out of itself, — the perception which the old thinkers tried to express when they said that all knowing was in its real origin and nature only a memory of inwardly existing knowledge.” The Synthesis of Yoga ::: *knowledge-bales, knowledge-scrap, half-knowledge, self-knowledge, world-knowledge.
“The supermind contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and even in its lower, limited or individualised forms has only to bring the latent truth out of itself,—the perception which the old thinkers tried to express when they said that all knowing was in its real origin and nature only a memory of inwardly existing knowledge.” The Synthesis of Yoga
The view of freedom of the will and the soul influenced to a great extent the ethics of the Jewish philosophers. A large number of thinkers accepted the Aristotelian norm of the golden mean as the rule of conduct, but considered that the laws and precepts of the Torah help towards obtaining right conduct. Maimonides, however, stated that the norm of the mean is only for the average man, but that the higher man should incline towards an extreme good way in conduct. Crescas' view of the good way follows from the theory of the soul, he stresses the emotional element, namely the necessity of the love of the Good and the desire to actualize it in life.
"The whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight. Physical he seeks for this immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the infinite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.
“The whole nature of man is to become more than himself. He was the man-animal, he has become more than the animal man. He is the thinker, the craftsman, the seeker after beauty. He shall be more than the thinker, he shall be the seer of knowledge; he shall be more than the craftsman, he shall be the creator and master of his creation; he shall be more than the seeker of beauty, for he shall enjoy all beauty and all delight. Physical he seeks for this immortal substance; vital he seeks after immortal life and the infinite power of his being; mental and partial in knowledge, he seeks after the whole light and the utter vision.
The Younger Edda, in which the verses are rendered in prose form by Snorri Sturlusson, a pupil of Saemund’s grandson in the school at Oddi, contains some material which has been omitted or lost from the poetic version. A large part of Snorri’s Edda is devoted to Skaldskaparmal, a treatise on the rules of alliteration and meter that apply in the creation of poetry, and the uses of kenningar — a type of word play giving suggestive descriptions instead of the words commonly used to designate people, gods, and things. As examples of kennings the Tree of Life is called variously the soil mulcher, the shade giver, and Odin is named allfather, the thinker, the disguised, etc. The other two sections of Snorri’s Edda are named Hattatal (rules or conventions), and Gylfaginning (the mocking of Gylfe). This can also mean the “apotheosis of Gylfe” which, in the context of a Mystery teaching presents interesting possibilities.
THIRD HUMAN TYPE The third type is the thinker, philosopher, mathematician (often the unpractical theorist), who examines everything from every side, etc. K 2.7.11
This rebuilding of the notion of creature permits St. Thomas also to analyze the problems that Averroism was making more and more prominent. Philosophical truth was discovered by the Greeks and the Arabians neither completely nor adequately nor without error. What the Christian thinker must do in their presence is not to divide his allegiance between them and Christianity, but to discover the meaning of reason and the conditions of true thinking. That discovery will enable him to learn from the Greeks without also learning their errors; and it would thus show him the possibility of the harmony between reason and revelation. He must learn to be a philosopher, to discover the philosopher within the Christian man, in order to meet philosophers. In exploring the meaning of a creature, St. Thomas was building a philosophy which permitted his contemporaries (at least, if they listened to him) to free themselves from the old eternalistic and rigid world of the Greeks and to free their thinking, therefore, from the antinomies which this world could raise up for them. In the harmony of faith and reason which St. Thomas defended against Averroism, we must see the culminating point of his activity. For such a harmony meant ultimately not only a judicious and synthetic diagnosis of Greek philosophy, as well as a synthetic incorporation of Greek ideas in Christian thought, it meant also the final vindication of the humanism and the naturalism of Thomistic philosophy. The expression and the defense of this Christian humanism constitute one of St. Thomas' most enduring contributions to European thought. -- A.C.P.
Three The first odd truly manifested number in the Pythagorean system, the second in emanation from the first odd number, the unit or monad. Because it was odd, like its grandparent the monad, it partook of the qualities and attributes of the latter and hence occupied a noteworthy place in the mystical numerative system of the Pythagorean school. It was designated as corresponding to a superficies because it is the first of all numeral causes generating a plane figure. Even a circle probably may in one sense be said to comprise a triad, for it has a center, a circumference, and a space contained within the latter. The number three, however, was commonly represented by the ancient thinkers by the triangle, the three sides making a complete plane figure. “This number is truly the number of mystery par excellence,” remarks Blavatsky; in order to understand the esoteric side of the mysteries connected with it, however, one is obliged to study the Hindu symbolism of numerals “as the combinations which were applied to it are numberless” (SD 2:575).
Thub bstan rgya mtsho. (Tupten Gyatso) (1876-1933). The thirteenth DALAI LAMA of Tibet, remembered as a particularly forward-thinking and politically astute leader. Born in southeastern Tibet, he was recognized as the new Dalai Lama in 1878 and enthroned the next year. Surviving an assassination attempt (using black magic) by his regent, he assumed the duties of his office in 1895 during a period of complicated international politics between Britain, Russia, and China. British troops under the command of Col. Francis Younghusband entered Tibet in 1903. Before the British arrived in LHA SA the following year, the Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia and then continued to China, not returning to Lha sa until 1909. The following year, Chinese Manchu troops invaded Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled to India, returning in 1912. In 1912, the Manchu troops were expelled, and in 1913 the Dalai Lama declared Tibet's de facto independence. A progressive thinker, the thirteenth Dalai Lama made direct contact with Europe and the United States, and befriended Sir Charles Bell, the British political officer in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet. He tried, unsuccessfully, to have Tibet admitted to the League of Nations, developed Tibet's first modern army, and sent the first young Tibetans to be educated in England. Most of his progressive plans, however, were thwarted by conservative religious and political forces within Tibet. The thirteenth Dalai Lama died in 1933, leaving behind a chilling prophecy, which read in part: "The monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away. The great works of the noble dharma kings of old will be undone, and all of our cultural and spiritual institutions persecuted, destroyed, and forgotten. The birthrights and property of the people will be stolen. We will become like slaves to our conquerors, and will be made to wander helplessly like beggars. Everyone will be forced to live in misery, and the days and nights will pass slowly, with great suffering and terror."
ti. (J. tai; K. ch'e 體). In Chinese, lit. "body," and by extension "essence," or "substance"; a term widely used in East Asian religious traditions, including Buddhism. "Essence" often constitutes a philosophical pair together with the term "function" (YONG). In early Confucian texts, such as the Lunyu ("Analects") and the Mengzi, ti simply referred to a "body" or the "appearance" of a person or a thing. It was Wang Bi (226-249), the founder of the "Dark Learning" (XUANXUE) school of Chinese philosophy, who imbued the term with philosophical implications, using ti as a synonym for the Daoist concepts of "nonbeing" (WU) or "voidness" (xu). However, ti, along with its companion yong, was not widely used until the Buddhists adopted both terms to provide a basic conceptual frame for reality or truth. For example, the Later Qin (384-417) monk SENGZHAO (384-414?) identified ti as the nature of calmness (ji) and advocated its unity with yong, which he defined as the function of illumination (zhao). The SAN LUN ZONG master JIZANG (549-623), in discussing the two-truth (SATYADVAYA) theory of MADHYAMAKA, argued that "neither ultimate nor conventional" (feizhen feisu) was the ti ("essence") of the two truths, while "both ultimate and conventional" (zhensu) were their yong ("function"). The LIUZU TAN JING ("Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch") associates ti and yong with two modes of meditation: concentration (SAMĀDHI) is the ti or essence of wisdom (PRAJNĀ); wisdom is the yong or function of concentration. GUIFENG ZONGMI (780-841), the Tang master of both the HUAYAN ZONG scholastic and the Heze Chan traditions, systematized the Chinese discourse of the terms. Based on the DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna"), Zongmi interpreted ti as the unchanging essence of true thusness (ZHENRU), calling this absolute aspect of mind the "void and calm, numinous awareness" (KONGJI LINGZHI; see LINGZHI). Yong instead referred to the diverse functional aspects of true thusness, which corresponded to the "production-and-cessation" aspect of mind (shengmie). He also aligned ti and yong with other indigenous Chinese philosophical polarities such as, respectively, "nature" (XING) and "characteristics" (xiang), "principle" (LI) and "phenomena" (SHI), and "root" (ben) and "branches" (mo). Subsequently, Neo-Confucian thinkers, such as Cheng Yi (1033-1107) and Zhu Xi (1130-1200), adopted this paradigm into their own philosophical systems. In particular, Zhu Xi connected ti to the "nature bestowed by the heavenly mandate" (tianming zhixing) and yong to the "physical nature" (qizhi zhixing).
T'ime: The general medium in which all events take place in succession or appear to take place in succession. All specific and finite periods of time, whether past, present or future, constitute merely parts of the entire and single Time. Common-sense interprets Time vaguely as something moving toward the future or as something in which events point in that direction. But the many contradictions contained in this notion have led philosophers to postulate doctrines purporting to eliminate some of the difficulties implied in common-sense ideas. The first famous but unresolved controversy arose in Ancient Greece, between Parmenides, who maintained that change and becoming were irrational illusions, and Heraclitus, who asserted that there was no permanence and that change characterized everything without exception. Another great controversy arose centuries later between disciples of Newton and Leibniz. According to Newton, time was independent of, and prior to, events; in his own words, "absolute time, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external." According to Leibniz, on the other hand, there can be no time independent of events: for time is formed by events and relations among them, and constitutes the universal order of succession. It was this latter doctrine which eventually gave rise to the doctrine of space-time, in which both space and time are regarded as two systems of relations, distinct from a perceptual standpoint, but inseparably bound together in reality. All these controversies led many thinkers to believe that the concept of time cannot be fully accounted for, unless we distinguish between perceptual, or subjective, time, which is confined to the perceptually shifting 'now' of the present, and conceptual, or objective, time, which includes til periods of time and in which the events we call past, present and future can be mutually and fixedly related. See Becoming, Change, Duration, Persistence, Space-Time. -- R.B.W.
To be an Aristotelian under such extremely complicated circumstances was the problem that St. Thomas set himself. What he did reduced itself fundamentally to three points: (a) He showed the Platonic orientation of St. Augustine's thought, the limitations that St. Augustine himself placed on his Platonism, and he inferred from this that St. Augustine could not be made the patron of the highly elaborated and sophisticated Platonism that an Ibn Gebirol expounded in his Fons Vitae or an Avicenna in his commentaries on the metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle. (b) Having singled out Plato as the thinker to search out behind St. Augustine, and having really eliminated St. Augustine from the Platonic controversies of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas is then concerned to diagnose the Platonic inspiration of the various commentators of Aristotle, and to separate what is to him the authentic Aristotle from those Platonic aberrations. In this sense, the philosophical activity of St. Thomas in the thirteenth century can be understood as a systematic critique and elimination of Platonism in metaphysics, psychology and epistemology. The Platonic World of Ideas is translated into a theory of substantial principles in a world of stable and intelligible individuals; the Platonic man, who was scarcely more than an incarcerated spirit, became a rational animal, containing within his being an interior economy which presented in a rational system his mysterious nature as a reality existing on the confines of two worlds, spirit and matter; the Platonic theory of knowledge (at least in the version of the Meno rather than that of the later dialogues where the doctrine of division is more prominent), which was regularly beset with the difficulty of accounting for the origin and the truth of knowledge, was translated into a theory of abstraction in which sensible experience enters as a necessary moment into the explanation of the origin, the growth and the use of knowledge, and in which the intelligible structure of sensible being becomes the measure of the truth of knowledge and of knowing.
Tominaga Nakamoto. (富永仲基) (1715-1746). Important Japanese thinker during the Edo period. The third son of a soy sauce manufacturer in osaka, Tominaga was raised in the merchant community. Tominaga's social position and subsequent education resulted in an eclectic and fairly impartial understanding of the varying schools of Confucian thought, Buddhism, and Daoism. Tominaga received a classical Confucian education at Kaitokudo, a private academy funded by his father and a few other osaka manufacturers. He began his education at age nine, and eventually studied Buddhist scripture in great breadth and depth, even though he was never ordained. Tominaga was forced to leave Kaitokudo after writing a critical piece on competing Confucian schools of thought. The work, which is no longer extant, was called Setsuhei, or "A Critical Examination of [Confucian] Doctrine." Tominaga did the majority of his study of sutras and MAHĀYĀNA Buddhism between 1730 and 1738. He published two titles that are still extant, Shutsujo kogo ("Emerging from Meditation") (1745), and Okina no fumi ("Writings of an Old Man"), which was published six months after he died of lung disease in 1746. In these works, he took a historical approach that critiqued all claims to authenticity by the existing schools of Japanese religion, suggesting that the different sects of Buddhism evolved by reformations of preceding schools, reformations that were then justified by appeals to the authority of the Buddha himself. He even made the radical claim that the Buddha could not have taught the Mahāyāna sutras because their language and teachings differed so dramatically from other types of Buddhist sutras. Although he was vigorously criticized by the Buddhist ecclesia, his historical approach to Buddhism helped to establish the foundation for the Japanese scholarly study of Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Transmutation Generally the transmutation of inferior metals into gold, although the reverse process properly falls under the same term. Three things are involved: the old metal, the new metal, and the underlying essence common to both. To transmute lead into gold we must change something which is now lead so that this something will then be gold. Transmutations are now being performed in chemistry on this principle. The alchemists reasoned that, since all elements come from a root-element, it must be possible to perform transmutations by reducing the gross elements to their subtle substratum. Apart from the love of knowledge, one sees no object in the physical process other than that of acquisitive gain. If the language of alchemy is taken allegorically, as it very frequently was and is, transmutation means the refinement of the gross elements of human nature. The scientific thinkers and researchers who are leading the world in scientific experimentation in the ultimates of matter are the modern alchemists or transmutationists.
triple heavens ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Vishnu is the wide-moving one. He is that which has gone abroad — as it is put in the language of the Isha Upanishad, sa paryagât, — triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker and Former, in the superconscient Bliss, in the heaven of mind, in the earth of the physical consciousness, tredhâ vicakramânah. In those three strides he has measured out, he has formed in all their extension the earthly worlds; for in the Vedic idea the material world which we inhabit is only one of several steps leading to and supporting the vital and mental worlds beyond. In those strides he supports upon the earth and mid-world, — the earth the material, the mid-world the vital realms of Vayu, Lord of the dynamic Life-principle, — the triple heaven and its three luminous summits, trîni rocanâ. These heavens the Rishi describes as the higher seat of the fulfilling. Earth, the mid-world and heaven are the triple place of the conscious being"s progressive self-fulfilling, trishadhastha, earth the lower seat, the vital world the middle, heaven the higher. All these are contained in the threefold movement of Vishnu.” The Secret of the Veda
Two opposite errors have to be avoided, two misconceptions that disfigure opposite sides of the truth of gnosis. One error of intellect-bounded thinkers takes vijnana as synonymous with the other Indian term buddhi and buddhi as synonymous with the reason, the discerning intellect, the logical intelligence. The systems that accept this significance, pass at once from a plane of pure intellect to a plane of pure spirit. No intermediate power is recognised, no diviner action of knowledge than the pure reason is admitted; the limited human means for fixing truth is taken for the highest possible dynamics of consciousness, its topmost force and original movement. An opposite error, a misconception of the mystics identifies vijnana with the consciousness of the Infinite free from all ideation or else ideation packed into one essence of thought, lost to other dynamic action in the single and invariable idea of the One. This is the caitanyaghana of the Upanishad and is one movement or rather one thread of the many-aspected movement of the gnosis. The gnosis, the Vijnana, is not only this concentrated consciousness of the infinite Essence; it is also and at the same time an infinite knowledge of the myriad play of the Infinite. It contains all ideation (not mental but supramental), but it is not limited by ideation, for it far exceeds all ideative movement.
Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 476-77
unbeliever ::: n. --> One who does not believe; an incredulous person; a doubter; a skeptic.
A disbeliever; especially, one who does not believe that the Bible is a divine revelation, and holds that Christ was neither a divine nor a supernatural person; an infidel; a freethinker.
unthinker ::: n. --> A person who does not think, or does not think wisely.
Uttara-Mimamsa: Same as Vedanta (q.v.). Uttarapaksa: (Skr.) "Subsequent view", the second, or the thinker's own view, stated after the refutation (Khandana) of the opponent's view (see prvapaksa). -- K.F.L.
Vallabha: An Indian thinker and theologian of the 15th century A.D., a follower of the Vedanta (q.v.) and of Vishnuism (q.v.), who interpreted all to be the divine reality with its threefold aspect of sat-cit-ananda, the human soul ananda. -- K.F.L.
“Vishnu is the wide-moving one. He is that which has gone abroad—as it is put in the language of the Isha Upanishad, sa paryagât,—triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker and Former, in the superconscient Bliss, in the heaven of mind, in the earth of the physical consciousness, tredhâ vicakramânah. In those three strides he has measured out, he has formed in all their extension the earthly worlds; for in the Vedic idea the material world which we inhabit is only one of several steps leading to and supporting the vital and mental worlds beyond. In those strides he supports upon the earth and mid-world,—the earth the material, the mid-world the vital realms of Vayu, Lord of the dynamic Life-principle,—the triple heaven and its three luminous summits, trîni rocanâ. These heavens the Rishi describes as the higher seat of the fulfilling. Earth, the mid-world and heaven are the triple place of the conscious being’s progressive self-fulfilling, trishadhastha, earth the lower seat, the vital world the middle, heaven the higher. All these are contained in the threefold movement of Vishnu.” The Secret of the Veda
With these principles of matter and form, and the parallel distinction between potential and actual existence, Aristotle claims to have solved the difficulties that earlier thinkers had found in the fact of change. The changes in nature are to be interpreted not as the passage from non-being to being, which would make them unintelligible, but as the process by which what is merely potential being passes over, through form, into actual being, or entelechy. The philosophy of nature which results from these basic concepts views nature as a dynamic realm in which change is real, spontaneous, continuous, and in the main directed. Matter, though indeed capable of form, possesses a residual inertia which on occasion produces accidental effects; so that alongside the teological causation of the forms Aristotle recognizes what he calls "necessity" in nature; but the products of the latter, since they are aberrations from form, cannot be made the object of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the system of nature as developed by Aristotle is a graded series of existences, in which the simpler beings, though in themselves formed matter, function also as matter for higher forms. At the base of the series is prime matter, which as wholly unformed is mere potentiality, not actual being. The simplest formed matter is the so-called primary bodies -- earth, water, air and fire. From these as matter arise by the intervention of successively more complex forms the composite inorganic bodies, organic tissues, and the world of organisms, characterized by varying degrees of complexity in structure and function. In this realization of form in matter Aristotle distinguishes three sorts of change: qualitative change, or alteration; quantitative change, or growth and diminution; and change, of place, or locomotion, the last being primary, since it is presupposed in all the others. But Aristotle is far from suggesting a mechanical explanation of change, for not even locomotion can be explained by impact alone. The motion of the primary bodies is due to the fact that each has its natural place to which it moves when not opposed; earth to the center, then water, air, and fire to successive spheres about the center. The ceaseless motion of these primary bodies results from their ceaseless transformation into one another through the interaction of the forms of hot and cold, wet and dry. Thus qualitative differences of form underlie even the most elemental changes in the world of nature.
wu. (J. mu; K. mu 無). In Chinese, a Sinograph meaning "not have," "without," "no," and, as a philosophical term, "nonbeing," "nothingness." Exegetes in the Dark Learning (XUANXUE) school of Chinese philosophy, which was influential in early Chinese Buddhist thought, first explored the philosophical implications of the term wu. Based on their reading of the Daode jing ("The Way and Its Power"), a seminal Daoist classic traditionally attributed to the legendary Laozi, they interpreted wu as meaning either (1) "nonexistence" or "nonbeing," in distinction to the Sinograph you, viz., "existence," or "being"; or (2) the metaphysical substratum of the universe, viz., "nothingness," which transcended the dichotomy of you and wu. Wu in this second denotation did not indicate simply voidness or negation; it rather referred to the source of the DAO itself or the principle underlying all existence. In this sense, wu was inseparable from you, the phenomenal expressions of the dao. This wu was termed "original nothingness" (benwu), because it served as the ultimate foundation of the myriad of existing things in the universe, and thus represented a preconceptual reality that transcended dichotomous existence (you). Wang Bi (226-249), traditionally regarded as the founder of Xuanxue, defined a person who attained wu as a sage (shengren). ¶ Early Chinese Buddhist thinkers, such as DAO'AN (312-385) and Zhu Fatai (320-387), drew on this Xuanxue concept of benwu to render the Buddhist concept of emptiness (suNYATĀ); SENGZHAO (374-414) in his ZHAO LUN also equates the original nothingness (benwu) with the dharma-nature (DHARMATĀ). As Chinese Buddhists gradually refined their understanding of the Buddhist notion of emptiness, prompted especially by the influence of KUMĀRAJĪVA's translations of the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ texts, this rendering of sunyatā as wu was ultimately replaced by the new term kong (emptiness). ¶ In the context of the CHAN ZONG, wu was often used to emphasize the mental state of nonattachment. However, ever since the character wu (pronounced mu in Japanese and Korean) was singled out by Chan master DAHUI ZONGGAO as a meditative topic (HUATOU) in Chan practice, Chan adepts began to use "wu" as an aid in their "questioning meditation" (KANHUA CHAN). This meditative topic was derived from a popular GONG'AN (KoAN) attributed to ZHAOZHOU CONGSHEN: "Does a dog have buddha nature, or not?" Zhaozhou answered, "wu" ("no," lit. "it does not have it"). The Sinograph wu was also a frequent subject of monochrome brushstroke calligraphy, which was and is still often hung on the walls of the abbot's quarters (FANGZHANG) in Chan monasteries. See WU GONG'AN; GOUZI WU FOXING.
Xuanxue. (J. Gengaku; K. Hyonhak 玄學). In Chinese, "Dark Learning," or "Profound Learning"; a Chinese philosophical movement of the third through sixth centuries CE, which provided a fertile intellectual ground for the emergence of early Chinese forms of Buddhism. It is sometimes known as "Neo-Daoism," although the target audience of Xuanxue literati was fellow elite rather than adherents of the new schools of religious Daoism that were then developing in China. The social and political upheaval that accompanied the fall of the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) prompted many Chinese intellectuals to question the traditional foundations of Chinese thought and society and opened them to alternative worldviews. Buddhism, which was just then beginning to filter into Chinese territories, found a receptive audience among these groups of thinkers. Xuanxue scholars critiqued and reinterpreted the normative Chinese teachings of Confucianism by drawing on the so-called "three dark [treatises]" (sanxuan), i.e., the Yijing ("Book of Changes"), Daode jing ("The Way and Its Power"), and the Zhuangzi. Xuanxue designates a broad intellectual trend that sought a new way of understanding the "way" (DAO). Xuanxue philosophers explored the ontological grounding of the changing and diverse world of "being" (C. you) on a permanent and indivisible substratum called "nothingness" or "non-being" (C. WU). Xuanxue thinkers such as Wang Bi (226-249), who is regarded as the founder of the movement, and Guo Xiang (d. 312), who is often considered to represent its apex, explored how this ontological stratum of nothingness still was able to produce the world of being in all its diversity. This process was clarified by adopting the mainstream Chinese philosophical bifurcations between (1) the ineffable "substance" or "essence" (TI) of things and the ways in which that substance "functions" (YONG) in the phenomenal world; and (2) the "patterns" or "principles" (LI) that underlie all things and their phenomenal manifestations (SHI). These distinctions between ti/yong and li/shi proved to be extremely influential in subsequent Chinese Buddhist exegesis. Also according to Xuanxue interpretation, the sage (shengren) is one who understands this association between being and nothingness but realizes that their relationship is fundamentally inexpressible; nevertheless, in order to make it intelligible to others, he feels "compelled" to describe it verbally. This emphasis on the inadequacy of language resonated with Buddhist treatments of the ineffability of spiritual experience and the necessity to deploy verbal stratagems (UPĀYA) in order to make that experience intelligible to others. The sage was able to manifest his understanding in the phenomenal world not by conscious intent but as an automatic "response" (ying) to "stimuli" (gan); early Chinese Buddhist thinkers deploy the compound "stimulus and response" (GANYING) to explain the Buddhist concepts of action (KARMAN) and of grace (i.e., the "response" of a buddha or BODHISATTVA to a supplicant's invocation, or "stimulus"). Xuanxue thinkers also began to explore parallels between their ideas of "nonbeing" (wu) and the notion of emptiness (suNYATĀ) in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ corpus, which was just then being translated into Chinese. Xuanxue exegesis has often been described in the scholarly literature as a "matching concepts" (GEYI) style of interpretation, where Buddhist concepts were elucidated by drawing on indigenous Chinese philosophical terminology, though this interpretation of geyi has recently been called into question. Although Xuanxue vanished as a philosophical movement by the early sixth century, its influence was profound on several pioneering Chinese Buddhist thinkers, including ZHI DUN (314-366) and SENGZHAO (374-414), and on such early philosophical schools of Chinese Buddhism as the SAN LUN ZONG and DI LUN ZONG, and eventually on the TIANTAI ZONG and HUAYAN ZONG of the mature Chinese tradition.
yong. (J. yu; K. yong 用). In Chinese, "function," or "application"; a term often deployed in the East Asian religious traditions, including Buddhism, as a philosophical pair with "essence" (TI). Chinese Daoist and "Dark Learning" (XUANXUE) texts first imbued the term with philosophical implications: the Daode jing refers to yong as the "attributes" of the way, and the Daodejing zhu, Wang Bi's (226-249) commentary to the text, employs the term to indicate the functions or attributes of "nonbeing" (WU) or "voidness" (xu). However, yong, along with its companion ti, was not widely used until the Buddhists adopted both terms to provide a basic conceptual frame for reality or truth. For example, the SAN LUN ZONG master JIZANG (549-623) used ti and yong to explicate his theory of the middle way (MADHYAMAPRATIPAD). He connected the middle (zhong) to ti, which he described as "neither ultimate nor conventional" (feizhen feisu), and the provisional (jia) to yong, which he described as "ultimate and conventional" (zhensu). The ti and yong pair was often used in the HUAYAN, TIANTAI, and CHAN traditions. GUIFENG ZONGMI (780-841), a Tang-dynasty master of both the HUAYAN ZONG and Heze Chan traditions, provided a systematic explanation for yong and ti, based on the DASHENG QIXIN LUN ("Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna"). In particular, he distinguished between two different types of function in his theory of mind: the "inherent function of the self-nature" (zixing benyong), which he called "numinous awareness" (LINGZHI), and the responsive functions that accord with conditions (suiyuan yingyong), which he described as the various mental functions that derive from the inherent function of the mind. Many Chinese and Korean Neo-Confucian thinkers, such as Cheng Yi (1033-1107), Zhu Xi (1130-1200), and Yi Hwang (1501-1570), applied Zongmi's interpretation of this pair to their own philosophical systems.
Zeus, in the conception of the ancient Greek philosophers who nearly all were initiate-thinkers, was not the highest god. It was because all public mention of the cosmic hierarch was forbidden that Homer omitted to mention this first principle, and even the secondary, the Chaos and Aether of Orpheus and Hesiod, commencing his cosmogony with Night, which Zeus reverences — Night here being equivalent to the Hindu pradhana-prakriti.
Ziehen, Theodor: (b. 1862) A German thinker whose main interest lay in the field of physiological psychology. -- R.B.W.
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23 Sri Aurobindo
2 Robert Adams
2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 Winston Churchill
1 Thomas S Kuhn
1 Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
1 Sri Aurobindo
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein
1 Liehtemberg
1 Katha Upanisbad
1 Georg C Lichtenberg
1 Friedrich Nietzsche
1 Friedrich Neitzsche
1 Emerson
1 Eckhart Tolle
1 Bertrand Russell
1 Apollonius of Tyana
1 The Mother
1 Paracelsus
1 Aristotle
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25 Friedrich Nietzsche
16 Anonymous
11 Sri Aurobindo
11 John C Maxwell
11 Israelmore Ayivor
10 Victor Hugo
9 Douglas Adams
8 Norman Vincent Peale
8 G K Chesterton
8 Eckhart Tolle
7 David J Schwartz
6 Ralph Waldo Emerson
6 John Stuart Mill
6 Bertrand Russell
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Isabel Briggs Myers
5 Gilbert K Chesterton
5 Edward de Bono
5 Amy Webb
4 William James
1:Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. ~ Friedrich Neitzsche, #KEYS
2:The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible." ~ Winston Churchill, #KEYS
3:The highest path of jnana has no thinker left to think at all. Nobody is home. There is a total blank. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
4:The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
~ Bertrand Russell,#KEYS
5:There is an eternal Thinker, but his thoughts are not eternal. ~ Katha Upanisbad, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
6:Who is the doubter? Who is the thinker? Find him [her]. These doubts will vanish. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
7:Beware when the Almighty sends a thinker on this planet; all is then in peril. ~ Emerson, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
8:It is always the business of man the thinker to know. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Knowledge and the Ignorance, #KEYS
9:Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.
~ Aristotle,#KEYS
10:The mind is a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is the thinker. The thinker is the ego. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #KEYS
11:Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #KEYS
12:To the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #KEYS
13:The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Barbarism, #KEYS
14:When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #KEYS
15:The centre of mental thinking is the ego, the person of the individual thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #KEYS
16:A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #KEYS
17:Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #KEYS
18:If you wish to battle and strive for Truth become a thinker, that is to say, a free man. ~ Apollonius of Tyana, 28th Letter to the King.", the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
19:Its light stirs man the thinker to create
An earthly semblance of diviner things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#KEYS
20:If the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #KEYS
21:An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #KEYS
22:Catch the thoughts by becoming aware of the thinker, that's how you do it. Or, just look at the thoughts; ignore them; that stops thoughts. You cause the thoughts to cease by doing absolutely nothing; by being your self. ~ Robert Adams, #KEYS
23:At the beginning of each far-spread plane
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works
And thinker of the symbol of its scene. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Soul,#KEYS
24:Man is a thinker. He is that what he thinks. When he thinks fire he is fire. When he thinks war, he will create war. Everything depends if his entire imagination will be an entire sun, that is, that he will imagine himself completely that what he wants. ~ Paracelsus, #KEYS
25:In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#KEYS
26:Into thought's narrow limits she has come;
Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed
Into the little cabin of the Idea,
The closed room of a lonely thinker's grasp: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,#KEYS
27:... we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, Passages from The Synthesis of Yoga, #KEYS
28:This witness hush is the Thinker's secret base:
Hidden in silent depths the word is formed,
From hidden silences the act is born
Into the voiceful mind, the labouring world;
In secrecy wraps the seed the Eternal sows
Silence, the mystic birthpla ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, In the Self of Mind,#KEYS
29:Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release,#KEYS
30:In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man.
He stood erect, a godlike form and force,
And a soul's thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;
Man stood erect, he wore the thinker's brow:
He looked at heaven ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#KEYS
31:One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #KEYS
32:A single thinker in an aimless world
Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,
He saw the purpose in the works of Time.
Even in that aimlessness a work was done
Pregnant with magic will and change divine.
The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 02.04#KEYS
33:The architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul's Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#KEYS
34:Although some Western psychologies believe that the dreamer should not control the dream, according to Tibetan teachings this is a wrong view. It is better for the lucid and aware dreamer to control the dream than for the dreamer to be dreamed. The same is true with thoughts: it is better for the thinker to control the thoughts than for the thoughts to control the thinker. ~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep, #KEYS
35:The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 129,#KEYS
36:The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought, - these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present.
For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#KEYS
37:The most outward psychological form of these things is the mould or trend of the nature towards certain dominant tendencies, capacities, characteristics, form of active power, quality of the mind and inner life, cultural personality or type. The turn is often towards the predominance of the intellectual element and the capacities which make for the seeking and finding of knowledge and an intellectual creation or formativeness and a preoccupation with ideas and the study of ideas or of life and the information and development of the reflective intelligence. According to the grade of the development there is produced successively the make and character of the man of active, open, inquiring intelligence, then the intellectual and, last, the thinker, sage, great mind of knowledge. The soul-powers which make their appearance by a considerable development of this temperament, personality, soul-type, are a mind of light more and more open to all ideas and knowledge and incomings of Truth; a hunger and passion for knowledge, for its growth in ourselves, for its communication to others, for its reign in the world, the reign of reason and right and truth and justice and, on a higher level of the harmony of our greater being, the reign of the spirit and its universal unity and light and love; a power of this light in the mind and will which makes all the life subject to reason and its right and truth or to the spirit and spiritual right and truth and subdues the lower members to their greater law; a poise in the temperament turned from the first to patience, steady musing and calm, to reflection, to meditation, which dominates and quiets the turmoil of the will and passions and makes for high thinking and pure living, founds the self-governed sattwic mind, grows into a more and more mild, lofty, impersonalised and universalised personality. This is the ideal character and soul-power of the Brahmana, the priest of knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, 4:15 - Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality #KEYS
38:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],#KEYS
39:The poet-seer sees differently, thinks in another way, voices himself in quite another manner than the philosopher or the prophet. The prophet announces the Truth as the Word, the Law or the command of the Eternal, he is the giver of the message; the poet shows us Truth in its power of beauty, in its symbol or image, or reveals it to us in the workings of Nature or in the workings of life, and when he has done that, his whole work is done; he need not be its explicit spokesman or its official messenger. The philosopher's business is to discriminate Truth and put its parts and aspects into intellectual relation with each other; the poet's is to seize and embody aspects of Truth in their living relations, or rather - for that is too philosophical a language - to see her features and, excited by the vision, create in the beauty of her image.
No doubt, the prophet may have in him a poet who breaks out often into speech and surrounds with the vivid atmosphere of life the directness of his message; he may follow up his injunction "Take no thought for the morrow," by a revealing image of the beauty of the truth he enounces, in the life of Nature, in the figure of the lily, or link it to human life by apologue and parable. The philosopher may bring in the aid of colour and image to give some relief and hue to his dry light of reason and water his arid path of abstractions with some healing dew of poetry. But these are ornaments and not the substance of his work; and if the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. Thus the more rigid metaphysicians are perhaps right in denying to Nietzsche the name of philosopher; for Nietzsche does not think, but always sees, turbidly or clearly, rightly or distortedly, but with the eye of the seer rather than with the brain of the thinker. On the other hand we may get great poetry which is full of a prophetic enthusiasm of utterance or is largely or even wholly philosophic in its matter; but this prophetic poetry gives us no direct message, only a mass of sublime inspirations of thought and image, and this philosophic poetry is poetry and lives as poetry only in so far as it departs from the method, the expression, the way of seeing proper to the philosophic mind. It must be vision pouring itself into thought-images and not thought trying to observe truth and distinguish its province and bounds and fences.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#KEYS
40:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution, Part I, The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti [336-337],#KEYS
41:The Teachings of Some Modern Indian Yogis
Ramana Maharshi
According to Brunton's description of the sadhana he (Brunton) practised under the Maharshi's instructions,1 it is the Overself one has to seek within, but he describes the Overself in a way that is at once the Psychic Being, the Atman and the Ishwara. So it is a little difficult to know what is the exact reading.
*
The methods described in the account [of Ramana Maharshi's technique of self-realisation] are the well-established methods of Jnanayoga - (1) one-pointed concentration followed by thought-suspension, (2) the method of distinguishing or finding out the true self by separating it from mind, life, body (this I have seen described by him [Brunton] more at length in another book) and coming to the pure I behind; this also can disappear into the Impersonal Self. The usual result is a merging in the Atman or Brahman - which is what one would suppose is meant by the Overself, for it is that which is the real Overself. This Brahman or Atman is everywhere, all is in it, it is in all, but it is in all not as an individual being in each but is the same in all - as the Ether is in all. When the merging into the Overself is complete, there is no ego, no distinguishable I, or any formed separative person or personality. All is ekakara - an indivisible and undistinguishable Oneness either free from all formations or carrying all formations in it without being affected - for one can realise it in either way. There is a realisation in which all beings are moving in the one Self and this Self is there stable in all beings; there is another more complete and thoroughgoing in which not only is it so but all are vividly realised as the Self, the Brahman, the Divine. In the former, it is possible to dismiss all beings as creations of Maya, leaving the one Self alone as true - in the other it is easier to regard them as real manifestations of the Self, not as illusions. But one can also regard all beings as souls, independent realities in an eternal Nature dependent upon the One Divine. These are the characteristic realisations of the Overself familiar to the Vedanta. But on the other hand you say that this Overself is realised by the Maharshi as lodged in the heart-centre, and it is described by Brunton as something concealed which when it manifests appears as the real Thinker, source of all action, but now guiding thought and action in the Truth. Now the first description applies to the Purusha in the heart, described by the Gita as the Ishwara situated in the heart and by the Upanishads as the Purusha Antaratma; the second could apply also to the mental Purusha, manomayah. pran.asarı̄ra neta of the Upanishads, the mental Being or Purusha who leads the life and the body. So your question is one which on the data I cannot easily answer. His Overself may be a combination of all these experiences, without any distinction being made or thought necessary between the various aspects. There are a thousand ways of approaching and realising the Divine and each way has its own experiences which have their own truth and stand really on a basis, one in essence but complex in aspects, common to all, but not expressed in the same way by all. There is not much use in discussing these variations; the important thing is to follow one's own way well and thoroughly. In this Yoga, one can realise the psychic being as a portion of the Divine seated in the heart with the Divine supporting it there - this psychic being takes charge of the sadhana and turns the ......
1 The correspondent sent to Sri Aurobindo two paragraphs from Paul Brunton's book A Message from Arunachala (London: Rider & Co., n.d. [1936], pp. 205 - 7). - Ed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#KEYS
42:To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single subject and this it must do undistracted by all lures and alien calls on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to keep the mind; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker of knowledge must effect. Nor must it be merely the consecutive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted so much as a dwelling so far as possible on the fruitful essence of the idea which by the insistence of the soul's will upon it must yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestation of the divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the Sadhaka. The thought may come first and the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held till it becomes a constant experience and finally the Dharma or law of the being.
This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation of the object or by a merging into it m an inner Samadhi. If this be the process followed, then subsequently the state into which we rise must still be called down to take possession of the lower being, to shed its light, power and bliss on our ordinary consciousness. For otherwise we may possess it, as many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi, but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into the contacts of the world; and this truncated possession is not the aim of an integral Yoga.
A third process is neither at first to concentrate in a strenuous meditation on the one subject nor in a strenuous contemplation of the one object of thought-vision, but first to still the mind altogether. This may be done by various ways; one is to stand back from the mental action altogether not participating in but simply watching it until, tired of its unsanctioned leaping and running, it falls into an increasing and finally an absolute quiet. Another is to reject the thought-suggestions, to cast them away from the mind whenever they come and firmly hold to the peace of the being which really and always exists behind the trouble and riot of the mind. When this secret peace is unveiled, a great calm settles on the being and there comes usually with it the perception and experience of the all-pervading silent Brahman, everything else at first seeming to be mere form and eidolon. On the basis of this calm everything else may be built up in the knowledge and experience no longer of the external phenomena of things but of the deeper truth of the divine manifestation.
Ordinarily, once this state is obtained, strenuous concentration will be found no longer necessary. A free concentration of will using thought merely for suggestion and the giving of light to the lower members will take its place. This Will will then insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman. By swifter or slower degrees according to the previous preparation and purification of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that eventually the knowledge of the Divine takes possession of our consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is formed in our human existence even as it was done by the old Vedic Sadhakas. For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and powerful discipline.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, Concentration,#KEYS
43:What are these operations? They are not mere psychological self-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such observation are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and practically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead to a right thought of considerable power and effectivity. Like intellectual discrimination by the process of meditative thought they will have an effect of purification; they will lead to self-knowledge of a certain kind and to the setting right of the disorders of the soul and the heart and even of the disorders of the understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight path to the knowledge of the real Self. The Upanishad tells us that the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances of things; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought and steady wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to immortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self-observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction.We can look into the inward of ourselves more easily than we can look into the inward of things external to us because there, in things outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the form and secondly we have no natural previous experience of that in them which is other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. (2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs us towards the knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the realisation of the Self in its pure being.
The status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is not merely an intellectual conception or clear discrimination of the truth, nor is it an enlightened psychological experience of the modes of our being. It is a "realisation", in the full sense of the word; it is the making real to ourselves and in ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and it is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its flux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity.
This internal vision, dr.s.t.i, the power so highly valued by the ancient sages, the power which made a man a Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it-to the soul and not merely to the intellect-as do things seen to the physical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaks.a, of that which is present to the eyes, and paroks.a, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision, we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who have seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes,-for no other sense is adequate,-we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge. Precisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of he Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from philosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and exclusive concentration;3 but we have not yet realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality, jyotirmaya brahman, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever fadings of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held. The experience is inevitably renewed and must become more frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity.
(2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the 2 In one respect, however, it is easier, because in external things we are not so much hampered by the sense of the limited ego as in ourselves; one obstacle to the realisation of God is therefore removed.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge,#KEYS
44:For instance, a popular game with California occultists-I do not know its inventor-involves a Magic Room, much like the Pleasure Dome discussed earlier except that this Magic Room contains an Omniscient Computer.
To play this game, you simply "astrally project" into the Magic Room. Do not ask what "astral projection" means, and do not assume it is metaphysical (and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic). Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a "mind game." Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer. It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, "reading" them and decoding their meaning. (Crude prototypes of such computers already exist.) So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know. It will read your thought, and project into your brain, by a laser ray, the correct answer.
There is one slight problem. The computer is very sensitive to all brain-waves. If you have any doubts, it registers them as negative commands, meaning "Do not answer my question." So, the way to use it is to start simply, with "easy" questions. Ask it to dig out of the archives the name of your second-grade teacher. (Almost everybody remembers the name of their first grade teacher-imprint vulnerability again-but that of the second grade teacher tends to get lost.)
When the computer has dug out the name of your second grade teacher, try it on a harder question, but not one that is too hard. It is very easy to sabotage this machine, but you don't want to sabotage it during these experiments. You want to see how well it can be made to perform.
It is wise to ask only one question at a time, since it requires concentration to keep this magic computer real on the field of your perception. Do not exhaust your capacities for imagination and visualization on your first trial runs.
After a few trivial experiments of the second-grade-teacher variety, you can try more interesting programs. Take a person toward whom you have negative feelings, such as anger, disappointment, feeling-of-betrayal, jealousy or whatever interferes with the smooth, tranquil operation of your own bio-computer. Ask the Magic Computer to explain that other person to you; to translate you into their reality-tunnel long enough for you to understand how events seem to them. Especially, ask how you seem to them.
This computer will do that job for you; but be prepared for some shocks which might be disagreeable at first. This super-brain can also perform exegesis on ideas that seem obscure, paradoxical or enigmatic to us. For instance, early experiments with this computer can very profitably turn on asking it to explain some of the propositions in this book which may seem inexplicable or perversely wrong-headed to you, such as "We are all greater artists than we realize" or "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" or "mind and its contents are functionally identical."
This computer is much more powerful and scientifically advanced than the rapture-machine in the neurosomatic circuit. It has total access to all the earlier, primitive circuits, and overrules any of them. That is, if you put a meta-programming instruction into this computer; it will relay it downward to the old circuits and cancel contradictory programs left over from the past. For instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions as: 1. I am at cause over my body. 2. I am at cause over my imagination. 3.1 am at cause over my future. 4. My mind abounds with beauty and power. 5.1 like people, and people like me.
Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.
This represents cybernetic consciousness; the programmer becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-metaprogrammer, etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the metaprogrammer. "Whatever you say it is, it isn't, " Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves. "Neti, neti" (not that, not that), Hindu teachers traditionally say when asked what "God" is or what "Reality" is. Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to develop meta-programming consciousness than most of humanity. Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of your mind as mind 1 , and the mind which contemplates that mind as mind2 and the mind which contemplates mind2 contemplating mind 1 as mind3, you are well on your way to meta-programming awareness. Alice in Wonderland is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon all students of yoga. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Is there a thinker apart from thought? ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 2:Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 3:The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial. ~ benjamin-disraeli, @wisdomtrove 4:God is the one great employer, thinker, planner, supervisor. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 5:The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future. ~ oliver-wendell-holmes-jr, @wisdomtrove 6:A possibility thinker notices a problem just long enough to get excited about the solution. ~ alan-cohen, @wisdomtrove 7:The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 8:To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove 9:A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker. ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 10:If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 11:I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove 12:He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. ~ douglas-adams, @wisdomtrove 13:Remember, every great leader (or visionary or brave thinker) was initially laughed at. Now they are revered. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 14:When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice—the thinker—but the one who is aware of it. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 15:Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world? ~ thomas-carlyle, @wisdomtrove 16:The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something. ~ brian-tracy, @wisdomtrove 17:A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. ~ jiddu-krishnamurti, @wisdomtrove 18:When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 19:You can think negatively or positively. If you are a positive thinker, you will base your decisions on faith rather than fear. ~ robert-h-schuller, @wisdomtrove 20:At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry. ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 21:I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador ~ sigmund-freud, @wisdomtrove 22:But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 23:No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 24:Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don’t be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don’t pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. ~ rajneesh, @wisdomtrove 25:What did I do? I read. I followed the path from one book to another, from one thinker to another. I followed my bliss, though I didn’t know that was what I was doing. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove 26:If we become forever engrossed with battling the mind, this prevents us seeing how easy it is to wake up by simply becoming conscious of the thinker as well as the thoughts. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 27:When the mind goes beyond the thought of & 28:Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains. ~ margaret-fuller, @wisdomtrove 29:The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. ~ henry-miller, @wisdomtrove 30:I say & 31:One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical‚Ķfor the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 32:The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove 33:When the Spirit illuminates the heart, then a part of the man sees which never saw before; a part of him knows which never knew before, and that with a kind of knowing which the most acute thinker cannot imitate. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 34:I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 35:The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 36:Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove 37:Commit to Excellence. Become massively innovative and wear your passion on your sleeve. They might call you different or weird or even crazy. But please remember, every great leader (or visionary or brave thinker) was initially laughed at. Now they are revered. ~ robin-sharma, @wisdomtrove 38:I choose joy... I will invite my God to be the God of circumstance. I will refuse the temptation to be cynical... the tool of the lazy thinker. I will refuse to see people as anything less than human beings, created by God. I will refuse to see any problem as anything less than an opportunity to see God. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 39:In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 40:To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape. ~ alan-watts, @wisdomtrove 41:There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. ~ g-k-chesterton, @wisdomtrove 42:Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by ‘waching the thinker,’ which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 43:Is there any man that thinks in chains like the man who calls himself a free-thinker? Is there any man so credulous as the man who will not believe in the Bible? He swallows a ton of difficulties, and yet complains that we have swallowed an ounce of them. He has much more need of faith of a certain sort than we have, for skepticism has far harder problems than faith. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 44:When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 45:The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena, and strives to penetrate by thinking what he experiences by observing. Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we again find the unity out of which we had separated ourselves. We shall see later that this goal can be reached only if the task of the research scientist is conceived at a much deeper level than is often the case. ~ rudolf-steiner, @wisdomtrove 46:A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 47:Instead of & 48:The beginning of freedom is the realisation that you are not the "thinker." The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realise that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also begin to realise that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ~ eckhart-tolle, @wisdomtrove 49:Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival. ~ john-stuart-mill, @wisdomtrove 50:Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world... . [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street... . He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial. ~ gertrude-stein, @wisdomtrove 51:I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals... there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart? ~ victor-hugo, @wisdomtrove 52:J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? ~ charles-darwin, @wisdomtrove 53:There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. ~ ayn-rand, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:I'm a thinker not a talker. ~ David Bowie, #NFDB
2:You can be a business thinker. ~ Bill Gates, #NFDB
3:You are the only thinker in ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
4:I am a very bottom-up thinker. ~ Ken Thompson, #NFDB
5:No, I try not to be a negative thinker. ~ Earl Butz, #NFDB
6:You’re a jumper. He’s a thinker. ~ Diane Chamberlain, #NFDB
7:Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud. ~ David Bowie, #NFDB
8:artist, thinker, blurter of brilliance Many ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
9:He was a 'how' thinker, not an 'if' thinker. ~ Rick Danko, #NFDB
10:He was a thinker, but also a man of action. ~ Dan Millman, #NFDB
11:Don’t be an ‘if’ thinker, be a ‘how’ thinker, ~ Zig Ziglar, #NFDB
12:Every great thinker is someone else's moron. ~ Umberto Eco, #NFDB
13:Free thinker walks on shortcuts among wisdoms. ~ Toba Beta, #NFDB
14:Life is sometimes about being a CRITICAL THINKER ~ Unknown, #NFDB
15:Is there a thinker apart from thought? ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
16:Thoughts arise because of the thinker. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
17:What the thinker thinks, the prover proves. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
18:Every great thinker keeps a journal, you know. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart, #NFDB
19:I'm a deep thinker when it comes to shallow no brainers. ~ Dane Cook, #NFDB
20:The thinker as reader reads what has been written. ~ Wallace Stevens, #NFDB
21:I aint a drinker Im a thinker, call it what you want ~ Kendrick Lamar, #NFDB
22:I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. ~ Steven Pinker, #NFDB
23:I was not a public - I was not a thinker. I was a doer. ~ Bill Moyers, #NFDB
24:I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker. ~ John Lennon, #NFDB
25:You can kill a thinker, but you can't kill the thought. ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
26:you can kill a thinker, but you can’t kill the thought. ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
27:God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
28:The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel, #NFDB
29:A thinker reverses roles and sees the perspectives of others. ~ James Cook, #NFDB
30:said—you can kill a thinker, but you can’t kill the thought. ~ Terry Hayes, #NFDB
31:If you want to be a sharp thinker, be around sharp people. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
32:I am not an original thinker—but I am an original listener.) ~ Aravind Adiga, #NFDB
33:I am not very good at statistics. I am also a poor thinker. ~ Manmohan Singh, #NFDB
34:I'm not my thoughts, I'm the thinker who has those thoughts. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
35:Thinkers are rare; doers are rarer; and thinker-doers are rarest. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
36:Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker. ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
37:Philosophy is to a thinker … what push-ups are to a model. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
38:Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
39:Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
40:The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, #NFDB
41:There is an eternal Thinker, but his thoughts are not eternal. ~ Katha Upanisbad, #NFDB
42:God is the one great employer, thinker, planner, supervisor. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
43:I think it's very desirable to be an individual and a free thinker. ~ Paul Newman, #NFDB
44:All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
45:not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
46:The clear thinker is suddenly at war with himself and flow is lost. ~ Josh Waitzkin, #NFDB
47:Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
48:Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril. ~ John Dewey, #NFDB
49:[James Mattis] is a student of history. He's a strategic thinker. ~ Michele Flournoy, #NFDB
50:The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking. ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
51:Whenever a maker and a thinker get together, really cool stuff happens. ~ Max McKeown, #NFDB
52:He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
53:Beware when the Almighty sends a thinker on this planet; all is then in peril. ~ Emerson, #NFDB
54:The thinker is the ego, which if sought will automatically vanish. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
55:Ever since I was a kid, I've always been a real deep thinker and stuff. ~ Billy Ray Cyrus, #NFDB
56:I think that if you're a digital thinker, you can use a digital camera. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
57:Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich, #NFDB
58:It takes me time to realize things; I'm a speedy person but a slow thinker. ~ Julie Christie, #NFDB
59:Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
60:Man is a conscious, rational thinker and a supra-conscious creator genius. ~ Pitirim Sorokin, #NFDB
61:It's a journal, Reynard. Every great thinker keeps a journal, you know. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart, #NFDB
62:Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
63:You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
64:You are a victim of the rules you live by. —Jenny Holzer; artist, thinker, blurter ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
65:I am neither a philosopher nor a thinker, but simply follower of my own thoughts. ~ M F Moonzajer, #NFDB
66:Joy was substance over optics,” he said. “Joy was a long-term thinker. Joy was bold. ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
67:The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, #NFDB
68:I'm a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
69:Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
70:Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
71:The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
72:I spent 22 years in the United States military, so I'm a pretty strategic level thinker. ~ Allen West, #NFDB
73:You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
74:Who is the doubter? Who is the thinker? Find him [her]. These doubts will vanish. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
75:Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
76:For most of my life, I was a worrier and an over-thinker. I had pretty bad social anxiety. ~ Rob Corddry, #NFDB
77:Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin. ~ Avital Ronell, #NFDB
78:There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
79:The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
80:To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be. ~ Ayn Rand, #NFDB
81:Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Ilion, #NFDB
82:Every Profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
83:I'm a big thinker, and sometimes I think too much, and my brain can get in the way of myself. ~ Amanda Crew, #NFDB
84:Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
85:Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
86:A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
87:I am a very positive thinker, and I think that is what helps me the most in difficult moments. ~ Roger Federer, #NFDB
88:If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
89:I'm not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
90:A positive thinker does not refuse to recognize the negative; he refuses to dwell on it. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
91:As a Jewish thinker, I don't think of myself in relationship to the dominant culture's religion. ~ Emily Barton, #NFDB
92:The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
93:Aristotle was by far a less able thinker than Plato ... he was completely overwhelmed by Plato. ~ Wolfgang Pauli, #NFDB
94:Concentration is a form of exclusion, and where there is exclusion, there is a thinker who excludes. ~ Bruce Lee, #NFDB
95:You are a devious woman, Blackthorn,' she said.
'I prefer the term strategic thinker. ~ Juliet Marillier,#NFDB
96:The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE. ~ Winston S Churchill, #NFDB
97:You are a thinker, that I can tell. You turn the world over in your mind to see if it is truly round. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
98:[Emerson] was interested not in the bookworm, not even in the thinker, only in Man Thinking. ~ Robert D Richardson, #NFDB
99:He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
100:Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
101:You are a victim of the rules you live by. —Jenny Holzer; artist, thinker, blurter of brilliance ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
102:All meditation ends at last with the thinker, and he finds he is what he, himself, has conceived. ~ Neville Goddard, #NFDB
103:I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel. ~ Hilary Mantel, #NFDB
104:Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
105:The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
106:I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals. ~ Linus Torvalds, #NFDB
107:No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person's enemies say about him. ~ Napoleon Hill, #NFDB
108:You don't hurry a thinker, and you don't talk to him when he's thinking. It's just inconsiderate. ~ Christopher Moore, #NFDB
109:Be an independent thinker at all times, and ignore anyone who attempts to define you in a limiting way. ~ Sherry Argov, #NFDB
110:If you are an over-thinker, an overachiever, or a perfectionist, then stop thinking and start doing. ~ Monika Kanokova, #NFDB
111:Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster. ~ William Landay, #NFDB
112:hailed the Florentine as the first modern thinker to have exposed the nature of political tyranny. ~ Niccol Machiavelli, #NFDB
113:The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier. ~ James Bryant Conant, #NFDB
114:The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
~ Bertrand Russell,#NFDB
115:When obstacles or difficulties arise, the positive thinker takes them as creative opportunities. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
116:You are a victim of the rules you live by. —Jenny Holzer; artist, thinker, blurter of brilliance Many ~ Jen Sincero, #NFDB
117:It is always the business of man the thinker to know. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Knowledge and the Ignorance, #NFDB
118:C. K. Prahalad ". . .he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." BusinessWeek ~ C K Prahalad, #NFDB
119:I'm admittedly a record guy. Singles and I are a different beast. I'm definitely an overall picture thinker. ~ David Cook, #NFDB
120:I was a romantic, messy thinker. I was raised with very conservative beliefs, but that was a long time ago. ~ Julia Child, #NFDB
121:Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in. ~ Aristotle, #NFDB
122:And when were theories useless? I was a thinker, not a fighter, and the world was always in need of thoughts. ~ Jaida Jones, #NFDB
123:From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right. ~ Hans Georg Gadamer, #NFDB
124:I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated. ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
125:Remember, every great leader (or visionary or brave thinker) was initially laughed at. Now they are revered. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
126:and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great. ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
127:Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.
~ Aristotle,#NFDB
128:The mind is a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is the thinker. The thinker is the ego. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
129:What characterizes a really great thinker is that they misrecognize the basic dimension of their own breakthrough. ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
130:You say: "I'm a blue sky thinker." Investor thinks: "You have no business model, and you don't know how to ship." ~ Guy Kawasaki, #NFDB
131:An enlightened thinker does not waste his precious time thinking about what others think of what he thinks. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana, #NFDB
132:The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
133:The greatest thinker we can ever think of is Jesus Christ. He knew how to make His contenders ponder in awe ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
134:For the thinker the world is a thought; for the wit, an image; for the enthusiast, a dream; for the inquirer, truth. ~ Ludwig Buchner, #NFDB
135:In choosing not to be a beast, I discovered my humanity. I became autodidactic, self-educated - a critical thinker. ~ Stanley Williams, #NFDB
136:Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism. ~ Thomas Huxley, #NFDB
137:The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
138:They can ta'k our lives but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
139:I am what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker - a mere diversion, a comic interlude, something that is soon forgotten. ~ Anne Frank, #NFDB
140:If I had to choose between a narrow-minded woman or a man who was an enlightened thinker, I would vote for the man. ~ Marianne Williamson, #NFDB
141:If you wish to battle and strive for Truth become a thinker, that is to say, a free man. ~ Apollonius of Tyana, 28th Letter to the King.”, #NFDB
142:Generally speaking, the truly great thinker is a humble man. It is `a little learning' that `is a dangerous thing'. ~ D Martyn Lloyd Jones, #NFDB
143:In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. ~ David Ogilvy, #NFDB
144:Luke is a brilliant and eccentric thinker; his co-founder was an MBA type who didn’t want to miss out on the ’90s gold rush. ~ Peter Thiel, #NFDB
145:Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world? ~ Thomas Carlyle, #NFDB
146:We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
147:How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
148:Mostly I’m a thinker, a worrier … it’s not that there’s no free spirit in me. But it’s a free spirit with a five-year plan ~ Elizabeth Bard, #NFDB
149:The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something. ~ Brian Tracy, #NFDB
150:Abhijit Naskar is a self-trained scientist and thinker who discovers the paradigm shifting phenomena of the human mind. ~ Michael A Persinger, #NFDB
151:As Erasmus, the great Renaissance thinker, reminds us, “The best hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth. ~ Daniel Goleman, #NFDB
152:When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
153:How can any one become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third part of the day without passions, men, and books? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
154:I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print ~ Laurell K Hamilton, #NFDB
155:Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or as his wife would have it, an idiot. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
156:A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
157:I have learned more from Hayek than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski - but not even excepting Russell. ~ Karl Popper, #NFDB
158:"When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are." ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
159:Every morning you have a choice. Are you going to be a positive thinker or a negative thinker? Positive thinking will energize you. ~ Jon Gordon, #NFDB
160:It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
161:The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse. ~ William James, #NFDB
162:Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious. ~ Jacques Maritain, #NFDB
163:It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
164:Sesquihoral (adj.) Lasting an hour and a half. Because sometimes you just don’t feel like saying “an hour and a half.” Short-thinker ~ Ammon Shea, #NFDB
165:Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute. ~ Peter Singer, #NFDB
166:I'm an independent thinker. And I'm not the poster child for any movement. I'm trying to support whatever's right no matter where it is. ~ Mos Def, #NFDB
167:To the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Threefold Life, #NFDB
168:Their crime? They were related to a suspected Thinker, someone who questioned the Tyranny’s motives and saw through its propaganda. ~ Chris Dietzel, #NFDB
169:Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
170:He had entered some state of grace—but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing. ~ Julian Barnes, #NFDB
171:Hillary Clinton has a vision, she has knowledge and judgment. She is a strategic thinker, based on her experience and her connection. ~ Nancy Pelosi, #NFDB
172:Make a list of your friends and determine who is the most positive thinker among them and deliberately cultivate his society. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
173:At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
174:Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the “real universe” and our own “Thinker” — proving its pet beliefs. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
175:Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
176:Are you a thinker, a doer, or a clutch player? The better you are, the greater potential for influence you will have with your people. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
177:I don’t know who that guy was in the famous statue called The Thinker, but he was so deep in thought, he forgot to put on a pair of pants. ~ R J Silver, #NFDB
178:No writer or thinker has taught me as much as James Hunter has about this all-important and complex subject of how culture is changed. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
179:The scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing them. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Civilisation and Barbarism, #NFDB
180:They’re the sort of dozy bastards who don’t think beyond their next pot of ale, but Thomas does, Thomas is a two-pot thinker, he is. ~ Bernard Cornwell, #NFDB
181:I'm quite a neurotic thinker, quite an adrenalized person. But after meditation, I felt this beautiful serenity and selfless connection. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
182:As the influential management thinker Peter Drucker taught, the best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.10 ~ James C Collins, #NFDB
183:The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
184:You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly. ~ Ken Robinson, #NFDB
185:Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it but the free-thinker alone is truly free. ~ George Berkeley, #NFDB
186:The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, #NFDB
187:If you’re never an original thinker how can you possibly get in trouble? If you’re banal and unoriginal enough you’ll get promoted.” We ~ Patricia Cornwell, #NFDB
188:It is true, I am no high thinker.” Her voice showed not the slightest strain. “I like simple things well-done and have no time to philosophize. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
189:Its light stirs man the thinker to create
An earthly semblance of diviner things. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Gospel of Death and Vanity of the Ideal,#NFDB
190:The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
191:Every revolutionary thinker in America, White, Black, Brown or Red, never got the true representation from the corporate-controlled media. ~ Louis Farrakhan, #NFDB
192:He looked personable enough, not exactly a great thinker, but definitely the kind of profile you wouldn’t mind seeing on your small change. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
193:The how thinker gets problems solved effectively because he wastes no time with futile ifs but goes right to work on the creative how. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
194:I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
195:The centre of mental thinking is the ego, the person of the individual thinker. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, #NFDB
196:On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
197:To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle, God, is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker. ~ Fritz Zwicky, #NFDB
198:I wouldn't say I'm a very original thinker, but if I have a good experience with something, I'll want to take it further or adapt it in some way. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow, #NFDB
199:Lucidity of speech is unquestionably one of the surest tests of mental precision...In my experience a confused talker is never a clear thinker. ~ David Lloyd George, #NFDB
200:The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, #NFDB
201:There is nothing to fear from truth....Being truthful is essential to being an independent thinker and obtaining greater understanding of what is right. ~ Ray Dalio, #NFDB
202:Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
203:A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. ~ Oswald Spengler, #NFDB
204:Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
205:Plenty of philosophical men live in abstract regions, debating types and shadows. The rarer sort is the reader and thinker who can see the world whole. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
206:A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
207:I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people's ideas and thoughts and words, because I'm very independent and, I guess, a free thinker. ~ Elizabeth Taylor, #NFDB
208:The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker. ~ Eula Biss, #NFDB
209:The universe can best be pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what for want of a better word we must describe as a mathematical thinker. ~ James Jeans, #NFDB
210:A thinker cannot do other than convert his physical condition into the most highly intellectual of forms –this act of transformation is philosophy. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
211:The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. ~ Lafcadio Hearn, #NFDB
212:I never want to try and be a thinker again. I’m not a thinker. I’d really like to read what somebody else wrote about Lawrence, and, by God, hereafter I will. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
213:But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
214:No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
215:The vertical thinker says: ‘I know what lam looking for.’ The lateral thinker says: ‘I am looking but I won’t know what I am looking for until I have found it. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
216:No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
217:No earnest thinker is a plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others that which he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself. ~ Charles Kingsley, #NFDB
218:The writer of Proverbs observed that sharp people sharpen one another, just as iron sharpens iron. If you want to be a sharp thinker, be around sharp people. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
219:Certainly Lewis failed—or refused—to sketch a solution to the threat of fascism. He was a social satirist, not a systematic political thinker or theorist. Worth ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
220:Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker. ~ Charlie Munger, #NFDB
221:Goethe, the great nineteenth-century thinker, reportedly summed up, “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. ~ Simon Sinek, #NFDB
222:"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." ~ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #NFDB
223:Fundamentally, the conventional thinker prefers to accept the world as it is. The integrative thinker welcomes the challenge of shaping the world for the better. ~ Roger L Martin, #NFDB
224:The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above. ~ August Wilhelm von Schlegel, #NFDB
225:The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed ~ William James, #NFDB
226:The vertical thinker says: 'I know what I am looking for.' The lateral thinker says: 'I am looking but I won't know what I am looking for until I have found it.' ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
227:Not every President is a great speaker. Not every President is a great thinker. But in the modern era, every single President is a master of one thing: eye contact. ~ Brad Meltzer, #NFDB
228:When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
229:You could be a rebel, a profound thinker, and a rock and roll maniac and still eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and drink a nice cup of tea with your friends. ~ Pamela Des Barres, #NFDB
230:For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker. ~ Gregg Easterbrook, #NFDB
231:I feel that if I sit down now I will do some bad thinking about Lawrence. Remember Gide on Dostoevsky—“When he began to explain himself he showed himself a bad thinker. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
232:I've always been a deep thinker. Since I was a kid I was delving into the very depths of why we existed, often driving my parents crazy with unanswerable questions. ~ Missy Higgins, #NFDB
233:just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others . . .” (7.67). ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
234:The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
235:When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. ~ Thomas S Kuhn, #NFDB
236:If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. ~ Janet Fitch, #NFDB
237:Poor Arthur, you’re not really cut out for this life, are you?” “You call this life?” “You’re beginning to sound like Marvin.” “Marvin’s the clearest thinker I know. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
238:When the mind goes beyond the thought of 'the me,' the experiencer, the observer, the thinker, then there is a possibility of a happiness that is incorruptible. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
239:the waking day of a mythically vibrant people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, is in fact more akin to dream than to the day of a sober scientific thinker. If ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
240:who did more than any other thinker to develop our ideas of human flourishing, said that “happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence. ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
241:Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
242:As a logical thinker, I cannot help thinking, based on the evidence, that many people who exhibit dramatic reactions to bad news involving strangers are hypocrites. ~ John Elder Robison, #NFDB
243:I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story. ~ Nick Earls, #NFDB
244:People are a lot more open than even they think they are. And I feel like I carry a heavy story about where I come from and those roots, but also what I like as a thinker. ~ Lizz Wright, #NFDB
245:To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
246:In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz. ~ Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, #NFDB
247:Lorenz was the charismatic, flamboyant thinker—he didn’t conduct a single statistical analysis in his life—while Tinbergen did the nitty-gritty of actual data collection. ~ Frans de Waal, #NFDB
248:thinker sees in his own actions attempts and questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and failure are answers to him first and foremost. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
249:A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #NFDB
250:Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
251:I think I identify more with the smart guy, but most people might take umbrage at that. I like to think of myself as a real thinker, but I suppose people might beg to differ. ~ Colin Quinn, #NFDB
252:Profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason, and it is the superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief. ~ Humphry Davy, #NFDB
253:To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
254:If a thinker throws off too many unsystematic and rich insights, there is no place to grab onto his thought. The thing he is trying to illuminate seems as elusive as before. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
255:Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
256:Read and listen to one thinker and you become a clone; Read two and you become confused; Read ten and you get your own voice; Read a hundred and you start to become wise. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
257:This is Galileo,” said Aristotle. “He advocates understanding the world through observation and experiment. He is an unimaginative thinker, but his results demand our attention. ~ Liu Cixin, #NFDB
258:Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains. ~ Margaret Fuller, #NFDB
259:You can't use up creativity, creative thinking builds on itself and increases the creativity of the thinker...You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
260:The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. ~ Theodore Parker, #NFDB
261:When you read one thinker, you become a clone. Two thinkers, you become confused. Ten thinkers, you begin developing your own voice. Two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
262:I learned to cross the threshold of my studio with reverence, as though I were entering a shrine set apart for me to become co-creator with the Universal Thinker of all things. ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
263:It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus. ~ Terry Pratchett, #NFDB
264:Somewhere along the line, I conditioned myself to be a quick thinker. I take a step back and try to assess the situation, then make the best decision possible at the moment. ~ Jonathan Sadowski, #NFDB
265:The ancient maxim still applies: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To any serious thinker, and especially to the professing Christian, an unexamined life is not an option. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
266:I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible. ~ Karl Jaspers, #NFDB
267:In America, there are people who don't read science fiction but still think about tomorrow, so it's not only the force of science-fiction that makes you a tomorrow thinker. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, #NFDB
268:The biggest thinker that's influenced my feminism is definitely Bell Hooks, who's a feminist cultural critic, because of her accessibility but also just because she's a genius. ~ Jessica Valenti, #NFDB
269:But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
270:If the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, Poetic Vision and the Mantra, #NFDB
271:To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about? ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
272:The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
273:You are to have implicit confidence in your own ability, knowing that it is the nature of thought to externalize itself in your health and affairs, knowing that you are the thinker. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
274:Never think negatively, for the negative thinker does a very dangerous thing. He pumps out negative thoughts into the world around him and thus activates the world negatively. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
275:All labor and toil, however hard and difficult, is made easy by the power of rhythm in some way or other. This idea opens to the thinker a means for a still deeper study of life. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, #NFDB
276:It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awake that slumbering Progress. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
277:It is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
278:The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples. ~ Walter Lippmann, #NFDB
279:We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonableto do so when his proposition is agreeable to us. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
280:Dave [Holland] plays the way he wants to play. And it's usually what's needed. You know, Dave is such a deep thinker. You can't tell him too much, else it might spoil his spirit, you know. ~ Miles Davis, #NFDB
281:I'm a positive thinker and actor. I look at a glass; a negative person sees the glass and says: too bad it's half empty... I look at the same glass and say: Hallelujah!! It's half full!!! ~ Maya Angelou, #NFDB
282:I'm not a political thinker, but I've just always thought of myself as a Labour supporter. I was a great fan of Tony Blair. He sent me a letter before I swam the Channel to wish me luck. ~ David Walliams, #NFDB
283:I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now. ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
284:I'm not at all a linear thinker. I know the feeling I want to convey, but the form is what I struggle to find. I'm sure I'd fail if I tried to write a grant proposal or a book proposal. ~ Phoebe Gloeckner, #NFDB
285:I say 'Out' to every negative thought that comes to my mind. No person, place, or thing has any power over me, for I am the only thinker in my mind. I create my own reality and everyone in it. ~ Louise Hay, #NFDB
286:To my mind [ Jonathan Edwards] is an interesting figure because he is both a canonical Reformed thinker, and yet also someone that pushed the envelope in a number of key areas of theology. ~ Oliver D Crisp, #NFDB
287:I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now. In ~ Phil Knight, #NFDB
288:Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn't stuck with the present ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
289:I say “Out” to every negative thought that comes to my mind. No person, place, or thing has any power over me, for I am the only thinker in my mind. I create my own reality and everyone in it. ~ Louise L Hay, #NFDB
290:Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn’t stuck with the present. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
291:The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
292:The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
293:The only true free–thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
294:I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world...[however,] they have more humility than the scholarly thinker. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
295:Looking for the positive does not necessarily mean overlooking faults. being a positive thinker does not mean one has to agree or accept everything. It only means that a person is solution-focused. ~ Shiv Khera, #NFDB
296:No thinker has ever entered into another thinker’s solitude. Yet it is only from its solitude that all thinking, in a hidden mode, speaks to the thinking that comes after or that went before. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
297:Rosenzweig daringly criticizes Plato’s dialogues because in them “the thinker knows his thoughts in advance,” and moreover the other is only raising the objections the author thought of himself. ~ Hilary Putnam, #NFDB
298:In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: 'Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.' Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken. ~ Conor Cruise O Brien, #NFDB
299:I think the UN's role - especially since it's not an extremely rich fund, and that's to put it mildly - is mainly to act as a leading thinker of the world in terms of how to think about the future. ~ Amartya Sen, #NFDB
300:There is little doubt that the majority of Mr. Mills supporters in 1865 did not know what his political opinions were, and that they voted for him simply on his reputation as a great thinker. ~ Millicent Fawcett, #NFDB
301:The thought of one strong thinker will overcome the weak, purposeless thought of very many people who send forth only negative thoughts. The positive is a sure antidote to the negative. ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
302:When one says to the great Thinker:-- "Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!" that is a prayer--a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.-- Look, there is another! ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
303:One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
304:One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
305:A hateful or resentful thought is a mental poison. Do not think ill of another for to do so is to think ill of yourself. You are the only thinker in your universe, and your thoughts are creative. 3. ~ Joseph Murphy, #NFDB
306:I'm a visual thinker. With almost all of my writing, I start with something that's visual: either the way someone says something that is visual or an actual visual description of a scene and color. ~ Gerald Vizenor, #NFDB
307:I think that a visual artist's philosophy develops much more freely than a writer's or a thinker's philosophy. It is not so disciplined. The photographer works with both his eyes and his mind. ~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo, #NFDB
308:At the beginning of each far-spread plane
Pervading with her power the cosmic suns
She reigns, inspirer of its multiple works
And thinker of the symbol of its scene. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The World-Soul,#NFDB
309:This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion. ~ James Russell Lowell, #NFDB
310:He is a thinker,’ wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, ‘who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land. ~ William Dalrymple, #NFDB
311:In Hitler the rare union has taken place between the most acute logical thinker and truly profound philosopher, and the iron man of action...I follow no leadership but that of Adolf Hitler and of God. ~ Hermann Goring, #NFDB
312:Not every alt-right thinker or activist is a white nationalist, by far, but there's a sense that political correctness is a bigger problem than racism, and that racism is used as a cudgel for silencing. ~ David Weigel, #NFDB
313:The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind. ~ Ernst Mach, #NFDB
314:The belief that the stories told in the Bible are in some or any sense accurate forms the baseline mythology of the field. In the words of Robert Anton Wilson, ‘what the thinker thinks, the prover proves. ~ Gordon White, #NFDB
315:A positive thinker does not refuse to recognize the negative; he refuses to dwell on it. Positive thinking is a form of thought which habitually looks for the best results from the worst conditions ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
316:Attitude is the first quality that marks the successful man. If he has a positive attitude and is a positive thinker, who likes challenges and difficult situations, then he has half his success achieved. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
317:I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He's not a great mind, he's not a great thinker, he's not a great philosopher, he's a story-teller. ~ Erskine Caldwell, #NFDB
318:"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
319:I'm a free-thinker. I'm an American. I'm very concerned with what's happening. So, I just give it my all. I've learned how to take care of myself and detach from outcomes because, otherwise, you can't survive. ~ Matt Drudge, #NFDB
320:I think sometimes I should do more carousing, because I don't do much and maybe it would be fun occasionally. It's hard for me to have fun and I'm a serious thinker and a searcher and funny from the front. ~ Garry Shandling, #NFDB
321:The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought. ~ Sri Aurobindo, #NFDB
322:one of the Library’s mottos was borrowed directly from the great military thinker Clausewitz: no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared. She ~ Genevieve Cogman, #NFDB
323:She seems a lot like me. A loner, a thinker, an artist with her life. And it appears as though she's afraid I'll alter her canvas if she allows me too close. She doesn't need to worry. The feeling is mutual. ~ Colleen Hoover, #NFDB
324:I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
325:Listen, God can’t bless what you won’t do. You haven’t been taught correctly. Prosperity doesn’t just come from giving an offering. It’s good to be a giver. But you must also be a thinker, a planner, and a worker. ~ T D Jakes, #NFDB
326:An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
327:A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker. ~ Anne Fadiman, #NFDB
328:I’m not a fucking thinker, wisher, dancer, or whiner. I’m a fucking doer. Can’t expect God to do it all now, can we? The man’s got plenty to do already, I’m just doing my part and cleaning up my side of the room. ~ Lucian Bane, #NFDB
329:The moral is this: Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn’t stuck with the present. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
330:When a country goes to war, men can no longer operate free and open laboratories. The Government would like to know what you are doing. Businesses became corporations, the individual thinker became unpatriotic. ~ Samantha Hunt, #NFDB
331:An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
332:By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
333:He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in [London]. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Final Problem ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
334:If you want to become a positive thinker, don't think lack, think abundance, for you and for everyone. Dream big; as bigger as the blue ocean. Become aware of your thoughts and you will be aware of yourself. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
335:the average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born—or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
336:Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
337:Whenever a great thinker wants to make of himself a binding institution for future mankind, one may be certain that he is past the peak of his powers and is very weary, very close to the setting of his sun. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
338:You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator. ~ Christopher Galvin, #NFDB
339:The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa. ~ Chuck Wendig, #NFDB
340:It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition. ~ Uta Hagen, #NFDB
341:When you listen and read one thinker, you become a clone… two thinkers, you become confused… ten thinkers, you’ll begin developing your own voice… two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise and develop your voice. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
342:You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man do death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
343:I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him. ~ Simone de Beauvoir, #NFDB
344:In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems, Who,#NFDB
345:The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed. ~ George Henry Lewes, #NFDB
346:Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
347:I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky' ~ Seth MacFarlane, #NFDB
348:Maybe sometimes I'm such a thinker, I reevaluate too much. Sometimes when it comes down to it, I really don't need to do anything, I don't really need to change anything. I need to just keep plugging away, working at it. ~ Michael Chang, #NFDB
349:they [thinkers] can remember how feeling types respond to sympathy and appreciation; a little of either will greatly tone down a necessary criticism, but the thinker must express the sympathy or appreciation first. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers, #NFDB
350:When you listen and read one thinker, you become a clone… two thinkers, you become confused… ten thinkers, you’ll begin developing your own voice… two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise and develop your voice. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
351:See who is the doubter, who is the thinker. It is the ego. Hold it; the other thoughts will die away - the ego will be left pure. See the source from where the ego arises and abide in it. That is pure consciousness. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
352:The path-breaking writer and thinker on nationalism, Benedict Anderson, has convincingly pointed out that identities uniting large numbers of people could arise only after a certain technological level had been attained. ~ Shashi Tharoor, #NFDB
353:The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism. ~ Paul Ryan, #NFDB
354:He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
355:I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
356:Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
357:I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador...with the curiosity, the boldness, and the tenacity that belong to that type of person. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
358:The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula – for that was his name – was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
359:There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. ~ Woody Allen, #NFDB
360:I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison. ~ Bell Hooks, #NFDB
361:I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
362:The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
363:No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon , the least confused thinker its Socrates , the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare . ~ George Bernard Shaw, #NFDB
364:The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. ~ Pablo Neruda, #NFDB
365:I just take the Bible for what it is, I guess, and recognize that I am not a scientist, not trained to be a scientist. I'm not a deep thinker on all of this. I wish I was. I wish I was more knowledgeable, but I'm not a scientist. ~ Michele Bachmann, #NFDB
366:Man, free thinker!
Do you imagine you alone think in this world where life is blazing forth in all things?
You are free to avail yourself of the forces you command, but the universe has gone missing from your prescriptions. ~ G rard de Nerval,#NFDB
367:The incessant struggle of the mind to be true to itself, to absorb new truths, to grow, to overcome pressures--these are the painful portion of the independent thinker. Almost his sole reward is the satisfaction of integrity. ~ Howard Mumford Jones, #NFDB
368:Into thought’s narrow limits she has come;
Her greatness she has suffered to be pressed
Into the little cabin of the Idea,
The closed room of a lonely thinker’s grasp: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind,#NFDB
369:I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
370:From the outset, when [Ho Chi Minh] became a member of the French Communist Party in 1920, he was an independent thinker who adjusted Marxist-Leninist ideas and tactics to what he perceived to be the concrete situation in Indochina. ~ William J Duiker, #NFDB
371:It could be argued that no one on the planet knew more about the realities of getting things into space than Griffin, and he was working for Musk as space thinker in chief. (Four years later, in 2005, Griffin took over as head of NASA.) ~ Ashlee Vance, #NFDB
372:The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious). ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
373:George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'. ~ Gideon Haigh, #NFDB
374:My political philosophy as a libertarian says that government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior. My professional ethic as a thinker and writer, however, says that self-knowledge is our ultimate responsibility ~ Camille Paglia, #NFDB
375:The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University. ~ Carl Honor, #NFDB
376:The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
377:The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness. ~ Jerome Bruner, #NFDB
378:What else could I be? If I were a mono-thinker, I probably wouldn’t be an insomniac. How is a poly-thinker supposed to fall asleep, and more importantly, stay asleep, when thoughts just won’t stop darting! darting! darting! through my head? ~ Rachel Cohn, #NFDB
379:Because you’re a rule follower and would immediately call your boss. She’s smarter.” “I respect the chain of command.” “Rule follower. Linear thinker.” Matt resented the fact he was right. “I’m hanging up and calling Frazer any second now. ~ Toni Anderson, #NFDB
380:The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
381:The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University. ~ Carl Honore, #NFDB
382:Once we have found ourselves, we must understand how from time to time to lose--and then to find--ourselves once again: assuming,that is, that we are thinkers. For a thinker it is a drawback to be bound to a single person all the time. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
383:In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
384:Books are health food for your brain and dessert for your soul. Books are one of the few proven sources of mental exercise known to man. Reading is a workout for your mind. If your body needs thirty minutes of exercise a day, so does your thinker. ~ Pat Williams, #NFDB
385:He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
386:The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow. ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
387:To appeal to common sense when insight and science fail, and no sooner—this is one of the subtle discoveries of modern times, by means of which the most superficial ranter can safely enter the lists with the most thorough thinker and hold his own. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
388:The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner. ~ Martin Heidegger, #NFDB
389:The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
390:He dismissed with contempt the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, the foremost German thinker of the age, according to which history was the progressive unfoldment of a world-spirit – a view Schopenhauer rightly believed was Christian theodicy in disguise. ~ John N Gray, #NFDB
391:Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time. ~ Bill Viola, #NFDB
392:The bitch is an empowered woman who derives tremendous strength from the ability to be an independent thinker, particularly in a world that still teaches women how to be self-abnegating. This woman doesn't live someone else's standards, only her own. ~ Sherry Argov, #NFDB
393:The stranger’s way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize, who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being & non-being — belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition. ~ Paul Val ry, #NFDB
394:For the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life, by which something great may be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of occurrences. ~ William Barrett, #NFDB
395:Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
396:The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to wake. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
397:Popular women use positive, optimistic language in their online profiles, not buzzwords like "future thinker". Here are the ten most often used words I found: easy-going, love, laugh, laid-back, optimistic, outgoing, fun, down-to-earth, pleasure, adventure. ~ Amy Webb, #NFDB
398:My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
399:Rationality is the application of reason to form beliefs based on facts and evidence, instead of guesswork, opinions, and feelings. That is to say, the rational thinker wants to know what is really true and not just what he or she would like to be true. ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
400:She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
401:You can come out of the repetitive thought patterns by witnessing the thinker inside you. Witnessing will give you the state of "no-mind" -the state of deep inner connectedness. Gradually, you move into the state of pure being - the state of pure consciousness. ~ Amit Ray, #NFDB
402:But Zarathustra made it clear in which direction the answer lay; it is towards the artist-psychologist, the intuitional thinker. There are very few such men in the world's literature; the great artists are not thinkers, the great thinkers are seldom artists. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
403:As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized! ~ Mark Twain, #NFDB
404:The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation. ~ Emil M Cioran, #NFDB
405:The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts. ~ Philip K Dick, #NFDB
406:But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was. ~ Jeffrey Rosen, #NFDB
407:Steinitz was a thinker worthy of a seat in the halls of a university. A player, as the world believed he was, he was not; his studious temperament made that impossible; and thus he was conquered by a player and in the end little valued by the world, he died. ~ Emanuel Lasker, #NFDB
408:Commit to Excellence. Become massively innovative and wear your passion on your sleeve. They might call you different or weird or even crazy. But please remember, every great leader (or visionary or brave thinker) was initially laughed at. Now they are revered. ~ Robin Sharma, #NFDB
409:Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind. ~ William James, #NFDB
410:The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. —WILLIAM JAMES1 ~ Niall Ferguson, #NFDB
411:A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.... We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
412:If death, mused the great thinker Dr. Samuel Johnson, is merely a gateway on the path from life into eternity, a portal from mortality to immortality, then what does it matter how a man dies? The act of dying is not of importance. It is how he lives that counts. ~ Tessa Harris, #NFDB
413:I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself. ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
414:I was never a "big thinker". One of my philosophies in Linux has always been to not worry about the future too much, but make sure that we make the best of what we have now - together with keeping our options open for the future and not digging us into a hole. ~ Linus Torvalds, #NFDB
415:If I hadn't spent many years trying to be as compassionate as Mother Teresa, as positive a thinker as W. Clement Stone, as prolific a writer as Stephen King, and as good a speaker as many of the legends I have studied, I would not be as successful as I am today. ~ Jack Canfield, #NFDB
416:In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
417:Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built. ~ Donald O Clifton, #NFDB
418:One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid–not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
419:When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation or the so-called eternal names of fame that many not be refused and condemned. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
420:Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.' ~ Jeffrey Eugenides, #NFDB
421:It fills all Space, and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being! ~ Edwin A Abbott, #NFDB
422:My mother Vivian Ayers always instilled within her children that our opinions, our thoughts and our ideas about what was possible was important. My mother made me feel that I was important as a thinker at four-years-old. And I instill that within my students everyday. ~ Debbie Allen, #NFDB
423:Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a 'ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of 'fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually. ~ John Carroll, #NFDB
424:And are you not,” said Fook, leaning anxiously forward, “a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard? ~ Douglas Adams, #NFDB
425:I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated — with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. ~ Sigmund Freud, #NFDB
426:The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
427:My mother said I was always an intense child, a very sensitive child. So that probably helped the emotions to be very present. I was just a big thinker. I would evaluate and analyze and feel and cry and discuss and be angry. All of those emotions were very surface for me. ~ Nicole Kidman, #NFDB
428:I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn't want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject. ~ Agnes Varda, #NFDB
429:Quinn was used to Lucan’s quiet ways. He’d always been the thinker of them, the one who waited and watched and formulated a plan, the one with a steady head, a cool temper. It stood to reason that he would be the one to keep them together as well as master the god inside him. ~ Donna Grant, #NFDB
430:The positive thinker is a hard-headed, tough-minded, and factual realist. He sees all the difficulties clearly... which is more than can be said for the average negative thinker. But he sees more than difficulties - he tries to see the solutions of those difficulties. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
431:Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” the theologian and thinker Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1944, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” We try; we fail; but we must try again, and again, and again, for only in trial is progress possible. ~ Jon Meacham, #NFDB
432:When a newspaper posed the question, “What’s Wrong with the World?” the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: “Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton.” That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
433:Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don’t be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don’t pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. The whole world is showering its joy on you in so many ways, but you are too serious, you cannot open your heart. ~ Osho, #NFDB
434:Zig Ziglar may be the master motivator, Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul, the master story tellers; Anthony Robbins may be the guru of personal development, but Bob Proctor is a master thinker. When it comes to systemizing life, no one can touch him. ~ Doug Wead, #NFDB
435:If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and in the Preface disclosed the fact that it was only a thought-experiment (in which however at many points he had steered clear of many things), he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
436:My engineering training taught me to be a systems thinker. I looked at companies as "systems" and saw work as a system of tasks - that needed to be reengineered. I was also focused on operations, getting things done and built. My engineering training taught me to be a pragmatist. ~ James A Champy, #NFDB
437:In the media's eyes Bannon made Trump. Trump is too dumb to have made himself. Trump is too rough around the edges. Trump is not a deep enough thinker, and he's not nearly a brilliant strategist. Trump couldn't have gotten himself elected. That's what they all think. Bannon did that. ~ Rush Limbaugh, #NFDB
438:The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people. ~ Emily Barton, #NFDB
439:Freddy walked back to the cow barn with Mrs. Wiggins. Although a cow, and therefore a pretty slow thinker, Mrs. Wiggins had a lot of what is commonly called horse sense, although cows have a good deal more than horses—or indeed than some people; and Freddy valued her opinion highly. ~ Walter R Brooks, #NFDB
440:Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don't be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don't pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. The whole world is showering its joy on you in so many ways, but if you are too serious, you cannot open your heart. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
441:The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
442:Michael Harris opens the doors and gently guides you into a magic world. Once inside, you can't help but feel mesmerized, eager to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. And no wonder: a major thinker of our time is talking to you about math and so much more, like you've never heard before. ~ Edward Frenkel, #NFDB
443:Because when a man tries to realize himself through the gifts with which nature has endowed him, he does the best and only meaningful thing he can do. That’s why, in former days, I often said to you: don’t try to imitate the thinker or the ascetic man, but be yourself, try to be yourself. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
444:You cannot see That which is the Seer of seeing; you cannot hear That which is the Hearer of hearing; you cannot think of That which is the Thinker of thought; you cannot know That which is the Knower of knowledge. This is your Self, that is within all; everything else but This is perishable. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
445:In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (1837), #NFDB
446:There were different heroes with different images. There was Mike Tyson, the animal, there was Evander Holyfield, the devout, the priest. And there was me, the thinker, the intellectual boxer. So there was something for every fan, if you like. The public could always identify with one of us. ~ Lennox Lewis, #NFDB
447:This witness hush is the Thinker’s secret base:
Hidden in silent depths the word is formed,
From hidden silences the act is born
Into the voiceful mind, the labouring world;
In secrecy wraps the seed the Eternal sows
Silence, the mystic birthpla ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, In the Self of Mind,#NFDB
448:It is not enough to call yourself a 'free thinker' just because you can change your beliefs. A whole mess of people change their beliefs based on what is fashionable rather than what is factual, which, by always following the crowd, would be the complete opposite of the beauty of a free thinker. ~ Criss Jami, #NFDB
449:Within the covers of a single book are ideas that, if acted upon, have the power to rescript every part of your life. Few things are as smart as investing in becoming a better thinker and developing a stronger mind. Relentless learning is one of the main traits of an open and powerful person. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
450:A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low. ~ Mary McCarthy, #NFDB
451:What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
452:That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad. Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance. ~ Iris Murdoch, #NFDB
453:Indeed, Anselm, who is often seen as a key thinker in claiming that God is conceivable, writes that when gazing upon the Lord, the eye is darkened, noting that: Surely it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by you. Indeed it is both obscured by its own littleness and overwhelmed by your vastness. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
454:I choose joy... I will invite my God to be the God of circumstance. I will refuse the temptation to be cynical... the tool of the lazy thinker. I will refuse to see people as anything less than human beings, created by God. I will refuse to see any problem as anything less than an opportunity to see God. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
455:[John] Calvin is revered as a thinker of immense importance in Reformed thought, Jonathan Edwards could say in his preface to his treatise on Freedom of the Will that he had derived none of his views from the work of Calvin, though he was willing to be called a "Calvinist" for the sake of convention. ~ Oliver D Crisp, #NFDB
456:There is no such thing as creativity in the abstract. Likewise, there is no such thing as innovation in the abstract. To describe yourself as an entrepreneur or a disrupter is as meaningless as describing yourself as an athlete or a thinker. Really? What sports do you play? What do you think about? What ~ Eric Weiner, #NFDB
457:No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy. ~ Honor de Balzac, #NFDB
458:A brilliant black thinker, he grew up in South Carolina, where someone called the police when young Ron tried to check out a science book from the segregated library in his town. Once the police officer arrived, he saw Ron’s determination to learn and was so moved that he checked out the book for Ron. A ~ Leland Melvin, #NFDB
459:A single thinker in an aimless world
Awaiting some tremendous dawn of God,
He saw the purpose in the works of Time.
Even in that aimlessness a work was done
Pregnant with magic will and change divine.
The first writhings of the cosmic serpent Force
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Kingdoms of the Little Life,#NFDB
460:One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
461:Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
462:Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
463:Those who have worked with Ms. Wojcicki describe her less as a visionary thinker than an open-minded and analytical one. There’s an argument to be made that her understated manner could be an asset as she makes her way in a rapidly changing, competitive industry where people are naturally wary of one another. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
464:Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release,#NFDB
465:In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
466:The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.
The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB
467:To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape. ~ Alan Watts, #NFDB
468:Plato is widely believed to have been a student of Socrates and to have been deeply influenced by his teacher's unjust death. Plato's brilliance as a writer and thinker can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious ~ Plato, #NFDB
469:Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev. ~ Russell Baker, #NFDB
470:To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
471:No one can stop or control your thought process or your thinking. You can think anything you want. But that doesn't seem to be the point. The thinking process has to be directed into a certain approach... not in accord with certain dogma, philosophy, or concepts. Instead, one has to know the thinker itself. ~ Chogyam Trungpa, #NFDB
472:Smoking comforts ordinary men, but I'm not an ordinary man. There aren't many like me left. And it's a good thing for the world that there isn't. There'll always be a few of us in America in every generation. Because only a great country like America can produce men like me. I'm not a thinker, I'm a doer. ~ Charles Willeford, #NFDB
473:History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century. ~ Isaiah Berlin, #NFDB
474:In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man.
He stood erect, a godlike form and force,
And a soul’s thoughts looked out from earth-born eyes;
Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s brow:
He looked at heaven ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Parable of the Search for the Soul,#NFDB
475:The positive thinker, on the contrary, constantly sends out positive thoughts, together with vital mental images of hope, optimism and creativity. He therefore activates the world around him positively and strongly tends to draw back to himself positive results. This, too, is a basic law of mind action. ~ Norman Vincent Peale, #NFDB
476:When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
477:Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.”
Excerpt From: Adams, Douglas. “The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.” Random House Publishing Group, 2010-09-29. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright. ~ Douglas Adams,#NFDB
478:Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can't persuade himself to believe are good. ~ Oliver Burkeman, #NFDB
479:Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature. … [T]he essence of religion … is evident to the thinker … . [T]he antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory; … it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
480:How did a merchant become a radical re-thinker of both God and society, directly challenging the established social and political order? How did the man hounded out of Mecca turn exile into a new and victorious beginning, to be welcomed back just eight years later as a national hero? How did he succeed against such odds? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
481:And when you look at the twentieth-century experiment with collectivism-that Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did such a good job of articulating the pitfalls of statism and collectivism-you can't find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism than Ayn Rand. ~ Paul Ryan, #NFDB
482:Epictetus told his students, when they’d quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It’s funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure. See them in your mind, grunting, groaning, and awkward in their private life—just like the rest of us. ~ Ryan Holiday, #NFDB
483:The satisfaction earned by the striving can be whatever furnishes the strongest incentive to the child, for example, extra pleasures or possessions for a sensing child, special freedoms or opportunities for an intuitive, new dignity or authority for a thinker, and more praise or companionship for a feeling type. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers, #NFDB
484:Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both Progressivism and Conservatism, saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
485:The same is true about the conventional sense of self — the feeling of being a subject inside your head, a locus of consciousness behind your eyes, a thinker in addition to the flow of thoughts. This form of subjectivity does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for what you are calling “I,” this feeling will disappear. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
486:the thinker’s natural process is inappropriate when used in personal relations with feeling types, because it includes a readiness to criticize. Criticism is of great value when thinkers apply it to their own conduct or conclusions, but it has a destructive effect upon feeling types, who need a harmonious climate. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers, #NFDB
487:A great thinker does not necessary have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspect of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, #NFDB
488:To have mastered "method" and "theory" is to have become a self-conscious thinker, a man at work and aware of assumptions and the implications of whatever he is about. To be mastered by "method" or "theory" is simply to be kept from working, from trying, that is, to find out about something that is going on in the world. ~ C Wright Mills, #NFDB
489:And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
490:Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are its slave. It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
491:I'm a visual thinker, really bad at algebra. There's others that are a pattern thinker. These are the music and math minds. They think in patterns instead of pictures. Then there's another type that's not a visual thinker at all, and they're the ones that memorize all of the sports statistics, all of the weather statistics. ~ Temple Grandin, #NFDB
492:An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage. ~ Karl Jaspers, #NFDB
493:The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost. ~ Bryce Courtenay, #NFDB
494:\“… we must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also beyond the snare of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the bondage of the Idea\” [[p. 330](/cwsa/23/renunciation# ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Himself and the Ashram, Passages from The Synthesis of Yoga, #NFDB
495:As many a thinker since Aristotle has said, everything we do is ultimately aimed at experiencing happiness. We don't really want wealth, or health, or fame as such-we want these things
because we hope that they will make us happy. But happiness we seek not because it will get us something else, but for its own sake. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,#NFDB
496:Guard your psychological environment. Select friends who are interested in positive things, friends who really do want to see you succeed. Find friends who breathe encouragement into your plans and ideals. If you don’t, if you select petty thinkers as your close friends, you’ll gradually develop into a petty thinker yourself. ~ David J Schwartz, #NFDB
497:No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God's grace. ~ Adolf Hitler, #NFDB
498:All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
499:The architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virat, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Eternal Day, The Soul’s Choice and the Supreme Consummation,#NFDB
500:Chevy Chase had been a bad boy with a drug problem, and had never really realized his potential. Fletch was the first movie he sort of straightened up on. And Michael Ritchie was Harvard-educated, 6'6", a brilliant director and political thinker. He was the guy the studio thought could handle Chevy, and keep him in check. And he could. ~ Tim Matheson, #NFDB
501:chew on one thinker-writer, activist, role model- you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people the thinker loved and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you built your tree, it's time to start your own branch. ~ Austin Kleon, #NFDB
502:The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. ~ Maximilien Robespierre, #NFDB
503:The fox—the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events—is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. ~ Eric Greitens, #NFDB
504:There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. ~ Walpola Rahula, #NFDB
505:It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
506:No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize, that as a thinker his first duty is to follow his intellect wherever it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions if those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
507:We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
508:She said, “You say no one ever is sure what to expect. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all I need to be.” “Correct,” I said. “Weird things are going to happen, and things are going to change, and the ground is going to move under our feet, but if we keep on thinking fast, we’ll be OK. ~ Lee Child, #NFDB
509:fly.” Meaning that, yes, the mind creates its own universe; but no, we can’t solve our problems through affirmations and positive thinking alone. And the fact is, New Agey solutions that put smiley-face stickers over our problems can make those problems worse. So the question for us going forward is: Who’s in charge—the thinker or the thought? ~ Susan David, #NFDB
510:Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
511:... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them. ~ William James, #NFDB
512:———————————— WHAT WE TEACH YOU How to address your lodge. How to give toasts. How to tell dialect stories. How to propose to a lady. How to entertain banquets. How to make convincing selling-talks. How to build big vocabulary. How to create a strong personality. How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker. How to be a MASTER MAN! ~ Sinclair Lewis, #NFDB
513:Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
514:chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch. ~ Austin Kleon, #NFDB
515:I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker. And one of the crucial things he brings to me, is that the encounter with another being is an . . . occasion in which you can, to the best of your ability, honour the other person as being someone sent to you by God. ~ Marilynne Robinson, #NFDB
516:The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled. He wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself. There is nothing immodest about this. Is it immodest for a worker to drive himself toward heavy labor? Is it presumptuous of a man with the high forehead of a thinker to ponder through the nights till he gives the world an invention? ~ Hourly History, #NFDB
517:When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos. ~ Anne Waldman, #NFDB
518:Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these differences. Both were knightly and delicate; both set apart by visible signs from their fellows, since both had received the particular admonishment of fate. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
519:The happiness visible in the eye of the thinker is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency towards suppression goes against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness prevails. Thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Who ever refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him, has not resigned ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
520:For love to flourish, the light of your presence needs to be strong enough so that you no longer get taken over by the thinker or the pain-body and mistake them for who you are. To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. To ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
521:The happiness visible in the eye of the thinker is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency towards suppression goes against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness prevails. Thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Who ever refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him, has not resigned. ~ Theodor W Adorno, #NFDB
522:There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
523:But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
524:Becoming a strategic thinker is about opening your mind to possibilities. It’s about seeing the bigger picture. It’s about understanding the various parts of your business, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again in a more powerful way. It’s about insight, invention, emotion and imagination focused on reshaping some part of the world. ~ Max McKeown, #NFDB
525:always remember that we are in Germany where we have been able to do what would have been possible nowhere else: namely to proclaim as a great mind and profound thinker a mindless, ignorant, nonsense-spreading philosophaster who, through unprecedented, hollow verbiage, thoroughly and permanently disorganizes their brains. I mean our dear Hegel. And ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
526:[Osip] Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of [Carl] Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice. ~ Robert Hass, #NFDB
527:No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
528:There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton, #NFDB
529:Derek Sivers, one of my favorite thinkers, says he’s a slow thinker: “It’s a common belief that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s triggering a knee-jerk emotional response to something that happened long ago. ~ Darius Foroux, #NFDB
530:It is a serious mistake to think that irrationalism opposes anything but thought to reason - whether it be the rights of the given, of the heart, of feeling, caprice or passion. In irrationalism we are concerned only
with thought, only with thinking. What is opposed to reason is thought itself; what is opposed to the reasonable being is the thinker
himself. ~ Gilles Deleuze,#NFDB
531:I saw all the male guests take up the similar carnations that were lying by their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their coats. I did as they had done, with the air of spontaneity that a free-thinker assumes in church, who is not familiar with the order of service but rises when everyone else rises and kneels a moment after everyone else is on his knees. ~ Marcel Proust, #NFDB
532:The most agreeable of all companions is a simple, frank man, without any high pretensions to an oppressive greatness; one who loves life, and understands the use of it; obliging alike at all hours; above all, of a golden temper and steadfast as an anchor. For such an one we gladly exchange the greatest genius, the most brilliant wit, the profoundest thinker. ~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, #NFDB
533:Is there any man that thinks in chains like the man who calls himself a free-thinker? Is there any man so credulous as the man who will not believe in the Bible? He swallows a ton of difficulties, and yet complains that we have swallowed an ounce of them. He has much more need of faith of a certain sort than we have, for skepticism has far harder problems than faith. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
534:If it had been up to Von Neumann’s purely intellectual reasoning alone, many of the bombs he helped to create would have exploded on the Soviet Union.Thankfully, there was another thinker on hand whose deeper grasp of human foibles added a new dimension to game theory that, among other things, helped save the world from mutually assured destruction. Enter Thomas Schelling. ~ Tim Harford, #NFDB
535:Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
536:It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author. ~ Clarice Lispector, #NFDB
537:Dodd listened intently as Hitler portrayed Germany as a well-meaning, peace-seeking nation whose modest desire for equality of armaments was being opposed by other nations. 'It was not the address of a thinker,' Dodd wrote in his diary, 'but of an emotionalist claiming that Germany had in no way been responsible for the World War and that she was the victim of wicked enemies. ~ Erik Larson, #NFDB
538:If you act out of love, whatever you do is both perfect and right. It doesn't matter if you're a deep thinker or a squirrel nut if you act out of love. Crap starts getting seriously screwed if something else gets in the way, something like fear or revenge or even victory or being famous or some other dumb thing. The only thing we need to do is figure out what we really love. ~ Geoff Herbach, #NFDB
539:The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
540:One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
541:One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use. ~ Georg C Lichtenberg, #NFDB
542:I think he [King Edward] was a modernizer who was a new thinker. The things he intended to do - unify the country, expand it all from coast to coast - were very modern and radical in those days. Also, the fact that he married who he did and that he managed to deal with the consequences and ramifications of that marriage and stay on the throne until the day he died, that shows skill. ~ Max Irons, #NFDB
543:When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable animated instrument which is Aristotle's definition of a slave. ~ Eric Hoffer, #NFDB
544:Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience—is an illusion. The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. Consider ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
545:It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007), p. xxvii, footnote., #NFDB
546:Every new generation in its hour of dawn, filled with the dreams of youth, its thirsts, intoxications and enthusiasms, thinks itself called upon to impel humanity towards heights unmeasured, believes itself an appointed pathfinder, a thinker of thoughts, a doer of deeds greater than any of those which came before. Every new generation desires beauty, but a beauty all its own. ~ Ignacy Jan Paderewski, #NFDB
547:In many inner cities, there are issues of less economic stability, poorer education, community centers being stripped away, arts being removed from the school system leaving many children imbalanced, isolated from their most powerful self... the independent thinker, the creator, the dreamer often leaving children more susceptible to other harmful things out of boredom or feelings of rejection. ~ Mya, #NFDB
548:The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
549:What, indeed, is an atheist? He is one who destroys delusions which are harmful to humanity in order to lead men back to nature, to reality, to reason. He is a thinker who, having reflected on the nature of matter, its energy, properties and ways of acting, has no need of idealized powers or imaginary intelligences to explain the phenomena of the universe and the operations of nature. ~ Baron d Holbach, #NFDB
550:I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now. ~ Tilda Swinton, #NFDB
551:One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker. ~ C Wright Mills, #NFDB
552:Perhaps the most prominent young radical in the early 1960s was Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student who had worked with SNCC in 1961. Raised a Catholic, Hayden was a serious thinker with a commitment to elevating the spirit and improving human relationships in the United States. In 1962 he emerged as chief author of a major position paper of the SDS, the Port Huron Statement. ~ James T Patterson, #NFDB
553:A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing. ~ Henry Hazlitt, #NFDB
554:Is not prayer also a study of truth,--a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learningsomething. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into creation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
555:Putting Instagram into a different context is about rescuing it from the tyranny of now, taking it back from the muddy river that everyone is pouring things into. As a poet, as a thinker, as an artist, I believe there's another way to experience the world, and another way to experience time.It can't all just be public relations and branding; it's about making meaning with signs around you. ~ Frances Stark, #NFDB
556:At the office I worked in before that, my required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here. ~ Pamela Paul, #NFDB
557:Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists. ~ John Locke, #NFDB
558:[The kitchen] was also messy--delightfully so, thought Jane--and it didn't look as though lots of cooking went on there. There was a laptop computer on the counter with duck stickers on it, the spice cabinet was full of Ben's toy trucks, and Jane couldn't spot a cookbook anywhere. This is the kitchen of a Thinker, she decided, and promised herself that she'd never bother with cooking, either. ~ Jeanne Birdsall, #NFDB
559:At the office I worked in before that, my boss required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here. ~ Pamela Paul, #NFDB
560:Certainly the revolutionary thinker must go beyond thought. He knows that almost all his best ideas come to him when thinking has stopped. He may have struggled and struggled to understand a problem in terms of old ways of thinking, only to find it impossible. But when thought stops from exhaustion, the mind is open to see the problem as it is—not as it is verbalized—and at once it is understood. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
561:The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena, and strives to penetrate by thinking what he experiences by observing. Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we again find the unity out of which we had separated ourselves. We shall see later that this goal can be reached only if the task of the research scientist is conceived at a much deeper level than is often the case. ~ Rudolf Steiner, #NFDB
562:You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
563:In my eyes Marlantes has become the pre-eminent literary voice on war of our generation. He is a natural storyteller and a deeply profound thinker who not only illuminates war for civilians, but also offers a kind of spiritual guidance to vets themselves. As this generation of warriors comes home, they will be enormously helped by what Marlantes has written. I’m sure he will literally save lives. ~ Sebastian Junger, #NFDB
564:There is no violent surface indication of the ecstasy which great thinkers alone enjoy. There is nothing dramatic about it, but there is some subtle light in the eye of the inspired one, or some even more subtle quiet emanation which surrounds the inspired thinker, which tells you that you are in the presence of one who has bridged the gap which separates the mundane world from the world of spirit. ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
565:What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. ~ Bertrand Russell, #NFDB
566:A free thinker used to be a man who had been educated on ideas of religion, law, morality, and had arrived at free thought by virtue of his own struggle and toil; but now a new type of born freethinker has been appearing, who’ve never even heard that there have been laws of morality and religion, and that there are authorities, but who simply grow up with negative ideas about everything, that is savages. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
567:Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, #NFDB
568:I believe that there is but One Thinker in the universe; that my thinking is His thinking, and that every man's thinking is an extension, through God, of every other man's thinking. I therefore think that the greater the exaltation and ecstasy of my thinking, the greater the standards of all man's thinking will be. Each man is thus empowered to uplift all men as each drop of water uplifts the entire ocean. ~ Walter Russell, #NFDB
569:To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape. But so long as you are not aware of the inseparability of thinker and thought, you will try to escape. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
570:He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, #NFDB
571:The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, 129,#NFDB
572:Is not prayer also a study of truth,
— a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed
heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker,
resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in
the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the
fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the
creation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson,#NFDB
573:This is the inverted logic of people who see around them a fallen world. The midcentury thinker most associated with this ironic logic is Reinhold Niebuhr. People like Randolph, Rustin, and King thought along Niebuhrian lines, and were influenced by him. Niebuhr argued that, beset by his own sinful nature, man is a problem to himself. Human actions take place in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension. ~ David Brooks, #NFDB
574:Instead of 'watching the thinker,' you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
575:Instead of “watching the thinker,” you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
576:Necessary.—One of those things that may drive a thinker into despair is the recognition of the fact that the illogical is necessary for man, and that out of the illogical comes much that is good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything that gives value to life, that it cannot be withdrawn without thereby hopelessly injuring these beautiful things. It ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
577:Be yourself. Hillary Clinton, you have a great vision for our country. You know the policy, you have good judgment that springs from that. You're a strategic thinker, and you have a connection with the American people that springs from a lifetime of service and leadership to them, to America's working families. So, just go talk about that. Forget the script, forget everything else. Just be Hillary Clinton. Be yourself. ~ Nancy Pelosi, #NFDB
578:As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. ~ Annie Dillard, #NFDB
579:Although some Western psychologies believe that the dreamer should not control the dream, according to Tibetan teachings this is a wrong view. It is better for the lucid and aware dreamer to control the dream than for the dreamer to be dreamed. The same is true with thoughts: it is better for the thinker to control the thoughts than for the thoughts to control the thinker. ~ Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep, #NFDB
580:If you turn consciousness upon itself in this moment, you will discover that your mind tends to wander into thought. If you look closely at thoughts themselves, you will notice that they continually arise and pass away. If you look for the thinker of these thoughts, you will not find one. And the sense that you have — “What the hell is Harris talking about? I’m the thinker!”— is just another thought, arising in consciousness. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
581:It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
582:Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
583:Randomness can be of considerable help with the matter. For there is another, far more entertaining way to make the distinction between the babbler and the thinker. You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one. Rhetoric can be constructed randomly, but not genuine scientific knowledge. This ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
584:I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating, nor was it wholly nonsense for Kepler to exult that he was thinking God's thoughts after him. The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to which the thinker can surrender his thought to that system and follow it, he is in a sense participating in that which is timeless or eternal. ~ Brand Blanshard, #NFDB
585:Those mitigating circumstances could just as well be mentioned if the thinker thought it worth the trouble. From the standpoint of human relations it is worth vastly more than the trouble it takes. The little sympathy or appreciation, coming first, puts the thinkers in the same camp with the feeling types, and the feeling types’ desire to stay in the same camp will keep them agreeing with the thinkers as far as possible. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers, #NFDB
586:If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
587:Nature did not blend things so inextricably that you can’t draw your own boundaries—place your own well-being in your own hands. It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that. And this too: you don’t need much to live happily. And just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others, obeying God. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
588:Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You’ll know that you’re getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done. ~ Max McKeown, #NFDB
589:...I realized that happiness could be more—something that elevates from the inside. Butterflies in the stomach, a smile that won't go away, and it's like an addiction that makes a person yearn for more. It‘s not something one thinks about, it‘s something that‘s felt, involuntarily.
I had always been a thinker, trying to find happiness and comfort in thoughts and ideas. It was only now that I realized happiness begins in the heart... ~ Shelena Shorts,#NFDB
590:The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. If you have become a negative thinker, this is because you have not cared for your mind and taken the time to train it to focus on the good. Winston Churchill said that ‘the price of greatness is responsibility over each of your thoughts.’ Then you will install the vibrant mindset you are looking for. Remember, the mind truly is like any other muscle in your body. Use it or lose it. ~ Robin S Sharma, #NFDB
591:Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Thinking for Oneself,” Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. 2, § 260, #NFDB
592:Most people have no desire to swim until they are able to. Isn’t that a laugh? Of course they don’t want to swim! After all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. Nor, of course, do they want to think. They weren’t made to think, but to live! It’s true, and anyone who makes thinking his priority may well go far as a thinker, but when all’s said and done he has just mistaken water for dry land, and one of these days he’ll drown. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
593:I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
594:That room was Rolandsen’s world. Rolandsen was not just irresponsibility and inebriation, he was also great thinker and inventor. There was a smell of acids that permeated the corridor and came to the notice of every visitor. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he had all these medicaments there solely to disguise the aroma of all the brandy he consumed. But this was part of an act designed purely to give himself an air of inscrutability. ~ Knut Hamsun, #NFDB
595:What it felt to me was like the dissolution of my idea of myself. I felt like separateness evaporated. I felt this tremendous sense of oneness. I'm quite an erratic thinker, quite an adrenalized person, but through meditation, I found this beautiful serenity and selfless connection. My tendency towards selfishness, I felt that kind of exposed as a superficial and pointless perspective to have. I felt very relaxed, a sense of oneness. I felt love. ~ Russell Brand, #NFDB
596:From my student days I found him a compelling and fascinating, though often puzzling, figure. It's a lifelong fascination now and I don't expect that to stop! His vision of God, God's faithfulness, God's purposes and so on is so much bigger and richer than almost any subsequent Christian thinker has ever managed. In addition, I have always loved ancient history, especially the history of the early Roman empire, and of course Paul fits right into that. ~ N T Wright, #NFDB
597:Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting ~ Erich Maria Remarque, #NFDB
598:The apartment was entirely, was only, for her; a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self. ~ Claire Messud, #NFDB
599:This wariness of authority reflected the most fundamental of all of Einstein’s moral principles: Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish. He had demonstrated this as an impertinent young thinker, and he proclaimed the principle clearly in 1931. “I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality,” he said.69 ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
600:The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
601:Obama is not just a powerful speaker, but a thinker engaged with the ideas of his country and his age--this argument by historian James Kloppenberg should therefore fascinate anyone interested in American politics or how ideas shape public life. Tracing the influences of Obama's family, educational, and work experiences on his ideas, Reading Obama locates a unique individual in the crosscurrents of American democracy and continuing fights over American ideals. ~ Martha Minow, #NFDB
602:In order to discredit faith and seduce believers, Kant does not hesitate to appeal to pride or vanity: whoever does not rely on reason alone is a "minor" who refuses to "grow up"; if men allow themselves to be led by "authorities" instead of "thinking for themselves," it is solely through laziness and cowardice, neither more nor less. A thinker who needs to make use of such means — which on the whole are demagogic — must indeed be short of serious arguments. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
603:But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with--which, unfortunately, is rarely the case--tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important--nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
604:Then, what," asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a flower, "what is the difference between Christ and Satan?"
"It is quite simple," replied the Highlander. "Christ descended into hell; Satan fell into it."
"Does it make much odds?" asked the free-thinker.
"It makes all the odds," said the other. "One of them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. A god can be humble, a devil can only be humbled. ~ G K Chesterton,#NFDB
605:I think I'm too indoctrinated. I'm going to use everything I can, and I think if I used an advertisement in that one, it would be yet another way to connect the current day with Wharton. Wharton has been perceived sometimes as being too upper class; Wharton was an extraordinary social thinker. As relevant today as anyone, so she uses some language that isn't current, but to me, I'm so happy about that because I get so bored with the 100 words that people mostly use. ~ Lynne Tillman, #NFDB
606:When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That's why I'm always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down. ~ Jay Z, #NFDB
607:As he left, I peered at Sarah Mapps and her mother, the way they grabbed hands and squeezed in relief, and then at Nina, at the small exultation on her face. She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinions of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, #NFDB
608:I've always been a very rebellious, philosophical person, so my mother set the foundation for my appreciation for nature and my empathy for other people. But then, being a sort of rebellious, philosophical thinker, I'm always looking for new ways to shake things up. So I feel like I'm really lucky to be alive in a time where there's so much opportunity to disrupt and shake it up. It's sort of a combination between that and having the foundation that my mother gave me. ~ Adrian Grenier, #NFDB
609:The senior British economic thinker on climate, Sir Nicholas Stern, has estimated that if we don't reverse climate change, the costs of dealing with the resulting catastrophe would be as much as twenty percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product. He's saying that if we do nothing about climate change, then we will have to spend a full fifth of our planet's economic energy on dealing with the floods, hurricanes, droughts, food shortages, and epidemics that will result. ~ Colin Beavan, #NFDB
610:All the beauty and sublimity we have bestowed upon real and imaginary things I will reclaim as the property and product of man: as his fairest apology. Man as poet, as thinker, as God, as love, as power: with what regal liberality he has lavished gifts upon things so as to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! His most unselfish act hitherto has been to admire and worship and to know how to conceal from himself that it was he who created what he admired. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
611:I'm a thinker. That is what I do, in great depth and detail, every waking moment of the day. I like to believe it's worthwhile. And yet, I can't help but recall something ... said to me once when I was young: "All of these things with which we occupy ourselves don't amount to much in the cosmic scale of things, do they? No matter how extensively we ponder any particular topic, there is really very little there"--Gilbertus Albans, Reflections in the Mirror of the Mind ~ Brian Herbert, #NFDB
612:Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial. ~ Gertrude Stein, #NFDB
613:Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
614:As a logical thinker, I cannot help thinking, based on the evidence, that many people who exhibit dramatic reactions to bad news involving strangers are hypocrites. That troubles me. People like that hear bad news from across the world, and they burst into wails and tears as though their own children have just been run over by a bus. To me, they don’t seem very different from actors and actresses—they are able to burst into tears on command, but does it really mean anything? ~ John Elder Robison, #NFDB
615:The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
616:For Mill, the acknowledgment of his or her own fallibility is part of what makes someone a serious thinker. Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that seem certain to them. Wisdom involves openness to those who disagree with us. It is only when our ideas have been subjected to criticism and all objections considered—if necessary seeking these objections out—that we have any right to think of our judgement as better than another’s. ~ Nigel Warburton, #NFDB
617:The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions. ~ Karl Popper, #NFDB
618:It would much conduce to the public benefit, if, instead of discouraging free-thinking, there was erected in the midst of this free country a dianoetic academy, or seminary for free-thinkers, provided with retired chambers, and galleries, and shady walks and groves, where, after seven years spent in silence and meditation, a man might commence a genuine free-thinker, and from that time forward, have license to think what he pleased, and a badge to distinguish him from counterfeits. ~ George Berkeley, #NFDB
619:Narcissus knew only too well what a charming golden bird had flown to him. This hermit soon sensed a kindred soul in Goldmund, in spite of their apparent contrasts. Narcissus was dark and spare; Goldmund, a radiant youth. Narcissus was analytical, a thinker; Goldmund, a dreamer with the soul of a child. But something they had in common bridged these contrasts: both were refined; both were different from the others because of obvious gifts and signs; both bore the special mark of fate. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
620:There’s a virtuous cycle when people have to defend challenges to their ideas. Any gaps in thinking or analysis become clear pretty quickly when smart people ask good, logical questions. You can’t be a good value investor without being an independent thinker – you’re seeing valuations that the market is not appreciating. But it’s critical that you understand why the market isn’t seeing the value you do. The back and forth that goes on in the investment process helps you get at that. ~ Joel Greenblatt, #NFDB
621:Professor J. B. S. Haldane was one of the most celebrated scientists in Britain. A pioneering and broad-ranging thinker, he developed a mathematical theory of population genetics, predicted that hydrogen-producing windmills would replace fossil fuel, explained nuclear fission, and suffered a perforated eardrum while testing a homemade decompression chamber: “Although one is somewhat deaf,” he wrote, “one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment. ~ Ben Macintyre, #NFDB
622:Each thought, emotion, or feeling is manifested by a certain shade or combination of colors belonging to that particular thought, emotion, or feeling, which color or colors manifest themselves in the Aura of that particular mental principle in which the thought, emotion, or feeling naturally originates, and are of course visible to the observer studying the composite Aura of the thinker. The developed psychic may read the thoughts of a person as he can the pages of an open book, ~ William Walker Atkinson, #NFDB
623:So… what? You want me to sign my name in blood or something?”
“Hmmm,” he said, tapping his finger against his cheek as he looked at the ceiling — the epitome of an overly dramatic thinker.
I rolled my eyes.
“Why don’t we just seal it with a kiss?” he suggested, as if the thought of it didn’t gnaw at my intestines.
“Is there a Door Number Two?”
“Well, I could stay at your side every second until Nergal is dead,” he answered. “And before you ask, there is no Door Number Three. ~ L J Kentowski,#NFDB
624:The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge: God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. A great and lonely thinker. Only ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
625:After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Descartes seemed about to take the leadership of human thought... in promoting an evolution doctrine as regards the mechanical formation of the solar system... but his constant dread of persecution, both from Catholics and Protestants, led him steadily to veil his thoughts and even to suppress them. ...Since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no great thinker had been so completely abased and thwarted by theological oppression. ~ Andrew Dickson White, #NFDB
626:The Happy Slow Thinker
Full many a time a thought has come
That had a bitter meaning in it.
And in the conversation's hum
I lost it ere I could begin it.
I've had it on my tongue to spring
Some poisoned quip that I thought clever;
Then something happened and the sting
Unuttered went, and died forever.
A lot of bitter thoughts I've had
To silence fellows and to flay 'em,
But next day always I've been glad
I wasn't quick enough to say 'em.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
627:It is characteristic of fundamental discoveries, of great achievements of the intellect, that they retain an undiminished power upon the imagination of the thinker. The memorable experiment of Faraday with a disc rotating between two poles of a magnet, which has borne such magnificent fruit, has long passed into every-day experience; yet there are certain features about this embryo of the present dynamos and motors which even today appear to us striking, and are worthy of the most careful study. ~ Nikola Tesla, #NFDB
628:No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered. ~ David Darling, #NFDB
629:The only dedication in one of the hosts of books I have had the privilege of knowing, is from the great contemporary thinker, Will Durant whose incredible encyclopedic mind had within it- the poetry of the heart, I quote:
“ TO MY WIFE
Grow strong, my comrade…that you may stand
Unshaken when I fall; that I may know
The shattered fragments of my song will come
At last to finer melody in you;
That I may tell my heart that you begin
Where passing I leave off, and fathom more. ~ Will Durant,#NFDB
630:may seem strange that a thinker should seek to prove that the God of monotheism cannot possibly exist, and then go on to assert that love of God is the supreme good. What Spinoza is trying to do is bring into a single system of ideas two radically divergent ways of looking at the world – a view from an imaginary Absolute, necessarily infinite and eternal, and the view of a finite, mortal human individual. But these perspectives are too different to be compared, let alone melded into one. Why Spinoza ~ John N Gray, #NFDB
631:I came to Paul at quite an early age, having already studied Plato and Aristotle; and I found Paul easily their intellectual equal, though he was handling these amazing questions about God, Jesus, Israel, faith and so on. He continues to be an amazingly stimulating thinker, especially when we try to understand the flow of thought in letter after letter rather than just combing him for a few verses on 'our favourite topics', which, sadly, some Christian teachers do just as some journalists and broadcasters do! ~ N T Wright, #NFDB
632:I think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means. ~ Marina Warner, #NFDB
633:THE BEGINNING OF FREEDOM is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
634:Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin, #NFDB
635:It would seem, then, that a true striving toward realization of supreme possibilities should fill the greater part of human life as a most essential and engrossing occupation. But in reality the light of knowledge has been replaced by the conventional dogma of religion; and man, meant to be a thinker, worships his dark corner of idols, hanging amulets upon himself without even understanding the meaning of their symbols. Repeat this to all those who sleep in the darkness of the ordinary. ~ Agni Yoga, Agni Yoga, 158, (1929), #NFDB
636:John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), English philosopher, political theorist, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century whose works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. He clearly set forth the premises of the scientific method. ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
637:Effective communication is fascinating to me yet bad communication is just as fascinating. There are lessons to be learned from both. I can't say I am a natural communicator, it's taken a lot of work to be able to develop content relevant to the audience and deliver it with credibility. My initial natural ability tended to be more around the visual display of information. For years I was more comfortable visualizing other people's great thinking. I preferred to be hidden behind the curtain than a thinker myself. ~ Nancy Duarte, #NFDB
638:My friend Olan Hendrix remarked, “Strategic thinking is like showering, you have to keep doing it.” If you expect to solve any major problem once, you’re in for disappointment. Little things can be won easily through systems and personal discipline. But major issues need major strategic thinking time. What Thane Yost said is really true: “The will to win is worthless if you do not have the will to prepare.” If you want to be an effective strategic thinker, then you need to become a continuous strategic thinker. ~ John C Maxwell, #NFDB
639:Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult. ~ Neal Stephenson, #NFDB
640:The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself...If evil means to be self motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine with fuels us as a race. ~ Janet Finch, #NFDB
641:In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what he called “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” The author was Rudolf Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist.3 He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in his view in anarcho-syndicalism—in European terms, a variety of “libertarian socialism.” These ~ Noam Chomsky, #NFDB
642:This seems crazy to me.’
‘Because you aren’t quite sure what to expect. To which I say what?’
She thought back, and repeated it straight up. She had a good memory for words. She said, ‘You say no one ever is sure what to expect. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all I need to be.’
‘Correct,’ I said. ‘Weird things are going to happen, and things are going to change, and the ground is going to move under our feet, but if we keep on thinking fast, we’ll be OK. ~ Lee Child,#NFDB
643:I believe that pity is a law like justice, and that kindness is a duty like uprightness. That which is weak has a right to the kindness and pity of that which is strong. In the relations of man with the animals...there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break through into the light, and which will be the corollary and the complement to humans ethics. Are there not here unsounded depths for the thinker? Is one to think oneself mad because one has the sentiment of universal pity in one's heart? ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
644:Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don't want leaders 'whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
645:One who loves must learn fear. One who fears must learn love. The thinker must do. The doer must think. The pacifist must fight, the fighter must find peace. If you flow as a river, burn as a fire. If you burn as a furnace, flow as a river. If you fly as a bird, sit firm as a rock. If you sit firmly, then fly as a bird. Be a fire that flows. A rock that flies. Love with fear and fear with love. For we are not fire, not water, not air, not rocks, not thoughts, not deeds, not fear, not love. We are G-dly beings. ~ Menachem Mendel Schneerson, #NFDB
646:There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast. ~ O Henry, #NFDB
647:A great thinker once described innovative thinkers this way: "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" Innovative thinkers are constantly asking questions such as these. How can we improve recruiting, hiring and training. How can be add greater value to our products and services by making them even better? How can we do more to nourish the personal as well as professional development of our people? What more can we do as a good citizen where we do business? ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter, #NFDB
648:A very good friend of mine spent a fair amount of time doing postmortems and met with a number of the senior folks on the Romney campaign and they spent, what was it, $140, $160 million on data. And this friend of mine, who is a very sharp thinker, asked a series of questions, but the most important one he asked, he said, "What decisions did you make differently because of the data?" And he's coming from the private equity world where he wants to know, OK, and the answer from virtually every single senior Romney person was "nothing." ~ Ted Cruz, #NFDB
649:Some writers are writing one great, big book and just taking all these different avenues towards it. They might seem on the outside to be different, but they're really not. And that's a different kind of mindset. I don't know why it is, but I just feel like I really want to escape myself as much as I can - myself as the artist, or as the writer, or as the thinker - with each new project, because one, it's just boredom, but also, I guess I just feel most comfortable starting a new book if I just feel a little in the dark about it. ~ Chang Rae Lee, #NFDB
650:We live in a world of want ads. Some of them are printed on pages; many more are unspoken. Wanted: A woman who is a perfect friend, mom, wife, coworker, housekeeper, cook, driver, thinker, encourager, and more. Messy, real, in-progress people need not apply. God has a very different idea in mind. Wanted: A woman who is imperfect, in need of grace, gloriously gifted, flawed, and beautiful and who dares to believe she’s loved through it all by a God who has an amazing purpose for her life. No need to apply. You’ve already been chosen. ~ Holley Gerth, #NFDB
651:What is reasoning? It is the result of doing away with the vital distinction which separates subjectivity and objectivity. As a form of abstract thought reasoning is not profoundly dialectical enough; as an opinion and a conviction it lacks full-blooded individuality. But where mere scope is concerned, reasoning has all the apparent advantage; for a thinker can encompass his science, a man can have an opinion upon a particular subject and a conviction as a result of a certain view of life, but one can reason about anything. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
652:In former days," said Golenishtchev, not observing, or not willing to observe, that both Anna and Vronsky wanted to speak, "in former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
653:And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man's life. It said: "See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!" and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick! ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
654:The child who is a skilled thinker and adept learner can adjust to whatever the future doles out. She can spackle in those holes in her knowledge, and she knows how to acquire skills she needs to do things she wants to do. On the other hand, the child who shoveled down his prepared education but lost his curiosity, whose interests withered away and were replaced by a general malaise and desire to just be left alone — that child has a bagful of knowledge and skills with varying expiration dates and dubious ability or desire to acquire more. ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert, #NFDB
655:Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
656:I'm not the girl who swings from the chandeliers and screws men because she can, fixing her lipstick in the rear view mirror of a cab hailed at dawn. I'm the girl you call Wednesday for Saturday. The girl who reads Milton for fun and knows a fish fork when she sees one. A flirt maybe, but in that harmless, nineteenth-century, kiss-my-hand-and-ask-me-to-waltz kind of way. Mostly, I'm a thinker, a worrier. Since I'm a New Yorker, you can take that last bit up a notch. It's not that there's no free spirit in me. But it's a free spirit with a five-year plan. ~ Elizabeth Bard, #NFDB
657:We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now. ~ Lydia Davis, #NFDB
658:Any profession should have norms around the issue you raise. And, in the words of the great economic thinker Albert Hirschman, we all owe a measure of loyalty to professional norms. But when the norms seem unhelpful or unproductive, one needs to speak up - to activate voice. And in the extreme, if the profession and one's colleagues seem estranged from a thoughtfully selected course of action, you need to consider the possibility of exit. Of course, if you knowingly violate norms or laws, you need to be prepared to face the consequences - or to lead a revolution! ~ Howard Gardner, #NFDB
659:I believe you can train yourself to become a positive thinker, but you must cultivate a desire to develop the skill of setting personal worthy and realistic goals. I am so thoroughly convinced that if we don’t set goals in our life and learn how to master the technique of living to reach our goals, we can reach a ripe old age and look back on our life only to see that we reached but a small part of our full potential. When you learn to master the principle of setting a goal, you will then be able to make a great difference in the results you attain in this life. ~ M Russell Ballard, #NFDB
660:Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad ~ Huston Smith, #NFDB
661:How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that God exists unless one has already allowed Himself to ignore Him? A king's existence is demonstrated by way of subjection and submissiveness. Do you want to try and demonstrate that the king exists? Will you do so by offering a string of proofs, a series of arguments? No. If you are serious, you will demonstrate the king's existence by your submission, by the way you live. And so it is with demonstrating God's existence. It is accomplished not by proofs but by worship. Any other way is but a thinker's pious bungling. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
662:As long as there is the experiencer remembering the experience, truth is not. Truth is not something to be remembered, stored up, recorded, and then brought out. What is accumulated is not truth. The desire to experience creates the experiencer, who then accumulates and remembers. Desire makes for the separation of the thinker from his thought; the desire to become, to experience, to be more or to be less, makes for division between the experiencer and the experience. Awareness of the ways of desire is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
663:However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time. ~ Sarah Vowell, #NFDB
664:Every strength has a corresponding challenge and every challenge has a corresponding strength. The inattentive child may be a deep thinker. The uncooperative child may be a good leader. The emotionally-charged child may be gifted with exceptional empathy. The rule-defying child may be an out-of-the-box innovator.
When faced with challenging behaviors, look for the corresponding strength, and focus on nurturing that gift while providing gentle guidance and coping techniques for the challenging areas. That is the essence of working with, instead of against, our children. ~ L R Knost,#NFDB
665:There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
666:The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. ~ William James, #NFDB
667:What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71) ~ Thomas Nagel, #NFDB
668:I have a bad rote memory, but I tend to learn through my experiences. And then when I went into the markets, and then starting my business as an entrepreneur, that affected my thinking a lot, too, because in order to be successful as both an investor and an entrepreneur, one has to be an independent thinker and bet against the consensus and be right. Because the consensus is built into the price, and if you're not an independent thinker in the markets you won't succeed. And if you're not an independent thinker as an entrepreneur starting out, you're not going to bring anything special. ~ Ray Dalio, #NFDB
669:You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance. ~ Anais Nin, #NFDB
670:You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers -- you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance. ~ Ana s Nin, #NFDB
671:Do you think you could persuade that horse of yours to stay with the other horses for a minute or two?” he said with a mock severity. “Otherwise he’ll wind up believing he’s one of us.”
He’s been driving Halt crazy since we found your tracks,” Horace put in. “He must have picked up your scent and known it was you we were following, although Halt didn’t realize it.”
At that, Halt raised an eyebrow. “Halt didn’t realize it?” he repeated. “And I suppose you did?”
Horace shrugged. “I’m just a warrior,” he replied. “I’m not supposed to be the thinker. I leave that to you Rangers. ~ John Flanagan,#NFDB
672:What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....
Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71) ~ Thomas Nagel,#NFDB
673:He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet's cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the colour of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. In it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore. ~ Ben Bova, #NFDB
674:In 1956, Herb Simon... predicted that within ten years computers would beat the world chess champion, compose "aesthetically satisfying" original music, and prove new mathematical theorems. It took forty years, not ten, but all these goals were achieved—and within a few years of each other! The music composed by David Cope's programs cannot be distinguished... from that composed by Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. In 1976, a computer was used in the proof of the long-unsolved "four color problem." ~ Michael J. Beeson, "The Mechanization of Mathematics," in Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (2004), #NFDB
675:I'm not trying to tell you that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with- which, unfortunately, is rarely the case- tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And- most important- nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
676:The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole. ~ Robert Greene, #NFDB
677:We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! 'The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!' groans some solitary thinker. 'Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,' replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride. As for me, I don't believe in these waggons bringing bread to humanity. For, founded on no moral principle, these may well, even in the act of carrying bread to humanity, coldly exclude a considerable portion of humanity from enjoying it; that has been seen more than once. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
678:For the next twelve hours I will be exposed to the day’s demands. It is now that I must make a choice. Because of Calvary, I’m free to choose. And so I choose. I choose love . . . No occasion justifies hatred; no injustice warrants bitterness. I choose love. Today I will love God and what God loves. I choose joy . . . I will invite my God to be the God of circumstance. I will refuse the temptation to be cynical . . . the tool of the lazy thinker. I will refuse to see people as anything less than human beings, created by God. I will refuse to see any problem as anything less than an opportunity to see God. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
679:I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case--tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important—nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
680:Capitalism is nothing if it is not on the move. Marx is incredibly appreciative of that, and he sets out to evoke the transformative dynamism of capital. That’s why it is so very strange that he’s often depicted as a static thinker who reduces capitalism to a structural configuration. No, what Marx seeks out in Capital is a conceptual apparatus, a deep structure, that explains the way in which motion is actually instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. Consequently, many of his concepts are formulated around relations rather than stand-alone principles; they are about transformative activity. ~ David Harvey, #NFDB
681:The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought, - these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present.
For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga,#NFDB
682:And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all. ~ Vladimir Nabokov, #NFDB
683:I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with — which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important—nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
684:One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation. ~ S ren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
685:I'm not trying to tell you," he said, "that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with — which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And — most important—nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
686:You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a "genetic" approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. "Is that a metaphor?" I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no. ~ Donald Barthelme, #NFDB
687:The biologist Peter Medawar described science as ‘the art of the soluble’, but the same applies to all forms of knowledge. All kinds of creative thought involve judgements about what approaches might or might not work. Gaining or losing interest in particular problems or sub-problems is part of the creative process and itself constitutes problem-solving. So whether ‘problems are soluble’ does not depend on whether any given question can be answered, or answered by a particular thinker on a particular day. But if progress ever depended on violating a law of physics, then ‘problems are soluble’ would be false. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
688:At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
689:Paul was not only a spirited man, as any reading of his more polemical letters will attest, but also a man of the Spirit. It is important that we not downplay this factor, and it is equally important that we not anachronistically contrast it with the notion of Paul being a profound and rational thinker. We are talking about a person who manifests both life in the Spirit and life of the mind, and in fact we see a marriage of the two. No doubt Paul might have said that the only people really in their right minds are those who are filled with and inspired by the Spirit to think God’s thoughts after God has revealed those thoughts. ~ Ben Witherington III, #NFDB
690:I regret nothing. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. ~ Janet Fitch, #NFDB
691:The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish thinker and teacher appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. 'In him was life; and the life was the light of men.' Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them. ~ Howard Thurman, #NFDB
692:Progress is man’s mode of existence. The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
693:On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance - along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy - namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol'boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed. ~ Sarah Vowell, #NFDB
694:Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, #NFDB
695: Lila
In us is the thousandfold Spirit who is one,
An eternal thinker calm and great and wise,
A seer whose eye is an all-regarding sun,
A poet of the cosmic mysteries.
A critic Witness pieces everything
And binds the fragments in his brilliant sheaf;
A World-adventurer borne on Destiny's wing
Gambles with death and triumph, joy and grief.
A king of greatness and a slave of love,
Host of the stars and guest in Nature's inn,
A high spectator spirit throned above,
A pawn of passion in the game divine,
One who has made in sport the suns and seas
Mirrors in our being his immense caprice.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Lila
,#NFDB
696:But the real fascination for Usher was Leonardo’s straddling of two worlds of creativity, the artistic and the inventive. No one, before or since, more clearly demonstrated the importance to invention of what we might call “spatial intelligence”; Leonardo was not an abstract thinker of any great achievement, nor were his mathematical skills, which he taught himself late in life, remarkable. His perceptual skills, on the other hand, developed primarily for his painting, were extraordinary; but they were so extraordinary that Usher could write, “It is only with Leonardo25 that the process of invention is lifted decisively into the field of the imagination ~ William Rosen, #NFDB
697:It was in the later sub-races of the Lemurian race that the human being we know as man was differentiated from the animal prototype. Thus in Lemuria the true man came into being. Man having been formed as the vehicle for the "thinker," we have the explanation for the opening verses of chapter 6 [Genesis]. The 1st verse describes that men began to multiply on the earth; and in the 2nd verse it explains that the sons of God (the intellectual egos or conscious entities) gazed upon the bodies that had been formed (the daughters of men) and took wives from among them, i.e. joined with them to become the true humanity that we know. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible, #NFDB
698:you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better.—When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts are strong, happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker:—‘Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’ that is a prayer—a word to the big heart ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
699:As in other exercises my father taught me, the way to begin is to sit up straight, breathe normally, and gradually allow your mind to relax. “With your mind at rest,” he instructed those of us in his little teaching room in Nepal, “just allow yourself to become aware of all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations passing through it. And as you watch them pass, simply ask yourself, ‘Is there a difference between the mind and the thoughts that pass through it? Is there any difference between the thinker and the thoughts perceived by the thinker?’ Continue watching your thoughts with these questions in mind for about three minutes or so, and then stop. ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, #NFDB
700:I am writing this because on that night of the tenth of May in the 1,940th year of Our Lord, Churchill stood for more than England. Millions of people, especially across Europe, recognized him now as the champion of their hopes. (In faraway Bengal India there was at least one man, that admirably independent writer and thinker, Nirad Chaudhuri, who fastened Churchill's picture on the wall of his room the next day.) Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal, and new. ~ John Lukacs, #NFDB
701:I am writing this because on that night of the tenth of May in the 1,940th year of Our Lord, Churchill stood for more than England. Millions of people, especially across Europe, recognized him now as the champion of their hopes. (In faraway Bengal India there was at least one man, that admirably independent writer and thinker, Nirad Chaudhuri, who fastened Churchill's picture on the wall of his room the next day.) Churchill was _the_ opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal, and new. ~ John Lukacs, #NFDB
702:You see, the future is a kind of stew, a soup, a vichyssoise of the present and the past. That's how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything everyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too. And salt and lizard and pearl and umbrellas and typewriters and a lot of other things I'm not at liberty to tell you, because I took vows, and a witch's vows have teeth. Magic is funny like that. It's not a linear thinker. The point is if you mash it all up together and you have a big enough pot and you're very good at witchcraft, you can wind up with a cauldron full of tomorrow. ~ Catherynne M Valente, #NFDB
703:Thought is verbalized sensation; thought is the response of memory, the word, the experience, the image. Thought is transient, changing, impermanent, and it is seeking permanency. So thought creates the thinker, who then becomes the permanent; he assumes the role of the censor, the guide, the controller, the molder of thought. This illusory permanent entity is the product of thought, of the transient. This entity is thought; without thought he is not. The thinker is made up of qualities; his qualities cannot be separated from himself. The controller is the controlled, he is merely playing a deceptive game with himself. Till the false is seen as the false, truth is not. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
704:Hitler the thinker was wrong that politics and science are the same thing. Hitler the politician was right that conflating them creates a rapturous sense of catastrophic time and thus the potential for radical action. When an apocalypse is on the horizon, waiting for scientific solutions seems senseless, struggle seems natural, an demagogues of blood and soil come to the fore. A sound policy for our world, then, would be one that keeps the fear of planetary catastrophe as far away as possible. This means accepting the autonomy of science from politics, and making the political choice to support the pertinent kinds of science that will allow conventional politics to proceed. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
705:In the Puranas it was predicted that toward the end of Kali Yuga humanity would be driven to acts of madness. It is very dangerous that people do not recognize this state, for while it is possible to cure a patient who does not resist treatment, if he struggles against it the beneficial effects of the medicine will be diminished. But how do you explain to people that their leaders and their teachers are insane? ...such mental confusion fully corresponds with the end of Kali Yuga... Most people hate the messenger who brings knowledge... let them at least remember the warning that humanity is acting insanely. The Thinker warned, “Do not fall into madness.” (285) ~ Agni Yoga, Supermundane, (1938), #NFDB
706:Consider Herbert A. Simon, a right sharp scientific thinker, who did his thinking most frequently at Carnegie Mellon, by which I mean this chap was smart as shit. Check out some of his smart-thinks: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Slogan-worthy. ~ Nick Offerman, #NFDB
707:More than two thousand years ago, the Roman orator, belletrist, thinker, Stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story. One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, "Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?"
The drowned worshippers, being dead, would have a lot of trouble advertising their experiences from the bottom of the sea. This can fool the casual observer into believing in miracles. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,#NFDB
708:Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe,3 a collective notion identifying “us” Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. ~ Edward W Said, #NFDB
709:Dad adored our mother, Sandra, and had a remarkable relationship with her for fifty-six years. A few times a week, they had a ritual of connecting with each other—they would take a ride on a Honda motorbike, driving slowly enough to “talk it over” while they enjoyed the scenery and just being together. They called each other on the phone two or three times a day, even when he was out of town. They discussed everything under the sun from politics to great books to raising kids, and Dad valued her opinion more than anyone else’s. He was a deep thinker and had a tendency to be too theoretical. Mom was an excellent sounding board and would help him simplify and make his material practical, ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
710:In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense. ~ Russell Shorto, #NFDB
711:We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, - nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, - not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the lory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth...and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
712:The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations... The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large and the largest is small... Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers... Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mould is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an antheap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
713:Average employee: Not too bright. Exceptionally well qualified: Made no major blunders yet. Character above reproach: Still one step ahead of the law. Zealous attitude: Opinionated. Quick-thinking: Offers plausible excuses. Careful thinker: Won’t make a decision. Takes pride in work: Conceited. Forceful: Argumentative. Aggressive: Obnoxious. A keen analyst: Thoroughly confused. Conscientious: Scared. Meticulous attention to detail: A nitpicker. Has leadership qualities: Is tall or has a loud voice. Strong principles: Stubborn Career-minded: Backstabber Coming along well: About to be let go. Independent worker: Nobody knows what he/she does. Forward-thinking: Procrastinator. Loyal: Can’t get a job anywhere else. ~ Samuel A Culbert, #NFDB
714:Every single iceberg filled me with feelings of sadness and wonder. Not thoughts of sadness and wonder, mind you, because thoughts require a thinker, and my head was a balloon, incapable of thoughts. I didn't think about Dad, I didn't think about you, and, the big one, I didn't think about myself. The effect was like heroin (I think), and I wanted to stretch it out as long as possible.
Even the simplest human interaction would send me crashing back to earthly thoughts. So I was the first one out in the morning, and the last one back. I only went kayaking, never stepped foot on the White Continent proper. I kept my head down, stayed in my room, and slept, but, mainly, I was. No racing heart, no flying thoughts. ~ Maria Semple,#NFDB
715:The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practising of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one’s everyday life. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
716:The global nature of the religious knowledge of a learned Muslim sitting in Isfahan in the fourteenth century was very different from that of a scholastic thinker in Paris or Bologna of the same period. On the basis of the Quranic doctrine of religious universality and the vast historical experiences of a global nature, Islamic civilization developed a cosmopolitan and worldwide religious perspective unmatched before the modern period in any other religion. This global vision is still part and parcel of the worldview of traditional Muslims, of those who have not abandoned their universal vision as a result of the onslaught of modernism or reactions to this onslaught in the form of what has come to be called “fundamentalism. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, #NFDB
717:The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition,” writes Thomas Merton, “is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.” A little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life. Nothing new to be discovered? The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within. Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
718:As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.
The Thinker can think about virtually anything.
(...) The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it. It will find evidence that the poorest Jew in the most run-down ghetto has hidden money somewhere. Similarly, Feminists are able to believe that all men, including the starving wretches who live and sleep on the streets, are exploiting all women, including the Queen of England. ~ Robert Anton Wilson,#NFDB
719:indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. ~ Edward W Said, #NFDB
720:All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet.” They were let loose in Greece. The Greeks were intellectualists; they had a passion for using their minds. The fact shines through even their use of language. Our word for school comes from the Greek word for leisure. Of course, reasoned the Greek, given leisure a man will employ it in thinking and finding out about things. Leisure and the pursuit of knowledge, the connection was inevitable—to a Greek. In our ears Philosophy has an austere if not a dreary sound. The word is Greek but it had not that sound in the original. The Greeks meant by it the endeavor to understand everything there is, and they called it what they felt it to be, the love of knowledge: How charming is divine philosophy— ~ Edith Hamilton, #NFDB
721:Students are welcome at such schools to study historical and contemporary theology, and to relate these to auxiliary disciplines such as philosophy and literary criticism. But they are not taught to seek ways of applying Scripture for the edification of God’s people. Rather, professors encourage each student to be “up to date” with the current academic discussion and to make “original contributions” to that discussion, out of his autonomous reasoning. So when the theologian finishes his graduate work and moves to a teaching position, even if he is personally evangelical in his convictions, he often writes and teaches as he was encouraged to do in graduate school: academic comparisons and contrasts between this thinker and that, minimal interaction with Scripture itself. ~ John M Frame, #NFDB
722:Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
723:The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. ~ William James, #NFDB
724:The Thinker wisely encouraged His disciples, and prophesied the victory of the Forces of Light. (259) In the Puranas it was predicted that toward the end of Kali Yuga humanity would be driven to acts of madness. It is very dangerous that people do not recognize this state, for while it is possible to cure a patient who does not resist treatment, if he struggles against it the beneficial effects of the medicine will be diminished. But how do you explain to people that their leaders and their teachers are insane? ...such mental confusion fully corresponds with the end of Kali Yuga... Most people hate the messenger who brings knowledge... let them at least remember the warning that humanity is acting insanely. The Thinker warned, “Do not fall into madness.” (285) ~ Agni Yoga, Supermundane, (1938), #NFDB
725:The nation has entered an age of post-constitutional soft tyranny. As French thinker and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville explained presciently, “It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ~ Mark R Levin, #NFDB
726:The stress placed upon the Adams-Hamilton feud pointed up a deeper problem in the Federalist party, one that may explain its ultimate failure to survive: the elitist nature of its politics. James McHenry complained to Oliver Wolcott, Jr., of their adherents, “They write private letters to each other, but do nothing to give a proper direction to the public mind.”50 The Federalists issued appeals to the electorate but did not try to mobilize a broad-based popular movement. Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
727:Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
728:Worthy of love and admiration were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life. And Siddhartha even doubted in many an hour, whether this knowledge, this thought was to be valued thus highly, whether it might not also perhaps be a childish idea of the thinking people, of the thinking and childlike people. In all other respects, the worldly people were of equal rank to the wise men, were often far superior to them, just as animals too can, after all, in some moments, seem to be superior to humans in their tough, unrelenting performance of what is necessary. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
729:I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in
a dream?
...
Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. – I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience,
Wenzel ~ Robert Walser,#NFDB
730:Indeed, on close inspection one sees that by far the greater number of educated people still desire convictions from a thinker and nothing but convictions, and that only a small minority want certainty. The former want to be forcibly carried away in order thereby to obtain an increase of strength; the latter few have the real interest which disregards personal advantages and the increase of strength also. The former class, who greatly predominate, are always reckoned upon when the thinker comports himself and labels himself as a genius, and thus views himself as a higher being to whom authority belongs. In so far as genius of this kind upholds the ardour of convictions, and arouses distrust of the cautious and modest spirit of science, it is an enemy of truth, however much it may think itself the wooer thereof. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
731:Hamilton was that rare revolutionary: a master administrator and as competent a public servant as American politics would ever produce. One historian has written, “Hamilton was an administrative genius” who “assumed an influence in Washington’s cabinet which is unmatched in the annals of the American cabinet system.”73 The position demanded both a thinker and a doer, a skilled executive and a political theorist, a system builder who could devise interrelated policies. It also demanded someone who could build an institutional framework consistent with constitutional principles. Virtually every program that Hamilton put together raised fundamental constitutional issues, so that his legal training and work on The Federalist enabled him to craft the efficient machinery of government while expounding its theoretical underpinnings. ~ Ron Chernow, #NFDB
732:The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment — the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists — perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein — you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found — and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears. ~ Sam Harris, #NFDB
733:You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can’t, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don’t even know that you are its slave. It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
734:Note that I am not relying in this book on the beastly method of collecting selective "corroborating evidence." ...I call this overload of examples naïve empiricism--successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself--and no doubt his peers.* The Black Swan idea is based on the structure of randomness in empirical reality.
*It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view--and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite. Almost all my non Yogi Berra quotes are from people I disagree with. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb,#NFDB
735:Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys— ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
736:One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver’s seat on the left-hand side. Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road. Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit. The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows. Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature. Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford’s seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
737:The blood cyst works kind of like a whip, doesn’t it?” I asked. “For the sheep to manipulate the host.” “Exactly. Once that forms, there’s no escaping the sheep.” “So what on earth was the Boss after, doing what he was doing?” “He went mad. He probably couldn’t take the heat of that blast furnace. The sheep used him to build up a supreme power base. That’s why the sheep entered him. He was, in a word, disposable. The man was zero as a thinker, after all.” “So when the Boss died, you were earmarked to take over that power base.” “I’m afraid so.” “And what lay ahead after that?” “A realm of total conceptual anarchy. A scheme in which all opposites would be resolved into unity. With me and the sheep at the center.” “So why did you reject it?” Time trailed off into death. And over this dead time, a silent snow was falling. “I guess I felt attached to my ~ Haruki Murakami, #NFDB
738:It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim....
.... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power. ~ Hannah Arendt,#NFDB
739:No, Steppenwolf's look penetrated our whole age. It saw through all its hustle and bustle, all its pushy ambition, all its conceitedness, the whole superficial comedy of its shallow, self-important intellectualism. And sad to say, his look penetrated deeper still, well beyond the mere deficiencies and hopeless inadequacies of our age, our intellectualism and our culture. It went right to the heart of all things human. In a single second it eloquently expressed all the skepticism of a thinker—and perhaps of one in the know — as to the dignity and meaning of human life as such. He look seemed to say: ' Don't you see what apes we are? That's what human beings are like, just take a look!' and all celebrity, all cleverness, all intellectual achievements, all humanity's attempts to create something sublime, great and enduring were reduced to a fairground farce. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
740:I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans -- the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blueprint. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress -- but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
741:But his friend and colleague the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905) was a deeper and more measured thinker. He believed that education and not revolution was the answer. Abdu had been devastated by the British occupation of Egypt, but he loved Europe, felt quite at ease with Europeans and was widely read in Western science and philosophy. He greatly respected the political, legal and educational institutions of the modern West, but did not believe that they could be transplanted wholesale in a deeply religious country, such as Egypt, where modernization had been too rapid and had perforce excluded the vast mass of the people. It was essential to graft modern legal and constitutional innovations on to traditional Islamic ideas that the people could understand; a society in which people cannot understand the law becomes in effect a country without law. ~ Karen Armstrong, #NFDB
742:This conversation revealed to Odo a third conception of the religious idea. In Piedmont religion imposed itself as a military discipline, the enforced duty of the Christian citizen to the heavenly state; to the Duke it was a means of purchasing spiritual immunity from the consequences of bodily weakness; to the Bishop, it replaced the panem et circenses of ancient Rome. Where, in all this, was the share of those whom Christ had come to save? Where was Saint Francis’s devotion to his heavenly bride, the Lady Poverty? Though here and there a good parish priest like Crescenti ministered to the temporal wants of the peasantry, it was only the free-thinker and the atheist who, at the risk of life and fortune, laboured for their moral liberation. Odo listened with a saddened heart, thinking, as he followed his host through the perfumed shade of the gardens, and down ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
743:When Americans think of freedom, we usually imagine a contest between a lone individual and a powerful government. We tend to conclude that the individual should be empowered and the government kept at bay. This is all well and good. But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members. This is why we should engage in activities that are of interest to us, our friends, our families. These need not be expressly political: Václav Havel, the Czech dissident thinker, gave the example of brewing good beer. Insofar as we take pride in these activities, and come to know others who do so as well, we are creating civil society. Sharing in an undertaking teaches us that we can trust people beyond a narrow circle of friends and families, and helps us to recognize authorities from whom we can learn. ~ Timothy Snyder, #NFDB
744:That the development of the human being is but the passing from one state of consciousness to another. It is a succession of expansions, a growth of that faculty of awareness that constitutes the predominant characteristic of the indwelling Thinker. It is the progressing from consciousness polarised in the personality, lower self, or body, to that polarised in the higher self, ego, or soul, thence to a polarisation in the Monad, or Spirit, till the consciousness eventually is Divine. As the human being develops, the faculty of awareness extends first of all beyond the circumscribing walls that confine it within the lower kingdoms of nature (the mineral, vegetable and animal) to the three worlds of the evolving personality, to the planet whereon he plays his part, to the system wherein that planet revolves, until it finally escapes from the solar system itself and becomes universal. ~ Alice A Bailey, #NFDB
745:A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, #NFDB
746:A prisoner named Denis Martinez, for example, explained what getting an education and learning to read deeply into subjects gave him in terms of perspective: “It’s given me a new set of glasses. Before I wasn’t able to see the things I see now. I was a nineteen-year old knucklehead going around and thinking I knew it all. The more I learned the more I could sense how wrong I was and how many things I didn’t know.” Inspired by his reading of René Descartes, Martinez reflected, “There are two ways to be in prison—physically and/or mentally. Being in prison mentally is to live in ignorance, closed-mindedness, and pessimism. You can confine me for as long as you want, but my mind will always be free.” The title of a painting this prisoner made is revealing: Cogito Ergo Sum Liber—I Think Therefore I Am Free. (Now, there’s a bumper sticker/T-shirt slogan for the modern Enlightenment thinker.) ~ Michael Shermer, #NFDB
747:If we want them to buy a box of expensive chocolates, we can first arrange for them to write down a number that’s much larger than the price of the chocolates. If we want them to choose a bottle of French wine, we can expose them to French background music before they decide. If we want them to agree to try an untested product, we can first inquire whether they consider themselves adventurous. If we want to convince them to select a highly popular item, we can begin by showing them a scary movie. If we want them to feel warmly toward us, we can hand them a hot drink. If we want them to be more helpful to us, we can have them look at photos of individuals standing close together. If we want them to be more achievement oriented, we can provide them with an image of a runner winning a race. If we want them to make careful assessments, we can show them a picture of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. ~ Robert B Cialdini, #NFDB
748:I suggest this passage from the German “philosopher” (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper): Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten and or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound. Even a Monte Carlo engine could not sound as random as the great philosophical master thinker (it would take plenty of sample runs to get the mixture of “heat” and “sound.” People call that philosophy and frequently finance it with taxpayer subsidies! ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, #NFDB
749:It was an extremely hard and discouraging business, for I knew no one whose interests overlapped with mine. I married when I was nineteen, and a wife and child added to the problems. But at least it meant that I got used to working completely and totally alone, and not expecting encouragement. Later on, reviewers and critics were outraged by what one of them called “his stupefying assurance about his own genius.” But it would have been impossible to go on working without some conviction of genius—at least, of certainty about the importance of what I was doing, and the belief that it wouldn’t matter if no other human being ever came to share this certainty. The feeling of alienation had to be totally accepted. Luckily, I’ve always had a fairly cheerful temperament, not much given to self-pity. So I went on working, reading and writing in my total vacuum, without contact with any other writer or thinker. I ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
750:I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate? ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
751:I do not ignore the theological and metaphysical interpretation of the Christian doctrine of salvation. But the underprivileged everywhere have long since abandoned any hope that this type of salvation deals with the crucial issues by which their days are turned into despair without consolation. The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them. ~ Howard Thurman, #NFDB
752:It took me many years to lose my spirit, to unlearn thinking and forget the unity. Isn't it just as if I had turned about slowly and was on a long detour from being a man to being a child, from a thinker to a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good, and the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path this has been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, so many vices, so many errors, so much disgust, so many disappointments and woes just to begin again. But it was fitting this way; my heart says "Yes" to it and my eyes smile at it. I've had to experience despair. I've had to descend to the most foolish of all thoughts--the thought of suicide--in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear "Om" again, to be able to sleep and awaken properly again [...] Where else might my path lead me? This path is foolish; it moves in loops, and perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go where it likes; I want to follow it. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
753:The Thinker Is the Thought Is it not necessary to understand the thinker, the doer, the actor, since his thought, his deed, his action cannot be separated from him? The thinker is the thought, the doer is the deed, the actor is the action. In his thought the thinker is revealed. The thinker through his actions creates his own misery, his ignorance, his strife. The painter paints this picture of passing happiness, of sorrow, of confusion. Why does he produce this painful picture? Surely, this is the problem that must be studied, understood and dissolved. Why does the thinker think his thoughts, from which flow all his actions? This is the rock wall against which you have been battering your head, is it not? If the thinker can transcend himself, then all conflict will cease: and to transcend he must know himself. What is known and understood, what is fulfilled and completed does not repeat itself. It is repetition that gives continuity to the thinker. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
754:I regard marriage as a sin and propagation of children as a crime. It is my conviction also that he is a fool, and still more a sinner, who takes upon himself the yoke of marriage - a fool, because he thereby throws away his freedom, without gaining a corresponding recompense; a sinner, because he gives life to children, without being able to give them the certainty of happiness. I despise humanity in all its strata; I foresee that our posterity will be far more unhappy than we are; and should not I be a sinner, if, in spite of this insight, I should take care to leave a posterity of unhappy beings behind me? The whole of life is the greatest insanity. And if for eighty years one strives and inquiries, still one is obliged finally to confess that he has striven for nothing and has found nothing. Did we at least know why we are in this world! But to the thinker, everything is and remains a riddle; and the greatest good luck is that of being born a flathead. ~ Alexander von Humboldt, #NFDB
755:Despite the great wealth of words which European languages possess, the thinker finds himself often at a loss for an expression exactly suited to his conception, for want of which he is unable to make himself intelligible either to others or to himself. To coin new words is a pretension to legislation in language which is seldom successful; and, before recourse is taken to so desperate an expedient, it is advisable to examine the dead and learned languages, with the hope and the probability that we may there meet with some adequate expression of the notion we have in our minds. In this case, even if the original meaning of the word has become somewhat uncertain, from carelessness or want of caution on the part of the authors of it, it is always better to adhere to and confirm its proper meaning– even although it may be doubtful whether it was formerly used in exactly this sense– than to make our labour vain by want of sufficient care to render ourselves intelligible. ~ Immanuel Kant, #NFDB
756:You can’t separate how you approach life as a family and how your child will approach life as a thinker and learner. Your home is your child’s first workplace, first studio, first school — and your family members are your child’s first friends, first coworkers, first audience, first collaborators. You are his first mentor, and his siblings are his first teammates. You can’t separate learning from living. If your daily habits and routines don’t support your learning goals, you need to get them back into alignment. You want to build a family culture that celebrates and supports meaningful work. This is much more than saying the right thing — this is creating a lifestyle, a set of articulated beliefs, and a daily routine that encourage and sustain the life you want for your family. Building a family culture means being purposeful with your choices. What you say you value pales in importance next to the way you live from day to day, the choices you make, big and small. ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert, #NFDB
757:Once you understand that you are the thinker of your own thoughts, and that your mind doesn‘t produce ‘reality’, it produces ‘thoughts’, you won’t be as affected by what you think. You’ll see your thinking as something that you are doing – an ability you have that brings your experience of life – rather than as the source of reality. Do you remember the old saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’? Thoughts could be substituted for words. Your thoughts can’t hurt or depress you once you understand that they are just thoughts. When you start to view your own thinking in this more impersonal way (in other words, looking at your thinking instead of being caught in it), you will find yourself becoming free of depression. Your thinking goes on and on, and it will continue to do so for as long as you live. But when you step back from your thinking and simply observe that you are doing it, your mind becomes free, and you open the door to experience. ~ Richard Carlson, #NFDB
758:See if you can catch, that is to say, notice, the voice in the head, perhaps in the very moment it complains about something, and recognize it for what it is: the voice of the ego, no more than a conditioned mind-pattern, a thought. Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. In fact, you are the awareness that is aware of the voice. In the background, there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind. The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while because it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
759:Statue
Cement up to the neck
& my head packed
with unsaid words.
A gullet full of pebbles,
a mouth
of cast concreteI am stuck
in a lovelessness so thick,
it seems my natural element.
My mouth closes
on stones.
Hand frozen to my chin,
my back a question mark,
my heart soldered
to its arteries,
my feet planted
in grass that cannot grow,
The Thinker ponders
ten more years of this:
a woman
living the life
of a statue.
Break free!
Melt the metal
in love's cauldron,
open doors, eyes, heart,
those frozen ventricles,
those stuck tongues,
those stuttering dependencies.
When the statue walks,
will the world dissolve?
When she shakes her shoulders,
will the sky shrug
& skitter off in space?
Or will the clouds cluster
178
to cover her,
& the blue wind gather
at her shoulders
& the men streak by
like jet trails in the air,
utterly ephemeral?
~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
760:It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed. In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle. He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.” In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.” Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind. Freud called introspection “morbid”—unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. The ~ Tom Hodgkinson, #NFDB
761:W. Lloyd Garrison Standard
Vegetarian, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian;
Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll.
Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan.
Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain,
Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter;
With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair;
Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat;
I, child of the abolitionist idealism -A sort of Brand in a birth of half-and-half.
What other thing could happen when I defended
The patriot scamps who burned the court house,
That Spoon River might have a new one,
Than plead them guilty? When Kinsey Keene drove through
The card-board mask of my life with a spear of light,
What could I do but slink away, like the beast of myself
Which I raised from a whelp, to a corner and growl?
The pyramid of my life was nought but a dune,
Barren and formless, spoiled at last by the storm.
~ Edgar Lee Masters,#NFDB
762:The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition,” writes Thomas Merton, “is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.” A little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life. Nothing new to be discovered? The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within. Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance. Truth inheres not in doctrine itself, but in the spirit with which it is engaged, for the spirit of God is always seeking and creating new forms. (To be fair, Merton himself certainly realized this later in his life, when he became interested in merging ideas from Christianity with Buddhism.) ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
763:I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.
"The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere.
"I'm working on it. ~ Andrew Sullivan,#NFDB
764:Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand. Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving. “If I’m a corporate samurai,” I said, “I’d be a little worried about taking all these pauses that you recommend because I’d be thinking, ‘Well, my rivals aren’t pausing. They’re working all the time.’ ” “Yeah, but that assumes that those pauses aren’t helping you. Those pauses are the ways to make you a more clear thinker and for you to be more focused on what’s important. ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
765:Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution. We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free–thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
766:author class:Sri Aurobindo
The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou
I shall not die.
Although this body, when the spirit tires
Of its cramped residence, shall feed the fires,
My house consumes, not I.
Leaving that case
I find out ample and ethereal room.
My spirit shall avoid the hungry tomb,
Deceiving death's embrace.
Night shall contain
The sun in its cold depths; Time too must cease;
The stars that labour shall have their release.
I cease not, I remain.
Ere the first seeds
Were sown on earth, I was already old,
And when now unborn planets shall grow cold
My history proceeds.
I am the light
In stars, the strength of lions and the joy
Of mornings; I am man and maid and boy,
Protean, infinite.
I am a tree
That stands out singly from the infinite blue;
I am the quiet falling of the dew
And am the unmeasured sea.
I hold the sky
Together and upbear the teeming earth.
I was the eternal thinker at my birth
And shall be, though I die.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - The Triumph-Song of Trishuncou
,#NFDB
767:There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
768:The early Church, patterned after pagan Mysteries, sought for a little time to perpetuate the arcana, but such a procedure would doom the Church to a humble and obscure existence, ministering only to a devout and dedicated few. The bishops of the Church were mortal men instinctively desiring power and authority, and they sacrificed the spiritual doctrines of Christianity to temporal ambitions. The majority of mankind neither desires to improve itself nor to support an organization which demands a high degree of integrity. The outer body of the Church increased to the degree that the standards of Christian living were lowered, until at last, promising everything and demanding only temporal support, the Church gained temporal power at the expense of spiritual authority. It is for this reason particularly that the Christian thinker must never confuse the Jesus of Nazareth with the Christ of the modern church. Nor must the Christian thinker permit the clergy to interpret for him spiritual matters of which the clergy itself is ignorant. ~ Manly P Hall, Twelve World Teachers, #NFDB
769:For most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger; he was perhaps the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think of the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience he denied to himself, and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? We have a suspicion that if these questions were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
770:life, Meeker continued on to New York, where he scuffled with police who wouldn’t allow him to run his oxen down Fifth Avenue. In Washington, D.C., he ran his rig onto the White House lawn and enlisted President Theodore Roosevelt to help him preserve the trail. Meeker was a big, visionary thinker. Not content with merely preserving the trail, he advocated the creation of a national commercial and military road across the West, linking growing cities like Denver and Salt Lake with the East, and spur roads that would connect with the vast national parks that had been created during the Progressive Era. Swimming and fishing facilities, hotels, and even towers with navigational beacons for passing airmail planes were all part of Meeker’s plan. None of this was built during his lifetime, and Meeker would receive no credit for his elaborate transportation dreams. But the national parks system built during the New Deal, and the interstate highways paved in the 1950s, eventually created a network of concrete and open spaces remarkably similar to Meeker’s original scheme. Meeker ~ Rinker Buck, #NFDB
771:Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
772:By contrast, elder brothers divide the world in two: “The good people (like us) are in and the bad people, who are the real problem with the world, are out.” Younger brothers, even if they don’t believe in God at all, do the same thing, saying: “No, the open-minded and tolerant people are in and the bigoted, narrow-minded people, who are the real problem with the world, are out.” But Jesus says: “The humble are in and the proud are out” (see Luke 18:14).8 The people who confess they aren’t particularly good or open-minded are moving toward God, because the prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it. The people who think they are just fine, thank you, are moving away from God. “The Lord . . . cares for the humble, but he keeps his distance from the proud” (Psalm 138:6—New Living Translation). When a newspaper posed the question, “What’s Wrong with the World?” the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: “Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton.” That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
773:Vice Versa
Down in the state of Maine, the story goes,
A woman, to secure a lapsing pension,
Married a soldier-though the good Lord knows
That very common act scarce calls for mention.
What makes it worthy to be writ and read
The man she married had been nine hours dead!
Now, marrying a corpse is not an act
Familiar to our daily observation,
And so I crave her pardon if the fact
Suggests this interesting speculation:
Should some mischance restore the man to life
Would she be then a widow, or a wife?
Let casuists contest the point; I'm not
Disposed to grapple with so great a matter.
'T would tie my thinker in a double knot
And drive me staring mad as any hatter
Though I submit that hatters are, in fact,
Sane, and all other human beings cracked.
Small thought have I of Destiny or Chance;
Luck seems to me the same thing as Intention;
In metaphysics I could ne'er advance,
And think it of the Devil's own invention.
Enough of joy to know though when I wed
I _must_ be married, yet I _may_ be dead.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
774:By False Pretenses
John S. Hittell, whose sovereign genius wields
The quill his tributary body yields;
The author of an opera-that is,
All but the music and libretto's his:
A work renowned, whose formidable name,
Linked with his own, repels the assault of fame
From the high vantage of a dusty shelf,
Secure from all the world except himself;
Who told the tale of 'Culture' in a screed
That all might understand if some would read;
Master of poesy and lord of prose,
Dowered, like a setter, with a double nose;
That one for Erato, for Clio this;
He flushes both-not his fault if we miss;
Judge of the painter's art, who'll straight proclaim
The hue of any color you can name,
And knows a painting with a canvas back
Distinguished from a duck by the duck's quack;
This thinker and philosopher, whose work
Is famous from Commercial street to Turk,
Has got a fortune now, his talent's meed.
A woman left it him who could not read,
And so went down to death's eternal night
Sweetly unconscious that the wretch could write.
~ Ambrose Bierce,#NFDB
775:Atheism is an idea. Most often (thank God), it is an idea lived and told with blunt jumbo-crayon clumsiness. Some child of Christianity or Judaism dons an unbelieving Zorro costume and preens about the living room.
Behold, a dangerous thinker of thinks! A believer in free-from-any-and-all-goodness! Fear my brainy blade!
Put candy in their bucket. Act scared. Don't tell them that they're adorable. Atheism is not an idea we want fleshed out.
Atheism incarnate does happen in this reality narrative. But it doesn't rant about Islam's treatment of women as did the (often courageous) atheist Christopher Hitchens. It doesn't thunder words like evil and mean it (as Hitch so often did) when talking about oppressive communist regimes. His costume slipped all the time—and in many of his best moments.
Atheism incarnate is nihilism from follicle to toenail. It is morality merely as evolved herd survival instinct (non-bindng, of course, and as easy for us to outgrow as our feathers were). When Hitchens thundered, he stood in the boots of forefathers who knew that all thunder comes from on high. ~ N D Wilson,#NFDB
776:Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past. The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have heard much in our time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery. ~ Barry M Goldwater, #NFDB
777:I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic ... It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood ... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days. ~ Thomas A Edison, #NFDB
778:We discovered this when we invited the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to TED. Known as the father of behavioral economics, he’s an extraordinary thinker with a toolkit of ideas that can change any worldview. We had originally asked him to speak in the traditional TED way. No lectern. Just stand on the stage, with some note cards if need be, and give the talk. But in rehearsal, it was clear that he was uncomfortable. He hadn’t been able to fully memorize the talk and so kept pausing and glancing down awkwardly to catch himself up. Finally I said to him, “Danny, you’ve given thousands of talks in your time. How are you most comfortable speaking?” He said he liked to put his computer on a lectern so that he could refer to his notes more readily. We tried that, and he relaxed immediately. But he was also looking down at the screen a little too much. The deal we struck was to give him the lectern in return for looking out at the audience as much as he could. And that’s exactly what he did. His excellent talk did not come across as a recited or read speech at all. It felt connected. And he said everything he wanted to say, with no awkwardness. ~ Chris J Anderson, #NFDB
779:It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch. ~ Rodney Stark, #NFDB
780:Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self-government in the English-speaking world.
On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my [Pentecostal] mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol' boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed. ~ Sarah Vowell,#NFDB
781:A Prince From Western Libya
Aristomenis, son of Menelaos,
the Prince from Western Libya,
was generally liked in Alexandria
during the ten days he spent there.
As his name, his dress, modest, was also Greek.
He received honors gladly,
but he did not solicit them; he was unassuming.
He bought Greek books,
especially history and philosophy.
Above all he was a man of few words.
It got around that he must be a profound thinker,
and men like that naturally don't speak very much.
He was neither a profound thinker nor anything else—
just a piddling, laughable man.
He assumed a Greek name, dressed like the Greeks,
learned to behave more or less like a Greek;
and all the time he was terrified he would spoil
his reasonably good image
by coming out with barbaric howlers in Greek
and the Alexandrians, in their usual way,
would make fun of him, vile people that they are.
This was why he limited himself to a few words,
terribly careful of his syntax and pronunciation;
and he was driven almost out of his mind, having
so much talk bottled up inside him.
~ Constantine P. Cavafy,#NFDB
782:There is, however, another avenue of utopian thought, one that is all but forgotten. If the blueprint is a high-resolution photo, then this utopia is just a vague outline. It offers not solutions but guideposts. Instead of forcing us into a straitjacket, it inspires us to change. And it understands that, as Voltaire put it, the perfect is the enemy of the good. As one American philosopher has remarked, “any serious utopian thinker will be made uncomfortable by the very idea of the blueprint.”23 It was in this spirit that the British philosopher Thomas More literally wrote the book on utopia (and coined the term). Rather than a blueprint to be ruthlessly applied, his utopia was, more than anything, an indictment of a grasping aristocracy that demanded ever more luxury as common people lived in extreme poverty. More understood that utopia is dangerous when taken too seriously. “One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them,” observes philosopher and leading utopia expert Lyman Tower Sargent. Like humor and satire, utopias throw open the windows of the mind. And that’s vital. As ~ Rutger Bregman, #NFDB
783:If you turn to a branch of those sciences that try to give a solution to the questions of life--to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology--there you will find an astounding poverty of thought, a very great lack of clarity, completely unjustified claims to answer questions that lie outside their subject and never-ending contradictions between one thinker and others, and even within himself.
If you turn to a branch of the sciences that is not concerned with solving the questions of life but answers its own scientific, specialized questions, then you are captivated by the power of human intellect but you know in advance that there are no answers to the questions of life.
These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.
They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers. ~ Leo Tolstoy,#NFDB
784:How can there be a fusion of the thinker with his thoughts? Not through the action of will, nor through discipline, nor through any form of effort, control, or concentration, nor through any other means. The use of a means implies an agent who is acting, does it not? As long as there is an actor, there will be a division. The fusion takes place only when the mind is utterly still without trying to be still. There is this stillness, not when the thinker comes to an end, but only when thought itself has come to an end. There must be freedom from the response of conditioning, which is thought. Each problem is solved only when idea, conclusion, is not; conclusions, idea, thought, are the agitations of the mind. How can there be understanding when the mind is agitated? Earnestness must be tempered with the swift play of spontaneity. You will find, if you have heard all that has been said, that truth will come in moments when you are not expecting it. If I may say so, be open, sensitive, be fully aware of what is from moment to moment. Don’t build around yourself a wall of impregnable thought. The bliss of truth comes when the mind is not occupied with its own activities and struggles. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
785:The real violence exerted by propaganda is this: by means of apparent truth and apparent reason, it induces us to surrender our freedom and self-possession. It predetermines us to certain conclusions, and does so in such a way that we imagine that we are fully free in reaching them by our own judgment and our own thought. Propaganda makes up our mind for us, but in such a way that it leaves us the sense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And, in the last analysis, propaganda achieves this effect because we want it to. This is one of the few real pleasures left to modern man: this illusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact, someone else is doing his thinking for him. And this someone else is not a personal authority, the great mind of a genial thinker, it is the mass mind, the general “they,” the anonymous whole. One is left, therefore, not only with the sense that one has thought things out for himself, but that he has also reached the correct answer without difficulty - the answer which is shown to be correct because it is the answer of everybody. Since it is at once my answer and the answer of everybody, how should I resist it? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
786:Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn't mean that you use your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. Thats why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs. You have no interest in either. Let me ask you this: can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the “off” button? You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
787:[The Devil] 'The question now,' my young thinker reflected, 'is whether or not it is possible for such a period ever to come. If it does come, then everything will be resolved and mankind will finally be settled. But since, in view of man's inveterate stupidity, it may not be settled for another thousand years, anyone who already knows the truth is permitted to settle things for himself, absolutely as he wishes, on the new principles. In this sense, "everything is permitted" to him. Moreover, since God and immortality do not exist in any case, even if this period should never come, the new man is allowed to become a man-god, though it be he alone in the whole world, and of course, in this new rank, to jump lightheartedly over any former moral obstacle of the former slave-man, if need be. There is no law for God! Where God stand--there is the place of God! Where I stand, there at once will be the foremost place..."everything is permitted," and that's that!' It's all very nice; only if one wants to swindle, why, I wonder, should one also need the sanction of truth? But such is the modern little Russian man: without such a sanction, he doesn't even dare to swindle, so much does he love the truth... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, #NFDB
788:This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either. Then ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
789:What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life. ~ Seraphim Rose, #NFDB
790:You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before. Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility—Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
791:This conversation revealed to Odo a third conception of the religious idea. In Piedmont religion imposed itself as a military discipline, the enforced duty of the Christian citizen to the heavenly state; to the Duke it was a means of purchasing spiritual immunity from the consequences of bodily weakness; to the Bishop, it replaced the panem et circenses of ancient Rome. Where, in all this, was the share of those whom Christ had come to save? Where was Saint Francis’s devotion to his heavenly bride, the Lady Poverty? Though here and there a good parish priest like Crescenti ministered to the temporal wants of the peasantry, it was only the free-thinker and the atheist who, at the risk of life and fortune, laboured for their moral liberation. Odo listened with a saddened heart, thinking, as he followed his host through the perfumed shade of the gardens, and down the long saloon at the end of which the Venus stood, of those who for the love of man had denied themselves such delicate emotions and gone forth cheerfully to exile or imprisonment. These were the true lovers of the Lady Poverty, the band in which he longed to be enrolled; yet how restrain a thrill of delight as the slender dusky goddess detached herself against the cool marble of ~ Edith Wharton, #NFDB
792:At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock.
During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore—in part because it’s fun to do. But there’s a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment—until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson,#NFDB
793:1. You catch him looking at you in class. Did you just happen to lock eyes five times during a test recently? Unless you had the answers written on the side of your face, it’s because he’s TOTALLY INTO YOU! 2. He pauses a lot when he’s talking to you. It’s probably not because he’s a super-slow thinker. It’s because he wants to say the right things because he’s TOTALLY INTO YOU! 3. He drops things a lot when he talks to you. It’s not because he has some kind of disease that makes him tremor 24/7. He’s just nervous because he’s TOTALLY INTO YOU! 4. He asks your friends stuff about you. I know, I know, he could be completing an English assignment to write about all the girls in school. OR maybe it’s the way more obvious answer . . . He’s TOTALLY INTO YOU! 5. He laughs at your jokes, even the silly ones. That knock-knock joke you busted out in class? Nope, not funny! It’s just that he’s TOTALLY INTO YOU! 6. He defends you against CCPs. Remember when that evil girl said something obnoxious, like, “Could you’re shirt be more ugly?” And he was all like, “I think it’s kind of cool.” He’s not just REALLY into girls’ fashion. It’s just that he’s TOTALLY INTO YOU! What do you think . . . good stuff? If your crush likes you too, how did you find out? ~ Rachel Ren e Russell, #NFDB
794:THE TECHNOSPHERE DOESN’T particularly care whether you live or die, or whether you are happy or miserable. Its goal is to control you and to make you serve its purposes, which are to grow, to control everything and to dominate the biosphere. How it achieves this control is a matter of what is most efficient. If you are one of its faithful servants, then the best way to make you do your job well is to incentivize you—to give you high status, ample pay and lots of perks. But if you are a lowly menial grunt in its service who, unfortunately, cannot yet be replaced by a shiny new robot, then low pay and low status suffice, and destroying your autonomy and self-reliance while fostering your dependency is the key to making you perform. If you are a technologically useless person but harmless—an artist, a philosopher, writer, poet, free thinker—then the technosphere simply can’t see you, because what you do is not measurable in units the technosphere can understand. But if your thinking turns out to be dangerous or harmful to the techno-sphere—because you are someone who tries to break the chains of dependency and to find ways to live outside of the technosphere, or to undermine it in some other way—then it will consider you as nothing less than a terrorist! ~ Dmitry Orlov, #NFDB
795:Nijinsky, Lawrence, Van Gogh, each had his own form of discipline towards this end. Each one had, as it were, discovered in some moment of insight a source from which these supplies of ‘more abundant life’ flowed, and each concentrated on a discipline that would make the source accessible. Lawrence was a thinker who had found imaginative relief in his study of the past. Van Gogh’s religious temperament needed to accumulate sense impressions; his striving towards a sense of ‘otherness’ took the form of a sort of pictorial memory of other times and other places: a memory that was, after all, incomplete, since he could not capture the scent of the almond tree or the hot July wind, or the tension in the air of a rising storm on his canvas. But Nijinsky’s kingdom was the body. People who saw him dance have testified to his amazing ability to become the part he was acting, whether the Negro in Scheherezade, the puppet in Petrouchka, or the Prince in Giselle. His discipline gave him the power to dismiss his identity at will, or to expand some parts and contract others to give an illusion of a completely new personality. It was this power that, at times, became a mystical intensity of abnegation in his dancing, that occasionally gave him glimpses into the ecstasy of the saint. ~ Colin Wilson, #NFDB
796:White Mike was a thinker, his teachers said. This is what he was thinking as he watched his mother's coffin being lowered into the ground.
You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.
That was what White Mike was thinking. ~ Nick McDonell,#NFDB
797:That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. Some, like Gorky or Gold, were overtly subversive in their political aims; others, like Fitzgerald and Mark Twain, were in my opinion more subversive, if less obviously so. I told them we would come back to this term, because my understanding of it was somewhat different from its usual definition. I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. ~ Azar Nafisi, #NFDB
798:To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense, the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule. ~ Richard Hofstadter, #NFDB
799:About the principle of representation and the concept of a parliament, today we have grown accustomed to associating them exclusively with the system of absolute democracy, based on universal suffrage and the principle of one man, one vote. This basis is absurd and indicates more than anything else the individualism that, combined with the pure criterion of quantity and of number, defines modern democracy. We say individualism in the bad sense, because here we are dealing with the individual as an abstract, atomistic and statistical unity, not as a ‘person’, because the quality of a person — that is, a being that has a specific dignity, a unique quality and differentiated traits—is obviously negated and offended in a system in which one vote is the equal of any other, in which the vote of a great thinker, a prince of the Church, an eminent jurist or sociologist, the commander of an army, and so on has the same weight, measured by counting votes, as the vote of an illiterate butcher’s boy, a halfwit, or the ordinary man in the street who allows himself to be influenced in public meetings, or who votes for whoever pays him. The fact that we can talk about ‘progress’ in reference to a society where we have reached the level of considering all this as normal is one of the many absurdities that, perhaps, in better times will be the cause of amazement or amusement. ~ Julius Evola, #NFDB
800:Graham developed his core principles, which are at least as valid today as they were during his lifetime: A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price. The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists. The future value of every investment is a function of its present price. The higher the price you pay, the lower your return will be. No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the “margin of safety”—never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be—can you minimize your odds of error. The secret to your financial success is inside yourself. If you become a critical thinker who takes no Wall Street “fact” on faith, and you invest with patient confidence, you can take steady advantage of even the worst bear markets. By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people’s mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave. ~ Benjamin Graham, #NFDB
801:Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licon, Navarro, Iturbi; Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from him horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull. ~ Ray Bradbury, #NFDB
802:Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget. Or, alternatively, he buries himself in psychology in the belief that awareness all by itself will be some kind of magical cure for his problems. But psychology was born with the breakdown of shared social heroisms; it can only be gone beyond with the creation of new heroisms that are basically matters of belief and will, dedication to a vision. Lifton has recently concluded the same thing, from a conceptual point of view almost identical to Rank's. When a thinker of Norman Brown's stature wrote his later book Love's Body, he was led to take his thought to this same point. He realized that the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence was in the timeworn religious way: to project one's problems onto a god-figure, to be healed by an all-embracing and all-justifying beyond. To talk in these terms is not at all the same thing as to talk the language of the psychotherapeutic religionists. Rank was also not nor so messianic: he saw that the orientation of men has to be always beyond their bodies, has to be grounded in healthy repressions, and toward explicit immortality-ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence. ~ Ernest Becker, #NFDB
803:It's only that... well, if Olivia cannot be with the man she loves, as he has vanished like a bloody 'cowardly'..."
She stopped talking abruptly. Yanking herself back like a dog on a leash.
Which was a pity, as the words had acquired a fascinating whiff of venom and had begun to escalate in volume. She would have done some squeaking of her own.
Genevieve Eversea was beginning to interest him.
"If she cannot be with the man she loves..." he prompted.
"I do believe she can only to be with someone... impressive."
"Impressive..." He pretended to ponder this. "I hope you do not think I presume, but I cannot help but wonder if you're referring to me. Given my rank and fortune, some might describe me as such. And I'm flattered indeed, given that there really are so many other words you could have chosen to describe me."
A pause followed. The girl was most definitely a 'thinker.'
"We have only just become acquainted, Lord Moncrieffe. I might elect to use other words to describe you should I come to know you better."
Exquisite and refined as convent lace, her manners, her delivery.
And still he could have sworn she was having one over on him.
She seemed to be watching her feet now. The scenery didn't interest her, or it caused her discomfort.
And as he watched her, something unfamiliar stirred.
He was... 'genuinely' interested in what she might say next. ~ Julie Anne Long,#NFDB
804:It is not the comfort of youth that we should be concerned with, but with equipping them better for the life struggle which is an immutable cosmic law. That is why, in the structure of the New Epoch, the main factor of the national welfare will be the education and upbringing of people. It is urgently necessary to pay attention to the betterment and broadening of school programs, especially those of the elementary and high schools... From very childhood, respect for knowledge should be taught. In schools, this true and only propeller of evolution should be pointed out through concrete historical examples. It is necessary to reach a state where the aspiration to and respect for science enter our flesh and blood and become an inalienable part of our daily life. Only then will it be possible to say that the nations have entered the path of culture. Only then will the bearers of knowledge be considered as true treasures, not only of any one particular country but of the whole world. Then it will be possible to speak about the acceleration of evolution and bringing into life the dreams of communication with the far-off worlds. Thus, we may repeat the words of a thinker and leader who said, "First, all should learn; second, all should learn; third, all should learn; and then see that knowledge does not become a dead letter, but is applied in life." ~ Helena Roerich Letters of Helena Roerich II, (24 August 1936), #NFDB
805:Luck ever attends the bold and constructive thinker: the apple, for instance, fell from the tree precisely when Newton's mind was groping after the law of gravity, and as Diva stepped into her grocer's to begin her morning's shopping (for she had been occupied with roses ever since breakfast) the attendant was at the telephone at the back of the shop. He spoke in a lucid telephone-voice.
"We've only two of the big tins of corned beef," he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with attention as a satyr's. But she could only hear little hollow quacks from the other end.
"Tongue as well. Very good. I'll send them up at once," he added, and came forward into the shop.
"Good morning," said Diva. Her voice was tremulous with anxiety and investigation. "Got any big tins of corned beef? The ones that contain six pounds."
"Very sorry, ma'am. We've only got two, and they've just been ordered."
"A small pot of ginger then, please," said Diva recklessly. "Will you send it round immediately?"
"Yes, ma'am. The boy's just going out."
That was luck. Diva hurried into the street, and was absorbed by the headlines of the news outside the stationer's. This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny... ~ E F Benson,#NFDB
806:And I hate to tell you... but I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in a school. You'll have to. You're a student—whether the idea appeals to you or not. You're in love with knowledge. And I think you'll find, once... you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer—that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it—to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior... Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of thier troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry... But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And—most important—nine times out of ten they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker. ~ J D Salinger, #NFDB
807:Dear Mama: The reason I didn’t write last Sunday was because I was out of town. My friend Pound invited me to spend Saturday and Sunday with him … His parents are very nice people and have always been exceptionally kind to me. Mrs. Pound had prepared a fine meal … After supper Pound and I went to his room where we had a long talk on subjects that I love yet have not time to study and which he is making a life work of. That is literature, and the drama and the classics, also a little philosophy. He, Pound, is a fine fellow; he is the essence of optimism and has a cast-iron faith that is something to admire. If he ever does get blue nobody knows it, so he is just the man for me. But not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him and why? Because he is so darned full of conceits and affectation. He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making himself just exactly what he is not: a laughing boor. His friends must be all patience in order to find him out and even then you must not let him know it, for he will immediately put on some artificial mood and be really unbearable. It is too bad, for he loves to be liked, yet there is some quality in him which makes him too proud to try to please people. I am sure his only fault is an exaggeration of a trait that in itself is good and in every way admirable. He is afraid of being taken in if he trusts his really tender heart to mercies of a cruel crowd and so keeps it hidden and trusts no one. ~ William Carlos Williams, #NFDB
808:Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce. ~ Brad Stone, #NFDB
809:MSB: Isn't there something of this sort in Nietzsche's view of Jesus, who, in The Antichrist, appears as a sort of idiot? RG: Nietzsche wanted to separate Christ from Christianity. He's not the only thinker who's wanted to do this. But against the view of Christ as naïve and unsophisticated, let me put the passage in Matthew I referred to earlier, where Jesus says, “You build the tombs of the prophets…, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets' blood’” (Matthew 23:29–30). Here Christ is denouncing the mimetic repetition of the past—the mimetic mechanism by which sons imagine they are better than their fathers, imagine that they do not traffic in violence. The same mechanism still operates today. It must be true that the Jews built false tombs for the prophets. This passage couldn't have been added to the Gospels. It couldn't have been invented by Matthew. Its psychological power is extraordinary! A naïve person couldn't possibly have said such a thing. Neither Myshkin nor Stavrogin could have said such a thing. MSB: In contrast to the dominant perspective in philosophy and the human sciences today, could your method fairly be characterized as “rational realism”? RG: Perhaps, but I have no certainty on the level of method and I have no philosophy. In a way, I don't understand the imperatives, the prohibitions of philosophy—for example, the rejection of reality we see today. Or, rather, I do understand them, but wanting to jettison emotion and personal involvement I find incomprehensible. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
810:We often fail to grasp the seriousness of the menace to the Jewish heritage involved in the modern ideology because we use the term "traditional conception of God" loosely. If we use it in the sense of the belief in the existence of a supreme being as defined by the most advanced Jewish thinkers in the past, there is nothing in that belief which cannot be made compatible with views held by many a modern thinker of note. But if by the term "traditional conception of God" we mean the specific facts recorded in the Bible about the way God revealed himself and intervened in the affairs of men, then tradition and the modern ideology are irreconcilable.
The chief opposition to the traditional conception of God in that sense arises not from the scientific approach to the study of nature in general, or even man in general. It arises from the objective study of history. The natural sciences like physics and chemistry cannot disprove the possibility of miracles, though they may assert their improbability. But the objective study of history has established the fact that the records of miracles are unreliable, and that the stories about them are merely the product of the popular imagination. The traditional conception of God is challenged by history, anthropology and psychology; these prove that beliefs similar to those found in the Bible about God arise among all peoples at a certain stage of mental and social development, and pass through a process of evolution which is entirely conditioned by the development of the other elements in their civilization. ~ Mordecai Menahem Kaplan,#NFDB
811:Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something possessed by you? Your body—what is it? A machine for converting stimuli into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your I is both subject and object; it predicates things of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is the thought, the knower is what is known, the possessor is the things possessed. "After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland. But this, man will not accept of himself. He refuses to accept his own passing. He will not pass. He will live again if he has to die to do it. "He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they—monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer vanishes and are no more when he is not. ~ Jack London, #NFDB
812:Thomas Carlyle, following Plato, pictures a man, a deep pagan thinker, who had grown to maturity in some hidden cave and is brought out suddenly to see the sun rise. “What would his wonder be,” exclaims Carlyle, “his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free, open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight.... This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all.” How different are we who have grown used to it, who have become jaded with a satiety of wonder. “It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty,” says Carlyle, “it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight. It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it.... We call that fire of the black thundercloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.” These penetrating, almost prophetic, ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
813:So you have no remorse for your actions? No guilt for what you’ve done?” Drax’s mouth lolls half open; he wrinkles up his nose and sniffs. “Did you think I was going to murder you down in the cabin?” he asks. “Split open your skull like I did Brownlee. Is that what you were thinking?” “What else were you intending?” “Oh, I don’t intend too much. I’m a doer, not a thinker, me. I follow my inclination.” “You have no conscience then?” “One thing happens, then another comes after it. Why is the first thing more important than the second? Why is the second more important than the third? Tell me that.” “Because each action is separate and distinct; some are good and some are evil.” Drax sniffs again and scratches himself. “Them’s just words. If they hang me, they will hang me ’cause they can, and ’cause they wish to do it. They will be following their own inclination as I follow mine.” “You recognize no authority at all then, no right or wrong beyond yourself?” Drax shrugs and bares his upper teeth in something like a grin. “Men like you ask such questions to satisfy themselves,” he says. “To make them feel cleverer or cleaner than the rest. But they int.” “You truly believe we are all like you? How is that possible? Am I a murderer like you are? Is that what you accuse me of?” “I seen enough killing to suspect I int the only one to do it. I’m a man like any other, give or take.” Sumner shakes his head. “No,” he says. “That I won’t accept.” “You please yourself, as I please myself. You accept what suits you and you reject what don’t. The law is just a name they give to what a certain kind of men prefer.” Sumner ~ Ian McGuire, #NFDB
814:As you watch anything—a tree, your wife, your children, your neighbor, the stars of a night, the light on the water, the bird in the sky, anything—there is always the observer—the censor, the thinker, the experiencer, the seeker—and the thing he is observing; the observer and the observed; the thinker and the thought. So, there is always a division. It is this division that is time. That division is the very essence of conflict. And when there is conflict, there is contradiction. There is “the observer and the observed”—that is a contradiction; there is a separation. And hence where there is contradiction, there is conflict. And when there is conflict, there is always the urgency to get beyond it, to conquer it, to overcome it, to escape from it, to do something about it, and all that activity involves time…. As long as there is this division, time will go on, and time is sorrow. And a man who will understand the end of sorrow must understand this, must find, must go beyond this duality between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experienced. That is, when there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is time, and therefore there is no ending of sorrow. Then, what is one to do? You understand the question? I see, within myself, the observer is always watching, judging, censoring, accepting, rejecting, disciplining, controlling, shaping. That observer, that thinker, is the result of thought, obviously. Thought is first; not the observer, not the thinker. If there was no thinking at all, there would be no observer, no thinker; then there would only be complete, total attention. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, #NFDB
815:The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window.
She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs.
Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate. ~ Claire Messud,#NFDB
816:This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being "higher," do not know either. Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission and sitting still. Nature is going to do something some day; nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting, and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right: if anything is prevented it was wrong. Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything. Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs. Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
817:Every religion offers an interpretation of the world, a worldview, a counterpart to the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption. Translated into worldview terms, creation refers to a theory of origins: Where did we come from? What is ultimate reality? Fall refers to the problem of evil: What’s wrong with the world, the source of evil and suffering? Redemption asks, How can the problem be fixed? What must I do to become part of the solution? These are the three fundamental questions that every religion, worldview, or philosophy seeks to answer.16 The answers offered by Romanticism were adapted from neo-Platonism.17 In neo-Platonism, the counterpart to creation, or the ultimate source of all things, is a primordial spiritual essence or unity referred to as the One, the Absolute, the Infinite. Even thinking cannot be attributed to the One because thought implies a distinction between subject and object—between the thinker and the object of his thought. In fact, for the Romantics, thinking itself constituted the fall, the cause of all that is wrong with the world. Why? Because it introduced division into the original unity. More precisely, the fault lay in a particular kind of thinking—the Enlightenment reductionism that had produced the upper/lower story dichotomy in the first place. Coleridge wrote that “the rational instinct” posed “the original temptation, through which man fell.” The poet Friedrich Schiller blamed the “all-dividing Intellect” for modern society’s fragmentation, conflict, isolation, and alienation. And what would redeem us from this fall? The creative imagination. Art would restore the spiritual meaning and purpose that Enlightenment science had stripped from the world. ~ Nancy R Pearcey, #NFDB
818:Differently than before, he now looked upon people, less smart, less proud, but instead warmer, more curious, more involved. When he ferried travelers of the ordinary kind, childlike people, businessmen, warriors, women, these people did not seem alien to him as they used to: he understood them, he understood and shared their life, which was not guided by thoughts and insight, but solely by urges and wishes, he felt like them. Though he was near perfection and was bearing his final wound, it still seemed to him as if those childlike people were his brothers, their vanities, desires for possession, and ridiculous aspects were no longer ridiculous to him, became understandable, became lovable, even became worthy of veneration to him. The blind love of a mother for her child, the stupid, blind pride of a conceited father for his only son, the blind, wild desire of a young, vain woman for jewelry and admiring glances from men, all of these urges, all of this childish stuff, all of these simple, foolish, but immensely strong, strongly living, strongly prevailing urges and desires were now no childish notions for Siddhartha any more, he saw people living for their sake, saw them achieving infinitely much for their sake, traveling, conducting wars, suffering infinitely much, bearing infinitely much, and he could love them for it, he saw life, that what is alive, the indestructible, the Brahman in each of their passions, each of their acts. Worthy of love and admiration were these people in their blind loyalty, their blind strength and tenacity. They lacked nothing, there was nothing the knowledgeable one, the thinker, had to put him above them except for one little thing, a single, tiny, small thing: the consciousness, the conscious thought of the oneness of all life. ~ Hermann Hesse, #NFDB
819:When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.”
There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurian.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before.
Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that.
Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today.
But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought.
This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara,#NFDB
820:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],#NFDB
821:Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and animal life.
These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the greatest Naturalist the world has produced.
The theological view began to look small and mean.
Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher, a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of the wisest.
Theology looked more absurd than ever.
Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword -- a better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the small scientists -- those who had more courage than sense, accepted the challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends.
Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth. Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life from the lowest to the highest forms.
Theology looked smaller still.
Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change -- from form to form -- followed the line of development, the path of life, until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no interference from without.
I read the works of these great men -- of many others – and became convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians -- all the believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong.
The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth. ~ Robert G Ingersoll,#NFDB
822:The Old Days
WHEN I was but a little tad I used to hear my dear old dad
Tell friends about the good old days forever gone from him;
My dear old kindly gran'dad, too, explained the merry joys he knew,
When he was in his twenties, and could dance and run and swim;
The burden of their song always was this — the good old bygone days,
The days of thirty years ago, when all the world was gay,
And folks were always merry then, and men were bigger, better men,
And fun was funnier by far than what it is today.
When I was young I couldn't see, how such a state of things could be,
For I was having fun myself, and plenty of it, too;
And not so long ago I told — a sign that I am getting old —
About the good old days that once upon a time I knew;
I found that like my dear old dad, I thought about the joys I had,
And I was sure that times had changed and fun had ceased to be;
I often heaved a bitter sigh, and wished and wished for days gone by;
The old days were the happy days, or so they seemed to me.
But looking back in history, unto the time we call B. C.
I find that dads and gran'dads then were living in the past;
Old Julius Caesar, who was slain, once sat and sighed and wished in vain
Because the joys that once he knew were not allowed to last.
Before Noah built his famous ark, I'll bet some ancient patriarch
Beneath his vine tree sat and said the days of fun were gone,
That times were not as once they were, that joys had vanished from the air,
And fun and mirth and merriment somehow had wandered on.
And so today I've ceased to talk and ceased to let my thinker walk
Away back where the old days are — I've ceased to call them best;
I've got the notion that today is just as happy, just as gay
As any yesterday of mine, and just as full of zest.
Tomorrow will be just as bright, and just as full of rare delight
For those who follow me as were the golden days of yore;
And when I hear some croaker say, there's no such thing as fun today,
I get his derby, coat and cane and show him to the door.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,#NFDB
823:Was it as scary for you as it is for me? Falling for Sawyer?”
“Not really, no.” She shakes her head. “I’m sure I had some of the same worries, everyone does. But I’m a leaper. You’re a thinker. We process things differently.”
“You didn’t have a panic attack and run away?” I ask sarcastically.
“No,” she muses. “Not even that time he refused to have sex with me.”
“That was your first date, Everly. And you did have sex,” I remind her. I know, because I heard about it for a week.
“Whew.” She blows out a breath. “It was a tough few hours though. How is Boyd’s POD by the way? Can we talk about that?” She leans forward on the couch, looking at me expectantly.
“Um, no. I don’t think so.”
She shrugs good-naturedly then changes the subject back to me. “Chloe, why didn’t you tell me you were struggling with your anxiety? You know I’m never too busy for you, no matter how many husbands or children I have.”
“You have one husband, babe,” Sawyer says, walking into the room at that moment.
“You’re still the one, baby.”
“We’ve been married for three months, Everly. I sure as hell better still be the one.”
“Sawyer,” she sighs. “I was trying to have a moment, okay? Work with me.”
“Next time, try waiting more than a day after downloading Shania Twain’s greatest hits to your iPod. You do realize the receipts come to my email, don’t you?”
“Um.” Everly looks away and scrunches her nose. “No?”
“You’ve been on quite the 90’s love ballads kick this week. Which is weird, because you’re not old enough to have owned the CD’s those songs were originally released on.” He looks at her with amused interest.
“What’s a CD?” She blinks at Sawyer dramatically.
“Cute. Keep it up.”
“Nineties music is all the rage with the millennials,” she tells him with a shrug. “I saw a blog post about it.”
“Don’t worry, sweets. We’ll beat the odds together.” He winks and she scowls. “You’re still the only one I dream of,” he calls as he walks into the kitchen and grabs a bottle of water.
“See! I don’t even care that you lifted that from a song. It still gave me all the feels! ~ Jana Aston,#NFDB
824:it was customary in long-past centuries on Earth for every man bold enough to aspire to the right to be considered by others and to consider himself a “conscious thinker” to be instructed, while still in the early years of his responsible existence, that man has two kinds of mentation one kind, mentation by thought, expressed by words always possessing a relative meaning, and another kind, proper to all animals as well as to man, which I would call “mentation by form.” The second kind of mentation, that is, “mentation by form”—through which, by the way, the exact meaning of all writing should be perceived and then assimilated after conscious confrontation with information previously acquired—is determined in people by the conditions of geographical locality, climate, time, and in general the whole environment in which they have arisen and in which their existence has flowed up to adulthood. Thus, in the brains of people of different races living in different geographical localities under different conditions, there arise in regard to one and the same thing or idea quite different independent forms, which during the flow of associations evoke in their being a definite sensation giving rise to a definite picturing, and this picturing is expressed by some word or other that serves only for its outer subjective expression. That is why each word for the same thing or idea almost always acquires for people of different geographical localities and races a quite specific and entirely different so to say “inner content.” In other words, if in the “presence” of a man who has arisen and grown up in a given locality a certain “form” has been fixed as a result of specific local influences and impressions, this “form” evokes in him by association the sensation of a definite “inner content,” and consequently a definite picturing or concept, for the expression of which he uses some word that has become habitual and, as I said, subjective to him, but the hearer of that word—in whose being, owing to the different conditions of his arising and growth, a form with a different “inner content” has been fixed for the given word—will always perceive and infallibly understand that word in quite another sense. ~ G I Gurdjieff, #NFDB
825:While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.
Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.
The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.
Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.
But we must first realize that we are lost in thought. ~ Sam Harris,#NFDB
826:It is now that I must make a choice. Because of Calvary, I’m free to choose. And so I choose. I choose love . . . No occasion justifies hatred; no injustice warrants bitterness. I choose love. Today I will love God and what God loves. I choose joy . . . I will invite my God to be the God of circumstance. I will refuse the temptation to be cynical . . . the tool of the lazy thinker. I will refuse to see people as anything less than human beings, created by God. I will refuse to see any problem as anything less than an opportunity to see God. I choose peace . . . I will live forgiven. I will forgive so that I may live. I choose patience . . . I will overlook the inconveniences of the world. Instead of cursing the one who takes my place, I’ll invite him to do so. Rather than complain that the wait is too long, I will thank God for a moment to pray. Instead of clinching my fist at new assignments, I will face them with joy and courage. I choose kindness . . . I will be kind to the poor, for they are alone. Kind to the rich, for they are afraid. And kind to the unkind, for such is how God has treated me. I choose goodness . . . I will go without a dollar before I take a dishonest one. I will be overlooked before I will boast. I will confess before I will accuse. I choose goodness. I choose faithfulness . . . Today I will keep my promises. My debtors will not regret their trust. My associates will not question my word. My wife will not question my love. And my children will never fear that their father will not come home. I choose gentleness . . . Nothing is won by force. I choose to be gentle. If I raise my voice may it be only in praise. If I clench my fist, may it be only in prayer. If I make a demand, may it be only of myself. I choose self-control . . . I am a spiritual being. After this body is dead, my spirit will soar. I refuse to let what will rot, rule the eternal. I choose self-control. I will be drunk only by joy. I will be impassioned only by my faith. I will be influenced only by God. I will be taught only by Christ. I choose self-control. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. To these I commit my day. If I succeed, I will give thanks. If I fail, I will seek his grace. And then, when this day is done, I will place my head on my pillow and rest. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
827:author class:Sri Aurobindo
Who
In the blue of the sky, in the green of the forest,
Whose is the hand that has painted the glow?
When the winds were asleep in the womb of the ether,
Who was it roused them and bade them to blow?
He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught.
In the strength of a man, in the beauty of woman,
In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a girl;
The hand that sent Jupiter spinning through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl.
These are His works and His veils and His shadows;
But where is He then? by what name is He known?
Is He Brahma or Vishnu? a man or a woman?
Bodied or bodiless? twin or alone?
We have love for a boy who is dark and resplendent,
A woman is lord of us, naked and fierce.
We have seen Him a-muse on the snow of the mountains,
We have watched Him at work in the heart of the spheres.
We will tell the whole world of His ways and His cunning:
He has rapture of torture and passion and pain;
He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,
Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.
All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss.
He is strength that is loud in the blare of the trumpets,
And He rides in the car and He strikes in the spears;
He slays without stint and is full of compassion;
He wars for the world and its ultimate years.
In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that for ever endure.
The Master of man and his infinite Lover,
He is close to our hearts, had we vision to see;
We are blind with our pride and the pomp of our passions,
We are bound in our thoughts where we hold ourselves free.
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Who
,#NFDB
828:Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death – a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race? ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
829:David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.) ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
830:The poet-seer sees differently, thinks in another way, voices himself in quite another manner than the philosopher or the prophet. The prophet announces the Truth as the Word, the Law or the command of the Eternal, he is the giver of the message; the poet shows us Truth in its power of beauty, in its symbol or image, or reveals it to us in the workings of Nature or in the workings of life, and when he has done that, his whole work is done; he need not be its explicit spokesman or its official messenger. The philosopher's business is to discriminate Truth and put its parts and aspects into intellectual relation with each other; the poet's is to seize and embody aspects of Truth in their living relations, or rather - for that is too philosophical a language - to see her features and, excited by the vision, create in the beauty of her image.
No doubt, the prophet may have in him a poet who breaks out often into speech and surrounds with the vivid atmosphere of life the directness of his message; he may follow up his injunction "Take no thought for the morrow," by a revealing image of the beauty of the truth he enounces, in the life of Nature, in the figure of the lily, or link it to human life by apologue and parable. The philosopher may bring in the aid of colour and image to give some relief and hue to his dry light of reason and water his arid path of abstractions with some healing dew of poetry. But these are ornaments and not the substance of his work; and if the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. Thus the more rigid metaphysicians are perhaps right in denying to Nietzsche the name of philosopher; for Nietzsche does not think, but always sees, turbidly or clearly, rightly or distortedly, but with the eye of the seer rather than with the brain of the thinker. On the other hand we may get great poetry which is full of a prophetic enthusiasm of utterance or is largely or even wholly philosophic in its matter; but this prophetic poetry gives us no direct message, only a mass of sublime inspirations of thought and image, and this philosophic poetry is poetry and lives as poetry only in so far as it departs from the method, the expression, the way of seeing proper to the philosophic mind. It must be vision pouring itself into thought-images and not thought trying to observe truth and distinguish its province and bounds and fences.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry,#NFDB
831:One really has to ask oneself how Socrates managed to maneuver himself into such conjugal misery, and this question can be posed in several variations. If Xantippe really was from the start the kind of woman the legend says she was, we would show very little understanding for our great philosopher because then it was his own carelessness that led him to choose precisely her and no other woman. Or is he supposed to have thought, ironic as he was, that a surly woman is just what a thinker needs? If, from the beginning, he recognized her "true nature" and put up with it, then this indicates deplorable marital behavior on his part because he thus unreasonably expected a women to spend her whole life with a man who obviously at best endured her but did not appreciate her. Conversely, if Xantippe had become as she is described only during her marriage to Socrates, then the philosopher would really come into a questionable light because then indisputably he himself must have caused his wife's vexation without having interested himself in it. No matter how the story is turned, Xantippe's moods fall back on Socrates. This is a genuine philosophical problem: How did the thinker and questioner manage not to solve the puzzle of Xantippe's bad temper? This great midwife of truth was obviously unable to let his wife's rage express itself or to help her find a language in which she would have been able to express the grounds and justifications for her behavior. The failure of a philosopher often consists not in false answers but in neglecting to pose the right questions —and in denying some experiences the right to become "problems." His experiences with Xantippe must have been of this kind—a misery that is not given the dignity of obtruding into the male problem-monopoly. Philosphers fail when they endure as a naturally given evil that for which they are to blame; indeed, their capacity for "wisely" enduring it is itself an intellectual scandal, a misuse of wisdom in favor of blindness. With Socrates, it seems, this misuse immediately avenged itself. When a thinker cannot refrain from equating humanity with masculinity, reality will strike back in the philosopher's marital hell. The stories about this thus have, I think, also a kynical meaning. They reveal the real reason for philosophicalclerical celibacy in our civilization. A definite dominating kind of idealism, philosophy, and grand theory becomes possible only when a certain "other kind" of experience is systematically avoided ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
832:Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world, and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light, and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible dissolving all, that geometric point, the self; reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating--who knows, if only by the identity of the law--the evolutions of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last is the zodiac. ~ Victor Hugo, #NFDB
833:All we’ve got to do now is to trace the development of language in the same way and then we’ve really and truly progressed from the insect-eater to man.” “Let’s see. When does an animal emit a sound? In pain or in surprise; in anger, or on recognizing danger.” “Take the recognition of danger: the springbok whistles; the baboon roars. Each recognition produces a feeling based on experience. The tone will differ according to whether the object recognized by the baboon is a snake or a leopard. Recognition is based on recollection. Where an animal relies on its eyes recollection consists primarily of pictures. Animals which live together in herds experience the same things together; isn’t it therefore possible that the same sound produces the same picture in the recollection of all of them? And oughtn’t we to look for the beginning of word formation there?” “So long as the shock of the experience produces the sound, as in the case of the baboons, we can’t talk of word or language. But with growing intelligence and the capacity to learn, children increasingly imitate—in play—the behavior of the adults and also the sounds they make. In play the sounds are separated from the experience which produced them, and by association they call up the appropriate picture or pictures in the mind. Thus pictures can be conjured up again and again merely by the repetition of the appropriate sounds. In short, children can play with danger—without danger. In this way and because of the long duration of childhood, speech can develop from children’s games.” “Deliberately reproduced pictures in the mind represent the beginning of thought. Thus thought and speaking are twins; they develop hand in hand. As soon as a certain store of words has been collected pictures can be conjured up and linked together at will. What the thinker has not yet experienced in reality he can now experience in thought and at the same time he can foresee future experiences. Life no longer consists merely of past and present as it does with animals; it has a future too. Thus with speaking and thinking man creates a new dimension for himself. It’s astonishing what life can produce with an unburdened childhood at its disposal. “Yes, it’s quite true: without a protected childhood in which there’s time for play, mankind would probably never have risen above an animal existence. And perhaps in the future the playing of children will be recognized as more important than technical developments, wars and revolutions. Woe betide the people which forces its children and their games into the strait-jacket of adult politics! ~ Henno Martin, #NFDB
834:FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”? When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
835:Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand. Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving. “If I’m a corporate samurai,” I said, “I’d be a little worried about taking all these pauses that you recommend because I’d be thinking, ‘Well, my rivals aren’t pausing. They’re working all the time.’ ” “Yeah, but that assumes that those pauses aren’t helping you. Those pauses are the ways to make you a more clear thinker and for you to be more focused on what’s important.” This was another attack on my work style. I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano’s point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness. This was a practical complement to Joseph’s “is this useful?” mantra. It was the opposite of zoning out, it was zoning in. In fact, I looked into it and found there was science to suggest that pausing could be a key ingredient in creativity and innovation. Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. That didn’t necessarily mean meditate, but do something that relaxes and distracts you; let your unconscious mind go to work, making connections from disparate parts of the brain. This, too, was massively counterintuitive for me. My impulse when presented with a thorny problem was to bulldoze my way through it, to swarm it with thought. But the best solutions often come when you allow yourself to get comfortable with ambiguity. This is why people have aha moments in the shower. It was why Kabat-Zinn had a vision while on retreat. It was why Don Draper from Mad Men, when asked how he comes up with his great slogans, said he spends all day thinking and then goes to the movies. Janice Marturano was on ~ Dan Harris, #NFDB
836:Preference
NOT in scorn do I reprove thee,
Not in pride thy vows I waive,
But, believe, I could not love thee,
Wert thou prince, and I a slave.
These, then, are thine oaths of passion ?
This, thy tenderness for me ?
Judged, even, by thine own confession,
Thou art steeped in perfidy.
Having vanquished, thou wouldst leave me !
Thus I read thee long ago;
Therefore, dared I not deceive thee,
Even with friendship's gentle show.
Therefore, with impassive coldness
Have I ever met thy gaze;
Though, full oft, with daring boldness,
Thou thine eyes to mine didst raise.
Why that smile ? Thou now art deeming
This my coldness all untrue,
But a mask of frozen seeming,
Hiding secret fires from view.
Touch my hand, thou self-deceiver,
Naybe calm, for I am so:
Does it burn ? Does my lip quiver ?
Has mine eye a troubled glow ?
Canst thou call a moment's colour
To my foreheadto my cheek ?
Canst thou tinge their tranquil pallor
With one flattering, feverish streak?
Am I marble ? What ! no woman
Could so calm before thee stand ?
Nothing living, sentient, human,
Could so coldly take thy hand ?
Yesa sister might, a mother:
My good-will is sisterly:
Dream not, then, I strive to smother
Fires that inly burn for thee.
Rave not, rage not, wrath is fruitless,
Fury cannot change my mind;
I but deem the feeling rootless
52
Which so whirls in passion's wind.
Can I love ? Oh, deeplytruly
Warmlyfondlybut not thee;
And my love is answered duly,
With an equal energy.
Wouldst thou see thy rival ? Hasten,
Draw that curtain soft aside,
Look where yon thick branches chasten
Noon, with shades of eventide.
In that glade, where foliage blending
Forms a green arch overhead,
Sits thy rival thoughtful bending
O'er a stand with papers spread
Motionless, his fingers plying
That untired, unresting pen;
Time and tide unnoticed flying,
There he sitsthe first of men !
Man of conscienceman of reason;
Stern, perchance, but ever just;
Foe to falsehood, wrong, and treason,
Honour's shield, and virtue's trust !
Worker, thinker, firm defender
Of Heaven's truthman's liberty;
Soul of ironproof to slander,
Rock where founders tyranny.
Fame he seeks notbut full surely
She will seek him, in his home;
This I know, and wait securely
For the atoning hour to come.
To that man my faith is given,
Therefore, soldier, cease to sue;
While God reigns in earth and heaven,
I to him will still be true !
~ Charlotte Brontë,#NFDB
837:We have seen that imagining an act engages the same motor and sensory programs that are involved in doing it. We have long viewed our imaginative life with a kind of sacred awe: as noble, pure, immaterial, and ethereal, cut off from our material brain. Now we cannot be so sure about where to draw the line between them. Everything your “immaterial” mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses at a microscopic level. Each time you imagine moving your fingers across the keys to play the piano, you alter the tendrils in your living brain. These experiments are not only delightful and intriguing, they also overturn the centuries of confusion that have grown out of the work of the French philosopher René Descartes, who argued that mind and brain are made of different substances and are governed by different laws. The brain, he claimed, was a physical, material thing, existing in space and obeying the laws of physics. The mind (or the soul, as Descartes called it) was immaterial, a thinking thing that did not take up space or obey physical laws. Thoughts, he argued, were governed by the rules of reasoning, judgment, and desires, not by the physical laws of cause and effect. Human beings consisted of this duality, this marriage of immaterial mind and material brain. But Descartes—whose mind/body division has dominated science for four hundred years—could never credibly explain how the immaterial mind could influence the material brain. As a result, people began to doubt that an immaterial thought, or mere imagining, might change the structure of the material brain. Descartes’s view seemed to open an unbridgeable gap between mind and brain. His noble attempt to rescue the brain from the mysticism that surrounded it in his time, by making it mechanical, failed. Instead the brain came to be seen as an inert, inanimate machine that could be moved to action only by the immaterial, ghostlike soul Descartes placed within it, which came to be called “the ghost in the machine.” By depicting a mechanistic brain, Descartes drained the life out of it and slowed the acceptance of brain plasticity more than any other thinker. Any plasticity—any ability to change that we had—existed in the mind, with its changing thoughts, not in the brain. But now we can see that our “immaterial” thoughts too have a physical signature, and we cannot be so sure that thought won’t someday be explained in physical terms. While we have yet to understand exactly how thoughts actually change brain structure, it is now clear that they do, and the firm line that Descartes drew between mind and brain is increasingly a dotted line. ~ Norman Doidge, #NFDB
838:I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book.
The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose.
The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here.
I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use.
The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones. ~ W Brian Arthur,#NFDB
839:[The Devil] "This legend is about paradise. There was, they say, a certain thinker and philospher here on your earth, who 'rejected all--laws, conscience faith, and, above all, the future life. He died and thought he'd go straight into darkness and death, but no--there was the future life before him. He was amazed and indignant. 'This,' he said, 'goes against my convictions.' So for that he was sentenced...I mean, you see, I beg your pardon, I'm repeating what I heard, it's just a legend...you see, he was sentenced to walk in darkness a quadrillion kilometers (we also use kilometers now), and once he finished that quadrillion, the doors of paradise would be open to him and he would be forgiven everything...Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood a while, looked, and then lay down across the road: 'I dont want to go, I refuse to go on principle!' Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights--you'll get the character of this thinker lying in the road...He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking."
"What an ass!" Ivan exclaimed, bursting into nervous laughter, still apparently trying hard to figure something out. "isn't it all the same whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion kilometers? It must be about a billion years' walk!"
"Much more, even. If we had a pencil and paper, we could work it out. But he arrived long ago, and this is where the anecdote begins."
"Arrived! But where did he get a billion years?"
"You keep thinking about our present earth! But our present earth may have repeated itself a billion times; it died out, lets say, got covered with ice, cracked, fell to pieces, broke down into its original components, again there were the waters above the firmament, then again a comet, again the sun, again the earth from the sun--all this development may already have been repeated an infinite number of times, and always in the same way, to the last detail. A most unspeakable bore...
"Go on, what happened when he arrived?"
"The moment the doors of paradise were opened and he went in, before he had even been there two seconds--and that by the watch--before he had been there two seconds, he exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion kilometers, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In short, he sang 'Hosannah' and oversweetened it so much that some persons there, of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first: he jumped over to the conservatives a bit too precipitously. The Russian character. I repeat: it's a legend. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
840:The Job Application
Esteemed gentlemen,
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience.
Wenzel ~ Robert Walser,#NFDB
841:Speaking of gendered differences in reaction and action—you’ve talked of a certain “bullying reception” to your book here in New Zealand by a certain set of older male critics. The omniscient narrator, the idea that you “had to be everywhere,” seems to have affronted some male readers, as has the length of the book. Have you experienced this reaction in the UK, too, or in Canada? Has it been a peculiarly New Zealand response, perhaps because of the necessarily small pool of literary competition here? This is a point that has been perhaps overstated. There’s been a lot written about what I said, and in fact the way I think and feel about the reviewing culture we have in New Zealand has changed a lot through reading the responses and objections of others. Initially I used the word “bullying” only to remark that, as we all learn at school, more often than not someone’s objections are more to do with their own shortcomings or failures than with yours, and that’s something that you have to remember when you’re seeing your artistic efforts devalued or dismissed in print. I don’t feel bullied when I receive a negative review, but I do think that some of the early reviewers refused to engage with the book on its own terms, and that refusal seemed to me to have a lot to do with my gender and my age. To even things out, I called attention to the gender and age of those reviewers, which at the time seemed only fair. I feel that it’s very important to say that sexism is a hegemonic problem, written in to all kinds of cultural attitudes that are held by men and women alike. As a culture we are much more comfortable with the idea of the male thinker than the female thinker, simply because there are so many more examples, throughout history, of male thinkers; as an image and as an idea, the male thinker is familiar to us, and acts in most cases as a default. Consequently female thinkers are often unacknowledged and discouraged, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by men, and sometimes by women. I am lucky, following the Man Booker announcement, that my work is now being read very seriously indeed; but that is a privilege conferred for the most part by the status of the prize, and I know that I am the exception rather than the rule. I’d like to see a paradigm shift, and I’m confident that one is on the way, but the first thing that needs to happen is a collective acknowledgment that reviewing culture is gendered—that everything is gendered—and that until each of us makes a conscious effort to address inequality, we will each remain a part of the problem, rather than a part of the solution. Protesting the fact of inequality is like protesting global warming or evolution: it’s a conservative blindness, born out of cowardice and hostility. ~ Eleanor Catton, #NFDB
842:It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist."
It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research.
Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion.
Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies. ~ Eric Voegelin,#NFDB
843:Those With Me
As on I drive, in my heart joy dwells
Of Sabbath silence with sound of bells.
The sun lifts
all
that is living, growing,
God's love itself in its symbol showing.
To church pass people from near and far,
Soon psalms ascend from the door ajar.
-Good cheer! Your greeting hailed more than me,
But that in hastening you failed to see.
Here's goodly company with me riding,
Though oft they cunningly keep in hiding;
But when you saw me so Sunday-glad,
It was because of the mates I had.
And when you heard me so softly singing,
The tones attuned to their hearts were ringing.
One soul is here of such priceless worth,
For me she offered her all on earth;
Yes, she who smiled in my boat storm-driven,
And blanched not, braving the waves wind-riven,
In whose white arms that in love caressed me
Full warmth of life and of faith possessed me.
The snail in this I am like when faring,My home I ever am with me bearing;
And who believes it is burdensome,
He ought to learn how it's good to come
And creep in under the roof thereafter,
Where she gives light amid children's laughter.
No poet paints nor can thinker tell
So vast a vault or so deep a well,
As where the glory of God's own love
On cradle-mirror falls from above.
Your soul is brighter, your heart more tender,
When by the cradle your thanks you render.
185
Who knows not love in the small and near,
The many in memory hold not dear.
Who cannot build him a house his own,
What towers he builds will be soon o'erthrown.
From Moscow victor to Carthagena,
He vanquished dies on his Saint Helena.
When such a stronghold you've reared with labor,
It often safely protects your neighbor;
Though work of woman's and children's hands,
Your soul finds strength where that fortress stands,
You go hence braver to battle-dangers,
Can courage give unto countless strangers.
One home bore often a whole land's fate,
And sent the hero who saved the state;
Thousands of
homes
, when the war was o'er,
The land delivered in safety bore.
So bear it onward in peace and beauty
The hearts of homes beating true to duty.
Though foreign perfumes be fine and rare,
Still pure alone is the home's sweet air.
Naught meets you there but the childlike, truthful,
And sin is kissed from your forehead ruthful.
To heaven's home leads its door ajar,
For thence it came and it lies not far.
Good cheer, to church on your way not staying!
For those we love we shall both be praying;
In prayer together the way we wander
That leads from this to the home up yonder.
You enter in; I must journey far,
While follow psalms from the door ajar.
Good cheer! Your greeting hailed more than me,
But that in hastening you failed to see.
~ Bjornstjerne Bjornson,#NFDB
844:he importance and influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can scarcely be exaggerated. A century after Darwin’s death, the great evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, wrote, ‘The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when On the Origin of Species was published, was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859… The intellectual revolution generated by Darwin went far beyond the confines of biology, causing the overthrow of some of the most basic beliefs of his age.’1 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s biographers, contend, ‘Darwin is arguably the best known scientist in history. More than any modern thinker—even Freud or Marx—this affable old-world naturalist from the minor Shropshire gentry has transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.’2 In the words of the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is… Darwin’s dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.’3 Dennett goes on to add, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’4 The editors of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin begin their introduction by stating, ‘Some scientific thinkers, while not themselves philosophers, make philosophers necessary. Charles Darwin is an obvious case. His conclusions about the history and diversity of life—including the evolutionary origin of humans—have seemed to bear on fundamental questions about being, knowledge, virtue and justice.’5 Among the fundamental questions raised by Darwin’s work, which are still being debated by philosophers (and others) are these: ‘Are we different in kind from other animals? Do our apparently unique capacities for language, reason and morality point to a divine spark within us, or to ancestral animal legacies still in evidence in our simian relatives? What forms of social life are we naturally disposed towards—competitive and selfish forms, or cooperative and altruistic ones?’6 As the editors of the volume point out, virtually the entire corpus of the foundational works of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel, has had to be re-examined in the light of Darwin’s work. Darwin continues to be read, discussed, interpreted, used, abused—and misused—to this day. As the philosopher and historian of science, Jean Gayon, puts it, ‘[T]his persistent positioning of new developments in relation to a single, pioneering figure is quite exceptional in the history of modern natural science. ~ Charles Darwin, #NFDB
845:(Ivan) Hold your tongue, or I'll kill you!
(The devil) You'll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young friends, quivering with eagerness for life! 'There are new men,' you decided last spring, when you were meaning to come here, 'they propose to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they didn't ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that's how we have to set to work. It's that, that we must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them denied God -- and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass -- the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what's more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it's useless for him to repine at life's being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave'... and so on and so on in the same style. Charming!
Ivan sat with his eyes on the floor, and his hands pressed to his ears, but he began trembling all over. The voice continued.
(The devil) The question now is, my young thinker reflected, is it possible that such a period will ever come? If it does, everything is determined and humanity is settled for ever. But as, owing to man's inveterate stupidity, this cannot come about for at least a thousand years, everyone who recognises the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense, 'all things are lawful' for him. What's more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if he is the only one in the whole world, and promoted to his new position, he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the old slaveman, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands, the place is holy. Where I stand will be at once the foremost place... 'all things are lawful' and that's the end of it! That's all very charming; but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for doing it? But that's our modern Russian all over. He can't bring himself to swindle without a moral sanction. He is so in love with truth-. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,#NFDB
846:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution, Part I, The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara - Maya, Prakriti, Shakti [336-337],#NFDB
847:The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnishes that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. “Bind me with the chains of Illusion,” he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honor of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police—seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses. This weakling transforms himself, in the name of a know-nothing utopia, into a gravedigger of the intellect; convinced of doing something useful, he prostitutes Pascal’s old “abêtissezvous,” the Solitary’s tragic device.
A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired intellectual abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble. Nothing more to overturn, if not himself: the last idol to smash … His own debris lures him on. While he contemplates it, he shapes the idol of new gods or restores the old ones by baptizing them with new names. Unable to sustain the dignity of being fastidious, less and less inclined to winnow truths, he is content with those he is offered. By-product of his ego, he proceeds—a wrecker gone to seed—to crawl before the altars, or before what takes their place. In the temple or on the tribunal, his place is where there is singing, or shouting—no longer a chance to hear one’s own voice. A parody of belief? It matters little to him, since all he aspires to is to desist from himself. All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna!
Let us be fair: as things stand now, what else could he do? Europe’s charm, her originality resided in the acuity of her critical spirit, in her militant, aggressive skepticism; this skepticism has had its day. Hence the intellectual, frustrated in his doubts, seeks out the compensations of dogma. Having reached the confines of analysis, struck down by the void he discovers there, he turns on his heel and attempts to seize the first certainty to come along; but he lacks the naiveté to hold onto it; henceforth, a fanatic without convictions, he is no more than an ideologist, a hybrid thinker, such as we find in all transitional periods. Participating in two different styles, he is, by the form of his intelligence, a tributary of the one of the one which is vanishing, and by the ideas he defends, of the one which is appearing. To understand him better, let us imagine an Augustine half-converted, drifting and tacking, and borrowing from Christianity only its hatred of the ancient world. Are we not in a period symmetrical with the one which saw the birth of The City of God? It is difficult to conceive of a book more timely. Today as then, men’s minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb. ~ Emil M Cioran,#NFDB
848:The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done?
MIND
The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free.
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there’s joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education.
SOCIETY
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not?
The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared there will be confusion and classes…hate and wars. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country to any religion to any political party. He is concerned with the understanding of mankind.
FEAR
You have religion. Yet the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. You can only be afraid of what you think you know. One is never afraid of the unknown…one is afraid of the known coming to an end. A man who is not afraid is not aggressive. A man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free and peaceful mind.
You want to be loved because you do not love…but the moment you really love, it is finished. You are no longer inquiring whether someone loves you or not.
MEDITATION
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
In meditation you will discover the whisperings of your own prejudices…your own noises…the monkey mind. You have to be your own teacher…truth is a pathless land. The beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are…where you are going…what the end is.
Down deep we all understand that it is truth that liberates…not your effort to be free. The idea of ourselves…our real selves…is your escape from the fact of what you really are. Here we are talking of something entirely different….not of self improvement…but the cessation of self.
ADVICE
Take a break with the past and see what happens. Release attachment to outcomes…inside you will feel good no matter what. Eventually you will find that you don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom…it is timeless spiritual truth.
If you can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it. The answer is not separate from the problem. Suffer and understand…for all of that is part of life. Understanding and detachment…this is the secret.
DEATH
There is hope in people…not in societies not in systems but only in you and me. The man who lives without conflict…who lives with beauty and love…is not frightened by death…because to love is to die. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,#NFDB
849:The Teachings of Some Modern Indian Yogis
Ramana Maharshi
According to Brunton's description of the sadhana he (Brunton) practised under the Maharshi's instructions,1 it is the Overself one has to seek within, but he describes the Overself in a way that is at once the Psychic Being, the Atman and the Ishwara. So it is a little difficult to know what is the exact reading.
*
The methods described in the account [of Ramana Maharshi's technique of self-realisation] are the well-established methods of Jnanayoga - (1) one-pointed concentration followed by thought-suspension, (2) the method of distinguishing or finding out the true self by separating it from mind, life, body (this I have seen described by him [Brunton] more at length in another book) and coming to the pure I behind; this also can disappear into the Impersonal Self. The usual result is a merging in the Atman or Brahman - which is what one would suppose is meant by the Overself, for it is that which is the real Overself. This Brahman or Atman is everywhere, all is in it, it is in all, but it is in all not as an individual being in each but is the same in all - as the Ether is in all. When the merging into the Overself is complete, there is no ego, no distinguishable I, or any formed separative person or personality. All is ekakara - an indivisible and undistinguishable Oneness either free from all formations or carrying all formations in it without being affected - for one can realise it in either way. There is a realisation in which all beings are moving in the one Self and this Self is there stable in all beings; there is another more complete and thoroughgoing in which not only is it so but all are vividly realised as the Self, the Brahman, the Divine. In the former, it is possible to dismiss all beings as creations of Maya, leaving the one Self alone as true - in the other it is easier to regard them as real manifestations of the Self, not as illusions. But one can also regard all beings as souls, independent realities in an eternal Nature dependent upon the One Divine. These are the characteristic realisations of the Overself familiar to the Vedanta. But on the other hand you say that this Overself is realised by the Maharshi as lodged in the heart-centre, and it is described by Brunton as something concealed which when it manifests appears as the real Thinker, source of all action, but now guiding thought and action in the Truth. Now the first description applies to the Purusha in the heart, described by the Gita as the Ishwara situated in the heart and by the Upanishads as the Purusha Antaratma; the second could apply also to the mental Purusha, manomayah. pran.asarı̄ra neta of the Upanishads, the mental Being or Purusha who leads the life and the body. So your question is one which on the data I cannot easily answer. His Overself may be a combination of all these experiences, without any distinction being made or thought necessary between the various aspects. There are a thousand ways of approaching and realising the Divine and each way has its own experiences which have their own truth and stand really on a basis, one in essence but complex in aspects, common to all, but not expressed in the same way by all. There is not much use in discussing these variations; the important thing is to follow one's own way well and thoroughly. In this Yoga, one can realise the psychic being as a portion of the Divine seated in the heart with the Divine supporting it there - this psychic being takes charge of the sadhana and turns the ......
1 The correspondent sent to Sri Aurobindo two paragraphs from Paul Brunton's book A Message from Arunachala (London: Rider & Co., n.d. [1936], pp. 205 - 7). - Ed. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,#NFDB
850:The end of the war will see the final ruin of the Jew. The Jew is the incarnation of egoism. And their egoism goes so far that they're not even capable of risking their lives for the defence of their most vital interests.
The Jew totally lacks any interest in things of the spirit. If he has pretended in Germany to have a bent for literature and the arts, that's only out of snobbery, or from a liking for speculation. He has no feeling for art, and no sensibility. Except in the regions where they live in groups, the Jews are said to have reached a very high cultural level! Take Nuremberg, for example: for four hundred years—that is to say, until 1838—it hadn't a single Jew in its population. Result: a situation in the first rank of German cultural life. Put the Jews all together: by the end of three hundred years, they'll have devoured one another. Where we have a philosopher, they have a Talmudistic pettifogger. What for us is an attempt to get to the bottom of things and express the inexpressible, becomes for the Jew a pretext for verbal juggleries. His only talent is for masticating ideas so as to disguise his thought. He has observed that the Aryan is stupid to the point of accepting anything in matters of religion, as soon as the idea of God is recognised. With the Aryan, the belief in the Beyond often takes a quite childish form ; but this belief does represent an effort towards a deepening of things. The man who doesn't believe in the Beyond has no understanding of religion. The great trick of Jewry was to insinuate itself fraudulently amongst the religions with a religion like Judaism, which in reality is not a religion. Simply, the Jew has put a religious camouflage over his racial doctrine. Everything he undertakes is built on this lie.
The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco- Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis!
The Jew has a talent for bringing confusion into the simplest matters, for getting everything muddled up. Thus comes the moment when nobody understands anything more about the question at issue. To tell you something utterly insignificant, the Jew drowns you in a flood of words. You try to analyse what he said, and you realise it's all wind. The Jew makes use of words to stultify his neighbours. And that's why people make them professors.
The law of life is : "God helps him who helps himself!" It's so simple that everybody is convinced of it, and nobody would pay to learn it. But the Jew succeeds in getting himself rewarded for his meaningless glibness. Stop following what he says, for a moment, and at once his whole scaffolding collapses. I've always said, the Jews are the most diabolic creatures in existence, and at the same time the stupidest. They can't produce a musician, or a thinker. No art, nothing, less than nothing. They're liars, forgers, crooks. They owe their success only to the stupidity of their victims.
If the Jew weren't kept presentable by the Aryan, he'd be so dirty he couldn't open his eyes. We can live without the Jews, but they couldn't live without us. When the Europeans realise that, they'll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together. The Jew prevents this solidarity. He owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist. ~ Adolf Hitler,#NFDB
851:To arrive then at this settled divine status must be the object of our concentration. The first step in concentration must be always to accustom the discursive mind to a settled unwavering pursuit of a single course of connected thought on a single subject and this it must do undistracted by all lures and alien calls on its attention. Such concentration is common enough in our ordinary life, but it becomes more difficult when we have to do it inwardly without any outward object or action on which to keep the mind; yet this inward concentration is what the seeker of knowledge must effect. Nor must it be merely the consecutive thought of the intellectual thinker, whose only object is to conceive and intellectually link together his conceptions. It is not, except perhaps at first, a process of reasoning that is wanted so much as a dwelling so far as possible on the fruitful essence of the idea which by the insistence of the soul's will upon it must yield up all the facets of its truth. Thus if it be the divine Love that is the subject of concentration, it is on the essence of the idea of God as Love that the mind should concentrate in such a way that the various manifestation of the divine Love should arise luminously, not only to the thought, but in the heart and being and vision of the Sadhaka. The thought may come first and the experience afterwards, but equally the experience may come first and the knowledge arise out of the experience. Afterwards the thing attained has to be dwelt on and more and more held till it becomes a constant experience and finally the Dharma or law of the being.
This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea. In this process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation of the object or by a merging into it m an inner Samadhi. If this be the process followed, then subsequently the state into which we rise must still be called down to take possession of the lower being, to shed its light, power and bliss on our ordinary consciousness. For otherwise we may possess it, as many do, in the elevated condition or in the inward Samadhi, but we shall lose our hold of it when we awake or descend into the contacts of the world; and this truncated possession is not the aim of an integral Yoga.
A third process is neither at first to concentrate in a strenuous meditation on the one subject nor in a strenuous contemplation of the one object of thought-vision, but first to still the mind altogether. This may be done by various ways; one is to stand back from the mental action altogether not participating in but simply watching it until, tired of its unsanctioned leaping and running, it falls into an increasing and finally an absolute quiet. Another is to reject the thought-suggestions, to cast them away from the mind whenever they come and firmly hold to the peace of the being which really and always exists behind the trouble and riot of the mind. When this secret peace is unveiled, a great calm settles on the being and there comes usually with it the perception and experience of the all-pervading silent Brahman, everything else at first seeming to be mere form and eidolon. On the basis of this calm everything else may be built up in the knowledge and experience no longer of the external phenomena of things but of the deeper truth of the divine manifestation.
Ordinarily, once this state is obtained, strenuous concentration will be found no longer necessary. A free concentration of will using thought merely for suggestion and the giving of light to the lower members will take its place. This Will will then insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman. By swifter or slower degrees according to the previous preparation and purification of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that eventually the knowledge of the Divine takes possession of our consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is formed in our human existence even as it was done by the old Vedic Sadhakas. For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and powerful discipline.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, Concentration, #concentration,#NFDB
852:What are these operations? They are not mere psychological self-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such observation are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and practically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead to a right thought of considerable power and effectivity. Like intellectual discrimination by the process of meditative thought they will have an effect of purification; they will lead to self-knowledge of a certain kind and to the setting right of the disorders of the soul and the heart and even of the disorders of the understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight path to the knowledge of the real Self. The Upanishad tells us that the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances of things; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought and steady wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to immortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self-observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction.We can look into the inward of ourselves more easily than we can look into the inward of things external to us because there, in things outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the form and secondly we have no natural previous experience of that in them which is other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may reflect or a powerful concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. (2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into self-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs us towards the knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the realisation of the Self in its pure being.
The status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is not merely an intellectual conception or clear discrimination of the truth, nor is it an enlightened psychological experience of the modes of our being. It is a "realisation", in the full sense of the word; it is the making real to ourselves and in ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and it is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its flux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity.
This internal vision, dr.s.t.i, the power so highly valued by the ancient sages, the power which made a man a Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it-to the soul and not merely to the intellect-as do things seen to the physical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaks.a, of that which is present to the eyes, and paroks.a, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision, we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions of others who have seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes,-for no other sense is adequate,-we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge. Precisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of he Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from philosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and exclusive concentration;3 but we have not yet realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality, jyotirmaya brahman, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever fadings of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held. The experience is inevitably renewed and must become more frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity.
(2) And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the 2 In one respect, however, it is easier, because in external things we are not so much hampered by the sense of the limited ego as in ourselves; one obstacle to the realisation of God is therefore removed.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Status of Knowledge,#NFDB
853:For instance, a popular game with California occultists-I do not know its inventor-involves a Magic Room, much like the Pleasure Dome discussed earlier except that this Magic Room contains an Omniscient Computer.
To play this game, you simply "astrally project" into the Magic Room. Do not ask what "astral projection" means, and do not assume it is metaphysical (and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic). Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a "mind game." Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer. It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, "reading" them and decoding their meaning. (Crude prototypes of such computers already exist.) So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know. It will read your thought, and project into your brain, by a laser ray, the correct answer.
There is one slight problem. The computer is very sensitive to all brain-waves. If you have any doubts, it registers them as negative commands, meaning "Do not answer my question." So, the way to use it is to start simply, with "easy" questions. Ask it to dig out of the archives the name of your second-grade teacher. (Almost everybody remembers the name of their first grade teacher-imprint vulnerability again-but that of the second grade teacher tends to get lost.)
When the computer has dug out the name of your second grade teacher, try it on a harder question, but not one that is too hard. It is very easy to sabotage this machine, but you don't want to sabotage it during these experiments. You want to see how well it can be made to perform.
It is wise to ask only one question at a time, since it requires concentration to keep this magic computer real on the field of your perception. Do not exhaust your capacities for imagination and visualization on your first trial runs.
After a few trivial experiments of the second-grade-teacher variety, you can try more interesting programs. Take a person toward whom you have negative feelings, such as anger, disappointment, feeling-of-betrayal, jealousy or whatever interferes with the smooth, tranquil operation of your own bio-computer. Ask the Magic Computer to explain that other person to you; to translate you into their reality-tunnel long enough for you to understand how events seem to them. Especially, ask how you seem to them.
This computer will do that job for you; but be prepared for some shocks which might be disagreeable at first. This super-brain can also perform exegesis on ideas that seem obscure, paradoxical or enigmatic to us. For instance, early experiments with this computer can very profitably turn on asking it to explain some of the propositions in this book which may seem inexplicable or perversely wrong-headed to you, such as "We are all greater artists than we realize" or "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" or "mind and its contents are functionally identical."
This computer is much more powerful and scientifically advanced than the rapture-machine in the neurosomatic circuit. It has total access to all the earlier, primitive circuits, and overrules any of them. That is, if you put a meta-programming instruction into this computer; it will relay it downward to the old circuits and cancel contradictory programs left over from the past. For instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions as: 1. I am at cause over my body. 2. I am at cause over my imagination. 3.1 am at cause over my future. 4. My mind abounds with beauty and power. 5.1 like people, and people like me.
Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.
This represents cybernetic consciousness; the programmer becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-metaprogrammer, etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the metaprogrammer. "Whatever you say it is, it isn't, " Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves. "Neti, neti" (not that, not that), Hindu teachers traditionally say when asked what "God" is or what "Reality" is. Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to develop meta-programming consciousness than most of humanity. Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of your mind as mind 1 , and the mind which contemplates that mind as mind2 and the mind which contemplates mind2 contemplating mind 1 as mind3, you are well on your way to meta-programming awareness. Alice in Wonderland is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon all students of yoga. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising,#NFDB
854:Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.'
But it is hardly strange.
Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.
We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen.
Washington himself appreciated Paine at his true worth. Franklin knew him for a great patriot and clear thinker. He was a friend and confidant of Jefferson, and the two must often have debated the academic and practical phases of liberty.
I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles. Although the present generation knows little of Paine's writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it.
Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring. Therefore time must balance the scales. The Declaration and the Constitution expressed in form Paine's theory of political rights. He worked in Philadelphia at the time that the first document was written, and occupied a position of intimate contact with the nation's leaders when they framed the Constitution.
Certainly we may believe that Washington had a considerable voice in the Constitution. We know that Jefferson had much to do with the document. Franklin also had a hand and probably was responsible in even larger measure for the Declaration. But all of these men had communed with Paine. Their views were intimately understood and closely correlated. There is no doubt whatever that the two great documents of American liberty reflect the philosophy of Paine.
...Then Paine wrote 'Common Sense,' an anonymous tract which immediately stirred the fires of liberty. It flashed from hand to hand throughout the Colonies. One copy reached the New York Assembly, in session at Albany, and a night meeting was voted to answer this unknown writer with his clarion call to liberty. The Assembly met, but could find no suitable answer. Tom Paine had inscribed a document which never has been answered adversely, and never can be, so long as man esteems his priceless possession.
In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again. It must be remembered that 'Common Sense' preceded the declaration and affirmed the very principles that went into the national doctrine of liberty. But that affirmation was made with more vigor, more of the fire of the patriot and was exactly suited to the hour... Certainly [the Revolution] could not be forestalled, once he had spoken.
{The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925} ~ Thomas A Edison,#NFDB
855:The Shooting Of John Dillinger Outside The Biograph
Theater, July 22, 1934
Chicago ran a fever of a hundred and one that groggy Sunday.
A reporter fried an egg on a sidewalk; the air looked shaky.
And a hundred thousand people were in the lake like shirts in
a laundry.
Why was Johnny lonely?
Not because two dozen solid citizens, heat-struck, had keeled
over backward.
Not because those lawful souls had fallen out of their sockets
and melted.
But because the sun went down like a lump in a furnace or a
bull in the Stockyards.
Where was Johnny headed?
Under the Biograph Theater sign that said, "Our Air is
Refrigerated."
Past seventeen FBI men and four policemen who stood in
doorways and sweated.
Johnny sat down in a cold seat to watch Clark Gable get
electrocuted.
Had Johnny been mistreated?
Yes, but Gable told the D.A. he'd rather fry than be shut up
forever.
Two women sat by looked sweet, one looked like
J. Edgar Hoover.
Polly Hamilton made him feel hot, but Anna Sage made him
shiver.
Was Johnny a good lover?
Yes, but he passed out his share of squeezes and pokes like a
jittery masher
While Agent Purvis sneaked up and down the aisle like an
extra usher,
Trying to make sure they wouldn't slip out till the show was
over.
Was Johnny a fourflusher?
No, not if he knew the got it up or got it back.
But he liked to take snapshots of policemen with his own Kodak,
And once in a while he liked to take them with an automatic.
Why was Johnny frantic?
33
Because he couldn't take a walk or sit down in a movie
Without begin afraid he'd run smack into somebody
Who'd point at his rearranged face and holler, "Johnny!"
Was Johnny ugly?
Yes, because Dr. Wilhelm Loeser had given him a new profile
With a baggy jawline and squint eyes and an erased dimple,
With kangaroo-tendon cheekbones and a gigolo's mustache
that should've been illegal.
Did Johnny love a girl?
Yes, a good-looking, hard-headed Indian named Billie Frechette.
He wanted to marry her and lie down and try to get over it,
But she was locked in jail for giving him first-aid and comfort.
Did Johnny feel hurt?
He felt like breaking a bank or jumping over a railing
Into some panicky teller's cage to shout, "Reach for the ceiling!"
Or like kicking some vice president in the bum checks and
smiling.
What was he really doing?
Going up the aisle with the crowd and into the lobby
With Polly saying, "Would you do what Clark done?" And
Johnny saying, "Maybe."
And Anna saying, "If he'd been smart, he'd of acted like
Bing Crosby."
Did Johnny look flashy?
Yes, his white-on-white shirt and tie were luminous.
His trousers were creased like knives to the tops of his shoes,
And his yellow straw hat came down to his dark glasses.
Was Johnny suspicious?
Yes, and when Agent Purvis signalled with a trembling cigar,
Johnny ducked left and ran out of the theater,
And innocent Polly and squealing Anna were left nowhere.
Was Johnny a fast runner?
No, but he crouched and scurried past a friendly liquor store
Under the coupled arms of double-daters, under awnings,
under stars,
To the curb at the mouth of an alley. He hunched there.
Was Johnny a thinker?
No, but he was thinking more or less of Billie Frechette
Who was lost in prison for longer than he could possibly wait,
And then it was suddenly too hard to think around a bullet.
Did anyone shoot straight?
Yes, but Mrs. Etta Natalsky fell out from under her picture hat.
34
Theresa Paulus sprawled on the sidewalk, clutching her left foot.
And both of them groaned loud and long under the streetlight.
Did Johnny like that?
No, but he lay down with those strange women, his face
in the alley,
One shoe off, cinders in his mouth, his eyelids heavy.
When they shouted questions at him, he talked back to nobody.
Did Johnny lie easy?
Yes, holding his gun and holding his breath as a last trick,
He waited, but when the Agents came close, his breath
wouldn't work.
Clark Gable walked his last mile; Johnny ran a half a block.
Did he run out of luck?
Yes, before he was cool, they had him spread out on dished-in
marble
In the Cook County Morgue, surrounded by babbling people
With a crime reporter presiding over the head of the table.
Did Johnny have a soul?
Yes, and it was climbing his slippery wind-pipe like a trapped
burglar.
It was beating the inside of his ribcage, hollering, "Let me
out of here!"
Maybe it got out, and maybe it just stayed there.
Was Johnny a money-maker?
Yes, and thousands paid 25¢ to see him, mostly women,
And one said, "I wouldn't have come, except he's a moral
lesson,"
And another, "I'm feels like a dead man."
Did Johnny have a brain?
Yes, and it always worked best through the worst of dangers,
Through flat-footed hammerlocks, through guarded doors,
around corners,
But it got taken out in the morgue and sold to some doctors.
Could Johnny take orders?
No, but he stayed in the wicker basket carried by six men
Through the bulging crowd to the hearse and let himself be
locked in,
And he stayed put as it went driving south in a driving rain.
And he didn't get stolen?
No, not even after his old hard-nosed dad refused to sell
The quick-drawing corpse for $10,000 to somebody in a
carnival.
35
He figured he'd let Johnny decide how to get to Hell.
Did anyone wish him well?
Yes, half of Indiana camped in the family pasture,
And the minister said, "With luck, he could have been a
minister."
And up the sleeve of his oversized gray suit, Johnny twitched
a finger.
Does anyone remember?
Everyone still some dead ones.It was a new kind of
holiday
With hot and cold drinks and hot and cold planted
him in a cemetery
With three unknown vice presidents, Benjamin Harrison, and
James Whitcomb Riley,
Who never held up anybody.
~ David Wagoner,#NFDB
856: Book VII: The Book of the Woman
So to the voice of their best they were bowed and obeyed undebating;
Men whose hearts were burning yet with implacable passion
Felt Odysseus strength and rose up clay to his counsels.
King Agamemnon rose at his word, the wide-ruling monarch,
Rose at his word the Cretan and Locrian, Thebes and Epirus,
Nestor rose, the time-tired hoary chief of the Pylians.
Round Agamemnon the Atreid Europe surged in her chieftains
Forth from their tent on the shores of the Troad, splendid in armour,
Into the golden blaze of the sun and the race of the sea-winds.
Fierce and clear like a flame to the death-gods bright on its altar
Shone in their eyes the lust of blood and of earth and of pillage;
For in their hearts those fires replaced the passions of discord
Forging a brittle peace by a common hatred and yearning.
Joyous they were of mood; for their hopes were already in Troya
Sating with massacre, plunder and rape and the groans of their foemen
Death and Hell in our mortal bosoms seated and shrouded;
There they have altars and seats, in mankind, in this fair-builded temple,
Made for purer gods; but we turn from their luminous temptings;
Vainly the divine whispers seek us; the heights are rejected.
Man to his earth drawn always prefers his nethermost promptings,
Man, devouring, devoured who is slayer and slain through the ages
Since by the beast he soars held and exceeds not that pedestals measure.
They now followed close on the steps of the mighty Atrides
Glued like the forest pack to the war-scarred coat of its leader,
Glued as the pack when wolves follow their prey like Doom that can turn not.
Perfect forms and beautiful faces crowded the tent-door,
Brilliant eyes and fierce of souls that remembered the forest,
Wild-beasts touched by thought and savages lusting for beauty.
Dire and fierce and formidable chieftains followed Atrides,
Merciless kings of merciless men and the founders of Europe,
Sackers of Troy and sires of the Par thenon, Athens and Caesar.
Here they had come to destroy the ancient perishing cultures;
For, it is said, from the savage we rose and were born to a wild-beast.
So when the Eye supreme perceives that we rise up too swiftly,
Drawn towards height but fullness contemning, called by the azure,
Life when we fail in, poor in our base and forgetting our mother,
Back we are hurled to our roots; we recover our sap from the savage.
So were these sent by Zeus to destroy the old that was grandiose.
Such were those frames of old as the sons of Heaven might have chosen
Who in the dawn of eternity wedded the daughters of Nature,
Cultures touched by the morning star, vast, bold and poetic,
Titans works and joys, but thrust down from their puissance and pleasure
Fainting now fell from the paces of Time or were left by his ages.
So were these born from Zeus to found the new that should flower
Lucid and slender and perfectly little as fit for this mortal
Ever who sinks back fatigued from immortalitys stature;
Man, repelled by the gulfs within him and shrinking from vastness,
Form of the earth accepts and is glad of the lap of his mother.
Safe through the infinite seas could his soul self-piloted voyage,
Chasing the dawns and the wondrous horizons, eternitys secrets
Drawn from her luminous gulfs! But he journeys rudderless, helmless,
Driven and led by the breath of God who meets him with tempest,
Hurls at him Night. The earth is safer, warmer its sunbeams;
Death and limits are known; so he clings to them hating the summons.
So might one dwell who has come to take joy in a fair-lighted prison;
Amorous grown of its marble walls and its noble adornments,
Lost to mightier cares and the spaces boundlessly calling
Lust of the infinite skies he forgets and the kiss of the stormwind.
So might one live who inured to his days of the field and the farm-yard
Shrinks from the grandiose mountain-tops; shut up in lanes and in hedges
Only his furrows he leads and only orders his gardens,
Only his fleeces weaves and drinks of the yield of his vine-rows:
Lost to his ear is the song of the waterfall, wind in the forests.
Now to our earth we are bent and we study the skies for its image.
That was Greece and its shining, that now is France and its keenness,
That still is Europe though by the Christ-touch troubled and tortured,
Seized by the East but clasping her chains and resisting our freedom.
Then was all founded, on Phrygias coasts, round Ilions ramparts,
Then by the spear of Achilles, then in the Trojan death-cry;
Bearers mute of a future world were those armoured Achaians.
So they arrived from Zeus, an army led by the death-god.
So one can see them still who has sight from the gods in the trance-sleep
Out from the tent emerging on Phrygias coasts in their armour;
Those of the early seed Pelasgian slighter in stature,
Dark-haired, hyacinth-curled from the isles of the sea and the southron,
Soft-eyed men with pitiless hearts; bright-haired the Achaians,
Hordes of the Arctic Dawn who had fled from the ice and the death-blast;
Children of conquerors lured to the coasts and the breezes and olives,
Noons of Mediterranean suns and the kiss of the southwind
Mingled their brilliant force with the plastic warmth of the Hamite.
There they shall rule and their children long till Fate and the Dorian
Break down Hellene doors and trample stern through the passes.
Mixed in a glittering rout on the Ocean beaches one sees them,
Perfect and beautiful figures and fronts, not as now are we mortals
Marred and crushed by our burden long of thought and of labour;
Perfect were these as our race bright-imaged was first by the Thinker
Seen who in golden lustres shapes all the glories we tarnish,
Rich from the moulds of Gods and unmarred in their splendour and swiftness.
Many and mighty they came over the beaches loud of the Aegean,
Roots of an infant world and the morning stars of this Europe,
Great Agamemnons kingly port and the bright Menelaus,
Tall Idomeneus, Nestor, Odysseus Atlas-shouldered,
Helmeted Ajax, his chin of the beast and his eyes of the dreamer.
Over the sands they dispersed to their armies ranked by the Ocean.
But from the Argive front Acirrous loosed by Tydides
Parted as hastens a shaft from the string and he sped on intently
Swift where the beaches were bare or threading the gaps of the nations;
Crossing Thebes and Epirus he passed through the Lemnian archers,
Ancient Gnossus hosts and Meriones leaderless legions.
Heedless of cry and of laughter calling over the sea-sands
Swiftly he laboured, wind in his hair and the sea to him crying,
Straight he ran to the Myrmidon hosts and the tents of Achilles.
There he beheld at his tent-door the Phthian gleaming in armour,
Glittering-helmed with the sun that climbed now the cusp of Cronion,
Nobly tall, excelling humanity, planned like Apollo.
Proud at his side like a pillar upreared of snow or of marble,
Golden-haired, hard and white was the boy Neoptolemus, fire-eyed.
New were his feet to the Trojan sands from the ships and from Scyros:
Led to this latest of all his fathers fights in the Troad
He for his earliest battle waited, the son of Achilles.
So in her mood had Fate brought them together, the son and the father,
Even as our souls travelling different paths have met in the ages
Each for its work and they cling for an hour to the names of affection,
Then Times long waves bear them apart for new forms we shall know not,
So these two long severed had met in the shadow of parting.
Often he smote his hand on the thigh-piece for sound of the armour,
Bent his ear to the plains or restless moved like a war-horse
Curbed by his masters will, when he stands new-saddled for battle
Hearing the voice of the trumpets afar and pawing the meadows.
Over the sands Acirrous came to them running and toiling,
Known from far off, for he ran unhelmeted. High on the hero
Sunlike smiled the golden Achilles and into the tent-space
Seized by the hand and brought him and seated. War-shaft of Troezen,
Whence was thy speed, Acirrous? Comst thou, O friend, to my tent-side
Spurred by thy eager will or the trusted stern Diomedes?
Or from the Greeks like the voice still loved from a heart that is hollow?
What say the banded princes of Greece to the single Achilles?
Bringest thou flattery pale or an empty and futureless menace?
But to the strength of Pelides the hero Acirrous answered:
Response none make the Greeks to thy high-voiced message and challenge;
Only their shout at thy side will reply when thou leapst into Troya.
So have their chieftains willed and the wisdom calm of Odysseus.
But with a haughty scorn made answer the high-crested Hellene:
Wise is Odysseus, wise are the hearts of Achaias chieftains.
Ilions chiefs are enough for their strength and life is too brittle
Hurrying Fate to advance on the spear of the Phthian Achilles.
Not from the Greeks have I sped to thy tents, their friendship or quarrel
Urged not my feet; but Tiryns chieftain strong Diomedes
Sent me claiming a word long old that first by his war-car
Young Neoptolemus come from island Scyros should enter
Far-crashing into the fight that has lacked this shoot of Achilles,
Pressing in front with his fathers strength in the playground of Ares,
Shouting his fathers cry as he clashed to his earliest battle.
So let Achilles son twin-carred fight close by Tydides,
Seal of the ancient friendship new-sworn twixt your sires in their boyhood
Then when they learned the spear to guide and strove in the wrestle.
So he spoke recalling other times and regretted
And to the Argives word consented the strength of Pelides.
He on the shoulder white of his son with a gesture of parting
Laid his fateful hand and spoke from his prescient spirit:
Pyrrhus, go. No mightier guide couldst thou hope into battle
Opening the foemens ranks than the hero stern Diomedes.
Noble that rugged heart, thy fathers friend and his fathers.
Journey through all wide Greece, seek her prytanies, schools and palaestras,
Traverse Oceans rocks and the cities that dream on his margin,
Phocian dales, Aetolias cliffs and Arcadys pastures,
Never a second man wilt thou find, but alone Diomedes.
Pyrrhus, follow his counsels always losing thy father,
If in this battle I fall and Fate has denied to me Troya.
Pyrrhus, be like thy father in virtue, thou canst not excel him;
Noble be in peace, invincible, brave in the battle,
Stern and calm to thy foe, to the suppliant merciful. Mortal
Favour and wrath as thou walkst heed never, son of Achilles.
Always thy will and the right impose on thy friend and thy foeman.
Count not life nor death, defeat nor triumph, Pyrrhus.
Only thy soul regard and the gods in thy joy or thy labour.
Pyrrhus heard and erect with a stride that was rigid and stately
Forth with Acirrous went from his sire to the joy of the battle.
Little he heeded the word of death that the god in our bosom
Spoke from the lips of Achilles, but deemed at sunset returning,
Slaying Halamus, Paris or dangerous mighty Aeneas,
Proudly to lay at his fathers feet the spoils of the foeman.
But in his lair alone the godlike doomed Pelides
Turned to the door of his tent and was striding forth to the battle,
When from her inner chamber Briseis parting the curtain,
Long had she stood there spying and waiting her lonely occasion,
Came and caught and held his hand like a creeper detaining
Vainly a moment the deathward stride of the kings of the forest.
Tarry awhile, Achilles; not yet have the war-horns clamoured,
Nor have the scouts streamed yet from Xanthus fierily running.
Lose a moment for her who has only thee under heaven.
Nay, had war sounded, thou yet wouldst squander that moment, Achilles,
Hearkening a womans fears and the voice of a dream in the midnight.
Art thou not gentle even as terrible, lion of Hellas?
Others have whispered the deeds of thy wrath; we have heard, but not seen it;
Marvelling much at their pallor and awe we have listened and wondered.
Never with thrall or slavegirl or captive saw I thee angered,
Hero, nor any humble heart ever trembled to near thee.
Pardoning rather our many faults and our failures in service
Lightly thou layedst thy yoke on us kind as the clasp of a lover
Sparing the weak as thou breakest the mighty, O godlike Achilles.
Only thy equals have felt all the dread of the death-god within thee;
We have presumed and have played with the strength at which nations have trembled.
Lo, thou hast leaned thy mane to the clutch of the boys and the maidens.
But to Briseis white-armed made answer smiling Achilles:
Something sorely thou needst, for thou flatterest long, O Briseis.
Tell me, O woman, thy fear or thy dream that my touch may dispel it,
White-armed net of bliss slipped down from the gold Aphrodite.
And to Achilles answered the captive white Briseis:
Long have they vexed my soul in the tents of the Greeks, O Achilles,
Telling of Thetis thy mother who bore thee in caves of the Ocean
Clasped by a mortal and of her fear from the threats of the Ancients,
Weavers of doom who play with our hopes and smile at our passions
Painting Time with the red of our hearts on the web they have woven,
How on the Oceans bosom she hid thee in vine-tangled Scyros
Clothed like a girl among girls with the daughters of King Lycomedes,
Art thou not fairer than womans beauty, yet great as Apollo?
Fearing Paris shafts and the anger of Delian Phoebus.
Now in the night has a vision three times besieged me from heaven.
Over the sea in my dream an argent bow was extended;
Nearing I saw a terror august over moonlit waters,
Cloud and a fear and a face that was young and lovely and hostile.
Then three times I heard arise in the grandiose silence,
Still was the sky and still was the land and still were the waters,
Echoing a mighty voice, Take back, O King, what thou gavest;
Strength, take thy strong man, sea, take thy wave, till the warfare eternal
Need him again to thunder through Asias plains to the Ganges.
That fell silent, but nearer the beautiful Terror approached me,
Clang I heard of the argent bow and I gazed on Apollo.
Shrilly I cried; it was thee that the shaft of the heavens had yearned for,
Thee that it sought like a wild thing in anger straight at its quarry,
Quivering into thy heel. I awoke and found myself trembling,
Held thee safe in my arms, yet hardly believed that thou livest.
Lo, in the night came this dream; on the morn thou arisest for battle.
But to Briseis white-armed made answer the golden Achilles:
This was a dream indeed, O princess, daughter of Brises!
Will it restrain Achilles from fight, the lion from preying?
Come, thou hast heard of my prowess and knowest what man is Achilles.
Deemst thou so near my end? or does Polyxena vex thee,
Jealousy shaping thy dreams to frighten me back from her capture?
Passionate, vexed Briseis, smiting his arm with her fingers,
Yet with a smile half-pleased made answer to mighty Achilles.
Thinkst thou I fear thee at all? I am brave and will chide thee and threaten.
See that thou recklessly throw not, Achilles, thy life into battle
Hurting this body, my world, nor venture sole midst thy foemen,
Leaving thy shielders behind as oft thou art wont in thy war-rage
Lured by thy tempting gods who seek their advantage to slay thee,
Fighting divinely, careless of all but thy spear and thy foeman.
Cover thy limbs with thy shield, speed slowly restraining thy coursers.
Dost thou not know all the terrible void and cold desolation
Once again my life must become if I lose thee, Achilles?
Twice then thus wilt thou smite me, O hero, a desolate woman?
I will not stay behind on an earth that is empty and kingless.
Into the grave I will leap, through the fire I will burn, I will follow
Down into Hades depths or wherever thy footsteps go clanging,
Hunting thee always,didst thou not seize me here for thy pleasure?
Stronger there by my love as thou than I here, O Achilles.
Thou shalt not dally alone with Polyxena safe in the shadows.
But to Briseis answered the hero, mighty Pelides,
Holding her delicate hands like gathered flowers in his bosom,
Pressing her passionate mouth like a rose that trembles with beauty.
There then follow me even as I would have drawn thee, O woman,
Voice that chimes with my soul and hands that are eager for service,
Beautiful spoil beloved of my foemen, perfect Briseis
But for the dreams that come to us mortals sleeping or waking,
Shadows are these from our souls and who shall discern what they figure?
Fears from the heart speak voiced like Zeus, take shape as Apollo.
But were they truer than Delphis cavern voice or Dodonas
Moan that seems wind in his oaks immemorable, how should they alter
Fate that the stern gods have planned from the first when the earth was unfashioned,
Shapeless the gyre of the sun? For dream or for oracle adverse
Why should man swerve from the path of his feet? The gods have invented
Only one way for a man through the world, O my slavegirl Briseis,
Valiant to be and noble and truthful and just to the humble,
Only one way for a woman, to love and serve and be faithful.
This observe, thy task in thy destiny noble or fallen;
Time and result are the gods; with these things be not thou troubled.
So he spoke and kissed her lips and released her and parted.
Out from the tent he strode and into his chariot leaping
Seized the reins and shouted his cry and drove with a far-borne
Sound of wheels mid the clamour of hooves and the neigh of the war-steeds
Swift through the line of the tents and forth from the heart of the leaguer.
Over the causeway Troyward thundered the wheels of Achilles.
After him crashing loud with a fierce and resonant rumour
Chieftains impetuous prone to the mellay and swift at the war-cry
Came, who long held from the lust of the spear and the joy of the war-din
Rushed over earth like hawks released through the air; a shouting
Limitless rolled behind, for nations followed each war-cry.
Lords renowned of the northern hills and the plains and the coast-lands,
Many a Dorian, many a Phthian, many a Hellene,
Names now lost to the ear though then reputed immortal!
Night has swallowed them, Zeus has devoured the light of his children;
Drawn are they back to his bosom vast whence they came in their fierceness
Thinking to conquer the earth and dominate Time and his ages.
Nor on their left less thick came numerous even as the sea-sands
Forth from the line of the leaguer that skirted the far-sounding waters,
Ranked behind Tydeus son and the Spartan, bright Menelaus,
Ithacas chief and Epeus, Idomeneus lord of the Cretans,
Acamas, Nestor, Neleus son, and the brave Ephialtus,
Prothous, Meges, Leitus the bold and the king Prothonor,
Wise Alcestes son and the Lemnian, stern Philoctetes,
These and unnumbered warlike captains marching the Argives.
Last in his spacious car drove shaping the tread of his armies,
Even as a shepherd who follows his flock to the green of the pastures,
Atreus far-famed son, the monarch great Agamemnon.
They on the plain moved out and gazing far over the pastures
Saw behind Xanthus rolling with dust like a cloud full of thunder,
Ominous, steadily nearing, shouting their war-cry the Trojans.
***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 7 - The Book of the Woman
,#NFDB
857:How gracefully, O man, with thy palm-bough,
Upon the waning century standest thou,
In proud and noble manhood's prime,
With unlocked senses, with a spirit freed,
Of firmness mild,though silent, rich in deed,
The ripest son of Time,
Through meekness great, through precepts strong,
Through treasures rich, that time had long
Hid in thy bosom, and through reason free,
Master of Nature, who thy fetters loves,
And who thy strength in thousand conflicts proves,
And from the desert soared in pride with thee!
Flushed with the glow of victory,
Never forget to prize the hand
That found the weeping orphan child
Deserted on life's barren strand,
And left a prey to hazard wild,
That, ere thy spirit-honor saw the day,
Thy youthful heart watched over silently,
And from thy tender bosom turned away
Each thought that might have stained its purity;
That kind one ne'er forget who, as in sport,
Thy youth to noble aspirations trained,
And who to thee in easy riddles taught
The secret how each virtue might be gained;
Who, to receive him back more perfect still,
E'en into strangers' arms her favorite gave
Oh, may'st thou never with degenerate will,
Humble thyself to be her abject slave!
In industry, the bee the palm may bear;
In skill, the worm a lesson may impart;
With spirits blest thy knowledge thou dost share,
But thou, O man, alone hast art!
Only through beauty's morning gate
Didst thou the land of knowledge find.
To merit a more glorious fate,
In graces trains itself the mind.
What thrilled thee through with trembling blessed,
When erst the Muses swept the chord,
That power created in thy breast,
Which to the mighty spirit soared.
When first was seen by doting reason's ken,
When many a thousand years had passed away,
A symbol of the fair and great e'en then,
Before the childlike mind uncovered lay.
Its blessed form bade us honor virtue's cause,
The honest sense 'gainst vice put forth its powers,
Before a Solon had devised the laws
That slowly bring to light their languid flowers.
Before Eternity's vast scheme
Was to the thinker's mind revealed,
Was't not foreshadowed in his dream,
Whose eyes explored yon starry field?
Urania,the majestic dreaded one,
Who wears a glory of Orions twined
Around her brow, and who is seen by none
Save purest spirits, when, in splendor shrined,
She soars above the stars in pride,
Ascending to her sunny throne,
Her fiery chaplet lays aside,
And now, as beauty, stands alone;
While, with the Graces' girdle round her cast,
She seems a child, by children understood;
For we shall recognize as truth at last,
What here as beauty only we have viewed.
When the Creator banished from his sight
Frail man to dark mortality's abode,
And granted him a late return to light,
Only by treading reason's arduous road,
When each immortal turned his face away,
She, the compassionate, alone
Took up her dwelling in that house of clay,
With the deserted, banished one.
With drooping wing she hovers here
Around her darling, near the senses' land,
And on his prison-walls so drear
Elysium paints with fond deceptive hand.
While soft humanity still lay at rest,
Within her tender arms extended,
No flame was stirred by bigots' murderous zest,
No guiltless blood on high ascended.
The heart that she in gentle fetters binds,
Views duty's slavish escort scornfully;
Her path of light, though fairer far it winds,
Sinks in the sun-track of morality.
Those who in her chaste service still remain,
No grovelling thought can tempt, no fate affright;
The spiritual life, so free from stain,
Freedom's sweet birthright, they receive again,
Under the mystic sway of holy might.
The purest among millions, happy they
Whom to her service she has sanctified,
Whose mouths the mighty one's commands convey,
Within whose breasts she deigneth to abide;
Whom she ordained to feed her holy fire
Upon her altar's ever-flaming pyre,
Whose eyes alone her unveiled graces meet,
And whom she gathers round in union sweet
In the much-honored place be glad
Where noble order bade ye climb,
For in the spirit-world sublime,
Man's loftiest rank ye've ever had!
Ere to the world proportion ye revealed,
That every being joyfully obeys,
A boundless structure, in night's veil concealed,
Illumed by naught but faint and languid rays,
A band of phantoms, struggling ceaselessly,
Holding his mind in slavish fetters bound,
Unsociable and rude as be,
Assailing him on every side around,
Thus seemed to man creation in that day!
United to surrounding forms alone
By the blind chains the passions had put on,
Whilst Nature's beauteous spirit fled away
Unfelt, untasted, and unknown.
And, as it hovered o'er with parting ray,
Ye seized the shades so neighborly,
With silent hand, with feeling mind,
And taught how they might be combined
In one firm bond of harmony.
The gaze, light-soaring, felt uplifted then,
When first the cedar's slender trunk it viewed;
And pleasingly the ocean's crystal flood
Reflected back the dancing form again.
Could ye mistake the look, with beauty fraught,
That Nature gave to help ye on your way?
The image floating on the billows taught
The art the fleeting shadow to portray.
From her own being torn apart,
Her phantom, beauteous as a dream,
She plunged into the silvery stream,
Surrendering to her spoiler's art.
Creative power soon in your breast unfolded;
Too noble far, not idly to conceive,
The shadow's form in sand, in clay ye moulded,
And made it in the sketch its being leave.
The longing thirst for action then awoke,
And from your breast the first creation broke.
By contemplation captive made,
Ensnared by your discerning eye,
The friendly phantom's soon betrayed
The talisman that roused your ecstasy.
The laws of wonder-working might,
The stores by beauty brought to light,
Inventive reason in soft union planned
To blend together 'neath your forming hand.
The obelisk, the pyramid ascended,
The Hermes stood, the column sprang on high,
The reed poured forth the woodland melody,
Immortal song on victor's deeds attended.
The fairest flowers that decked the earth,
Into a nosegay, with wise choice combined,
Thus the first art from Nature had its birth;
Into a garland then were nosegays twined,
And from the works that mortal hands had made,
A second, nobler art was now displayed.
The child of beauty, self-sufficient now,
That issued from your hands to perfect day,
Loses the chaplet that adorned its brow,
Soon as reality asserts its sway.
The column, yielding to proportion's chains,
Must with its sisters join in friendly link,
The hero in the hero-band must sink,
The Muses' harp peals forth its tuneful strains.
The wondering savages soon came
To view the new creation's plan
"Behold!"the joyous crowds exclaim,
"Behold, all this is done by man!"
With jocund and more social aim
The minstrel's lyre their awe awoke,
Telling of Titans, and of giant's frays
And lion-slayers, turning, as he spoke,
Even into heroes those who heard his lays.
For the first time the soul feels joy,
By raptures blessed that calmer are,
That only greet it from afar,
That passions wild can ne'er destroy,
And that, when tasted, do not cloy.
And now the spirit, free and fair,
Awoke from out its sensual sleep;
By you unchained, the slave of care
Into the arms of joy could leap.
Each brutish barrier soon was set at naught,
Humanity first graced the cloudless brow,
And the majestic, noble stranger, thought,
From out the wondering brain sprang boldly now.
Man in his glory stood upright,
And showed the stars his kingly face;
His speaking glance the sun's bright light
Blessed in the realms sublime of space.
Upon the cheek now bloomed the smile,
The voice's soulful harmony
Expanded into song the while,
And feeling swam in the moist eye;
And from the mouth, with spirit teeming o'er,
Jest, sweetly linked with grace, began to pour.
Sunk in the instincts of the worm,
By naught but sensual lust possessed,
Ye recognized within his breast
Love-spiritual's noble germ;
And that this germ of love so blest
Escaped the senses' abject load,
To the first pastoral song he owed.
Raised to the dignity of thought,
Passions more calm to flow were taught
From the bard's mouth with melody.
The cheeks with dewy softness burned;
The longing that, though quenched, still yearned,
Proclaimed the spirit-harmony.
The wisest's wisdom, and the strongest's vigor,
The meekest's meekness, and the noblest's grace,
By you were knit together in one figure,
Wreathing a radiant glory round the place.
Man at the Unknown's sight must tremble,
Yet its refulgence needs must love;
That mighty Being to resemble,
Each glorious hero madly strove;
The prototype of beauty's earliest strain
Ye made resound through Nature's wide domain.
The passions' wild and headlong course,
The ever-varying plan of fate,
Duty and instinct's twofold force,
With proving mind and guidance straight
Ye then conducted to their ends.
What Nature, as she moves along,
Far from each other ever rends,
Become upon the stage, in song,
Members of order, firmly bound.
Awed by the Furies' chorus dread,
Murder draws down upon its head
The doom of death from their wild sound.
Long e'er the wise to give a verdict dared,
An Iliad had fate's mysteries declared
To early ages from afar;
While Providence in silence fared
Into the world from Thespis' car.
Yet into that world's current so sublime
Your symmetry was borne before its time,
When the dark hand of destiny
Failed in your sight to part by force.
What it had fashioned 'neath your eye,
In darkness life made haste to die,
Ere it fulfilled its beauteous course.
Then ye with bold and self-sufficient might
Led the arch further through the future's night:
Then, too, ye plunged, without a fear,
Into Avernus' ocean black,
And found the vanished life so dear
Beyond the urn, and brought it back.
A blooming Pollux-form appeared now soon,
On Castor leaning, and enshrined in light
The shadow that is seen upon the moon,
Ere she has filled her silvery circle bright!
Yet higher,higher still above the earth
Inventive genius never ceased to rise:
Creations from creations had their birth,
And harmonies from harmonies.
What here alone enchants the ravished sight,
A nobler beauty yonder must obey;
The graceful charms that in the nymph unite,
In the divine Athene melt away;
The strength with which the wrestler is endowed,
In the god's beauty we no longer find:
The wonder of his timeJove's image proud
In the Olympian temple is enshrined.
The world, transformed by industry's bold hand,
The human heart, by new-born instincts moved,
That have in burning fights been fully proved,
Your circle of creation now expand.
Advancing man bears on his soaring pinions,
In gratitude, art with him in his flight,
And out of Nature's now-enriched dominions
New worlds of beauty issue forth to light.
The barriers upon knowledge are o'erthrown;
The spirit that, with pleasure soon matured,
Has in your easy triumphs been inured
To hasten through an artist-whole of graces,
Nature's more distant columns duly places.
And overtakes her on her pathway lone.
He weighs her now with weights that human are,
Metes her with measures that she lent of old;
While in her beauty's rites more practised far,
She now must let his eye her form behold.
With youthful and self-pleasing bliss,
He lends the spheres his harmony,
And, if he praise earth's edifice,
'Tis for its wondrous symmetry.
In all that now around him breathes,
Proportion sweet is ever rife;
And beauty's golden girdle wreathes
With mildness round his path through life;
Perfection blest, triumphantly,
Before him in your works soars high;
Wherever boisterous rapture swells,
Wherever silent sorrow flees,
Where pensive contemplation dwells,
Where he the tears of anguish sees,
Where thousand terrors on him glare,
Harmonious streams are yet behind
He sees the Graces sporting there,
With feeling silent and refined.
Gentle as beauty's lines together linking,
As the appearances that round him play,
In tender outline in each other sinking,
The soft breath of his life thus fleets away.
His spirit melts in the harmonious sea,
That, rich in rapture, round his senses flows,
And the dissolving thought all silently
To omnipresent Cytherea grows.
Joining in lofty union with the Fates,
On Graces and on Muses calm relying,
With freely-offered bosom he awaits
The shaft that soon against him will be flying
From the soft bow necessity creates.
Favorites beloved of blissful harmony,
Welcome attendants on life's dreary road,
The noblest and the dearest far that she,
Who gave us life, to bless that life bestowed!
That unyoked man his duties bears in mind,
And loves the fetters that his motions bind,
That Chance with brazen sceptre rules him not,
For this eternity is now your lot,
Your heart has won a bright reward for this.
That round the cup where freedom flows,
Merrily sport the gods of bliss,
The beauteous dream its fragrance throws,
For this, receive a loving kiss!
The spirit, glorious and serene,
Who round necessity the graces trains,
Who bids his ether and his starry plains
Upon us wait with pleasing mien,
Who, 'mid his terrors, by his majesty gives joy,
And who is beauteous e'en when seeking to destroy,
Him imitate, the artist good!
As o'er the streamlet's crystal flood
The banks with checkered dances hover,
The flowery mead, the sunset's light,
Thus gleams, life's barren pathway over,
Poesy's shadowy world so bright.
In bridal dress ye led us on
Before the terrible Unknown,
Before the inexorable fate,
As in your urns the bones are laid,
With beauteous magic veil ye shade
The chorus dread that cares create.
Thousands of years I hastened through
The boundless realm of vanished time
How sad it seems when left by you
But where ye linger, how sublime!
She who, with fleeting wing, of yore
From your creating hand arose in might,
Within your arms was found once more,
When, vanquished by Time's silent flight,
Life's blossoms faded from the cheek,
And from the limbs all vigor went,
And mournfully, with footstep weak,
Upon his staff the gray-beard leant.
Then gave ye to the languishing,
Life's waters from a new-born spring;
Twice was the youth of time renewed,
Twice, from the seeds that ye had strewed.
When chased by fierce barbarian hordes away,
The last remaining votive brand ye tore
From Orient's altars, now pollution's prey,
And to these western lands in safety bore.
The fugitive from yonder eastern shore,
The youthful day, the West her dwelling made;
And on Hesperia's plains sprang up once more
Ionia's flowers, in pristine bloom arrayed.
Over the spirit fairer Nature shed,
With soft refulgence, a reflection bright,
And through the graceful soul with stately tread
Advanced the mighty Deity of light.
Millions of chains were burst asunder then,
And to the slave then human laws applied,
And mildly rose the younger race of men,
As brethren, gently wandering side by side,
With noble inward ecstasy,
The bliss imparted ye receive,
And in the veil of modesty,
With silent merit take your leave.
If on the paths of thought, so freely given,
The searcher now with daring fortune stands,
And, by triumphant Paeans onward driven,
Would seize upon the crown with dauntless hands
If he with grovelling hireling's pay
Thinks to dismiss his glorious guide
Or, with the first slave's-place array
Art near the throne his dream supplied
Forgive him!O'er your head to-day
Hovers perfection's crown in pride,
With you the earliest plant Spring had,
Soul-forming Nature first began;
With you, the harvest-chaplet glad,
Perfected Nature ends her plan.
The art creative, that all-modestly arose
From clay and stone, with silent triumph throws
Its arms around the spirit's vast domain.
What in the land of knowledge the discoverer knows,
He knows, discovers, only for your gain
The treasures that the thinker has amassed,
He will enjoy within your arms alone,
Soon as his knowledge, beauty-ripe at last.
To art ennobled shall have grown,
Soon as with you he scales a mountain-height,
And there, illumined by the setting sun,
The smiling valley bursts upon his sight.
The richer ye reward the eager gaze
The higher, fairer orders that the mind
May traverse with its magic rays,
Or compass with enjoyment unconfined
The wider thoughts and feelings open lie
To more luxuriant floods of harmony.
To beauty's richer, more majestic stream,
The fair members of the world's vast scheme,
That, maimed, disgrace on his creation bring,
He sees the lofty forms then perfecting
The fairer riddles come from out the night
The richer is the world his arms enclose,
The broader stream the sea with which he flows
The weaker, too, is destiny's blind might
The nobler instincts does he prove
The smaller he himself, the greater grows his love.
Thus is he led, in still and hidden race,
By poetry, who strews his path with flowers,
Through ever-purer forms, and purer powers,
Through ever higher heights, and fairer grace.
At length, arrived at the ripe goal of time,
Yet one more inspiration all-sublime,
Poetic outburst of man's latest youth,
Andhe will glide into the arms of truth!
Herself, the gentle Cypria,
Illumined by her fiery crown,
Then stands before her full-grown son
Unveiledas great Urania;
The sooner only by him caught,
The fairer he had fled away!
Thus stood, in wonder rapture-fraught,
Ulysses' noble son that day,
When the sage mentor who his youth beguiled;
Herself transfigured as Jove's glorious child!
Man's honor is confided to your hand,
There let it well protected be!
It sinks with you! with you it will expand!
Poesy's sacred sorcery
Obeys a world-plan wise and good;
In silence let it swell the flood
Of mighty-rolling harmony.
By her own time viewed with disdain,
Let solemn truth in song remain,
And let the Muses' band defend her!
In all the fullness of her splendor,
Let her survive in numbers glorious,
More dread, when veiled her charms appear,
And vengeance take, with strains victorious,
On her tormentor's ear!
The freest mother's children free,
With steadfast countenance then rise
To highest beauty's radiancy,
And every other crown despise!
The sisters who escaped you here,
Within your mother's arms ye'll meet;
What noble spirits may revere,
Must be deserving and complete.
High over your own course of time
Exalt yourselves with pinion bold,
And dimly let your glass sublime
The coming century unfold!
On thousand roads advancing fast
Of ever-rich variety,
With fond embraces meet at last
Before the throne of harmony!
As into seven mild rays we view
With softness break the glimmer white,
As rainbow-beams of sevenfold hue
Dissolve again in that soft light,
In clearness thousandfold thus throw
Your magic round the ravished gaze,
Into one stream of light thus flow,
One bond of truth that ne'er decays!
~ Friedrich Schiller, The Artists
,#NFDB
858:Scene.Up the Hill-side, inside the Shrub-house. Luca's wife, Ottima, and her paramour, the German Sebald.
Sebald
[sings]
Let the watching lids wink!
Day's a-blaze with eyes, think!
Deep into the night, drink!
Ottima
Night? Such may be your Rhine-land nights perhaps;
But this blood-red beam through the shutter's chink
We call such light, the morning: let us see!
Mind how you grope your way, though! How these tall
Naked geraniums straggle! Push the lattice
Behind that frame!Nay, do I bid you?Sebald,
It shakes the dust down on me! Why, of course
The slide-bolt catches. Well, are you content,
Or must I find you something else to spoil?
Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is 't full morning?
Oh, don't speak then!
Sebald.
Ay, thus it used to be.
Ever your house was, I remember, shut
Till mid-day; I observed that, as I strolled
On mornings through the vale here; country girls
Were noisy, washing garments in the brook,
Hinds drove the slow white oxen up the hills:
But no, your house was mute, would ope no eye.
And wisely: you were plotting one thing there,
Nature, another outside. I looked up
Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,
Silent as death, blind in a flood of light.
Oh, I remember!and the peasants laughed
And said, "The old man sleeps with the young wife."
This house was his, this chair, this windowhis.
Ottima
Ah, the clear morning! I can see St. Mark's;
That black streak is the belfry. Stop: Vicenza
Should lie . . . there's Padua, plain enough, that blue!
Look o'er my shoulder, follow my finger!
Sebald
Morning?
It seems to me a night with a sun added.
Where's dew, where's freshness? That bruised plant, I bruised
In getting through the lattice yestereve,
Droops as it did. See, here's my elbow's mark
I' the dust o' the sill.
Ottima
Oh, shut the lattice, pray!
Sebald
Let me lean out. I cannot scent blood here,
Foul as the morn may be.
There, shut the world out!
How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse
The world and all outside! Let us throw off
This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out
With all of it.
Ottima
Best never speak of it.
Sebald
Best speak again and yet again of it,
Till words cease to be more than words. "His blood,"
For instancelet those two words mean "His blood"
And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now,
"His blood."
Ottima
Assuredly if I repented
The deed
Sebald
Repent? Who should repent, or why?
What puts that in your head? Did I once say
That I repented?
Ottima
No, I said the deed . . .
Sebald
"The deed" and "the event"just now it was
"Our passion's fruit"the devil take such cant!
Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol,
I am his cut-throat, you are . . .
Ottima
Here's the wine;
I brought it when we left the house above,
And glasses toowine of both sorts. Black? White then?
Sebald
But am not I his cut-throat? What are you?
Ottima
There trudges on his business from the Duomo
Benet the Capuchin, with his brown hood
And bare feet; always in one place at church,
Close under the stone wall by the south entry.
I used to take him for a brown cold piece
Of the wall's self, as out of it he rose
To let me passat first, I say, I used:
Now, so has that dumb figure fastened on me,
I rather should account the plastered wall
A piece of him, so chilly does it strike.
This, Sebald?
Sebald
No, the white winethe white wine!
Well, Ottima, I promised no new year
Should rise on us the ancient shameful way;
Nor does it rise. Pour on! To your black eyes!
Do you remember last damned New Year's day?
Ottima
You brought those foreign prints. We looked at them
Over the wine and fruit. I had to scheme
To get him from the fire. Nothing but saying
His own set wants the proof-mark, roused him up
To hunt them out.
Sebald
'Faith, he is not alive
To fondle you before my face.
Ottima
Do you
Fondle me then! Who means to take your life
For that, my Sebald?
Sebald
Hark you, Ottima!
One thing to guard against. We'll not make much
One of the otherthat is, not make more
Parade of warmth, childish officious coil,
Than yesterday: as if, sweet, I supposed
Proof upon proof were needed now, now first,
To show I love youyes, still love youlove you
In spite of Luca and what's come to him
Sure sign we had him ever in our thoughts,
White sneering old reproachful face and all!
We'll even quarrel, love, at times, as if
We still could lose each other, were not tied
By this: conceive you?
Ottima
Love!
Sebald
Not tied so sure.
Because though I was wrought upon, have struck
His insolence back into himam I
So surely yours?therefore forever yours?
Ottima
Love, to be wise, (one counsel pays another)
Should we havemonths ago, when first we loved,
For instance that May morning we two stole
Under the green ascent of sycamores
If we had come upon a thing like that
Suddenly . . .
Sebald
"A thing"there again"a thing!"
Ottima
Then, Venus' body, had we come upon
My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse
Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close
Would you have pored upon it? Why persist
In poring now upon it? For't is here
As much as there in the deserted house:
You cannot rid your eyes of it. For me,
Now he is dead I hate him worse: I hate . . .
Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold
His two dead hands, and say, "I hate you worse,
"Luca, than . . ."
Sebald
Off, offtake your hands off mine,
'T is the hot eveningoff! oh, morning is it?
Ottima
There's one thing must be done; you know what thing.
Come in and help to carry. We may sleep
Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night.
Sebald
What would come, think you, if we let him lie
Just as he is? Let him lie there until
The angels take him! He is turned by this
Off from his face beside, as you will see.
Ottima
This dusty pane might serve for looking glass.
Three, fourfour grey hairs! Is it so you said
A plait of hair should wave across my neck?
Nothis way.
Sebald
Ottima, I would give your neck,
Each splendid shoulder, both those breasts of yours,
That this were undone! Killing! Kill the world,
So Luca lives again!ay, lives to sputter
His fulsome dotage on youyes, and feign
Surprise that I return at eve to sup,
When all the morning I was loitering here
Bid me despatch my business and begone.
I would . . .
Ottima
See!
Sebald
No, I'll finish. Do you think
I fear to speak the bare truth once for all?
All we have talked of, is, at bottom, fine
To suffer; there's a recompense in guilt;
One must be venturous and fortunate:
What is one young for, else? In age we'll sigh
O'er the wild reckless wicked days flown over;
Still, we have lived: the vice was in its place.
But to have eaten Luca's bread, have worn
His clothes, have felt his money swell my purse
Do lovers in romances sin that way?
Why, I was starving when I used to call
And teach you music, starving while you plucked me
These flowers to smell!
Ottima
My poor lost friend!
Sebald
He gave me
Life, nothing less: what if he did reproach
My perfidy, and threaten, and do more
Had he no right? What was to wonder at?
He sat by us at table quietly:
Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?
Could he do less than make pretence to strike?
'T is not the crime's sakeI'd commit ten crimes
Greater, to have this crime wiped out, undone!
And youO how feel you? Feel you for me?
Ottima
Well then, I love you better now than ever,
And best (look at me while I speak to you)
Best for the crime; nor do I grieve, in truth,
This mask, this simulated ignorance,
This affectation of simplicity,
Falls off our crime; this naked crime of ours
May not now be looked over: look it down!
Great? let it be great; but the joys it brought,
Pay they or no its price? Come: they or it!
Speak not! The past, would you give up the past
Such as it is, pleasure and crime together?
Give up that noon I owned my love for you?
The garden's silence: even the single bee
Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopped,
And where he hid you only could surmise
By some campanula chalice set a-swing.
Who stammered"Yes, I love you?"
Sebald
And I drew
Back; put far back your face with both my hands
Lest you should grow too full of meyour face
So seemed athirst for my whole soul and body!
Ottima
And when I ventured to receive you here,
Made you steal hither in the mornings
Sebald
When
I used to look up 'neath the shrub-house here,
Till the red fire on its glazed windows spread
To a yellow haze?
Ottima
Ahmy sign was, the sun
Inflamed the sere side of yon chestnut-tree
Nipped by the first frost.
Sebald
You would always laugh
At my wet boots: I had to stride thro' grass
Over my ankles.
Ottima
Then our crowning night!
Sebald
The July night?
Ottima
The day of it too, Sebald!
When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat,
Its black-blue canopy suffered descend
Close on us both, to weigh down each to each,
And smother up all life except our life.
So lay we till the storm came.
Sebald
How it came!
Ottima
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead
Sebald
Yes!
Ottima
While I stretched myself upon you, hands
To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook
All my locks loose, and covered you with them
You, Sebald, the same you!
Sebald
Slower, Ottima!
Ottima
And as we lay
Sebald
Less vehemently! Love me!
Forgive me! Take not words, mere words, to heart!
Your breath is worse than wine! Breathe slow, speak slow!
Do not lean on me!
Ottima
Sebald, as we lay,
Rising and falling only with our pants,
Who said, "Let death come now! 'T is right to die!
"Right to be punished! Nought completes such bliss
"But woe!" Who said that?
Sebald
How did we ever rise?
Was't that we slept? Why did it end?
Ottima
I felt you
Taper into a point the ruffled ends
Of my loose locks 'twixt both your humid lips.
My hair is fallen now: knot it again!
Sebald
I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!
This way? Will you forgive mebe once more
My great queen?
Ottima
Bind it thrice about my brow;
Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!
Sebald
I crown you
My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent . . .
[From without is heard the voice of Pippa, singing
The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven
All's right with the world!
[Pippa passes]
Sebald
God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?
You, you spoke!
Ottima
Ohthat little ragged girl!
She must have rested on the step: we give them
But this one holiday the whole year round.
Did you ever see our silk-millstheir inside?
There are ten silk-mills now belong to you.
She stoops to pick my double heartsease . . . Sh!
She does not hear: call you out louder!
Sebald
Leave me!
Go, get your clothes ondress those shoulders!
Ottima
Sebald?
Sebald
Wipe off that paint! I hate you.
Ottima
Miserable!
Sebald
My God, and she is emptied of it now!
Outright now!how miraculously gone
All of the gracehad she not strange grace once?
Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,
No purpose holds the features up together,
Only the cloven brow and puckered chin
Stay in their places: and the very hair,
That seemed to have a sort of life in it,
Drops, a dead web!
Ottima
Speak to menot of me!
Sebald
That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle
Broke the delicious indolenceall broken!
Ottima
To menot of me! Ungrateful, perjured cheat!
A coward too: but ingrate's worse than all.
Beggarmy slavea fawning, cringing lie!
Leave me! Betray me! I can see your drift!
A lie that walks and eats and drinks!
Sebald
My God!
Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades
I should have known there was no blood beneath!
Ottima
You hate me then? You hate me then?
Sebald
To think
She would succeed in her absurd attempt,
And fascinate by sinning, show herself
Superiorguilt from its excess superior
To innocence! That little peasant's voice
Has righted all again. Though I be lost,
I know which is the better, never fear,
Of vice or virtue, purity or lust,
Nature or trick! I see what I have done,
Entirely now! Oh I am proud to feel
Such tormentslet the world take credit thence
I, having done my deed, pay too its price!
I hate, hatecurse you! God's in his heaven!
Ottima
Me!
Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourselfkill me
Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill methen
Yourselfthenpresentlyfirst hear me speak!
I always meant to kill myselfwait, you!
Lean on my breastnot as a breast; don't love me
The more because you lean on me, my own
Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently!
Sebald
My brain is drowned nowquite drowned: all I feel
Is . . . is, at swift-recurring intervals,
A hurry-down within me, as of waters
Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit:
There they gowhirls from a black fiery sea!
Ottima
Not meto him, O God, be merciful!
Talk by the way, while Pippa is passing from the hill-side to Orcana. Foreign Students of painting and sculpture, from Venice, assembled opposite the house of Jules, a young French statuary, at Possagno.
1st Student
Attention! My own post is beneath this window, but the pomegranate clump yonder will hide three or four of you with a little squeezing, and Schramm and his pipe must lie flat in the balcony. Four, five who's a defaulter? We want everybody, for Jules must not be suffered to hurt his bride when the jest's found out.
2nd Student
All here! Only our poet's awaynever having much meant to be present, moonstrike him! The airs of that fellow, that Giovacchino! He was in violent love with himself, and had a fair prospect of thriving in his suit, so unmolested was it,when suddenly a woman falls in love with him, too; and out of pure jealousy he takes himself off to Trieste, immortal poem and all: whereto is this prophetical epitaph appended already, as Bluphocks assures me,"Here a mammoth-poem lies, Fouled to death by butterflies." His own fault, the simpleton! Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly. sculapius, an Epic. Catalogue of the drugs: Hebe's plaisterOne strip Cools your lip. Phoebus' emulsion One bottle Clears your throttle. Mercury's bolusOne box Cures . . .
3rd Student
Subside, my fine fellow! If the marriage was over by ten o'clock, Jules will certainly be here in a minute with his bride.
2nd Student
Good!only, so should the poet's muse have been universally acceptable, says Bluphocks, et canibus nostris . . . and Delia not better known to our literary dogs than the boy Giovacchino!
1st Student
To the point, now. Where's Gottlieb, the new-comer? Oh,listen, Gottlieb, to what has called down this piece of friendly vengeance on Jules, of which we now assemble to witness the winding-up. We are all agreed, all in a tale, observe, when Jules shall burst out on us in a fury by and by: I am spokesmanthe verses that are to undeceive Jules bear my name of Lutwyche but each professes himself alike insulted by this strutting stone-squarer, who came alone from Paris to Munich, and thence with a crowd of us to Venice and Possagno here, but proceeds in a day or two alone againoh, alone indubitably!to Rome and Florence. He, forsooth, take up his portion with these dissolute, brutalized, heartless bunglers!so he was heard to call us all: now, is Schramm brutalized, I should like to know? Am I heartless?
Gottlieb
Why, somewhat heartless; for, suppose Jules a coxcomb as much as you choose, still, for this mere coxcombry, you will have brushed offwhat do folks style it?the bloom of his life. Is it too late to alter? These love-letters now, you call hisI can't laugh at them.
4th Student
Because you never read the sham letters of our inditing which drew forth these.
Gottlieb
His discovery of the truth will be frightful.
4th Student
That's the joke. But you should have joined us at the beginning: there's no doubt he loves the girlloves a model he might hire by the hour!
Gottlieb
See here! "He has been accustomed," he writes, "to have Canova's women about him, in stone, "and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these "being as much below, as those above, his soul's aspi- "ration: but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth.
1st Student
Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth?
Schramm
Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world: look at a blossomit drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom's place could it continue? As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, because its earliest favourite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus . . .
1st Student
Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again! There, you see! Well, this Jules . . . a wretched fribble oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other day! Canova's galleryyou know: there he marches first resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing an eye: all at once he stops full at thePsiche-fanciulla cannot pass that old acquaintance without a nod of encouragement"In your new place, beauty? Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich I see you!" Next he posts himself deliberately before the unfinished Piet for half an hour without moving, till up he starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose intoI say, intothe group; by which gesture you are informed that precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in Canova's practice was a certain method of using the drill in the articulation of the knee-jointand that, likewise, has he mastered at length! Good-bye, therefore, to poor Canovawhose gallery no longer needs detain his successor Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble!
5th Student
Tell him about the women: go on to the women!
1st Student
Why, on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least: he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now, I happened to hear of a young Greekreal Greek girl at Malamocco; a true Islander, do you see, with Alciphron's "hair like sea-moss"Schramm knows!white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest, a daughter of Natalia, so she swearsthat hag Natalia, who helps us to models at three lire an hour. We selected this girl for the heroine of our jest. So first, Jules received a scented lettersomebody had seen his Tydeus at the Academy, and my picture was nothing to it: a profound admirer bade him perseverewould make herself known to him ere long. (Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice, transcribes divinely.) And in due time, the mysterious correspondent gave certain hints of her peculiar charmsthe pale cheeks, the black hairwhatever, in short, had struck us in our Malamocco model: we retained her name, tooPhene, which is, by interpretation, sea-eagle. Now, think of Jules finding himself distinguished from the herd of us by such a creature! In his very first answer he proposed marrying his monitress: and fancy us over these letters, two, three times a day, to receive and despatch! I concocted the main of it: relations were in the waysecrecy must be observedin fine, would he wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united? St stHere they come!
6th Student
Both of them! Heaven's love, speak softly, speak within yourselves!
5th Student
Look at the bridegroom! Half his hair in storm and half in calm,patted down over the left temple,like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it: and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in.
2nd Student
Not a rich vest like yours, Hannibal Scratchy!rich, that your face may the better set it off.
6th Student
And the bride! Yes, sure enough, our Phene! Should you have known her in her clothes? How magnificently pale!
Gottlieb
She does not also take it for earnest, I hope?
1st Student
Oh, Natalia's concern, that is! We settle with Natalia.
6th Student
She does not speakhas evidently let out no word. The only thing is, will she equally remember the rest of her lesson, and repeat correctly all those verses which are to break the secret to Jules?
Gottlieb
How he gazes on her! Pitypity!
1st Student
They go in: now, silence! You three, not nearer the window, mind, than that pomegranate: just where the little girl, who a few minutes ago passed us singing, is seated!
~ Robert Browning, Pippa Passes - Part I - Morning
,#NFDB
859: Ahana
Ahana
(Ahana, the Dawn of God, descends on the world where amid the strife and trouble of mortality the Hunters of Joy, the
Seekers after Knowledge, the Climbers in the quest of Power are toiling up the slopes or waiting in the valleys. As she stands on the mountains of the East, voices of the Hunters of Joy are the first to greet her.)
Vision delightful alone on the hills whom the silences cover,
Closer yet lean to mortality; human, stoop to thy lover.
Wonderful, gold like a moon in the square of the sun where thou strayest
Glimmers thy face amid crystal purities; mighty thou playest
Sole on the peaks of the world, unafraid of thy loneliness. Glances
Leap from thee down to us, dream-seas and light-falls and magical trances;
Sun-drops flake from thy eyes and the heart's caverns packed are with pleasure
Strange like a song without words or the dance of a measureless measure.
Tread through the edges of dawn, over twilight's grey-lidded margin;
Heal earth's unease with thy feet, O heaven-born delicate virgin.
Children of Time whose spirits came down from eternity, seizing
Joys that escape us, yoked by our hearts to a labour unceasing,
Earth-bound, torn with our longings, our life is a brief incompleteness.
Thou hast the stars to sport with, the winds run like bees to thy sweetness.
Art thou not heaven-bound even as I with the earth? Hast thou ended
All desirable things in a stillness lone and unfriended?
Only is calm so sweet? is our close tranquillity only?
Cold are the rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.
Heavy is godhead to bear with its mighty sun-burden of lustre.
Art thou not weary of only the stars in their solemn muster,
Sky-hung the chill bare plateaus and peaks where the eagle rejoices
In the inhuman height of his nesting, solitude's voices
Making the heart of the silence lonelier? strong and untiring,
Deaf with the cry of the waterfall, lonely the pine lives aspiring.
Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother:
478
Pondicherry, c. 1910 - 1920
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other, -
Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture,
Heaven needing earth's passion to quiver its peace into rapture.
Marry, O lightning eternal, the passion of a moment-born fire!
Out of thy greatness draw close to the breast of our mortal desire!
Is he thy master, Rudra the mighty, Shiva ascetic?
Has he denied thee his world? In his dance that they tell of, ecstatic,
Slaying, creating, calm in the midst of the movement and madness,
Stole there no rhythm of an earthly joy and a mortal sadness?
Wast thou not made in the shape of a woman? Sweetness and beauty
Move like a song of the gods in thy limbs and to love is thy duty
Graved in thy heart as on tablets of fate; joy's delicate blossom
Sleeps in thy lids of delight; all Nature hides in thy bosom
Claiming her children unborn and the food of her love and her laughter.
Is he the first? was there none then before him? shall none come after?
He who denies and his blows beat down on our hearts like a hammer's,
He whose calm is the silent reply to our passion and clamours!
Is not there deity greater here new-born in a noble
Labour and sorrow and struggle than stilled into rapture immobile?
Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven's that are bare and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to Infinity flying.
Earth has her godheads; the Tritons sway on the toss of the billows,
Emerald locks of the Nereids stream on their foam-crested pillows,
Dryads peer out from the branches, Naiads glance up from the waters;
High are her flame-points of joy and the gods are ensnared by her daughters.
Artemis calls as she flees through the glades and the breezes pursue her;
Cypris laughs in her isles where the ocean-winds linger to woo her.
Here thou shalt meet amid beauty forgotten the dance of the Graces;
Night shall be haunted for ever with strange and delicate faces.
Music is here of the fife and the flute and the lyre and the timbal,
Wind in the forests, bees in the grove, - spring's ardent cymbal
Thrilling, the cry of the cuckoo; the nightingale sings in the branches,
Human laughter is heard and the cattle low in the ranches.
Frankly and sweetly she gives to her children the bliss of her body,
Breath of her lips and the green of her garments, rain-pourings heady
Tossed from her cloud-carried beaker of tempest, oceans and streamlets,
Dawn and the mountain-air, corn-fields and vineyards, pastures and hamlets,
Ahana
479
Tangles of sunbeams asleep, mooned dream-depths, twilight's shadows,
Taste and scent and the fruits of her trees and the flowers of her meadows,
Life with her wine-cup of longing under the purple of her tenture,
Death as her gate of escape and rebirth and renewal of venture.
Still must they mutter that all here is vision and passing appearance,
Magic of Maya with falsehood and pain for its only inherence.
One is there only, apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning, -
He who has sent through his soul's wide spaces the universe spinning.
One eternal, Time an illusion, life a brief error!
One eternal, Master of heaven - and of hell and its terror!
Spirit of silence and purity rapt and aloof from creation, -
Dreaming through aeons unreal his splendid and empty formation!
Spirit all-wise in omnipotence shaping a world but to break it, -
Pushed by what mood of a moment, the breath of what fancy to make it?
None is there great but the eternal and lonely, the unique and unmated,
Bliss lives alone with the self-pure, the single, the forever-uncreated.
Truths? or thought's structures bridging the vacancy mute and unsounded
Facing the soul when it turns from the stress of the figures around it?
Solely we see here a world self-made by some indwelling Glory
Building with forms and events its strange and magnificent story.
Yet at the last has not all been solved and unwisdom demolished,
Myth cast out and all dreams of the soul, and all worship abolished?
All now is changed, the reverse of the coin has been shown to us; Reason
Waking, detecting the hoax of the spirit, at last has arisen,
Captured the Truth and built round her its bars that she may not skedaddle,
Gallop again with the bit in her teeth and with Fancy in the saddle.
Now have the wise men discovered that all is the craft of a superMagic of Chance and a movement of Void and inconscient Stupor.
Chance by a wonderful accident ever her ripples expanding
Out of a gaseous circle of Nothingness, implacably extending
Freak upon freak, repeating rigidly marvels on marvels,
Making a world out of Nothing, started on the arc of her travels.
Nothingness born into feeling and action dies back to Nothing.
Sea of a vague electricity, romping through space-curves and clothing
Strangely the Void with a semblance of Matter, painfully flowered
Into this giant phenomenon universe. Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
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Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and mechanic.
Once by an accident queer but quite natural, provable, simple,
Out of blind Space-Nought lashed into life, wearing Mind as its wimple,
Dupe of a figment of consciousness, doped with behaviour and feature,
Matter deluded claimed to be spirit and sentient creature.
All the high dreams man has dreamed and his hopes and his deeds, his soul's greatness
Are but a food-seeking animal's acts with the mind for their witness, -
Mind a machine for the flickers of thought, Matter's logic unpremissed, -
Are but a singular fireworks, chemistry lacking the chemist,
Matter's nervous display; the heart's passion, the sorrow and burning
Fire of delight and sweet ecstasy, love and its fathomless yearning,
Boundless spiritual impulses making us one with world-being,
Outbursts of vision opening doors to a limitless seeing,
Gases and glands and the genes and the nerves and the brain-cells have done it,
Brooded out drama and epic, structured the climb of the sonnet,
Studied the stars and discovered the brain and the laws of its thinking,
Sculptured the cave-temple, reared the cathedral, infinity drinking
Wrought manufacturing God and the soul for the uplift of Nature, -
Science, philosophy, head of his mystical chemical stature,
Music and painting revealing the godhead in sound and in colour,
Acts of the hero, thoughts of the thinker, search of the scholar,
All the magnificent planning, all the inquiry and wonder
Only a trick of the atom, its marvellous magical blunder.
Who can believe it? Something or someone, a Force or a Spirit
Conscious, creative, wonderful shaped out a world to inherit
Here for the beings born from its vast universal existence, -
Fields of surprise and adventure, vistas of light-haunted distance,
Play-routes of wisdom and vision and struggle and rapture and sorrow,
Sailing in Time through the straits of today to the sea of tomorrow.
Worlds and their wonders, suns and their flamings, earth and her nations,
Voyages endless of Mind through the surge of its fate-tossed creations,
Star upon star throbbing out in the silence of infinite spaces,
Species on species, bodies on bodies, faces on faces,
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Souls without number crossing through Time towards eternity, aeons
Crowding on aeons, loving and battle, dirges and paeans,
Thoughts ever leaping, hopes ever yearning, lives ever streaming,
Millions and millions on trek through the days with their doings and dreaming,
Herds of the Sun who move on at the cry of the radiant drover, -
Countless, surviving the death of the centuries, lost to recover,
Finished, but only to begin again, who is its tireless creator,
Cause or the force of its driving, its thinker or formless dictator?
Surely no senseless Vacancy made it, surely 'twas fashioned
By an almighty One million-ecstasied, thousand-passioned.
Self-made? then by what self from which thought could arise and emotion,
Waves that well up to the surface, born from what mysteried ocean?
Nature alone is the fountain. But what is she? Is she not only
Figure and name for what none understands, though all feel, or a lonely
Word in which all finds expression, spirit-heights, dumb work of Matter, -
Vague designation filling the gaps of our thought with its clatter?
Power without vision that blunders in man into thinking and sinning?
Rigid, too vast inexhaustible mystery void of a meaning?
Energy blindly devising, unconsciously ranging in order?
Chance in the march of a cosmic Insanity crossing the border
Out of the eternal silence to thought and its strangeness and splendour?
Consciousness born by an accident until an accident end her?
Nought else is she but the power of the Spirit who dwells in her ever,
Witness and cause of her workings, lord of her pauseless endeavour.
All things she knows, though she seems here unseeing; even in her slumber
Wondrous her works are, design and its magic and magic of number,
Plan of her mighty cosmic geometry, balance of forces,
Universe flung beyond universe, law of the stars and their courses,
Cosmos atomic stretched to the scale of the Infinite's measure.
Mute in the trance of the Eternal she sleeps with the stone and the azure.
Now she awakes; for life has just stirred in her, stretching first blindly
Outward for sense and its pleasure and pain and the gifts of the kindly
Mother of all, for her light and her air and the sap from her flowing,
Pleasure of bloom and inconscient beauty, pleasure of growing.
Then into mind she arises; heart's yearning awakes and reflection
Looks out on struggle and harmony, - conscious, her will of selection
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Studies her works and illumines the choice of her way; last, slowly
Inward she turns and stares at the Spirit within her. Holy
Silences brood in her heart and she feels in her ardent recesses
Passions too great for her frame, on her body immortal caresses.
Into the calm of the Greatness beyond her she enters, burning
Now with a light beyond thought's, towards Self and Infinity turning,
Turned to beatitude, turned to eternity, spiritual grandeur,
Power without limit, ecstasy imperishable, shadowless splendour.
Then to her mortals come, flashing, thoughts that are wisdom's fire-kernel;
Leaping her flame-sweeps of might and delight and of vision supernal
Kindle the word and the act, the Divine and humanity fusing,
Illuminations, trance-seeds of silence, flowers of musing, -
Light of our being that yet has to be, its glory and glimmer
Smiting with sunrise the soul of the sage and the heart of the dreamer.
Or is it all but a vain expectation and effort ungrounded,
Wings without body, sight without object, waters unsounded,
Hue of a shimmer that steals through some secret celestial portal,
Glory of a gleam or a dream in an animal brief-lived and mortal?
Are they not radiances native to heaven's more fortunate ether,
Won when we part from this body, this temporal house of a nether
Mystery of life lived in vain? Upon earth is the glory forbidden,
Nature for ever accursed, frustrated, grief-vexed, fate-ridden?
Half of the glory she dreamed of forgotten or lost in earth's darkness,
Half of it mangled and missed as the death-wheels whirl in their starkness,
Cast out from heaven a goddess rebellious with mind for her mirror,
Cursed with desire and self-will and doomed to self-torture and error,
Came she to birth then with God for her enemy? Were we created
He unwilling or sleeping? did someone transgress the fated
Limits he set, outwitting God? In the too hasty vision
Marred of some demiurge filmed there the blur of a fatal misprision,
Making a world that revolves on itself in a circuit of failure,
Aeons of striving, death for a recompense, Time for our tenure?
Out of him rather she came and for him are her cry and her labour;
Deep are her roots in him; topless she climbs, to his greatness a neighbour.
All is himself in her, brooding in darkness, mounting the sun-ways;
Air-flight to him is man's journey with heaven and earth for the runways.
He is the witness and doer, he is the loved and the lover,
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He the eternal Truth that we look in ourselves to discover.
All is his travel in Time; it is he who turns history's pages,
Act and event and result are the trail that he leaves through the ages;
Form and idea are his signs and number and sound are his symbols,
Music and singing, the word and its rhythm are Divinity's cymbals,
Thunder and surge are the drums of his marching. Through us, with urges
Self-ward, form-bound, mute, motionless, slowly inevitably emerges
Vast as the cosmos, minute as the atom, the Spirit eternal.
Often the gusts of his force illumining moments diurnal
Flame into speech and idea; transcendences splendid and subtle
Suddenly shoot through the weft of our lives from a magical shuttle;
Hid in our hearts is his glory; the Spirit works in our members.
Silence is he, with our voices he speaks, in our thoughts he remembers.
Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher;
Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature.
Out of his Void we arise to a mighty and shining existence,
Out of Inconscience, tearing the black Mask's giant resistance;
Waves of his consciousness well from him into these bodies in Nature,
Forms are put round him; his oneness, divided by mind's nomenclature,
High on the summits of being ponders immobile and single,
Penetrates atom and cell as the tide drenches sand-grain and shingle.
Oneness unknown to us dwells in these millions of figures and faces,
Wars with itself in our battles, loves in our clinging embraces,
Inly the self and the substance of things and their cause and their mover
Veiled in the depths which the foam of our thoughts and our life's billows cover,
Heaves like the sea in its waves; like heaven with its star-fires it gazes
Watching the world and its works. Interned in the finite's mazes,
Still shall he rise to his vast superconscience, we with him climbing;
Truth of man's thought with the truth of God's spirit faultlessly timing,
That which was mortal shall enter immortality's golden precincts,
Hushed breath of ecstasy, honey of lotus depths where the bee sinks,
Timeless expanses too still for the voice of the hours to inveigle,
Spaces of spirit too vast for the flight of the God-bearing eagle, -
Enter the Splendour that broods now unseen on us, deity invading,
Sight without error, light without shadow, beauty unfading,
Infinite largeness, rapture eternal, love none can sever,
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Life, not this death-play, but a power God-driven and blissful for ever.
"No," cry the wise, "for a circle was traced, there was pyloned a limit
Only we escape through dream's thin passages. None can disclaim it;
All things created are made by their borders, sketched out and coded;
Vain is the passion to divinise manhood, humanise godhead.
None can exceed himself; even to find oneself hard for our search is:
Only we see as in night by a lustre of flickering torches.
To be content with our measure, our space is the law of our living.
All of thyself to thy manhood and Nature and Circumstance giving,
Be what thou must be or be what thou canst be, one hour in an era.
Knowing the truth of thy days, shun the light of ideal and chimera:
Curb heart's impatience, bind thy desires down, pause from self-vexing."
Who is the nomad then? who is the seeker, the gambler risking
All for a dream in a dream, the old and the sure and the stable
Flung as a stake for a prize that was never yet laid on the table?
Always the world is expanding and growing from minute to minute;
Playing the march of the adventure of Time with our lives for her spinet
Maya or Nature, the wonderful Mother, strikes out surprising
Strains of the spirit disprisoned; creation heavenward rising
Wrestles with Time and Space and the Unknown to give form to the Formless.
Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death-blast and storm-race.
All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle.
Vainly man, crouched in his corner of safety, shrinks from the fatal
Lure of the Infinite. Guided by Powers that surround and precede us
Fearful and faltering steps are our perishing efforts that lead us
On through the rooms of the finite till open the limitless spaces
And we can look into all-seeing eyes and imperishable faces.
But we must pass through the aeons; Space is a bar twixt our ankles,
Time is a weight that we drag and the scar of the centuries rankles:
Caught by the moments, held back from the spirit's timelessness, slowly
Wading in shallows we take not the sea-plunge vastly and wholly.
Hard is the way to the Eternal for the mind-born will of the mortal
Bound by the body and life to the gait of the house-burdened turtle.
Here in this world that knows not its morrow, this reason that stumbles
Onward from error to truth and from truth back to error while crumbles
All that it fashioned, after the passion and travail are ended,
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After the sacrifice offered when the will and the strength are expended,
Nothing is done but to have laid down one stone of a road without issue,
Added our quota of evil and good to an ambiguous tissue.
Destiny's lasso, its slip-knot tied by delight and repining,
Draws us through tangles of failure and victory's inextricable twining.
In the hard reckoning made by the grey-robed accountant at even
Pain is the ransom we pay for the smallest foretaste of heaven.
Ignorance darkens, death and inconscience gape to absorb us;
Thick and persistent the Night confronts us, its hunger enormous
Swallowing our work and our lives. Our love and our knowledge squandered
Lie like a treasure refused and trod down on the ways where we wandered;
All we have done is effaced by the thousands behind us arriving.
Trapped in a round fixed for ever circles our thought and our living.
Fiercely the gods in their jealousy strike down the heads that have neighboured
Even for a moment their skies; in the sands our achievements are gravured.
Yet survives bliss in the rhythm of our heart-beats, yet is there wonder,
Beauty's immortal delight, and the seals of the mystery sunder.
Honied a thousand whispers come, in the birds, in the breezes,
Moonlight, the voices of streams; with a hundred marvellous faces
Always he lures us to love him, always he draws us to pleasure
Leaving remembrance and anguish behind for our only treasure.
Passionate we seek for him everywhere, yearn for some sign of him, calling,
Scanning the dust for his footprints, praying and stumbling and falling;
Nothing is found and no answer comes from the masks that are passing.
Memories linger, lines from the past like a half-faded tracing.
He has passed on into silence wearing his luminous mantle.
Out of the melodied distance a laugh rings pure-toned, infantile,
Sole reminder that he is, last signal recalling his presence.
There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
All things have bliss for their secret; only our consciousness falters
Fearing to offer itself as a victim on ecstasy's altars.
Is not the world his disguise? when that cloak is tossed back from his shoulders,
Beauty looks out like a sun on the hearts of the ravished beholders.
Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning:
Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening
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Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther.
These too were magic of Maya, smiles of the marvellous Mother.
Oh, but the cruelty! oh, but the empty pain we go rueing!
Edges of opposite sweetness, calls to a closer pursuing.
All that we meet is a symbol and gateway; cryptic intention
Lurks in a common appearance, smiles from a casual mention:
Opposites hide in each other; in the laughter of Nature is danger,
Glory and greatness their embryos form in the womb of her anger.
Why are we terrified? wherefore cry out and draw back from the smiting -
Blows from the hands of a lover to direr exactions exciting,
Fiery points of his play! Was he Rudra only the mighty?
Whose were the whispers of sweetness, whose were the murmurs of pity?
Something opposes our grasp on the light and the sweetness and power,
Something within us, something without us, trap-door or tower,
Nature's gap in our being - or hinge! That device could we vanquish,
Once could we clasp him and hold, his joy we could never relinquish.
Then we could not be denied, for our might would be single and flawless.
Sons of the Eternal, sovereigns of Nature absolute and lawless,
Termlessly our souls would possess as he now enjoys and possesses,
Termlessly probe the delight of his laughter's lurking recesses,
Chasing its trail to the apex of sweetness and secrecy. Treasured
Close to the beats of Eternity's heart in a greatness unmeasured,
Locked into a miracle and mystery of Light we would live in him, - seated
Deep in his core of beatitude ceaselessly by Nature repeated,
Careless of Time, with no fear of an end, with no need for endeavour
Caught by his ecstasy dwell in a rapture enduring for ever.
What was the garden he built when the stars were first set in their places,
Soul and Nature together mid streams and in cloudless spaces
Naked and innocent? Someone offered a fruit of derision,
Knowledge of good and of evil, cleaving in God a division.
Though He who made all said, "It is good; I have fashioned perfection,"
"No, there is evil," someone whispered, "'tis screened from detection."
Wisest he of the beasts of the field, one cunning and creeping;
"See it," he said, "be wise; you shall be as the gods are, unsleeping,
They who know all." And they ate. The roots of our being were shaken;
Hatred and weeping and wrath at once trampled a world overtaken,
Terror and fleeing and anguish and shame and desires unsated;
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Cruelty stalked like a lion; Revenge and her brood were created.
Out to the desert he drove the rebellious. Flaming behind them
Streamed out the sword of his wrath and it followed leaping to find them,
Stabbing at random. The pure and the evil, the strong and the tempted,
All are confounded in punishment; justly is no one exempted.
Virtuous? yes, there are many, but who is there innocent? Toiling
Therefore we seek, but find not that Eden. Planting and spoiling,
"This is the garden," we say, "lo, the trees and this is the river."
Vainly redeemers came, not one has availed to deliver.
Never can Nature go back to her careless and childlike beginning,
Laugh of the babe and the song of the wheel in its delicate spinning,
Smile of the sun upon flowers and earth's beauty, life without labour
Plucking the fruits of the soil and rejoicing in cottage and arbour.
Once we have chosen to be as the gods, we must follow that motion.
Knowledge must grow in us, might like a Titan's, bliss like an ocean,
Calmness and purity born of the spirit's gaze on the Real,
Rapture of his oneness embracing the soul in a clasp hymeneal.
Was it not he once in Brindavan? Woods divine to our yearning,
Memorable always! O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning,
Grasses his herds have grazed and crushed by his feet in the dancing,
Yamuna flowing with song, through the greenness always advancing,
You unforgotten remind; for his flute with its sweetness ensnaring
Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring
Hales us out naked and absolute, out to his woodlands eternal,
Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal,
And we go stumbling, maddened and thrilled to his dreadful embraces,
Slaves of his rapture to Brindavan crowded with amorous faces,
Luminous kine in the green glades seated, soft-eyed gazing,
Flowers on the branches distressing us, moonbeams unearthly amazing,
Yamuna flowing before us, laughing low with her voices,
Brindavan arching o'er us where Shyama sports and rejoices.
Inly the miracle trembles repeated; mist-walls are broken
Hiding that country of God and we look on the wonderful token,
Clasp the beautiful body of the Eternal; his flute-call of yearning
Cries in our breast with its blissful anguish for ever returning;
Life flows past us with passionate voices, a heavenly river,
All our being goes back as a bride of his bliss to the Giver.
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Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn, the Everlasting,
Gaze on its mighty Companion; the load of mortality casting,
Mind hushes stilled in eternity; waves of the Infinite wander
Thrilling body and soul and its endless felicity squander;
All world-sorrow is finished, the cry of the parting is over;
Ecstasy laughs in our veins, in our heart is the heart of the Lover.
As when a stream from a highl and plateau green mid the mountains
Draws through broad lakes of delight the gracious sweep of its fountains,
Life from its heaven of desire comes down to the toil of the earth-ways;
Streaming through mire it pours still the mystical joy of its birthplace,
Green of its banks and the green of its trees and the hues of the flower.
Something of child-heart beauty, something of greatness and power,
Dwell with it still in its early torrent laughter and brightness,
Call in the youth of its floods and the voice of the wideness and whiteness.
But in its course are set darkness and fall and the spirit's ordeal.
Hating its narrowness, forced by an ardour to see all and be all,
Dashed on the inconscient rocks and straining through mud, over gravel,
Flows, like an ardent prisoner bound to the scenes of his travail,
Life, the river of the Spirit, consenting to anguish and sorrow
If by her heart's toil a loan-light of joy from the heavens she can borrow.
Out of the sun-rays and moon-rays, the winds' wing-glimmer and revel,
Out of the star-fields of wonder, down to earth's danger and evil
Headlong cast with a stridulant thunder, the doom-ways descending,
Shuddering below into sunless depths, across chasms unending,
Baulked of the might of its waters, a thread in a mountainous vastness,
Parcelled and scanted it hurries as if storming a Titan fastness,
Carving the hills with a sullen and lonely gigantic labour.
Hurled into strangling ravines it escapes with a leap and a quaver,
Breaks from the channels of hiding it grooves out and chisels and twistens,
Angry, afraid, white, foaming. A stony and monstrous resistance
Meets it piling up stubborn limits. Afflicted the river
Treasures a scattered sunbeam, moans for a god to deliver,
Longing to lapse through the plain's green felicity, yearning to widen
Joined to the ocean's shoreless eternity far-off and hidden.
High on the cliffs the Great Ones are watching, the Mighty and Deathless,
Soaring and plunging the roadway of the Gods climbs uplifted and breathless;
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Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,
Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us.
Ignorant, circled with death and the abyss, we have dreamed of a human
Paradise made from the mind of a man, from the heart of a woman,
Dreamed of the Isles of the Blest in a light of perpetual summer,
Dreamed of the joy of an earthly life with no pain for incomer.
Never, we said, can these waters from heaven be lost in the marshes,
Cease in the sands of the desert, die where the simoom parches;
Plains are beyond, there are hamlets and fields where the river rejoices
Pacing once more with a quiet step and with amical voices:
Bright amid woodlands red with the berries and cool with the breezes
Glimmer the leaves; all night long the heart of the nightingale eases
Sweetly its burden of pity and sorrow. There amid flowers
We shall take pleasure in arbours delightful, leng thening the hours,
Time for our servitor waiting our fancy through moments unhasting,
Under the cloudless blue of those skies of tranquillity resting,
Lying on beds of lilies, hearing the bells of the cattle
Tinkle, and drink red wine of life and go forth to the battle,
Fight and unwounded return to our beautiful home by the waters,
Fruit of our joy rear tall strong sons and radiant daughters.
Then shall the Virgins of Light come down to us clad in clear raiment
Woven from sunbeam and moonbeam and lightnings, limitless payment
Bring of our toil and our sorrow, carrying life-giving garlands
Plucked by the fountains of Paradise, bring from imperishable star-lands
Hymn-words of wisdom, visions of beauty, heaven-fruit ruddy,
Wine-cups of ecstasy sending the soul like a stream through the body.
Fate shall not know; if her spies come down to our beautiful valley,
They shall grow drunk with its grapes and wander in woodl and and alley.
There leaps the anger of Rudra? there will his lightnings immortal
Circle around with their red eye of cruelty stabbing the portal?
Fearless is there life's play; I shall sport with my dove from his highlands,
Drinking her laughter of bliss like a god in my Grecian islands.
Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the God-glory tingle,
Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle.
These are but dreams and the truth shall be greater. Heaven made woman!
Flower of beatitude! living shape of the bliss of the Brahman!
Art thou not she who shall bring into life and time the Eternal?
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Body of the summer of the Gods, a sweetness virginal, vernal,
Breathes from thy soul into Nature; Love sits dreaming in thy bosom,
Wisdom gazes from thy eyes, thy breasts of God-rapture are the blossom.
If but the joy of thy feet once could touch our spaces smiting
Earth with a ray from the Unknown, on the world's heart heaven's script writing,
All then would change into harmony and beauty, Time's doors shudder
Swinging wide on their hinges into Eternity, other
Voices than earth's would be fire in our speech and make deathless our thinking.
One who is hidden in Light would grow visible, multitudes linking,
Lyres of a single ecstasy, throbs of the one heart beating,
Wonderful bodies and souls in the spirit's identity meeting
Even as stars in sky-vastness know their kindred in grandeur.
Yet may it be that although in the hands of our destiny stands sure
Fixed to its hour the Decree of the Advent, still it is fated
Only when kindling earth's bodies a mightier Soul is created.
Far-off the gold and the greatness, the rapture too splendid and dire.
Are not the ages too young? too low in our hearts burns the fire.
Bringest thou only a gleam on the summits, a cry in the distance,
Seen by the eyes that are wakened, heard by a spirit that listens?
Form of the formless All-Beautiful, lodestar of Nature's aspirance,
Music of prelude giving a voice to the ineffable Silence,
First white dawn of the God-Light cast on these creatures that perish,
Word-key of a divine and eternal truth for mortals to cherish,
Come! let thy sweetness and force be a breath in the breast of the future
Making the god-ways alive, immortality's golden-red suture:
Deep in our lives there shall work out a honeyed celestial leaven,
Bliss shall grow native to being and earth be a kin-soil to heaven.
Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy beauty enamour.
Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the dawn-moment's glamour,
Forcing the heart of the Midnight where slumber and secrecy linger,
Guardians of Mystery, touching her bosom with thy luminous finger,
Daughter of Heaven, break through to me moonlike, mystic and gleaming;
Tread through the margins of twilight, cross over borders of dreaming.
Vision delightful alone on the peaks whom the silences cover,
Vision of bliss, stoop down to mortality, lean to thy lover.
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AHANA
Voice of the sensuous mortal, heart of eternal longing,
Thou who hast lived as in walls, thy soul with thy senses wronging!
But I descend at last. Fickle and terrible, sweet and deceiving,
Poison and nectar one has dispensed to thee, luring thee, leaving.
We two together shall capture the flute and the player relentless.
Son of man, thou hast crowned thy life with the flowers that are scentless,
Chased the delights that wound. But I come and midnight shall sunder.
Lo, I come, and behind me Knowledge descends and with thunder
Filling the spaces Strength, the Angel, bears on his bosom
Joy to thy arms. Thou shalt look on her face like a child's or a blossom,
Innocent, free as in Eden of old, not afraid of her playing,
When thy desires I have seized and devoured like a lioness preying.
Thou shalt not suffer always nor cry to me lured and forsaken:
I have a snare for his footsteps, I have a chain for him taken.
Come then to Brindavan, soul of the joyous; faster and faster
Follow the dance I shall teach thee with Shyama for slave and for master.
Follow the notes of the flute with a soul aware and exulting;
Trample Delight that submits and crouch to a sweetness insulting.
Then shalt thou know what the dance meant, fathom the song and the singer,
Hear behind thunder its rhymes, touched by lightning thrill to his finger,
Brindavan's rustle shalt understand and Yamuna's laughter,
Take thy place in the Ras1 and thy share of the ecstasy after.
1 The dance-round of Krishna with the cowherdesses in the moonlit groves of Brindavan, type of the dance of Divine Delight with the souls of men liberated in the world of
Bliss secret within us.
Poems from Manuscripts
Circa 1912 - 1913
~ Sri Aurobindo, - Ahana
,#NFDB
860:Scene. Salzburg; a cell in the Hospital of St. Sebastian. 1541.
Festus, Paracelsus.
Festus.
No change! The weary night is well-nigh spent,
The lamp burns low, and through the casement-bars
Grey morning glimmers feebly: yet no change!
Another night, and still no sigh has stirred
That fallen discoloured mouth, no pang relit
Those fixed eyes, quenched by the decaying body,
Like torch-flame choked in dust. While all beside
Was breaking, to the last they held out bright,
As a stronghold where life intrenched itself;
But they are dead nowvery blind and dead:
He will drowse into death without a groan.
My Aureolemy forgotten, ruined Aureole!
The days are gone, are gone! How grand thou wast!
And now not one of those who struck thee down
Poor glorious spiritconcerns him even to stay
And satisfy himself his little hand
Could turn God's image to a livid thing.
Another night, and yet no change! 'T is much
That I should sit by him, and bathe his brow,
And chafe his hands; 't is much: but he will sure
Know me, and look on me, and speak to me
Once morebut only once! His hollow cheek
Looked all night long as though a creeping laugh
At his own state were just about to break
From the dying man: my brain swam, my throat swelled,
And yet I could not turn away. In truth,
They told me how, when first brought here, he seemed
Resolved to live, to lose no faculty;
Thus striving to keep up his shattered strength,
Until they bore him to this stifling cell:
When straight his features fell, an hour made white
The flushed face, and relaxed the quivering limb,
Only the eye remained intense awhile
As though it recognized the tomb-like place,
And then he lay as here he lies.
Ay, here!
Here is earth's noblest, nobly garlanded
Her bravest champion with his well-won prize
Her best achievement, her sublime amends
For countless generations fleeting fast
And followed by no trace;the creature-god
She instances when angels would dispute
The title of her brood to rank with them.
Angels, this is our angel! Those bright forms
We clothe with purple, crown and call to thrones,
Are human, but not his; those are but men
Whom other men press round and kneel before;
Those palaces are dwelt in by mankind;
Higher provision is for him you seek
Amid our pomps and glories: see it here!
Behold earth's paragon! Now, raise thee, clay!
God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that
Even as I watch beside thy tortured child
Unconscious whose hot tears fall fast by him,
So doth thy right hand guide us through the world
Wherein we stumble. God! what shall we say?
How has he sinned? How else should he have done?
Surely he sought thy praisethy praise, for all
He might be busied by the task so much
As half forget awhile its proper end.
Dost thou well, Lord? Thou canst not but prefer
That I should range myself upon his side
How could he stop at every step to set
Thy glory forth? Hadst thou but granted him
Success, thy honour would have crowned success,
A halo round a star. Or, say he erred,
Save him, dear God; it will be like thee: bathe him
In light and life! Thou art not made like us;
We should be wroth in such a case; but thou
Forgivestso, forgive these passionate thoughts
Which come unsought and will not pass away!
I know thee, who hast kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should doubt thy love.
But what am I? Thou madest him and knowest
How he was fashioned. I could never err
That way: the quiet place beside thy feet,
Reserved for me, was ever in my thoughts:
But hethou shouldst have favoured him as well!
Ah! he wakens! Aureole, I am here! 't is Festus!
I cast away all wishes save one wish
Let him but know me, only speak to me!
He mutters; louder and louder; any other
Than I, with brain less laden, could collect
What he pours forth. Dear Aureole, do but look!
Is it talking or singing, this he utters fast?
Misery that he should fix me with his eye,
Quick talking to some other all the while!
If he would husband this wild vehemence
Which frustrates its intent!I heard, I know
I heard my name amid those rapid words.
Oh, he will know me yet! Could I divert
This current, lead it somehow gently back
Into the channels of the past!His eye
Brighter than ever! It must recognize me!
I am Erasmus: I am here to pray
That Paracelsus use his skill for me.
The schools of Paris and of Padua send
These questions for your learning to resolve.
We are your students, noble master: leave
This wretched cell, what business have you here?
Our class awaits you; come to us once more!
(O agony! the utmost I can do
Touches him not; how else arrest his ear?)
I am commissioned . . . I shall craze like him.
Better be mute and see what God shall send.
Paracelsus.
Stay, stay with me!
Festus.
I will; I am come here
To stay with youFestus, you loved of old;
Festus, you know, you must know!
Paracelsus.
Festus! Where's
Aprile, then? Has he not chanted softly
The melodies I heard all night? I could not
Get to him for a cold hand on my breast,
But I made out his music well enough,
O well enough! If they have filled him full
With magical music, as they freight a star
With light, and have remitted all his sin,
They will forgive me too, I too shall know!
Festus.
Festus, your Festus!
Paracelsus.
Ask him if Aprile
Knows as he Lovesif I shall Love and Know?
I try; but that cold hand, like leadso cold!
Festus.
My hand, see!
Paracelsus.
Ah, the curse, Aprile, Aprile!
We get so nearso very, very near!
'T is an old tale: Jove strikes the Titans down,
Not when they set about their mountain-piling
But when another rock would crown the work.
And Phaetondoubtless his first radiant plunge
Astonished mortals, though the gods were calm,
And Jove prepared his thunder: all old tales!
Festus.
And what are these to you?
Paracelsus.
Ay, fiends must laugh
So cruelly, so well! most like I never
Could tread a single pleasure underfoot,
But they were grinning by my side, were chuckling
To see me toil and drop away by flakes!
Hell-spawn! I am glad, most glad, that thus I fail!
Your cunning has o'ershot its aim. One year,
One month, perhaps, and I had served your turn!
You should have curbed your spite awhile. But now,
Who will believe 't was you that held me back?
Listen: there's shame and hissing and contempt,
And none but laughs who names me, none but spits
Measureless scorn upon me, me alone,
The quack, the cheat, the liar,all on me!
And thus your famous plan to sink mankind
In silence and despair, by teaching them
One of their race had probed the inmost truth,
Had done all man could do, yet failed no less
Your wise plan proves abortive. Men despair?
Ha, ha! why, they are hooting the empiric,
The ignorant and incapable fool who rushed
Madly upon a work beyond his wits;
Nor doubt they but the simplest of themselves
Could bring the matter to triumphant issue.
So, pick and choose among them all, accursed!
Try now, persuade some other to slave for you,
To ruin body and soul to work your ends!
No, no; I am the first and last, I think.
Festus.
Dear friend, who are accursed? who has done
Paracelsus.
What have I done? Fiends dare ask that? or you,
Brave men? Oh, you can chime in boldly, backed
By the others! What had you to do, sage peers?
Here stand my rivals; Latin, Arab, Jew,
Greek, join dead hands against me: all I ask
Is, that the world enrol my name with theirs,
And even this poor privilege, it seems,
They range themselves, prepared to disallow.
Only observe! why, fiends may learn from them!
How they talk calmly of my throes, my fierce
Aspirings, terrible watchings, each one claiming
Its price of blood and brain; how they dissect
And sneeringly disparage the few truths
Got at a life's cost; they too hanging the while
About my neck, their lies misleading me
And their dead names browbeating me! Grey crew,
Yet steeped in fresh malevolence from hell,
Is there a reason for your hate? My truths
Have shaken a little the palm about each prince?
Just think, Aprile, all these leering dotards
Were bent on nothing less than to be crowned
As we! That yellow blear-eyed wretch in chief
To whom the rest cringe low with feigned respect,
Galen of Pergamos and hellnay speak
The tale, old man! We met there face to face:
I said the crown should fall from thee. Once more
We meet as in that ghastly vestibule:
Look to my brow! Have I redeemed my pledge?
Festus.
Peace, peace; ah, see!
Paracelsus.
Oh, emptiness of fame!
Oh Persic Zoroaster, lord of stars!
Who said these old renowns, dead long ago,
Could make me overlook the living world
To gaze through gloom at where they stood, indeed,
But stand no longer? What a warm light life
After the shade! In truth, my delicate witch,
My serpent-queen, you did but well to hide
The juggles I had else detected. Fire
May well run harmless o'er a breast like yours!
The cave was not so darkened by the smoke
But that your white limbs dazzled me: oh, white,
And panting as they twinkled, wildly dancing!
I cared not for your passionate gestures then,
But now I have forgotten the charm of charms,
The foolish knowledge which I came to seek,
While I remember that quaint dance; and thus
I am come back, not for those mummeries,
But to love you, and to kiss your little feet
Soft as an ermine's winter coat!
Festus.
A light
Will struggle through these thronging words at last.
As in the angry and tumultuous West
A soft star trembles through the drifting clouds.
These are the strivings of a spirit which hates
So sad a vault should coop it, and calls up
The past to stand between it and its fate.
Were he at Einsiedelnor Michal here!
Paracelsus.
Cruel! I seek her nowI kneelI shriek
I clasp her vesturebut she fades, still fades;
And she is gone; sweet human love is gone!
'T is only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you; they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you
Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep,
And all at once they leave you, and you know them!
We are so fooled, so cheated! Why, even now
I am not too secure against foul play;
The shadows deepen and the walls contract:
No doubt some treachery is going on.
'T is very dusk. Where are we put, Aprile?
Have they left us in the lurch? This murky loathsome
Death-trap, this slaughter-house, is not the hall
In the golden city! Keep by me, Aprile!
There is a hand groping amid the blackness
To catch us. Have the spider-fingers got you,
Poet? Hold on me for your life! If once
They pull you!Hold!
'Tis but a dreamno more!
I have you still; the sun comes out again;
Let us be happy: all will yet go well!
Let us confer: is it not like, Aprile,
That spite of trouble, this ordeal passed,
The value of my labours ascertained,
Just as some stream foams long among the rocks
But after glideth glassy to the sea,
So, full content shall henceforth be my lot?
What think you, poet? Louder! Your clear voice
Vibrates too like a harp-string. Do you ask
How could I still remain on earth, should God
Grant me the great approval which I seek?
I, you, and God can comprehend each other,
But men would murmur, and with cause enough;
For when they saw me, stainless of all sin,
Preserved and sanctified by inward light,
They would complain that comfort, shut from them,
I drank thus unespied; that they live on,
Nor taste the quiet of a constant joy,
For ache and care and doubt and weariness,
While I am calm; help being vouchsafed to me,
And hid from them.'T were best consider that!
You reason well, Aprile; but at least
Let me know this, and die! Is this too much?
I will learn this, if God so please, and die!
If thou shalt please, dear God, if thou shalt please!
We are so weak, we know our motives least
In their confused beginning. If at first
I sought . . . but wherefore bare my heart to thee?
I know thy mercy; and already thoughts
Flock fast about my soul to comfort it,
And intimate I cannot wholly fail,
For love and praise would clasp me willingly
Could I resolve to seek them. Thou art good,
And I should be content. Yetyet first show
I have done wrong in daring! Rather give
The supernatural consciousness of strength
Which fed my youth! Only one hour of that
With thee to helpO what should bar me then!
Lost, lost! Thus things are ordered here! God's creatures,
And yet he takes no pride in us!none, none!
Truly there needs another life to come!
If this be all(I must tell Festus that)
And other life await us notfor one,
I say 't is a poor cheat, a stupid bungle,
A wretched failure. I, for one, protest
Against it, and I hurl it back with scorn.
Well, onward though alone! Small time remains,
And much to do: I must have fruit, must reap
Some profit from my toils. I doubt my body
Will hardly serve me through; while I have laboured
It has decayed; and now that I demand
Its best assistance, it will crumble fast:
A sad thought, a sad fate! How very full
Of wormwood 't is, that just at altar-service,
The rapt hymn rising with the rolling smoke,
When glory dawns and all is at the best,
The sacred fire may flicker and grow faint
And die for want of a wood-piler's help!
Thus fades the flagging body, and the soul
Is pulled down in the overthrow. Well, well
Let men catch every word, let them lose nought
Of what I say; something may yet be done.
They are ruins! Trust me who am one of you!
All ruins, glorious once, but lonely now.
It makes my heart sick to behold you crouch
Beside your desolate fane: the arches dim,
The crumbling columns grand against the moon,
Could I but rear them up once morebut that
May never be, so leave them! Trust me, friends,
Why should you linger here when I have built
A far resplendent temple, all your own?
Trust me, they are but ruins! See, Aprile,
Men will not heed! Yet were I not prepared
With better refuge for them, tongue of mine
Should ne'er reveal how blank their dwelling is:
I would sit down in silence with the rest.
Ha, what? you spit at me, you grin and shriek
Contempt into my earmy ear which drank
God's accents once? you curse me? Why men, men,
I am not formed for it! Those hideous eyes
Will be before me sleeping, waking, praying,
They will not let me even die. Spare, spare me,
Sinning or no, forget that, only spare me
The horrible scorn! You thought I could support it.
But now you see what silly fragile creature
Cowers thus. I am not good nor bad enough,
Not Christ nor Cain, yet even Cain was saved
From Hate like this. Let me but totter back!
Perhaps I shall elude those jeers which creep
Into my very brain, and shut these scorched
Eyelids and keep those mocking faces out.
Listen, Aprile! I am very calm:
Be not deceived, there is no passion here
Where the blood leaps like an imprisoned thing:
I am calm: I will exterminate the race!
Enough of that: 't is said and it shall be.
And now be merry: safe and sound am I
Who broke through their best ranks to get at you.
And such a havoc, such a rout, Aprile!
Festus.
Have you no thought, no memory for me,
Aureole? I am so wretchedmy pure Michal
Is gone, and you alone are left me now,
And even you forget me. Take my hand
Lean on me thus. Do you not know me, Aureole?
Paracelsus.
Festus, my own friend, you are come at last?
As you say, 't is an awful enterprise;
But you believe I shall go through with it:
'T is like you, and I thank you. Thank him for me,
Dear Michal! See how bright St. Saviour's spire
Flames in the sunset; all its figures quaint
Gay in the glancing light: you might conceive them
A troop of yellow-vested white-haired Jews
Bound for their own land where redemption dawns.
Festus.
Not that blest timenot our youth's time, dear God!
Paracelsus.
Hastay! true, I forgetall is done since,
And he is come to judge me. How he speaks,
How calm, how well! yes, it is true, all true;
All quackery; all deceit; myself can laugh
The first at it, if you desire: but still
You know the obstacles which taught me tricks
So foreign to my natureenvy and hate,
Blind opposition, brutal prejudice,
Bald ignorancewhat wonder if I sunk
To humour men the way they most approved?
My cheats were never palmed on such as you,
Dear Festus! I will kneel if you require me,
Impart the meagre knowledge I possess,
Explain its bounded nature, and avow
My insufficiencywhate'er you will:
I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.
But if that cannot be, dear Festus, lay me,
When I shall die, within some narrow grave,
Not by itselffor that would be too proud
But where such graves are thickest; let it look
Nowise distinguished from the hillocks round,
So that the peasant at his brother's bed
May tread upon my own and know it not;
And we shall all be equal at the last,
Or classed according to life's natural ranks,
Fathers, sons, brothers, friendsnot rich, nor wise,
Nor gifted: lay me thus, then say, "He lived
"Too much advanced before his brother men;
"They kept him still in front: 't was for their good
"But yet a dangerous station. It were strange
"That he should tell God he had never ranked
"With men: so, here at least he is a man."
Festus.
That God shall take thee to his breast, dear spirit,
Unto his breast, be sure! and here on earth
Shall splendour sit upon thy name for ever.
Sun! all the heaven is glad for thee: what care
If lower mountains light their snowy phares
At thine effulgence, yet acknowledge not
The source of day? Their theft shall be their bale:
For after-ages shall retrack thy beams,
And put aside the crowd of busy ones
And worship thee alonethe master-mind,
The thinker, the explorer, the creator!
Then, who should sneer at the convulsive throes
With which thy deeds were born, would scorn as well
The sheet of winding subterraneous fire
Which, pent and writhing, sends no less at last
Huge islands up amid the simmering sea.
Behold thy might in me! thou hast infused
Thy soul in mine; and I am grand as thou,
Seeing I comprehend theeI so simple,
Thou so august. I recognize thee first;
I saw thee rise, I watched thee early and late,
And though no glance reveal thou dost accept
My homagethus no less I proffer it,
And bid thee enter gloriously thy rest.
Paracelsus.
Festus!
Festus.
I am for noble Aureole, God!
I am upon his side, come weal or woe.
His portion shall be mine. He has done well.
I would have sinned, had I been strong enough,
As he has sinned. Reward him or I waive
Reward! If thou canst find no place for him,
He shall be king elsewhere, and I will be
His slave for ever. There are two of us.
Paracelsus.
Dear Festus!
Festus.
Here, dear Aureole! ever by you!
Paracelsus.
Nay, speak on, or I dream again. Speak on!
Some story, anythingonly your voice.
I shall dream else. Speak on! ay, leaning so!
Festus.
Thus the Mayne glideth
Where my Love abideth.
Sleep's no softer: it proceeds
On through lawns, on through meads,
On and on, whate'er befall,
Meandering and musical,
Though the ****rd pasturage
Bears not on its shaven ledge
Aught but weeds and waving grasses
To view the river as it passes,
Save here and there a scanty patch
Of primroses too faint to catch
A weary bee.
Paracelsus.
More, more; say on!
Festus.
And scarce it pushes
Its gentle way through strangling rushes
Where the glossy kingfisher
Flutters when noon-heats are near,
Glad the shelving banks to shun,
Red and steaming in the sun,
Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat
Burrows, and the speckled stoat;
Where the quick sandpipers flit
In and out the marl and grit
That seems to breed them, brown as they:
Nought disturbs its quiet way,
Save some lazy stork that springs,
Trailing it with legs and wings,
Whom the shy fox from the hill
Rouses, creep he ne'er so still.
Paracelsus.
My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words;
Its darkness passes, which nought else could touch:
Like some dark snake that force may not expel,
Which glideth out to music sweet and low.
What were you doing when your voice broke through
A chaos of ugly images? You, indeed!
Are you alone here?
Festus.
All alone: you know me?
This cell?
Paracelsus.
An unexceptionable vault:
Good brick and stone: the bats kept out, the rats
Kept in: a snug nook: how should I mistake it?
Festus.
But wherefore am I here?
Paracelsus.
Ah, well remembered!
Why, for a purposefor a purpose, Festus!
'T is like me: here I trifle while time fleets,
And this occasion, lost, will ne'er return.
You are here to be instructed. I will tell
God's message; but I have so much to say,
I fear to leave half out. All is confused
No doubt; but doubtless you will learn in time.
He would not else have brought you here: no doubt
I shall see clearer soon.
Festus.
Tell me but this
You are not in despair?
Paracelsus.
I? and for what?
Festus.
Alas, alas! he knows not, as I feared!
Paracelsus.
What is it you would ask me with that earnest
Dear searching face?
Festus.
How feel you, Aureole?
Paracelsus.
Well:
Well. 'T is a strange thing: I am dying, Festus,
And now that fast the storm of life subsides,
I first perceive how great the whirl has been.
I was calm then, who am so dizzy now
Calm in the thick of the tempest, but no less
A partner of its motion and mixed up
With its career. The hurricane is spent,
And the good boat speeds through the brightening weather;
But is it earth or sea that heaves below?
The gulf rolls like a meadow-swell, o'erstrewn
With ravaged boughs and remnants of the shore;
And now some slet, loosened from the land,
Swims past with all its trees, sailing to ocean;
And now the air is full of uptorn canes,
Light strippings from the fan-trees, tamarisks
Unrooted, with their birds still clinging to them,
All high in the wind. Even so my varied life
Drifts by me; I am young, old, happy, sad,
Hoping, desponding, acting, taking rest,
And all at once: that is, those past conditions
Float back at once on me. If I select
Some special epoch from the crowd, 't is but
To will, and straight the rest dissolve away,
And only that particular state is present
With all its long-forgotten circumstance
Distinct and vivid as at firstmyself
A careless looker-on and nothing more,
Indifferent and amused, but nothing more.
And this is death: I understand it all.
New being waits me; new perceptions must
Be born in me before I plunge therein;
Which last is Death's affair; and while I speak,
Minute by minute he is filling me
With power; and while my foot is on the threshold
Of boundless lifethe doors unopened yet,
All preparations not complete within
I turn new knowledge upon old events,
And the effect is . . . but I must not tell;
It is not lawful. Your own turn will come
One day. Wait, Festus! You will die like me.
Festus.
'T is of that past life that I burn to hear.
Paracelsus.
You wonder it engages me just now?
In truth, I wonder too. What 's life to me?
Where'er I look is fire, where'er I listen
Music, and where I tend bliss evermore.
Yet how can I refrain? 'T is a refined
Delight to view those chances,one last view.
I am so near the perils I escape,
That I must play with them and turn them over,
To feel how fully they are past and gone.
Still, it is like, some further cause exists
For this peculiar moodsome hidden purpose;
Did I not tell you something of it, Festus?
I had it fast, but it has somehow slipt
Away from me; it will return anon.
Festus.
(Indeed his cheek seems young again, his voice
Complete with its old tones: that little laugh
Concluding every phrase, with upturned eye,
As though one stooped above his head to whom
He looked for confirmation and approval,
Where was it gone so long, so well preserved?
Then, the fore-finger pointing as he speaks,
Like one who traces in an open book
The matter he declares; 't is many a year
Since I remarked it last: and this in him,
But now a ghastly wreck!)
And can it be,
Dear Aureole, you have then found out at last
That worldly things are utter vanity?
That man is made for weakness, and should wait
In patient ignorance, till God appoint . . .
Paracelsus.
Ha, the purpose: the true purpose: that is it!
How could I fail to apprehend! You here,
I thus! But no more trifling: I see all,
I know all: my last mission shall be done
If strength suffice. No trifling! Stay; this posture
Hardly befits one thus about to speak:
I will arise.
Festus.
Nay, Aureole, are you wild?
You cannot leave your couch.
Paracelsus.
No help; no help;
Not even your hand. So! there, I stand once more!
Speak from a couch? I never lectured thus.
My gownthe scarlet lined with fur; now put
The chain about my neck; my signet-ring
Is still upon my hand, I thinkeven so;
Last, my good sword; ah, trusty Azoth, leapest
Beneath thy master's grasp for the last time?
This couch shall be my throne: I bid these walls
Be consecrate, this wretched cell become
A shrine, for here God speaks to men through me.
Now, Festus, I am ready to begin.
Festus.
I am dumb with wonder.
Paracelsus.
Listen, therefore, Festus!
There will be time enough, but none to spare.
I must content myself with telling only
The most important points. You doubtless feel
That I am happy, Festus; very happy.
Festus.
'T is no delusion which uplifts him thus!
Then you are pardoned, Aureole, all your sin?
Paracelsus.
Ay, pardoned: yet why pardoned?
Festus.
'T is God's praise
That man is bound to seek, and you . . .
Paracelsus.
Have lived!
We have to live alone to set forth well
God's praise. 'T is true, I sinned much, as I thought,
And in effect need mercy, for I strove
To do that very thing; but, do your best
Or worst, praise rises, and will rise for ever
Pardon from him, because of praise denied
Who calls me to himself to exalt himself?
He might laugh as I laugh!
Festus.
But all comes
To the same thing. 'T is fruitless for mankind
To fret themselves with what concerns them not;
They are no use that way: they should lie down
Content as God has made them, nor go mad
In thriveless cares to better what is ill.
Paracelsus.
No, no; mistake me not; let me not work
More harm than I have worked! This is my case:
If I go joyous back to God, yet bring
No offering, if I render up my soul
Without the fruits it was ordained to bear,
If I appear the better to love God
For sin, as one who has no claim on him,-
Be not deceived! It may be surely thus
With me, while higher prizes still await
The mortal persevering to the end.
Beside I am not all so valueless:
I have been something, though too soon I left
Following the instincts of that happy time.
Festus.
What happy time? For God's sake, for man's sake,
What time was happy? All I hope to know
That answer will decide. What happy time?
Paracelsus.
When but the time I vowed myself to man?
Festus.
Great God, thy judgments are inscrutable!
Paracelsus.
Yes, it was in me; I was born for it
I, Paracelsus: it was mine by right.
Doubtless a searching and impetuous soul
Might learn from its own motions that some task
Like this awaited it about the world;
Might seek somewhere in this blank life of ours
For fit delights to stay its longings vast;
And, grappling Nature, so prevail on her
To fill the creature full she dared thus frame
Hungry for joy; and, bravely tyrannous,
Grow in demand, still craving more and more,
And make each joy conceded prove a pledge
Of other joy to followbating nought
Of its desires, still seizing fresh pretence
To turn the knowledge and the rapture wrung
As an extreme, last boon, from destiny,
Into occasion for new coyetings,
New strifes, new triumphs:doubtless a strong soul,
Alone, unaided might attain to this,
So glorious is our nature, so august
Man's inborn uninstructed impulses,
His naked spirit so majestical!
But this was born in me; I was made so;
Thus much time saved: the feverish appeties,
The tumult of unproved desire, the unaimed
Uncertain yearnings, aspirations blind,
Distrust, mistake, and all that ends in tears
Were saved me; thus I entered on my course.
You may be sure I was not all exempt
From human trouble; just so much of doubt
As bade me plant a surer foot upon
The sun-road, kept my eye unruined 'mid
The fierce and flashing splendour, set my heart
Trembling so much as warned me I stood there
On sufferancenot to idly gaze, but cast
Light on a darkling race; save for that doubt,
I stood at first where all aspire at last
To stand: the secret of the world was mine.
I knew, I felt, (perception unexpressed,
Uncomprehended by our narrow thought,
But somehow felt and known in every shift
And change in the spirit,nay, in every pore
Of the body, even,)what God is, what we are,
What life ishow God tastes an infinite joy
In infinite waysone everlasting bliss,
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds; in whom is life for evermore,
Yet whom existence in its lowest form
Includes; where dwells enjoyment there is he;
With still a flying point of bliss remote,
A happiness in store afar, a sphere
Of distant glory in full view; thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.
The centre-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate,
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face;
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms
Like chrysalids impatient for the air,
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run
Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plainand God renews
His ancient rapture. Thus he dwells in all,
From life's minute beginnings, up at last
To manthe consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere
Of life: whose attributes had here and there
Been scattered o'er the visible world before,
Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant
To be united in some wondrous whole,
Imperfect qualities throughout creation,
Suggesting some one creature yet to make,
Some point where all those scattered rays should meet
Convergent in the faculties of man.
Powerneither put forth blindly, nor controlled
Calmly by perfect knowledge; to be used
At risk, inspired or checked by hope and fear:
Knowledgenot intuition, but the slow
Uncertain fruit of an enhancing toil,
Strengthened by love: lovenot serenely pure,
But strong from weakness, like a chance-sown plant
Which, cast on stubborn soil, puts forth changed buds
And softer stains, unknown in happier climes;
Love which endures and doubts and is oppressed
And cherished, suffering much and much sustained,
And blind, oft-failing, yet believing love,
A half-enlightened, often-chequered trust:
Hints and previsions of which faculties,
Are strewn confusedly everywhere about
The inferior natures, and all lead up higher,
All shape out dimly the superior race,
The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,
And man appears at last. So far the seal
Is put on life; one stage of being complete,
One scheme wound up: and from the grand result
A supplementary reflux of light,
Illustrates all the inferior grades, explains
Each back step in the circle. Not alone
For their possessor dawn those qualities,
But the new glory mixes with the heaven
And earth; man, once descried, imprints for ever
His presence on all lifeless things: the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
Never a senseless gust now man is born.
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head: no bird
Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above
That let light in upon the gloomy woods,
A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top,
Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye.
The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour,
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:
And this to fill us with regard for man.
With apprehension of his passing worth,
Desire to work his proper nature out,
And ascertain his rank and final place,
For these things tend still upward, progress is
The law of life, man is not Man as yet.
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
While only here and there a star dispels
The darkness, here and there a towering mind
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host
Is out at once to the despair of night,
When all mankind alike is perfected,
Equal in full-blown powersthen, not till then,
I say, begins man's general infancy.
For wherefore make account of feverish starts
Of restless members of a dormant whole,
Impatient nerves which quiver while the body
Slumbers as in a grave? Oh long ago
The brow was twitched, the tremulous lids astir,
The peaceful mouth disturbed; half-uttered speech
Ruffled the lip, and then the teeth were set,
The breath drawn sharp, the strong right-hand clenched stronger,
As it would pluck a lion by the jaw;
The glorious creature laughed out even in sleep!
But when full roused, each giant-limb awake,
Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date,thus wholly roused,
What he achieves shall be set down to him.
When all the race is perfected alike
As man, that is; all tended to mankind,
And, man produced, all has its end thus far:
But in completed man begins anew
A tendency to God. Prognostics told
Man's near approach; so in man's self arise
August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever on before
In that eternal circle life pursues.
For men begin to pass their nature's bound,
And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant
Their proper joys and griefs; they grow too great
For narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade
Before the unmeasured thirst for good: while peace
Rises within them ever more and more.
Such men are even now upon the earth,
Serene amid the half-formed creatures round
Who should be saved by them and joined with them.
Such was my task, and I was born to it
Free, as I said but now, from much that chains
Spirits, high-dowered but limited and vexed
By a divided and delusive aim,
A shadow mocking a reality
Whose truth avails not wholly to disperse
The flitting mimic called up by itself,
And so remains perplexed and nigh put out
By its fantastic fellow's wavering gleam.
I, from the first, was never cheated thus;
I never fashioned out a fancied good
Distinct from man's; a service to be done,
A glory to be ministered unto
With powers put forth at man's expense, withdrawn
From labouring in his behalf; a strength
Denied that might avail him. I cared not
Lest his success ran counter to success
Elsewhere: for God is glorified in man,
And to man's glory vowed I soul and limb.
Yet, constituted thus, and thus endowed,
I failed: I gazed on power till I grew blind.
Power; I could not take my eyes from that:
That only, I thought, should be preserved, increased
At any risk, displayed, struck out at once-
The sign and note and character of man.
I saw no use in the past: only a scene
Of degradation, ugliness and tears,
The record of disgraces best forgotten,
A sullen page in human chronicles
Fit to erase. I saw no cause why man
Should not stand all-sufficient even now,
Or why his annals should be forced to tell
That once the tide of light, about to break
Upon the world, was sealed within its spring:
I would have had one day, one moment's space,
Change man's condition, push each slumbering claim
Of mastery o'er the elemental world
At once to full maturity, then roll
Oblivion o'er the work, and hide from man
What night had ushered morn. Not so, dear child
Of after-days, wilt thou reject the past
Big with deep warnings of the proper tenure
By which thou hast the earth: for thee the present
Shall have distinct and trembling beauty, seen
Beside that past's own shade when, in relief,
Its brightness shall stand out: nor yet on thee
Shall burst the future, as successive zones
Of several wonder open on some spirit
Flying secure and glad from heaven to heaven:
But thou shalt painfully attain to joy,
While hope and fear and love shall keep thee man!
All this was hid from me: as one by one
My dreams grew dim, my wide aims circumscribed,
As actual good within my reach decreased,
While obstacles sprung up this way and that
To keep me from effecting half the sum,
Small as it proved; as objects, mean within
The primal aggregate, seemed, even the least,
Itself a match for my concentred strength
What wonder if I saw no way to shun
Despair? The power I sought for man, seemed God's.
In this conjuncture, as I prayed to die,
A strange adventure made me know, one sin
Had spotted my career from its uprise;
I saw Aprilemy Aprile there!
And as the poor melodious wretch disburthened
His heart, and moaned his weakness in my ear,
I learned my own deep error; love's undoing
Taught me the worth of love in man's estate,
And what proportion love should hold with power
In his right constitution; love preceding
Power, and with much power, always much more love;
Love still too straitened in his present means,
And earnest for new power to set love free.
I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned:
And thus, when men received with stupid wonder
My first revealings, would have worshipped me,
And I despised and loathed their proffered praise
When, with awakened eyes, they took revenge
For past credulity in casting shame
On my real knowledge, and I hated them
It was not strange I saw no good in man,
To overbalance all the wear and waste
Of faculties, displayed in vain, but born
To prosper in some better sphere: and why?
In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success; to sympathize, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts;
All with a touch of nobleness, despite
Their error, upward tending all though weak,
Like plants in mines which never saw the sun,
But dream of him, and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him.
All this I knew not, and I failed. Let men
Regard me, and the poet dead long ago
Who loved too rashly; and shape forth a third
And better-tempered spirit, warned by both:
As from the over-radiant star too mad
To drink the life-springs, beamless thence itself
And the dark orb which borders the abyss,
Ingulfed in icy night,might have its course
A temperate and equidistant world.
Meanwhile, I have done well, though not all well.
As yet men cannot do without contempt;
'T is for their good, and therefore fit awhile
That they reject the weak, and scorn the false,
Rather than praise the strong and true, in me:
But after, they will know me. If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
You understand me? I have said enough?
Festus.
Now die, dear Aureole!
Paracelsus.
Festus, let my hand
This hand, lie in your own, my own true friend!
Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!
Festus.
And this was Paracelsus!
~ Robert Browning, Paracelsus - Part V - Paracelsus Attains
,#NFDB
861: Ilion
Book I: The Book of the Herald
Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,
Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,
Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine.
Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness
Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty,
All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother.
Out of the formless vision of Night with its look on things hidden
Given to the gaze of the azure she lay in her garment of greenness,
Wearing light on her brow. In the dawn-ray lofty and voiceless
Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks into diamond lustres,
Ida first of the hills with the ranges silent beyond her
Watching the dawn in their giant companies, as since the ages
First began they had watched her, upbearing Time on their summits.
Troas cold on her plain awaited the boon of the sunshine.
There, like a hope through an emerald dream sole-pacing for ever,
Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his currents,
Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds and the grasses.
Headlong, impatient of Space and its boundaries, Time and its slowness,
Xanthus clamoured aloud as he ran to the far-surging waters,
Joining his call to the many-voiced roar of the mighty Aegean,
Answering Oceans limitless cry like a whelp to its parent.
Forests looked up through their rifts, the ravines grew aware of their shadows.
Closer now gliding glimmered the golden feet of the goddess.
Over the hills and the headlands spreading her garment of splendour,
Fateful she came with her eyes impartial looking on all things,
Bringer to man of the day of his fortune and day of his downfall.
Full of her luminous errand, careless of eve and its weeping,
Fateful she paused unconcerned above Ilions mysteried greatness,
Domes like shimmering tongues of the crystal flames of the morning,
Opalesque rhythm-line of tower-tops, notes of the lyre of the sungod.
High over all that a nation had built and its love and its laughter,
Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market and temple,
Looking on men who must die and women destined to sorrow,
Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter,
Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals,
Deep in the invisible air that folds in the race and its morrows
Fixed it, and passed on smiling the smile of the griefless and deathless,
Dealers of death though death they know not, who in the morning
Scatter the seed of the event for the reaping ready at nightfall.
Over the brooding of plains and the agelong trance of the summits
Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal,
And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sungod,
Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas.
Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether,
Swiftly when Life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift,
And, with the choice that has chanced or the fate man has called and now suffers
Weighted, the moment travels driving the past towards the future,
Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it carries.
Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.
Earth sees not; lifes clamour deafens the ear of the spirit:
Man knows not; least knows the messenger chosen for the summons.
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his hearts ignorant whisper,
Whistle of winds in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature.
Now too the messenger hastened driving the car of the errand:
Even while dawn was a gleam in the east, he had cried to his coursers.
Half yet awake in lights turrets started the scouts of the morning
Hearing the jar of the wheels and the throb of the hooves exultation,
Hooves of the horses of Greece as they galloped to Phrygian Troya.
Proudly they trampled through Xanthus thwarting the foam of his anger,
Whinnying high as in scorn crossed Simois tangled currents,
Xanthus reed-girdled twin, the gentle and sluggard river.
One and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was he, shrunken,
Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with strength Cyclopean
Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals,
Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.
Ilion, couchant, saw him arrive from the sea and the darkness.
Heard mid the faint slow stirrings of life in the sleep of the city,
Rapid there neared a running of feet, and the cry of the summons
Beat round the doors that guarded the domes of the splendour of Priam.
Wardens charged with the night, ye who stand in Laomedons gateway,
Waken the Ilian kings. Talthybius, herald of Argos,
Parleying stands at the portals of Troy in the grey of the dawning.
High and insistent the call. In the dimness and hush of his chamber
Charioted far in his dreams amid visions of glory and terror,
Scenes of a vivider world,though blurred and deformed in the brain-cells,
Vague and inconsequent, there full of colour and beauty and greatness,
Suddenly drawn by the pull of the conscious thread of the earth-bond
And of the needs of Time and the travail assigned in the transience
Warned by his body, Deiphobus, reached in that splendid remoteness,
Touched through the nerve-ways of life that branch to the brain of the dreamer,
Heard the terrestrial call and slumber startled receded
Sliding like dew from the mane of a lion. Reluctant he travelled
Back from the light of the fields beyond death, from the wonderful kingdoms
Where he had wandered a soul among souls in the countries beyond us,
Free from the toil and incertitude, free from the struggle and danger:
Now, compelled, he returned from the respite given to the time-born,
Called to the strife and the wounds of the earth and the burden of daylight.
He from the carven couch upreared his giant stature.
Haste-spurred he laved his eyes and regained earths memories, haste-spurred
Donning apparel and armour strode through the town of his fathers,
Watched by her gods on his way to his fate, towards Pergamas portals.
Nine long years had passed and the tenth now was wearily ending,
Years of the wrath of the gods, and the leaguer still threatened the ramparts
Since through a tranquil morn the ships came past Tenedos sailing
And the first Argive fell slain as he leaped on the Phrygian beaches;
Still the assailants attacked, still fought back the stubborn defenders.
When the reward is withheld and endlessly leng thens the labour,
Weary of fruitless toil grows the transient heart of the mortal.
Weary of battle the invaders warring hearthless and homeless
Prayed to the gods for release and return to the land of their fathers:
Weary of battle the Phrygians beset in their beautiful city
Prayed to the gods for an end of the danger and mortal encounter.
Long had the high-beached ships forgotten their measureless ocean.
Greece seemed old and strange to her children camped on the beaches,
Old like a life long past one remembers hardly believing
But as a dream that has happened, but as the tale of another.
Time with his tardy touch and Nature changing our substance
Slowly had dimmed the faces loved and the scenes once cherished:
Yet was the dream still dear to them longing for wife and for children,
Longing for hearth and glebe in the far-off valleys of Hellas.
Always like waves that swallow the shingles, lapsing, returning,
Tide of the battle, race of the onset relentlessly thundered
Over the Phrygian corn-fields. Trojan wrestled with Argive,
Caria, Lycia, Thrace and the war-lord mighty Achaia
Joined in the clasp of the fight. Death, panic and wounds and disaster,
Glory of conquest and glory of fall, and the empty hearth-side,
Weeping and fortitude, terror and hope and the pang of remembrance,
Anguish of hearts, the lives of the warriors, the strength of the nations
Thrown were like weights into Destinys scales, but the balance wavered
Pressed by invisible hands. For not only the mortal fighters,
Heroes half divine whose names are like stars in remoteness,
Triumphed and failed and were winds or were weeds on the dance of the surges,
But from the peaks of Olympus and shimmering summits of Ida
Gleaming and clanging the gods of the antique ages descended.
Hidden from human knowledge the brilliant shapes of Immortals
Mingled unseen in the mellay, or sometimes, marvellous, maskless,
Forms of undying beauty and power that made tremble the heart-strings
Parting their deathless secrecy crossed through the borders of vision,
Plain as of old to the demigods out of their glory emerging,
Heard by mortal ears and seen by the eyeballs that perish.
Mighty they came from their spaces of freedom and sorrowless splendour.
Sea-vast, trailing the azure hem of his clamorous waters,
Blue-lidded, maned with the Night, Poseidon smote for the future,
Earth-shaker who with his trident releases the coils of the Dragon,
Freeing the forces unborn that are locked in the caverns of Nature.
Calm and unmoved, upholding the Word that is Fate and the order
Fixed in the sight of a Will foreknowing and silent and changeless,
Hera sent by Zeus and Athene lifting his aegis
Guarded the hidden decree. But for Ilion, loud as the surges,
Ares impetuous called to the fire in mens hearts, and his passion
Woke in the shadowy depths the forms of the Titan and demon;
Dumb and coerced by the grip of the gods in the abyss of the being,
Formidable, veiled they sit in the grey subconscient darkness
Watching the sleep of the snake-haired Erinnys. Miracled, haloed,
Seer and magician and prophet who beholds what the thought cannot witness,
Lifting the godhead within us to more than a human endeavour,
Slayer and saviour, thinker and mystic, leaped from his sun-peaks
Guarding in Ilion the wall of his mysteries Delphic Apollo.
Heavens strengths divided swayed in the whirl of the Earth-force.
All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages;
Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure;
Goal seems there none for the ball that is chased throughout Time by the Fate-teams;
Evil once ended renews and no issue comes out of living:
Only an Eye unseen can distinguish the thread of its workings.
Such seemed the rule of the pastime of Fate on the plains of the Troad;
All went backwards and forwards tossed in the swing of the death-game.
Vain was the toil of the heroes, the blood of the mighty was squandered,
Spray as of surf on the cliffs when it moans unappeased, unrequited
Age after fruitless age. Day hunted the steps of the nightfall;
Joy succeeded to grief; defeat only greatened the vanquished,
Victory offered an empty delight without guerdon or profit.
End there was none of the effort and end there was none of the failure.
Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate measure
Faced and turned as a man and a maiden trampling the grasses
Face and turn and they laugh in their joy of the dance and each other.
These were gods and they trampled lives. But though Time is immortal,
Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish ends like the rapture.
Artists of Nature content with their work in the plan of the transience,
Beautiful, deathless, august, the Olympians turned from the carnage,
Leaving the battle already decided, leaving the heroes
Slain in their minds, Troy burned, Greece left to her glory and downfall.
Into their heavens they rose up mighty like eagles ascending
Fanning the world with their wings. As the great to their luminous mansions
Turn from the cry and the strife, forgetting the wounded and fallen,
Calm they repose from their toil and incline to the joy of the banquet,
Watching the feet of the wine-bearers rosily placed on the marble,
Filling their hearts with ease, so they to their sorrowless ether
Passed from the wounded earth and its air that is ploughed with mens anguish;
Calm they reposed and their hearts inclined to the joy and the silence.
Lifted was the burden laid on our wills by their starry presence:
Man was restored to his smallness, the world to its inconscient labour.
Life felt a respite from height, the winds breathed freer delivered;
Light was released from their blaze and the earth was released from their greatness.
But their immortal content from the struggle titanic departed.
Vacant the noise of the battle roared like the sea on the shingles;
Wearily hunted the spears their quarry; strength was disheartened;
Silence increased with the march of the months on the tents of the leaguer.
But not alone on the Achaians the steps of the moments fell heavy;
Slowly the shadow deepened on Ilion mighty and scornful:
Dragging her days went by; in the rear of the hearts of her people
Something that knew what they dared not know and the mind would not utter,
Something that smote at her soul of defiance and beauty and laughter,
Darkened the hours. For Doom in her sombre and giant uprising
Neared, assailing the skies: the sense of her lived in all pastimes;
Time was pursued by unease and a terror woke in the midnight:
Even the ramparts felt her, stones that the gods had erected.
Now no longer she dallied and played, but bounded and hastened,
Seeing before her the end and, imagining massacre calmly,
Laughed and admired the flames and rejoiced in the cry of the captives.
Under her, dead to the watching immortals, Deiphobus hastened
Clanging in arms through the streets of the beautiful insolent city,
Brilliant, a gleaming husk but empty and left by the daemon.
Even as a star long extinguished whose light still travels the spaces,
Seen in its form by men, but itself goes phantom-like fleeting
Void and null and dark through the uncaring infinite vastness,
So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from the Real.
Timeless its vision of Time creates the hour by things coming.
Borne on a force from the past and no more by a power for the future
Mighty and bright was his body, but shadowy the shape of his spirit
Only an eidolon seemed of the being that had lived in him, fleeting
Vague like a phantom seen by the dim Acherontian waters.
But to the guardian towers that watched over Pergamas gateway
Out of the waking city Deiphobus swiftly arriving
Called, and swinging back the huge gates slowly, reluctant,
Flung Troy wide to the entering Argive. Ilions portals
Parted admitting her destiny, then with a sullen and iron
Cry they closed. Mute, staring, grey like a wolf descended
Old Talthybius, propping his steps on the staff of his errand;
Feeble his body, but fierce still his glance with the fire within him;
Speechless and brooding he gazed on the hated and coveted city.
Suddenly, seeking heaven with her buildings hewn as for Titans,
Marvellous, rhythmic, a child of the gods with marble for raiment,
Smiting the vision with harmony, splendid and mighty and golden,
Ilion stood up around him entrenched in her giant defences.
Strength was uplifted on strength and grandeur supported by grandeur;
Beauty lay in her lap. Remote, hieratic and changeless,
Filled with her deeds and her dreams her gods looked out on the Argive,
Helpless and dumb with his hate as he gazed on her, they too like mortals
Knowing their centuries past, not knowing the morrow before them.
Dire were his eyes upon Troya the beautiful, his face like a doom-mask:
All Greece gazed in them, hated, admired, grew afraid, grew relentless.
But to the Greek Deiphobus cried and he turned from his passion
Fixing his ominous eyes with the god in them straight on the Trojan:
Messenger, voice of Achaia, wherefore confronting the daybreak
Comest thou driving thy car from the sleep of the tents that besiege us?
Fateful, I deem, was the thought that, conceived in the silence of midnight,
Raised up thy aged limbs from the couch of their rest in the stillness,
Thoughts of a mortal but forged by the Will that uses our members
And of its promptings our speech and our acts are the tools and the image.
Oft from the veil and the shadow they leap out like stars in their brightness,
Lights that we think our own, yet they are but tokens and counters,
Signs of the Forces that flow through us serving a Power that is secret.
What in the dawning bringst thou to Troya the mighty and dateless
Now in the ending of Time when the gods are weary of struggle?
Sends Agamemnon challenge or courtesy, Greek, to the Trojans?
High like the northwind answered the voice of the doom from Achaia:
Trojan Deiphobus, daybreak, silence of night and the evening
Sink and arise and even the strong sun rests from his splendour.
Not for the servant is rest nor Time is his, only his death-pyre.
I have not come from the monarch of men or the armoured assembly
Held on the wind-swept marge of the thunder and laughter of ocean.
One in his singleness greater than kings and multitudes sends me.
I am a voice out of Phthia, I am the will of the Hellene.
Peace in my right I bring to you, death in my left hand. Trojan,
Proudly receive them, honour the gifts of the mighty Achilles.
Death accept, if Ate deceives you and Doom is your lover,
Peace if your fate can turn and the god in you chooses to hearken.
Full is my heart and my lips are impatient of speech undelivered.
It was not made for the streets or the market, nor to be uttered
Meanly to common ears, but where counsel and majesty harbour
Far from the crowd in the halls of the great and to wisdom and foresight
Secrecy whispers, there I will speak among Ilions princes.
Envoy, answered the Laomedontian, voice of Achilles,
Vain is the offer of peace that sets out with a threat for its prelude.
Yet will we hear thee. Arise who are fleetest of foot in the gateway,
Thou, Thrasymachus, haste. Let the domes of the mansion of Ilus
Wake to the bruit of the Hellene challenge. Summon Aeneas.
Even as the word sank back into stillness, doffing his mantle
Started to run at the bidding a swift-footed youth of the Trojans
First in the race and the battle, Thrasymachus son of Aretes.
He in the dawn disappeared into swiftness. Deiphobus slowly,
Measuring Fate with his thoughts in the troubled vasts of his spirit,
Back through the stir of the city returned to the house of his fathers,
Taming his mighty stride to the pace infirm of the Argive.
But with the god in his feet Thrasymachus rapidly running
Came to the halls in the youth of the wonderful city by Ilus
Built for the joy of the eye; for he rested from war and, triumphant,
Reigned adored by the prostrate nations. Now when all ended,
Last of its mortal possessors to walk in its flowering gardens,
Great Anchises lay in that luminous house of the ancients
Soothing his restful age, the far-warring victor Anchises,
High Bucoleons son and the father of Rome by a goddess;
Lonely and vagrant once in his boyhood divine upon Ida
White Aphrodite ensnared him and she loosed her ambrosial girdle
Seeking a mortals love. On the threshold Thrasymachus halted
Looking for servant or guard, but felt only a loneness of slumber
Drawing the souls sight within away from its life and things human;
Soundless, unheeding, the vacant corridors fled into darkness.
He to the shades of the house and the dreams of the echoing rafters
Trusted his high-voiced call, and from chambers still dim in their twilight
Strong Aeneas armoured and mantled, leonine striding,
Came, Anchises son; for the dawn had not found him reposing,
But in the night he had left his couch and the clasp of Cresa,
Rising from sleep at the call of his spirit that turned to the waters
Prompted by Fate and his mother who guided him, white Aphrodite.
Still with the impulse of speed Thrasymachus greeted Aeneas:
Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top.
Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the morning,
Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we can see it,
Glows on their anvils of destiny, clang we can hear of their hammers.
Something they forge there sitting unknown in the silence eternal,
Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose who are masters
Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out their iron caprices.
Troy is their stage and Argos their background; we are their puppets.
Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. Action and impulse,
Yearning and thought are their engines, our will is their shadow and helper.
Now too, deeming he comes with a purpose framed by a mortal,
Shaft of their will they have shot from the bow of the Grecian leaguer,
Lashing themselves at his steeds, Talthybius sent by Achilles.
Busy the gods are always, Thrasymachus son of Aretes,
Weaving Fate on their looms, and yesterday, now and tomorrow
Are but the stands they have made with Space and Time for their timber,
Frame but the dance of their shuttle. What eye unamazed by their workings
Ever can pierce where they dwell and uncover their far-stretching purpose?
Silent they toil, they are hid in the clouds, they are wrapped with the midnight.
Yet to Apollo I pray, the Archer friendly to mortals,
Yet to the rider on Fate I abase myself, wielder of thunder,
Evil and doom to avert from my fatherland. All night Morpheus,
He who with shadowy hands heaps error and truth upon mortals,
Stood at my pillow with images. Dreaming I erred like a phantom
Helpless in Ilions streets with the fire and the foeman around me.
Red was the smoke as it mounted triumphant the house-top of Priam,
Clang of the arms of the Greeks was in Troya, and thwarting the clangour
Voices were crying and calling me over the violent Ocean
Borne by the winds of the West from a land where Hesperus harbours.
Brooding they ceased, for their thoughts grew heavy upon them and voiceless.
Then, in a farewell brief and unthought and unconscious of meaning,
Parting they turned to their tasks and their lives now close but soon severed:
Destined to perish even before his perishing nation,
Back to his watch at the gate sped Thrasymachus rapidly running;
Large of pace and swift, but with eyes absorbed and unseeing,
Driven like a car of the gods by the whip of his thoughts through the highways,
Turned to his mighty future the hero born of a goddess.
One was he chosen to ascend into greatness through fall and disaster,
Loser of his world by the will of a heaven that seemed ruthless and adverse,
Founder of a newer and greater world by daring adventure.
Now, from the citadels rise with the townships crowding below it
High towards a pondering of domes and the mystic Palladium climbing,
Fronted with the morning ray and joined by the winds of the ocean,
Fate-weighed up Troys slope strode musing strong Aeneas.
Under him silent the slumbering roofs of the city of Ilus
Dreamed in the light of the dawn; above watched the citadel, sleepless
Lonely and strong like a goddess white-limbed and bright on a hill-top,
Looking far out at the sea and the foe and the prowling of danger.
Over the brow he mounted and saw the palace of Priam,
Home of the gods of the earth, Laomedons marvellous vision
Held in the thought that accustomed his will to unearthly achievement
And in the blaze of his spirit compelling heaven with its greatness,
Dreamed by the harp of Apollo, a melody caught into marble.
Out of his mind it arose like an epic canto by canto;
Each of its halls was a strophe, its chambers lines of an epode,
Victor chant of Ilions destiny. Absent he entered,
Voiceless with thought, the brilliant megaron crowded with paintings,
Paved with a splendour of marble, and saw Deiphobus seated,
Son of the ancient house by the opulent hearth of his fathers,
And at his side like a shadow the grey and ominous Argive.
Happy of light like a lustrous star when it welcomes the morning,
Brilliant, beautiful, glamoured with gold and a fillet of gem-fire,
Paris, plucked from the song and the lyre by the Grecian challenge,
Came with the joy in his face and his eyes that Fate could not alter.
Ever a child of the dawn at play near a turn of the sun-roads,
Facing destinys look with the careless laugh of a comrade,
He with his vision of delight and beauty brightening the earth-field
Passed through its peril and grief on his way to the ambiguous Shadow.
Last from her chamber of sleep where she lay in the Ilian mansion
Far in the heart of the house with the deep-bosomed daughters of Priam,
Noble and tall and erect in a nimbus of youth and of glory,
Claiming the world and life as a fief of her strength and her courage,
Dawned through a doorway that opened to distant murmurs and laughter,
Capturing the eye like a smile or a sunbeam, Penthesilea.
She from the threshold cried to the herald, crossing the marble,
Regal and fleet, with her voice that was mighty and dire in its sweetness.
What with such speed has impelled from the wind-haunted beaches of Troas,
Herald, thy car though the sun yet hesitates under the mountains?
Comest thou humbler to Troy, Talthybius, now than thou camest
Once when the streams of my East sang low to my ear, not this Ocean
Loud, and I roamed in my mountains uncalled by the voice of Apollo?
Bringest thou dulcet-eyed peace or, sweeter to Penthesilea,
Challenge of war when the spears fall thick on the shields of the fighters,
Lightly the wheels leap onward chanting the anthem of Ares,
Death is at work in his fields and the heart is enamoured of danger?
What says Odysseus, the baffled Ithacan? what Agamemnon?
Are they then weary of war who were rapid and bold and triumphant,
Now that their gods are reluctant, now victory darts not from heaven
Down from the clouds above Ida directing the luminous legions
Armed by Fate, now Pallas forgets, now Poseidon slumbers?
Bronze were their throats to the battle like bugles blaring in chorus;
Mercy they knew not, but shouted and ravened and ran to the slaughter
Eager as hounds when they chase, till a woman met them and stayed them,
Loud my war-shout rang by Scamander. Herald of Argos,
What say the vaunters of Greece to the virgin Penthesilea?
High was the Argives answer confronting the mighty in Troya.
Princes of Pergama, whelps of the lion who roar for the mellay,
Suffer my speech! It shall ring like a spear on the hearts of the mighty.
Blame not the herald; his voice is an impulse, an echo, a channel
Now for the timbrels of peace and now for the drums of the battle.
And I have come from no cautious strength, from no half-hearted speaker,
But from the Phthian. All know him! Proud is his soul as his fortunes,
Swift as his sword and his spear are the speech and the wrath from his bosom.
I am his envoy, herald am I of the conquering Argives.
Has not one heard in the night when the breezes whisper and shudder,
Dire, the voice of a lion unsatisfied, gnawed by his hunger,
Seeking his prey from the gods? For he prowls through the glens of the mountains,
Errs a dangerous gleam in the woodlands, fatal and silent.
So for a while he endures, for a while he seeks and he suffers
Patient yet in his terrible grace as assured of his banquet;
But he has lacked too long and he lifts his head and to heaven
Roars in his wonder, incensed, impatiently. Startled the valleys
Shrink from the dreadful alarum, the cattle gallop to shelter.
Arming the herdsmen cry to each other for comfort and courage.
So Talthybius spoke, as a harper voicing his prelude
Touches his strings to a varied music, seeks for a concord;
Long his strain he prepares. But one broke in on the speaker,
Sweet was his voice like a harps though heard in the front of the onset,
One of the sons of Fate by the people loved whom he ruined,
Leader in counsel and battle, the Priamid, he in his beauty
Carelessly walking who scattered the seeds of Titanic disaster.
Surely thou dreamedst at night and awaking thy dreams have not left thee!
Hast thou not woven thy words to intimidate children in Argos
Sitting alarmed in the shadows who listen pale to their nurses?
Greek, thou art standing in Ilion now and thou facest her princes.
Use not thy words but thy kings. If friendship their honey-breathed burden,
Friendship we clasp from Achilles, but challenge outpace with our challenge
Meeting the foe ere he moves in his will to the clash of encounter.
Such is the way of the Trojans since Phryx by the Hellespont halting
Seated Troy on her hill with the Ocean for comrade and sister.
Shaking in wrath his filleted head Talthybius answered:
Princes, ye speak their words who drive you! Thus said Achilles:
Rise, Talthybius, meet in her spaces the car of the morning;
Challenge her coursers divine as they bound through the plains of the Troad.
Hasten, let not the day wear gold ere thou stand in her ramparts.
Herald charged with my will to a haughty and obstinate nation,
Speak in the palace of Priam the word of the Phthian Achilles.
Freely and not as his vassal who leads, Agamemnon, the Argive,
But as a ruler in Hellas I send thee, king of my nations.
Long I have walked apart from the mellay of gods in the Troad,
Long has my listless spear leaned back on the peace of my tent-side,
Deaf to the talk of the trumpets, the whine of the chariots speeding;
Sole with my heart I have lived, unheeding the Hellene murmur,
Chid when it roared for the hunt the lion pack of the war-god,
Day after day I walked at dawn and in blush of the sunset,
Far by the call of the seas and alone with the gods and my dreaming,
Leaned to the unsatisfied chant of my heart and the rhythms of ocean,
Sung to by hopes that were sweet-lipped and vain. For Polyxenas brothers
Still are the brood of the Titan Laomedon slain in his greatness,
Engines of God unable to bear all the might that they harbour.
Awe they have chid from their hearts, nor our common humanity binds them,
Stay have they none in the gods who approve, giving calmness to mortals:
But like the Titans of old they have hugged to them grandeur and ruin.
Seek then the race self-doomed, the leaders blinded by heaven
Not in the agora swept by the winds of debate and the shoutings
Lion-voiced, huge of the people! In Troyas high-crested mansion
Speak out my word to the hero Deiphobus, head of the mellay,
Paris the racer of doom and the stubborn strength of Aeneas.
Herald of Greece, when thy feet shall be pressed on the gold and the marble,
Rise in the Ilian megaron, curb not the cry of the challenge.
Thus shalt thou say to them striking the ground with the staff of defiance,
Fronting the tempests of war, the insensate, the gamblers with downfall.
Princes of Troy, I have sat in your halls, I have slept in your chambers;
Not in the battle alone as a warrior glad of his foemen,
Glad of the strength that mates with his own, in peace we encountered.
Marvelling I sat in the halls of my enemies, close to the bosoms
Scarred by the dints of my sword and the eyes I had seen through the battle,
Ate rejoicing the food of the East at the tables of Priam
Served by the delicatest hands in the world, by Hecubas daughter,
Or with our souls reconciled in some careless and rapturous midnight
Drank of the sweetness of Phrygian wine, admiring your bodies
Shaped by the gods indeed, and my spirit revolted from hatred,
Softening it yearned in its strings to the beauty and joy of its foemen,
Yearned from the death that oertakes and the flame that cries and desires
Even at the end to save and even on the verge to deliver
Troy and her wonderful works and her sons and her deep-bosomed daughters.
Warned by the gods who reveal to the heart what the mind cannot hearken
Deaf with its thoughts, I offered you friendship, I offered you bridal,
Hellas for comrade, Achilles for brother, the world for enjoyment
Won by my spear. And one heard my call and one turned to my seeking.
Why is it then that the war-cry sinks not to rest by the Xanthus?
We are not voices from Argolis, Lacedaemonian tricksters,
Splendid and subtle and false; we are speakers of truth, we are Hellenes,
Men of the northl and faithful in friendship and noble in anger,
Strong like our fathers of old. But you answered my truth with evasion
Hoping to seize what I will not yield and you flattered your people.
Long have I waited for wisdom to dawn on your violent natures.
Lonely I paced oer the sands by the thousand-throated waters
Praying to Pallas the wise that the doom might turn from your mansions,
Buildings delightful, gracious as rhythms, lyrics in marble,
Works of the transient gods, and I yearned for the end of the war-din
Hoping that Death might relent to the beautiful sons of the Trojans.
Far from the cry of the spears, from the speed and the laughter of axles,
Heavy upon me like iron the intolerable yoke of inaction
Weighed like a load on a runner. The war-cry rose by Scamander;
Xanthus was crossed on a bridge of the fallen, not by Achilles.
Often I stretched out my hand to the spear, for the Trojan beaches
Rang with the voice of Deiphobus shouting and slaying the Argives;
Often my heart like an anxious mother for Greece and her children
Leaped, for the air was full of the leonine roar of Aeneas.
Always the evening fell or the gods protected the Argives.
Then by the moat of the ships, on the hither plain of the Xanthus
New was the voice that climbed through the din and sailed on the breezes,
High, insistent, clear, and it shouted an unknown war-cry
Threatening doom to the peoples. A woman had come in to aid you,
Regal and insolent, fair as the morning and fell as the northwind,
Freed from the distaff who grasps at the sword and she spurns at subjection
Breaking the rule of the gods. She is turbulent, swift in the battle.
Clanging her voice of the swan as a summons to death and disaster,
Fleet-footed, happy and pitiless, laughing she runs to the slaughter;
Strong with the gait that allures she leaps from her car to the slaying,
Dabbles in blood smooth hands like lilies. Europe astonished
Reels from her shock to the Ocean. She is the panic and mellay,
War is her paean, the chariots thunder of Penthesilea.
Doom was her coming, it seems, to the men of the West and their legions;
Ajax sleeps for ever, Meriones lies on the beaches.
One by one they are falling before you, the great in Achaia.
Ever the wounded are borne like the stream of the ants when they forage
Past my ships, and they hush their moans as they near and in silence
Gaze at the legions inactive accusing the fame of Achilles.
Still have I borne with you, waited a little, looked for a summons,
Longing for bridal torches, not flame on the Ilian housetops,
Blood in the chambers of sweetness, the golden amorous city
Swallowed by doom. Not broken I turned from the wrestle Titanic,
Hopeless, weary of toil in the ebb of my glorious spirit,
But from my stress of compassion for doom of the kindred nations,
But for her sake whom my soul desires, for the daughter of Priam.
And for Polyxenas sake I will speak to you yet as your lover
Once ere the Fury, abrupt from Erebus, deaf to your crying,
Mad with the joy of the massacre, seizes on wealth and on women
Calling to Fire as it strides and Ilion sinks into ashes.
Yield; for your doom is impatient. No longer your helpers hasten,
Legions swift to your call; the yoke of your pride and your splendour
Lies not now on the nations of earth as when Fortune desired you,
Strength was your slave and Troya the lioness hungrily roaring
Threatened the western world from her ramparts built by Apollo.
Gladly released from the thraldom they hated, the insolent shackles
Curbing their manhood the peoples arise and they pray for your ruin;
Piled are their altars with gifts; their blessings help the Achaians.
Memnon came, but he sleeps, and the faces swart of his nation
Darken no more like a cloud over thunder and surge of the onset.
Wearily Lycia fights; far fled are the Carian levies.
Thrace retreats to her plains preferring the whistle of stormwinds
Or on the banks of the Strymon to wheel in her Orphean measure,
Not in the revel of swords and fronting the spears of the Hellenes.
Princes of Pergama, open your gates to our Peace who would enter,
Life in her gracious clasp and forgetfulness, grave of earths passions,
Healer of wounds and the past. In a comity equal, Hellenic,
Asia join with Greece, one world from the frozen rivers
Trod by the hooves of the Scythian to farthest undulant Ganges.
Tyndarid Helen resign, the desirable cause of your danger,
Back to Greece that is empty long of her smile and her movements.
Broider with riches her coming, pomp of her slaves and the waggons
Endlessly groaning with gold that arrive with the ransom of nations.
So shall the Fury be pacified, she who exultant from Sparta
Breathed in the sails of the Trojan ravisher helping his oarsmen.
So shall the gods be appeased and the thoughts of their wrath shall be cancelled,
Justice contented trace back her steps and for brands of the burning
Torches delightful shall break into Troy with the swords of the bridal.
I like a bridegroom will seize on your city and clasp and defend her
Safe from the envy of Argos, from Lacedaemonian hatred,
Safe from the hunger of Crete and the Locrians violent rapine.
But if you turn from my voice and you hearken only to Ares
Crying for battle within you deluded by Hera and Pallas,
Swiftly the fierce deaths surges shall close over Troy and her ramparts
Built by the gods shall be stubble and earth to the tread of the Hellene.
For to my tents I return not, I swear it by Zeus and Apollo,
Master of Truth who sits within Delphi fathomless brooding
Sole in the caverns of Nature and hearkens her underground murmur,
Giving my oath to his keeping mute and stern who forgets not,
Not from the panting of Ares toil to repose, from the wrestle
Locked of hope and death in the ruthless clasp of the mellay
Leaving again the Trojan ramparts unmounted, leaving
Greece unavenged, the Aegean a lake and Europe a province.
Choosing from Hellas exile, from Peleus and Deidamia,
Choosing the field for my chamber of sleep and the battle for hearthside
I shall go warring on till Asia enslaved to my footsteps
Feels the tread of the God in my sandal pressed on her bosom.
Rest shall I then when the borders of Greece are fringed with the Ganges;
Thus shall the past pay its Titan ransom and, Fate her balance
Changing, a continent ravished suffer the fortune of Helen.
This I have sworn allying my will to Zeus and Ananke.
So was it spoken, the Phthian challenge. Silent the heroes
Looked back amazed on their past and into the night of their future.
Silent their hearts felt a grasp from gods and had hints of the heavens.
Hush was awhile in the room, as if Fate were trying her balance
Poised on the thoughts of her mortals. At length with a musical laughter
Sweet as the jangling of bells upon anklets leaping in measure
Answered aloud to the gods the virgin Penthesilea.
Long I had heard in my distant realms of the fame of Achilles,
Ignorant still while I played with the ball and ran in the dances
Thinking not ever to war; but I dreamed of the shock of the hero.
So might a poet inland who imagines the rumour of Ocean,
Yearn with his lust for the giant upheaval, the dance as of hill-tops,
Toss of the yellow mane and the tawny march and the voices
Lionlike claiming earth as a prey for the clamorous waters.
So have I longed as I came for the cry and the speed of Achilles.
But he has lurked in his ships, he has sulked like a boy that is angry.
Glad am I now of his soul that arises hungry for battle,
Glad, whether victor I live or defeated travel the shadows.
Once shall my spear have rung on the shield of the Phthian Achilles.
Peace I desire not. I came to a haughty and resolute nation,
Honour and fame they cherish, not life by the gift of a foeman.
Sons of the ancient house on whom Ilion looks as on Titans,
Chiefs whom the world admires, do you fear then the shock of the Phthian?
Gods, it is said, have decided your doom. Are you less in your greatness?
Are you not gods to reverse their decrees or unshaken to suffer?
Memnon is dead and the Carians leave you? Lycia lingers?
But from the streams of my East I have come to you, Penthesilea.
Virgin of Asia, answered Talthybius, doom of a nation
Brought thee to Troy and her haters Olympian shielded thy coming,
Vainly who feedest mens hearts with a hope that the gods have rejected.
Doom in thy sweet voice utters her counsels robed like a woman.
Answered the virgin disdainfully, wroth at the words of the Argive:
Hast thou not ended the errand they gave thee, envoy of Hellas?
Not, do I think, as our counsellor camst thou elected from Argos,
Nor as a lover to Troy hast thou hastened with amorous footing
Hurting thy heart with her frowardness. Hatred and rapine sent thee,
Greed of the Ilian gold and lust of the Phrygian women,
Voice of Achaian aggression! Doom am I truly; let Gnossus
Witness it, Salamis speak of my fatal arrival and Argos
Silent remember her wounds. But the Argive answered the virgin:
Hearken then to the words of the Hellene, Penthesilea.
Virgin to whom earths strongest are corn in the sweep of thy sickle,
Lioness vain of thy bruit who besiegest the paths of the battle!
Art thou not satiate yet? hast thou drunk then so little of slaughter?
Death has ascended thy car; he has chosen thy hand for his harvest.
But I have heard of thy pride and disdain, how thou scornest the Argives
And of thy fate thou complainest that ever averse to thy wishes
Cloisters the Phthian and matches with weaklings Penthesilea.
Not of the Ithacan boar nor the wild-cat littered in Locris
Nor of the sleek-coat Argive wild-bulls sates me the hunting;
So hast thou said, I would bury my spear in the lion of Hellas.
Blind and infatuate, art thou not beautiful, bright as the lightning?
Were not thy limbs made cunningly linking sweetness to sweetness?
Is not thy laughter an arrow surprising hearts imprudent?
Charm is the seal of the gods upon woman. Distaff and girdle,
Work of the jar at the well and the hush of our innermost chambers,
These were appointed thee, but thou hast scorned them, O Titaness, grasping
Rather the shield and the spear. Thou, obeying thy turbulent nature,
Tramplest oer laws that are old to the pleasure thy heart has demanded.
Rather bow to the ancient Gods who are seated and constant.
But for thyself thou passest and what hast thou gained for the aeons
Mingled with men in their works and depriving the age of thy beauty?
Fair art thou, woman, but fair with a bitter and opposite sweetness
Clanging in war when thou matchest thy voice with the shout of assemblies.
Not to this end was thy sweetness made and the joy of thy members,
Not to this rhythm Heaven tuned its pipe in thy throat of enchantment,
Armoured like men to go warring forth and with hardness and fierceness
Mix in the strife and the hate while the varied meaning of Nature
Perishes hurt in its heart and life is emptied of music.
Long have I marked in your world a madness. Monarchs descending
Court the imperious mob of their slaves and their suppliant gesture
Shameless and venal offends the majestic tradition of ages:
Princes plead in the agora; spurred by the tongue of a coward,
Heroes march to an impious war at a priestly bidding.
Gold is sought by the great with the chaffering heart of the trader.
Asia fails and the Gods are abandoning Ida for Hellas.
Why must thou come here to perish, O noble and exquisite virgin,
Here in a cause not thine, in a quarrel remote from thy beauty,
Leaving a land that is lovely and far to be slain among strangers?
Girl, to thy rivers go back and thy hills where the grapes are aspirant.
Trust not a fate that indulges; for all things, Penthesilea,
Break with excess and he is the wisest who walks by a measure.
Yet, if thou wilt, thou shalt meet me today in the shock of the battle:
There will I give thee the fame thou desirest; captive in Hellas,
Men shall point to thee always, smiling and whispering, saying,
This is the woman who fought with the Greeks, overthrowing their heroes;
This is the slayer of Ajax, this is the slave of Achilles.
Then with her musical laughter the fearless Penthesilea:
Well do I hope that Achilles enslaved shall taste of that glory
Or on the Phrygian fields lie slain by the spear of a woman.
But to the herald Achaian the Priamid, leader of Troya:
Rest in the halls of thy foes and ease thy fatigue and thy winters.
Herald, abide till the people have heard and reply to Achilles.
Not as the kings of the West are Ilions princes and archons,
Monarchs of men who drive their nations dumb to the battle.
Not in the palace of Priam and not in the halls of the mighty
Whispered councils prevail and the few dispose of the millions;
But with their nation consulting, feeling the hearts of the commons
Ilions princes march to the war or give peace to their foemen.
Lightning departs from her kings and the thunder returns from her people
Met in the ancient assembly where Ilus founded his columns
And since her famous centuries, names that the ages remember
Leading her, Troya proclaims her decrees to obedient nations.
Ceasing he cried to the thralls of his house and they tended the Argive.
Brought to a chamber of rest in the luminous peace of the mansion,
Grey he sat and endured the food and the wine of his foemen,
Chiding his spirit that murmured within him and gazed undelighted,
Vexed with the endless pomps of Laomedon. Far from those glories
Memory winged it back to a sward half-forgotten, a village
Nestling in leaves and low hills watching it crowned with the sunset.
So for his hour he abode in earths palace of lordliest beauty,
But in its caverns his heart was weary and, hurt by the splendours,
Longed for Greece and the smoke-darkened roof of a cottage in Argos,
Eyes of a woman faded and children crowding the hearthside.
Joyless he rose and eastward expected the sunrise on Ida.
***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 1 - The Book of the Herald
,#NFDB
862: Book IV: The Book of Partings
Eagerly, spurred by Ares swift in their souls to the war-cry,
All now pressed to their homes for the food of their strength in the battle.
Ilion turned her thoughts in a proud expectancy seaward
Waiting to hear the sounds that she loved and the cry of the mellay.
Now to their citadel Priams sons returned with their father,
Now from the gates Talthybius issued grey in his chariot;
But in the halls of Anchises Aeneas not doffing his breastpiece
Hastily ate of the corn of his country, cakes of the millet
Doubled with wild-deers flesh, from the quiet hands of Cresa.
She, as he ate, with her calm eyes watching him smiled on her husband:
Ever thou hastest to battle, O warrior, ever thou fightest
Far in the front of the ranks and thou seekest out Locrian Ajax,
Turnest thy ear to the roar for the dangerous shout of Tydides;
There, once heard, leaving all thou drivest, O stark in thy courage.
Yet am I blest among women who tremble not, left in thy mansion,
Quiet at old Anchises feet when I see thee in vision
Sole with the shafts hissing round thee and say to my quivering spirit,
Now he is striking at Ajax, now he has met Diomedes.
Such are the mighty twain who are ever near to protect thee,
Phoebus, the Thunderers son, and thy mother, gold Aphrodite;
Such are the Fates that demand thee, O destined head of the future.
But though my thoughts for their own are not troubled, always, Aeneas,
Sore is my heart with pity for other Ilian women
Who in this battle are losing their children and well-loved husbands,
Brothers too dear, for the eyes that are wet, for the hearts that are silent.
Will not this war then end that thunders for ever round Troya?
But to Cresa the hero answered, the son of Anchises:
Surely the gods protect, yet is Death too always mighty.
Most in his shadowy envy he strikes at the brave and the lovely,
Grudging works to abridge their days and to widow the sunlight.
Most, disappointed, he rages against the beloved of Heaven;
Striking their lives through their hearts he mows down their loves and their pleasures.
Truly thou sayst, thou needst not to fear for my life in the battle;
Ever for thine I fear lest he find thee out in his anger,
Missing my head in the fight, when he comes here crossed in his godhead.
Yet shall Phoebus protect and my mother, gold Aphrodite.
But to Aeneas answered the tranquil lips of Cresa:
So may it be that I go before thee, seeing, Aeneas,
Over my dying eyes thy lips bend down for the parting.
Blissfullest end is this for a woman here mid earths sorrows;
Afterwards there we hope that the hands shall join which were parted.
So she spoke, not knowing the gods: but Aeneas departing
Clasped his fathers knees, the ancient mighty Anchises.
Bless me, my father; I go to the battle. Strong with thy blessing
Even today may I hurl down Ajax, slay Diomedes,
And on the morrow gaze on the empty beaches of Troas.
Troubled and joyless, nought replying to warlike Aeneas
Long Anchises sat unmoving, silent, sombre,
Gazing into his soul with eyes that were closed to the sunlight.
Prosper, Aeneas, slowly he answered him, son of a goddess,
Prosper, Aeneas; and if for Troy some doom is preparing,
Suffer always the will of the gods with a piety constant.
Only they will what Necessity fashions compelled by the Silence.
Labour and war she has given to man as the law of his transience.
Work; she shall give thee the crown of thy deeds or their ending appointed,
Whether glorious thou pass or in silent shadows forgotten.
But what thy mother commands perform ever, loading thy vessels.
Who can know what the gods have hid with the mist of our hopings?
Then from the house of his fathers Aeneas rapidly striding
Came to the city echoing now with the wheels of the chariots,
Clanging with arms and astream with the warlike tramp of her thousands.
Fast through the press he strode and men turning knew Aeneas,
Greatened in heart and went on with loftier thoughts towards battle.
He through the noise and the crowd to Antenors high-built mansion
Striding came, and he turned to its courts and the bronze of its threshold
Trod which had suffered the feet of so many princes departed.
But as he crossed its brazen square from the hall there came running,
Leaping up light to his feet and laughing with sudden pleasure,
Eurus the youngest son of Polydamas. Clasping the fatal
War-hardened hand with a palm that was smooth as a maidens or infants,
Well art thou come, Aeneas, he said, and good fortune has sent thee!
Now I shall go to the field; thou wilt speak with my grandsire Antenor
And he shall hear thee though chid by his heart reluctant. Rejoicing
I shall go forth in thy car or warring by Penthesilea,
Famous, give to her grasp the spear that shall smite down Achilles.
Smiling answered Aeneas, Surely will, Eurus, thy prowess
Carry thee far to the front; thou shalt fight with Epeus and slay him.
Who shall say that this hand was not chosen to pierce Menelaus?
But for a while with the ball should it rather strive, O hero,
Till in the play and the wrestle its softness is trained for the smiting.
Eagerly Eurus answered, But they have told me, Aeneas,
This is the last of our fights; for today will Penthesilea
Meet Achilles in battle and slay him ending the Argives.
Then shall I never have mixed in this war that is famous for ever.
What shall I say when my hairs are white like the aged Antenors?
Men will ask, And what were thy deeds in the warfare Titanic?
Whom didst thou slay of the Argives, son of Polydamas, venging
Bravely thy father? Then must I say, I lurked in the city.
I was too young and only ascending the Ilian ramparts
Saw the return or the flight, but never the deed and the triumph.
Friend, if you take me not forth, I shall die of grief ere the sunset.
Plucking the hand of Aeneas he drew him into the mansion
Vast; and over the floor of the spacious hall they hastened
Laughing, the gracious child and the mighty hero and statesman,
Flower of a present stock and the burdened star of the future.
Meanwhile girt by his sons and the sons of his sons in his chamber
Cried to the remnants left of his blood the aged Antenor.
Hearken you who are sprung from my loins and children, their offspring!
None shall again go forth to the fight who is kin to Antenor.
Weighed with my curse he shall go and the spear-points athirst of the Argives
Meet him wroth; he shall die in his sin and his name be forgotten.
Oft have I sent forth my blood to be spilled in vain in the battle
Fighting for Troy and her greatness earned by my toil and my fathers.
Now all the debt has been paid; she rejects us driven by the immortals.
Much do we owe to the mother who bore us, much to our country;
But at the last our life is ours and the gods and the futures.
Gather the gold of my house and our kin, O ye sons of Antenor.
Warned by a voice in my soul I will go forth tonight from this city
Fleeing the doom and bearing my treasures; the ships shall receive them
Gathered, new-keeled by my care and the gods, in the narrow Propontis.
Over Gods waters guided, treading the rage of Poseidon,
Bellying out with their sails let them cleave to the untravelled distance
Oceans crests and resign to their Fates the doomed and the evil.
So Antenor spoke and his children heard him in silence;
Awed by his voice and the dread of his curse they obeyed, though in sorrow.
Halamus only replied to his father: Dire are the white hairs
Reverend, loved, of a father, dreadful his curse to his children.
Yet in my heart there is one who cries, tis the voice of my country,
She for whose sake I would be in Tartarus tortured for ever.
Pardon me then, if thou wilt; if the gods can, then let them pardon.
For I will sleep in the dust of Troy embracing her ashes,
There where Polydamas sleeps and the many comrades I cherished.
So let me go to the darkness remembered or wholly forgotten,
Yet having fought for my country, true in my fall to my nation.
Then in his aged wrath to Halamus answered Antenor:
Go then and perish doomed with the doomed and the hated of heaven;
Nor shall the gods forgive thee dying nor shall thy father.
Out from the chamber Halamus strode with grief in his bosom
Wrestling with wrath and he went to his doom nor looked back at his dear ones.
Crossing the hall the son of Antenor and son of Anchises
Met in the paths of their fates where they knotted and crossed for the parting,
One with the curse of the gods and his sire fast wending to Hades,
Fortunate, blessed the other; yet equal their minds were and virtues.
Cypris son to the Antenorid: Thee I have sought and thy brothers,
Bough of Antenor; sore is our need today of thy counsels,
Endless our want of their arms that are strong and their hearts that recoil not
Meeting myriads stark with the spear in unequal battle.
Halamus answered him: I will go forth to the palace of Priam,
There where Troy yet lives and far from the halls of my fathers;
There will I speak, not here. For my kin they repose in the mansion
Sitting unarmed in their halls while their brothers fall in the battle.
Eurus eagerly answered the hero: Me rather, therefore,
Take to the fight with you; I will make war on the Greeks for my uncles;
One for all I will fill their place in the shock with the foemen.
But from his chamber-door Antenor heard and rebuked him:
Scamp of my heart, thou torment! in to thy chamber and rest there,
Bound with cords lest thou cease, thou flutter-brain, scourged into quiet;
So shall thy lust of the fight be healed and our mansion grow tranquil.
Chid by the old man Eurus slunk from the hall discontented,
Yet with a dubious smile like a moonbeam lighting his beauty.
But to Antenor the Dardanid born from the white Aphrodite:
Late the Antenorids learn to flinch from the spears of the Argives,
Even this boy of their blood has Polydamas heart and his valour.
Nor should a life that was honoured and noble be stained in its ending.
Nay, then, the mood of a child would shame a grey-headed wisdom,
If for the fault of the people virtue and Troy were forgotten.
For, though the people hear us not, yet are we bound to our nation:
Over the people the gods are; over a man is his country;
This is the deity first adored by the hearths of the noble.
For by our nations will we are ruled in the home and the battle
And for our nations weal we offer our lives and our childrens.
Not by their own wills led nor their passions men rise to their manhood,
Selfishly seeking their good, but the gods and the States and the fathers.
Wroth Antenor replied to the warlike son of Anchises:
Great is the soul in thee housed and stern is thy will, O Aeneas;
Onward it moves undismayed to its goal though a city be ruined.
They too guide thee who deepest see of the ageless immortals,
One with her heart and one in his spirit, Cypris and Phoebus.
Yet might a man not knowing this think as he watched thee, Aeneas,
Spurring Priams race to its fall he endangers this city,
Hoping to build a throne out of ruins sole in the Troad.
I too have gods who warn me and lead, Athene and Hera.
Not as the ways of other mortals are theirs who are guided,
They whose eyes are the gods and they walk by a light that is secret.
Coldly Aeneas made answer, stirred into wrath by the taunting:
High wert thou always, nurtured in wisdom, ancient Antenor.
Walk then favoured and led, yet watch lest passion and evil
Feign auguster names and mimic the gait of the deathless.
And with a smile on his lips but wrath in his bosom answered,
Wisest of men but with wisdom of mortals, aged Antenor:
Led or misled we are mortals and walk by a light that is given;
Most they err who deem themselves most from error excluded.
Nor shalt thou hear in this battle the shout of the men of my lineage
Holding the Greeks as once and driving back Fate from their country.
His alone will be heard for a space while the stern gods are patient
Even now who went forth a victim self-offered to Hades,
Last whom their wills have plucked from the fated house of Antenor.
They now with wrath in their bosoms sundered for ever and parted.
Forth from the halls of Antenor Aeneas rapidly striding
Passed once more through the city hurrying now with its car-wheels,
Filled with a mightier rumour of war and the march of its thousands,
Till at Troys upward curve he found the Antenorid crestward
Mounting the steep incline that climbed to the palace of Priam
White in her proud and armed citadel. Silent, ascending
Hardly their feet had attempted the hill when behind them they hearkened
Sweet-tongued a call and the patter and hurry of light-running sandals,
Turning they beheld with a flush on his cheeks and a light on his lashes
Challenging mutely and pleading the boyish beauty of Eurus.
Racer to mischief, said Halamus, couldst thou not sit in thy chamber?
Surely cords and the rod await thee, Eurus, returning.
Answered with laughter the child, I have broken through ranks of the fighters,
Dived under chariot-wheels to arrive here and I return not.
I too for counsel of battle have come to the palace of Priam.
Burdened with thought they mounted slowly the road of their fathers
Breasting the Ilian hill where Laomedons mansion was seated,
They from the crest down-gazing saw their countrys housetops
Under their feet and heard the murmur of Troya below them.
But in the palace of Priam coming and going of house-thralls
Filled all the corridors; smoke from the kitchens curled in its plenty
Rich with savour and breathed from the labouring lungs of Hephaestus.
Far in the halls and the chambers voices travelled and clustered,
Anklets jangling ran and sang back from doorway to doorway
Mocking with music of speed and its laughters the haste of the happy,
Sound came of arms, there was tread of the great, there were murmurs of women,
Voices glad of the doomed in Laomedons marvellous mansion.
Six were the halls of its splendour, a hundred and one were its chambers
Lifted on high upon columns that soared like the thoughts of its dwellers,
Thoughts that transcended the earth though they sank down at last into ashes;
So had Apollo dreamed to his lyre; and its tops were a grandeur
Domed, as if seeking to roof mens lives with a hint of the heavens;
Marble his columns rose and with marble his roofs were appointed,
Conquered wealth of the world in its largeness suffered, supporting
Purities of marble, glories of gold. Nor only of matter
Blazed there the brutal pomps, but images mystic or mighty
Crowded ceiling and wall, a work that the gods even admire
Hardly believing that forms like these were imagined by mortals
Here upon earth where sight is a blur and the soul lives encumbered.
Scrolls that remembered in gems the thoughts austere of the ancients
Bordered the lines of the stone and the forms of serpent and Naiad
Ran in relief on those walls of pride in the palace of Priam
Mingled with Dryads who tempted and fled and Satyrs who followed,
Sports of the nymphs in the sea and the woods and their meetings with mortals,
Sessions and battles of Trojan demigods, deaths that were famous,
Wars and loves of men and the deeds of the golden immortals.
Pillars sculptured with gods and with giants soared up from bases
Lion-carved or were seated on bulls and bore into grandeur
Amply those halls where they soared, or in lordliness slenderly fashioned,
Dressed in flowers and reeds like virgins standing on Ida,
Guarded the screens of stone and divided alcove and chamber.
Ivory carved and broidered robes and the riches of Indus
Cherished in sandalwood triumphed and teemed in the palace of Priam;
Doors that were carven and fragrant sheltered the joys of its princes.
Here in a chamber of luminous privacy Paris was arming.
Near him moved Helen, a whiteness divine, and intent on her labour
Fastened his cuirass, bound the greaves and settled the hauberk
Thrilling his limbs with her touch that was heaven to the yearning of mortals.
She with her hands of delight caressing the senseless metal
Pressed her lips to his brilliant armour; she bowed down, she whispered:
Cuirass, allowed by the gods, protect the beauty of Paris;
Keep for me that for which country was lost and my child and my brothers.
Yearning she bent to his feet, to the sandal-strings of her lover;
Then as she gazed up, changed grew her mood; for the Daemon within her
Rose that had banded Greece and was burning Troy into ashes.
Slowly a smile that was perfect and perilous over her beauty
Dawned like the sunlight on Paradise; strangely she looked on her lover.
So might a goddess have gazed as she played with the love of a mortal
Passing an hour on the earth ere she rose up white to Olympus.
So art thou winner, Paris, yet and thy spirit ascendant
Leads this Troy where thou wilt, O thou mighty one veiled in thy beauty.
First in the dance and the revel, first in the joy of the mellay,
Who would not leave for thy sake and repent it not country and homestead?
Winning thou reignest still over Troy, over Fate, over Helen.
Always so canst thou win? Has Death no claim on thy beauty,
Fate no scourge for thy sins? How the years have passed by in a glory,
Years of this heaven of the gods, O ravisher, since from my hearthstone
Seizing thou borest me compelled to thy ships and my joy on the waters.
Troy is enringed with the spears, her children fall and her glories,
Mighty souls of heroes have gone down prone to the darkness;
Thou and I abide! the mothers wail for our pleasure.
Wilt thou then keep me for ever, O son of Priam, in Troya?
Fate was my mother, they say, and Zeus for this hour begot me.
Art thou a god too, O hero, disguised in this robe of the mortal,
Brilliant, careless of death and of sin as if sure of thy rapture?
What then if Fate today were to lay her hands on thee, Paris?
Calmly he looked on the face of which Greece was enamoured, the body
For whose desire great Troy was a sacrifice, tranquil regarded
Lovely and dire on the lips he loved that smile of a goddess,
Saw the daughter of Zeus in the woman, yet was not shaken.
Temptress of Argos, he answered, thou snare for the world to be seized in,
Thou then hopst to escape! But the gods could not take thee, O Helen,
How then thy will that to mine is a captive, or how, though with battle,
He who has lost thee, unhappy, the Spartan, bright Menelaus?
All things yield to a man and Zeus is himself his accomplice
When like a god he wills without remorse or longing.
Thou on this earth art mine since I claimed thee beheld, not speaking,
But with thy lids that fell thou veiledst thy heart of compliance.
Then in whatever beyond I shall know how to take thee, O Helen,
Even as here upon earth I knew, in heaven as in Sparta;
I on Elysian fields will enjoy thee as now in the Troad.
Silent a moment she lingered like one who is lured by a music
Rapturous, heard by himself alone and his lover in heaven,
Then in her beauty compelling she rose up divine among women.
Yes, it is good, she cried, what the gods do and actions of mortals;
Good is this play of the world; it is good, the joy and the torture.
Praised be the hour of the gods when I wedded bright Menelaus!
Praised, more praised the keels that severed the seas towards Helen
Churning the senseless waves that knew not the bliss of their burden!
Praised to the end the hour when I passed through the doors of my husband
Laughing with joy in my heart for the arms that bore and enchained me!
Never can Death undo what life has done for us, Paris.
Nor, whatsoever betide, can the hour be unlived of our rapture.
This too is good that nations should meet in the shock of the battle,
Heroes be slain and a theme be made for the songs of the poets,
Songs that shall thrill with the name of Helen, the beauty of Paris.
Well is this also that empires should fall for the eyes of a woman;
Well that for Helen Hector ended, Memnon was slaughtered,
Strong Sarpedon fell and Troilus ceased in his boyhood.
Troy for Helen burning, her glory, her empire, her riches,
This is the sign of the gods and the type of things that are mortal.
Thou who art kin to the masters of heaven, unconstrained like thy kindred
High on this ancient stage of the Troad with gods for spectators
Play till the end thy part, O thou wondrous and beautiful actor:
Fight and slay the Greeks, my countrymen; victor returning
Take for reward of the play, thy delight of Argive Helen.
Force from my bosom a hint of the joy denied to the death-claimed,
Rob in the kiss of my lips a pang from the raptures of heaven.
Clasping him wholly her arms of desire were a girdle of madness,
Cestus divine of the dread Aphrodite. He with her kisses
Flushed like the gods with unearthly wine and rejoiced in his ruin.
Thus while they conversed now in this hour that was near to their parting
Last upon earth, a fleet-footed slavegirl came to the chamber:
Paris, thy father and mother desire thee; there in the strangers
Outer hall Aeneas and Halamus wait for thy coming.
So with the Argive he wended to Priams ample chamber
Far in Laomedons house where Troy looked upwards to Ida.
Priam and Hecuba there, the ancient grey-haired rulers,
Waiting him sat in their chairs of ivory calm in their greatness;
Hid in her robes at their feet lay Cassandra crouched from her visions.
Since, O my father, said Paris, thy thoughts have been with me, thy blessing
Surely shall help me today in my strife with the strength of Achilles.
Surely the gods shall obey in the end the might of our spirits,
Pallas and Hera, flame-sandalled Artemis, Zeus and Apollo.
Ever serve the immortal brightnesses man when he stands up
Firm with his will uplifted a steadfast flame towards the heavens,
Ares works in his heart and Hephaestus burns in his labour.
Priam replied to his son: Forewilled by the gods, Alexander,
All things happen on earth and yet we must strive who are mortals,
Knowing all vain, yet we strive; for our nature seizing us always
Drives like the flock that is herded and urged towards shambles or pasture.
So have the high gods fashioned these tools of their action and pleasure;
Failure and grief are their engines no less than the might of the victor;
They in the blow descend and resist in the sobs of the smitten.
Such are their goads that I too must walk in the paths that are common,
Even I who know must send for thee, moved by Cassandra.
Speak, O my child, since Apollo has willed it, once, and be silent.
But in her raiment hidden Cassandra answered her father:
No, for my heart has changed since I cried for him, vexed by Apollo.
Why should I speak? For who will believe me in Troy? who believed me
Ever in Troy or the world? Event and disaster approve me
Only, my comrades, not men in their thoughts, not my brothers and kinsmen.
All by their hopes are gladly deceived and grow wroth with the warner,
Half-blind prophets of hope entertained by the gods in the mortal!
Wiser blind, if nothing they saw or only the darkness.
I too once hoped when Apollo pursued me with love in his temple.
Round me already there gleamed the ray of the vision prophetic,
Thrill of that rapture I felt and the joy of the god in his seeing
Nor did I know that the knowledge of mortals is bound unto blindness.
Either only they walk mid the coloured dreams of the senses
Treading the greenness of earth and deeming the touch of things real,
Or if they see, by the curse of the gods their sight into falsehood
Easily turns and leads them more stumbling astray than the sightless.
So are we either blind in a darkness or dazzled by seeing.
Thus have the gods protected their purpose and baffled the sages;
Over the face of the Truth their shield of gold is extended.
But I deemed otherwise, urged by the Dreadful One, he who sits always
Veiled in us fighting the gods whom he uses. I cried to Apollo,
Give me thy vision sheer, not such as thou givst to thy prophets,
Troubled though luminous; clear be the vision and ruthless to error,
Far-darting god who art veiled by the sun and by death thou art shielded.
Then I shall know that thou lovest. He gave, alarmed and reluctant,
Driven by Fate and his heart; but I mocked him, I broke from my promise,
Courage fatal helping my heart to its ruin with laughter.
Always now I remember his face that grew tranquil and ruthless,
Hear the voice divine and implacable: Since thou deceivest
Even the gods and thou hast not feared to lie to Apollo,
Speak shalt thou henceforth only truth, but none shall believe thee:
Scorned in thy words, rejected yet more for their bitter fulfilment,
Scourged by the gods thou must speak though thy sick heart yearns to be silent.
For in this play thou hast dared to play with the masters of heaven,
Girl, it is thou who hast lost; thy voice is mine and thy bosom.
Since then all I foreknow; therefore anguish is mine for my portion:
Since then all whom I love must perish slain by my loving.
Even of that I denied him, violent force shall bereave me
Grasped mid the flames of my city and shouts of her merciless victors.
But to Cassandra answered gently the voice of her brother:
Sister of mine, afflicted and seized by the dreadful Apollo,
All whose eyes can pierce that curtain, gaze into dimness;
This they have glimpsed and that they imagine deceived by their natures
Seeing the forms in their hearts of dreadful things and of joyous;
As in the darkness our eyes are deceived by shadows uncertain,
Such is their sight who rend the veil that the dire gods have woven.
Busy our hearts are weaving thoughts and images always:
After their kind they see what here we call truth. So thy nature
Tender and loving, plagued by this war and its fears for thy loved ones,
Sees calamity everywhere; when the event like the vision
Seems, as in every war the beloved must fall and the cherished,
Then the heart cries, It has happened as all shall happen I mourn for.
All that was bright it misses and only seizes on sorrow.
Dear, on the brightness look and if thou must prophesy, tell us
Rather of great Pelides slain by my spear in the onset.
But with a voice of grief the sister answered her brother:
Yes, he shall fall and his slayer too perish and Troy with his slayer.
But in his spirit rejoicing Paris answered Cassandra:
Let but this word come true; for the rest, the gods shall avert it.
Look once more, O Cassandra, and comfort the heart of thy mother,
See, O seer, my safe return with the spoils of Achilles.
And with a voice of grief the sister answered her brother:
Thou shalt return for thy hour while Troy yet stands in the sunshine.
But in his spirit exultant Paris seizing the omen:
Hearst thou, my father, my mother? She who still prophesied evil
Now perceives of our night this dawning. Yet is it grievous,
Since through a heart that we love must be pierced the heart of Achilles.
Fate, with this evil satisfied, turn in the end from Troya.
Bless me, my father, and thou, O Hecuba, mother long-patient,
Still forgive that thy children have fallen for Helen and Paris.
Tenderly yearning his mother drew him towards her and murmured:
All for thy hyacinth curls was forgiven even from childhood
And for thy sunlit looks, O wonder of charm, O Paris.
Paris, my son, though Troy must fall, thy mother forgives thee,
Blessing the gods who have lent thee to me for a while in their sunshine.
Theirs are fate and result, but ours is the joy of our children;
Even the griefs are dear that come from their hands while they love us.
Fight and slay Achilles, the murderer dire of thy brothers;
Venging Hector return, my son, to the clasp of thy mother.
But in his calm august to Paris Priam the monarch:
Victor so mightst thou come, so gladden the heart of thy mother.
Then to the aged father of Paris Helen the Argive
Bright and immortal and sad like a star that grows near to the dawning
And on its pale companions looks who now fade from its vision:
Me too pardon and love, my parents, even Helen,
Cause of all bane and all death; but I came from the gods for this ruin
Born as a torch for the burning of empires, cursed with this beauty.
Nor have I known a fathers embrace, a mothers caresses,
But to the distant gods I was born and nursed as an alien
Here by earth from fear, not affection, compelled by the thunders.
Two are her monstrous births, from the Furies and from the immortals;
Either touching mortality suffers and bears not the contact.
I have been both, a monster of doom and a portent of beauty.
Slowly Priam the monarch answered to Argive Helen:
That which thou art the gods have made thee; thou couldst not be other:
That which thou didst, the gods have done; thou couldst not prevent them.
Who here shall blame or whom shall he pardon? Should not my people
Rail at me murmuring, Priam has lost what his fathers had gathered;
Cursed is this king by heaven and cursed who are born as his subjects?
Masked the high gods act; the doer is hid by his working.
Each of us bears his punishment, fruit of a seed thats forgotten;
Each of us curses his neighbour protecting his heart with illusions:
Therefore like children we blame each other and hate and are angry.
Take, my child, the joy of the sunshine won by thy beauty.
I who lodge on this earth as an alien bound by the body,
Wearing my sorrow even as I wear the imperial purple,
Praise yet the gods for my days that have seen thee at last in my ending.
Fitly Troy may cease having gazed on thy beauty, O Helen.
He became silent, he ceased from words. But Paris and Helen
Lightly went and gladly; pursuing their footsteps the mother,
Mother once of Troilus, mother once of Hector,
Stood at the door with her death in her eyes, nor returned from her yearning,
But as one after a vanishing sunbeam gazes in prison,
Gazed down the corridors after him, long who had passed from her vision.
Then in the silent chamber Cassandra seized by Apollo
Staggered erect and tossing her snow-white arms of affliction
Cried to the heavens in her pain; for the fierce god tortured her bosom:
Woe is me, woe for the guile and the bitter gift of Apollo!
Woe, thrice woe, for my birth in Troy and the lineage of Teucer!
So do you deal, O gods, with those who have served you and laboured,
Those who have borne for your sake the evil burden of greatness.
Blessed is he who holds mattock in hand or who bends oer the furrow
Taking no thought for the good of mankind, with no yearnings for knowledge.
Woe unto me for my wisdom which none shall value nor hearken!
Woe unto thee, O King, for thy strength which shall not deliver!
Better the eye that is sealed, more blest is the spirit thats feeble.
Vainly your hopes with iron Necessity struggle, O mortals.
Virtue shall lie in her pangs, for the gods have need of her torture;
Sin shall be scourged, though her deeds were compelled by the gods in their anger.
None shall avail in the end, the coward shall die and the hero.
Troy shall fall in her sin and her virtues shall not protect her;
Argos shall grow by her crimes till the gods shall destroy her for ever.
Now have I fruit of thy love, O Loxias, dreadful Apollo.
Woe is me, woe for the flame that approaches the house of my fathers!
Woe is me, woe for the hand of Ajax laid on my tresses!
Woe, thrice woe to him who shall ravish and him who shall cherish!
Woe for the ships that shall bound too swift oer the azure Aegean!
Woe for thy splendid shambles of hell, O Argive Mycenae!
Woe for the evil spouse and the house accursd of Atreus!
So with her voice of the swan she clanged out doom on the peoples,
Over the palace of Priam and over the armd nation
Marching resolved to the war in the pride of its centuries conquered,
Centuries slain by a single day of the anger of heaven.
Dim to the thoughts like a vision of Hades the luminous chamber
Grew; in his ivory chair King Priam sat like a shadow
Throned mid the ghosts of departed kings and forgotten empires.
But in his valiance careless and bli the the Priamid hastened
Seeking the pillared megaron wide where Deiphobus armoured
Waited his coming forth with the warlike chiefs of the Trojans.
Now as he passed by the halls of the women, the chambers that harboured
Daughters and wives of King Priam and wives of his sons and their playmates,
Niches of joy that were peopled with murmurs and sweet-tongued laughters,
Troubled like trees with their birds in a morning of sun and of shadow
Where in some garden of kings one walks with his heart in the sunshine,
Out from her door where she stood for him waiting Polyxena started,
Seized his hand and looked in his face and spoke to her brother.
Then not even the brilliant strength of Paris availed him;
Joyless he turned his face from her eyes of beauty and sorrow.
So it is come, the hour that I feared, and thou goest, O Paris,
Armed with the strength of Fate to strike at my heart in the battle;
For he is doomed and thou and I, a victim to Hades.
This thou preferrest and neither thy father could move nor thy mother
Burning with Troy in their palace, nor could thy country persuade thee,
Nor dost thou care for thy sisters happiness pierced by thy arrows.
Will she remember it all, my sister Helen, in Argos
Passing tranquil days with her husband, bright Menelaus,
Holding her child on her knees? But we shall lie joyless in Hades.
Paris replied: O sister Polyxena, blame me not wholly.
We by the gods are ensnared; for the pitiless white Aphrodite
Doing her will with us both compels this. Helpless our hearts are
And when she drives perforce must love, for death or for gladness:
Weighed in unequal scales she deals them to one or another.
Happy who holding his love can go down into bottomless Hades.
But to her brother replied in her anguish the daughter of Priam:
Evilly deal with my days the immortals happy in heaven;
Yes, I accuse the gods and I curse them who heed not our sorrow.
This they have done with me, forcing my heart to the love of a foeman,
One whose terrible hands have been stained with the blood of my brothers.
This now they do, they have taken the two whom I love beyond heaven,
Brother and husband, and drive to the fight to be slain by each other.
Nay, go thou forth; for thou canst not help it, nor I, nor can Helen.
Since I must die as a pageant to satisfy Zeus and his daughter,
Since now my heart must be borne as a victim bleeding to please them,
So let it be, let me deck myself and be bright for the altar.
Into her chamber she turned with her great eyes blind, unregarding;
He for a moment stood, then passed to the megaron slowly;
Dim was the light in his eyes and clouded his glorious beauty.
Meanwhile armed in the palace of Priam Penthesilea.
Near her her captains silent and mighty stood, from the Orient
Distant clouds of war, Surabdas and iron Surenas,
Pharatus planned like the hills, Somaranes, Valarus, Tauron,
High-crested Sumalus, Arithon, Sambus and Artavoruxes.
There too the princes of Phrygian Troya gathered for counsel
And with them Eurus came, Polydamas son, who most dearly
Loved was of all the Trojan boys by the glorious virgin.
She from her arming stayed to caress his curls and to chide him:
Eurus, forgotten of grace, dost thou gad like a stray in the city
Eager to mix with the armoured men and the chariots gliding?
High on the roofs wouldst thou watch the swaying speck that is battle?
Better to aim with the dart or seek with thy kind the palaestra;
So wilt thou sooner be part of this greatness rather than straining
Yearn from afar to the distance that veils the deeds of the mighty.
But with an anxious lure in his smile on her Eurus answered:
Not that remoteness to see have I come to the palace of Priam
Leaving the house of my fathers, but for the spear and the breastpiece.
Hast thou not promised me long I shall fight in thy car with Achilles?
Doubtful he eyed her, a lions cub at play in his beauty,
And mid the heroes who heard him laughter arose for a moment,
Yet with a sympathy stirred; they remembered the days of their childhood,
Thought of Troy still mighty, life in its rose-touched dawning
When they had longed for the clash of the fight and the burden of armour.
Glad, with the pride of the lioness watching her cub in the desert,
Couchant she lies with her paws before her and joys in his gambols,
Over the prey as he frisks and is careless, answered the virgin:
Younger than thou in my nation have mounted the steed and the war-car.
Eurus, arm; from under my shield thou shalt gaze at the Phthian,
Reaching my shafts for the cast from the rim of my car in the battle
Handle perhaps the spear that shall smite down the Phthian Achilles.
What sayst thou, Halamus? Were not such prowess a perfect beginning
Worthy Polydamas son and the warlike house of Antenor?
Halamus started and smiting his hand on the grief of his bosom,
Sombre replied and threatened with Fate the high-hearted virgin.
Virgin armipotent, wherefore mockst thou thy friend, though unwitting?
Nay, for the world will know at the end and my death cannot hide it,
Slain by a fathers curse we fight who are kin to Antenor.
Take not the boy in thy car, lest the Furies, Penthesilea,
Aim through the shield and the shielder to wreak the curse of the grandsire.
They will not turn nor repent for thy strength nor his delicate beauty.
Swiftly to Halamus answered the high-crested might of the virgin:
Curses leave lightly the lips when the soul of a man is in anger
Even as blessings easily crowd round the head that is cherished.
Yet have I never seen that a curse has sharpened a spear-point;
Never Death drew back from the doomed by the power of a blessing.
Valour and skill and chance are Fate and the gods and the Furies.
Give me the boy; a hero shall come back formed from the onset.
Do as thou wilt, replied Halamus; Fate shall guard or shall end him.
Then to the boy delighted and smiling-eyed and exultant
Cried with her voice like the call of heavens bugles waking the heroes,
Blown by the lips of gold-haired Valkyries, Penthesilea.
Go, find the spear, gird the sword, don the cuirass, child of the mighty.
Armed when thou standst on the plain of the Xanthus, field of thy fathers,
See that thou fight on this day like the comrade of Penthesilea.
Bud of a hero, gaze unalarmed in the eyes of Achilles.
Light as a hound released he ran to the hall of the armour
Where were the shields of the mighty, the arms of the mansion of Teucer;
There from the house-thralls he wrung the greaves and the cuirass and helmet
Troilus wore, the wonderful boy who, ere ripened his prowess,
Conquered the Greeks and drove to the ships and fought with Achilles.
These on his boyish limbs he donned and ran back exulting
Bearing spears and a sword and rejoiced in the clank on his armour.
Meanwhile Deiphobus, head of the mellay, moved by Aeneas
Opened the doors of their warlike debate to the strength of the virgin:
Well do I hope that our courage outwearying every opponent
Triumph shall lift to her ancient seat on the Pergaman turrets;
Clouds from Zeus come and pass; his sunshine eternal survives them.
Yet we are few in the fight and armoured nations besiege us.
Surging on Troy today a numberless foe well-captained
Hardly pushed back in shock after shock with the Myrmidon numbers
Swelled returns; they fight with a hope that broken refashion
Helpful skies and a man now leads them who conquers and slaughters,
One of the sons of the gods and armed by the gods for the struggle.
We unhelped save by Ares stern and the mystic Apollo
And but as mortals striving with stubborn mortal courage,
Hated and scorned and alone in the world, by the nations rejected,
Fight with the gods and mankind and Achilles and numbers against us
Keeping our country from death in this bitter hour of her fortunes.
Therefore have prudence and hardihood severed contending our counsels
Whether far out to fight on the seaward plain with the Argives
Or behind Xanthus the river impetuous friendly to Troya.
This my brother approves and the son of Antenor advises,
Prudent masters of war who prepare by defence their aggression.
But for myself from rashness I seek a more far-seeing wisdom,
Not behind vain defences choosing a tardy destruction,
Rather as Zeus with his spear of the lightning and chariot of tempest
Scatters and chases the heavy mass of the clouds through the heavens,
So would I hunt the Greeks through the plains to their lair by the Ocean,
Straight at the throat of my foeman so would I leap in the battle.
Swiftly to smite at the foe is prudence for armies outnumbered.
Then to the Dardanid answered the high-crested Penthesilea:
There where I find my foe I will fight him, whether by Xanthus
Or at the fosse of the ships where they crouch behind bulwarks for shelter,
Or if they dare by Scamander the higher marching on Troya.
Sternly approved her the Trojan, So should they fight who would triumph
Meeting the foe ere he move in his will to the clash of encounter.
But with his careless laughter the brilliant Priamid Paris:
Joy of the battle, joy of the tempest, joy of the gamble
Mated are in thy blood, O virgin, daughter of Ares.
Thou like the deathless wouldst have us combat, us who are human?
Come, let the gods do their will with us, Ares let lead and his daughter!
Always the blood is wiser and knows what is hid from the thinker.
Life and treasure and fame to cast on the wings of a moment,
Fiercer joy than this the gods have not given to mortals.
Highly to Paris the virgin armipotent Penthesilea,
Paris and Halamus, shafts of the war-god, fear not for Troya.
Not as a vaunt do I speak it, you gods who stern-thoughted watch us,
But in my vision of strength and the soul that is seated within me,
Not while I live and war shall the host of the Myrmidon fighters
Forcing the currents lave, as once they were wont, in Scamander
Vaunting their victor car-wheels red with the blood of the vanquished.
Then when I lie by some war-god slain on the fields of the Troad,
Fight again if you will behind high-banked fast-flowing Xanthus.
Halamus answered her, Never so by my will would I battle
Flinging Troy as a stake on the doubtful diceboard of Ares.
But you have willed it and so let it be; yet hearken my counsel.
Massed in the fight let us aim the storm of our spears at one greatness,
Mighty Pelides head who gives victory still to the Argives.
Easy the Greeks to destroy lay Achilles once slain on the Troad,
But if the Peleid lives the fire shall yet finish with Troya.
Join then Orestes speed to the stubborn might of Aeneas,
Paris fatal shafts and the missiles of Penthesilea.
Others meanwhile, a puissant screen of our bravest and strongest,
Fighting shall hold back Pylos and Argolis, Crete and the Locrian.
Thou, Deiphobus, front the bronze-clad stern Diomedes,
I with Polydamas spear will dare to restrain and discourage
Ajax feet though they yearn for pursuit and are hungry for swiftness.
Knot of retreat behind let some strong experienced captain
Stand with our younger levies guarding the fords of the Xanthus,
Fortify the wavering line and dawn as fresh strength on the wearied.
Then if the fierce gods prevail we shall perish not driven like cattle
Over the plains, but draw back sternly and slowly to Troya.
Answered the Priamid, Wise is thy counsel, branch of Antenor.
Chaff are the southern Achaians, only the hardihood Hellene,
Only the savage speed of the Locrian rescues their legions.
Marshal we so this field. Stand, Halamus, covering Xanthus,
Helping our need when the foe press hard on the Ilian fighters.
Paris, my brother, thou with our masses aid the Eoan.
I with Aeneas single spear am enough for the Argive.
Gladlier Halamus cried would I fight in the front with the Locrian!
This too let be as you will; for one is the glory and service
Fighting in front or guarding behind the fate of our country.
So in their thoughts they ordered battle. Meanwhile Eurus
Gleaming returned and the room grew glad with the light of his armour.
Glad were its conscious walls of that vision of boyhood and valour;
Gods of the household sighed and smiled at his courage and beauty,
They who had seen so many pass over their floors and return not
Hasting to battle, the fair and the mighty, the curled and the grizzled,
All of them treading one path like the conscious masks of one pageant
Winding past through the glare of a light to the shadows beyond them.
But on her captains proudly smiling Penthesilea
Seized him and cried aloud, her wild and warlike nature
Moved by the mothers heart that the woman loses not ever.
Who then shall fear for the fate of Troy when such are her children?
Verily, Eurus, yearning has seized me to meet thee in battle
Rather than Locrian Ajax, rather than Phthian Achilles.
There acquiring a deathless fame I would make thee my captive,
Greedy and glad who feel as a lioness eyeing her booty.
Nay, I can never leave thee behind, my delicate Trojan,
But, when this war ends, will bear thee away to the hills of my country
And, as a robber might, with my captive glad and unwilling
Bring thee a perfect gift to my sisters Ditis and Anna.
Eurus, there in my land thou shalt look on such hills as thy vision
Gazed not on yet, with their craggy tops besieging Cronion,
Sheeted in virgin white and chilling his feet with their vastness.
Thou shalt rejoice in our wooded peaks and our fruit-bearing valleys,
Lakes of Elysium dreaming and wide and rivers of wonder.
All day long thou shalt glide between mystic woodlands in silence
Broken only by call of the birds and the plashing of waters.
There shalt thou see, O Eurus, the childhood of Penthesilea.
Thou shalt repose in my fathers house and walk in the gardens
Green where I played at the ball with my sisters, Ditis and Anna.
Musing she ceased, but if any god had touched her with prescience
Bidding her think for the last time now of the haunts of her childhood,
Gaze in her soul with a parting love at the thought of her sisters
And of the lovely and distant land where she played through her summers,
Brief was the touch; for she changed at once and only of triumph
Dreamed and only yearned in her heart for the shock of Achilles.
So they passed from the halls of Priam fated and lofty,
Halls where the air seemed sobbing yet with the cry of Cassandra;
Clad in their brilliant armour, bright in their beauty and courage,
Sons of the passing demigods, they to their latest battle
Down the ancestral hill of the Pergamans moved to the gateway.
Loud with an endless march, with a tireless gliding to meet them,
All Troy streamed from her streets and her palaces armed for the combat.
Then to the voice of Deiphobus clanging high oer the rumour
Wide the portals swung that shall close on a blood-red evening,
Slow, foreboding, reluctant, and through the yawn of the gateway
Drove with a cry her steeds the virgin Penthesilea
Calling aloud, O steeds of my east, we drive to Achilles.
Bli the in the car behind her Eurus scouted around him
Scared with his eyes lest Antenor his grandsire should rise in the gateway,
Hardly believing his fate that led him safe through the portals.
After her trampled and crashed the ranks of her orient fighters.
Paris next with his hosts came brilliant, gold on his armour,
Gold on his helm; a mighty bow hung slack on his shoulder,
Propped oer his arm a spear, as he drove his car through the gateway.
Next Deiphobus drove and the hero strong Aeneas,
Leading their numbers on. Behind them Dus and Polites,
Helenus, Priams son, Thrasymachus, grizzled Aretes,
Came like the tempest his father, Adamas, son of the Northwind
Orus old in the fight and Eumachus, kin to Aeneas,
Who was Cresas brother and richest of men in the Troad
After Antenor only and Priam, Ilions monarch.
Halamus drove and Arintheus led on his Lycian levies.
Who were the last to speed out of Troya of all those legions
Doomed to the sword? for never again from the ancient city
Foot would march or chariots crash in their pride to the Xanthus.
Aetor the old and Tryas the conqueror known by the Oxus.
They in the portals met and their ancient eyes on each other
Looked amazed, admiring on age the harness of battle.
They in the turreted head of the gateway halted and conversed.
Twenty years have passed, O Tryas, chief of the Trojans,
Since in the battle thy car was seen and the arm of thy prowess
Age has wronged. Why now to the crowded ways of the battle
Move once more thy body infirm and thy eyes that are faded?
And to Antenors brother the Teucrian, Thou too, O Aetor,
Old and weary hast sat in thy halls and desisted from battle.
Now in Troys portals I meet thee driving forth to the mellay.
Aetor answered, Which then is better, to wretchedly perish
Crushed by the stones of my falling house or slain like a victim
Dragged through the blood of my kin on the sacred hearth of my fathers,
Or in the battle to cease mid the war-cry and hymn of the chariots
Knowing that Troy yet stands in her pride though doomed in her morrows?
So have the young men willed and the old like thee who age not,
Old are thy limbs, but thy heart is still young and hot for the war-din.
Tryas replied, To perish is better for man or for nation
Nobly in battle, nor end disgraced by disease or subjection.
So have I come here to offer this shoulder Laomedon leaned on,
Arms that have fought by the Oxus and conquered the Orients heroes
Famous in Priams wars, and a heart that is faithful to Troya.
These I will offer to death on his splendid altar of battle,
Tri bute from Ilion. If she must fall, I shall see not her ending.
Aetor replied to Tryas, Then let us perish together,
Joined by the love of our race who in life were divided in counsel.
All things embrace in death and the strife and the hatred are ended.
Silent together they drove for the last time through Ilions portals
Out with the rest to the fight towards the sea and the spears of the Argives.
Only once, as they drove, they gazed back silent on Troya
Lifting her marble pride in the golden joy of the morning.
So through the ripening morn the army, crossing Scamander,
Filling the heavens with the dust and the war-cry, marched on the Argives.
Far in front Troys plain spread wide to the echoing Ocean.
***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 4 - The Book of Partings
,#NFDB
863: Book VIII: The Book of the Gods
So on the earth the seed that was sown of the centuries ripened;
Europe and Asia, met on their borders, clashed in the Troad.
All over earth men wept and bled and laboured, world-wide
Sowing Fate with their deeds and had other fruit than they hoped for,
Out of desires and their passionate griefs and fleeting enjoyments
Weaving a tapestry fit for the gods to admire, who in silence
Joy, by the cloud and the sunbeam veiled, and men know not their movers.
They in the glens of Olympus, they by the waters of Ida
Or in their temples worshipped in vain or with heart-strings of mortals
Sated their vast desire and enjoying the world and each other
Sported free and unscourged; for the earth was their prey and their playground.
But from his luminous deep domain, from his estate of azure
Zeus looked forth; he beheld the earth in its flowering greenness
Spread like an emerald dream that the eyes have enthroned in the sunlight,
Heard the symphonies old of the ocean recalling the ages
Lost and dead from its marches salt and unharvested furrows,
Felt in the pregnant hour the unborn hearts of the future.
Troubled kingdoms of men he beheld, the hind in the furrow,
Lords of the glebe and the serf subdued to the yoke of his fortunes,
Slavegirls tending the fire and herdsmen driving the cattle,
Artisans labouring long for a little hire in mens cities,
Labour long and the meagre reward for a toil that is priceless.
Kings in their seats august or marching swift with their armies
Founded ruthlessly brittle empires. Merchant and toiler
Patiently heaped up our transient wealth like the ants in their hillock.
And to preserve it all, to protect this dust that must perish,
Hurting the eternal soul and maiming heaven for some metal
Judges condemned their brothers to chains and to death and to torment,
Criminals scourgers of crime, for so are these ant-heaps founded,
Punishing sin by a worse affront to our crucified natures.
All the uncertainty, all the mistaking, all the delusion
Naked were to his gaze; in the moonlit orchards there wandered
Lovers dreaming of love that endurestill the moment of treason;
Helped by the anxious joy of their kindred supported their anguish
Women with travail racked for the child who shall rack them with sorrow.
Hopes that were confident, fates that sprang dire from the seed of a moment,
Yearning that claimed all time for its date and all life for its fuel,
All that we wonder at gazing back when the passion has fallen,
Labour blind and vain expense and sacrifice wasted,
These he beheld with a heart unshaken; to each side he studied
Seas of confused attempt and the strife and the din and the crying.
All things he pierced in us gazing down with his eyelids immortal,
Lids on which sleep dare not settle, the Father of men on his creatures;
Nor by the cloud and the mist was obscured which baffles our eyeballs,
But he distinguished our source and saw to the end of our labour.
He in the animal racked knew the god that is slowly delivered;
Therefore his heart rejoiced. Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture.
Might not our human gaze on the smoke of a furnace, the burning
Red, intolerable, anguish of ore that is fused in the hell-heat,
Shrink and yearn for coolness and peace and condemn all the labour?
Rather look to the purity coming, the steel in its beauty,
Rather rejoice with the master who stands in his gladness accepting
Heat of the glorious god and the fruitful pain of the iron.
Last the eternal gaze was fixed on Troy and the armies
Marching swift to the shock. It beheld the might of Achilles
Helmed and armed, knew all the craft in the brain of Odysseus,
Saw Deiphobus stern in his car and the fates of Aeneas,
Greece of her heroes empty, Troy enringed by her slayers,
Paris a setting star and the beauty of Penthesilea.
These things he saw delighted; the heart that contains all our ages
Blessed our toil and grew full of its fruits, as the Artist eternal
Watched his vehement drama staged twixt the sea and the mountains,
Phrased in the clamour and glitter of arms and closed by the firebrand,
Act itself out in blood and in passions fierce on the Troad.
Yet as a father his children, who sits in the peace of his study
Hearing the noise of his brood and pleased with their play and their quarrels,
So he beheld our mortal race. Then, turned from the armies,
Into his mind he gazed where Time is reflected and, conscient,
Knew the iron knot of our human fates in their warfare.
Calm he arose and left our earth for his limitless kingdoms.
Far from this lower blue and high in the death-scorning spaces
Lifted oer mortal mind where Time and Space are but figures
Lightly imagined by Thought divine in her luminous stillness,
Zeus has his palace high and there he has stabled his war-car.
Thence he descends to our mortal realms; where the heights of our mountains
Meet with the divine air, he touches and enters our regions.
Now he ascended back to his natural realms and their rapture,
There where all life is bliss and each feeling an ecstasy mastered.
Thence his eagle Thought with its flashing pinions extended
Winged through the world to the gods, and they came at the call, they ascended
Up from their play and their calm and their works through the infinite azure.
Some from our mortal domains in grove or by far-flowing river
Cool from the winds of the earth or quivering with perishable fragrance
Came, or our laughter they bore and the song of the sea in their paces.
Some from the heavens above us arrived, our vital dominions
Whence we draw breath; for there all things have life, the stone like the ilex,
Clay of those realms like the children of men and the brood of the giants.
There Enceladus groans oppressed and draws strength from his anguish
Under a living Aetna and flames that have joy of his entrails.
Fiercely he groans and rejoices expecting the end of his foemen
Hastened by every pang and counts long Time by his writhings.
There in the champaigns unending battle the gods and the giants,
There in eternal groves the lovers have pleasure for ever,
There are the faery climes and there are the wonderful pastures.
Some from a marvellous Paradise hundred-realmed in its musings,
Million-ecstasied, climbed like flames that in silence aspire
Windless, erect in a motionless dream, yet ascending for ever.
All grew aware of the will divine and were drawn to the Father.
Grandiose, calm in her gait, imperious, awing the regions,
Hera came in her pride, the spouse of Zeus and his sister.
As at her birth from the foam of the spaces white Aphrodite
Rose in the cloud of her golden hair like the moon in its halo.
Aegis-bearing Athene, shielded and helmeted, answered
Rushing the call and the heavens thrilled with the joy of her footsteps
Dumbly repeating her name, as insulted and trampled by beauty
Thrill might the soul of a lover and cry out the name of its tyrant.
Others there were as mighty; for Artemis, archeress ancient,
Came on her sandals lightning-tasselled. Up the vast incline
Shaking the world with the force of his advent thundered Poseidon;
Space grew full of his stride and his cry. Immortal Apollo
Shone and his silver clang was heard with alarm in our kingdoms.
Ares impetuous eyes looked forth from a cloud-drift of splendour;
Themis steps appeared and Ananke, the mystic Erinnys;
Nor was Hephaestus flaming strength from his father divided.
Even the ancient Dis to arrive dim-featured, eternal,
Seemed; but his rays are the shades and his voice is the call of the silence.
Into the courts divine they crowded, radiant, burning,
Perfect in utter grace and light. The joy of their spirits
Calls to eternal Time and the glories of Space are his answer:
Thence were these bright worlds born and persist by the throb of their heart-beats.
Not in the forms that mortals have seen when assisted they scatter
Mists of this earthly dust from their eyes in their moments of greatness
Shone those unaging Powers; nor as in our centuries radiant
Mortal-seeming bodies they wore when they mixed with our nations.
Then the long youth of the world had not faded still out of our natures,
Flowers and the sunlight were felt and the earth was glad like a mother.
Then for a human delight they were masked in this denser vesture
Earth desires for her bliss, thin veils, for the god through them glimmered.
Quick were mens days with the throng of the brilliant presences near them:
Gods from the wood and the valley, gods from the obvious wayside,
Gods on the secret hills leaped out from their light on the mortal.
Oft in the haunt and the grove they met with our kind and their touches
Seized and subjected our clay to the greatness of passions supernal,
Grasping the earthly virgin and forcing heaven on this death-dust.
Glorifying human beauty Apollo roamed in our regions
Clymene when he pursued or yearned in vain for Marpessa;
Glorifying earth with a human-seeming face of the beauty
Brought from her heavenly climes Aphrodite mixed with Anchises.
Glimpsed in the wilds were the Satyrs, seen in the woodlands the Graces,
Dryad and Naiad in river and forest, Oreads haunting
Glens and the mountain-glades where they played with the manes of our lions
Glimmered on death-claimed eyes; for the gods then were near us and clasped us,
Heaven leaned down in love with our clay and yearned to its transience.
But we have coarsened in heart and in mood; we have turned in our natures
Nearer our poorer kindred; leaned to the ant and the ferret.
Sight we have darkened with sense and power we have stifled with labour,
Likened in mood to the things we gaze at and are in our vestures:
Therefore we toil unhelped; we are left to our weakness and blindness.
Not in those veils now they rose to their skies, but like loose-fitting mantles
Dropped in the vestibules huge of their vigorous realms that besiege us
All that reminded of earth; then clothed with raiment of swiftness
Straight they went quivering up in a glory like fire or the storm-blast.
Even those natural vestures of puissance they leave when they enter
Minds more subtle fields and agree with its limitless regions
Peopled by creatures of bliss and forms more true than earths shadows,
Mind that pure from this density, throned in her splendours immortal
Looks up at Light and suffers bliss from ineffable kingdoms
Where beyond Mind and its rays is the gleam of a glory supernal:
There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered.
They with bodies impalpable here to our touch and our seeing,
But for a higher delight, to a brighter sense, with more sweetness
Palpable there and visible, thrilled with a lordlier joyance,
Came to the courts of Zeus and his heavens sang to their footsteps.
Harmonies flowed through the blissful coils of the kingdoms of rapture.
Then by his mighty equals surrounded the Thunderer regnant
Veiled his thought in sound that was heard in their souls as they listened.
Veiled are the high gods always lest there should dawn on the mortal
Light too great from the skies and men to their destiny clear-eyed
Walk unsustained like the gods; then Night and Dawn were defeated
And of their masks the deities robbed would be slaves to their subjects.
Children of Immortality, gods who are joyous for ever,
Rapture is ours and eternity measures our lives by his aeons.
For we desireless toil who have joy in the fall as the triumph,
Knowledge eternal possessing we work for an end that is destined
Long already beyond by the Will of which Time is the courser.
Therefore death cannot alter our lives nor pain our enjoyment.
But in the world of mortals twilight is lord of its creatures.
Nothing they perfectly see, but all things seek and imagine,
Out of the clod who have come and would climb from their mire to our heavens.
Yet are the heavenly seats not easy even for the chosen:
Rough and remote is that path; that ascent is too hard for the death-bound.
Hard are Gods terms and few can meet them of men who are mortal.
Mind resists; their breath is a clog; by their tools they are hampered,
Blindly mistaking the throb of their mortal desires for our guidance.
How shall they win in their earth to our skies who are clay and a life-wind,
But that their hearts we invade? Our shocks on their lives come incessant,
Ease discourage and penetrate coarseness; sternness celestial
Forces their souls towards the skies and their bodies by anguish are sifted.
We in the mortal wake an immortal strength by our tortures
And by the flame of our lightnings choose out the vessels of godhead.
This is the nature of earth that to blows she responds and by scourgings
Travails excited; pain is the bed of her blossoms of pleasure.
Earth that was wakened by pain to life and by hunger to thinking
Left to her joys rests inert and content with her gains and her station.
But for the unbearable whips of the gods back soon to her matter
She would go glad and the goal would be missed and the aeons be wasted.
But for the god in their breasts unsatisfied, but for his spurrings
Soon would the hero turn beast and the sage reel back to the savage;
Man from his difficult heights would recoil and be mud in the earth-mud.
This by pain we prevent; we compel his feet to the journey.
But in their minds to impression made subject, by forms of things captured
Blind is the thought and presumptuous the hope and they swerve from our goading;
Blinded are human hearts by desire and fear and possession,
Darkened is knowledge on earth by hope the helper of mortals.
Now too from earth and her children voices of anger and weeping
Beat at our thrones; tis the grief and the wrath of fate-stricken creatures,
Mortals struggling with destiny, hearts that are slaves to their sorrow.
We unmoved by the cry will fulfil our unvarying purpose.
Troy shall fall at last and the ancient ages shall perish.
You who are lovers of Ilion turn from the moans of her people,
Chase from your hearts their prayers, blow back from your nostrils the incense.
Let not one nation resist by its glory the good of the ages.
Twilight thickens over man and he moves to his winter of darkness.
Troy that displaced with her force and her arms the luminous ancients,
Sinks in her turn by the ruder strength of the half-savage Achaians.
They to the Hellene shall yield and the Hellene fall by the Roman.
Rome too shall not endure, but by strengths ill-shaped shall be broken,
Nations formed in the ice and mist, confused and crude-hearted.
So shall the darker and ruder always prevail oer the brilliant
Till in its turn to a ruder and darker it falls and is shattered.
So shall mankind make speed to destroy what twas mighty creating.
Ever since knowledge failed and the ancient ecstasy slackened,
Light has been helper to death and darkness increases the victor.
So shall it last till the fallen ages return to their greatness.
For if the twilight be helped not, night oer the world cannot darken;
Night forbidden how shall a greater dawn be effected?
Gods of the light who know and resist that the doomed may have succour,
Always then shall desire and passion strive with Ananke?
Conquer the cry of your heart-strings that man too may conquer his sorrow,
Stilled in his yearnings. Cease, O ye gods, from the joy of rebellion.
Open the eye of the soul, admit the voice of the Silence.
So in the courts of Heaven august the Thunderer puissant
Spoke to his sons in their souls and they heard him, mighty in silence.
Then to her brother divine the white-armed passionless Hera:
Zeus, we remember; thy sons forget, Apollo and Ares.
Hera, queen of the heavens, they forget not, but choose to be mindless.
This is the greatness of gods that they know and can put back the knowledge;
Doing the work they have chosen they turn not for fruit nor for failure,
Griefless they walk to their goal and strain not their eyes towards the ending.
Light that they have they can lose with a smile, not as souls in the darkness
Clutch at every beam and mistake their one ray for all splendour.
All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us,
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning.
There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour.
Great Cronion ceased and high in the heavenly silence
Rose in their midst the voice of the loud impetuous Ares
Sounding far in the luminous fields of his soul as with thunder.
Father, we know and we have not forgotten. This is our godhead,
Still to strive and never to yield to the evil that conquers.
I will not dwell with the Greeks nor aid them save forced by Ananke
And because lives of the great and the blood of the strong are my portion.
This too thou knowest, our nature enjoys in mankind its fulfilment.
War is my nature and greatness and hardness, the necks of the vanquished;
Force is my soul and strength is my bosom; I shout in the battle
Breaking cities like toys and the nations are playthings of Ares:
Hither and thither I shove them and throw down or range on my table.
Constancy most I love, nobility, virtue and courage;
Fugitive hearts I abhor and the nature fickle as sea-foam.
Now if the ancient spirit of Titan battle is over,
Tros fights no more on the earth, nor now Heracles tramples and struggles,
Bane of the hydra or slaying the Centaurs oer Pelion driven,
Now if the earth no more must be shaken by Titan horsehooves,
Since to a pettier framework all things are fitted consenting,
Yet will I dwell not in Greece nor favour the nurslings of Pallas.
I will await the sons of my loins and the teats of the she-wolf,
Consuls browed like the cliffs and plebeians stern of the wolf-brood,
Senates of kings and armies of granite that grow by disaster;
Such be the nation august that is fit for the favour of Ares!
They shall fulfil me and honour my mother, imperial Hera.
Then with an iron march they shall move to their world-wide dominion,
Through the long centuries rule and at last because earth is impatient,
Slowly with haughtiness perish compelled by mortalitys transience
Leaving a Roman memory stamped on the ages of weakness.
But to his son far-sounding the Father high of the Immortals:
So let it be since such is the will in thee, mightiest Ares;
Thou shalt till sunset prevail, O war-god, fighting for Troya.
So he decreed and the soul of the Warrior sternly consented.
He from his seats arose and down on the summits of Ida
Flaming through Space in his cloud in a headlong glory descended,
Prone like a thunderbolt flaming down from the hand of the Father.
Thence in his chariot drawn by living fire and by swiftness,
Thundered down to earths plains the mighty impetuous Ares.
Far where Deiphobus stern was labouring stark and outnumbered
Smiting the Achaian myriads back on the right of the carnage,
Over the hosts in his car he stood and darkened the Argives.
But in the courts divine the Thunderer spoke to his children:
Ares resisting a present Fate for the hope of the future,
Gods, has gone forth from us. Choose thou thy paths, O my daughter,
More than thy brother assailed by the night that darkens oer creatures.
Choose the silence in heaven or choose the struggle mid mortals,
Golden joy of the worlds, O thou roseate white Aphrodite.
Then with her starry eyes and bosom of bliss from the immortals
Glowing and rosy-limbed cried the wonderful white Aphrodite,
Drawing her fingers like flowers through the flowing gold of her tresses,
Calm, discontented, her perfect mouth like a rose of resistance
Chidingly budded gainst Fate, a charm to their senses enamoured.
Well do I know thou hast given my world to Hera and Pallas.
What though my temples shall stand in Paphos and island Cythera
And though the Greek be a priest for my thoughts and a lyre for my singing,
Beauty pursuing and light through the figures of grace and of rhythm,
Forms shall he mould for mens eyes that the earth has forgotten and mourns for,
Mould even the workings of Pallas to commune with Paphias sweetness,
Mould Hephaestus craft in the gaze of the gold Aphrodite,
Only my form he pursues that I wear for a mortal enchantment,
He to whom now thou givest the world, the Ionian, the Hellene,
But for my might is unfit which Babylon worshipped and Sidon
Palely received from the past in images faint of the gladness
Once that was known by the children of men when the thrill of their members
Was but the immortal joy of the spirit overflowing their bodies,
Wine-cups of Gods desire; but their clay from my natural greatness
Falters betrayed to pain, their delight they have turned into ashes.
Nor to my peaks shall he rise and the perfect fruit of my promptings,
There where the senses swoon but the heart is delivered by rapture:
Never my touch can cling to his soul nor reply from his heart-strings.
Once could my godhead surprise all the stars with the seas of its rapture;
Once the world in its orbit danced to a marvellous rhythm.
Men in their limits, gods in their amplitudes answered my calling;
Life was moved by a chant of delight that sang from the spaces,
Sang from the Soul of the Vast, its rapture clasping its creatures.
Sweetly agreed my fire with their soil and their hearts were as altars.
Pure were its crests; twas not dulled with earth, twas not lost in the hazes
Then when the sons of earth and the daughters of heaven together
Met on lone mountain peaks or, linked on wild beach and green meadow,
Twining embraced. For I danced on Taygetus peaks and oer Ida
Naked and loosing my golden hair like a nimbus of glory
Oer a deep-ecstasied earth that was drunk with my roses and whiteness.
There was no shrinking nor veil in our old Saturnian kingdoms.
Equals were heaven and earth, twin gods on the lap of Dione.
Now shall my waning greatness perish and pass out of Nature.
For though the Romans, my children, shall grasp at the strength of their mother,
They shall not hold the god, but lose in unsatisfied orgies
Yet what the earth has kept of my joy, my glory, my puissance,
Who shall but drink for a troubled hour in the dusk of the sunset
Dregs of my wine Pandemian missing the Uranian sweetness.
So shall the night descend on the greatness and rapture of living;
Creeds that refuse shall persuade the world to revolt from its mother.
Pallas adorers shall loa the me and Heras scorn me for lowness;
Beauty shall pass from mens work and delight from their play and their labour;
Earth restored to the Cyclops shall shrink from the gold Aphrodite.
So shall I live diminished, owned but by beasts in the forest,
Birds of the air and the gods in their heavens, but disgraced in the mortal.
Then to the discontented rosy-mouthed Aphrodite
Zeus replied, the Father divine: O goddess Astarte,
What are these thoughts thou hast suffered to wing from thy rose-mouth immortal?
Bees that sting and delight are the words from thy lips, Cytherea.
Art thou not womb of the world and from thee are the thronging of creatures?
And didst thou cease the worlds too would cease and the aeons be ended.
Suffer my Greeks; accept who accept thee, O gold Dionaean.
They in the works of their craft and their dreams shall enthrone thee for ever,
Building thee temples in Paphos and Eryx and island Cythera,
Building the fane more enduring and bright of thy golden ideal.
Even if natures of men could renounce thee and God do without thee,
Rose of love and sea of delight, O my child Aphrodite,
Still wouldst thou live in the worship they gave thee protected from fading,
Splendidly statued and shrined in mens works and mens thoughts, Cytherea.
Pleased and blushing with bliss of her praise and the thought of her empire
Answered, as cries a harp in heaven, the gold Aphrodite:
Father, I know and I spoke but to hear from another my praises.
I am the womb of the world and the cause of this teeming of creatures,
And if discouraged I ceased, Gods world would lose heart and would perish.
How will you do then without me your works of wisdom and greatness,
Hera, queen of heaven, and thou, O my sister Athene?
Yes, I shall reign and endure though the pride of my workings be conquered.
What though no second Helen find a second Paris,
Lost though their glories of form to the earth, though their confident gladness
Pass from a race misled and forgetting the sap that it sprang from,
They are eternal in man in the worship of beauty and rapture.
Ever while earth is embraced by the sun and hot with his kisses
And while a Will supernal works through the passions of Nature,
Me shall men seek with my light or their darkness, sweetly or crudely,
Cold on the ice of the north or warm in the heats of the southland,
Slowly enduring my touch or with violence rapidly burning.
I am the sweetness of living, I am the touch of the Master.
Love shall die bound to my stake like a victim adorned as for bridal,
Life shall be bathed in my flames and be purified gold or be ashes.
I, Aphrodite, shall move the world for ever and ever.
Yet now since most to me, Father of all, the ages arriving,
Hostile, rebuke my heart and turn from my joy and my sweetness,
I will resist and not yield, nor care what I do, so I conquer.
Often I curbed my mood for your sakes and was gracious and kindly,
Often I lay at Heras feet and obeyed her commandments
Tranquil and proud or oercome by a honeyed and ancient compulsion
Fawned on thy pureness and served thy behests, O my sister Pallas.
Deep was the love that united us, happy the wrestle and clasping;
Love divided, Love united, Love was our mover.
But since you now overbear and would scourge me and chain and control me,
War I declare on you all, O my Father and brothers and sisters.
Henceforth I do my will as the joy in me prompts or the anger.
Ranging the earth with my beauty and passion and golden enjoyments
All whom I can, I will bind; I will drive at the bliss of my workings,
Whether mens hearts are seized by the joy or seized by the torture.
Most I will plague your men, your worshippers and in my malice
Break up your works with confusion divine, O my mother and sister;
Then shall you fume and resist and be helpless and pine with my torments.
Yet will I never relent but always be sweet and malignant,
Cruel and tyrannous, hurtful and subtle, a charm and a torture.
Thou too, O father Zeus, shalt always be vexed with my doings;
Called in each moment to judge thou shalt chafe at our cry and our quarrels,
Often grope for thy thunderbolt, often frown magisterial
Joining in vain thy awful brows oer thy turbulent children.
Yet in thy wrath recall my might and my wickedness, Father;
Hurt me not then too much lest the world and thyself too should suffer.
Save, O my Father, life and grace and the charm of the senses;
Love preserve lest the heart of the world grow dulled and forsaken.
Smiling her smile immortal of love and of mirth and of malice
White Aphrodite arose in her loveliness armed for the conflict.
Golden and careless and joyous she went like a wild bird that winging
Flits from bough to bough and resumes its chant interrupted.
Love where her white feet trod bloomed up like a flower from the spaces;
Mad round her touches billowed incessantly laughter and rapture.
Thrilled with her feet was the bosom of Space, for her amorous motion
Floated, a flower on the wave of her bliss or swayed like the lightning.
Rich as a summer fruit and fresh as Springs blossoms her body
Gleaming and blushing, veiled and bare and with ecstasy smiting
Burned out rosy and white through her happy ambrosial raiment,
Golden-tressed and a charm, her bosom a fragrance and peril.
So was she framed to the gaze as she came from the seats of the Mighty,
So embodied she visits the hearts of men and their dwellings
And in her breathing tenement laughs at the eyes that can see her.
Swift-footed down to the Troad she hastened thrilling the earth-gods.
There with ambrosial secrecy veiled, admiring the heroes
Strong and beautiful, might of the warring and glory of armour,
Over her son Aeneas she stood, his guard in the battle.
But in the courts divine the Thunderer spoke mid his children:
Thou for a day and a night and another day and a nightfall,
White Aphrodite, prevail; oer thee too the night is extended.
She has gone forth who made men like gods in their glory and gladness.
Now in the darkness coming all beauty must wane or be tarnished;
Joy shall fade and mighty Love grow fickle and fretful;
Even as a child that is scared in the night, he shall shake in his chambers.
Yet shall a portion be kept for these, Ares and white Aphrodite.
Thou whom already thy Pythoness bears not, torn by thy advent,
Caverned already who sittest in Delphi knowing thy future,
What wilt thou do with the veil and the night, O burning Apollo?
Then from the orb of his glory unbearable save to immortals
Bright and austere replied the beautiful mystic Apollo:
Zeus, I know that I fade; already the night is around me.
Dusk she extends her reign and obscures my lightnings with error.
Therefore my prophets mislead mens hearts to the ruin appointed,
Therefore Cassandra cries in vain to her sire and her brothers.
All I endure I foresee and the strength in me waits for its coming;
All I foresee I approve; for I know what is willed, O Cronion.
Yet is the fierce strength wroth in my breast at the need of approval
And for the human race fierce pity works in my bosom;
Wroth is my splendid heart with the cowering knowledge of mortals,
Wroth are my burning eyes with the purblind vision of reason.
I will go forth from your seats and descend to the night among mortals
There to guard the flame and the mystery; vast in my moments
Rare and sublime to sound like a sea against Time and its limits,
Cry like a spirit in pain in the hearts of the priest and the poet,
Cry against limits set and disorder sanities bounded.
Jealous for truth to the end my might shall prevail and for ever
Shatter the moulds that men make to imprison their limitless spirits.
Dire, overpowering the brain I shall speak out my oracles splendid.
Then in their ages of barren light or lucidity fruitful
Whenso the clear gods think they have conquered earth and its mortals,
Hidden God from all eyes, they shall wake from their dream and recoiling
Still they shall find in their paths the fallen and darkened Apollo.
So he spoke, repressing his dreadful might in his bosom,
And from their high seats passed, his soul august and resplendent
Drawn to the anguish of men and the fierce terrestrial labour.
Down he dropped with a roar of light invading the regions,
And in his fierce and burning spirit intense and uplifted
Sure of his luminous truth and careless for weakness of mortals
Flaming oppressed the earth with his dire intolerant beauty.
Over the summits descending that slept in the silence of heaven,
He through the spaces angrily drew towards the tramp and the shouting
Over the speeding of Xanthus and over the pastures of Troya.
Clang of his argent bow was the wrath restrained of the mighty,
Stern was his pace like Fates; so he came to the warfare of mortals
And behind Paris strong and inactive waited Gods moment
Knowing what should arrive, nor disturbed like men by their hopings.
But in the courts of Heaven Zeus to his brother immortal
Turned like a menaced king on his counsellor smiling augustly:
Seest thou, Poseidon, this sign that great gods revolting have left us,
Follow their hearts and strive with Ananke? Yet though they struggle,
Thou and I will do our will with the world, O earth-shaker.
Answered to Zeus the besieger of earth, the voice of the waters:
This is our strength and our right, for we are the kings and the masters.
Too much pity has been and yielding of Heaven to mortals.
I will go down with my chariot drawn by my thunder-maned coursers
Into the battle and thrust down Troy with my hand to the silence,
Even though she cling round the snowy knees of our child Aphrodite
Or with Apollos sun take refuge from Night and her shadows.
I will not pity her pain, who am ruthless even as my surges.
Brother, thou knowest, O Zeus, that I am a king and a trader;
For on my paths I receive earths skill and her merchandise gather,
Traffic richly in pearls and bear the swift ships on my bosom.
Blue are my waves and they call mens hearts to wealth and adventure.
Lured by the shifting surges they launch their delight and their treasures
Trusting the toil of years to the perilous moments of Ocean.
Huge mans soul in its petty frame goes wrestling with Nature
Over her vasts and his fragile ships between my horizons
Buffeting death in his solitudes labour through swell and through storm-blast
Bound for each land with her sons and watched for by eyes in each haven.
I from Tyre up to Gades trace on my billows their trade-routes
And on my vast and spuming Atlantic suffer their rudders.
Carthage and Greece are my children, the marts of the world are my term-posts.
Who then deserves the earth if not he who enriches and fosters?
But thou hast favoured thy sons, O Zeus; O Hera, earths sceptres
Still were denied me and kept for strong Ares and brilliant Apollo.
Now all your will shall be done, so you give me the earth for my nations.
Gold shall make men like gods and bind their thoughts into oneness;
Peace I will build with gold and heaven with the pearls of my caverns.
Smiling replied to his brothers craft the mighty Cronion:
Lord of the boundless seas, Poseidon, soul of the surges,
Well thou knowest that earth shall be seized as a booth for the trader.
Rome nor Greece nor France can drive back Carthage for ever.
Always each birth of the silence attaining the field and the movement
Takes from Time its reign; for it came for its throne and its godhead.
So too shall Mammon take and his sons their hour from the ages.
Yet is the flame and the dust last end of the silk and the iron,
And at their end the king and the prophet shall govern the nations.
Even as Troy, so shall Babylon flame up to heaven for the spoiler
Wailed by the merchant afar as he sees the red glow from the ocean.
Up from the seats of the Mighty the Earth-shaker rose. His raiment
Round him purple and dominant rippled and murmured and whispered,
Whispered of argosies sunk and the pearls and the Nereids playing,
Murmured of azure solitudes, sounded of storm and the death-wail.
Even as the march of his waters so was the pace of the sea-god
Flowing on endless through Time; with the glittering symbol of empire
Crowned were his fatal brows; in his grasp was the wrath of the trident,
Tripled force, life-shattering, brutal, imperial, sombre.
Resonant, surging, vast in the pomp of his clamorous greatness
Proud and victorious he came to his home in the far-spuming waters.
Even as a soul from the heights of thought plunges back into living,
So he plunged like a rock through the foam; for it falls from a mountain
Overpeering the waves in some silence of desolate waters
Left to the wind and the sea-gull where Ocean alone with the ages
Dreams of the calm of the skies or tosses its spray to the wind-gods,
Tosses for ever its foam in the solitude huge of its longings
Far from the homes and the noises of men. So the dark-browed Poseidon
Came to his coral halls and the sapphire stables of Nereus
Ever where champ their bits the harnessed steeds of the Ocean
Watched by foam-white girls in the caverns of still Amphitrite.
There was his chariot yoked by the Tritons, drawn by his coursers
Born of the fleeing sea-spray and shod with the northwind who journey
Black like the front of the storm and clothed with their manes as with thunder.
This now rose from its depths to the upper tumults of Ocean
Bearing the awful brows and the mighty form of the sea-god
And from the roar of the surges fast oer the giant margin
Came remembering the storm and the swiftness wide towards the Troad.
So among men he arrived to the clamorous labours of Ares,
Close by the stern Diomedes stood and frowned oer the battle.
He for the Trojan slaughter chose for his mace and his sword-edge
Iron Tydeus son and the adamant heart of young Pyrrhus.
But in the courts divine the Father high of the immortals
Turned in his heart to the brilliant offspring born of his musings,
She who tranquil observes and judges her father and all things.
What shall I say to the thought that is calm in thy breasts, O Athene?
Have I not given thee earth for thy portion, throned thee and armoured,
Darkened Cypris smile, dimmed Heras son and Latonas?
Swift in thy silent ambition, proud in thy radiant sternness,
Girl, thou shalt rule with the Greek and the Saxon, the Frank and the Roman.
Worker and fighter and builder and thinker, light of the reason,
Men shall leave all temples to crowd in thy courts, O Athene.
Go then and do my will, prepare mans tribes for their fullness.
But with her high clear smile on him answered the mighty Athene,
Wisely and soberly, tenderly smiled she chiding her father
Even as a mother might rail at her child when he hides and dissembles:
Zeus, I see and I am not deceived by thy words in my spirit.
We but build forms for thy thought while thou smilest down high oer our toiling;
Even as men are we tools for thee, who are thy children and dear ones.
All this life is thy sport and thou workst like a boy at his engines
Making a toil of the game and a play of the serious labour.
Then to that play thou callest us wearing a sombre visage,
This consulting, that to our wills confiding, O Ruler;
Choosing thy helpers, hastened by those whom thou lurest to oppose thee
Guile thou usest with gods as with mortals, scheming, deceiving,
And at the wrath and the love thou hast prompted laughest in secret.
So we two who are sisters and enemies, lovers and rivals,
Fondled and baffled in turn obey thy will and thy cunning,
I, thy girl of war, and the rosy-white Aphrodite.
Always we served but thy pleasure since our immortal beginnings,
Always each other we helped by our play and our wrestlings and quarrels.
This too I know that I pass preparing the paths of Apollo
And at the end as his sister and slave and bride I must sojourn
Rapt to his courts of mystic light and unbearable brilliance.
Was I not ever condemned since my birth from the toil of thy musings
Seized like a lyre in my body to sob and to laugh out his music,
Shake as a leaf in his fierceness and leap as a flame in his splendours!
So must I dwell overpowered and so must I labour subjected
Robbed of my loneliness pure and coerced in my radiant freedom,
Now whose clearness and pride are the sovereign joy of thy creatures.
Such the reward that thou keepst for my labour obedient always.
Yet I work and I do thy will, for tis mine, O my father.
Proud of her ruthless lust of thought and action and battle,
Swift-footed rose the daughter of Zeus from her sessions immortal:
Breasts of the morning unveiled in a purity awful and candid,
Head of the mighty Dawn, the goddess Pallas Athene!
Strong and rapacious she swooped on the world as her prey and her booty
Down from the courts of the Mighty descending, darting on Ida.
Dire she descended, a god in her reason, a child in her longings,
Joy and woe to the world that is given to the whims of the child-god
Greedy for rule and play and the minds of men and their doings!
So with her aegis scattering light oer the heads of the nations
Shining-eyed in her boyish beauty severe and attractive
Came to the fields of the Troad, came to the fateful warfare,
Veiled, the goddess calm and pure in her luminous raiment
Zoned with beauty and strength. Rejoicing, spurring the fighters
Close oer Odysseus she stood and clear-eyed governed the battle.
Zeus to Hephaestus next, the Cyclopean toiler
Turned, Hephaestus the strong-souled, priest and king and a bond-slave,
Servant of men in their homes and their workshops, servant of Nature,
He who has built these worlds and kindles the fire for a mortal.
Thou, my son, art obedient always. Wisdom is with thee,
Therefore thou knowst and obeyest. Submission is wisdom and knowledge;
He who is blind revolts and he who is limited struggles:
Strife is not for the infinite; wisdom observes to accomplish.
Troy and her sons and her works are thy food today, O Hephaestus.
And to his father the Toiler answered, the silent Seer:
Yes, I obey thee, my Father, and That which than thou is more mighty;
Even as thou obeyest by rule, so I by my labour.
Now must I heap the furnace, now must I toil at the smithy,
I who have flamed on the altar of sacrifice helping the sages.
I am the Cyclops, the lamester, who once was pure and a high-priest.
Holy the pomp of my flames ascendant from pyre and from altar
Robed mens souls for their heavens and my smoke was a pillar to Nature.
Though I have burned in the sight of the sage and the heart of the hero,
Now is no nobler hymn for my ear than the clanging of metal,
Breath of human greed and the dolorous pant of the engines.
Still I repine not, but toil; for to toil I was yoked by my Maker.
I am your servant, O Gods, and his of whom you are servants.
But to the toiler Zeus replied, to the servant of creatures:
What is the thought thou hast uttered betrayed by thy speech, O Hephaestus?
True is it earth shall grow as a smithy, the smoke of the furnace
Fill mens eyes and their souls shall be stunned with the clang of the hammers;
Yet in the end there is rest on the peak of a labour accomplished.
Nor shall the might of the thinker be quelled by that iron oppression,
Nor shall the soul of the warrior despair in the darkness triumphant;
For when the night shall be deepest, dawn shall increase on the mountains
And in the heart of the worst the best shall be born by my wisdom.
Pallas thy sister shall guard mans knowledge fighting the earth-smoke.
Thou too art mighty to live through the clamour even as Apollo.
Work then, endure; expect from the Silence an end and thy wages.
So King Hephaestus arose and passed from the courts of his father;
Down upon earth he came with his lame omnipotent motion;
And with uneven steps absorbed and silent the Master
Worked employed mid the wheels of the cars as a smith in his smithy,
But it was death and bale that he forged, not the bronze and the iron.
Stark, like a fire obscured by its smoke, through the spear-casts he laboured
Helping Ajax war and the Theban and Phocian fighters.
Zeus to his grandiose helper next, who proved and unmoving,
Calm in her greatness waited the mighty comm and of her husband:
Hera, sister and spouse, what my will is thou knowest, O consort.
One are our blood and our hearts, nor the thought for the words of the speaker
Waits, but each other we know and ourselves and the Vast and the heavens,
Life and all between and all beyond and the ages.
That which Space not knows nor Time, we have known, O my sister.
Therefore our souls are one soul and our minds become mirrors of oneness.
Go then and do my will, O thou mighty one, burning down Troya.
Silent she rose from the seats of the Blissful, Hera majestic,
And with her flowing garment and mystical zone through the spaces
Haloed came like the moon on an evening of luminous silence
Down upon Ida descending, a snow-white swan on the greenness,
Down upon Ida the mystic haunted by footsteps immortal
Ever since out of the Ocean it rose and lived gazing towards heaven.
There on a peak of the mountains alone with the sea and the azure
Voiceless and mighty she paused like a thought on the summits of being
Clasped by all heaven; the winds at play in her gust-scattered raiment
Sported insulting her gracious strength with their turbulent sweetness,
Played with their mother and queen; but she stood absorbed and unheeding,
Mute, with her sandalled foot for a moment thrilling the grasses,
Dumbly adored by a soul in the mountains, a thought in the rivers,
Roared to loud by her lions. The voice of the cataracts falling
Entered her soul profound and it heard eternitys rumour.
Silent its gaze immense contained the wheeling of aeons.
Huge-winged through Time flew her thought and its grandiose vast revolutions
Turned and returned. So musing her timeless creative spirit,
Master of Time, its instrument, grieflessly hastening forward
Parted with greatnesses dead and summoned new strengths from their stables;
Maned they came to her call and filled with their pacings the future.
Calm, with the vision satisfied, thrilled by the grandeurs within her,
Down in a billow of whiteness and gold and delicate raiment
Gliding the daughter of Heaven came to the earth that received her
Glad of the tread divine and bright with her more than with sunbeams.
King Agamemnon she found and smiling on Spartas levies
Mixed unseen with the far-glinting spears of haughty Mycenae.
Then to the Mighty who tranquil abode and august in his regions
Zeus, while his gaze over many forms and high-seated godheads
Passed like a swift-fleeing eagle over the peaks and the glaciers
When to his eyrie he flies alone through the vastness and silence:
Artemis, child of my loins and you, O legioned immortals,
All you have heard. Descend, O ye gods, to your sovereign stations,
Labour rejoicing whose task is joy and your bliss is creation;
Shrink from no act that Necessity asks from your luminous natures.
Thee I have given no part in the years that come, O my daughter,
Huntress swift of the worlds who with purity all things pursuest.
Yet not less is thy portion intended than theirs who oerpass thee:
Helped are the souls that wait more than strengths soon fulfilled and exhausted.
Archeress, brilliance, wait thine hour from the speed of the ages.
So they departed, Artemis leading lightning-tasselled.
Ancient Themis remained and awful Dis and Ananke.
Then mid these last of the gods who shall stand when all others have perished,
Zeus to the Silence obscure under iron brows of that goddess,
Griefless, unveiled was her visage, dire and unmoved and eternal:
Thou and I, O Dis, remain and our sister Ananke.
That which the joyous hearts of our children, radiant heaven-moths
Flitting mid flowers of sense for the honey of thought have not captured,
That which Poseidon forgets mid the pomp and the roar of his waters,
We three keep in our hearts. By the Light that I watch for unsleeping,
By thy tremendous consent to the silence and darkness, O Hades,
By her delight renounced and the prayers and the worship of mortals
Making herself as an engine of God without bowels or vision,
Yet in that engine are only heart-beats, yet is her riddle
Only Love that is veiled and pity that suffers and slaughters,
We three are free from ourselves, O Dis, and free from each other.
Do then, O King of the Night, observe then with Time for thy servant
Not my behest, but What she and thou and I are for ever.
Mute the Darkness sat like a soul unmoved through the aeons,
Then came a voice from the silence of Dis, from the night there came wisdom.
Yes, I have chosen and that which I chose I endure, O Cronion,
Though to the courts of the gods I come as a threat and a shadow,
Even though none to their counsels call me, none to their pastime,
None companions me willingly; even thy daughter, my consort,
Trembling whom once from our sister Demeter I plucked like a blossom
Torn from Sicilian fields, while Fate reluctant, consenting,
Bowed her head, lives but by her gasps of the sun and the azure;
Stretched are her hands to the light and she seeks for the clasp of her mother.
I, I am Night and her reign and that of which Night is a symbol.
All to me comes, even thou shalt come to me, brilliant Cronion.
All here exists by me whom all walk fearing and shunning;
He who shuns not, He am I and thou and Ananke.
All things I take to my bosom that Life may be swift in her voyage;
For out of death is Life and not by birth and her motions
And behind Night is light and not in the sun and his splendours.
Troy to the Night I will gather a wreath for my shadows, O grower.
So in his arrogance dire the vast invincible Death-god
Triumphing passed out of heaven with Themis and silent Ananke.
Zeus alone in the spheres of his bliss, in his kingdoms of brilliance
Sat divine and alarmed; for even the gods in their heavens
Scarce shall live who have gazed on the unveiled face of Ananke,
Heard the accents dire of the Darkness that waits for the ages.
Awful and dull grew his eyes and mighty and still grew his members.
Back from his nature he drew to the passionless peaks of the spirit,
Throned where it dwells for ever uplifted and silent and changeless
Far beyond living and death, beyond Nature and ending of Nature.
There for a while he dwelt veiled, protected from Dis and his greatness;
Then to the works of the world he returned and the joy of his musings.
Life and the blaze of the mighty soul that he was of Gods making
Dawned again in the heavenly eyes and the majestied semblance.
Comforted heaven he beheld, to the green of the earth was attracted.
But through this Space unreal, but through these worlds that are shadows
Went the awful Three. None saw them pass, none felt them.
Only in the heavens was a tread as of death, in the air was a winter,
Earth oppressed moaned long like a woman striving with anguish.
Ida saw them not, but her grim lions cowered in their caverns,
Ceased for a while on her slopes the eternal laughter of fountains.
Over the ancient ramparts of Dardanus high-roofed city
Darkening her victor domes and her gardens of life and its sweetness
Silent they came. Unseen and unheard was the dreadful arrival.
Troy and her gods dreamed secure in the moment flattered by sunlight.
Dim to the citadel high they arrived and their silence invaded
Pallas marble shrine where stern and white in her beauty,
Armed on her pedestal, trampling the prostrate image of darkness
Mighty Athenes statue guarded imperial Troya.
Dim and vast they entered in. Then through all the great city
Huge a rushing sound was heard from her gardens and places
And in their musings her seers as they strove with night and with error
And in the fane of Apollo Laocoon torn by his visions
Heard aghast the voice of Troys deities fleeing from Troya,
Saw the flaming lords of her households drive in a death-rout
Forth from her ancient halls and their noble familiar sessions.
Ghosts of her splendid centuries wailed on the wings of the doom-blast.
Moaning the Dryads fled and her Naiads passed from Scamander
Leaving the world to deities dumb of the clod and the earth-smoke,
And from their tombs and their shrines the shadowy Ancestors faded.
Filled was the air with their troops and the sound of a vast lamentation.
Wailing they went, lamenting mortalitys ages of greatness,
Ruthless Anankes deeds and the mortal conquests of Hades.
Then in the fane Palladian the shuddering priests of Athene
Entered the darkened shrine and saw on the suffering marble
Shattered Athenes mighty statue prostrate as conquered,
But on its pedestal rose oer the unhurt image of darkness
Awful shapes, a Trinity dim and dire unto mortals.
Dumb they fell down on the earth and the life-breath was slain in their bosoms.
And in the noon there was night. And Apollo passed out of Troya.
***
~ Sri Aurobindo, 8 - The Book of the Gods
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