Quotations relevant to the Path

Rituals, spells, prayer, meditation and magical acts.
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Mimesis
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Mimesis »

Like sand, the world trickles through your fingers if you try to hold all of it. Pain must be accepted, and many things must be done through it in order to create something beautiful. Calmness and inner silence can cure.

- Svetlana Zakharova [paraphrased]
"We are such stuff. As dreams are made on, and our little life. Is rounded with a sleep."
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Heith
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Heith »

Stumbled across this on a youtube video, thought it was interesting.

"I fell into the trap of, this, black magic, Cabbalism, and the whole idea of the... just the Crowleyism of the times; it was a significant part of that middle point of the 70s. I really got completely disoriented by that. It was a awful, dreadful period for me. The only escape for me in the end was just to get out and clean myself up, just to finish my association with cocaine, which had become such a problem that I couldn't function in any other way from day to day."

-David Bowie in 2004, interview
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Jiva
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Jiva »

There is no way for a man to escape from this world. It is in this world that… he must realise himself morally. Freedom must project itself toward its own reality through a content whose value it establishes. An end is valid only by a return to the freedom which established it and which willed itself through this end. But this will implies that freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal; neither is it to dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal. It is not necessary for the subject to seek to be, but it must desire that there be being. To will oneself free and to will that there be being are one and the same choice, the choice that man makes of himself as a presence in the world. We can neither say that the free man wants freedom in order to desire being, nor that he wants the disclosure of being by freedom. These are two aspects of a single reality. And whichever be the one under consideration, they both imply the bond of each man with all others.

- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
'Oh Krishna, restless and overpowering, this mind is overwhelmingly strong; I think we might as easily gain control over the wind as over this.'
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Nefastos
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

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[Satan to Jesus:]
"For what he bids I do; though I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be belov'd of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire
What I see excellent in good, or fair,
Or vertuous, I should so have lost all sense.
What can be then less in me then desire
To see thee and approach thee, whom I know
Declar'd the Son of God, to hear attent
Thy wisdom, and behold thy God-like deeds?
Men generally think me much a foe
To all mankind: why should I? they to me
Never did wrong or violence, by them
I lost not what I lost, rather by them
I gain'd what I have gain'd, and with them dwell
Copartner in these Regions of the World,
If not disposer; lend them oft my aid,
Oft my advice by presages and signs,
And answers, oracles, portents and dreams,
Whereby they may direct their future life."


– Milton: Paradise Regained, 1:377–396
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Jiva
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Jiva »

The absorption and, to a certain extent, confiscation by religion of the theme and practice of the true life has certainly been one of the reasons for [the disturbance of truth-telling as a practical, philosophical exercise]. It is as if philosophy was able to disburden itself of the problem of the true life to the same extent as religion, religious institutions, asceticism, and spirituality took over this problem in an increasingly evident manner from the end of Antiquity down to the modern world. We can take it also that the institutionalisation of truth-telling practices in the form of a science (a normed, regulated, established science embodied in institutions) has no doubt been the other major reason for the disappearance of the theme of the true life as a philosophical question, as a problem of the conditions of access to the truth. If scientific consensus are by themselves sufficient to assure access to the truth, then it is clear that the problem of the true life as the necessary basis for the practice of truth-telling disappears. So, there has been confiscation of the problem of the true life in the religious institution, and invalidation of the problem of the true life in the scientific institution. You understand why the question of the true life has continually become worn out, faded, eliminated, and threadbare in Western thought.

- Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth; the Government of Self and Others II
'Oh Krishna, restless and overpowering, this mind is overwhelmingly strong; I think we might as easily gain control over the wind as over this.'
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Mimesis
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Mimesis »

[Manfred, alone]:

"I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learn’d the language of another world."


- George Gordon (Lord) Byron
"We are such stuff. As dreams are made on, and our little life. Is rounded with a sleep."
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Nefastos
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

"von Doom: – To fight is to prove we are but microbes on a slide! We must transcend ourselves! We have a chance to reach out to a being to whom the gods are insects! The key to totality, to immortality! Near at hand... perhaps in our grasp!
Absorbing Man: – Lemme get this straight – you're a wimp, right?"

– Stan Lee: Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, #1
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
obnoxion
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by obnoxion »

Jung understands this divine insistence currently to demand that the demonic, the feminine and the earth be included in the wider synthesis the Spirit now seeks. Jung can envision the unity of male and female in androgynous imagery from various cultures including the West. He saw the unity of heaven and earth, the spiritual and the bodily, as the deepest motif in the symbol of Mary's Assumption proclaimed in 1950. Christianity had at last its compensating goddess who united in herself heaven and earth and in so doing brought the Trinity to completion... But in terms of the union of good and evil Jung was unable to be precise on how the symbols of Christ and Satan would embrace in a symbol beyond their split. He left only statements that the battle between these opposites must continue till such a symbol emerged and urged those he addressed to appreciate the unresolved conflict the Christian myth presents at its core. This conflict was not to be superseded by being dismissed. In fact in a personal passage, in which he related his psychology to Joachim de Fiore's vision of an imminent age of the Spirit, he confessed that only the Spirit that has given rise to the Christian myth can lead humanity beyond it. At the same time he was convinced that this was how the Spirit currently worked but only through suffering to the full the conflict symbolized in the separation between Christ and Satan and not through any form of evasion or jettisoning of the current conflicted myth or myth of continued conlict between Christ and Satan.

John P. Dourley "Paul Tillich, Carl Jung and the Recovery of Religion" (Routledge 2008), page 108, Chapter "The three and the four in Tillich and Jung".
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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Nefastos
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

""In the meantime, as long as we're not on the subject, do you know what your church says the nature of an angel is?"
"Pure love," answered Atkins.
"Exactly. Even a fallen angel, they say. Why didn't you tell me that before?""
– William Peter Blatty: Legion

* * *

"Someone had created the world. Made sense. For why would an eye want to form? To see? And why should it see? In order to survive? And why should it survive? And why? And why? The child's question haunted the nebulae, a thought in search of its own maker that cornered reason in a dead-end maze and make Kinderman certain the materialist universe was the greatest superstition of his age. He believed in wonders but not in the impossible: not in an infinite regression in contingencies, or that love and acts of will were reducible to neurons firing in the brain."
– ibid.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
obnoxion
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Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

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He who takes the right-hand way will eat his fill, but his horse will go hungry; he who takes the left-hand way - his horse will eat his fill, but he himself will go hungry; he who takes the middle way will suffer death.

Text on a pillar in a Russian fairy tale "The Virgin Tsar",
quothed from Marie-Louise von Franz's "Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche" (Sambhala, 1994) page 78. The one who rides right finds a copper snake and is imprisoned by his father, and the one riding west is caught in a trap-bed of a prostitute. The who takes the middle road, survives alive.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
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