Quotations relevant to the Path

Rituals, spells, prayer, meditation and magical acts.
Locked
obnoxion
Posts: 1806
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 7:59 pm

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by obnoxion »

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

-Mother Teresa-
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.
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

While waiting the frolics of the Walpurgisnacht, some quotations from my bat-infested cave. To be taken with utmost seriousness.

* * *

"Common men, as they knew only too well, found it easy to distinguish between anticipation and fulfillment, but he was no longer a common man. Gods, he presumed, had sufficient will power to alloy intention and reward into a perfect whole, and this facility must be one of the echoes that resonated in the souls of their favourite acolytes."
- Brian Craig: The Road to Damnation

* * *

"Wizards are an eccentric, even perverse, lot... There are wizards who spend all their time shut away from humanity in dark forbidding towers or gloomy, bat-infested caves. Here they may live in rooms where opulent splendor mingles with damp foulness. Perhaps the strains and demands of their art have driven them mad. Perhaps they live as they do because they see and know more than other men. Who knows? They are, after all, eccentric in the extreme."
- Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master's Guide

* * *

"Ten years is not a long time in a wizard's life - some live for over two hundred years, keeping themselves alive by their own magic and potions. There is a well-known saying among the wizards which goes: 'You're a long time dead, so let's live instead!'"

- Ian Livingstone: Return to Firetop Mountain
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!"
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

This next quotation I find as hilarious, but for little different reasons. Mind you, the element of humor doesn't lessen the actual validity of the text.

"Come on ye philosophers, and ye lawyers and advocates, that justify and defend king Lucifer! Come near and bring him to the bar, whilst he hath yet the crown upon him, for here we will hold a court of judgment against malefactors for him; if you can maintain his cause to be right, then he shall be your king..."
- Boehme: The Aurora, 14:2

Next time, something more solemn.

Have a great feast of the Lucifer's Night!
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!"
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

Wht not add here those quotations that are already in English form in the Finnish forum? Here we go:

* * *

"...We cannot pray among the ruins: the holy fire of purification must recreate the foundations of faith, a faith no longer in God but in the divine order that lies behind the chaos of the world. I don't think there has ever been a universal state of peace and tranquillity. It is a state to which we can aspire, like the Buddhist state of Nirvana, but without the samsaric recurrence of strife in the world this state of bliss would be inconceivable. Chaos and order are two sides of the same mirror of being. The goal is to transform the downward march of time into an upward spiral, the alchemical inversion that requires the heaviest burden for its final consummation..."

- Richard Leviathan, Ostara (Quoted by Lux, June 2010)

* * *

"O thou my friend! The prosperity of Crime is like unto the lightning, whose traitorous brilliancies embellish the atmosphere but for an instant, in order to hurl into death's very depths the luckless one they have dazzled."

- Marquis de Sade (Quoted by Obnoxion, June 2010)

* * *

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

- John Milton (Quoted by V-A, June 2010)

* * *

"There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life."


- H.P. Lovecraft: "Celephaïs" (Quoted by Krieger, June 2010)

* * *

"Nasir [Sherif of Medina] rolled over his back, with my glasses, and began to study the stars, counting along the first group and then another; crying out with surprise at discovering little lights not noticed by his unaided eye. Auda set us on to talk of telescopes - of the greater ones - and of how many in three hundred years had so far advanced from his first essay that now he built glasses as long as a tent, through which he counted thousands of unknown stars. We slipped into talk of suns beyond suns, sizes and distances beyond wit. 'What will now happen with this knowledge?', asked Mohammed. 'We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo's; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.' 'Why are the Westerners always wanting all?' said Auda provokingly. 'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions.' 'We want the world's end, Auda'..."

- T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Quoted by Lux, June 2010)

* * *

"Brotherhood is religion"

-William Blake (Quoted by Obnoxion, July 2010)

* * *

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

- Plato (Quoted by Obnoxion, July 2010)

* * *

"Do you want power over something? Be more nearly real than it."

- Charles Fort (Quoted by Obnoxion, August 2010)

* * *

"The hottest seats in hell are reserved for those, who in times of moral crisis maintain their neutrality."

- Dante (Quoted by Lux, August 2010)

* * *

"The uninitiated man takes the world as it appears to him as the norm; this is not the real world, but is a second reality, or a shadow world hiding its true source; such a man lives in that second reality. The initiate begins to wake up and must see through that second reality in order to become fully conscious. Of course, in our day and age, everyone thinks he is a rebel and boasts about flaunting societal mores. Unable to conceive of any higher goal, this faux rebel can only act out against the taboos against sex, drugs, and other anti-social behaviour. This is just another trap, another way of being moulded. What better way to keep someone from liberating himself than to convince him he is already a 'free spirit'?"

- Gornahoor (Quoted by Lux, September 2010)

* * *

"There is a flow in the universe. Our task is to join it."

- George Leonard, The Ultimate Athlete (Quoted by Lux, September 2010)

* * *

"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean".

- Socrates (Quoted by Obnoxion, September 2010)

* *

"Finally, integral spirituality — as the very name "integral" implies — transcends and includes science, it does not exclude, repress, or deny science."

- Ken Wilber (Quoted by Vajrasramana, September 2010)

* * *

"But though apparently more broad in view in admitting the excellence of every religion, unfortunately he shows the usual injustice to and jealousy of women which has distinguished men for so many ages, and which as fas as I can see arises purely and simply from an innate consciousness that were women once admitted to compete with them on any plane without being handicapped as they have been for so many centuries, the former would speedily prove their superiority..."

- Samuel MacGregor Mathers (Quoted by Nefastos, September 2010)

* * *

"Helena Petrovna Blavatsky... was an enlightened charlatan, a trickster-teacher of foolish wisdom, the protagonist and antagonist alike of the weird tale she made of her life. It is no accident that Hermes, the patron of magic, was also the thief among gods. Blavatsky was a truly Hermetic character, and many more people today than realize it are under her spell."

- Tim Maroney (ed.): The Book of Dzyan (Quoted [with irony] by Nefastos, September 2010)

* * *

"One Sunday I watched the monks shape an elaborate offering of dough and colored butter and put it atop a roof as a treat for the ravens. "All living things are sacred," a monk explained, "but especially the ravens. They spend their days repeating one of our holy syllables, 'Ah! Ah! Ah!'" Killing a raven, he informed me, would be as great a sin as slaughtering a thousand monks..."

- Scofield, one of the first western journalists into Bhutan, according to Wikipedia: Bön in Bhutan (Quoted by Obnoxion, September 2010)

* * *

"...it is true that in certain countries and epochs schisms from the orthodox tradition may have occurred, and the schismatics, in order to manifest their antagonism, may have deliberately given the figure an orientation contrary to the one used in the environment from which they have separated; but this in no way touches the essential meaning, which remains the same in all cases..."

- René Guénon, The Symbolism of the Cross (Quoted by Lux, September 2010)

* * *

"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."

- Krishnamurti (Quoted by Lux, September 2010)

* * *

"Keep them busy, busy, busy, back on the farm with the other animals."

- NWO cabal (Quoted by Lux, September 2010)

* * *

"Talk little, do much, be more than you appear to be."

- Hermann Wirth: On the Nordic Ethos (Quoted by Lux, October 2010)

* * *

"Use no limits as a limits, use no way as a way"

- Bruce Lee (Quoted by Vajrasramana, October 2010)

* * *

"Do not accuse your Head because it has not appointed you as an eye but rather as a finger. And do not be jealous of that which has been put in the class of an eye or a hand or a foot, but be thankful that you do not exist outside the body."

- The Interpretation of Knowledge (Quoted by Obnoxion, October 2010)

* * *

"Does someone have a prophetic gift? Share it without hesitation."

- The Interpretation of Knowledge (Quoted by Obnoxion, October 2010)

* * *

"He was nailed to a tree. He became a fruit of the knowledge of the father. He did not, however, destroy them because they ate of it. He rather caused those who ate of it to be joyful because of this discovery."

- The Gospel of Truth (Quoted by Obnoxion, October 2010)

* * *

"The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine."

- Li Po (Quoted by Obnoxion, October 2010)

* * *

"There is a common tendency today to represent the Saints as experts in 'natural' religion or 'perennial philosophy'; as men and woman who, by breaking the chains of Christian dogma, have been enabled by their own natural genius to attain to union with the Divine. Probably the most frequent victim of such misrepresentation is that most loyal son of the Church, S. Francis of Assisi..."

- Leo Shirley-Price (Thomas à Kempis: The Imitation of Christ, Introduction. Quoted [with irony] by Nefastos, November 2010)

* * *

"I say that created beings are nothing. I do not say that they are this or that, but that they are absolutely nothing - purus nihil."

- Meister Eckhart (Quoted by Lux, November 2010)

* * *

"The trial of our time is that of the satisfaction of desires. This applies not only to communists, capitalists and materialists, but also, and no less, to - I shall not say esotericists, but - occultists and magicians. For they are also under the sign of the same trial."

- Valentin Tomberg: Meditations on the Tarot (Quoted by Lux, November 2010)

* * *

"Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion."

- Alan Moore (Quoted by Lux, December 2010)
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!"
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

“The pure spirit in us may safely cultivate universal sympathies; for it can have no grudge against anything and will be tender also to our accidental natural selves and our home world; but the man must remain loyal to himself and his traditions, or he will be morally a eunuch and a secret hater of all mankind.”

- George Santayana, Persons and Places (Quoted by Lux, February 2011)

* * *

"Humanity is the right, the Way is the left."

- Li Chi (Quoted by Obnoxion, February 2011)

* * *

”Does not wisdom cry out,
And understanding lift up her voice?
She takes her stand on the top of the high hill,
Beside the way, where the paths meet.”


- Proverbs 8: 1-5 (Quoted by Nefastos, February 2011)

* * *

"An Indian Yogi came to a bank of a river; he didn't have the money to pay the ferryman to take him across and the ferryman refused to take him for nothing, so he stepped on the water and walked upon its surface to the other side. The Yogi (telling the story) shrugged his shoulders rather scornfully and said, "A miracle like that is worth no more than the penny it would have cost to go on the ferryboat".

- W. Somerset Maugham: The Razor's Edge (Quoted by Obnoxion, February 2011)

* * *

"The preliminary has two elements: first you prepare the mind by cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, and the awakening mind. Second, on the basis of hollow-body meditation, contemplate your body as an appearance devoid of intrinsic existence, like a form's reflection in a mirror, and then imagine your heart as a mass of light."

- Guru Yoga Mind Training (Quoted by Nefastos, March 2011)

* * *

"He said that when he did descend below
Among the shades in Hell, he there beheld
All men who e'er had died; and there he saw,
That the Pythagoreans differed much
From all the rest; for that with them alone
Did Pluto deign to eat, much honoring
Their pious habits."


- Austophon (Quoted by Obnoxion, March 2011)

* * *

"To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night."

- Novalis: Hymns to the Night (Quoted by Obnoxion, March 2011)

* * *

"A darkening of the world is happening."

- Martin Heidegger (Quoted by Lux, March 2011)

* * *

"What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence?"

- F. Nietzsche (Quoted by Flamen, April 2011)

* * *

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying: 'You are not mad, you are not like us."

- Anthony of Egypt (Quoted by Lux, March 2011)

* * *

"In all these watery cards, there is a certain element of illusion; they begin by Love, and love is the greatest and most deadly of the illusions."

- Crowley: Book of Thoth (Quoted by Insanus, May 2011)

* * *

"The ego, as I see it, exists at an intermediate stage between rationality and reflex existence. Blotting it out is a retreat, though. If you come from that Absolute - of a self-canceling All - why do you wish to go back home? Do you so despise yourself that you fear mirrors? Why not make the trip worthwhile? Develop. Learn. Live. If you have been sent on a journey why do you wish to cop out and run back to your point of departure? Or did your Absolute make a mistake in sending something of your caliber?"

- Roger Zelazny: The Courts of Chaos (Quoted by Nefastos, May 2011)

* * *

"Each of the three views of the self has something derogatory to say about the other two. From the standpoint of the transcendental self, the materialistic self has become the prey to pride of intellect, the demon hubris, while the magical view of self is considered to be entirely demonic. The materialistic self views the trancendentalist as obsessed with assumptions having no basis in fact, and the magical self as being childlike and incoherent. From the standpoint of the magical view, the assorted selves of the transcendentalist have ascribed as grossly exaggerated importance to one or a few of the selves which they call God or gods, while the materialist has attempted to make all selves subordinate to the self that does the rational thinking. Ultimately it's a matter of faith and taste. The transcendentalist has faith in a god self, the materialist has faith in a reasoning self and the selves of the magician have faith in each other. Naturally, all these forms of faith are subject to periods of doubt."

- Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos (Quoted by Vajrasramana, May 2011)

* * *

"Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses... And who [in this general carnage] will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man... So it is accomplished... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death."

- Joseph de Maistre (Quoted by Lux, Juny 2011)

* * *

"The secret of all the scripture, the supreme essence of the oral tradition, is on the lips of the yogini."

- Manthanabhairavatantra (Quoted by Obnoxion, August 2011)

* * *

"Blue lotuses
Flower everywhere
And black kokilas sing
King of the seasons,
Spring has come
And wild with longing
The bee goes to his love.
Birds flight in the air
And cowherd girls
Smile face to face
Krishna has entered
The great forest."

- Love Songs of Vidyapati (Quoted by Obnoxion, August 2011)

* * *

"Paradox is sometimes the most reassuring quality the multiverse possesses. It's a happy thought, for one of my background and experience, to know that God is indeed a paradox."

- Moorcock: The Dreamthief's Daughter (Quoted by Nefastos, August 2011)

* * *

"The end of the Kali Yugä is a particularly favorable period to pursue true knowledge. Some will attain wisdom in a short time, for the merits acquired in one year during the Treta Yugä can be obtained in one day in the age of Kali."

- Shiva Purana (Quoted by Obnoxion, August 2011)

* * *

"At the end of the Kali Yugä, the god Shiva will appear to reestablish the right path in secret and hidden form."

- Linga Purana (Quoted by Obnoxion, August 2011)

* * *

"Hesperos, you bring home all the bright dawn
scattered,
bring home the sheep,
bring home the goat, bring the child home
to her mother"


- Sappho: Evening Star (Quoted by Nefastos, August 2011)

* * *

"We worship in our hearts the left-hand deity dressed in red and adornde with red ornaments. His colour is that of lotus' heart. Two of his hands show the gestures of granting boons and removing fear. The others hold a rosary and a hatchet."


- Sivatosini (Quoted by Obnoxion, September 2011)

* * *

"For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere."

- Yoda (The Empire Strikes Back, quoted by Crux September 2011)

* * *

"I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance."

- Albert Einstein: Cosmic Religion (Quoted by Nefastos, September 2011)

* * *

"This is how the mystic lives: seeing the magic, changing the environment with the mind, and allowing actions, even actions of the imagination, to have significance."

- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Quoted by Nefastos, September 2011)

* * *

"Sexual energy, kama, the fire of passion, is the main potential source of tapas - and at the same time it is its opposite."

-Dolf Hartsuiker: Sadhus (Quoted by Obnoxion, September 2011)

* * *

"No man on earth deserves to taste her beauty,
Her blameless loveliness and worth,
Unless he has fulfilled man's perfect duty—
And is there such a one on earth?"


- Kalidasa (Quoted by Obnoxion, October 2011)

* * *

"...It is indeed very difficult to reconstruct the mythological (and/or astral) symbolism and the various levels of meaning of the myths of the Osiris-Seth and Horus-Seth conflicts, particularly when one encounters some of the enigmatic references in the Pyramid Texts stating that Seth came forth from Osiris or that Osiris is the ka of Seth, which have been interpreted , for example, as suggesting that by acting as a demonic initiator, Seth performed a form of sacrificial suicide - 'by killing Osiris, Seth had slain himself and given himself as sacrifice'."

-Yuri Stoyanov: The Other God (Quoted by Obnoxion, October 2011)

* * *

"...those human beings... whose soul knows no melancholy, are those whose soul senses no metamorphosis"

- Kierkegaard (Quoted by Vajrasramana, November 2011)

* * *

"As a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet pass quite unnoticed, or, perhaps, in certain cases, as good but mistaken men."

- Arthur Machen: The White People (Quoted by Obnoxion, November 2011)

* * *

"O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to judgement Day
Be gentle when "the heathen" pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!"


- Rudyard Kipling: Buddha at Kamakura (Quoted by Obnoxion, November 2011)

* * *

"He is the first to be, and to know that He is; for the One can know nothing."

- Meshaf i Resh (The Black Book, quoted by Lux, November 2011)

* * *

"External chöd is to wander in fearful places where there are deities and demons. Internal chöd is to offer one's own body as food to the deities and demons. Ultimate chöd is to realize the true nature of the mind and cut through the fine strand of hair of subtle ignorance. I am the yogi who has these three kinds of chöd practice."

- Milarepa (Quoted by Obnoxion, December 2011)

* * *

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”

- Aleister Crowley (Quoted by Insanus, March 2012)

* * *

"The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other - but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humour, of his sadness - of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something in life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them. Specifically with regard to love this means: love is a power which produces love; impotence is the inability to produce love."

- Erich Fromm: The art of loving (Quoted by Insanus, June 2012)

* * *

"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?"


- Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (Quoted by Nefastos, August 2012)

* * *

"When the best part of your journey is done, you will meet a lame man with a bundle of faggots on his back and an ass as lame as he."

- Apuleius (Quoted by Obnoxion, November 2012)

* * *

"None can use or exercise this Art of Necromancy unless he first make a secret Agreement or express Covenant with the Devil, and such Devils with whom they deal in those Covenants are not of the common sort but of a higher and superior condition, for amongst themselves they do observe their orders and degrees of superiority, as Franciscus de Victoria asserts, and this is for the better use of their wickedness, and so saith Aquinas."

- A Treatise on Angel Magic (Quoted by Obnoxion, December 2012)

* * *

"It is one characteristic of the study of true occult science that it may be freely explained to all men. Like the parables, so dear to the ancients, it appears to many as only the expression of a flight of a bold imagination: we need, therefore, never be afraid of speaking too openly; the word will only reach those who should be touched thereby."

- Papus, 1889 (Quoted by Nefastos, February 2013)

* * *

“Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards.' In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to 'fly upwards.”

- Andrei Tarkovski (Quoted by Xenos, February 2013)

* * *

"I stayed up all night reading while listening to the cows lowing and their bells clanging until I cried out, 'I've found it!' 'It' was the religion of the Goddess and the power of her mysteries."

- Mary K. Greer: Women of the Golden Dawn - Rebels and Priestesses (Quoted by Nefastos, March 2013)

* * *

"The Goddess has three eyes:
sun of knowledge, moon of love,
and fire of cosmic dissolution.
What artist can create such a gaze?
August Kali is the destroyer of every limit.
How can limited representation contain her?
Only she can wash the stains of conventional concepts
from the bright cloth of primal awareness,
revealing her indescribable nature
to the child who sings this song."


- Lex Hixon: August Kali is the destroyer of every limit (Quoted by Nefastos, March 2013)
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!"
Fomalhaut
Posts: 169
Joined: Tue Sep 27, 2011 8:16 pm

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Fomalhaut »

"1. In generosity and helping others be like a river
2. In compassion and grace be like the sun
3. In concealing others’ faults be like the night
4. In anger and fury be like the dead
5. In modesty and humility be like the earth
6. In tolerance be like a sea
7. Either exist as you are or be as you look"

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī
"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become."
— C.G. Jung
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

Virtues of the seven cosmocrators:
1. In generosity and helping others be like a river

Mercury.

2. In compassion and grace be like the sun

Sun.

3. In concealing others’ faults be like the night

Saturn.

4. In anger and fury be like the dead

Mars.

5. In modesty and humility be like the earth

Moon.

6. In tolerance be like a sea

Venus.

7. Either exist as you are or be as you look

Jupiter.
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!"
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

"Every man and every woman is a star."
- Aleister Crowley: The Book of the Law

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."
- William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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!"
User avatar
Nefastos
Posts: 3029
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 10:05 am
Location: Helsinki

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Nefastos »

"They say there is a monk on Tai-pei mountains,
Floating like scent, three hundred feet beneath the sky.
Once with his scriptures he hid himself in the middle peak,
And he has scarcely been seen by those who hear the ringing bell.

His metal stick once parted two tigers in a death struggle:
Now it lies against the window. Under his bed a jar contains a dragon.
His clothes were made of weeds and leaves; his ears
Touch his shoulders, and his brow hangs over his face.

No one knows his age. Only the green pines planted
By him cannot be ringed around ten arms.
His mind is as clear as a flowing river.
His person, like clouds, knows either right nor wrong.

Once an old man of Shang Shan met him,
But I can find no way through these untrodden heights.
Still in the mountains lives this unknown monk.
The towsnmen do not know him: they look in vain to the melting blue sky."


- Ts'en Ts'an: Ode To A Monk On The Tai-Pei Mountains (transl. Yuan Chia-hua)
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!"
User avatar
Jiva
Posts: 316
Joined: Thu Apr 25, 2013 2:13 am

Re: Quotations relevant to the Path

Post by Jiva »

On the advice of Nefastos I'm posting this video of Slavoj Žižek's comtemplation on Love. I personally think it's very thought provoking; I'm not sure why I didn't post it before. The following is a transcription.
There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. But then, how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics where, you know, the idea there is that [the] universe is a void, but a kind of a positively charged void. And then, particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And I like this idea spontaneously very much, that the fact that it's not just nothing: things are out there. It means something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance – cosmic catastrophe – [and] that things exist by mistake. And I'm even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this: it's called love. Isn't love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of “I love the world” - universal love. I don't like the world. I'm basically somewhere in-between: “I hate the world” or “I'm indifferent towards it”. But the whole of reality is just it. It's stupid, it's out there, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I love you all”, love means “I pick out something”. And it's, you know, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail – a fragile individual person – I say: “I love you more than anything else”. In this quite formal sense, love is evil.
'Oh Krishna, restless and overpowering, this mind is overwhelmingly strong; I think we might as easily gain control over the wind as over this.'
Locked