Philosophy

"Yoga is defined as a method – the process of nirodha (mental control) – by which union (the goal of yoga) is achieved. Yoga is therefore both the process of nirodha and the unqualified state of niruddha (the perfection of that process). The word yoga (union) implies duality (as in joining of two things or principles); the result of yoga is the nondual state..., or as the union of the lower self and higher Self. The nondual state is characterized by the absence of individuality; it can be described as eternal peace, pure love, Self-realization, or liberation."

"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 polarized in the higher self, ego, or soul, thence to a polarisation in the Monad, or Spirit, till the consciousness eventually is Divine."

"Spiritual freedom has to be won by oneself for oneself through watchful and unfailing war against the lower self and the lower desires. (p 2313)"

"A God is not the universal deity, but only a spark from the one ocean of Divine Fire. Our God within us, or “our Father in Secret” is what we call the “Higher Self,” Atma. Our incarnating Ego was a God in its origin, as were all the primeval emanations of the One Unknown Principle. But since its “fall into Matter,” having to incarnate throughout the cycle, in succession, from first to last, it is no longer a free and happy god, but a poor pilgrim on his way to regain that which he has lost. I can answer you more fully... what is said of the Inner Man in Isis Unveiled (Vol. II. 593):—[143]... Such is the destiny of the Man—the true Ego, not the Automaton, the shell that goes by that name. It is for him to become the conqueror over matter."

"The Higher Self is the consciousness beyond the physical, the larger, wider, greater consciousness which is our real Self, the Self of which the consciousness in the brain is only the faintest of reflections. This body of ours is only a house in which we dwell for our physical work; we hold the key of the body... We may trust the consciousness and the testimony of the Saints, the Prophets, the Seers, and the Teachers of humanity... They were divine, showing Their divinity to the worlds. We are none the less divine, although our divinity is veiled. Let us claim our birthright, to know as They knew.... Every one of us is a divine fragment, every one of us an eternal Spirit, every one of us a deific life, striving to attain through matter to consciousness of our own divinity. That is the teaching of all faiths, that is the fundamental principle of life, of religion, of nature, and Modern Science is finding that even physical nature is not intelligible without the understanding of the higher world, without the recognition of larger possibilities."

"Belief is of the lower mind, and often is swept away by a torrent of opposing 'logic'. But real knowing is a bringing through of truth from the high level of the intuition. Thus what we know in this true sense no man takes from us, as was promised long ago. Truly, the realization we bring through from the higher Self is unshakable knowing. What a contrast to mere believing, which is like the proverbial house built on the shifting sands."

"The "Dweller on the Threshold"...[is] created by the lower personal self and not by the soul, it is impermanent and is simply held together by the man's lower energy. When the man begins to function as the soul this "image" he has created, through... his reaction to delusion, is dissipated by a supreme exertion. It has no real existence once there is nothing in the aspirant to feed it, and the realization of this enables him to free himself from its thraldom."

"Unless you go against your lower self, you cannot unite with your higher Self. Now what is the lower self? That which makes you think you are small, that which makes you feel that you are not satisfied, not happy, that which makes others see you as small. So the meaning of going against the lower self is to transform this in quite the opposite direction... Remain pleased and contented, happy and satisfied. When you are displeased, unhappy or upset and moody, it is your lower self asserting itself. (p. 2143)"

"According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?"

"The development of the Christ Consciousness and the Christ Nature in individual man, and in the race as a whole, carries with it the solution of our world problem."

"“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the biblical prophet (Revelation 21:1). The foundation for a new earth is a new heaven – the awakened consciousness. The earth – external reality – is only its outer reflection. The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free. Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening."

"Atma, the “Higher Self,” is neither your Spirit nor mine, but like sunlight shines on all. It is the universally diffused “divine principle,” and is inseparable from its one and absolute Meta-Spirit, as the sunbeam is inseparable from sunlight."

"This tendency, however, to ascribe an universality of genius to great men, led Dryden to affirm, on the strength of two smart satyrical lines, that Virgil could have written a satire equal to Juvenal. But, with all due deference to Dryden, I conceive it much more manifest, that Juvenal could have written a better epic than Virgil, than that Virgil could have written a satire equal to Juvenal. Juvenal has many passages of the moral sublime far superior to any that can be found in Virgil, who, indeed, seldom attempts a higher flight than the sublime of description. Had Lucan lived, he might have rivalled them both, as he has all the vigour of the one, and time might have furnished him with the taste and elegance of the other."

"That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense."

"If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean of his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinions. He is every where confident of his own reason, and assuming an absolute command, not only over his vulgar reader, but even his patron Memmius. For he is always bidding him attend, as if he had the rod over him, and using a magisterial authority, while he instructs him. [...] He seems to disdain all manner of replies, and is so confident of his cause, that he is beforehand with his antagonists; urging for them whatever he imagined they could say, and leaving them, as he supposes, without an objection for the future; all this too, with so much scorn and indignation, as if he were assured of the triumph, before he entered into the lists. From this sublime and daring genius of his, it must of necessity come to pass, that his thoughts must be masculine, full of argumentation, and that sufficiently warm. From the same fiery temper proceeds the loftiness of his expressions, and the perpetual torrent of his verse, where the barrenness of his subject does not too much constrain the quickness of his fancy. For there is no doubt to be made, but that he could have been every where as poetical, as he is in his descriptions, and in the moral part of his philosophy, if he had not aimed more to instruct, in his system of nature, than to delight."

"Without minute neatness of execution the sublime cannot exist. Grandeur of ideas is precision of ideas. Singular and particular detail is the foundation of the sublime."

"It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfectly bombast."

"Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent."

"We may describe the Sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of Ideas. ...That is, the sublime is that which overwhelms the rational capacities of the mind, temporarily freezing the mortal in awe and fear, before his apparatus reignites and grants a pleasurable overcoming of sensation by rational comprehension."

"In the Old Testament stories... the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."

"The feeling of the sublime is . . . at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law. It is, in other words, for us a law (of reason), which goes to make us what we are, that we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law."

"I resolved, therefore, to bend my studies towards the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. But behold, I espy something in them not revealed to the proud, not discovered unto children, humble in style, sublime in operation, and wholly veiled over in mysteries. ...such are thy Scriptures as grew up together with thy little ones. But I much disdained to be held a little one; and big swollen with pride, I took myself to be some great man."

"[I]t is the duty of nations, as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord: And insomuch as we know that by his divine law nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of the civil war which now desolates our land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us: It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness... I do by this proclamation designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. ...All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country..."

"There are, one may say, some five most productive sources of the sublime in literature, the common groundwork, as it were, of all five being competence in speaking, without which nothing can be done. The first and most powerful is the power of grand conceptions... and the second is the inspiration of vehement emotion."

"Utterances which appear inspired are often not sublime but merely childish."

"[T]he Sublime is no longer an (empirical) object indicating through its very inadequacy the dimension of a transcendent Thing-in-itself (Idea) but an object which occupies the place, replaces, fills out the empty place of the Thing as the void, as the pure nothing of absolute negativity—the Sublime is an object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing. This logic of an object which, by its very inadequacy, 'gives body' to the absolute negativity of the Idea, is articulated in Hegel..."

"Above all... Beauty and Sublimity are opposed along the axis pleasure-displeasure: a view of Beauty offers us pleasure, while 'the object is received as sublime with a pleasure that is only possible through the mediation of dipleasure' (Kant...). In short, the Sublime is 'beyond the pleasure principle', it is a paradoxical pleasure procured by displeasure itself... [T]he relation of Beauty to Sublimity coincides with the relation of immediacy to mediation—further proof that the Sublime must follow Beauty..."

"The ' is a thing in the Lacanian sense: the material leftover, the materialization of the terrifying, impossible jouissance. By looking at the wreck we gain an insight into the forbidden domain, into a space that should be left unseen... This terrifying impact has nothing to do with meaning—or... it is a meaning that is permeated with enjoyment, a Lacanian jouissance. The wreck of the Titanic therefore functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing."

"Homologous to Hegel's determination of the difference between the death of the pagan god and the death of Christ (the first being merely the death of the... terrestrial representation... while with the death of Christ... is of... God as a positive, transcendent, unattainable entity...) ...what Kant fails to take into account is the way the experience of the nullity, of the inadequacy of the phenomenal world of representation, which befalls us in the sentiment of the Sublime, means at the same time the nullity, the nonexistence of the transcendent Thing-in-itself as a positive entity."

"Happy he who possesses this double power of meditation and inspiration, which is genius! Whatever may be the age on which he is, or the country—be he born in the bosom of domestic calamities, be he thrown on a time of popular convulsions, or, what is still more to be lamented, on a period of stagnant indifference—let him trust himself to the future; for, if the present belong to other men, the future is for him. He is of the number of chosen beings for whom a day is allotted. Sooner or later, the day comes; and it is then—fed by sublime thought, and elevated by divine inspiration—that he throws himself boldly before the world, with the cry of the poet upon his lips ‘Voici mon Orient: peuples levez les yeux!’"

"Poetical composition results from two intellectual phenomena, meditation and inspiration. Meditation is a faculty; inspiration is a gift. All men, to a certain degree, can meditate; very few are inspired. Spiritus flat ubi vult [The spirit flows where it wills.]. In meditation, the spirit acts; in inspiration, it obeys; because the first is of men, the second comes from a higher source. He who gave us this power is stronger than we. These two processes of thoughts are intimately linked in the soul of the poet. The poet invites inspiration by meditation, as the prophets raised themselves to ecstasies by prayer. That the muse should reveal herself to him, he must in some sort have passed all his material existence in repose, in silence, and in meditation. He must be isolated from external life, to enjoy in its fullness that inward life, which develops in him a new existence; and it is only when the physical world has utterly vanished from before his eyes, that the ideal world is fully revealed to him. It seems that poetic inspiration has in it something too sublime for the common nature of man. Genius can compass its greater efforts only when the soul is released from the vulgar cares that follow it in life; for thought cannot take its wings till it has laid aside its burden. Thence comes it, doubtless, that inspiration is born only of meditation. Among the Jews, the people whose history is so rich in mysterious symbols when the priest had built the altar, he lighted upon it an earthly flame -- and it was then only that the divine ray descended from Heaven."

"The most satisfactory theory of the sublime is that of Emmanuel Kant in his Critic of the Judgment. This philosopher distinguishes two kinds of sublime... the mathematical sublime, which results from the intuitions of time and of space, and the dynamical sublime, that is derived from the idea of force. The dynamical sublime is immaterial or material, according to the nature of the physical or spiritual force which is the source of it: the spiritual force gives rise to a second subdivision, as far as it may be intellectual or moral."

"[I]f these very objects whose significant forms invite us to pure contemplation, have a hostile relation to the human will... so that it is menaced by the irresistible predominance of their power, or sinks into insignificance... if, nevertheless, the beholder... turns consciously away from it, forcibly detaches himself from his will and its relations, and, giving himself up entirely to knowledge, quietly contemplates those very objects... comprehends only their Idea, which is foreign to all relation, so that he lingers gladly over its contemplation, and is thereby raised above himself, his person, his will, and all will:—in that case he is filled with the sense of the sublime, he is in the state of spiritual exaltation, and therefore the object producing such a state is called sublime."

"[A]fter the account which I have given... of the inner nature of æsthetical knowledge in its most general outlines, the following more exact philosophical treatment of the beautiful and the sublime will explain them both, in nature and in art, without separating them further. ...[W]e shall consider what takes place in a man when he is affected by the beautiful and the sublime; whether he derives this emotion directly from nature, from life, or partakes of it only through the medium of art, does not make any essential, but merely an external, difference."

"Thus what distinguishes the sense of the sublime from that of the beautiful is this: in... the beautiful, pure knowledge has gained the upper hand without a struggle, for the beauty... has removed from consciousness without resistance... imperceptibly, the will and the knowledge of relations which is subject to it, so that what is left is the pure subject of knowledge without... will. On the other hand, in... the sublime that state of pure knowledge is only attained by a conscious and forcible breaking away from the relations of the... object to the will, which are... unfavourable, by a free and conscious transcending of the will..."

"[A]n earthquake, a hurricane, a storm, a volcanic eruption, occasion the dynamical physical sublime; whereas genius and heroic virtue produce the dynamical immaterial sublime in its two aspects, of which one regards and concerns the intellectual force of the mind, and the other relates to the moral energy of the human will."

"Affability is beautiful, thoughtful taciturnity sublime. He is a good keeper of his own and of other's secrets."

"Friendship is sublime, and therefore for his feeling. He may perhaps lose a changeable friend; but the latter does not lose him so soon. The very memory of extinguished friendship is still venerable to him."

"Veracity is sublime, and he hates lying or dissimulation. He has a high feeling for the dignity of human nature. He esteems himself and holds a man a creature that merits reverence. He suffers no abject submission, and breathes liberty in a noble breast. All chains, from the golden, which are worn at court, to the heavy iron ones of galley-slaves, are to him abominable. He is a severe judge as well of himself as of others, and not seldom tired of himself and of the world."

"All emotions of the sublime have something in them more enchanting, than the juggling charms of the beautiful. His being-well is rather contentment than mirth. He is steadfast. He therefore ranges his feelings under principles. They are the less subjected to inconstancy and to alteration, the more universal this principle is... The noble ground remains and is not so much subjected to the inconstancy, of external things. ...[W]hat befalls men, concerns [him] likewise. Then his procedure rests upon the highest ground of benevolence in human nature, and is extremely sublime, as well as to its immutability, as on account of the universality of its application."

"The subduing of one's passions by principles is sublime."

"The man of a melancholy temper of mind gives himself little trouble about what others judge of, what they hold good or true, he relies on his own insight merely. As the motives with him assume the nature of principles; it is not easy to bring him to other thoughts; his steadfastness sometimes degenerates into stubbornness. He beholds the change of modes with indifference and their glitter with contempt."

"Genius... consists... in the capacity for knowing, independently of the , not individual things, which have their existence only in their relations, but the Ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the Idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge. Yet this faculty must exist in all men... for if not, they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of producing them; they would have no susceptibility for the beautiful or the sublime... this power of knowing the Ideas in things, and consequently of transcending... personality for the moment... The man of genius... possessing this kind of knowledge... more continuously... [W]hile under its influence... presence of mind... enable[s] him to repeat in a voluntary and intentional work what he has learned... and this repetition is the work of art. Through this he communicates to others the Idea... unchanged... so that æsthetic pleasure is one and the same whether it is called forth by a work of art or directly by the contemplation of nature and life. ...That the Idea comes to us more easily from the work of art than directly from nature... arises from the fact that the artist... has reproduced in his work the pure Idea... abstracted... from the actual, omitting... disturbing accidents. The artist lets us see the world through his eyes. ...that he is able to lend us this gift... is acquired, and is the technical side of art."

"But the conceptions of time, of space, and of force, either corporeal or spiritual, cannot produce the sublime without the concourse of... the notion of the infinite and of the absolute, in which the human mind seeks naturally a refuge when the form of the object which appears to it cannot be seized on account of its grandeur, and surpasses even the forces of the imagination, which endeavours in vain to become master of it."

"Friendship has principally the stroke of the sublime in it, but the love of the sex that of the beautiful."

"The sentiments of the sublime strain the powers of the soul more, and therefore tire sooner."

"Tragedy... distinguishes itself from comedy chiefly in... that in the former is touched the sentiment of the sublime, in the latter that of the beautiful."

"Boldness is at once great and sublime, artifice is little, but beautiful."

"Understanding is sublime, wit is beautiful."

"Sublime properties inspire esteem, but beautiful ones love."