Philosophy

"Wakefulness Wakefulness is the way to life. The fool sleeps. As if he were already dead, But the Master is awake. And he lives forever. He that watches with a clear mind. How happy he is For he sees that wakefulness is life. How happy he is! That goes in the path of the awakened with great perseverance For he sees that wakefulness is life. He meditates, seeking Freedom and happiness. So be awake, reflect, watch. Work with care and attention. Live in the way and the light will grow in you. By watching and working The Master makes for himself an island Which the flood cannot overwhelm The fool is careless But the Master guards his watching. It is his most precious treasure He never gives in to desire He meditates. And in the strength of his resolve He discovers true happiness. He overcomes desire- And from the tower of his wisdom He looks down with dispassion Upon the sorrowing crowd. from the mountain top He looks down at those Who live close to the ground. Mindful among the mindless Awake while others dream. Swift as the race horse He outstrips the field. How wonderful it is to watch. How foolish to sleep. The simpleton who guards his mind And fears the waywardness of his thoughts Burns through every bond With the fire of his vigilance. The simpleton who guards his mind And fears his own confusion Cannot fall. He had found his way to peace."

"Everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith."

"The Union will awaken. It always has. We always will."

"Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile."

"Jesse: Man, some straight like you, giant stick up his ass, all of a sudden at age, what, 60, he's just gonna break bad?"

"We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality."

"If a king is energetic, his subjects will be equally energetic. If he is reckless, they will not only be reckless likewise, but also eat into his works. Besides, a reckless king will easily fall into the hands of his enemies. Hence the king shall ever be wakeful."

"Despondency becomes not the dignity of our cause, nor the character of those who are its supporters. Let us awaken then, and evince a different spirit, — a spirit that shall inspire the people with confidence in themselves and in us, — a spirit that will encourage them to persevere in this glorious struggle, until their rights and liberties shall be established on a rock."

"Wakefulness (yaqza) — may God encompass you in this matter with thoughts and ideas — is not to the exclusion of dreaming if the soul of the vigilant is awake and unblemished by evil and impurity. Dreaming, however, is more extraordinary, and man is more avid for it, for it is like a legacy one inherits, while wakefulness is like something gained by toil. And ardour for a vision is commensurate with this."

"When the One who has realized God says, “I am God. You are God, and we are all one,” and also awakens this feeling of Oneness in his illusion-bound selves, then the question of the lowly and the great, the poor and the rich, the humble and the modest, the good and the bad, simply vanishes. It is his false awareness of duality that misleads man into making illusory distinctions and filing them into separate categories."

"Awaken from your ignorance and try at least to understand that, in the uncompromisingly Indivisible Oneness, not only is the Avatar God, but also the ant and the sparrow, just as one and all of you are nothing but God. The only apparent difference is in the states of consciousness. The Avatar knows that that which is a sparrow is not a sparrow, whereas the sparrow does not realize this and, being ignorant of its ignorance, identifies itself as a sparrow."

"Being the Avatar, I have come to awaken mankind, and would like the entire world to come to me. Real saints are dearest and nearest to my heart. Perfect Ones and lovers of God adorn the world, and will ever do so."

"Some investigators contend that EEG patterns denoting wakefulness indicate when consciousness is first possible. Wakefulness is a state of arousal mediated by the brainstem and thalamus in communication with the cortex. In preterm neonates, the earliest EEG pattern representing wakefulness appears around 30 weeks’ PCA. However, wakefulness alone is insufficient to establish consciousness, as unconscious patients in a persistent vegetative state may also have wakeful EEGs."

"The goddess awakens in infinite forms and a thousand disguises. She is found where she is least expected, appears out of nowhere and everywhere to illumine the open heart."

"I have come not to teach but to awaken. Understand therefore that I lay down no precepts."

"Political leaders are never leaders. For leaders we have to look to the Awakeners! Lao Tse, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Gurdjiev, Krishnamurti."

"The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts — Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be."

"He who dreamed of democracy, far back in a world of absolutism, was indeed heroic, and we of today awaken to the wonder of his dream."

"Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."

"In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level."

"I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. … I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country."

"It has been proposed that arguments around fetal pain can be resolved by the fact that the fetus never enters a state of wakefulness in utero. This evidence is derived largely from observations of fetal lambs. Rigatto et al., for example, directly observed an unanaesthetised sheep fetus, in utero, through a Plexiglas window, for 5000 hours without observing signs of wakefulness such as eyes opening or coordinated movement of the head. Several factors explain this lack of wakefulness, including the environment of the womb, which is warm, buoyant and cushioned, and the presence of a chemical environment (most notably adenosine) that preserves a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness or sedation and suppresses higher cortical activation in the presence of intrusive external stimulation. Mellor et al. also propose that the fetus is unconscious based on the presence of sleep-like EEG patterns observed in the lamb fetus, which enter a more quiescent state together with lack of movement, during hypoxic stress, although it should be emphasised that this is quite different from the kind of noxious stress generated by surgery discussed here. Mellor et al. report that the general pattern of EEG during gestation is equivalent to a sleep-like state analogous to non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep."

"[I]increasing evidence suggests that the fetus never enters a state of wakefulness inside the womb. The placenta produces chemicals that suppress nervous system activity and awareness."

"Goe to my Love where she is carelesse layd Yet in her winter's bowere not well awake; Tell her the joyous time will not be staid Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take."

"Although these data are derived from sheep, this species has been a useful investigative model of human pregnancy and the extrapolation of these data to the human fetus is plausible. Being asleep or awake is not as easy to distinguish in the fetus and newborn as it is in adults but the broad categories can still be classified on the basis of EEG recordings. On this basis, sleep state differentiation appears in humans as early as 25 weeks in preterm infants and is complete at 30 weeks. EEG recordings in late fetal baboons support these observations and define only two physiological states from EEG analysis, quiet sleep and active sleep. While the lack of fetal movement during anoxic stress in sheep may not be the same as the response to acute surgical tissue damage in humans, this work does highlight the important differences between fetal and neonatal life and the potential pitfalls of extrapolating from observations of newborn preterm infants to observations of the fetus. Sedation of the fetus and suppression of cortical arousal in times of stress imply that the cortex in utero responds differently from the neonatal cortex and that it is only after birth, with the separation of the baby from the uterus and the umbilical cord, that wakefulness truly begins. This conclusion is not inconsistent with reports of fetal conditioning and habituation to repeated exposure of sounds and smells in late pregnancy which are often referred to as fetal learning. Such responses do not require a cortex in a state of wakefulness and can be induced in simple circuits in lower organisms."

"During that first minute of wakefulness, you have the best chance of bringing your dreams into your normal consciousness. Sometimes you can hold onto a flash memory a little longer if you don’t move around."

"Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation. No, explanation is not needed – only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates."

""If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty."

"Life is a waste of wearisome hours, Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns, And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers, Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns."

"There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul."

"Set you intention to awaken from dreams. As you fall asleep for the night, assert to yourself that you will awaken after dreams during the night. Remind yourself that want to recall your dreams clearly and do the MILD Exercise Awaken from a dream and recall it. When you awaken from a dream in the night, first recall it in as much detail as you can, and then write out enough of it to describe the basic events and scenes of the dream. Increase your wakefulness. Get out of bed, go to the bathroom, wash your face with cool water. Carefully test reality to make sure you are actually awake. Do some stretches to increase your circulation and alertness. Get back in bed, and read your dream report, noting any important recurring dream images you find in it."

"There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness—if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time."

"[By 1939] Simone Weil had developed a social and political awareness which it took the war and the German occupation to awaken in many French intellectuals and beyond which many of them, including Sartre, have never progressed."

"Though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are."

"Until recently, the pride of workmanship exceeded the quest for high incomes. However, we have been able to enslave society to our own power which is money, by causing them to seek after it. We have converted the people to our philosophy of getting and acquiring so that they will never be satisfied. A dissatisfied people are the pawns in our game of world conquest. Thus, they are always seeking and never able to find satisfaction. The very moment they seek happiness outside themselves, they become our willing servants."

"Beauty … is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses."

"“If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.” That is to say, all men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation and power, cut themselves off from that charity which is the principle of all spiritual vitality and happiness because it alone saves us from the barren wilderness of our own abominable selfishness."

"Things of the senses are real if considered as perceptible things, but unreal if considered as goods."

"The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape; Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions."

"Indulging sinful and vain desires always leads to obsession with them, and after the obsession comes slavery, which is death to everything spiritual. Those who allowed themselves to follow their desires and carnal mind became obsessed with them, enslaved by them, forgot God and eternity, and waster their earthly lives pointlessly, dying an eternal death."

"Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment."

"In his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization."

"The spiritualization of sensuality is called love."

"The senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal."

"The charm of the Platonic way of thinking, which was a noble way of thinking, consisted precisely in resistance to obvious sense evidence—perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more demanding senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of their senses—and this by means of pale, cold, gray concept nets which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses—the mob of the senses, as Plato said. … “Where man cannot find anything to see or to grasp, he has no further business”—that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may be the right imperative for a tough, industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to do."

"The noblest are they who turning from the things the vulgar crave, seek the source of a blessed life in worlds to which the senses do not lead."

"Be watchful lest thou lose the power of desiring and loving what appeals to the soul—this is the miser’s curse—this the chain and ball the sensualist drags."

"How nicely the bitch, sensuality, knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a piece of meat."

"To ask them to read books whose life-breath is pure thought and beauty is as though one asked them to read things written in a language they do not understand and have no desire to learn. A taste for the best books, as a taste for whatever is best, is acquired; and it can be acquired only by long study and practice. It is a result of free and disinterested self-activity, of efforts to attain what rarely brings other reward than the consciousness of having loved and striven for the best. But the many have little appreciation of what does not flatter or soothe the senses. Their world, like the world of children and animals, is good enough for them; meat and drink, dance and song, are worth more, in their eyes, than all the thoughts of all the literatures."

"The more the sensuous is denied, the more sensuous is the God to whom it is sacrificed."