Know Thyself

Gnothi Seauton

I

If thou canst bear
Strong meat of simple truth
If thou durst my words compare
With what thou thinkest in my soul's free youth,
Then take this fact unto thy soul,-----
God dwells in thee.
It is no metaphor nor parable,
It is unknown to thousands, and to thee;
Yet there is God.

II

He is in thy world,
But thy world knows him not.
He is the mighty Heart
From which life's varied pulses part.
Clouded and shrouded there doth sit
The Infinite
Embosomed in a man;
And thou art stranger to thy guest
And know'st not what thou doth invest.
The clouds that veil his life within
Are thy thick woven webs of sin,
Which his glory struggling through
Darkens to thine evil hue.

III

Then bear thyself, O man!
Up to the scale and compass of thy guest;
Soul of thy soul.
Be great as doth beseem
The ambassador who bears
The royal presence where he goes.

IV

Give up to thy soul-----
Let it have its way-----
It is, I tell thee, God himself,
The selfsame One that rules the Whole,
Tho' he speaks thro' thee with a stifled voice,
And looks through thee, shorn of his beams.
But if thou listen to his voice,
If thou obey the royal thought,
It will grow clearer to thine ear,
More glorious to thine eye.
The clouds will burst that veil him now
And thou shalt see the Lord.

V

Therefore be great,
Not proud,-----too great to be proud.
Let not thine eyes rove,
Peep not in corners; let thine eyes
Look straight before thee, as befits
The simplicity of Power.
And in thy closet carry state;
Filled with light, walk therein;
And, as a king
Would do no treason to his own empire,
So do not thou to thine.

VI

This is the reason why thou dost recognize
Things now first revealed,
Because in thee resides
The Spirit that lives in all;
And thou canst learn the laws of nature
Because its author is latent in thy breast.

VII

Therefore, O happy youth,
Happy if thou dost know and love this truth,
Thou art unto thyself a law,
And since the soul of things is in thee,
Thou needest nothing out of thee.
The law, the gospel, and the Providence,
Heaven, Hell, the Judgement, and the stores
Immeasurable of Truth and Good,
All these thou must find
Within thy single mind,
Or never find.

VIII

Thou art the law;
The gospel has no revelation
Of peace and hope until there is response
From the deep chambers of thy mind thereto,-----
The rest is straw.
It can reveal no truth unknown before.
The Providence
Thou art thyself that doth dispense
Wealth to thy work, want to thy sloth,
Glory to goodness, to neglect, the moth.
Thou sow'st the wind, the whirlwind reapest,
Thou payest the wages
Of thy own work, through all ages.
The almighty energy within
Crowneth virtue, curseth sin.
Virtue sees by its own light;
Stumbleth sin in self-made night.

IX

Who approves thee doing right?
God in thee.
Who condemns thee doing wrong?
God in thee.
Who punishes thine evil deed?
God in thee.
What is thine evil meed?
Thy worse mind, with error blind
And more prone to evil
That is, the greater hiding of the God within:
The loss of peace
The terrible displeasure of this inmate
And next the consequence
More faintly as more distant wro't
Upon our outward fortunes
Which decay with vice
With Virtue rise.

X

The selfsame God
By the same law
Makes the souls of angels glad
And the souls of devils sad
See
There is nothing else but God
Where e'er I look
All things hasten back to him
Light is but his shadow dim.

XI

Shall I ask wealth or power of God, who gave
An image of himself to be my soul?
As well might swilling ocean ask a wave,
Or the starred firmament a dying coal,-----
For that which is in me lives in the whole.

--Emerson, 1831

I Want to Know You....

I Want to Know You
......... By Oriah Mountain Dreamer (an Indian Elder)

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your life's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have been shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you're telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray you own soul. I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty everyday, and if you can source your life from God's presence. I want to know if you can live with the failure, yours or mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes'!

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Who am I?

I have a body, but I am not my body.
I can see and feel my body,
and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer.
My body may be tired or excited,
sick or healthy, heavy or light,
but that has nothing to do with my inward I.
I have a body, but I am not my body.


I have desires, but am not my desires.
I can know my desires,
and what can be known is not the true Knower.
Desires come and go, floating through my awareness,
but they do not affect my inward I.
I have desires, but I am not desires.


I have emotions, but I am not my emotions.
I can feel and sense my emotions,
and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler.
Emotions pass through me,
but they do not affect my inward I.
I have emotions, but I am not emotions.


I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.
I can know and intuit my thoughts,
and what can be known is not the true Knower.
Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me,
but they do not affect my inward I.
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts.


I am what remains, a pure center of awareness,
an unmoved witness of all these
thoughts, emotions, feelings, and desires.

-Ken wilber?

Materialism revisited

This is an interesting article I just read by Jung, which talks about some of the themes I was trying to get across in my post about materialism below...very interesting and serves to highlight some of the arbitrariness and rigidities of modern day science.

Matter of the soul — Carl G Jung

IT was universally believed in the Middle Ages as well as in the Græco-Roman world that the soul is a substance. Indeed, mankind as a whole has held this belief from its earliest beginnings, and it was left for the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a “psychology without the soul” [the German Seele = soul or psyche]. Under the influence of scientific materialism, everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt; such things were even laughed at because of their supposed affinity with metaphysics. Nothing was considered “scientific” or admitted to be true unless it could be perceived by the senses or traced back to physical causes. This radical change of view did not begin with philosophical materialism, for the way was being prepared long before. When the spiritual catastrophe of the Reformation put an end to the Gothic Age with its impetuous yearning for the heights, its geographical confinement, and its restricted view of the world, the vertical outlook of the mind was forthwith intersected by the horizontal outlook of modern times. Consciousness ceased to grow upward, and grew instead in breadth of view, as well as in knowledge of the terrestrial globe. This was the period of the great voyages, and of the widening of man’s ideas of the world by empirical discoveries. Belief in the substantiality of the spirit yielded more and more to the obtrusive conviction that material things alone have substance, till at last, after nearly four hundred years, the leading European thinkers and investigators came to regard the mind as wholly dependent on matter and material causation.

We are certainly not justified in saying that philosophy or natural science has brought about this complete volte-face. There were always a fair number of intelligent philosophers and scientists who had enough insight and depth of thought to accept this irrational reversal of standpoint only under protest; a few even resisted it, but they had no following and were powerless against the popular attitude of unreasoned, not to say emotional, surrender to the all-importance of the physical world. Let no one suppose that so radical a change in man’s outlook could be brought about by reasoning and reflection, for no chain of reasoning can prove or disprove the existence of either mind or matter. Both these concepts, as every intelligent man today may ascertain for himself, are mere symbols that stand for something unknown and unexplored, and this something is postulated or denied according to man’s mood and disposition or as the spirit of the age dictates. There is nothing to prevent the speculative intellect from treating the psyche, on the one hand, as a complicated biochemical phenomenon, and at bottom a mere play of electrons, or, on the other, from regarding the unpredictable behaviour of electrons as the sign of mental life even in them.

The fact that a metaphysics of the mind was supplanted in the nineteenth century by a metaphysics of matter, is a mere trick if we consider it as a question for the intellect; yet regarded from the standpoint of psychology, it is an unexampled revolution in man’s outlook upon the world. Other-worldliness is converted into matter-of-factness; empirical boundaries are set to man’s discussion of every problem, to his choice of purposes, and even to what he calls “meaning”. Intangible, inner happenings seem to have to yield place to things in the external, tangible world, and no value exists if it is not founded on a so-called fact. At least, this is how it appears to the simple mind.

It is futile, indeed, to attempt to treat this unreasoned change of opinion as a question of philosophy. We had better not try to do so, for if we maintain that mental phenomena arise from the activity of glands, we are sure of the thanks and respect of our contemporaries, whereas if we explain the break-up of the atom in the sun as an emanation of the creative Weltgeist, we shall be looked down upon as intellectual freaks. And yet both views are equally logical, equally metaphysical, equally arbitrary and equally symbolic. From the standpoint of epistemology it is just as admissible to derive animals from the human species, as man from animal species. But we know how ill Professor Daque fared in his academic career because of his sin against the spirit of the age, which will not let itself be trifled with. It is a religion, or — even more — a creed which has absolutely no connection with reason, but whose significance lies in the unpleasant fact that it is taken as the absolute measure of all truth and is supposed always to have common-sense upon its side.

The spirit of the age cannot be compassed by the processes of human reason. It is an inclination, an emotional tendency that works upon weaker minds, through the unconscious, with an overwhelming force of suggestion that carries them along with it. To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is stupidly swimming against the social current. Just as formerly the assumption was unquestionable that everything that exists takes its rise from the creative will of a God who is spirit, so the nineteenth century discovered the equally unquestionable truth that everything arises from material causes. Today the psyche does not build itself a body, but on the contrary, matter, by chemical action, produces the psyche. This reversal of outlook would be ludicrous if it were not one of the outstanding features of the spirit of the age. It is the popular way of thinking, and therefore it is decent, reasonable, scientific and normal. Mind must be thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter. The same conclusion is reached even if we say not “mind” but “psyche”, and in place of matter speak of brain, hormones, instincts or drives. To grant the substantiality of the soul or psyche is repugnant to the spirit of the age, for to do so would be heresy.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, influential thinker and founder of analytical psychology. This excerpt is taken from his book ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’

"Waking Up"?

I was dozing off the other night and I started having dreams etc where other people would be in my dreams and what they were saying etc would affect me emotionally or in one way or the other.. Then i would sort of wake up and realize it was a dream and that those characters were really just in my consciousness...in my dream all the characters are really just characters in MY consciousness...in effect aspects of myself. and that when i realized that, what they say or did really lost all the MEGA importance or weight on it ..because it was really just me.

But that's exactly what this "Waking" life is also...all the people/characters are just reflections of ourselves but they seem so real that we think they are separate and attach so much importance to them and what they say etc and let it affect us. "WAKING UP" then is just realizing that everything around us is just in our consciousness , is in affect US. So theres no need to be intimidated or emotional or attach SO much importance etc. Just change your thoughts/attitudes etc and eerything else will change!.

BEING

"It means allowing yourself to be however you are and wholly loving yourself for being that. It is feeling whatever you are feeling and living that emotion. Being is living wholly in the moment because you know that the Now is all there is. It is doing whatever you want to do, living the adventure that your soul urges you to pursue."

Ramtha, The White Book

Materialism??? .... :P

The mystery and magic have been taken out of life. The sense of wonder and the miraculous has gone. They have been replaced by a bitter resignation to the prevalent view that the universe is a cold and mechanistic place. The theory of materialism has taken over and even people with a religious bent are affected by this general mood.

- on a sidenote, I want to clarify something about the term materialism. I had heard this term a lot over the course of my life , generally used in terms to refer to our society as a materialistic one and so on. I had always assumed that it meant that people these days are concerned with gathering materials, (material wealth, things etc) . I have only recently come to a deeper meaning of this. I shouldn’t say deeper, since it has been out there for people interested in this subject, but for general people like myself, it was not generally understood to be as such. This is referred to as the Age of Materialism primarily because the prevailing world view as espoused by the leading scientists, intellectuals etc regards this "Objective" Reality as completely MATERIAL. i.e. all things can be described in terms of their physical characteristic, environment, breakdowns ,in essence materials, down to the molecules and atoms. It does not suppose any explanation for any phenomena or event that goes beyond this and that cannot be measured explicitly in the laboratory. This world view started taking prevalence since the dawn of the Newtonian Age, when Newton attempted to describe the forces of nature in purely mathematical forms. Now granted, this may have felt like a wise move at the time, what with all the superstition and so on prevalent at the time and Europe having come out of the Dark Ages and so on. But the path that scientists have gone down since that time has taken us completely to the other end of the spectrum.


In essence, we have taken the absence of evidence, as evidence of absence. If one needs ANY evidence of the magical in their lives, they should look up the term synchronicity and see if it applies to any experiences in their life. Almost inevitably, everyone has those few experiences where multiple events happened, beyond their control, in almost a synchronized manner to produce a desired outcome. And as is common, I myself have in the past passed them off as JUST a coincidence. However, now that I’ve started noticing them more and not just dismissing them, they have started occurring more and more frequently; to the point where I can now say my INTENTION for a particular outcome often leads to this chain of events that I could never have foreseen.

Ok so I don’t know how this post has evolved to where it is. Just some thoughts I had that I wanted to get out and now I have to go!

The Creator

"then He realized, I indeed am this Creation for I have poured it forth from Myself. In that way He became this Creation, and verily, he who knows this, becomes in this Creation , the Creator"

-Upanishads