Creating Fresh Cultures

   A culture could be described as civilized if it contains a significant number of civilized humans. As such, there have been very few civilized societies, but quite a number of civilized individuals…In each era of human history, small groups of advanced thinkers (Perennialists) have pushed humankind forward, revealing what persons are capable of, while battling the forces of degradation, ignorance, and murderous tyranny. But the ongoing struggle against oppression is ultimately insufficient–as one form of tyranny replaces another in historic succession. Humans must at last attain the understanding and capability that will enable them to create a higher social order.

The only viable way for this to occur is for a Perennialist, totally positive group to constitute itself as a “saving remnant,” ³ separate from but related to the larger culture. This Perennialist saving remnant leavens ⁵ and fecundates ⁴ the larger culture with its higher knowledge and power, ultimately transforming the negative culture into a commonwealth. This actually constitutes realising a new world in the sense of making real or concrete, giving reality to, being fully aware or cognizant of a world that already exists as an Ideal or Form. This new world is composed of essences (Forms) that Plato and other teachers within the Perennial Tradition reveal.

A Perennialist group locates its Higher Being within a Higher Realm in a separate entity outside the larger, negative culture–even though its members may have their terrestrial being within the larger, negative culture. The Perennialist group then leavens and fecundates the larger culture, ultimately transforming the larger culture into a commonwealth culture.

Credit to

http://www.hermes-press.com/creating_cultures.htm

 

Author unknown

 

“I have attaine…

“I have attained the capability of experiencing my own essence within myself, and for me this experience becomes enlarged into another, that in me and through me the universal essence expresses itself, or, in other words, knows itself. ”

 

Nicholas of Cusa, On Searching for God

 

“Essence- is the attribute or set of attributes that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the entity or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity.” Wikipedia entry on Essence

The Highest Mysteries

“In the earlier degrees, the candidates were made acquainted with the human soul, pictured as a little bird-man in the system of hieroglyphs ; they solved the mystery of death. They learned that it was really disappearance from one state of being, only to reappear in another ; that it affected the fleshly body, but did not destroy the mind and the self. They learned, too, that the soul not only survived the destruction of its mortal envelope but progressed onwards to higher spheres.

“In the advanced degrees, they were made acquainted with the divine soul; they were brought into personal communion with the Creator; they stood face to face with the Divine. They were first instructed in the true explanation of the Fall of Man from his original spiritual state. They were told the inner history of Atlantis, a history so intimately associated with the history of the Fall. Then they were lifted up, sphere beyond sphere, until they found themselves in the same highly spiritual consciousness as Man had enjoyed at the beginning. Thus, while yet on their pilgrimage in time, they had gathered the spoils of eternity.”

 

 

Paul Brunton (1898-1981), A Search in Secret Egypt

 

“He attains to …

“He attains to the knowledge of Forms in their purity who goes to each of them with the soul alone, not allowing when in the act of meditation the intrusion or introduction of sight or any other sense in the company of reason, but with the very light of the soul in her clearness penetrates into the very light of truth in each Form. . .”

‘The race of m…

‘The race of mankind is a crop sprung from dragon’s teeth: there is no hope! there is no hope!’

A stanza from a poem by Lóránt Czigány

Man is a Crop

“The true purpose of all food-raising is to produce God’s final crop — man. “Man is the crop which God wants produced — the Final Crop for whose nourishment all lesser crops are raised and garnered. An uneducated man is a crop-failure.

 

From The Green Book magazine

fascinating!

Laughter is the…

Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played upon itself.

Peter Carrol

Little White Lies – What satya (truthfulness) reveals about little white lies and how it can illuminate the inner self.

Satya (truthfulness) guides us to think, speak, and act with integrity. The word sat means “that which exists, that which is.” Satya, therefore, is seeing and communicating things as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. This can be quite challenging since our thoughts, beliefs, and past experiences shape and color whatever we see. What we experience as truth one day may not be the same truth we live the next. Practicing satya requires staying open to truth in the present moment, as it reveals itself. Not always an easy task, as I learned firsthand many years ago.

As a college student, I considered myself an honest person, except, of course, for the occasional little white lies that would slip from my lips when I didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or admit something to my parents. But, as I came to realize, lies can be such an automatic response that we’re not even aware we’re telling them, or that we’re hurting others and ourselves in the process.

One day, my close friend Don called to see if I wanted to go to a party that night. I told him that as much as I would love to, I didn’t feel well. And as I said it, I started to feel sickish and felt the pull of the couch calling me. I just wanted to nestle under a cozy blanket, sip chamomile tea, and read a good mystery.

Usually Don would sympathize with me and ask if I needed anything. But not today. In a quiet, matter-of-fact tone he said, “You know, if you don’t want to go out tonight, just say so. You don’t need to pretend you’re not well.”

I sputtered some feeble protest that no, I was not pretending. But he wouldn’t let me off the hook. “You know, you tend to do this a lot. Every time you don’t want to do something you say you’re sick.” He wasn’t angry, he said, just concerned that I didn’t feel I could be honest with him. I mumbled another denial and hung up the phone. Then suddenly it hit me: Oh my God, he’s right.

Not only had I been lying to him and others, I had been lying to myself. Without being aware of it, I had learned this response from observing my mother—a young immigrant woman in a strange country with three small children to care for and a demanding husband. From my childhood on, I remember her often being ill after recovering from surgery. But even as she got physically better, it seemed to me that she still used the excuse of not feeling well quite often, especially when my father drank too much, or got angry, or wanted to go out and she didn’t. At such times, I watched this normally capable woman, whom I loved dearly, pop the pills her doctor gave her and fade in front of my eyes, as she shrank into herself to avoid those situations she couldn’t deal with.

And now here I was virtually doing the same thing. Don was right—it had become my default reply. Worse, each time I said it, I honestly believed I didn’t feel well. I would even start to experience physical symptoms. When we lie, the sages say, we disconnect from our higher self; our minds become confused, and we cannot trust ourselves. I no longer knew my own truth. What else am I lying to myself about? I wondered.

Should we always tell our friends what we think about their behavior, like Don did with me? This is where the principle of satya gets more complex. Satya follows ahimsa (non-violence), the highest ranking yama. This means that we need to honor the principle of non-harming first and should tell the truth only if it doesn’t cause harm, or in such a way that causes the least harm. The Greek philosopher Sophocles said, “Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.” According to the wisdom of the sages, it is better to remain silent than to speak a harsh or cruel truth. Before we offer an unsolicited opinion or criticism, the ancients advise us to pause and consider: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it useful? Is it kind?

In my case, Don acted from a place of love and caring, and our long-standing friendship was strong enough for me to hear and accept his words. A year earlier, he had trusted me with his secret of being gay—a huge risk in 1970—setting the honesty bar at a very high level. Even so, if I hadn’t been ready to face my own truth, his words could have damaged, or even ended, our friendship. But instead, Don opened the way for me to start examining myself. Later that year I started to do yoga. Little by little, the asanas and diaphragmatic breathing released the truths stored in my body, while mantra recitation and meditation gradually unveiled the root causes of my mental and emotional behaviors. Some patterns were easy to discern and change; others are so deeply embedded that I am still in the process of uprooting them. The more layers of untruths I unearth, the more I discover to work through. But each layer I dig up takes me closer to my inner core. And I find that the more honest I am with myself—in a loving, playful, nonjudgmental, accepting way—the more honest others feel they can be around me.

There is a great freedom in being able to be who we really are, rather than hiding behind a mask of what we think others expect us to be. It allows us to be more spontaneous, more in tune with our creative intuitive side, and, ultimately, more open to explore the deepest truth of all—Self-realization.

 

Irene (Aradhana) Petryszak is a senior editor at Yoga International and has practiced and taught yoga philosophy for more than 25 years. Excerpted from Yoga International (Fall 2012), a bimonthly magazine about yoga and ayurveda published by the Himalayan Institute. 

Secrets of Soul and Nous – Part 1

This article about Soul In its Relation to Nous, will save the seeker much time in deciphering alchemical texts, covering essentially the same ground. If this whets your appetite  more information (although un-formatted) can be found here, which I believe is the appendix to an unpublished work on Plotinus.

[There must be a principle before soul, because soul has an element of potentiality and changeability in it and needs an eternally actual cause to account for its existence; this cause is Nous.’]

 Why must we go higher than soul, instead of considering it as the first principle? First of all, Nous is other and better than soul, and the better comes first by nature. For it is not true, as people think, that ‘soul when it is made perfect produces intelligence’: for what could make soul in potency come to be in act unless there was some cause to bring it to actuality? If it happened by chance, it would be possible for soul not to come to actual existence. So we must consider that the first realities are actual and self-sufficient and perfect: imperfect things are posterior to them and are perfected by their producers who, like fathers, bring to perfection what in the beginning they generated imperfect: the imperfect is matter in relation to the principle which makes it, and is perfected by receiving form. Further, if soul is passible, there must be something impassable (or everything will be destroyed by the passage of time), so there must be something before soul. And if soul is in the universe, there must be something outside the universe, and in this way too there must be something prior to soul. For since what is in the universe is in body and matter, nothing remains the same; so [if that was all that existed] man and all the logoi would not be eternal or continue the same. One can see from these and many other arguments that Nous must exist before soul.

[Souls exist in the world of Nous, in the state of unity proper to that world: but they have the capacity to descend into the material world, where they are divided and separated spatially into different bodies: but even in this lower world they do not entirely lose their higher unity, but keep contact with the world of Nous.]

 In the intelligible world is true being: Nous is the best of it. But there are souls there too; for it is from There that they come here. That world contains souls without bodies; this one, the souls which have come to be in bodies and are divided by their bodies. There all and every Nous is together, not separated or divided, and all souls are together in the one world, without spatial division. Nous then is always without separation and undivided. Soul There is not separated or divided; but it has a natural capacity for division. Its division is departure from the intelligible world and embodiment. So it is reasonably said to be ‘divisible as regards body’, because it is in this way that it departs and is divided. How then is it also ‘undivided’? It does not all depart; there is something of it which does not come to this world, which is not divided. To say, then, that it consists of ‘the undivided and that which is divided in bodies’ is the same as saying that it consists of that which is above and that which depends Thence, and reaches as far as the things of this world, like a radius from a center  When it has come here it sees with the part of itself in which it preserves the nature of the whole. Even here below it is not only divided, but undivided as well: for the divided part of it is divided without division. It gives itself to the whole body and is undivided because it gives itself as a whole to the whole, and it is divided by being present in every part.

[We are not strictly speaking Nous, but soul, which is mid-way between Nous and sense-perception; in our normal life we are more closely connected with sense-perception; but we can become perfectly conformed to Nous by its own power, transcending our merely human nature, and then we do actually become Nous in a way.]

We are not Nous, we are conformed to it by our primary reasoning power which receives it. Still, we perceive through sense-perception, and it is we who perceive; surely we reason in the same way? It is certainly we ourselves who reason, and we ourselves who think the thoughts which are in our discursive understanding, for this is what we are. But the activities of Nous come from above, just as those proceeding from sense-perception come from below. We are the chief part of the soul, in the middle between two powers, a worse and a better, the worse being that of sense-perception and the better that of Nous. But it is generally agreed that sense-perception is continually our own possession; for we perceive continually: there is doubt about Nous, both because we are not always in touch with it and because it is separable. It is separable because it does not incline to us, but rather we to it when we look upwards. Sense-perception is our messenger: Nous is our king. Yet we are kings too when we are conformed to it. We are conformed to it in two ways, either by a sort of inscription, as if its laws were written in us, or by being filled with it and able to see it and be aware of its presence. And we know that we ourselves come to know other things by means of this vision of Nous. We either come to know the power which knows it by that power itself, or we ourselves become that vision. So the man who knows himself is double: there is the one who knows the nature of discursive reasoning, which belongs to soul, and there is the other who transcends the first one and knows himself according to Nous by becoming it: by it he thinks himself, not as man any longer, but as having become something completely different and as having carried himself off to the heights, bringing along with him only the better part of the soul, which alone can take wing to intuitive intellect, so that he can establish There what he saw. Does not the discursive reason know that it is discursive reason, that it gains understanding of things outside, and makes its judgments by the rules in itself which it has from Nous, and that there is something better than itself, which it does not seek but altogether possesses? But is there anything which it does not know when it knows what sort of a thing it is, and what its effects are like? If then discursive reason says that it comes from Nous and is second after Nous and the image of Nous, and has in itself all the characters which Nous has written and continues to write in it, will someone who knows himself like this stop at this point? Is it by using another extra power that we have the vision of Nous which knows itself, or do we share in Nous, since it is ours and we belong to it, and so know Nous and ourselves? This last must be the way if we are to know whatever it is in Nous that knows itself. A man becomes Nous when he puts away all the rest of himself and sees only this by means of this, himself by means of himself. Then he sees himself as Nous sees itself.

[Soul is directed to and is like Nous in its inward part; but even in that part of it which is directed to the outside world, and in its external activities, it keeps a sort of likeness to Nous.]

Once again, then, Nous is a self-contained activity, but soul has what we may call an inward part, which is that of it which is directed to Nous, and a part outside Nous which is directed to the outside world. By the one it is made like that from which it came, by the other, even though it has been made unlike, it becomes like, here below too, both in its action and its production. For even while it is active it contemplates, and when it produces it produces Forms (a kind of completed acts of intellect). So all things are traces of thought and Nous; they proceed according to their original pattern; those which are near imitate Nous better, and the remotest keep an obscure image of it.

[The soul is illuminated by Nous’, and, being so illuminated, is raised to its level and becomes an image of it.]

This light [of Nous} shines in the soul and illumines it: that is, it makes it intelligent: that is, it makes it like itself, the light above. You will come near to the nature of Nous and its content if you think of something like the trace of this light which is present in the soul, but still fairer and greater. For it is this illumination which gives the soul a clearer life, not, however, a generative life; on the contrary, it turns the soul to itself and does not allow it to scatter itself abroad, but makes it love the glory in Nous. It is not the life of sense-perception either, for this looks outwards, to the external world where its particular activity lies. But one who has received that light from true being looks, we may say, not particularly at visible things but just the opposite. It remains, then, that he must have received an intellectual life, a trace of the life of Nous: for true being is there. The life in Nous is also activity, the first light which lightens itself first of all and shines turned towards itself, at once enlightening and enlightened, the truly intelligible, thinking and thought, seen by itself and needing no other to enable it to see, sufficing to itself for seeing; for it is itself what it sees. It is known to us too by its very self; through itself the knowledge of it comes to us. Otherwise, from where should we get the means to speak of it? It is of such a nature that it grasps itself more clearly, and our apprehension is by means of it. By reasoning of this kind our soul is led back to it, by considering itself to be an image of Nous and its life a trace and likeness of Nous, and that whenever it thinks it becomes godlike and Nous-like. If anyone asks it what sort of thing is that perfect and universal Nous, the primary self-knower, the soul first of all enters into Nous or makes room for its activity; then it shows itself to be in possession of the things in Nous of which it holds in itself the memory, and, by means of its own likeness to Nous is able somehow to see it, being brought to a more exact resemblance as far as any part of the soul can come to resemble Nous.

[Nous is fully immanent and transcendent: the (common Hellenistic) idea of ‘presence by powers’ does not really apply to spiritual being: where the ‘power’ is present, the being is present as a whole, but the recipient only receives as much as it is able; the soul is present in the body in the same sort of way.]

Shall we say that it [the All, or Real Being, i.e. Nous] is present, or that it remains by itself, but powers go out from it to all things, and so it is present everywhere? In this way they say that souls are a sort of rays; the all remains established in itself, and the souls are sent out, each to a corresponding living being. Now in things which do not preserve the whole nature of the One Being as it is in itself, only a power of it is present where it is present; yet this certainly does not mean that it is not wholly present, since even in this case it is not cut off from the power which it gave to the other thing: but the recipient was only able to take a certain limited amount, though all was there. Where all its powers are present, it is clearly present itself, though at the same time separate: for if it became the form of a particular thing it would cease to be all and to exist everywhere in itself (though being incidentally the form of something else too).But since it belongs to no one particular thing, when something wants to belong to it, if it wishes it draws near to it, as much as is possible, but does not become the property of that or any other thing but remains the object of its desire. There is nothing surprising in it thus being present in all things, because it is in none of them in such a way as to belong to them. So perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that the soul has the same sort of relationship of accidental sympathy with the body, if we say that it remains by itself and does not become the property of matter or body, but the whole body is illumined by it in every one of its parts.

On the Soul and breaking its relationship to the ouside world…To be continued