... 1.8). 314.Bateson, op. cit., p. 128. 315. Ibid. 316.Keynes, ed. cit., pp. 148-149 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2, 11.1, 21). 317. Ibid., pp. 240, 242 (Europe, 12, 1.24; 5, 1.4; 8, 1.5). 318. Ibid., p. 159 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25-27:16). Page 231 which The Marriage ends "we have the first mention of Urthona, the noblest of the... op. cit., p. 52. 320.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 159 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25-27:9, 15). 321.Bateson, op. cit., pp. 112, 109. 322.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 211 (Songs of Experience, Earth's Answer, 1.7). 323. Ibid., p. 211 (ibid., 11 .11-12). 324. Ibid., p. 159 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25-27, 15, 10). 325. Ibid., p. 217 (Songs of Experience, The Human... being pressed to their final implication, are likely to terminate in our own concept. Bowra probes the poem with an eye to what to him is the central idea in Blake's book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and several passages in other writings of his. This central idea is that perfection is attainable by a meeting of contraries. Both Innocence and Experience have to be fused in order to produce ...
... big, tough Samurai once went to see a litde monk. "Monk," he said, in a voice accustomed to instant obedience, "teach methodology about heaven and hell!" The monk looked up at this mighty warrior and replied with utter disdain, 'Teach you about heaven and hell? I couldn't teach you about anything. You're dirty. You smell. Your blade is rusty. You're a disgrace, an embarrassment to the Samurai class ...
... to continue its sensational imaginations of heaven and hell for a time beyond the death of the physical body. Perhaps both these ideas of after-life and of rebirth as fields of punishment and reward were needed because suited to our half-mentalised animality. But after a certain stage the system ceases to be really effective. Men believe in Heaven and Hell but go on sinning merrily, quit at last by ...
... Aphorism - 42 42—If God assigns to me my place in Hell, I do not know why I should aspire to Heaven. He knows best what is for my welfare. Do Heaven and Hell exist? Heaven and Hell are at once real and unreal. They both exist and do not exist. Human thought is creative; it gives more or less lasting forms to mental, vital and even subtle physical substance ...
... an unusual insight by Blake into the problem of evil. After asking whether we are to answer the last query in some words about God which she quotes from Boehme - God visioned as all Being, both Heaven and Hell, Eternity and Time, Love and Anger - she 16 writes: "This is the god of the Alchemists, beyond the contraries. But the answer of the Platonists, and of the Hermetica, would be No: the Tyger... 431-434. 16. Ibid., p. 336. Page 28 emotive force. Next, Raine 17 remarks that The Tyger "is preparing the way" for the "vindication of Hell or Energy" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written and etched by Blake over the years 1790-1793 18 ): "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too ...
... illumined pages in a medieval copy of the Bible: It was wrought in the monk's slow manner, From silver and sanguine shell, Where the scenes are little and terrible Keyholes of heaven and hell. But surely the most impressive lines Chesterton ever wrote are among those describing in this manner the general state of chaotic indecision after the fall of Rome, the portentous change... quatrains as couplets and you have often the Chapman fourteeners: And Wessex lay in a patch of peace like a dog in a patch of sun... Where the scenes are little and terrible key-holes of heaven and hell... As the tall white devil of the Plague moves out of Asian skies, His foot in a waste of cities and his head in a cloud of flies... When Ceasar's sun fell out of the sky, and whoso ...
... in general throughout the poem do convince me. It all fits together. Yours is a scheme of advaita, mine dualistic, and finally the non-dual universe must be right and we know that for Blake heaven and hell, good and evil, the 'contraries', must be married in 'Jesus, the Imagination'. I find myself reflecting on the 'wrath-fires' of the Father, as the matrix of creation (Boehme) as surely depicted... one hears every day, and Ramchandra Gandhi said only yesterday that 'Satsang' is the essence of civilization. I too don't have my Blake with me but I believe the passage in the marriage of Heaven and Hell reads 'the first commander of the heavenly host (Lucifer that is) the Messiah fell, and made a heaven for himself from what he stole from the Abyss'. Deeply true, if the Messiah is 'reason'! ...
... 1929-1931 ( 12 May 1929 ) (A child) After death people enter the vital world, but those who do good go to paradise? Where is your paradise? Who has taught you that? They have spoken to you of heaven and hell and purgatory?... No? Not Page 129 of all that? From where did you gather your idea of paradise? From which book? I have heard about it. But from whom? I do not remember ...
... the entire movement and return to birth no longer for its own sake but for the sake of others and according to the will in it of its divine Self, the Lord of its movement. Page 66 HEAVEN AND HELL The enjoyment of beatitude in a heaven beyond is also not the supreme consummation. But Vedantic thought did not envisage rebirth as an immediate entry after death into a new body; the mental ...
... sexless con-ception. The righteous were asked to look forward to "the King-dom of God". There was sharp prolonged conflict between God and Satan and there were the regions of Light and Darkness, Heaven and Hell, for the future life of human beings. Angels and Page 125 demons were ranged on opposite sides. Also, there was to be a final resurrection of the dead similar to what is envisaged ...
... Classics. No doubt, the awakening of the mind of the time showed itself in the development of physical science with its stress on the study of Earth as against the stress on the contemplation of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory that had characterised the mind of the Middle Ages. But the new science itself was at the beginning borne along on a gust of the Life-force more than on a zest of the pure intellect ...
... p. 355-356 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth,LL . 561-563, 576578,580-583). 34.Ibid, p. 709 (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, pL. 71,LL.15-19). 35.Ibid., p. 160 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, A Song of Liberty, Chorus). 36.Ibid., p. 154 (ibid., pi. 14). 37.The Future Poetry, p. 114. Page 158 ...
... himself. Page 391 So in my vision, my body was as big as the universe, and that ( the Ashram ) was so tiny, so tiny. ( Soon afterwards, regarding an old 'Question and Answer' ) Heaven and hell are at once true and false. They exist and don't exist. I've seen various people go to heavens or hells after their death, and it's very difficult to make them understand that it is not real. Once ...
... 242,243,244, 252,257 Lowe, J. Livingstone, 126 Lucifer, 40,47,48, 59,104,181-82 Luvah, 4,141,142,177,178,180,189, 236 Lyca, 134-36 Malkin,B.H.,131 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The, 29. 137,158,173,176,205,231 Mathematical Commentaries, 139 Matthew, Brother, 48 McColley, C, 45 Mellon Lectures, A.W., ii Michael, 44,45,48,90,93,113 ...
... rebuild their temple at Jerusalem and whom the Book of Isaiah hails as "Messiah", Zoroastrian doctrines entered Judaism and through Judaism infiltrated Christianity. Zoroastrianism believes in heaven and hell, the soul's survival and the resurrection of bodily life at the end of time when a saviour, mystically continuous with Zoroaster's "seed", is expected, with a Last Judgment following. In the ...
... splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life." Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really mystical although it took Heaven and Hell to range over. His achievement, however, is not to be judged by what his mind could not do: the sweep of its positive virtues must be the determinant of our appraisal. Sri Aurobindo 2 sums up ...
... beings which had taken form on 70 Ibid, Canto 14. 71 Ibid., pp.291-292 Page 298 earth come to have a meaningful rest after they have passed through the long road of heaven and hell. In this trance they muse over their experience of their bygone days and sketch the map of the destiny and adventure of their new life to lead. Aswapati now understands why the same being persists ...
... absolute accuracy of vision and authenticity of rhythm." About Paradise Lost Sri Aurobindo 31 has said that in it Milton expressed "in fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had constructed out of his intellectual beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul". This means that his intellectual beliefs considerably ...
... helplessness; in that way, and out of ignorance, are born for life’s progress dharma and adharma, misconduct and gainful conducive action. These are the ones which, when fallen under their sway, cause heaven and hell to take birth in us. Therefore, tells the Teacher to Arjuna, by dismissing all these notions of things, these unavailing ideas, prejudices, misconceptions, individual preferences, this ignorance ...
... between the nature of life lived by an ordinary mortal and that of the life led by someone who has taken to the sadhana of śaranāgati or self-surrender? Surely that cannot be. There is a heaven and hell difference between these two types of lives so far as the inner psychological frames are concerned. There may be times when there will be no 'happiness' in the life of a surrendered sadhaka ...
... story is always a converging movement. Parallel lines meet at infinity, each overpasses its own limit and touches and coalesces with the other. The marriage of Heaven and Earth, of even Heaven and Hell, is a very ancient dream. It is an aspiration ingrained in existence. It is a prophecy that shall be fulfilled and is being worked out every moment. II For an integral vision of ...
... the hero, the supreme sage who has conquered all foes, the impassible, the purified, the enlightened. [41] I call him a Brahmin who knows his previous lives, who sees heaven and hell, and thus having come to the end of births and become a sage, attained perfect knowledge, attained all perfection. Page 252 ...
... somebody's death to help the passage of the soul through the vital world. SRI AUROBINDO: That is the most dangerous passage. It is this world of which people usually speak when they refer to heaven and hell. PURANI: By some process the Tibetans are able to awaken some flame in the heart and after that, even if one is kept immersed in ice, it does not affect one at all. SRI AUROBINDO: That is ...
... heavens without even knowing these squalid places, except by accident. But there are different kinds of heavens, just as there are different kinds of hells (each level of our being has its own "heaven" and "hell"). Generally, the religious man leaves behind the individual self, thereby leaving behind the subconscient. He merely has to pass through one gate, with "guardians" unpleasant enough to account ...
... and enthusiasm how much work gets so effortlessly accomplished! The Playground is living proof of this. The difference between the Playground of today and the Playground of those times is like heaven and hell. With discipline and order our boys transformed the place into a beautiful playing field. What is called today group D was then called group C. Mona, Manoj, Harit and several others were in ...
... MYMOONA I'll order litters. Exit. AJEBE Will you be like this always? BALKIS If you are good, I will be. If not, I will out-shrew Xantippe. AJEBE With such a heaven and hell in view, I'll be An angel. BALKIS Of what colour? AJEBE Black beside you, But fair as seraphs to what I have been. Exeunt. Page 96 Scene IV Ibn Sawy's house ...
... categories set constantly before us. All between is a confusion, a tug of war, an uncertain balance. This crude and summary classification is the foundation of the Christian system of an eternal heaven and hell; at best, the Catholic religion humanely interposes a precarious chance hung between that happy and this dread alternative, the chance of a painful purgatory for more than nine tenths of the human ...
... fulfilment of the spirit in heaven demands absolute rejection of the earthly life, Blake from personal realisation, spoke of a higher truth, the truth of the marriage of the body and soul, of heaven and hell, here and now. That is very much in the spirit of Sri Aurobindo and the Vedic Rishis who sang of the marriage of heaven and earth: "Heaven is my Father and this Earth my Mother." The highest ...
... course caused a considerable upheaval in the physical body – an upheaval making itself felt by pain. On the one hand there was the glory of the transformation, on the other the terror of it – heaven and hell alternating, sometimes in one and the same moment. “Three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery.” – “Some seconds of paradise for hours of hell.” – “The marvellous moment lasts for a ...
... n of "melopoeia" if we failed to put under this term the symphonic splendour of Paradise Lost. In that epic, Milton hears in remarkable rhythm the grand events he visualises as happening in Heaven and Hell and Earth. Sound bearing out the sense, not with an obvious echo but with a power of stirring the mind to the magnitude of the events related, meets us in a passage like: Him the Almighty Power ...
... particular element which the intellectual Milton, by outgrowing his vital being's Elizabethan inspira-tion, lost to the radical detriment of the substance of his great epic. A poem dealing with Heaven and Hell requires in its substance a more than conceptual-imaginative sense of worlds other than earth: it may achieve fine poetry without such super-sense, but it will not be heavenly or hellish enough ...
... by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life." Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really mystical although it took Heaven and Hell to range over. His achievement, however, is not to be judged by what his mind could not do: the sweep of its positive virtues must be the determinant of our appraisal. Sri Aurobindo 3 sums up ...
... 2. Quoted in "The Hallucinogenic Drug Cult" by Noah Gordon, The Reporter (New York), Aug. 15, 1963, p. 38. 3. Ibid., p. 39. 4. Ibid., p. 38. 5. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 45. 6. Heard, op. cit. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 114. 9. Yoga, in its true sense, does not mean merely the science and art of ext ...
... promise of his youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all Pagan delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness to express only in fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had built out of his beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul. One is moved to speculate on what we might have had from him if, instead of writing ...
... × It was wrought in the monk's slow manner, From silver and sanguine shell, Where the scenes are little and terrible Keyholes of heaven and hell. × When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky And whoso hearkened right Could only hear the plunging ...
... believe in a God of righteousness who was exclusive, arbitrary, wrathful, jealous, often cruel and even wantonly sanguinary. Even now it is possible for some to believe in a Creator who has made heaven and hell, an eternal hell, the two poles of his creation, and has even according to some religions predestined the souls he has created not only to sin and punishment, but to an eternal damnation. But even ...
... this will not serve, since it is palpably false in experience and even man cannot always deceive himself, it offers him a security of vital rewards denied here but conceded in some hereafter. Heaven and hell, happiness and suffering in other lives are put before him as the bribe and Page 403 the menace. He is told, the better to satisfy his easily satisfied intellect, that the world is ...
... psychological methods? Religious methods are those adopted by the various religions. Not many religions speak of the inner Truth; for them, it is more a matter of coming into contact with their God. Heaven and hell: this is a roundabout way of saying... 1 Psychological methods are those that deal with states of consciousness, that try to realise the inner self by withdrawing from all activity and ...
... impression of being... ( smiling ) more compact. ( Soon afterwards, Satprem reads Mother a Playground Talk of July 15, 1953 . ) "You will see that your whole conception and notion [of heaven and hell] is based on one thing, an entity you call God, and a world you call his creation, which, to your mind, are two different things—one having made the other, the latter being subjected to the former ...
... Messiah and Satan, Blake partly turns his own topsyturvying of them upside down and remains Miltonic when he is face to face with 57. Keynes, ed. cit . , pp. 1 49- 1 50 ( The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , pls. 3. 4, 5-6) 58. Ibid . , p. 90 ( Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love ). 59. Ibid . , p . 495 ( Milton , I, 14, 11 . 1 -2 ) . 60. Ibid . , p . 482 ( ibid . . I, 3, 11 ...
... BLESSINGS AND DISASTERS—Taoist 5.WE'RE EAGLES LIVING AMONGST CHICKS—Traditional 6.KRISHNA AND DURYODHANA—Hindu 7.WISDOM BRINGS BALANCE 8.THE GREAT SILENCE—Father Theophane 9.HEAVEN AND HELL—Zen 10.WAY TO NIRVANA—Early Buddhist 11.ENJOY NO LIFE—Contemporary wisdom 12.ALL ARE RIGHT—Chassid 13.THE HAPPY PRINCE—Oscar Wilde LETTING GO INTO OUR FREEDOM ...
... integral Divine, he who unites and reconciles in his body the highest height and the lowest Page 283 depth, who has effectuated in him something like the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" is an event of the future-even perhaps of the immediate future. The descent into hell is an image that has been made very familiar to man, but all its implications have not been sounded. For what ...
... is always a converging movement. Parallel lines meet at infinity, each overpasses its own limit and touches and coalesces with the other. The marriage of Heaven and Earth, of even Heaven and Hell, is a very ancient dream. It is an aspiration ingrained in existence. It is a prophecy that shall be fulfilled and is being worked out every moment. II For an integral ...
... suffering and hideous darknesses. Depending on the traditions and their specific terminology, these two classes of pleasant and unpleasant regions were variously named as 'svarga' and 'naraka', 'heaven' and 'hell', 'jannat' and 'jahannam', 'behest' and 'doze', 'paradise' and 'purgatory', etc. By the way, these regions ('loka', 'bhuvana') exist at the same time both subjectively and objectively; ...
... Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2 William Blake: “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” THE ideal was Blake's. It will not sound so revolting if we understand what the poet meant by Hell. Hell, he explains, is simply the body, the Energy of Life – hell, because body and life on earth were so considered by the orthodox Christianity. The Christian ...
... Our battle-cry dries up oceans, sways over mountains. Sun and moon and stars move at Mother's word: Children are we of this Mother; who calls us weak? What is sin for us, what is heaven or hell ? The work done, at eve-tide the Mother takes us in her lap. Chandikananda Swami Page 81 ...
... a last question and we come to the end of our chapter on death. The question is: Almost every religion speaks of heavens and hells. Do these heavens and hells really exist anywhere in the worlds beyond death? And is every departed being bound to go to these heavens and hells to enjoy or suffer the consequences of his meritorious or demeritorious deeds done in a living human body upon earth? Both... that case, what happens to the widely-held ideas of heavens and hells in the other world? Is it not generally believed that a departed jiva is judged in the supraphysical worlds beyond death for all his karmas and is then allotted a certain period of sojourn amongst the pleasures and happinesses of a "heaven" or in the torments and sufferings of a "hell", all depending on the relative quality of the karmas... deeply hidden psychic being, they may at times indulge in creative imagination and fictitiously "produce" subjective heavens and hells in the other worlds, all patterned on their own wishes and hopes and fears and other previously established personal saṅskāras. These heavens or hells have, of course, no ojective reality, but the experiences the disembodied being actually undergoes there after death ...
... splendour, it casts a hook Answering the curl before, with which the Name Of the Nameless unwound in the hours, by a curl behind Downward to dig and drag the dark Divine Out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All! 12-5-48 Page 8 ...
... splendour, it casts a hook Answering the curl before, with which the Name Of the Nameless unwound in the hours, by a curl behind Downward to dig and drag the dark Divine Out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All! 12.5.48 Page 234 ...
... into laughter. 461—They explained the evil in the world by saying that Satan had prevailed against God; but I think more proudly of my Beloved. I believe that nothing is done but by His will in heaven or hell, on earth or on the waters. In the Supreme, opposites are reconciled and complement each other. It is division in the manifestation which has made them Page 339 into opposites; ...
... True From such a chaos Of the heart's hue ? Mind cannot gauge Vermilion, Carmine or scarlet, Damask or dun, Shades of desire Self-uttering— Strange heavens and hells That suddenly fling Reasonless reveries Longing to make Our body their crater Of fierce flame-break. One colour of colour; That cry from the dark Is ...
... true From such a chaos Of the heart's hue? Mind cannot gauge Vermilion, Carmine or scarlet, Damask or dun, Shades of desire Self-uttering— Strange heavens and hells That suddenly fling Reasonless reveries Longing to make Our body their crater Of fierce flame-break. One colour of colours That cry from the dark Is the ...
... and happy. It is in reference to such a poise of consciousness that the great poet says: A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, . .¹ The soldier of an ideal, the martyr, bears testimony to the reality of this mental condition: the Yogi is he who is supremely indifferent to outside contacts (matrasparsah), fixed as ...
... It is in reference to such a poise of consciousness that the great poet says: A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell...... Page 61 The soldier of an ideal, the martyr, bears testimony to the reality of this mental condition: the Yogi is he who is supremely indifferent to outside contacts ( ...
... exceeded by the sense of becoming. Heaven, not Hell, is our rightful habitat; we are required to be in this pestilential congregation of vapours no longer than our decision and determination to change it nearer our heart's desire. We can not only rise to any heaven that we ourselves choose but we can also change this Hell-infected earth itself into any heaven we choose. And when we take such a... a decision, when we will such a change, we shall receive adequate response from the higher powers of the Universe, and out of this meeting of the heart's desire and the Spirit's response a new heaven and a new earth can be brought here into being. Such, indeed, is the message of hope that Savitri embodies in the vast spaces of its symbolic action culminating in the decisive victory of Light over ...
... to go to the supraphysical worlds where a series of heavens and hells are arranged to receive him. All his actions in his past terrestrial life will be judged on two counts: their qualities and Page 110 their quantities. And according to the decree of this judgment, the departed being will be sent to some of these heavens and hells to enjoy or suffer the pleasures or pains, deservedly... he will have to drop this second body also, whose other name is "dying". After this death he will go again to the heavens and hells to square accounts for his accumulated deeds in the second lifetime. After the lapse of a certain interval of time spent in these heavens and hells, he will come back again upon earth to continue his life-journey in another new body. And the series will continue... deservedly according as the case may be. But, the matter does not end there. For, after the quota of merits and demerits is exhausted through the experiences in the heavens and the hells beyond, the departed being has to leave the supraphysical other-worlds and come back to the earth to assume there a new body in an act of rebirth. But he will not be allowed to start his new life on a clean slate. ...
... their own wild heart— That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock— They find their home in this sweet silent Face With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven And deluges hell with mercies without end. The abysmal night opens its secret smile And all the world cries out it is the dawn! 9-5-48 Page 1 ...
... their own wild heart— That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock— They find their home in this sweet.silent Face With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven And deluges hell with mercies without end. The abysmal night opens its secret smile And all the world cries out it is the dawn! 9.5.48 Page 227 ...
... Balzac?" There is also the story of a Calvinist lady. The Calvinists have the doctrine that people are predestined to go to either heaven or hell. She was asked whether she knew where the congregation to which she belonged would go. She said, "All will go to hell, except myself and the minister—and I have doubts even about the minister." ...
... people who are hoping to go to a beatific heaven. The entire West is convinced, of course, that the earth has to be taken as it is and that it's a preparation for a life in another world, which according to your "faults" or "qualities" will be a heaven or a hell. But anyway, doing away with hell, all those who have goodwill will go to a beatific heaven. It's a weird invention, isn't it! Anyway ...
... nor Pippa's curls Contained it; thou alone canst meet my need. Deniest thou some secret of thy soul To me who claim thee all? Nay, can it be Thy bosom's joys escape from my control? Forbid it Heaven Hell should yawn for thee. Deny it now! Let not sweet love begun End in red blood and awful justice done. ...
... of this talk, so you can't blame me either. Imagination, friends, is a great power. Milton has said that by the Page 96 power of imagination you may "make a Heaven of Hell and a Hell of Heaven". 141 Just think where I would have been if I were not a poet, and what if the poets, artists, musicians, and even the scientists had had no imagination - where would they have been... satisfaction, and sometimes, good dreams. But without going so far, in this hard, matter-of-fact world of ours, 141"The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." Spoken by Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Book 1, lines 254-5. 142"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact." Spoken by Theseus in William... 148Self-rule. The struggle for self-rule was part of the Indian Independence movement. 149When Princess Savitri chose Satyavan to be her husband, Narada the divine sage descended from heaven, visited Aswapati and his Queen, and broke the dreadful news of Satyavan's impending death (in exactly one yeat's time). The Queen remonstrated and pleaded with Savitri to change her decision, but ...
... Where angels drowse, Padlocked from mirth. Like some bright key To that lost room, The pole's reverie Wakes the God-gloom. The captived cry Of heaven to heaven Lifts from hell's eye Where time has striven Vainly to reach The eternal noon. The silvering speech Climbs—a festoon— The silent bar Planted upright Between ...
... Where angels drowse, Padlocked from mirth. Like some bright key To that lost room, The pole's reverie Wakes the God-gloom. The captived cry Of heaven to heaven Lifts from hell's eye Where time has striven Vainly to reach The eternal noon. The silvering speech Climbs—a festoon— The silent bar Planted upright Between the ...
... India is pure. India is my punyabhumi: my pilgrimage. Vivekananda continues : I am prostrate before these hundreds of centuries of India’s brilliant unfolding history in awe. …No force in heaven or hell can stop this march of victory. Nineteen forty-seven, August 15th. In front of Sri Aurobindo’s own eyes his India, his motherland, was cut into two. But Sri Aurobindo came out with a luminous... we’re not talking about Mother.” “We do not believe in any other Mother,” Bhavananda replies. “ Janani janmabhumischa swargadapi gariyasi . (The Mother and one’s birthplace are greater even than Heaven.) We take this birthplace to be the Mother. We have no mother, father, brother, wife, son, house, home. We have only that ‘ sujala , suphala , malayaja sheetala , shashyashyamala ’.” A surprised ...
... to the invasion of falsehood. Ah yes, love's momentary thrill seems "a golden bridge across the roar of the years"; but, alas! spent soon, all too soon. The honey that turns to bane, the heaven that leaves hell behind! Even had Satyavan not died, would love for him have suffered no change? Love dies a thousand deaths—"a word, a moment's act can slay the god". Worse than the death of love is love's... pageant, he tells Savitri ingratiatingly; this is the source of her idealistic dreams and cravings, mere ethereal stuff as dreams are made on—no more, no more! The ideal dwells not in heaven, nor on the earth, A bright delirium of man's ardour of hope Drunk with the wine of its own fantasy. 30 And love, is there such a thing as love? Flesh calls to flesh... Although one attempt has misfired, Death accepts no defeat but tries again. Cannot Savitri yet realise that her thoughts are mere hallucination? Vain, all vain is her "longing to build heaven on earth". Matter is the only ultimate reality; soul itself is but "a brief flower by the gardener Mind" created on "Matter's terrain plot". In self-deception lies no safety. What boots it to camouflage ...
... alright, but why Balzac?” ( Laughter ) There is another story of a lady who believed the doctrine of eternal hell or heaven – according to which people will either go to heaven or to hell. Some one asked her : Do you know where the people will go? She said : All will go to hell, except myself and the minister – meaning the clergyman, but I have doubts about the minister. ( Laughter ) ...
... dynamise this nature with its own vision. The true posture of this individuality is best caught in that phrase of his: The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. 6 And the core of this individuality's vision was powerfully religious. Indeed, at the centre of anything we can call the soul, there must be, in the broad meaning of the term... Page 1 strength to Satan among the rebel Angels. After a long debate in Hell, Beelzebub suggests that the best way to continue war is not so much by direct action against Heaven's King as by a subtle attack on the soul of God's latest creation, Adam. But far indeed from the depths of Hell is the starry universe which in Milton's Cosmology hangs by a golden chain from God's Empyrean... there are things beneath it. Beneath it is not only the sphere of stars: there is also the region of Hell, between whose roof and the bottom of the stellar sphere the distance is half of that which is between the bottom and the top of this sphere. 10 Both the starry universe and the region of Hell are within the amorphous expanse of black Chaos - the expanse which originally occupied the whole ...
... regions to which he has been condemned: Hail, horrors, hail, Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor; one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than He Whom... not built Here for His envy, will not drive us hence: Page 286 Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. A Titanism is articulate in the lines, but, however misdirected, the sheer sense of the mind's independence is magnificent: this independence is celebrated in language... spiritual realities that are known by subtle inner senses or by direct identity through an extension of one's sheer self. Eyeful Thought uttering an experience that goes beyond all earth and all hell and even all heaven into a pure infinitude where name and form are effaced has been set artistically working by the realisation Page 287 Sri Aurobindo had at Baroda in 1908. A further vivification ...
... uprooting life itself from our bodies. It is this cage of the “I” that all philosophies, religions and sociologies come up against; it is to remedy or break it open that one creates Marxism, heavens and hells, democracies and telephones, but the true way out⎯the evolutionary door⎯is down below, as we have seen, behind or under the web of the physical Mind, in the Mind of the cells. And if we broke... formidable power and the formidable freedom that lay there. The Fundamental Cage We say “the mind of the cells,” “the intellectual mind,” “the intuitive mind,” or “the liberated mind” in its heaven up above, but it is but one and the same Mind and perhaps the word is inadequate: it is but one and the same consciousness, one and the same power in various vibratory modes or various “milieus.” Sri... Matter— and it said: The other states of being, the Vital, the Mind, may enjoy the intermediate contacts.... That is, the relationship with all the intermediary states of being: the gods, etc., heavens, illuminations, revelations and all sorts of music. The supreme Lord alone can satisfy me. And then, there was suddenly such a clear vision that the supremely perfect alone can give this body ...
... their own wild heart— That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock— They find their home in this sweet silent Face With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven And deluges hell with mercies without end. The abysmal night opens its secret smile And all the world cries out it is the dawn! SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENTS " Seated Above is a striking... the hammer of heaven. The last two lines elicit his first unquestioning approval; that, he says, is the right union of poetry and common sense. "I don't ask you to take these Johnsonianisms seriously; I have only been taking a little exercise in a field foreign to me; but 1 am not sure that this is not how some critics will grumble and groan under this particular hammer of heaven." ...
... be objected to on that ground. But a poet is not bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost. Are all D's bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi and bhakta. April 14, 1938 ... no "myriad", Sir, though "many" is peeping like a coward! But I don't understand why you are so wry over "myriad". In that case, heaven, spirit, luminous, shadow, dream, etc. have to go and I shall be left with what? "Myriad" is an epithet, not a key-word like heaven, spirit or dream. An epithet recurring in every poem (even if it were luminous!) ends by sounding poor. April 25, 1938 ... uplifted twice. Excuse me, no! You uplifted once, I repeated the operation Changed back the second uplift to a mere lift. [Chand's wire:] Inspectors contact uncongenial Trying avoid. What the hell! He seems to have plenty of money to waste on unnecessary telegrams! Why wire about the Inspector's contact? H had pain in the eyes last night... Looks like a mild attack of iritis. If you want ...
... circle, He says that Sri Aurobindo's signature with its final flourish is 'never a stagnant splendour' but is dynamic: '...it casts a hook... to dig and drag the dark Divine out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All.' These last two lines are reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's famous poem, "A God's Labour": .. .Go where none have gone! Dig deeper, deeper yet Till thou... light. Their soul spoke to mine and prompted my soul to speak. "The Tree of Time", a sonnet with a difference, being in blank verse, reveals the ultimate reality of a true poet. 'Earth-bound, heaven amorous', Timeless bound in time, the poet here sees himself as the tree of time whose 'one sole branch is lit by eternity', this sole branch being the poet's 'song-fruitful hand'. On this branch bloom... rooted' -in order to maintain the link. The antithetical sestet looks forward to a glorious future: the buried vast which holds me rooted In dreamful kinship to the height of heaven Shall wake. Then the promise will be fulfilled, the dream become a reality and 'nectar-flame' shall course through every nerve. This 'nectar-flame - a Force drunk with its own ...
... the Excellent, the Hero, the great Sage, the Victor, the Impassive, the Pure, the Enlightened, him I consider to be a Brahmin. One who knows his previous lives, one who perceives the heavens and the hells, who has come to the end of births, who has attained perfect vision, the Sage accomplished Page 296 in all accomplishments, him in truth I consider to be a Brahmin. Such is the ...
... flopping down into the subconscient alternately, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast contentedly or discontentedly in the mud, some are sitting in the mud and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, some have their legs in the mud and their head in the heavens etc., etc., an infinity of combinations, while many are simply nowhere ...
... Sin. Baptism saves the soul of an infant or a new church member by washing away the Original Sin, and so avoids damnation or being sent to Hell for eternity. That is, upon dying the human soul is judged by God to either be saved or damned to be in heaven or hell for eternity This judgement is brought about in several ways: a) By dying on the cross, Jesus as God in human form atoned for the sins of humanity... Judaism, the Orthodox still maintain that a Messiah, a descendant from King David, will come and reign in Jerusalem. It is important here to note that in the Jewish belief, there is no mention of heaven, hell or even of an afterlife. God's Kingdom reigned over by the Messiah will be established here on Earth. (b) Christian : Christianity insists that Jesus is the anointed* descendant of King David... Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father: Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit ...
... suffer & enjoy, enjoy & suffer through unending Time unless & until the knot is cut, the renunciation of the self-idea envisaged and effected. Then we escape from these running figments of heaven & earth & hell, pleasure & pain, life & death, self & not-self into the shoreless & streamless peace of Nirvana. Shankara, one of the mightiest of metaphysical intellects, a far greater intellect than the... action, of karma, & in a world of action the governing practical truth is the law of karma which drives the soul through the endless chain of birth & death & rebirth, whirling for ever betwixt heaven & earth & hell, tossed from good to evil & evil to good, pain to joy & joy to pain, like a tennis ball kept continually at play between two equally skilful players. But all action depends upon and is only ...
... cry out. ) Forgive us. Lord, our sins — we cry from Hell. SRI CHAITANYA ( singing ecstatically ) And what is hell and what is sin, We ask and ask in vain Until we, fools. Your love repel And know the answer of pain. And yet when we disown You, Lord, Your Grace still sings on high: "My heaven to hell I barter away For but one price: a sigh." ... ) You are right: but let me know first why they feel Infuriated with me. ROMA ( stingingly ) Oh I know that: Hell knows that Heaven wants to heal all pain. MADHAI ( with a growl ) Shut up — or you will know what's hell, my girl! ( he turns to Keshav ) You did your friend, the sycophant, a good turn. For he would have learnt a lesson he badly needs... the bullies transformed in a moment into abject cowards. ) JAGAI AND MADHAI ( simultaneously ) O help, help—murder. ROMA It's you, hell's own henchmen Who have come, disguised as men, to murder Heaven. Look, he is bleeding! Oh, what shall I do! ( She tears off a part of her sari to bandage him ) SRI CHAITANYA ( waving her aside and smiling ) ...
... days And the blue mountains of her soaring youth And the paradise groves and peacock wings of Love To joy clutched under the silent shadow of doom In a last turn where heaven raced with hell. 13 In these five lines are succinctly reviewed the variegated turns of her whole life upto the present. The birth of Savitri; the child-princess; the blushing maiden young; the... talking, working—was invested with the liquid purity of Heaven-born Grace. For this mortal woman has immortality within her; the human child is made of superhuman dimensions. She is of the earth, but not earthy; she is of Heaven, but is no featureless divinity. Rather she is: Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven, Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit... her glorious part. 27 Hers is the task to unclasp the net that binds this "immense material world" which is really a gaol, and thus release humanity to the freedom of a tremendous spiritual heaven. To break mankind's fetters, "Her single will opposed the Cosmic rule." Savitri is determined to face the issue and strive her uttermost to "stay the wheels of Doom." She is confident in her power ...
... on its own merits and comes ultimately to see in it a parable in which the Tyger is the embodiment of Christ's wrath when, empowered by God, he goes forth to battle with and expel from heaven into hell the rebellious angels whose ambience is conceived as "forests of the night" and who are themselves imaged as hostile "stars". A basis of this mysteriously projected confrontation is discerned... Rule, while the lord's bleeding and begger steps Go printing deep His love on forest paths Tangled with wry desires and shadowed over By titan cluitchings at the glow of heaven! Rule without stir and light each soul to peace!" Itihasic tales; Vedic-Upanishadic stories (the two birds on a tree, for instance); translation from French and Italian poets ...
... things at all. To do wrong while knowing what is right can cause acute mental distress. Thus, to do the right thing always is to be able to preserve a quiet mind. The popular notion of heaven for the doers of good and hell for evil-doers must not be taken literally. The Mother says that what the Buddha insisted on was that "you create, by your conduct and the state of your consciousness, the world in which... your life and that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness. Nor is anything to be gained by leaving the body, for there is no 'geographical' heaven or hell to repair to - and so the Mother says categorically: Expect nothing from death. Life is your salvation. It is in life that you must transform yourself. It is upon earth that you progress... themselves. When you can live in light and joy, are you going to cling to shadow and suffering? Page 647 As for the verses in the canto on "Niraya (Hell)", the Mother doesn't read them in their superficial sense. Hell is not the place where one is punished for one's sins. "The true sense of Niraya is that particular kind of atmosphere which one creates around oneself when one acts ...
... acquitted himself just as inspiredly in Osc i llation, a poem charged with the Yogi's surge towards the Supra-cosmic, conquering all great obstacles whether attractive or frightful, whether of heaven or hell, yet drawn subtly back by the cry of small frail insignificant things, a poignant Maya of compassion bringing into his other-worldly heroic heart a sweet sense of the value of the universe he spurns... of a stone-stricken soil, or Here I have seen a straight brush-stroke, iron-ash grey, A long winding of palm groves horizon-stretched, Branches of star-triangular rhythm with heaven-sapphire play, Steel-strong sinews by deathless spirals caged, or Give Thy colour-fountained luminous brush of power, Let bloom through my hard granite a heavenly flower... dreams in his wide illumined sleep and the crystal source Of the Creator flows through the stillness of burning stars. Lines of this kind hail from poetry's most spiritual heaven — some Over-world speaking its own tongue, the mortal words lifted straight up into its high direct dazzling mystery instead of getting lit up with some reflex of its altitudes. Nishikanto ...
... there reveal their secret and their motive of being because they are there established in their native power and full form of nature in their own world and their own exclusive atmosphere. Man's heavens and hells or worlds of light and worlds of darkness, however imaginative in their building, proceed from a perception of these powers existing in their own principle and throwing their influences on him... mind and life than true Page 820 worlds; they are the reflections of his own being, an artificial environment corresponding to his attempt during life to image these other worlds,—heavens and hells projected by the image-creating faculty in his human power of conscious being. But neither of these two contributions at all means a total creation of a real plane of being founded and acting ...
... relative sort useful to people in a certain position. A great Western Mystic — Eckhart — wrote: "Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue." And another: "Neither God nor Heaven nor Hell nor the World can be otherwise honourable in you or by you except by their own existence and manifestation in you." All pretended knowledge of these things without this self-evident perception ...
... spiritual worlds. You must also have read what happened to Satan. He was proud that there was no greater and truer devotee of God than himself. In the end he was cast out from Page 417 heaven into hell. Once the Emperor of Rome also gave way to pride. He died begging for alms. If your head has turned on clearing just one class, then your progress is indeed assured! You can take it from me that... running recklessly to loot a drifting kite. My eyes were turned upwards to the sky and my heart lay with this traveller who came gliding slowly, rolling towards a fall, like a restless soul coming out of heaven to inhabit a new world. A whole army of children was surging towards it to welcome it, armed with sticks and bamboos. Nobody was aware of his surroundings. Everyone was, as it were, flying with that ...
... Their official teaching was a dualism of body and soul, the burdensome body being the container of the soul in a world corrupted because of Adam’s Original Sin, and the immortal soul destined for heaven or hell, depending on its behaviour while in the body. Still, behind and in tandem with the Christian duality, the scale’s gradations, chiefly divided in the triad matter-life-mind, continued to determine ...
... laughter. 460) They explained the evil in the world by saying that Satan had prevailed against God; but I think more proudly of my Beloved. I believe that nothing is done but by His will in heaven or hell, on earth or on the waters. 461) In our ignorance we are like children proud of our success in walking erect and unaided and too eager to be aware of the mother's steadying touch on the shoulder... but the aim his soul kept its vision fixed upon all the time was to get back to its heaven as soon as possible & be again God's menial. Therefore, as the shortest way, it hurled itself against God in a furious clasp of enmity. 510) The greatest of joys is to be, like Naraka, the slave of God; the worst of Hells, being abandoned of God, to be the world's master. That which seems nearest to the ignorant... eternal life, they would have escaped the immediate consequence; but God's purpose in humanity would have been defeated. His wrath is our eternal advantage. 521) If Hell were possible, it would be the shortest cut to the highest heaven. For verily God loveth. 522) God drives us out [of] every Eden that we may be forced to travel through the desert to a diviner Paradise. If thou wonder why should ...
... world can only be a "... strain towards some bright extreme: Its greatness is to seek and to create." This greater Life-Force is creative. She is the same "on earth, in heaven, in hell". Even in the conditions of earthly evolution where she meets with great difficulties she is compelled by her Page 188 inmost spirit to encounter all the obstacles and make an effort... become saturated with the ideal and they mount or ascend into the very god- head who is the presiding power of the ideal. But it is not always the powers of Light and Heaven that they follow, but sometimes the powers of darkness and hell, for "Warriors of Good, they serve a shining cause, Or are Evil's soldiers in the pay of Sin." This is not a world of moral good only. It is a free... the divine. It can even put on the pose of virtue and try to recruit her worshippers. For these beings there is no common lot, "A mighty victory or a mighty fall, A throne in heaven or a pit in hell". These higher vital beings, if they manifest on earth, achieve some- thing and establish a stage in the evolutionary progress. They upset the balance on the material plane where gross ...
... heart — That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock — They find their home in this sweet silent Face With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven And deluges hell with mercies without end. The abysmal night opens its secret smile And all the world cries out it is the dawn! Shiva is the One who is seated above, but it... destruction until under his hard heels the lid of mind bursts asunder. There is a "tearing of thought", an opening to something above and a descent of its power, which pours down and "deluges hell with mercies without end". The threat implicit in "the lighting's streak of smile" is seen in the end, as the "secret smile" of a new dawn that was always there, hidden in the dark. ... and the self below. They blend to a single identity, and in their union Rudra the terrible becomes Shiva of the "sweet silent face" who heals all wounds. The brain that bursts to a "hammer of heaven" is Shiva's - and it is also Earth's Roof, that is, the dome of human mind that Must bear a trampling terror Before we find Through a sudden gap the mythic Eternity ...
... sections covered by Dante's labels: "Inferno", "Purgatorio", "Paradiso". The subtle-physical and vital planes have their own hells and heavens: neither these hells nor these heavens can be lumped together to make a Dantesque picture. It is not possible also to ignore these heavens and restrict that label to the idealities of the mind-plane and the rapturous intensities of the psychic. Both below them... structure to merit comparison with the close approximation of the structure of Rodogune and other plays to the model followed by the Elizabethan dramatists. Of course in general we have hells and heavens and perhaps even purgatories in Savitri , but they are of an entirely different kind and also they are differently organised. The correspondent appears to be somewhat in two minds here. At one... touch on mystical reality, may be said to have prefigured that knowledge; but they are themselves shadowy in comparison to Sri Aurobindo's masterful disclosures. How much more so must be the Dantesque Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, for all the systematic accounts of their levels and all the insets of human drama they carry! The system itself of other worlds unfolding in the Divine Comedy has little ...
... time and who holds that The mind is its own place and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. But Byron presents the dreadful greatness of the fallen Archangel in one swift forcible concentrated phrase: Page 165 his eye Glared forth the immortality of Hell. Again, Milton is unsurpassably powerful in conveying the terribleness of Satan's... the ordinary religious mind of his time must have struck as a blasphemy: For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep - and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil. All strength - all terror, single or in bands, That ever was put forth in personal form - Jehovah - with his thunder and his choir Of shouting Angels, and the... with Eternal Wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased With thy celestial song. Up led by thee Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed, An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air, Thy tempering. With like safety guided down, Return me to my native element; Lest, from this flying steed unreined ...
... ample air in triumph high Page 175 Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show The powers of Darkness bound. Thou, at the sight Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile, While, by thee raised, I ruin all thy foes... 18 Then, with the multitude of my redeemed Shall enter Heaven, long absent, and return, Father, to see thy face, wherein... and his subsequent entry into Heaven on the other, the question of questions is: 'What happens to his inner being, his 'spirit', when the body dies - what happens to it in the period between the body's death and the physical resurrection?" Ordinarily, we should suppose this crucial query in a Christian context to be concerned with an after-life in Heaven or Hell or Purgatory. And the early fanciful... hastening from everywhere of the living and of all the dead roused from their sleep by a peal, the judging of "bad men and Angels" who will be shut up in Hell for ever: Meanwhile The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell... 20 The "New Earth" would mean the regaining of the blissful Seat, Eden, on a wider scale than before ...
... believe in an afterlife whereby the soul will be sent either to Heaven where the soul receives bliss by being in the presence of God for eternity, or Hell, where the soul is damned to eternal suffering. Heaven or Hell is determined according to the judgement of God about the life of a human. Page 69 To go to heaven means a life of no sin. Obviously, evil acts such as murder, lying... meaning. Without Faith in the truth of the Crucifixion and the resulting forgiveness of sin as has been described in this essay, no human can be judged and go to Heaven. But to the contrary, humans without this Faith are condemned to Hell for eternity. For this reason, Christians with this Faith, try very hard to convert all unbelievers in order to save them from eternal damnation. Christians believe... Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Jesus' commandment that Faith in his mission is necessary for heaven after death [John 15:5] I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. ...
... be objected to on that ground. But a poet is not bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost . Are all Dilip's bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi and bhakta. 14 April 1938 ... like other things, but sadhana through literary activity is a phrase whose meaning is not very clear. 29 June 1937 What is the use of literature if the nature stays just the same? Good heavens! where did you get this idea that literature can transform people? Literary people are often the most impossible on the face of the earth. 10 November 1936 We may have progressed in literature ...
... to which he has been condemned: Hail, horrors, hail, Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor; one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than He Whom... free; the Almighty hath not built Here for His envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. A Titanism is articulate in the lines, but, however misdirected, the sheer sense of the mind's independence is magnificent: this independence is celebrated in language... spiritual realities that are known by subtle inner senses or by direct identity through an extension of one's sheer self. Eyeful Thought uttering an experience that goes beyond all earth and all hell and even all heaven into a pure infinitude where name and form are effaced has been set artistically working by the realisation Sri Aurobindo had at Baroda in 1908. A further vivification, as it were, ...
... I had to be his best man though no bridesmaids were available, But the great philosopher announced: 'Without love even Heaven were hell!' So the saviour angel of his soul led him to the turf in a mystic glee And then in the heaven of Monte Carlo gambled and lost exultantly. I wonder: could his Eden elect have failed him in the last resort? Else how... H) and the follies of his reason and his conduct. "But I presume you never heard of God's explanation of his non-interference to Anatole France when they met in some Heaven of Irony, I suppose, — it can't have been in the heaven of Karl Marx, in spite of France's conversion before his death. God is reported to have strolled up to him and said: 'I say, Anatole, you know that was a good joke... concluded his letter with this assuring postscript: "Dilip, your 'epistolary frivolity' was all right. There is laughter in the Kingdom of Heaven, though there may be no marriage there." Yes, dear readers, there is enough of laughter in 'the Kingdom of Heaven' and on this assuring note let us close this book on Sri Aurobindo's humour. Our infinite gratitude to the Smiling Master in whose lovelit ...
... sections covered by Dante's labels: "Inferno", "Purgatorio", "Paradiso". The subtle-physical and vital planes have their own hells and heavens: neither these hells nor these heavens can be lumped together to make a Dantesque picture. It is not possible also to ignore these heavens and restrict that label to the idealities of the mind-plane and the rapturous intensities of the psychic. Both below them... structure to merit comparison with the close approximation of the structure of Rodogune and other plays to the model followed by the Elizabethan dramatists. Of course in general we have hells and heavens and perhaps even purgatories in Savitri, but they are of an entirely different kind and also they are differently organised. The correspondent appears to be somewhat in two minds here. At... themselves shadowy in comparison _______________ 1 [23,837 in the 1993 edition.] Page 208 to Sri Aurobindo's masterful disclosures. How much more so must be the Dantesque Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, for all the systematic accounts of their levels and all the insets of human drama they carry! The system itself of other worlds unfolding in the Divine Comedy has ...
... inadequate language and with images expressive only of our three- dimensional impotence in a fishbowl that distorts and fragments a totality that has never ceased being total, without any high or low, heaven or hell: there is only the journey of our consciousness crossing all the evolutionary layers in order to reach what was always there ; there is only the rediscovery of our own Wholeness, "and they wholly... can turn it into a whole heaven, it is heaven!—But, at the risk of seeming impertinent, one wonders how our friend the baboon would perceive our merely mental world, which is his own verticality; would not he vanish all the same into an ecstasy of non-comprehension and an immensity quite baffling compared to the narrow workings of his sensory perceptions? Perhaps “Heaven" is "adjustable," if we... other the pursuers of a certain "liberation”—which was not so certain, for if we happened to be pulled a little roughly out of our heaven, we got quite furious and disgusted with the pettiness of this world, like all the rest of the common humankind. In short, “heaven” was within the four walls of an abbey or an ashram. And we died just the same. So we used to be divided between powerless mystics and ...
... their opposites, desires heaven more than he loves virtue, fears hell more than he abhors sin, and while he does so, the world-dispensation wears to him that meaning and colour. But the spirit of existence is not merely a legislator and judge concerned to maintain a standard of legal justice, to dole out deterrents and sanctions, rewards and penalties, ferocious pains of hell, indulgent joys of paradise... notion of rebirth, supposes a double prize for virtue and a double penalty for transgression. I am rewarded for my good deeds in heaven after death until the dynamic value of my virtue is exhausted and I am then reborn and rewarded again materially on earth. I am punished in hell to the equivalence of my sins and again punished for them in another life in the body. This looks a little superfluous and a... stic standard. If it is just that the virtuous man should be rewarded with success and happiness and the wicked man punished with downfall and pain at some time, in some life, on earth or in heaven or in hell, it is also just that the strong man should have the reward of his cultivated strength, the intellectual man the prize of his cultivated skill, the will that labours in whatever field the fruit ...
... pride in one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. What matter where if I be still the same? - or majestically modulating to beauty: Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move ... 36 Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering - or brief-cut as in Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Corneille provides many an occasion of dignified force, like Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute ou je suis - ... weakness, Heaven bestows on thee. Submit. - In this, or any other sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear: Safe in the hand of one disposing Power, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour. Let us listen to Milton in the same vein and on his own blindness, the "degree" of "weakness" bestowed by Heaven on ...
... lives, it is, it touches. It is a material perception. The body understands nothing of our tales of visions and psychics and all the rest of our mental theatrics, it understands nothing of our heavens and hells, which are mental creations, it understands nothing of our gods and damnations: for the body, a thing is or is not—like a baby. But a cosmic baby!... Perhaps that is what the "Divine" is. It is ...
... Knowledge, Love & Works. Nirguna & Saguna Brahman. Self-realisation in Virat. States of moksha (Hir[anyagarbha]). Laya (Prajna). Yoga. IV. I The Law of Karma. Sin & Virtue. Heaven & Hell. Salvation by Works V. Ethics of Vedanta. The Religion of Vedanta . 1906-8. An earlier draft of this fragment is published in the Reference Volume, volume 35 of T HE ...
... as if I had touched heaven; and then, nothing; that heaven was only the reverse of my dark flight, an escape into the light with eyes firmly shut so as not to see. Now I was reaching the port, at the end of my course; I was disembarking on that northern track as if for the first time in the world, the journey was over! There was no longer any haven, no more heaven, no more hell—disappeared, evaporated;... Now I understand why we erect our termite's ramparts and make our little revengeful laws: when one breaks the wall on top, one also breaks it below, everything enters, hell along with heaven In the depths of the night, as in heaven, there is no more “I”, it is an explosion of darkness like the explosion of light above, and all the sufferings of the world rush forth with all the shames. And I was there... no more “no”, no more good, no more evil, all is burned; I have lost everything, I have that which burns, for nothing, for everything, for whoever wishes. It burns, it is all I have: it is my hell, my heaven, my misery or my joy, I know not, it is all the same; it is my great fiery rhythm, my very smallness which burns, my immensity of a single flame—where is my fall, my deliverance? There is only ...
... he has nothing more. to fear, nothing more to lose, like a living being who has already lived so much that he wants nothing more for himself, and what could he want—what heaven? What could he still fear? He knew all heavens, all hells, he had wandered everywhere, known all riches, all miseries, what could he still expect? There was that song at the end, that tenderness for nothing, for everything, that... has no meaning—a meaning, you understand, here, on this very earth itself—if it is only a passage towards the Beyond, a trick to get out of it, then what heaven, tell me, what beatitude will ever atone for all this suffering? If there is no heaven for the earth , if there is no meaning for the earth , then the whole of this world is an insanity, and I have no use for paradise, let it stay up there... of the road, but suddenly it was as if millions of men came to cry out in my body, a world of suffering which fell upon my shoulders. Oh! it was not metaphysics, it was utter physics. —So... your heaven, I don't want it, I spit in its face. I saw his cheeks swell... I did not know whether he was going to laugh or explode. Then I plunged into a sort of burning prayer which sprang from the depths ...
... birth? Nothing but a solitary and unknown witness wandering on the Earth in search of the Future.’ Again we read: ‘We are at the world’s crucial hour, at the hour which must determine whether heaven or hell is to reign over the world … Today it must choose between two paths: the one which descends and the one which mounts; the one whither it is called by the forces from below, the forces of the lower... identification, his yoga of conversion – a conversion difficult to perform for any ordinary human being but near to impossible in the case of an Asura. She had vowed that even if she had to descend into hell, she would do so. Though the pages of her diary hardly tell us about it, her stay in Japan was ‘a perpetual battle with the adverse forces’ – not a battle on the human scale, but a battle of superhuman... heard distinctly this sentence: “Thus hast thou made thyself one with the soul of the cherry-trees and so thou canst take note that it is the Divine who makes the offering of this flower-prayer to heaven.” When I had written it, all was effaced; but now the blood of the cherry-tree flows in my veins and with it flows an incomparable peace and force.’ 22 She started painting and drawing again ...
... Mind were all seen as giant steps of the great energy of God on the road to Eternity. Human nature holds within itself both the forces of darkness and light. Man Communicates with Heaven, tampers with Hell. 9 He hisses but Savitri, undaunted, forces her way toward her soul. She first enters the chaotic world of the subconscient where everything is confused, "nothing self-found," ... surroundings, which seemed quite heavenly to her, she commenced a new life in the company of her husband: At first to her beneath the sapphire heavens The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream- Two lives were locked within an earthly heaven. 1 But soon with the change of seasons, and setting in of the Monsoon, the dark clouds with the sobbing winds and the cruel storm that came... doom? Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death. 2 Savitri felt within that her strength was taken away from her and given to Death. It was futile to raise her hands in supplication to Heaven and that by those 1 Savitri, p. 468. 2 Ibid., p. 474. Page 429 Who hug their lot and mock the saviour Light. 3 Taking the human stance for a while Savitri ...
... flopping down into the subconscient alternatively, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast contentedly or discontentedly in the mud, some are sitting in the mud and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, some have their legs in the mud and their head in the heavens etc., etc., an infinity of combinations, while many are simply nowhere... predicted that the Truth would manifest upon earth when the three dragons—the dragon of the earth (earth=body), the dragon of the mind and the dragon of heaven—would meet. That day may well have been the first moment of meeting between Matter and “heaven”—that “something” weighing on their heads. Once again, China had stuck its head right into Sri Aurobindo’s room and was present, as it were, for the event... Mid a horror of filth and mire A bed for the golden river's song, A home for the deathless fire. I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night To bring the fire to man; But the hate of hell and human spite Are my meed since the world began.... My gaping wounds are a thousand and one And the Titan kings assail ... A voice cried, "Go where none have gone! Dig deeper, deeper yet ...
... stic standard. If it is just that the virtuous man should be rewarded with success and happiness and the wicked man punished with downfall and pain at some time, in some life, on earth or in heaven or in hell, it is also just that the strong man should have the reward of his cultivated strength, the intellectual man the prize of his cultivated skill, the will that labours in whatever field the fruit... instruments of manifestation such as the mind, the heart and the body and finally to divinely transform them so that a divine life can be established upon earth itself and a bridge be built between the heaven and the terrestrial existence. And the Divine will do all that is necessary for this sole purpose. Page 126 His Grace is always at work, in every individual's life, under all ...
... apart in his greatness, the End and Beginning,— He who has sent through his soul's wide spaces the universe spinning. One eternal, Time an illusion, life a brief error! One eternal, Master of heaven—and of hell and its terror! Spirit of silence and purity rapt and aloof from creation,— Dreaming through aeons unreal his splendid and empty formation! Spirit all-wise in omnipotence shaping a world but... waterfall, lonely the pine lives aspiring. Two are the ends of existence, two are the dreams of the Mother: Page 477 Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other,— Earth-souls needing the touch of the heavens peace to recapture, Heaven needing earth's passion to quiver its peace into rapture. Marry, O lightning eternal, the passion of a moment-born fire! Out of... Heal earth's unease with thy feet, O heaven-born delicate virgin. Children of Time whose spirits came down from eternity, seizing Joys that escape us, yoked by our hearts to a labour unceasing, Earth-bound, torn with our longings, our life is a brief incompleteness. Thou hast the stars to sport with, the winds run like bees to thy sweetness. Art thou not heaven-bound even as I with the earth? Hast ...
... corpse that has been unfortunate enough to deviate from the medical chart or to be crushed beneath the wheels of a truck. And then, on the other side of the bars, we will supposedly find heaven, or hell, depending on our proportion of sins and virtues in the old environment. Or else “nothing” – still, by their death those “nothings” appear to have produced quite a number of species in the course... Earth. It is “another heaven,” as John of Patmos had seen. It is the Day, as the Vedic rishis saw some five or seven thousand years ago. They shattered the mountain rock with their cry; They made in us a path... They discovered the Day and the sun- world... the pregnant hill [our own matter, our dun- geon]... parted asunder, heaven was perfected. 7 ... other end, a new species that will change the face of the earth. The twilight of man is the beginning of the free Man and the divine life on earth. “May Earth and Heaven be equal and one,” said the Veda. “A new Heaven and a new Earth,” said Saint John of the Apocalypse. The resurrection from the dead is our resurrection. It is the last revolt of the Earth. It is Sri Aurobindo's ...
... in the air. And it is very fortunate, for if it were otherwise, there would be perhaps gods or types of superior men who would create hells and heavens as they do in their material imagination, where they would imprison you; you would be imprisoned in heaven or in hell according as you pleased or displeased them. It would be a very critical situation and happily it is not like that. Sometimes... In shining chambers of spiritual sleep. Passed were the pillar-posts of birth and death, Passed was their little scene of symbol deeds, Passed were the heavens and hells of their long road; They had returned into the world's deep soul. All now was gathered into pregnant rest: Person and nature suffered a slumber change. ... Never go into the psychic - the psychic is something essentially linked to divine manifestation, not to divine not-intervention, not to Nirvana. Earth must transform herself and equal Heaven Or Heaven descend into earth's mortal state. But for such vast spiritual change to be, Out of the mystic cavern in man's heart The heavenly Psyche must put off her veil And step into ...
... had met could not have been fulfilled by the efforts of one side alone; good must mingle with evil, the ideal take sides with the real, the soul work in harmony with the senses, virtue & sin, heaven & earth & hell labour towards a common end before it can be accomplished; for this object was no less than to evolve all that is beautiful & sweet & incredible in life, all that makes it something more than... are the Opsaras and Urvasie the most beautiful of them all. To understand the poetry & appeal of these nymphs of heaven, we must know something of their origin & meaning. In the beginning of things, in the great wide spaces of Time when mankind as yet was young and the azure heavens & the interregions between the stars were full of the crowding figures of luminous Gods & gigantic Titans by the collision... play of the feelings, the smile in the eyes, the ready tears, the sweetness of the mouth, the lowered lashes, the quick and easy gesture full of spontaneous charm. If this is a nymph of heaven, one thinks, then heaven must be beautifully like the earth. Her terror & collapse in the episode of her abduction & rescue, where Chitraleqha manages pretty successfully to keep up her courage as a goddess should ...
... flopping down into the subconscient alternately, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast contentedly or discontentedly in the mud, some are sitting in the mud and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, some have their legs in the mud and their head in the heavens etc., etc., an infinity of combinations, while many are simply nowhere... invisible stare; sometimes I might say, "Now, look here, Nirod, don't make an immortal ass of yourself - that is not the transformation wanted." Still another time I might shout, "Now! now! What the hell! what the blazes!" So it would depend on the occasion, not only on the person. 18 (5) "Requests, beseeches, entreats" all in vain! NB: Another letter from my friend Jatin. He has asked for... which! Bindu, a friend of Dilip's, once wrote to Sri Aurobindo a long letter besieging him with a number of world-shaking questions. Sri Aurobindo's reply was as follows: "Bindu, Good heavens! But what! But when! But which! You expect me to give you 'clear and concise' notes on all that, fixing the 'nature and salient features' of each blessed thing? It will take me several Sundays wholly ...
... insubstantial as everything else that is spiritual. It is said that the soul is created by God at the moment of our birth and breathed into us, and that it continues existing in all eternity, in heaven or in hell. Sometimes it is pictured as a tiny, naked being, a miniature of the living person, escaping out of the body at the time of death and then going through all kinds of vicissitudes in scary places... intelligent and of a stature so high as to commit sins against God — supposing that one could sin against God — sins of such a nature that his soul would have to burn eternally in hell? What understanding has man of God, sin, hell and eternity? Are his psychological and physiological shortcomings not too much of a disadvantage in his struggle for virtuous perfection and spiritual indemnity? And what use... vital sensation and even by the very physical sense, everywhere you see, hear, touch only the Divine. Then you can much less doubt it or deny it than you can doubt or deny daylight or air or the sun in heaven — for of these physical things you cannot be sure but they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experiences of the Divine, doubt is impossible.’ 18 Sri Aurobindo has ...
... flopping down into the subconscient alternately, some swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast contentedly or discontentedly in the mud, some are sitting in the mud and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, some have their legs in the mud and their head in the heavens, etc. etc., an infinity of combinations, while many are simply nowhere... consciousness. 7 May 1935 Page 341 It seems another victory has been won by you? Some people saw a red-crimson light around the Mother a few days back. What does it signify? ??? Great Heavens! which? who? But there is nothing new in that. It was coming down before Nov. 24, but afterwards all the damned mud arose and it stopped. But there are two red crimson lights. One is supramental Divine ...
... Father or mother dear or my far home. Nor shall thy pains by my companionship Be greatened; doom me not to parting, Rama. Page 308 For only where thou art is Heaven; 'tis Hell Where thou art not. 0 thou who know'st my love, If thou canst leave me, poison still is left To be my comforter. I will not bear Their yoke who hate thee. And if today I shunned... On mountains and by rivers large delight. Thus if a hundred years should pass or many Millenniums, yet I should not tire or change, For wandering so not heaven itself would seem Desirable, but this were rather heaven. 0 Rama, Paradise and thou not there No Paradise were to my mind. I should Grow miserable and reject the bliss. I rather mid the gloomy entangled... Appendices II Sri Aurobindo's Translations (a few passages from the Ramayana ) An Aryan City 1 Coshala by the Soroyou, a land Smiling at heaven, of riches measureless And corn abounding glad; in that great country Ayodhya was, the city world-renowned, Ayodhya by King Manou built, immense. Twelve yojans long the mighty ...
... all Eden, all hell, and the earth between. Love is an altogether new dimension of experience, defying reason, defying cold calculation, defying even death; it sharpens and purifies the senses, it is a sixth sense that controls the rest; it awakens the slumbering psyche and crowns him master of the ceremonies. And yet, when things go wrong, love changes to hate, heaven dwindles to hell, and love's... Page 111 vivid as it is, only describes the name and nature and motions of Love, here in the 'Descent to Hell (Patala)' passage, we see things actually happening, and we become almost participants in the action. It may, perhaps, be said that this 'descent' , into Hell is more Greek than Hindu, recalls vaguely Hades and Tartarus and the Circles in Dante than the legendary Patala of Indian... snow * Cf. To the Sea (Vol. 5, p. 45), and The Life Heavens (Vol. 5, p. 574), Also the prophecy in Savitri (Vol. 29, p. 699): The mind of earth shall be a home of light, The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven, The body of earth a tabernacle of God. Page 102 Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven, With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks, ...
... ghost of Bertrand Russell or someone of that kind muttering 'wishful thinking'. Or maybe it is for us to create that which we desire. Thereby making a reality of a wish? Who knows. To 'Build a heaven in hell's despite'. But what terrible dreams mankind has, star-wars and weapons of destruction and all kinds of material power and tyranny. All the same there are signs of hope as this year begins, many... traditional Vaish-navism but a new extension of an all-round spirituality as in the Gita with the Yogi's eye rolling super-Shakespeareanly with the finest frenzy possible both from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth? There is the prophecy put in the mouth of Savitri: Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts, Light shall invade the darkness of its base. Then in the process... Time-Spirit where we have those phrases which occurred to Oppenheimer during the experimental explosion at Alamo-gordo, "Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven". Now in the last chapter the Divine Charioteer prepares the final revelation by telling the disciple: "Further hear the most secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee..." Then the great ...
... Boulogne. I had to be his best man though no bridesmaids were available, But the great philosopher announced: "Without love even Heaven were hell!" So the saviour angel of his soul led him to the turf in a mystic glee Page 178 And then in the heaven of Monte Carlo gambled and lost exultantly. I wonder: could his Eden elect have failed him in the last resort? Else how could... engineering: I had hoped to build a rainbow bridge Marrying the soil to the sky And sow in this dancing planet midge The moods of infinity. But too bright were our heavens, too far away, Too frail their ethereal stuff; Too splendid and sudden our light could not stay; The roots were not deep enough. Page 145 How could the "roots" be... whom we called Bindu. He wrote to Gurudev (1934) a long letter besieging him with a number or world-shaking questions to which the reply came in due course: Page 151 'Bindu, Good heavens! But what! But when! But which! You expect me to give you 'clear and concise' notes on all that, fixing the 'nature and salient features' of each blessed thing? It will take me several Sundays wholly ...
... samadhi was increased & continuous coherent record established in the dream form, of speech, & communication with others on the plane of the Imagination, in the kalpanamayi prakriti of which are the heavens & hells of subjective Page 102 experience objectivised in sensation (to the sukshma indriyas) but not in annam. 24 July 1912 A day of reaction in the body, suspension of health in the ...
... inhibitions, commonly omnipotent, become too insignificant for notice, and new reaches of patience and fortitude open out. Fears and anxieties go, and blissful equanimity takes their place. Come heaven, come hell, it makes no difference now! c. Purity. — The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first, increase of purity. The sensitiveness to spiritual discords is enhanced, and the cleansing... and the fathers of our wives, and our grandsons and our wives' brothers and the kin of our beloved. These, though they slay me, O Madhushudan, I would not slay, no not for the empire of heaven and space and hell, much less for this poor earth of ours. Slaying the sons of Dhritarashtra what joy would be left to us, O Janardana? Sin, sin alone would find lodging in us, if we slew these, though our ... slayers of the race and the race itself to very hell; for the long line of fathers perish and the food ceaseth and the water is given no more. By these sins who bring their race to perdition, fathers they of bastard confusion, the eternal ideals of the nation and the hearth are overthrown, and for men who have lost the ancient righteousness of the race, in hell an eternal habitation is set apart, it is told ...
... levels of its existence, offsetting its heaven with hell, Page 10 matter with spirit, individualism with collectivism, or any other isms that proliferate in this sorry system. But one does not get out by the decrees of any ism pushed to its perfection: deprived of its heaven, our earth is a poor whirling machine; deprived of its matter, our heaven is a pale nebula filled with the silent... pursue a third path, which is neither that of science nor that of religion – although it may one day combine both within its rounded truth, with all our whites and blacks, goods and evils, heavens and hells, bumps and holes, in a new human or superhuman geography that all these goods and evils, holes and bumps were meticulously and accurately preparing. This new materialism has a most powerful... embrace pregnant with an inconceivable Possibility. Another mystery summons us. A voice arose that was so sweet and terrible It thrilled the heart with love and pain, as if all hell Tuned with all heaven in one inextricable note. Born from abysmal depths on highest heights to float, It carried all sorrow that the souls of creatures share, Yet hinted every rapture that the gods ...
... into nether regions of unconsciousness and materiality, the regions of the lower vital, its heaven and its hell, as a conscious witness. He then ascends to the regions of Heavens of the higher Vital and then crosses over to the Heavens of the Mind. After soaring into regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the Ideal and Illumined Mind he passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the centre... are extant turns out to be greater than any that has been sung by any epic poet. Dante speaks of inferno, — hell, — through which the human spirit has to pass to arrive at purgatory to be purified of all its dross in order to reach the vision beatific. But the Beatitude is far in the heaven of the Divine and this earth is condemned to remain a vale of tears, — it is a place where the soul of man... ce, it is valueless. When there is this sense of utter want of significance of life, a sense of its ultimate uselessness, "a blankness of unperturbable darkness," then, says a critic, "the word 'hell' is not too strong to express it." In the authentic epic wherein courage in the face of danger, heroism in fighting for a cause is portrayed, the significance of life is brought out, its value found ...
... s into nether regions of unconsciousness and materiality, the regions of the lower vital, its heaven and its hell, as a conscious witness. He then ascends to the regions of Heavens of the higher Vital and then crosses over to the Heavens of the Mind. After scaring into regions above Mind, into the Heavens of the Ideal and Illumined Mind he passes beyond the borders of manifested creation to the centre... extant turns out to be greater than any that has been sung by any epic poet. Dante speaks of inferno,—hell,—through which the human spirit has to pass to arrive at purgatory to be purified of all Page 36 its dross in order to reach the vision beatific. But the Beatitude is far in the heaven of the Divine and this earth is condemned to remain a vale of tears,—it is a place where the soul... significance, it is valueless. When there is this sense of utter want of significance of life, a sense of its ultimate uselessness, "a blankness of unperturbable darkness", then, says a critic, "the word 'hell' is not too strong to express it". In the authentic epic wherein courage in the face of danger, heroism in fighting for a cause is portrayed the significance of life is brought out, its value found ...
... flame-speed out of their own wild heart— That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock— They find their home in this sweet silent Face With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven And deluges hell with mercies without end. The abysmal night opens its secret smile And all the world cries out it is the dawn! Seated Above is a striking poem but its violent connections and di... his weapon through the gloaming. Took no aim; Saw his likenesses around him Do the same: Viewed a thousand swordless figures Like his own— Then first knew in that cold starlight Hell, alone. Exceedingly original and vivid—the description with its economy and felicity of phrase is very telling. 11 October 1936 My appreciation of the effect of Arjava's poem, especially... form a world. Smooth as untrodden snow the gleaming Host, Fraught with all history, ringed by opal pyx, Shone through eternity rays innermost 'Pon 5 all symbolic forms that intermix Silence of Heaven with lisping speech. God takes His very substance that from Beauty came; Then with world-urging power He freely breaks The bread that builds the fabric of His Name. Seven great realms the fragments ...
... traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Where - or which - is this "undiscovered country"? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Or is it (as Svidrigailov of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment images it to be) a mere bathroom somewhere with overhanging spider's webs? It is enough to "puzzle the will" and leave... and its tendency is always to see heaven in some other place. 8 But some chosen few, in ancient no less than in modem times, have resisted the notion that heaven must necessarily be in another place, not here on the earth. The assurance was given, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you". And sundry poets have affirmed: Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire... Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin took the material world as seriously as they did the Spirit. If Sri Aurobindo wrote on 20 May 1915: "Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, 'Heaven and Earth equal and one' ", Teilhard wrote in 1934 in his Comment Je crois ('How I Believe'): If, as a result of some interior revolution ...
... terrors and apprehensions, and straightway he privately appointed a commission of bishops to visit and question Joan daily until they should find out whether her supernatural helps hailed from heaven or from hell. The King's relative, the Duke of Alencon, three years prisoner of war to the English, was in these days released from captivity through promise of a great ransom; and the name and fame... next question: 'But tell me who you are, and what would you?' 'I am called Joan the Maid, and am sent to say that the King of Heaven wills that you be crowned and consecrated in your good city of Rheims, and be thereafter Lieutenant of the Lord of Heaven, who is King of France. And He willeth also that you set me at my appointed work and give me men-at-arms.' After a slight pause she added... obey I will slay them all, but if they obey, I will have them to mercy. I am come hither by God, the King of Heaven, body for body, to put you out of France, in spite of those who would work treason and mischief against the kingdom. Think not you shall ever hold the kingdom from the King of Heaven, the Son of the Blessed Mary; King Charles shall hold it, for God wills it so, and has revealed it to him ...
... transitions after death, and it would be an unacceptable oversimplification to call it a 'soul'. We ordinarily believe that man has a body and a soul, and that after death the soul goes either to heaven, to hell or takes up another body. But very many events intervene before these things happen. Besides his physical body, man has several subtle bodies or sheaths about which most people are ignorant. And... went to Hell where he was honoured with the hottest oven in the whole establishment. Here he must burn for ever and ever; but in his life he had done one kind act and for this they permitted him by special mercy of God to cool himself for an hour every Christmas on an iceberg in the North Pole. Now this had always seemed to me not mercy, but a peculiar refinement of cruelty. For how could Hell fail to... Jeanne d'Arc who was burnt alive - for several reasons, one of them being that she dared to fight on the battlefield dressed as a man! And then, with time, various notions such as - 'Woman leads man to Hell, she is the cause of his downfall, she must be debarred from the spiritual seeker's path' - tightened the noose around women. So the injunction of the Scriptures came to be that in childhood a girl ...
... totally, materially changed — so long as we are not in the next species. And I well understand this: nothing will change truly, neither heaven nor hell, so long as Matter is not changed. It is there that everything takes place, it is the key to all paradises and hells, both equally false, it is the place where the Thing is taking place, where, perhaps, the true paradise is taking shape, without any... abolished. As long as the root of this horror is not pulled out, nothing will ever be healed or perfect, in any heaven and any universe. It is clear to me now. I mean that I understand materially, with my senses, if I may say so.... ... Oh! I wish I never had to relive those five years of hell since '73 — Mauthausen and Buchenwald were charming in Page 46 comparison. I now understand why... that's all, and which will be relieved when it all stops. I no longer even think of leaving this place, I no longer think at all. To leave would still mean another world to move, to shake up. I am in hell up to my neck, without being able to move to one side or the other. It will stop one day, which is all I know. But what is surprising is that everything has vanished: Mother, Sri Aurobindo like ...
... what seem to be sister religions. Zoroastrianism is fundamentally monotheistic but pragmatically dualistic with its powers of Light fighting those of darkness through world-history. It has a heaven and a hell, with some sort of purgatory. There is no rebirth but only one life and at the end of it the Judgment. At the end of time there will be a resurrection and a final division of the good and the... "Certainly, from Paul's description one would never suspect that a risen body could eat, as Luke reports. Moreover, Paul distinguishes between the risen body that can enter heaven and 'flesh and blood' that cannot enter heaven - a distinction that does not agree with the emphasis in Luke 24:39 on the 'flesh and bones' of the risen Jesus" (p. 87). "Other features in the Gospel accounts may also... is Mark's statement on the Second Coming: "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the Angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father" (13:32). Support to it is drawn from Matthew 24:36: "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Here Jesus does not include himself openly, yet the concluding "only" can be taken to sweep him ...
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