stoics : philosopher(s) of the school founded at Athens c. 308 BC by Zeno: it held virtue as highest good, concentrated on ethics, & inculcated control of the passions & indifference to pleasure & pain. Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a well-known Stoic.
... religion, the social ideas, the daily life of the people, its immense dynamic Page 244 power on the mind and actions of Indian humanity. The Greek thinkers, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and Epicureans, had also this practical aim and dynamic force, but it acted only on the cultured few. That was because Greek philosophy, losing its ancient affiliation to the Mystics, separated itself... after God, tried to seize the ideal, had its hope of a perfect human society. We know how the Neo-platonists developed his ideas under the influence of the East and how they affected Christianity. The Stoics, still more directly the intellectual descendants of Heraclitus, arrived at very remarkable and fruitful ideas of human possibility and a powerful psychological discipline,—as we should say in India... according to their Page 250 nature from years sempiternal,—Heraclitus' "measures" which the Sun is forced to observe, his "things are utterly determined." This Knowledge-Will is the Logos. The Stoics spoke of it as a seed Logos, spermatikos , reproduced in conscious beings as a number of seed Logoi; and this at once reminds us of the Vedantic prājña puruṣa , the supreme Intelligence who is the ...
... improve his spiritual life and lead him towards truth which is virtuous. Reason was an important instrument for the stoics which they said should rule over passions, since passion distorts truth. They advocated self-control, endurance and detachment from distracting emotions. Stoics believed that by having a mastery over passion, it is possible to be free from the disharmony of the world and one would... Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes, and Zeno of Citium, who, inspired by the teachings of Socrates, was led to Crates of Thebes, who became his teacher, and later went on to develop the school of Stoics. All these men adhered steadfastly to the principles laid down by the Cynic School's founder, Antisthenes. They believed that virtue was the only necessity for happiness, and that it was entirely ...
... stage of Stoic equality, philosophic equality, and equality that comes with resignation. It is here that we come to appreciate the rationale Page 104 and usefulness of the stoics, particularly the Stoics of ancient philosophers of Greece and Rome, such as Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The attitudes and experiences which they have described refer in varying degrees to these... "What did you say man?" "Fetter me?" "You fetter my leg, but my will not even Zeus can conquer." 8 This sense of endurance is expressed even more explicitly in one writings of the Stoics: I must die. But must I die groaning? I must be imprisoned. But must I whine as well? I must suffer exile. Can anyone then hinder me, from going with a smile, and good courage, and at peace? 'Tell ...
... the stage of Stoic equality. philosophic equality, and equality that comes by resignation to the Divine Will. It is here that we come to appreciate the rationale and usefulness of the Stoics, particularly, the Stoics of ancient Europe, such as Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. The attitudes and experiences which they have described refer in varying degrees to these three stag65 of equality ...
... logical conclusion of his theory; it contradicts the evident suggestion of his metaphor about the road which implies a starting-point and a point of return; and we have too the distinct statement of the Stoics that he believed in the theory of conflagration,—an assertion which they are hardly likely to have made if this were not generally accepted as his teaching. The modern arguments against enumerated ...
... this...; his thought sought after God, tried to seize the ideal, had the hope of a perfect human society. We know how the Neo-Platonists developed his ideas...and how they affected Christianity. The Stoics, still more directly the intellectual descendants of Heraclitus, arrived at very remarkable and fruitful ideas of human possibility and a powerful psychological discipline, — as we should say in India ...
... “fire,” it is Agni, the mystic fire of the Vedas “which is hymned as the upbuilder of the worlds, the secret Immortal in men and things.” It is the central Fire of Heraclitus, Pythagoras and the Stoics, “the heart of Zeus.” “In the Pythagorean cosmology the centre of the world is occupied by a fire (different from the Sun) around which orbit all the heavenly bodies (including the Sun), and that fire ...
... ." (Le Chretien dans la Theologie Paulinienne, 1962, p. 212). Edgar Haulotte, S.J., tells us that "Paul puts the language of the Bible into words that can be understood by the Epicureans and Stoics to whom he is speaking" [L'Esprit de Yahwe dans L'Ancien Testament in the symposium L'Homme devant Dieu, 1964, I, p. 28.). 6. The Divine Milieu, p. 106. 7. Ibid., p. 105. ...
... foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us all power of thinking at all.... It has proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body." The Stoics gave an added impetus to the mortification of the flesh, and the Neo-Pythagorians carried on the tradition with an un- abated zeal. Nor did Christianity improve upon this pagan attitude, rather its ...
... what actually happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The old Page 204 knowledge was prolonged in a less inspired, less dynamic and more intellectual form by the Pythagoreans, by the Stoics, by Plato and the Neo-Platonists; but still in spite of them and in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual wave which swept over Europe from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity, the whole real ...
... normal ego a negation of personality Page 157 and a repellent menace, to its earthbound rationalism a dream, a self-hypnotic hallucination or a deluding mania. And yet in ancient Europe the Stoics, Platonists, Pythagoreans had made some approach to this aspiration, and even afterwards, a few rare souls have envisaged or pursued it through occult ways. And now it is again beginning to percolate ...
... an enormous practical effect on the civilisation and got into the very bones of current thought and action, it has never at all succeeded in achieving this importance in Europe. In the days of the Stoics and Epicureans it got a grip, but only among the highly cultured; at the present day, too, we have some renewed tendency of the kind. Nietzsche has had his influence, certain French thinkers also in ...
... separated from the body and bound for another world, 2 Corinthians 5:6-8; the cosmic pleroma in Colossians and Ephesians) and cliches (1 Corinthians 8:6; Romans 11:36; Ephesians 4:6). From the Cynics and Stoics he borrowed the rapid question and answer method (the diatribe), Romans 3:1-9, 27-31, and the rhetorical device of heaping word on word, 2 Corinthians 6:4-10. Even his use of long, packed phrases in ...
... explanation of the cosmos on the foundation of the principle of Beauty and Harmony, but I never got beyond the first three or four chapters. I read Epictetus and was interested in the ideas of the Stoics and the Epicureans; but I made no study of Greek philosophy or of any of the [? ]. I made in fact no study of metaphysics in my school and College days. What little I knew about philosophy I picked ...
... of the secret Mysteries of spiritual and occult knowledge. This eclipse proved there to be total, and even in Greece, where the light of the Mysteries continued for some time, through Pythagoras, Stoics, Plato and Neo-Platonists, there came about finally a cleavage between the old and the new and there arose a dominantly vital and mental civilization in which the knowledge of the old Mysteries ...
... Page 17 fervid assent. It is true that some forms of spiritual culture were prevalent in the West in the times of Pythagoras and Plato, and that Plotinus and some of the Gnostics and Stoics were regular Yogis, as also some of the Neo-Platonists and Essences. Among the mediaeval mystics of Europe and the Manicheans of Persia, there was a systematic culture of some forms of spiritual ...
... region where we find ourselves breathing a larger and purer air. The Stoic poise, the philosophic poise of the soul are only its first and second steps of ascension out of the whirl of the passions and the tossings of desire to a serenity and bliss, not of the Gods, but of the Divine himself in his supreme self-mastery. The Stoic equality, making character its pivot, founds itself upon self-mastery... subject but her king and lord, svarāṭ, samrāṭ . But the Gita accepts this Stoic discipline, this heroic philosophy, on the same condition that it accepts the tamasic recoil,—it must have above it the sattwic vision of knowledge, at its root the aim at self-realisation and in its steps the ascent to the divine Nature. A Stoic discipline which merely crushed down the common affections of our human nature... It is here that the possibility of a kind of rajasic equality comes in, which is at its lowest the strong nature's pride in self-mastery, self-control, superiority to passion and weakness; but the Stoic ideal seizes upon this point of departure and makes it the key to an entire liberation of the soul from subjection to all weakness of its lower nature. As the tamasic inward recoil is a generalisation ...
... By union with God we enter into a supreme freedom and a supreme mastery. The ideal of the Stoic, the sage who is king because by self-rule he becomes master also of outward conditions, resembles superficially the Vedantic idea of the self ruler and all-ruler, svarāṭ samrāṭ ; but it is on a lower plane. The Stoic kingship is maintained by a force put upon self and environment; the entirely liberated... said, the foundation of three kinds of equality; but the Gita's truth of knowledge not only gathers them all up together, but gives them an infinitely profound, a magnificently ample significance. The Stoic knowledge is that of the soul's power of self-mastery by fortitude, an equality attained by a struggle with one's nature, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against its natural rebellions:... dwelling in its superiority to the instrumental nature through which it acts. His mastery over things is because he has become one soul with all things. To take an image from Roman institutions, the Stoic freedom is that of the libertus , the freedman, who is still really a dependent on the power that once held him enslaved; his is a freedom allowed by Nature because he has merited it. The freedom of ...
... 'Cretan glance', which is really no more than a new name for the Sophoclean capacity to see life steadily and see it whole, or even the old Stoic capacity for patient determined sufferance. Perhaps the 'Cretan glance' includes more of the joy of life than the Stoic or the Sophoclean, though quite as much of its clarity and strength and integrality. Kazantzakis imagines (like Tennyson) ...
... world ? If it means merely sitting quiet, suffering and observing nonchalantly the impacts of the world—something in the manner described by Matthew Arnold in his famous lines on the East—, well, that stoic way, the way of indifference is a way of being in the world which is not very much unlike not being in the world; for it means simply erecting a wall of separation or isolation within one's consciousness ...
... If it means merely sitting quiet, suffering and observing nonchalantly the impacts of the world – something in the manner described by Matthew Arnold in his famous lines on the East –, well, that stoic way, the way of indifference is a way of being in the world which is not very much unlike not being in the world; for it means simply erecting a wall of separation or isolation within one's consciousness ...
... a great endurance, though at times a true love is sufficient. And if there is faith—a little, a very very little is enough—then everything is swept away. But in most cases what you need is a great stoic courage, a capacity to endure and to hold out: the resistance, especially in the case of a previous suicide, resistance to the temptation to again begin this foolishness—because it makes a terrible ...
... fully inclined towards Brahman. That is why his equality is based on the knowledge of the presence of the faultless Brahman and the spiritual beyond the sattwik, the pure mental equality, taught by the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece to their followers and also by the Gita. The sattwik equality leads on to spiritual equality. Page 271 perfect equality is not permanent, large ...
... parted company almost at the outset; philosophy took from the first a turn towards a purely intellectual and ratiocinative explanation of things. Nevertheless, there were systems like the Pythagorean, Stoic, and Epicurean, which were Page 403 dynamic not only for thought but for conduct of life and developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of the being; this reached a higher spiritual ...
... Plac'd on this Isthmus of a middle state, A Being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride... In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err.. . 11 If we concentrate ...
... udasinata is fatal to perfection. Rajasic udasinata is indifference enforced by effort, sustained by resolution, habitualised by long self-discipline. It is the indifference of the moral hero, of the stoic. This is more helpful than the tamasic, but if persisted in, has a hardening and narrowing effect on the soul which diminishes in flexibility & in capacity for delight. Rajasic udasinata if used, must ...
... sunrise Shall have forgotten him extinct and cold. But virtue to itself is joy enough? Yet if to us sin taste diviner? why Should we not herd in Epicurus' sty Whom Nature made not of a Stoic stuff? For Nature being all, desire must reign. It is too sweet and strong for us to slay Upon a nameless altar, saying nay To honied urgings for no purpose plain. A strange unreal ...
... not prevent them necessarily to reach true excellence. Many of those who have reached the summit in their specialities have displayed high human qualities such as courage, endurance, fearlessness, stoic composure in defeat, even Page 263 heroism in fighting back the effects of accidents to the point of being able to return to competition. There have been remarkable examples of fair play ...
... as the year when Mirra first heard about the inner Divine. And "I rushed headlong like a . . . like a cyclone." Mother was telling Satprem one day about her body. "I was reared by an ascetic, a stoic; my mother was a woman like a bar of iron, you know ..." who had dinned into the ears of her two small children that "one is not on earth to have a good time . . . and the Page 19 ...
... things; and above all, I think the main reason is that you have no desire to—it's no fun for you! ( Satprem laughs in complete agreement ) Page 170 I was brought up by an ascetic, a stoic; my mother was a woman like an iron bar, you know. When my brother and I were small she spent her time telling us over and over that we weren't on earth to have fun; that it's constant hell, but you ...
... influenced as he was by the Platonizing bent of Posidonius — the body was a contemptible thing. Marcus Aurelius, 'the last Roman who sat upon the throne of the Caesars', was also a professed Stoic. But he, too, "speaks repeatedly of the body in tones of passionate scorn. He reprobates it especially as the souree of carnal appetites, and as tending to inveigle the soul". 3 (c) Neo- ...
... here. A re-creation may be needed through the pure light and strength and sweetness that reside in our inmost soul. You have raised the question: "What is life?" Arthur Symons, with a dignified Stoic pessimism, says: Life is a long preparedness for death. Shakespeare, in the role of a disgruntled Macbeth, cries out, as everybody knows; Life's but a poor player Who struts and frets ...
... being. Whether they had their knowledge by thought Page 342 or by religion, from the judgment or from the heart, their first preoccupation was to live according to their knowledge,—the Stoic & the Epicurean quite as much as the Christian or the Jew held his knowledge as a means towards life, towards the highest fulfilment of his being. It has been left for enlightened Europe to profess ...
... does not derive from a dry sense of duty or from stern discipline. There is hardly any place for austerities in the temperament of the Bengalis. They cannot accept from the bottom of their hearts the stoic ideal of Mahatma Gandhi. Rabindranath is the model of a Bengali. The Deccan has produced Shankara; Nanak and Surdas appeared in the North; but in the fertile soil of Bengal were born Sri Chaitanya, ...
... set before the world from the beginning of our history by the Vedic Rishis. And we are doing the offering with a rush of rapture born of love: "hands of joy." Our equanimity is not of an intellectual Stoic: it is that of a spiritual Epicurean. An Eternal Face whose eyes are depths of immutable bliss and whose mouth is a moulder of ever-new beauty is our goal. Don't tax yourself with the problem ...
... value and justification. It also transcends the state of resignation in which everything and every occurrence is offered to the Supreme Being without any preference. These three states of equality, stoic, philosophic or religious, are indeed necessary to be cultivated in the course of developing the supramental equality, which is not only the state of internal Page 72 tranquility but also ...
... when the same poet makes Romeo exclaim at first sight of Juliet's beauty at a ball given by her family: O she doth teach the torches to burn bright! - or else when that distillation of the Stoic in the Roman temper is put in Caesar's mouth in Antony and Cleopatra: Be you not troubled with the time, which drives O'er your content these strong necessities, But let determined things ...
... of Savitri she may have to read the book of her fear Therefore she wants to know what it is about so that afterwards, if it is indeed an irredeemable fate, she can at least wait for the event with stoic forbearance. Now Narad realises that she ought to be told the truth, for it would be no use trying to hide this fatal secret from the queen, thereby torturing a mother's heart. He also ...
... truth and the evolution of systems of ethical self-discipline; but it could only think, it could not successfully practise. The later Hellenic mind and Athenian centre of culture gave to Rome the great Stoic system of ethical discipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century, but could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to the characteristic temperament ...
... before the world from the beginning of our history by the Rigvedic Rishis. And we are doing the offering with a rush of rapture born of love -"hands of joy". Our equanimity is not of an intellectual Stoic: it is that of a spiritual Epicurean. An Eternal Face whose eyes are depths of immutable bliss and whose mouth is a moulder of ever-new beauty is our goal. Don't tax yourself with the problem ...
... an entire indifference to the forms of the material existence or the uplifting of the race. This indifference is seen at its highest in the Epicurean discipline and is not entirely absent from the Stoic; and even altruism does the works of compassion more often for its own sake than for the sake of the world it helps. But this too is a limited fulfilment. The progressive mind is seen at its noblest ...
... the equality Page 246 we have been speaking of and which is absolutely essential for the establishment of a genuine spiritual life is not just the harsh power of endurance of the Stoic nor the disappointed resignation of someone for whom the 'grapes are sour' and are therefore of no interest! Nor is it the apparent equality of a dull-witted person who remains unperturbed in many ...
... insect under a magnifying glass—and not breathe a word to anyone, especially to her mother, who would have whisked her off to the nearest doctor. An obscure milieu, Mother said. An ascetic and stoic One of the very top French scientific schools. mother. One sometimes wonders at the absolute relativity of human conceptions and philosophies; for this same Energy or Shakti that drove Mathilde ...
... are egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed into the true quietude. There is too, on a higher level, the equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resignation or a sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first approaches they can be, but they ...
... angels. To quote Alexander Pope again: Plac’d in this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great, With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god or beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err … Created half to rise ...
... of them eternal—and through the ages they have perplexed and tormented humanity by their perpetual companionship in an always unfinished and inconclusive strife, dividing us into Puritan and Pagan, Stoic and Epicurean, worldling and ascetic, & perpetuating an opposition that rests on a false division of a double unity, maintaining a strife that can lead to no final victory. The Seer has deliberately ...
... insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. A most pregnant summing-up by him in a semi-Stoic semi-mystic tone is: Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. In the second place, we have not as in Classicism a lively or firm gentleness ...
... fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts ...
... "Romantic", understanding by it Mediaeval trappings such as his father had immured him amongst during his boyhood. But there was in him not only a queer blend of the emotional Byronic despair and the Stoic defiance of a Vigny: there was also the belief in the bursting of great truths with startling suddenness and ecstatic vividness over which the mind has little control and there was the desire to ...
... needn't degenerate into Karamazovism or mere hedonism, but even at its best it is a one-sided view of life that denies both the nourishment of the Spirit and the hope of tomorrow. On the other hand, the stoic and the ascetic would rather reason as follows: Life is but thus and thus; misery and pain do constitute the badge of our lives; we are hedged on all sides by the insuperable limitations of death... Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A Being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride... In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err... 26 It may be that, on ...
... the coherent & interwoven thought of the Upanishad tyaktena bhunjítháh need not go beyond a rule of moral self-discipline in which the aim of the Epicurean finds itself married to the method of the Stoic. But the Upanishads are never, like Greek epic & Jewish scripture, simply ethical in their intention. Their transcendence of the ethical plane is part of their profounder observation of life & soul ...
... awakening after the initial "trance of the Eternal". Coiled and hid within ourselves is the Spirit, and to awaken it wholly should be the aim of our endeavour. Although the pessimist, the sceptic and the stoic reject the vision of a divine future possibility, and are content to forge a limited destiny for themselves, the dreamers have continued to dream and have pinned their faith in man's evolutionary... entire winding course of human history and compressed into the mould of an apparently formal invocation the trials, struggles, self-exultations and self-lacerations of humanity, the defeatist moans, the stoic endurances, the heart's surge of hope and the brain's soulless speculations, the contradictory negations and the great affirmations, the loss of old Eden and the promise of a new Brindavan. Ahana listens ...
... parted company almost at the outset; Philosophy took from the first a turn towards a purely intellectual and ratiocinative explanation of things, even though there were systems like the Pythagorean, Stoic and Epicurean, which were dynamic not only for thought but for conduct of life and developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of being. A little later, this reached a higher spiritual plane ...
... the evil done to Sita. There are times that ask for cool orderly courage, as when a ship is about to sink, but at other times what is needed may very well be intrepid or reckless courage, or even a stoic courage expressed in tuneful numbers like the ailing Abu Sayed's noble exhortation: Despair not in your grief, for a joyous hour will come and take it all away;... Therefore be patient when ...
... figure of pain personified. He is the guardian of the unreconciled bottomless deeps. The universe has a long history of agony and the God of Pain is the inheritor of this agony. He is stone-like, stoic, calmly and loftily bearing the pain. He stares into space, looking at nothing in particular with a fixed gaze which sees the eternal depths of grief, but is unable to see the goal of life. ...
... puts its strengh at 30,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry3 and the highest ____________ 1 Diogenes of Synope was a Greek philosopher. He belonged to the Cynic philosophical school that stressed stoic self-sufficiency and the rejection of luxury. It was by personal example rather than any coherent system of thought that Diogenes demonstrated the Cynic philosophy. 2 Condescension: the act or an ...
... parted company almost at the outset; philosophy took from the first a turn towards a purely intellectual and ratiocinative explanation of things. Nevertheless, there were systems like the Pythagorean, Stoic and Epicurean, which were dynamic not only for thought but for conduct of life and developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection of the being; this reached a higher spiritual plane of knowledge ...
... egoistic in their nature. Inevitably they come in the course of the sadhana, but they must be rejected or transformed into the true qui-etude. There is too, on a higher level, the equality of the stoic, the equality of a devout resignation or a sage detachment, the equality of a soul aloof from the world and indifferent to its doings. These too are insufficient; first approaches they can be, but ...
... atmosphere of the original would tolerate. That atmosphere is one of abandonment, darkness, where all the circumstances justify despair—with it resignation, faith in the eventual utility of it all, a stoic-spiritual courage to go through, but all these like a flame burning under the weight of the thick darknesses—not the sense of an immediate help or even prayer or call for it or of any unsparing victory ...
... the terms of the Stoic God-mysticism which is pantheistic and which conceives God literally as the essence of all the forces at work in nature. One may wonder whether he was just being "all things to all men" in order to get his non-pantheistic message across or was actually harmonising with his doctrine of the transcendent God the immanence of divine substance visioned by Stoic pantheism - an... we live, and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). Teilhard wants us to take this statement "quite literally". 21 A literal interpretation conjures up at once the historical background of Stoic thought to Paul's pronouncements in the midst of Mars' Hill. As everybody knows, Paul himself refers to it when immediately after that great formula he declares: "As certain of your own poets have ...
... case you must hurry, because the flies are faster than you are: it is a fight to know who is going to eat. And Sujata through all that, stoic, somewhat pale, fanning the flies away and trying to eat a bit of cooked banana. I must say that she has been stoic from the beginning to the end, especially when she had to relieve herself publicly on the beach (please excuse these details, but for an ...
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