Yoga Sutras 1.2

Yoga is the restraint of the chaotic fluctuations of the mind which obscure one's innate Adeptship from oneself.

-- Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, 1.2

Petros will be giving a one-hour class introducing Raja Yoga (a.k.a. the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali) on Friday, 7 January 2011 at Alpha Books (4532 N. 7th St. Phoenix).

The Yoga Sutras may be read at: http://home.earthlink.net/~xristos/patanjali.htm.

Petros is now on Squidoo

Various eWakening and Petros websites have now been conveniently assembled on an easy-to-access Squidoo ™ page! Check it out! http://www.squidoo.com/ewakening

Squidoo is a popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for people to create “lenses” online. Lenses are pages, like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything a user knows about a topic of interest — and snap it all into focus.

eWakenShare (Beta) is now online!

eWakenShare is now up and running. Petros' latest innovation combines spirituality with prosperity. Copy and share the eWakenShare meme and watch your prosperity become magnified.

Our Mysterious Universe, Part II

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled persons make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

-- Wikipedia

Creative Basis of Magick (Bertiaux)

The magician will always be looking for opportunities to create his own magickal system of the world. He will be looking always for ideas and the simplest of elements, to be found anywhere, from which there will emerge a picture of reality, his reality. The creative energies of true practitioners of this art of cosmic creation are collected from here and there and fused together into a very wonderful picture of being. This is the basis of magick -- your imagination is making the world to be as it is in itself.

-- Michael Bertiaux

Religion vs. Magic (AC)

The only real strength of any religion is derived from its pilfering of Magical doctrine; and, religious persons being by definition entirely unscrupulous, it follows that any given religion is likely to contain scraps of Magical doctrine, filched more or less haphazard from one school or the other as occasion serves.

-- Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

Abyss in Between (K. Grant)

The gulf of the Abyss is the cosmic analogy, in terms of infinity, endurance, and remoteness, of the infinitesimally near and the infinitely fleeting; the finest, and normally imperceptible gap between thoughts that yields to hypersensitive awareness, a sudden insight into the real substratum of Being. This only is Reality, the sole Reality, and it is Non-Being -- the noumenal source from which arises the world of appearances.

-- Kenneth Grant, from Cults of the Shadow

Beginning Middle End (Mel Lyman)

In the beginning, there was God.
In the middle, there was Man.
In the ending, there was more God.

-- Mel Lyman (1938-1978?)

Our Mysterious Universe, Part I

The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set theoretic geometry which states that a solid ball in 3-dimensional space can be split into a finite number of non-overlapping pieces, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. The reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them, without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are complicated: they are not usual solids but infinite scatterings of points. A stronger form of the theorem implies that given any two "reasonable" objects (such as a small ball and a huge ball), either one can be reassembled into the other. This is often stated colloquially as "a pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the Sun."

The reason the Banach–Tarski theorem is called a paradox is because it contradicts basic geometric intuition. "Doubling the ball" by dividing it into parts and moving them around by rotations and translations, without any stretching, bending, or adding new points, seems to be impossible, since all these operations preserve the volume, but the volume is doubled in the end.

-- Wikipedia, "Banach-Tarski paradox"

Universal Form of Krishna

The vast manifestation of the phenomenal material world as a whole is the mask-body (persona) of the formless Pure Energy, Transcendent Reality of Spirit, wherein the universal resultant past, present and future of material time is experienced.

Persons who have realized it have studied that the planets known as Pātāla constitute the bottoms of the feet of the universal Lord, and the heels and the toes are the Rasātala planets. The ankles are the Mahātala planets, and His shanks constitute the Talātala planets.

The knees of the universal form are the planetary system of the name Sutala, and the two thighs are the Vitala and Atala planetary systems. The hips are Mahītala, and outer space is the depression of His navel.

The chest of the Original Personality of the gigantic form is the luminary planetary system, His neck is the Mahar planets, His mouth is the Janas planets, and His forehead is the Tapas planetary system. The topmost planetary system, known as Satyaloka, is the head of He who has one thousand heads.

His arms are the demigods headed by Indra, the ten directional sides are His ears, and physical sound is His sense of hearing. His nostrils are the two Aśvinī-kumāras, and material fragrance is His sense of smell. His mouth is the blazing fire.

The sphere of outer space constitutes His eyepits, and the eyeball is the sun as the power of seeing. His eyelids are both the day and night, and in the movements of His eyebrows, the Brahmā and similar supreme personalities reside. His palate is the director of water, Varuṇa, and the essence of taste of everything is His tongue.

The Vedic hymns are the cerebral passage of the Lord, and His jaws of teeth are Yama, god of death, who punishes the sinners. The art of affection is His set of teeth, and the most alluring illusory material energy is His smile. This great ocean of material creation is but the casting of His glance over us.

Modesty is the upper portion of His lips, hankering is His chin, religion is the breast of the Lord, and irreligion is His back. Brahmājī and the Mitra-varunas, who generate all living beings in the material world, are His genitals. The ocean is His waist, and the hills and mountains are the stacks of His bones.

The rivers are the veins of the gigantic body, the trees are the hairs of His body, and the omnipotent air is His breath. The passing ages are His movements, and His activities are the reactions of the three modes of material nature.

The clouds which carry water are the hairs on His head, the terminations of days or nights are His dress, and the supreme cause of material creation is His intelligence. His mind is the moon, the reservoir of all changes. The principle of matter is the consciousness of the omnipresent Lord, and Rudradeva is His ego.

Varieties of birds are indications of His masterful artistic sense. Manu, the father of mankind, is the emblem of His standard intelligence, and humanity is His residence. The celestial species of human beings, like the Gandharvas, Vidyādharas, Cāraṇas and angels, all represent His musical rhythm, and the demoniac soldiers are representations of His wonderful prowess.

I have thus explained to you the gross material gigantic conception of the Personality of Godhead. One who seriously desires liberation concentrates his mind on this form of the Lord, because there is nothing more than this in the material world.

One should concentrate his mind upon the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who alone distributes Himself in so many manifestations just as ordinary persons create thousands of manifestations in dreams. One must concentrate the mind on Him, the only all-blissful Absolute Truth.

-- Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 2 Chapter 1, "First Steps in God Realization"

(Un)Conscious Projection (Grossinger)

Most people, trapped as they are in symbol clusters and instincts, do not even know that they exist. Even the smartest of us are enacting bare protocols of subsistence, food acquisition, self-projection, and object possession. We are set on the implacable tracks of a machinery of eternal return. .... What are we unknowingly projecting now, that in twenty thousand years will become the Earth? Will our civilization of machines survive long enough to launch a civilization of light?

-- Richard Grossinger, from 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (p. 58)

The Edge (Hunter Thompson)

The Edge ... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In.

-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Midnight on the Coast Highway" (reprinted in Songs of the Doomed)

Creativity and youth (Hoffer)

The tendency to carry youthful characteristics into adult life, which renders man perpetually immature and unfinished, is at the root of his uniqueness in the Universe, and is particularly pronounced in the creative individual. . . . The creative individual is an imperishable juvenile.

– Eric Hoffer

Awakened in context

To know yourself as an awakened individual is also to know yourself as the being of the surrounding context.

-- Starseed: The Third Millennium

Open to enlightenment

Change people by opening them up to a new dimension of reality. Everyone has the potential for enlightenment if you are open to them. Accept the other person's reality if you are going to communicate with them; otherwise, you are just playing a word game.

-- Gridley Wright (1934-1979)

Paths and paths (Castaneda)

All paths are the same. They lead nowhere. They are paths going into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does your path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere, but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong, the other weakens you.

-- Carlos Castaneda

The one certain truth (Wm. James)

There is but one indisputably certain truth, and that is the truth that skepticism itself leaves standing: The truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge -- the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is.

-- William James (1842-1910), from "The Will to Believe"

Testing tradition (Clifford)

In regard to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted on the authority of tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power.

-- William K. Clifford (1845-1879), British philosopher

Mind and God (Dyson)

I do not make any distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. Atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus.

-- Freeman Dyson

Intelligence of the Abstract (Hertz)

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own; that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers; that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.

-- Heinrich Hertz

The Lighted Way (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)

There is a phrase: "Man is the master of his own destiny." So the destiny of every man doesn’t depend on the existence of a Maharishi or his absence. Man is the master of his own destiny. A Maharishi is showing a way. Who comes on the lighted way will get to the target, will get to the goal of the way; those who don’t, they won’t, that’s all. Man has a choice. Education is so very limited today, but a Maharishi’s message does not remain limited to his physical body. This is the message that was there before the body of a Maharishi, and it will remain there when the body of a Maharishi will not come up.

-- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Diary

"Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary."

-- Chuck Palahniuk, from Diary: A Novel

Art (Chabon)

Every great work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city – in every cranium – in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

– Michael Chabon, from Manhood for Amateurs

Goal of philosophy (Wittgenstein)

The goal of philosophy is to build a wall where language comes to an end.

-- Wittgenstein

On Limits (Wittgenstein)

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.61 Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits …. What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it happens. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happenings and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

– Wittgenstein, from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophus

Self-sustenance of nature (Aurelius)

Nature has no door to sweep things out of. But the wonderful thing about its workmanship is how, faced with that limitation, it takes everything within it that seems broken, old and useless, transforms it into itself, and makes new things from it, so that it doesn't need material from any outside source, or anywhere to dispose of what's left over. It relies on itself for all it needs: space, material, and labor.

-- Marcus Aurelius, from the Meditations, sect. 8.50

Resolved

Resolve in this new decade to pull harder on the energies from above, to open up to more and more light & wisdom, to dig deeper and uplevel your own energies within and around you.