Friday, December 23, 2011

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Kuan Yin












Digital montage by Graham Brown.
Like the Indian goddess Shri Jagadamba, Kuan Yin was said to have ridden a tiger.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Shri Nimbarka

Shri Nimbarka is a philosopher saint from the 13th or 14th century AD, who is believed to be an incarnation of the Sudarshana Chakra (discus) of Lord Vishnu. He was born in the region of India now known as Andhra Pradesh, and taught the philosophy of Dvaitadvaita - duality and non-duality at the same time.
To illustrate this principle he used the analogy of a snake in a coiled state. The coil is different to the snake yet it consists of the snake. The myriad forms that we see in the world are different to the Self/Brahman and yet they consist of the Self. So in one sense, world and Self are different, but in another sense they are one and the same.

The god Brahma, disguised as a renunciant, once visited Shri Nimbarka. When they had finished discussing philosophy, the renunciant got up to take leave but Nimbarka told him that he should stay and accept a meal. Lord Brahma replied that the sun had already set, and it was against the rules of ascetics for a renunciant to eat after sunset. Nimbarka did not want to break the rules of hospitality, neither did he want his guest to break the rules of asceticism, so he placed some of his radiance in a neem tree where it shone as brightly as the sun, making a day of night. Lord Brahma was pleased with the saint, and gave him the name Nimbarka, meaning sun in the neem tree.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.”
 

“I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.” 


“I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.”

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.”

“But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.”

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

“He who must travel happily must travel light.”

“The important thing is to strive toward a goal which is not immediately visible. That goal is not the concern of the mind, but of the spirit.” 




“We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.”

“Fais de ta vie un rêve, et d'un rêve, une réalité.” 
(make of your life a dream, and of a dream, a reality)


“The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.”

“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than itself.”

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...”

“Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.”

“For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have; and if you go to draw at the fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.”

“Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.”

“if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to collect wood and dont assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

“In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.”

“Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself”