Alchemy Book Quotes

…a man should say to his soul every morning, "God has given thee twenty-four treasures; take heed lest thou lose anyone of them, for thou wilt not be able to endure the regret that will follow such loss.

It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world.

We have the truth still with us. But it is not found in books, to any given extent. It has been passed along......from lip to ear. When it was written down at all, its meaning was veiled in terms of alchemy and astrology, so that only those possessing the key could read it aright.

Fear and sorrow inhibit action; anger generates it. When you learn to make proper use of your anger, you can change fear and sorrow to anger, then turn anger to action. That’s the body’s secret of internal alchemy.

Her books on alchemy were marvellous objects, every page a work of the engraver's art, but they nowhere contained instructions like "Be sure to open a window". They did have instructions like "Adde Aqua Quirmis to the Zinc untile Rising Gas Yse Vigorousky Evolved", but never added "Don't Doe Thys Atte Home" or even "And Say Fare-Thee-Welle to Thy Eyebrows.

It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world

There is something irrational about reading. Before you read a book, you can know immediately whether or not you are going to like it, just as with people, you can tell just from looking at them whether or not you’ll be their friend. You smell it, you sniff it, you wonder whether it’s worth spending time in its company. The pages of a book have an invisible alchemy that imprints itself on our brain. A book is a living creature.

As above in consciousness, so below in matter

I know the difference between reality and fantasy. Those with sick fantasies who know and respect this difference are much less dangerous than those with no fantasies at all, but who can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present. The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction. It is much greater. It is a work of art. It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. Not animals, not gods. It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served. It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress. But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing. And doing is life. Doing is karma. Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man. You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known. The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man. Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster. The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro. In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles. It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.

What I write about comes to me - before or after my writing. What is this? Is it some kind of alchemy?

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse. Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Books are not just things, but dynamic artifacts, milestones showing where the road took a sudden turn on our individual journeys -- our very individual journeys, since a book that changed one person's life is another person's dreaded English assignment. There's no rhyme or reason to what impacts whom except the alchemy of timing, temperament, and title.

Vonnegut had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.

Joy, it seemed, was a strange alchemy of mind over matter. The path to joy, like with sadness, did not lead away from suffering and adversity but through it.

I know that I hung on the windy tree Nine full nights, Pierced by a spear offered to Odin Myself to myself of which none knows Upon that tree Where its roots run...

Even the strongest warrior’s heart can break. His soul can still be crushed. Since I won’t be able to comfort you when the challenges before you feel too great, take this book and keep it as a guide. Above all, know this. There will be times when the world seeks to destroy you, Kingfisher. But you are stronger than you can ever know. You will not falter. And you will not face it all alone.

We all shuffle our own deck in life ... The deck is our brain, the cards are our thoughts, the results we get will determine if we are giving ourselves a fair deal. Do you have an authentic dealer?

One makes one's nature by one's likes and dislikes, by what one favors or disfavors. When a person says, 'I don't like this food,' he has built something into his nature. And then that food, when eaten, will often disagree with him. It is not that it was meant to disagree with him, but he made it disagree by disliking it. By

It didn't take inspiration to dredge up a list of plot points, but to find that moment — the perfect moment that defined a book, that made it come alive as something greater then the sum of its words — that required an alchemy you couldn't fake.

one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ile de la Cité, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. The artist says, 'I will make that event happen again, altering its shape, which was disfigured by its contacts with other events, so that its true significance is revealed'; and his audience says, 'We will let that event happen again by looking at this man's picture or house, listening to his music or reading his book.' It must not be copied, it must be remembered, it must be lived again, passed through those parts of the mind which are actively engaged in life, which bleed when they are wounded and give forth the bland emulsions of joy, while at the same time it is being examined by those parts of the mind which stand apart from life. At the end of this process the roots of experience are traced; the alchemy by which they make a flower of joy or pain is, so far as is possible to our brutishness, detected. What is understood is mastered. If art could investigate all experiences then man would understand the whole of life, and could control his destiny.

Is attention soul? If I pay attention to my mother’s sorrow, does that give it soul? If I pay attention to her unhappiness—if I put it into words, transform it, and make it into something new—can I be like the alchemists, turning lead into gold? If I sell this book, I will get back gold in return. That’s a kind of alchemy. The philosophers wanted to turn dark matter into gold, and I want to turn my mother’s sadness into gold. When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep, and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold.

Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.

Our Master, Fulcanelli, has convincingly demonstrated that a significant part of the decoration of churches, from humble parishes to the most ornate cathedrals, cannot satisfactorily be explained from a point of view that is limited to religion or morality. Quite often the hermetic sciences form the pretext of allegorical compositions.

Books turn people into time travelers, shape shifters, body switchers, mind readers, and immortals, and therefore books are the last great alchemy of our age.

In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want.

The green language is the initiate’s language of words and images that was applied to reveal meaningful associations among ideas and to allow for multiple layers of interpretation.

Pray, read, read, read, reread, work and you will discover.

Symbolism does not let itself be restricted. It is universal or does not exist.

I've just always loved books. There's something magical about them, the ability to create feelings from ink on a page. Really, it's a form of alchemy. [Richelle Bach]

The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.” Alfred Adler

Wine and conversation were all very well, but books were books were books.

It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

one of the arguments of this book is that economics has encouraged ways of thinking that made crises more probable. Economists have brought the problem upon themselves by pretending that they can forecast. No

Nature maintains the same rhythm of birth and death in metals as in vegetables and animals. For, as Bernard Palissy writes in....(long french title of a book I don't feel like repeating here) 'God did not create all these things in order to leave them idle. The stars and the planets are not idle...the sea is in constant motion...the earth likewise is not idle...what is naturally consumed within her, she renews and refashions forthwith, if not in one way then in another. Everything, including the exterior of the Earth, exerts itself to bring something forth; likewise, the interior and matrix strains itself in order to reproduce.

After his break with Freud, Jung pursued the connection between the unconscious and the occult and found example after example of ancient mystical and occult symbols in the dreams of people who had never encountered those symbols in waking life. He came to believe that below the repressed memories of individual life, there exists a collective unconscious full of archaic images that appear in myths, legends, and the traditions of occultism. By bringing those images into consciousness, it is possible to achieve individuation: a state of psychological balance and wholeness as far above ordinary sanity as neurotic conditions are below it.

Alchemy was (and is) considerably more than the attempt to turn base metals into gold. To an alchemist, all material things ripen toward perfection unless something gets in the way. The alchemist's mission is to remove the obstacles that keep material things from attaining their perfection. For metals, that perfection is gold; for the human body, health; for the human spirit, union with the divine-and all these and many more are appropriate goals for alchemical work.

— Porque ella es la luz de la luna. La niebla que envuelve las montañas. La picadura de electricidad en el aire antes de una tormenta. El humo que recorre un campo de batalla antes de que comience la matanza. No tienes ni idea de lo que es. De lo que podría ser. Deberías llamarla Majestad.

A knowledge of the human physique is considered essential in designing a chair, but a knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.

This book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above. It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America.

The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences- let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth." -H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891)

Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire, therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. When I was thirteen years of age, we all went on a party of pleasure to the baths near Thonon: the inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked carelessly at the title page of my book, and said, "Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash." If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.

An Alchemist’s journey is really a struggle to continue individual existence long after physical death, long after the bubble has burst. Another way to say this would be to say that an Alchemist’s journey is about changing the nature of the bubble that is his individuality, so that it becomes superfluid, unbound, unbreakable by the tides of the Dark Sea.

I never understood my first cooking lesson. I was six and had chicken pox, and my mother, having exhausted all other entertainments, began to explain how to boil an egg. The water must be salted. "It's to keep them from cracking." She regarded the egg. "But they still crack." We pondered this for a moment, then I nodded. Whether it cracked or not, obviously an egg had to be pacified with an offering of salt.

God save me from the yearners. The insatiable, the inconsolable, the ones who chafe and claw against the edges of the world. No book can save them. (That’s a lie. There are Books potent enough to save any mortal soul: books of witchery, augury, alchemy; books with wand-wood in their spines and moon-dust on their pages; books older than stones and wily as dragons. We give people the books they need most, except when we don’t.)

The life of the dreamer, that is a projectionist, is a life of duality. A projectionist is a being that exists in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand they participate in what at first seems to be a rather static existence, surrounded by human beings that oftentimes don’t have an inkling of the marvels possible to them. And on the other they explore and take part in fantastic adventures in worlds beyond rational description.

To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.

mentioned earlier in this book that there are five main reasons why human behaviour often departs from what we think of as conventional rationality. The first of these is signalling, the need to send reliable indications of commitment and intent, which can inspire confidence and trust. Cooperation is impossible unless a mechanism is in place to prevent deception and cheating; some degree of efficiency often needs to be sacrificed in order to convey trustworthiness or to build a reputation.

Ironically, once he was safely dead, Bruno was redefined as a martyr for science. For centuries, historians quietly ignored the vast amount of occultism in his writing and insisted that he had been burned at the stake for his belief that the earth circled the sun and there were an infinite number of habitable worlds in space. Only in the middle years of the twentieth century, when scholarly prejudices against occultism had begun to fade, did the scope and depth of his occult involvements become clear.

For Ibn ’Arabi, whose most beloved teacher Abu Madyan was identified as being the stone, the continual revelation of God’s word is a living, breathing creation. Those highest saints, who are known as the malamatiyya, the blameworthy of this world, the ‘hidden’ or kafirun of God are the embodiment of all the systems of concealment and disclosure, jafr, ta’wil, taqqiyah, et al. The Qur’an is not just a book, it is a person. The texts of al-Kimia are not simple words which when put together produce magical formulas, they are alive.

knowledge of human psychology is rarely considered useful, never mind a requirement, when someone is asked to design a pension scheme, a portable music player or a railway. Who is the Herman Miller of pensions, or the Steve Jobs of tax-return design? These people are starting to emerge – but it has been a painfully long wait. If there is a mystery at the heart of this book, it is why psychology has been so peculiarly uninfluential in business and in policy-making when, whether done well or badly, it makes a spectacular difference.

The second, and related, question was why would an increase in money supply not stimulate spending, returning the economy to full employment? Keynes’s reply was that in a slump the demand for liquidity – emergency money – was so high that further injections of money would simply be absorbed in idle cash balances as a claim on generalised future purchasing power without any impact on current spending. The economy would be stuck in a ‘liquidity trap’. The argument was set out in Chapters 13 and 14 of The General Theory. They are among the more difficult and obscure parts of the book. It

Juliet and Romeo Awake the scene, a twilight chamber’d dream, Two angels both alike in dignity: One imaged misadventure on the screen; The second struck by moonlight’s alchemy. A pair of star-crossed lovers spends their night; He in deed dreams such a sight as she, Swing crystal scales to crispest fair delight. In his eyes her merry fragrant dance: she Civil thoughts and civil music meet; on Fair Lansdowne Street where love lays its scene, Romeo and Juliet did greet; within Their airy eyes on hopes and thoughts unseen. The curtain lifts on this sweet poem with woe, For love to find Juliet and her Romeo.

we have but an infantile perception of morals. There is more in the subject than mere conformity to a law of evolution. It is yet deeper than conformity to things of earth alone. It is more involved than we, as yet, perceive. Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose’s subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie the first principles of morals. “Oh,” thought Drouet, “how delicious is my conquest.” “Ah,” thought Carrie, with mournful misgivings, “what is it I have lost?

A VALEDICTION: OF THE BOOK I'll tell thee now (dear love) what thou shalt do To anger destiny, as she doth us; How I shall stay, though she eloign me thus, And how posterity shall know it too; How thine may out-endure Sibyl's glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name. Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me; Thence write our annals, and in them will be To all whom love's subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; There the faith of any ground No schismatic will dare to wound, That sees, how Love this grace to us affords, To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records. This book, as long-lived as the elements, Or as the world's form, this all-graved tome In cypher writ, or new made idiom; We for Love's clergy only are instruments; When this book is made thus, Should again the ravenous Vandals and Goths invade us, Learning were safe; in this our universe, Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse. Here Love's divines—since all divinity Is love or wonder—may find all they seek, Whether abstract spiritual love they like, Their souls exhaled with what they do not see; Or, loth so to amuse Faith's infirmity, they choose Something which they may see and use; For, though mind be the heaven, where love doth sit, Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it. Here more than in their books may lawyers find, Both by what titles mistresses are ours, And how prerogative these states devours, Transferred from Love himself, to womankind; Who, though from heart and eyes, They exact great subsidies, Forsake him who on them relies; And for the cause, honour, or conscience give; Chimeras vain as they or their prerogative. Here statesmen, (or of them, they which can read) May of their occupation find the grounds; Love, and their art, alike it deadly wounds, If to consider what 'tis, one proceed. In both they do excel Who the present govern well, Whose weakness none doth, or dares tell; In this thy book, such will there something see, As in the Bible some can find out alchemy. Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I'll study thee, As he removes far off, that great heights takes; How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be; To take a latitude Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed At their brightest, but to conclude Of longitudes, what other way have we, But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?

A new global religious narrative should be constructed centred on the principle that every human has the potential to become God, not in the far distant future but within just one or two lifetimes. The idea of humanity as inherently sinful should be replaced with the psychologically much healthier concept of humanity as inherently divine (hence not sinful). There should be no more humans on their knees, abjectly bowing to a God who threatens everyone with eternal punishment. Instead, the whole of humanity should be engaged in Global Alchemy – transforming the raw material of themselves into the most shining and precious gold of divinity.

The projectionist’s intent, if focused on long enough, becomes a command (an energetic truth), which allows a person to move conscious awareness beyond the confines of the physical body. Not by waking up in a dream state or by having someone else manipulate your awareness, but by consciously and deliberately expanding the conscious range available to the awake individual in a methodical manner. In this way, the power and flexibility of this ghost-like self are slowly amplified, until a new type of self is birthed (a Unitary Entity that is usually seen in certain Alchemical symbolism as a Phoenix that never needs to touch the ground again).

She pushed the book toward them, and Harry and Ron read: The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making the Sorcerer’s Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal. There have been many reports of the Sorcerer’s Stone over the centuries, but the only Stone currently in existence belongs to Mr. Nicolas Flamel, the noted alchemist and opera lover. Mr. Flamel, who celebrated his six hundred and sixty-fifth birthday last year, enjoys a quiet life in Devon with his wife, Perenelle (six hundred and fifty-eight).

In true, Taoist parlance, 'immortality' refers to a spiritual state, not a condition of physical permanence. In his books on the teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Casteneda refers to the primordial source of creation as the nagual, the vast ocean of emptiness in which material worlds take form and dissolve like drops of dew. Nagual refers to everything that cannot be expressed in words, which brings to mind the second line of the Tao Teh Ching: 'The name which can be named is not the real Name.' Don Juan's teachings are remarkably similar to Taoist alchemy, and they both cite our innate awareness as the only bridge between the awesome emptiness and power of the nagual and its material manifestation in the temporal world.

The magics that were born here may have originated in the English landscape but they were informed from the very beginning by different cultures. The Druids were influenced by the Classical world, as was that world by India. Alchemy was influenced by Arabia, Medieval magic by Jewish cabbalism. The Golden Dawn was inspired by German Rosicrucianism, the French Occult Revival, and the religion of Ancient Egypt. Thelema was a result of Crowley’s explorations in Far and Near Eastern religion and magic, which informed Gardner’s Wicca too. For Dion Fortune, Christ, the Egyptian gods and the gods of the British Isles were equally inspiring, and as for Chaos magicians: they would claim the Universe and the world of physics as their inspiration.

The book you have in your hands is not, therefore, a respectable work of scholarship. It has not benefited from editorial oversight and contains little verifiable fact. It is just a story. I have written it anyway, for two reasons: First, because what is written is what is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. Even my own writings--so damnably powerless--may have just enough power to reach the right person and tell the right truth, and change the nature of things. Second, my long years of research have taught me that all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. They are artifacts and palimpsests, riddles and histories. They are the red threads that we may follow out of the labyrinth. It is my hope that this story is your thread, and at the end of it you find a door.

In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want. I’m not talking about stuff like The Secret self-help book, which basically tells you to tape a picture of a car to the wall and then sit on the couch and wait for someone to drop it off in your driveway. I am talking about visualization that works when we actually get off our asses and do stuff. How totally crazy is that? Each time you make a good decision or do something nice or take care of yourself; each time you show up to work and work hard and do your best at everything you can do, you’re planting seeds for a life that you can only hope will grow beyond your wildest dreams. Take care of the little things—even the little things that you hate—and treat them as promises to your own future. Soon you’ll see that fortune favors the bold who get shit done.

In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want. I’m not talking about stuff like ”the secret self-help book, which basically tells you to tape a picture of a car to the wall and then sit on the couch and wait for someone to drop it off in your driveway. I am talking about visulatization that works when we actually get off our asses and do stuff. How totally crazy it that? Each time you make a good decision or do something nice or take care of yourself; each time you show up to work and work hard and do your best at everything you can do, you’re planting seeds for a life that you can onlye hope will grow beyond your wildest dreams. Take care of the little things – even the little things you hate- and treat them as promises to your own future. Soon you’ll see that fortune favors thhe bold who get shit done.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

Our neighborhood ramen place was called Aoba. That's a joke. There were actually more than fifty ramen places with in walking distance of our apartment. But this one was our favorite. Aoba makes a wonderful and unusual ramen with a mixture of pork and fish broth. The noodles are firm and chewy, and the pork tender and almost smoky, like ham. I also liked how they gave us a small bowl for sharing with Iris without our even asking. What I really appreciated about this place, however, were two aspects of ramen that I haven't mentioned yet: the eggs and the dipping noodles. After these two, I will stop, but there's so much more to ramen. Would someone please write an English-language book about ramen? Real ramen, not how to cook with Top Ramen noodles? Thanks. (I did find a Japanese-language book called State-of-the-Art Technology of Pork Bone Ramen on Amazon. Wish-listed!) One of the most popular ramen toppings is a soft-boiled egg. Long before sous vide cookery, ramen cooks were slow-cooking eggs to a precise doneness. Eggs for ramen (ajitsuke tamago) are generally marinated in a soy sauce mixture after cooking so the whites turn a little brown and the eggs turn a little sweet and salty. I like it best when an egg is plunked whole into the broth so I can bisect it with my chopsticks and reveal the intensely orange, barely runny yolk. A cool egg moistened with rich broth is alchemy. Forget the noodles; I want a ramen egg with a little broth for breakfast. Finding hot and cold in the same mouthful is another hallmark of Japanese summer food, and many ramen restaurants, including Aoba, feature it in the form of tsukemen, dipping noodles. Tsukemen is deconstructed ramen, a bowl of cold cooked noodles and a smaller bowl of hot, ultra-rich broth and toppings. The goal is to lift a tangle of noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the bowl of broth on the way to your mouth. This is a crazy way to eat noodles and, unless you've been inculcated with the principles of noodle-slurping physics from birth, a great way to ruin your clothes.

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society] The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it. p171-172 The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims. Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade. He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood. In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky. p172-173

It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it. In consequence, I’d started going through the store, removing some tags (so the customer would have to come to me for the price) and changing others—not all, but some. The trick, as I discovered through trial and error, was to keep at least a quarter of the prices low and jack up the rest, sometimes by as much as four and five hundred percent. Years of abnormally low prices had built up a base of devoted customers; leaving a quarter of the prices low kept them devoted, and ensured that people hunting for a bargain could still find one, if they looked. Leaving a quarter of the prices low also meant that, by some perverse alchemy, the marked-up prices seemed legitimate in comparison: for whatever reason, some people were more apt to put out fifteen hundred bucks for a Meissen teapot if it was placed next to a plainer but comparable piece selling (correctly, but cheaply) for a few hundred.

Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.

If that focus is off and you are easily distracted, then there is no redoubling of hard effort and extra pain. Instead there is a waking up to the fact that your mind has become distracted, a ‘remembering’ of who you are and what you consciously want, and a gentle re-direction of that distracted attention back to focusing on that original conscious desire. You then repeat this process over and over again, until a change is made which happens slowly sometimes, faster at other times, but whatever the case, it is not painful and it’s not hard, it just requires time and attention.

Islam provides the method by which our hearts can become sound and safe again. This method has been the subject of brilliant and insightful scholarship for centuries in the Islamic tradition. One can say that Islam in essence is a program to restore purity and calm to the heart through the remembrance of God. This present text is based on the poem known as Maṭharat al-Qulūb (literally, Purification of the Hearts), which offers the means by which purification can be achieved. It is a treatise on the “alchemy of the hearts,” namely, a manual on how to transform the heart. It was written by a great scholar and saint, Shaykh Muhammad Mawlud al Ya’qubi al-Musawi al-Muratani, As his name indicates, he was from Mauritania in West Africa. He was a master of all the Islamic sciences, including the inward sciences of the heart. He stated that he wrote this poem because he observed the prevalence of diseased hearts. He saw students of religion spending their time learning abstract sciences that people were not really in need of, to the neglect of those sciences that pertain to what people are accountable for in the next life, namely, the spiritual condition of the heart, In one of his most cited statements, the Prophet said, “Actions are based upon intentions.” All deeds are thus valued according to the intentions behind them, and intentions emanate from the heart. So every action a person intends or performs is rooted in the heart. Imam Mawlud realized that the weakness of society was a matter of weakness of character in the heart, Imam Mawlud based his text on many previous illustrious works, especially Imam al-Ghazali’s great Ihya’ Ulum alDin (The Revivification of the Sciences of the Religion). Each of the 40 books of Ihya‘ Ulum al-Din is basically about rectifying the human heart. If we examine the trials and tribulations, wars and other conflicts, every act of injustice all over earth, we’ll find they are rooted in human hearts.

The universe is a self-playing game. We are the players. The universe is a self-solving equation. We are the active nodes of that equation. We breathe fire into the equations and animate and propel them. The universe is a self-optimising mathematical system. It’s the ultimate alchemical experiment. It turns bare, unclear monads (base metal; potential) into full, clear monads (gold; actuality). The universe exists to transform souls into Gods. The universe is an evolving divinity – a God factory – a dialectical system for producing mathematical perfection.

His private manuscripts show that, in the year he became a professor at Cambridge, Newton also bought two furnaces, a hotchpotch of chemicals, and a curious collection of books. Newton had found alchemy. Alchemy at the time had been outlawed. In these desperate days of confusion and crisis, the government feared that frauds would corrupt the economy with bogus gold. And, if you got caught practicing alchemy, the punishment was swift and severe. Defrocked alchemists were habitually hanged on a gilded scaffold. And sometimes they were made to wear suits of tinsel as they were hanged, to make it even more of a public spectacle.

If people ever look down upon you for crying for frictional characters, you should give them a gentle pitying look and feel bad for them. If they've never cried for a fictional character, then they have never loved one (and what a joy that is!). If they've never cried at a book, a movie, a piece of music, then they have missed one of the greatest pleasures of life has to offer. Just because friction does not contain things that are real, doesn't mean it doesn't contain truth, and we find it through the alchemy of our tears.

Newton, a devout Puritan believer, has anecdote that when he claimed that no disciple had God, he refused to claim atheism, saying, "Do not speak disrespectfully about God, I am studying God." He paid much attention to the Bible and had an eschatological belief that the Saints would resurrect and live in heaven and reign with Christ invisibly. And even after the day of judgment, people would continue to live on the ground, thinking that it would be forever, not only for a thousand years. According to historian Steven Snowovell, he thought that the presence of Christ would be in the distant future centuries after, because he was very pessimistic about the deeply rooted ideas that denied the Trinity around him. He thought that before the great tribulation came, the gospel activity had to be on a global scale. 카톡pak6 텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다 믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다. 원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다 ☆100%정품보장 ☆총알배송 ☆투명한 가격 ☆편한 상담 ☆끝내주는 서비스 ☆고객님 정보 보호 ☆깔끔한 거래 포폴,에토미,알약수면제 판매하고있습니다 Newton studied alchemy as a hobby, and his research notes were about three books. Newton served as a member of parliament on the recommendation of the University of Cambridge, but his character was silent and unable to adapt to the life of a parliamentarian. When he lived in the National Assembly for a year, the only thing he said was "Shut the door!" In Newton's "Optics" Volume 4, he tried to introduce the theory of unification that covered all of physics and solved his chosen tasks, but he went out with a candle on his desk, and his private diamond threw a candle There is a story that all of his research, which has not been published yet, has turned to ashes. Newton was also appointed to the president of the Minting Service, who said he enjoyed grabbing and executing the counterfeiters. Newton was a woman who was engaged to be a young man, but because he was so engaged in research and work he could not go on to marriage, and he lived alone for the rest of his life. He regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." [6] Newton was talented in crafting inventions by hand (for reference, Newton's craftsmanship was so good at his childhood that when he was a primary school student he was running his own spinning wheel after school, A child who throws a stone and breaks down a spinning wheel, so there is an anecdote that an angry Newton scatters the child.) He said he created a lantern fountain that could be carried around as a student at Cambridge University. Thanks to this, it was said that students who were going to attend the Thanksgiving ceremony (Episcopal Mass) were able to go to the Anglican Church in the university easily. Newton lost 20,000 pounds due to a South Sea company stock discovery, when "I can calculate the movement of the celestial body, but I can not measure the insanity of a human being" ("I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men ").

Here in the sixteenth century one of the most unusual and talented women in England’s history – Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke – maintained an alchemical laboratory, assisted by Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother Adrian Gilbert, who also created an elaborate magical garden in the grounds, based on sacred geometry. And although the garden and house have undergone many changes since their time, through fire and restoration, it still seems as if its former inhabitants were here only yesterday. Mary Sidney is remarkable for being one of the few women whose names appear in the history of alchemy in England and, indeed, the world. She was also the first English woman to achieve a significant literary reputation. Some even believe that it was her genius that lay behind the plays of William Shakespeare, which they claim she either wrote herself or collaborated upon with the group of literary luminaries that she patronised.

The rational world view that is maintained by the waking conscious self is a perfect cage; it limits our potential so much that even the contemplation of the possibility of another greater reality is interpreted as insanity, guaranteeing that few will ever even suspect the marvels hidden in the depths of the Second World. But that is the price we all are willing to pay I suppose, to also protect the cozy sensible human world from the titans beyond the gate.

The sweet scent of tobacco followed him and the saltiness of the sea. A dangerous sort of alchemy, mixed especially to snare me.

If we look at the Book of Hebrews (and combine all the words that convey the idea of gratitude to God and even to human beings) we notice that it is used more than a thousand times. This tells us that if we would pray effectively we must cultivate a kind of ontology (nature of being) of gratitude which creates a cosmology of praise. Gratitude is in itself a spiritual practice that can transform our world. It is not a state of mind — but of being. It is intrinsically a grammar of being, and spirituality that communicates authenticity. For the believer, it is the environment within which their spiritual life has its ebb and flow. The way each of us goes about showing gratitude may differ but, for the believer who has an effective prayer life, this mode of being in the world is indispensable. The believer’s relationship with God and the created world, which he/she believes is the gift of a gracious God to humankind, calls forth this flow of gratitude in the believer. The practice of gratitude in prayer can increase our ability to deal with the circumstances that befall us. A prayer of gratitude is a way of looking beyond the causality of life and, instead of adapting a “ho-hum” attitude, returning to joy by being surprised by the wonder in the so-called mundane.

His heat melted into my heat and created an alchemy that metamorphosed the butterflies into a bird of paradise, and I was taking flight with it. This kiss, this this, this us, tasted like indulgence and sustenance. Our tongues moved like we were each other's rice and wine, twirled with the ease of drunken, fed hips. In the kiss, I tasted him and I tasted me and I tasted what we were and what we could be. It tasted like hones and spice, twined.

What alchemy exists, she wondered, to produce such a seductive scent, simply from paper, ink and glue?

To Bruno and the hermeticists, of course, the four X were metaphysical as well as psychological. The cosmology of earth-air-fire-water has such a long history in alchemical-hermetic literature that it hardly needs to be insisted on; Jung has tried to find modern translations for this somewhat archaic system in his Psychology and Alchemy. The traditional system meanwhile lives on and is used by many occult groups still surviving; the reader will find it expounded in most of the works of Aleister Crowley, especially The Book of Thoth.

BOOKS The Alchemist’s Handbook: Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy, Frater Albertus (Red Wheel/Weiser, 1987) Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, Titus Burckhardt (Fons Vitae, 2000) Alchemy: The Secret Art, Stanislas Klossowski De Rola (Thames & Hudson, 1973) Ars Spagyrica – being a rendition of the Alchemical Arte of Spagyrics, G St M Nottingham, (Verdelet Publishing, 2005) Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, Michael White (Fourth Estate, 1998) Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician, Lauren Kassell (Oxford University Press, 2007) On Becoming an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician, Catherine MacCoun (Trumpeter Books, 2009) Path of Alchemy: Energetic Healing and the World of Natural Alchemy, Mark Stavish (Llewellyn Publications, 2006)

In most corporate settings, if you suddenly asked ‘Why do people clean their teeth?’ you would be looked at as a lunatic, and quite possibly unsafe. There is after all an official, approved, logical reason why we clean our teeth: to preserve dental health and reduce cavities or decay. Move on. Nothing to see here. But, as I will explain later in this book, I don’t think that’s the real reason. For instance, if it is, why are 95 per cent of all toothpastes flavoured with mint?

This book is not an attack on the many healthy uses of logic or reason, but it is an attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale before it can even be considered or attempted. If this book provides you with nothing else, I hope it gives you permission to suggest slightly silly things from time to time. To fail a little more often. To think unlike an economist. There are many problems which are logic-proof, and which will never be solved by the kind of people who aspire to go to the

They were the sun and moon, destined to shed light while never sharing the same sky. Elizabeth knew that despite their games and their bond, despite the pull they felt towards one another, they could never truly be joined. Doing so would mean destroying him, destroying everything he had dedicated his life to, destroying the man she had envied for so long, destroying the man she’d fallen for.

In order to prosper then, in whatever way we choose, we need to regain all of the energy that we were born with, and have created throughout the course of our life; energy which we have lost due to energy predation in one form or another. We need to do this in order to first of all escape the mass of the world and all its memetic traps, and in that way find true freedom, and the power needed to accomplish our life purpose.

For me, as an Inner Alchemist, there is no body and soul; the body and the soul are one indivisible thing. The soul then IS the body in a certain vibrational range. As such, there is no Out There or In Here for an Alchemist. Duality and separation are a good way to teach at first, they help to create demarcations that can certainly help to maintain a type of sanity in a young mind, but they are illusions that must be left behind as the intellect grows.

The linear order of time then is only true during wakeful states, only during the OUT cycle of consciousness. But again, wakefulness is not a constant linear thing, it is constantly fluctuating even when most of us think that we are quite awake and alert. The only way for humanity to maintain any linear order within physical time at all, is to use external physical devices (like clocks) or to focus the attention and record changes (like in calendars) in the First World. In this way, we may keep track of the physical cycles like the shift of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the seasons. Indeed, the written word, and the keeping of historical records, are ways for the outer self, the conscious ego, to maintain a semblance of linear and stable order within time.

Everything that I have ever taught in my books is about training and empowering your ghost in the machine!

Please note then that conscious dreaming truly is after death training for the ghost in the machine, because its experiences when the conscious self is turned off every night, are what it will truly experience when physical life ends. Dreams are a real experience of after physical death realities.

Alchemical Logic on the other hand, takes nothing for granted, even its own perceptions. It seeks the attainment of a deeper kind of direct knowledge, that begins by first letting go of all a priori understanding. This forsaking of all a priori knowledge is supplemented with energetic practices, until a certain threshold is reached, where a practitioner becomes a true Alchemist, and is then able to perceive the world in a more direct way that no longer relies on any a priori knowledge. This new way of perceiving is sometimes referred to as the Energetic Way. But calling it the Energetic Way is really an attempt to use words to try and define a new perceptual ability that allows the practitioner to see energy directly. And as a result of this new perceptive possibility, the world completely changes. It goes from being an object-filled place, to a sea of vibrating energy.

Your physical senses, which you may rationally believe pick up energy (electromagnetic energy) from the environment, actually project energy first; they project energy through attention because the physical senses are really attention focusing and modulation organs. And it is this attention that creates your personal world. The energy projected through this attention gives the world substance, thickness, and it is this thickness that you then classify as sight, sound, feeling, etc. Attention then is an actual force in the world, a type of very specific and powerful energy that is used consciously and subconsciously by all human beings.

...all projections of consciousness are indeed movements by the self from one place to another, from one dimension to another, and even though the physical body may not seem to move, it is nevertheless deeply affected by these journeys. Moreover, these journeys are not only powerful inner actions that can allow a person to escape the physical dimension and work through a great deal of repression and personal dis-balance, these real journeys provide access to a pool of knowledge and power that is staggering in its magnitude. Indeed, the most staggering of these possibilities is the energetic fact that we are indeed far more than the physical body, and that thanks to the non-physical aspects of our whole being, we have the possibility of surviving physical death!

One of the best ways to understand just how inadequate words can be when it comes to talking about subjective experience, is to realize that there are often multiple ways to describe inner action, and that even though these definitions can sometimes seem to contradict themselves in some ways, they are nevertheless quite valid.

Give up what you call freedom, your sacrifice could change the world.

Everything looked different now, as if the chest, the alchemy, and her clothes all belonged to someone else: someone younger, someone still possessing a shred of vanity.

In his book Risk Savvy (2014), the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer refers to this mental process as ‘Defensive Decision-Making’ – making a decision which is unconsciously designed not to maximise welfare overall but to minimise the damage to the decision maker in the event of a negative outcome. Much human behaviour that is derided as ‘irrational’ is actually evidence of a clever satisficing instinct – repeating a past behaviour or copying what most other people do may not be optimal, but is unlikely to be disastrous. We are all descended from people who managed to reproduce before making a fatal mistake, so it is hardly surprising that our brains are wired this way.

You are almost at the end of your journey,” said the alchemist. “I congratulate you for having pursued your Personal Legend.” “And you’ve told me nothing along the way,” said the boy. “I thought you were going to teach me some of the things you know. A while ago, I rode through the desert with a man who had books on alchemy. But I wasn’t able to learn anything from them.” “There is only one way to learn,” the alchemist answered. “It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey. You need to learn only one thing more.