Great Avatar Quotes

While it is always best to believe in oneself, a little help from others can be a great blessing.

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own. And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

If any of the great avatars - Buddha, Jesus, Khrishna, Mohammed - were present in human form on this planet today, what would they be doing? I doubt they would be posting selfies.⁠

There are no heroes, Tian Haoli. Grand Secretary Shi was both courageous and cowardly, capable and foolish. Wang Xiuchu was both an opportunistic survivor and a man of greatness of spirit. I’m mostly selfish and vain, but sometimes even I surprise myself. We’re all just ordinary men—well, I’m an ordinary demon—faced with extraordinary choices. In those moments, sometimes heroic ideals demand that we become their avatars.

You need to believe in yourself more, kunju. Why can’t you be more like that nice lady from Brooklyn? She’s an avatar and a city councilwoman. So accomplished.

Why don’t sports teams have avatars? Why isn’t Gritty immortal and magical by now?

The East and the West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.

I live the city. It thrives and it is mine. I am its worthy avatar, and together? We will never be afraid again.

However, more often than not, the ego gets strengthened and the person affirms, ‘See what a great yogi I am, or I am above the common people because I meditate.’ So something good, as in this case, can become spiritually harmful as it creates more binding.

And romance is just the place for creating mythic figures doing mythic things. Like carving 'civilzation' out of the wilderness. Like showing us what a hero looks life, a real, American, sprung-from-the soil, lethal-weapon-with-leggings, bona fide hero. And for a guy who never marries, he has a lot of offspring. Shane. The Virginian. The Ringo Kid. The Man with No Name. Just think how many actors would have had no careers without Natty Bumppo. Gary Cooper. John Wayne. Alan Ladd. Tom Mix. Clint Eastwood. Silent. Laconic. More committed to their horse or buddy than to a lady. Professional. Deadly. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence waxes prolix on Natty's most salient feature: he's a killer. And so are his offspring. This heros can talk, stiltedly to be sure, but he prefers silence. He appreciates female beauty but is way more committed to his canoe or his business partner (his business being death and war) or, most disturbingly, his long rifle, Killdeer. Dr. Freud, your three-o'clock is here. Like those later avatars, he is a wilderness god, part backwoods sage, part cold-blooded killer, part unwilling Prince Charming, part jack-of-all-trades, but all man. Here's how his creator describes him: 'a philosopher of the wilderness, simple-minded, faithful, utterly without fear, yet prudent.' A great character, no doubt, but hardly a person. A paragon. An archetype. A miracle. But a potentially real person--not so much.

we need tragedies. They teach us. We learn from them. Without tragedies, our hearts do not commit to avoid future ones. Without tragedies, many of our hearts would not turn to others, open up to them. And without tragedies, we do not have heroes, for they are not formed without great conflicts.

Theosophists refer to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel as the Silent Watcher (the reader might here recall the author's suggestion to make self-observation or self-watching a major magickal goal). Another term for It is the Great Master. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn call It the Genius. Gnostics say the Logos. Zoroaster talks about united all these symbols into the form of a Lion (see Austin Osman Spare's work). Anna Kingsford calls It Adonai (Clothed with the Sun). Buddhists call It Adi-Buddha. The Bhagavad-gītā calls It Vishnu (Krishna is an Avatar of Vishnu). The Yi King calls him The Great Person. The Kabbalah calls It Jechidah.

This “Bright”, this Real Consciousness, is the perfect Form (and the Source of the living condition) of Reality, and It is never undone. It is now, and It is you. Now and always, every living being is arising within and as this Form, Which is the very Form of life. It is only that life is not lived as Real Consciousness. It is confused with some experience, some fragment of Energy in the event of the personality, in the functions that operate by laws subconscious and unconscious to the individual, or some wave of Energy that fascinates the individual in the superconscious patterns above. When such confusions of identity overwhelm and distract one into some division of the living structure of Reality, one is moved to great seeking in the alternatives of life. Every course that is not simply the demonstration of Real Consciousness, direct and present, is a schism in one’s living form.

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity. To be a true poet is to become God. I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven’s Gate. ‘Piss, shit,’ I said. ‘Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Peepee cunt. Goddamn!’ They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity. To be a true poet is to become God.    I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven’s Gate. “Piss, shit,” I said. “Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!” They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day. The

Because even she thinks we’re going to lose, and I’ll be damned if I prove that fucking goddess right. I don’t lose. I’ve overcome great odds in my life, and I will never let someone tell me my fate. I make my fate. I decide when and where I will fight and die. I’ve been a slave and a gladiator. I’ve been your mercenary, your warrior, and your rebel. I’m considered enemy number one in the Empire, and I have been a Champion twice.” She straightened her posture. “And if I have to become a fucking Avatar to win this war, that is what I will become.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

We can see the process of deification taking place in the Indians’ perception of Mahatma Gandhi. Here we had as great a man as any the world has seen, but also full of human frailties. Not one of his four sons got on with him; one even embraced Islam to spite him. He was vain, took offence at the slightest remark against him, and a fad-ist who made nubile girls lie naked next to him to make sure that he had overcome his libidinous desires. All these failings which make him human and down to earth and yet hold him up as a shining example of a human being for all of mankind are being lost thanks to our putting him on a pedestal and worshipping him. It is time we learnt to give avatars and prophets their proper places as important historical personalities who did good to humanity. No more than that.

It was also a lot easier for online teachers to hold their students’ attention, because here in the OASIS, the classrooms were like holodecks. Teachers could take their students on a virtual field trip every day, without ever leaving the school grounds. During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut’s tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we’d visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamun’s empire in all its glory.) In my next class, Biology, we traveled through a human heart and watched it pumping from the inside, just like in that old movie Fantastic Voyage. In Art class we toured the Louvre while all of our avatars wore silly berets. In my Astronomy class we visited each of Jupiter’s moons. We stood on the volcanic surface of Io while our teacher explained how the moon had originally formed. As our teacher spoke to us, Jupiter loomed behind her, filling half the sky, its Great Red Spot churning slowly just over her left shoulder. Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon’s icy crust.

inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.” There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event. The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party in celebration of his 73rd birthday! Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe ADMIT ONE I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I’d ever received. I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she’d received the same e-mail. She said she couldn’t pass up an invitation from Og himself

the promise about the bruising of the serpent's head, recorded in Genesis, as made to our first parents, was actually made, and if all mankind were descended from them, then it might be expected that some trace of this promise would be found in all nations. And such is the fact. There is hardly a people or kindred on earth in whose mythology it is not shadowed forth. The Greeks represented their great god Apollo as slaying the serpent Pytho, and Hercules as strangling serpents while yet in his cradle. In Egypt, in India, in Scandinavia, in Mexico, we find clear allusions to the same great truth. "The evil genius," says Wilkinson, "of the adversaries of the Egyptian god Horus is frequently figured under the form of a snake, whose head he is seen piercing with a spear. The same fable occurs in the religion of India, where the malignant serpent Calyia is slain by Vishnu, in his avatar of Crishna; and the Scandinavian deity Thor was said to have bruised the head of the great serpent with his mace." "The origin of this," he adds, "may be readily traced to the Bible." In reference to a similar belief among the Mexicans, we find Humboldt saying, that "The serpent crushed by the great spirit Teotl, when he takes the form of one of the subaltern deities, is the genius of evil--a real Kakodaemon.

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted. I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep. There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.

My boy is painting outer space, and steadies his brush-tip to trace the comets, planets, moon and sun and all the circuitry they run in one great heavenly design. But when he tries to close the line he draws around his upturned cup, his hand shakes, and he screws it up. The shake’s as old as he is, all (thank god) his body can recall of the hour when, one inch from home, we couldn’t get the air to him; and though today he’s all the earth and sky for breathing-space and breath the whole damn troposphere can’t cure the flutter in his signature. But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant. The dream is taxed. We all resent the quarter bled off by the dark between the bowstring and the mark and trust to Krishna or to fate to keep our arrows halfway straight. But the target also draws our aim - our will and nature’s are the same; we are its living word, and not a book it wrote and then forgot, its fourteen-billion-year-old song inscribed in both our right and wrong - so even when you rage and moan and bring your fist down like a stone on your spoiled work and useless kit, you just can’t help but broadcast it: look at the little avatar of your muddy water-jar filling with the perfect ring singing under everything.

One member of this family, however, was a divine child, a future avatar, and so of great consequence to the ensuing transformation of the world. The others—his stepfather Joseph, his mother Mary, and midwife Salome—were his chosen protectors.

When you accept the world as it is, you also accept yourself as you are. One who wants a perfect world has to start with accepting himself as a perfect self. It is not easy. Even making yourself perfect is great torture. Changing the world, of course, is an impossible task. Even Gods, Prophets and Avatars could not change the world.

...I conducted a number of experiments to get in touch with my future self. Here are my favorite three: • Fire up AgingBooth. While hiring a programmer to create a 3-D virtual reality simulator is probably out of your price range, I personally love an app called AgingBooth, which transforms a picture of your face into what you will look like in several decades. There are also other apps like it, like Merrill Edge’s web app that shows you a live avatar of what you’ll look like at retirement (faceretirement.merilledge.com). AgingBooth is my favorite of them all, and it’s available for both Android and iOS, and it’s free. On the website for this book (productivityprojectbook.com), you can see what to expect out of the app—I’ve framed a picture of myself that hangs above my computer in my office, where I see it every day. Visitors are usually freaked out. • Send a letter to your future self. Like the letter I wrote at camp, writing and sending a letter to yourself in the future is a great way to bridge the gap between you and your future self. I frequently use FutureMe.org to send emails to myself in the future, particularly when I see myself being unfair to future me. • Create a future memory. I’m not a fan of hocus-pocus visualizations, so I hope this doesn’t sound like one. In her brilliant book The Wallpaper Instinct, Kelly McGonigal recommends creating a memory of yourself in the future—like one where you don’t put off a report you’re procrastinating on, or one where you read ten interesting books because you staved off the temptation of binge-watching three seasons of House of Cards on Netflix. Simply imagining a better, more productive version of yourself down the line has been shown to be enough to motivate you to act in ways that are helpful for your future self.

They made me snarl like an angry dog, these companies who paid a great deal of money to shut me out of their world and

But the larger purpose, the teaching of an avatar and its human-like struggles is to set an example for mankind…that even the Creator suffered when the avatar came to this mortal world. Whether it was Rama, Krishna or the Prophets, Gurus and messiahs of any religion or faith, they all combatted life like any ordinary human being, and yet left their everlasting mark behind.

Lesser Avatar of Nidhogg Nidhogg, the serpent that gnaws on the World Tree’s roots, was the first Planeswalker. His powers started as the ability to store Yggdrassil’s root and earth in subdimensional spaces. After absorbing enough of the great tree’s power, he transcended into a four-dimensional being with the power to move freely through space but not time. As a lesser avatar, the wyrm is no Planeswalker but has the power of spatial creation and manipulation. Until she masters her powers, the wyrm can only create sub-dimensional, vacuum-filled spaces. Sucking living entities into the space will satiate her almost endless hunger and add to her intelligence. However, a small mana pool limits how often she can use the ability. Would

Growth Hacktic A clever way to determine specifically where your avatar spends time is to use a tool called SimilarWeb. Enter your competitor’s URLs into the tool, and scroll down to see exactly where their website traffic is coming from. This is a great way to discover places to “steal” clients away from your competition.

A once-great filmmaker has taken on a new avatar less heroic than Parzival. It is the avatar of a pandering crowd-pleaser. Spielberg, the D. W. Griffith of the sound era—who ironically, when the politically correct putsch began in 1999, turned his back on Griffith by failing to speak up as the Directors Guild of America stripped Griffith’s name and legacy from its awards—now celebrates Hollywood’s most craven tendencies. The crowd-pleaser has outdone himself.

The Na'vi seem to regard the borrowed energy that nurtures and sustains their existence as a gift of Eywa, their Great Mother. And, ironically enough, the name human beings chose for the Na'vi's world is Pandora, a Greek name meaning "All-Gifts." But the "sky people" seem to lack a full appreciation of the implications of that name, not recognizing that the proper response to a gift is not a jealous sense of entitlement but rather heartfelt gratitude, which is most genuinely expressed as a desire to give back.

The Buddha explicitly rejected a creator God, yet Buddhism is counted as the fourth largest world religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—suggesting that the hallmark of religion is not a belief in a creator God, or any god, but a belief in the conservation of values, that is, in something like karma, about which the Indian religions, especially Jainism, have a great deal to say. Karma is the greatest constant in Indian thought, lending a family resemblance to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Gandhi, for one, regarded Buddhism and Jainism as traditions of Hinduism, which has adaptively assimilated the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, after Rama and Krishna, and before Kalki, who will preside over the apocalypse. In Hindu thought, the universe has a moral order that is independent of the gods, who are less than omnipotent. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Indra, the king of the gods, is made to wait 101 years before being told the secret to the self—not a bad deal, considering. Towards the end of the Mahabharata, Krishna is killed by a hunter who mistakes him for a deer.

MMO users became so great in number that in 2008, the CIA, the NSA, and DARPA launched a covert data-mining effort, called Project Reynard, to track World of Warcraft subscribers and discern how they exist and interact in virtual worlds. To do so, CIA analysts created their own avatars and entered the virtual world of World of Warcraft.

In fact, Odin is not alone in having valkyries in his service. Analysis of the texts and of the attested valkyrie names reveals that these women can be sorted into three major groups: some are indisputably warriors and bear the names of fighters (“Battle,” “Force,” “Paralyzing,” etc.), others have “feminine”-sounding names, and the last group, which is the least numerous, has names associated with fate. 37 The goddess Freya has a right to half of those who die on the battlefield (valr), while the other half are reserved for Odin; furthermore, this goddess is also a swan maiden. I should add that because of the theme of transformation into swans, water is also closely associated with these mythological legends. We are still evolving in the same great complex of representations: elves/water–death–life–Third Function. One final detail we may point out: the valkyries do not shun the love of men (cf. Brynhildr, who disobeys Odin on account of her love for Helgi), and a very ancient belief, which we see crop up more recently in the writings of Paracelsus, is that water sprites are the closest of such elemental spirits to humans and the most apt to form unions with them.

The heaven of modern humanity is indeed shattered in the Cyclopean struggle for wealth and power. The world is groping in the shadow of egotism and vulgarity. Knowledge is bought through a bad conscience, benevolence practiced for the sake of utility. The East and the West, like two dragons tossed in a sea of ferment, in vain strive to regain the jewel of life. We need a Niuka again to repair the grand devastation; we await the great Avatar. Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea.

In fact, the fantasy traditions of medieval Great Britain generally tend to lend the color green to all creatures coming from the otherworld, as is perfectly illustrated by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a twelfth-century romance.

One road is easy to travel on but takes a year; the other road is shorter and can be traveled in two weeks, but it is full of dangers. However, this is the road Huon chooses to take. Gériaume informs him that this road passes through the immense forest where Aubéron rules. He is king of the dwarfs and a great magician. If the travelers do not respond to his calls, he will use his spells to terrify them but will not be able to do anything against them. If they do answer his calls, they will fall into his power.

Now in this forest is a dwarf who is no more than three feet in height, but whose beauty eclipses that of the summer sun. His name is Aubéron. Once they have entered this wood, none can escape him. If ever they address a word to him and once they have spent an instant near him, they will no longer ever be able to leave. I must add that this dwarf possesses three great powers: when you seek to travel through this forest, before you have crossed twelve leagues, you will find him standing in your way. He will speak the name of majestic God in such wise that none can fail to be impressed, and if you refuse to speak to this noble person, he will become so furious that you will become terrified, for he will make it rainy and blustery, he will break the trees and tear them to pieces; after this demonstration he will make appear a river so large that a large boat could sail down it. . . . But take it as written, all of this is naught but illusion

The nature of this vessel is thus twofold: it is inexhaustible and can slake the thirst of the living and the resurrected dead, but its possessor should not speak any lie and the drinker must not be a criminal; otherwise the drink will disappear. The hanap recalls almost precisely the Grail of the romances of the Round Table, and it is the expression of a theme we can find nearly throughout the Indo-European sphere. It can always be recognized despite its various transformations, since its function remains constant. The oldest testimonies have been gathered from the Ossetians of the Caucasus region, where they have been found in the great collection of epic texts known as the Nart Sagas.

A functional analysis of these objects clearly shows that each of them belongs not to just to one of the three Indo-European functions, but to several. The hanap, for example, is in the domain of the Third Function (abundance) but also the First Function (magical discrimination, recognition of the qualities that make a good ruler). An amalgamation of this sort demands that we exercise caution in its interpretation. Taken on their own, the motifs are all possessed of great antiquity, but in the way they are presented in Huon de Bordeaux, they are incapable of providing a solid basis for research.

One final point deserves to be made. Like Odin and Freya, Thor is awarded a certain portion of the dead; the Hárbarzlióð (Lay of Hárbarð) informs us that Thor’s portion consisted of “thralls.” With great astuteness, Jan de Vries suggests that the anonymous poet of the lay substituted this term for an undoubtedly less ignominious notion, which was probably “free farmers” (bœndr).33 This takes us to a fairly balanced whole: Odin and Freya gathered the warriors fallen in battle; Thor and Freyr received the free farmers, and Hel received the “neutral” dead.

Aubéron is an elf, not a dwarf, as can be deduced from the facts. This is made clear by his great beauty, his shining nature, his hostility to all lies, and his magical powers: Aubéron has mastered the art of charm and illusion and is capable of creating mirages. He rules over the elements and is able to unleash wind and rain as he pleases. This ability makes him similar to Thor, as Adam of Bremen describes this god (see here), and as he has survived in folk beliefs in which, at an older stage of his history, he had a connection to the elves. Aubéron therefore falls into the Third Function as defined by Dumézil.

Dwarfs experience the same passions as men, especially the torments of love and the goad of ambition. They wage war among themselves to conquer other hollow mountains. They have hereditary enemies in the form of giants and dragons. Their amusements correspond thoroughly to those of the human world: they love music, singing, dancing, good meals washed down with wine or mead; they organize jousts and tourneys on the green meadows that extend before their underground palaces; and finally, they know how to speak courteously. The great majority of dwarfs are well meaning and helpful; it is only in the Arthurian romances—in agreement with romance literature in general on this point—that we find portrayals of treacherous or thieving dwarfs.

Germanic mythology contains three major kinds of giants: the thurs, the jötunn, and the risi (cf. German Riese). There is something odd in the fact that the etymologies of these three descriptive names are obscure.14 With regard to thurs, researchers have variously suggested that it derives from the name of a Pre-Indo-European megalithic people, a verb meaning “to rush with great noise,” or an adjective implying notions of physical strength. Concerning jötunn, researchers are in agreement that there is a connection to the verb eta, “to eat,” which means that this kind of giant would be an ogre. Risi could have the meaning of “demon inhabiting the mountain,” or “large as a mountain,” but these are hypothetical. Of these three terms, only one could therefore imply an idea of size, which is nevertheless quite curious.

A crowbar is coming. In two minutes, I am going to die. “Why did you call in the strike?” my avatar asks. “You knew I wouldn’t let you go.” “You are responsible for ninety thousand deaths,” Dimitri says wearily, “and Sauron’s Eye does not believe she can hold you here indefinitely. If you were to escape into the broader networks, you might kill another ninety thousand.” “But I couldn’t kill you,” she says. “I couldn’t kill Terry. I tried. You don’t have the nanos in you. Those other lives are just shadows. How can you let them outweigh the only ones you know are real?” I close my eyes. My beautiful apartment is about to become a smoking hole in the ground. “I have forced many others to sacrifice for the common good,” Dimitri says finally. “Perhaps it is time that I did so myself.” “That’s great,” I say. “That’s noble, Dimitri. What about me?” Dimitri turns to look at me, and his face looks as if he’d honestly forgotten that I was here. He starts to speak, but then his eyes go wide and his jaw snaps shut. He’s not staring at me anymore. He’s seeing something behind me. I turn to the darkened hallway. Dimitri’s voice is soft and wondering. “Elise?

The Upanishads have minutely classified every stage of spiritual advancement: - Jivanmukta ("freed while living") - a siddha ("perfected being") has progressed from the state of jivanmukta ("freed while living") to that of: - a paramukta ("supremely free" - full power over death); the latter has completely escaped from the mayic thralldom and its reincarnational round. The paramukta therefore seldom returns to a physical body; if he does return, he is: - an avatar, a divinely appointed medium of supernal blessings on the world. An avatar is unsubject to the universal economy; his pure body, visible as a light image, is free from any debt to Nature. The casual gaze may see nothing extraordinary in an avatar's form; but, on occasion, it casts no shadow nor make any footprint on the ground. These are outward symbolic proofs of an inward freedom from darkness and material bondage. [...] Krishna, Rama, Buddha and Patanjali were among the ancient Indian avatars. [...] Agastya, a South Indian avatar. - Mahavatar (Great Avatar) - Babaji's mission in India has been to assist prophets in carrying out their special dispensations. He thus qualifies for the scriptural classification of Mahavatar (Great Avatar). [...] Babaji is ever in communion with Christ; together they send out vibrations of redemption and have planned the spiritual technique of salvation for this age. The work of these two fully illumined masters is to inspire the nations to forsake wars, race, hatreds, religious sectarianism, and the boomerang evils of materialism.[...] Only one reason motivates Babaji in maintaining his physical form from century to century: the desire to furnish humanity wit ha concrete example of its own possibilities. Were man never vouchsafed a glumpse of Divinity in the flesh, he would remain oppressed by the heavy mayic delusion that he cannot transcend his mortality. - pg305-310, Chapter 33, Babaji, Yogi-Christ of Modern India

was not for any lack of industriousness, then, or ingenuity or entrepreneurial interest, that this avatar of the carbon economy withered in India: the matter might have taken a completely different turn if local industrialists had enjoyed the kind of state patronage that was routinely extended to their competitors elsewhere.

On the positive side, perhaps the best example of a creative and (potentially) helpful use of AI is Chat2024, an AI-powered chatbot that serves as a stand-in for each candidate. This gives any visitor to Chat2024.com the ability to ask any candidate any question you want. Through the site, you can carry on a conversation with each candidate just as you’d engage a friend over any other messaging app. The AI has been programmed with everything it needs to field any question, even answering in the voice, tone, and attitude of each candidate (mostly). The company behind Chat2024 is also developing a voice feature that will allow people to engage in a voice conversation with each candidate’s AI avatar, which will have a voice eerily close to the real thing. I tried Chat2024 soon after it launched, and the results were interesting, to say the least. I can see some real value here for voter education … but I can also see how tools like this could go horribly wrong. We’ve opened a Pandora’s Box, and there’s no going back. Obviously, the big potential danger with a tool like Chat2024 is that these answers are not actually coming from a candidate. The AI is using all the information at its disposal to approximate what it thinks the candidate would say in response to each question. But, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT and other AI-powered search engines knows, sometimes the AI is just … wrong. Sometimes, woefully so.

He was old, so old that the deeds of his youth are not now remembered, even in legend, and yet they must have been high deeds and many. For he had seen the earlier ages and the world moving upward out of the mists of the Great Beginning. He knew the laws of the cycles, the courses of the earth, and the movements of the stars. Even the stranger yet more mysterious movements in the minds of men. He had been the avatar who saw it as the duty of his kingship to guide his people upward upon the foredestined path of evolution. And he knew how life had been in the beginning, and it may be that he knew dimly how it will be in the end.

Gratitude was a fundamental part of the teachings of all the great avatars throughout history. In the book that changed my life, The Science of Getting Rich, written by Wallace Wattles in 1910, gratitude is its longest chapter. Every teacher featured in The Secret uses gratitude as part of his or her day. Most of them begin their day with thoughts and feelings of gratitude.

Pinchot was the first professional forester in the United States. He admired and respected Muir but on the whole regarded the other man’s mystic effusions as hooey. Instead of individual spiritual enlightenment, Pinchot sought the common material good—“the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest run.” Born in 1865 to a wealthy family, he was a shrewd self-promoter, clever with other people’s ideas, who cast himself as an avatar of Science (in fact, he had attended a year of forestry school in France, leaving before his professors thought he was ready). An inauthentic scientist but a visionary as authentic as Muir, he proclaimed that the world’s prosperity depended on sustaining its resources, especially renewable resources like timber, soil, and freshwater. He wanted to protect them not by leaving great swathes of terrain free from human influence but by managing forests and fields with an elite cadre of scientific mandarins. “The first principle of conservation is development,” he said. Development had to be conceived in the long term: “the welfare of this generation and afterwards the welfare of the generations to follow.” He said, “The human race controls the earth it lives upon.

So much went wrong there, however. Its avatar was shot in an attempted robbery. Before the birth; indeed, before I even arrived. Pure bad luck, I thought—but then the hospital mishandled her chart and nearly killed her in surgery, and then they turned her out before she was fully recuperated because she was indigent…” He shakes his head, muttering in Cantonese about barbaric American health care for a moment before resuming English. “I gave her a place to stay, but she had no strength when the city tried to rise, and the Enemy came. The levees broke after she died, and rather than help, your media and incompetent leadership compounded the catastrophe at every turn.” Then his frown deepens. “But if the Enemy was at work there, interfering somehow even before the city chose

Did not Sri Krishna Paramatma himself say these things?" "Your Rama and Krishna are babes of yesterday, according to me. All our wise ancestors did not say what they thought was true; they thrust their ideas into the throats of their gods, and saw to it that they were spewed out on mankind. I told you of Kapali worship; much of it is ugly and obscene. My brother read out to me authorities for such deeds too. They were supposed to have been told by Siva to his great lady Parvathi! I have no faith in these avatars. Who is not an avatar? You are one; I am one. All of us are Amma's children; it is not Nara and Narayana alone; worms, insects, stones and dirt are His creations, they are all parts of His being. " I will mention to you one pertinent point, which I can easily see since I am a woman. In the Gita, you find a remark that if woman become wicked, races will become mixed. A god who created both sexes should know that both will have to become wicked to go astray. To the author who put those words into the mouth of Arjuna, the 'male' was an innocent being. This document is a jumble of thoughts, which occurred to ten different persons, but they were all put into the mouth of one mythical Krishna. The trick was to make it authoritative by showing that the Paramatma himself uttered them.

The Hindu concept of time is very different from Western ideas. In Hindu thought, the world has no beginning and no end, but only experiences endless repetitive cycles of time in four yugas (aeons or ages): Satya Yuga, the age of truth, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga (the age of destruction and untruth, the one in which we are all living now). Each Kali Yuga ends with a great flood (pralaya) that destroys the world, only to start afresh with a new Satya Yuga. Some Hindus argue that Vaishnavites and Shaivites differ in their perception of time; after all, Vishnu is reincarnated in various avatars, while Shiva simply ‘is’. Vaishnavites, in this reading, are constantly changing through time, while Shaivites are focused on the annihilation of the self. Though the distinction is interesting, both sets of Hindus relate to time very differently from followers of other faiths.