Sanskrit Quotes

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life; dream of it; think of it; live on that idea. Let the brain, the body, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, and this is the way great spiritual giants are produced.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jamal Feldstein-Roth.” I blinked. “Wait, Jamal?” “Suck it,” he said with a grin. “My parents are liberal Jews from Long Island, okay? They wanted me to have a connection to my heritage.” Jamie made air quotes with his fingers. “I’m not judging—my middle name is Amitra. I’m just surprised.” “Amitra,” Noah amused. “Mystery solved.” “What is that?” Jamie asked me. “Sanskrit? Hindi?” I shrugged. “Randomly?” I shook my head. “My mom’s Indian.” “What does that mean?” Jamie asked me. “What does Jamal mean?” I asked him. “Point taken.

I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone. Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks. First in English. Then in Italian. And then - just to get the point across - in Sanskrit.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

I'll bet I'm as old as you are." "I'm older than Sanskrit." "Well, I was waitress at the Last Supper." "I'm so old I remember when McDonald's had only sold a hundred burgers." "You win.

A scene of Mahabharata where the Surya Devta(Sun God)would come to bless Kunti with a baby The child watching this on TV says "I have been taught that Neil Armstrong had taken several days to reach the moon.Surya Devta took only half a minute to land up in the Kunti's room; that too, he didn't even need a rocket-he had simply walked. Science and Sanskrit had always appeared contradicting subjects to me at school:-)

The truth itself is never vulnerable. What is vulnerable is the state of knowledge or ignorance of human beings, especially our youth, who are being exposed to so many falsehoods.

A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means, ‘one who lives at the border.’ In ancient times, this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not of the villager’s anymore-not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent-not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.

In Sanskrit, there exists no word for ‘The Individual’ (L’Individu). En Grèce antique, il n’y avait aucun mot pour dire ‘Devoir’ (Duty). In French, the word for ‘Wife’ is the same as the word for ‘Woman.’ En anglais, nous n’avons aucun mot semblable à l’exquise ‘Jouissance!

None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth. The word 'true' suggest a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be 'true.' It is related to 'trust,' and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one's trust. Such a situation is not an absolute - it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith and it involves being faithful to one's intentions.

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is "the cleaner" or "the animal that cleans itself," described by the Sanskrit word Margaras, which means "the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer." The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.

You retain your health only so long as you are willing to forgive your stresses, shrug off adversity and adapt to new situations. Resistance to change always impedes the workings of your immunity. An old Sanskrit proverb tells us kshama chajanani: the essence of motherly love is forgiveness. Damage to the ahamkara-mother predisposes us to disease by weakening our innate forgiveness.

India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages. India was the mother of our philosophy, of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in Christianity... of self-government and democracy. In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all.

In Sanskrit words are like living beings; depending on context, circumstance and environment their mood varies and meaning differs.

This is the law of Karma, which is Sanskrit for "Comeback." "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

In Sanskrit, “independent woman” is a synonym for a harlot. Hence the woman who is unattached to a man is not only a universal feminine type but a sacral type in antiquity.

The ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she's loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings - the wings that only we can see - and because wanting her kills every other desire of love.

It’s a myth that Sanskrit is the best language for writing computer code. Patriotic Indians have spread this lie for many years—Bill Gates

Each today, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope. Look, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life.” —Sanskrit poem

Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, after all. It’s the anticipation molecule. To enjoy the things we have, as opposed to the things that are only possible, our brains must transition from future-oriented dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules, or the H&Ns. Most people have heard of the H&Ns. They include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins (your brain’s version of morphine), and a class of chemicals called endocannabinoids (your brain’s version of marijuana). As opposed to the pleasure of anticipation via dopamine, these chemicals give us pleasure from sensation and emotion. In fact, one of the endocannabinoid molecules is called anandamide, named after a Sanskrit word that means joy, bliss, and delight.

It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they don't explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable - Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.

Ma’s pet peeve was how the Western world misunderstood the theory of karma. “I mean it’s the Bhagavad Gita they’re bastardizing. What is all this ‘karma’s a bitch’ nonsense!” Ma loved to say. The entire “what goes around comes around” thing was a backward view of karma. Karma was simply Sanskrit for action, and the theory was that your actions are the only thing under your control, as opposed to the fruits of your actions, which are not. And since actions always bear fruit, you were better off focusing your energy on your own actions, rather than worrying about the results you wanted them to produce.

Show me that you can divide the notes of a song; But first, show me that you can discern Between what can be divided And what cannot. —An anonymous musical composition inspired by a classical Sanskrit poem

The world exists because your mind exists. If your mind didn’t exist, there would be no world. As you look at these words, you see them in what appears to be a reality outside of you. What you are really seeing is the image that your mind is creating from the electrical signals being sent to your brain. While they may appear to be outside of you, this is an illusion, they exist within your own mind, and are being projected to appear as if they are outside of you. This apparent reality that is projected by our minds, is maya, and to believe that maya is the ultimate reality is a result of ignorance, or avidya in Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit this ardent, one-pointed, self-transcending passion is called tapas, and the Vedas revere it as an unsurpassable creative force. From the tapas of God, the Rig Veda says, the cosmos itself was born.

God's true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit. As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth. I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. [...] I learned God's true language is only silence and breath.

Gods do have their divisions thanks to man. Jesus Christ is the Christian God, Allah the Muslim and so on. As a convent student, I thought God was English till the Sanskrit mantras became somewhat comprehensible.

In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.

Now I’m really curious. Tell me.” I tapped on his bare chest. “Please?” He watched me a moment. “It’s in Sanskrit. It says, ‘This Is Forever.’” My heart skipped a beat as I stared up at him. “Does it mean what I think it does?

And here is where I’m humbled. I’m humbled by my feebleness in helping this person. Humbled that I had the arrogance to believe I’d seen and heard it all. You can never see and hear it all because, for all their sordid similarities, each story in the Downtown Eastside unfolded in the particular existence of a unique human being. Each one needs to be heard, witnessed, and acknowledged anew, every time it’s told. And I’m especially humbled because I dared to imagine that Serena was less than the complex and luminous person she is. Who am I to judge her for being driven to the belief that only through drugs will she find respite from her torments? Spiritual teachings of all traditions enjoin us to see the divine in each other. Namaste, the Sanskrit holy greeting, means, “The divine in me salutes the divine in you.” The divine? It’s so hard for us even to see the human. What have I to offer this young Native woman whose three decades of life bear the compressed torment of generations? An antidepressant capsule every morning, to be dispensed with her methadone, and half an hour of my time once or twice a month.

The word Zen derives from the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means ‘quiet contemplation’.

This unconditional wakefulness is described in the Sanskrit term bodhicitta,

The soul apart from the body and mind is a sound, a note, a tone, which is called in Sanskrit Svara.

True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In Sanskrit, these are, maitri, karuna, mudita, and upeksha.

Sanskrit is a beautiful contextual language. It is called “Dev Bhasha” the language of the soul. Here, meanings of the words must come from the heart, from direct experience – dictionary meanings or static meanings have not much value. Meanings of the words vary depending on mind-set, time, location and culture. The words are made to expand the possibilities of the mind.

It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code.

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.

प्रेम गली अति संकरी, तामें दाऊ न समाई | जब में था तब हरी नहीं, अब हरी है में नाहीं || The street of love is very narrow, two can’t pass through it at the same time When I was, there was no God (Hari), now there is God but I am not.

Om is said to be a four-syllable word in Sanskrit, originally as AUM. A, the waking state. U, the dream state. M, the unconscious state. And the fourth, the silence that surrounds it—wherefrom everything arises and whereto everything inevitably returns. It is the silence that surrounds om that contains everything. It is the silence in your own life that contains and gives birth to everything you have, and everything you will ever need. It is this same silence we avoid, overlook, and disregard as nothing. The white space of life we abhor. We fill our lives with noise, drama, screens, people, and “stuff” to avoid the void that reminds us of our truth—that beyond flesh that once was not, and will inescapably become not, we are eternal.

Akbar took Brahmins to task for misrepresenting Hindu texts to lower castes and hoped that translating Sanskrit texts into Persian would prompt these (in his opinion) arrogant leaders to reform their ways.

These words, they have a special appeal to you, don't they?' she asked softly. 'These dead languages. Why is that?' He was leaning close enough to her that she felt his warm breath on her cheek when he exhaled. 'I cannot be sure,' he said, 'though I think it has something to do with the clarity of them. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, they contain pure truths, before we cluttered our languages with so many useless words.

Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.

There is no greater enemy than pride.

Two Words from Sanskrit, that are Strikingly similar. CHITA & CHINTA One Burns the Dead & the other Burns the Living. Have a STRESS free Life….—feelingalive.

It says, ‘Be happy for this moment.’”  I groan, and continue.  “‘This moment is your life.’” “In what language?”  His finger is rubbing it now.  Oh wow. “Sanskrit.

symbolizes Shakti, the feminine; the upward triangle, Shiva, the masculine. The two components are known as om and hrim in Sanskrit. Remarkable examples of conceptual parallelism.

Look well to this one day, for it and it alone is life. In the brief course of this day lie all the verities and realities of your existence; the pride of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty. Yesterday is only a dream, and tomorrow is but a vision. Yet each day, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow, a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life.

Kali comes from the Sanskrit word ‘kal’, meaning time. She is a Hindu goddess, who is greatly misunderstood by the Western world as being associated with sex, death and violence, but in the Hindu text she kills only demons. For humankind, she represents the death of the ego and the will to overcome the ‘I am the body’ idea. She reminds us that the body is only temporary, and through this realisation she provides liberation to her children. To the soul who aspires to greater spiritual endeavours, Kali is receptive, supportive and loving. It is only a person filled with ego who will perceive Kali in a fearsome form. Her black skin represents the womb of the quantum darkness, the great non-manifest from which all of creation arises and into which all of creation will eventually dissolve.

Many are the scholars who make it their professional occupation to occupy themselves in this towering edifice of culture, exploring its nook and crannies, developing their responses, making their contributions here and there, and helping to hand it on to succeeding generations. For some the temptation proves irresistible to go yet farther and make this the concern of their lives, letting society go its own sorry way while they lock themselves away in this abiding, socially transcendent cultural stronghold, acquiescing in society while pursuing Bildung. As Rotterdam burns, they study Sanskrit verb forms.

Life is suffering” is misleading for at least two reasons. First, the Buddha used an ancient Indian language similar to Sanskrit called Pali, and the word he used in Pali for the first noble truth, dukkha, is difficult to translate. Dukkha is too multifaceted and nuanced a term to be captured in the one-word translation “suffering.” And second, the fact of dukkha in our lives doesn’t mean that life is only dukkha.

The artist, the poet, the musician and the philosopher show in their gifts throughout their lives the heritage of the jinn. The words genius and jinn come from a Sanskrit word Jnana, which means knowledge. The jinns. Therefore, are the beings of knowledge; whose hunger is for knowledge, whose joy is in learning, in understanding, and whose work is in inspiring, and bring light and joy to others. In every kind of knowledge that exists, the favorite knowledge to a jinn is the knowledge of truth, in which is the fulfillment of its life's purpose.

Die älteste Sprache, sagt man, sei das Indogermanische, Indo-europäische, das Sanskrit. Aber es ist so gut wie gewiß, daß das ein "Ur" ist, so vorschnell wie manches andere, und daß es eine wieder ältere Muttersprache gegeben hat, welche die Wurzeln der arischen sowohl wie auch der semitischen und chamitischen Mundarten in sich beschloß. Wahrscheinlich ist sie auf Atlantis gesprochen worden, dessen Silhouette die letzte im Fernendunst undeutlich noch sichtbare Vorbirgskulisse der Vergangenheit bildet, das aber selbst wohl kaum die Ur-Heimat des sprechenden Menschen ist.

Yoga is the way of our approach to the goal, that is, a way of getting connected to our objective. Etymologically, the word Yoga in Sanskrit means to add, to be united. In other words, it is the means to join or be united with our goal.

The Vedas are seen like kings’ (prabhu) utterances, the Puranas are like friends’ (mitra) utterances, and kavyas are like the utterances of a beloved wife (kanta).2

In Buddhism, the word “emptiness” is a translation of the Sanskrit sunyata. It means “empty of a separate self.” It is not a negative or despairing term. It is a celebration of interconnectedness, of interbeing. It means nothing can exist by itself alone, that everything is inextricably interconnected with everything else. I know that I must always work to remember that I am empty of a separate self and full of the many wonders of this universe, including the generosity of my grandparents and parents, the many friends and teachers who have helped and supported me along the path, and you dear readers, without whom this book could not exist. We inter-are, and therefore we are empty of an identity that is separate from our interconnectedness.

In the ancient Indian Upanishads, the answer to the question “Who am I?” is “Tat tvam asi.” This succinct Sanskrit sentence means literally: “Thou art That,” or “You are Godhead.” It suggests that we are not namarupa—name and form (body/ego), but that our deepest identity is with a divine spark in our innermost being (Atman) that is ultimately identical with the supreme universal principle (Brahman). And Hinduism is not the only religion that has made this discovery. The revelation concerning the identity of the individual with the divine is the ultimate secret that lies at the mystical core of all great spiritual traditions. The name for this principle could thus be the Tao, Buddha, Cosmic Christ, Allah, Great Spirit, Sila, and many others.

but it’s nowhere near as spooky as yoga studios full of rich white women wearing the same overpriced athleisure, possibly embellished with a bastardized Sanskrit pun—“Om is where the heart is,” “Namaslay,” “My chakras are aligned AF”—and calling themselves a “tribe.” Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing and shutting out their originators might not seem “culty”—it might just seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem.

Our bodies operate most efficiently in a state of balance, pivoting between action and relaxation, daydreaming and reasoned thought. This balance is influenced by the nasal cycle, and may even be controlled by it. It’s a balance that can also be gamed. There’s a yoga practice dedicated to manipulating the body’s functions with forced breathing through the nostrils. It’s called nadi shodhana—in Sanskrit, nadi means “channel” and shodhana means “purification”—or, more commonly, alternate nostril breathing. —

Unconditional happiness is the highest technique there is. You don’t have to learn Sanskrit or read any scriptures. You don’t have to renounce the world. You just have to really mean it when you say that you choose to be happy. And you have to mean it regardless of what happens. This is truly a spiritual path, and it is as direct and sure a path to Awakening as could possibly exist.

In Advaita Vedanta, and in many other ancient wisdom traditions, the world is said to be an illusion. This illusion is commonly referred to as maya, a Sanskrit name which refers to the apparent, or objective reality which is superimposed on the ultimate reality in order to generate the phenomena of what we call the material world. Maya is the magic by which we create duality—by which we create two worlds from one. This creation is an illusory creation—it is not real—it is an imaginary manifestation of the one Universal Consciousness, appearing as all of the various phenomena in objective reality. Maya is God’s, or Consciousness’s, creative power of emptying or reflecting itself into all things and thus creating all things—the power of subjectivity to take on objective appearance.

proverb from the Sanskrit Vedic Scriptures of around 1500 bce: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.

Karma, which originally meant “action” or “deed” in Sanskrit, is about this system of reviewing our previous deeds and choosing differently. Karma doesn’t get back to us unexpectedly. We get back to karma for our highest good. It’s like going back to where we bookmarked.

Our language is older than theirs. The Lepcha language is older than Hebrew. It is older than Sanskrit, Tibetan and even your English. Lepcha is the original language of the world. It was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden! In 1987 our written language was 5675 years old.

Why are we so easily swayed by facts forwarded by email? Why do so many Indians believe that the Taj Mahal was originally a temple called Tejo Mahalaya? Why do so many of us instantly believe and immediately proselytize that ‘India has never invaded any country in her last 1,000 years of history’ or that ‘The word “navigation” is derived from the Sanskrit navgath’ without even pausing to ask: ‘Is any of this actually true?

That's a good point, I suppose,' he said in that way people have when you've just said something that's so off the mark it might as well be in Sanskrit, but they like you, so they want to make something positive out of it so they can give you the credit you both know you don't deserve.

Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.

It’s all documented in the Vedas, Upanishads and in miscellaneous story formats. But to get to the real original texts, you need to know Sanskrit and Pali. The biggest disservice the British did to mankind — and the Indians let them do it — was to cut Sanskrit from common usage. Maybe it was the insecurity of the British to patent everything in their

One should never fear sorrow because it is the stepping stone to happiness,”   - Rig Veda

I don't have a choice sahib. Artho hi kanya parakeeya eva father used to say" "What does it mean?" "It means a girl is another man's property and she is held in trust by her parents.

Cannabis affects the brain because brain cells themselves produce cannabis-like neurotransmitters. The first such compound to be identified was christened anandamide, ananda being Sanskrit for “bliss.” The proteins that transmit anandamide’s message to the brain, the receptors, are mainly located in the striatum (hence the blissful feeling) and in the cerebellum (hence the unsteady gait after taking marijuana), in the cerebral cortex (hence the problems with association, the fragmented thoughts and confusion), and in the hippocampus (hence the memory impairment). But there are no receptors in the brain stem areas that regulate blood pressure and breathing. That’s why it’s impossible to take an overdose of cannabis, as opposed to opiates.

The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one’s trust. Such a situation is not an absolute – it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith, and it involves being faithful to one’s intuitions.

Normally when I tell people I'm a gender studies major, they look at me like I'm studying Sanskrit or Latin. But now, NOW I had something to show my family, to possibly convince them that one day I would be employable. Look! People still like feminism! Or maybe they just really like Ryan Gosling's face. But they're getting that face with a dose of feminism! Like it or not.

What are we really perceiving in trances? When we are watching a person cross a cobble-stone road and enter a tavern in the 16th Century, we are following the thread of life, the Akashic Records. Akasha is the Sanskrit word for "sky, atmosphere" or "aether". Just as a camera can catch a moment in time on film, or a video captures movement and action, so is it with the akasha … we leave traces in time and space, in the aethers. Consciously or not, when perceiving past lives we are looking back into time, and finding the records on the akasha. Time. And Space.

...The spiritual Oriental teachers say a person has three forms of mind,'' Beatrice was explaining to him once, while they were on break between one lesson and another at university, ''which are the dense mind, the subtle level and the ultra-subtle mind. Primary Consciousness, or the dense mind, is that existential, Sartrean mind which is related to our senses and so it is guided directly by human primitive instincts; in Sanskrit, this is referred to as ālaya-vijñāna which is directly tied to the brain. The subtle mind comes into effect when we begin to be aware of our true nature or that which in Sanskrit is called Ātman or self-existent essence that eventually leads us to the spiritual dimension. Ultimately there is the Consciousness-Only or the Vijñapti-Mātra, an ultra-subtle mind which goes beyond what the other two levels of mind can fabricate, precisely because this particular mind is not a by-product of the human brain but a part of the Cosmic Consciousness of the Absolute, known in Sanskrit as Tathāgatagarbha, and it is at this profound level of Consciousness that we are able to achieve access to the Divine Wisdom and become one with it in an Enlightened State.'' ''This spiritual subject really fascinates me,'' the Professor would declare, amazed at the extraordinary knowledge that Beatrice possessed.'' ''In other words, a human being recognises itself from its eternal essence and not from its existence,'' Beatrice replied, smiling, as she gently touched the tip of his nose with the tip of her finger, as if she was making a symbolic gesture like when children are corrected by their teachers. ''See, here,'' she had said once, pulling at the sleeve of his t-shirt to make him look at her book. ''For example, in the Preface to the 1960 Notes on Dhamma, the Buddhist philosopher from the University of Cambridge, Ñāṇavīra Thera, maintains those that have understood Buddhist teachings have gone way beyond Existential Thought. And on this same theme, the German scholar of Buddhist texts, Edward Conze, said that the possible similarity that exists between Buddhist and Existential Thought lies only on the preliminary level. He said that in terms of the Four Noble Truths, or in Sanskrit Catvāri Āryasatyāni, the Existentialists have only the first, which teaches everything is ill. Of the second - which assigns the origin of ill to craving - they have a very imperfect grasp. As for the third and fourth, which consist of letting go of craving, and the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to liberation from the cycle of rebirth in the form of Nirvāṇa - these are unheard of. Knowing no way out, the Existentialists are manufacturers of their own woes...

All problems of life arise from some weakness of mind. All weakness of mind is due to the mind’s ignorance of its own essential nature, which is universal and the source of infinite energy and intelligence.

The fundamental text of the Hindu tradition is, of course, the Bhagavad Gītā; and there four basic yogas are described. The word yoga itself, from a Sanskrit verbal root yuj, meaning “to yoke, to link one thing to another,” refers to the act of linking the mind to the source of mind, consciousness to the source of consciousness; the import of which definition is perhaps best illustrated in the discipline known as knowledge yoga, the yoga, that is to say, of discrimination between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object in every act of knowing, and the identification of oneself, then, with the subject. “I know my body. My body is the object. I am the witness, the knower of the object. I, therefore, am not my body.” Next: “I know my thoughts; I am not my thoughts.” And so on: “I know my feelings; I am not my feelings.” You can back yourself out of the room that way. And the Buddha then comes along and adds: “You are not the witness either. There is no witness.” So where are you now? Where are you between two thoughts? That is the way known as jñāna yoga, the way of sheer knowledge.

Breath, to a Sufi, is a bridge between himself and God; it is a rope for him, hanging down to earth, attached to the heavens. The Sufi climbs up by the help of this rope. In the Qur’anic language it is called Burak, a steed which was sent to the Prophet for his journey to the heavens. Hindus call it prana, which means life, but they picture it symbolically as a bird, which is named in Sanskrit Garuda, on which rode Narayana, the godhead. There is no mystical cult in which the breath is not given the greatest importance in spiritual progress. Once man has touched the depths of his own being by the help of the breath, then it becomes easy for him to become at one with all that exists on earth and in heaven.

books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

Recent scientific research reveals that the human system is capable of producing its own narcotic if it is maintained in a certain way. It is a completely self-contained system. And, what’s more, this is a narcotic which has a tremendous impact on health, well-being, alertness and perception. This chemical has been termed Anandamide (after the ancient Sanskrit word ‘ananda’, which refers to the core of life as blissfulness). If a sufficient amount is generated in the system, an individual can be intoxicated and fully awake at the same time. So, what Adiyogi disclosed, in effect, was that there is a whole marijuana mountain inside you! If you cultivate it properly, you could be stoned and yet stable, exuberant and yet aware all the time.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

Hindu mythology makes constant references to queerness, the idea that questions notions of maleness and femaleness. There are stories of men who become women, and women who become men, of men who create children without women, and women who create children without men, and of creatures who are neither this, nor that, but a little bit of both, like the makara (a combination of fish and elephant) or the yali (a combination of lion and elephant). There are also many words in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Tamil such as kliba, napumsaka, mukhabhaga, sanda, panda, pandaka, pedi that suggest a long familiarity with queer thought and behaviour. It is common to either deny the existence of such fluidity in our stories, or simply locate them in the realm of the supernatural or point to law books that, besides endorsing patriarchy and casteism, also frown upon queer behaviour. Yet the stories are repeatedly told and shown. Gentle attempts, perhaps, of wise sages to open up stubborn finite minds and lead them towards infinity

The thing was,I knew exactly how I had survived.Mary had been on to something with her anchor theory,but she was a little unclear on the logistics. Jack told me he dreamed of me every night, and it was as if I were really there. I was in a dark place,and he helped me see. Now Jack was invading my dreams every night. Not a dream Jack,but the real thing. I know this because during one of the first dreams, he told me what the tattoo on his arm said. Ever Yours. The next morning,I rushed to draw the image from memory, and then I researched it. The symbols were artistic versions of ancient Sanskrit words.They stood for eternity and belonging. Ever Yours, just as Jack had said. There was no way my subconscious could have come up with that explanation on its own. I'd finally found the connection Meredith had longed for,the tether from an anchor that kept a Forfeit alive. They were bound together through their dreams,sustaining each other during sleep. When I was asleep,Jack would come to my bedroom and sit on the end of the mattress and face me.He came to me every night,talking about his uncle's cabin, the Christmas Dance, how my hair hides my eyes,how my hand fits in his, how he loves me.How he'll never leave. I spent the first few dreams saying "I'm sorry" over and over and over, until he threatened to stay away if I didn't stop.

Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.

Just as I do not see how anyone can expect really to understand Kant and Hegel without knowing the German language and without such an understanding of the German mind as can only be acquired in the society of living Germans, so a fortiori I do not see how anyone can understand Confucius without some knowledge of Chinese and a long frequentation of the best Chinese society. I have the highest respect for the Chinese mind and for Chinese civilisation; and I am willing to believe that Chinese civilisation at its highest has graces and excellences which may make Europe seem crude. But I do not believe that I, for one, could ever come to understand it well enough to make Confucius a mainstay. I am led to this conclusion partly by an analogous experience. Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion seeing also that the 'influence' of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do

The Sanskrit Brihatsamhita, written perhaps in the sixth century, warns, ‘If a Shiva linga, image, or temple breaks apart, moves, sweats, cries, speaks, or otherwise acts with no apparent cause, this warns of the destruction of the king and his territory.’ Acting on this premise that religious images held political power, Hindu kings targeted one another’s temples beginning in the seventh century, regularly looting and defiling images of Durga, Ganesha, Vishnu, and so forth. They also periodically destroyed each other’s temples. Some Hindu kings even commissioned Sanskrit poetry to celebrate and memorialize such actions.

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Within two years Jones published his observations on the Sanskrit language, which pioneered the science of comparative linguistics. In his publications Jones pointed out surprising similarities between Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as similarities between all these languages and Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English. Thus in Sanskrit, ‘mother’ is ‘matar’, in Latin it is ‘mater’, and in Old Celtic it is ‘mathir’. Jones surmised that all these languages must share a common origin, developing from a now-forgotten ancient ancestor. He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.

The Sanskrit texts make it clear that a cataclysm on this scale, though a relatively rare event, is expected to wash away all traces of the former world and that the slate will be wiped clean again for the new age of the earth to begin. In order to ensure that the Vedas can be repromulgated for future mankind after each pralaya the gods have therefore designed an institution to preserve them -- the institution of the Seven Sages, a brotherhood of adepts possessed of unerring memories and supernatural powers, practitioners of yoga, performers of the ancient rituals and sacrifices, ascetics, spiritual visionaries, vigilant in the battle against evil, great teachers, knowledgeable beyond all imagining, who reincarnate from age to age as the guides of civilization and the guardians of cosmic justice.

How important was mantra to Gandhi’s transformation? Extremely. When done systematically, mantra has a powerful effect on the brain. It gathers and focuses the energy of the mind. It teaches the mind to focus on one point, and it cultivates a steadiness that over time becomes an unshakable evenness of temper. The cultivation of this quality of “evenness” is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita. It is called samatva in Sanskrit, and it is a central pillar of Krishna’s practice. When the mind develops steadiness, teaches Krishna, it is not shaken by fear or greed. So, in his early twenties, Gandhi had already begun to develop a still-point at the center of his consciousness—a still-point that could not be shaken. This little seed of inner stillness would grow into a mighty oak. Gandhi would become an immovable object. Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.” “But the wise elephant trainer,” said Rambha, “will give the elephant a stick of bamboo to hold in his trunk. The elephant likes this. He holds it fast. And as soon as the elephant wraps his trunk around the bamboo, the trunk begins to settle. Now the elephant strides through the market like a prince: calm, collected, focused, serene. Bananas and coconuts no longer distract.” So too with the mind. As soon as the mind grabs hold of the mantra, it begins to settle. The mind holds the mantra gently, and it becomes focused, calm, centered. Gradually this mind becomes extremely concentrated. This is the beginning stage of meditation. All meditation traditions prescribe some beginning practice of gathering, focusing, and concentration—and in the yoga tradition this is most often achieved precisely through mantra. The whole of Chapter Six in the Bhagavad Gita is devoted to Krishna’s teachings on this practice: “Whenever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self,” instructs Krishna. “When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.

Max had a book with her and began leafing through it, looking for something. "There's a passage our conversation reminds me of ..." "What?" "In the Upanishads -- a series of Sanskrit works which are part of the Veda. Here it is Pol, listen: In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. There is as much in that little space within the heart as there is in the whole world outside. Maybe that little space is the realty of your you and my me?" "Could I copy that?" I asked. "Of course. I've been watching that little space within your heart enlarging all year as more and more ideas are absorbed into it. Some people close their doors and lock them so that nothing can come in, and the space cannot hold anything as long as the heart clutches in self-protection or lust or greed. But if we're not afraid, that little space can be so large that one could put a whole universe in it and still have room for more.

We carry out our lives assuming ourselves to be something substantial and unchanging, and we become deeply attach[ed] to this assumed self (this attachment is known in Sanskrit as ātma-grāha). But we attach to more than simply a notion of a self. We also reify the things that we see, hear, and think, into substances, and attach to them as well. This is called attachment to dharmas (Skt. dharma-grāha). Among these two attachments, it may be the case that we can earnestly reflect and bring ourselves to the awareness of our attachment to self, making an effort to avoid it. But attachment to dharmas occurs at such a subtle level that stemming it based on conscious reflective awareness is practically impossible for most people. We grasp at all dharmas (all phenomena), despite the fact that they are nothing more than a provisional combination of elements according to certain conditions. Taking these as the framework created from our past experiences, along with accordance to our individual circumstances, we see, hear, and think. When we regard the content of such seeing, hearing, and thinking to be accurate, attachment to dharmas ends up being far more difficult to come to reconcile than attachment to self. How do you deal with something that is virtually unnoticeable? This attachment to dharmas engenders the cognitive hindrances (jñeya-āvaraṇa), while attachment to self engenders the afflictive hindrances (kleśa-āvaraṇa). Nirvāṇa is said to manifest based on the removal of the afflictive hindrances, while bodhi is obtained by the elimination of the cognitive hindrances.

The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning “contemplation, meditation.” Contemplation, however, of what? Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall where I originally presented the material for this chapter. Above, we see the many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other. Regarded that way, they are so many empirical facts; and the whole universe seen that way is called in Japanese ji hokkai, “the universe of things.” But now, let us consider further. Each of those separate bulbs is a vehicle of light, and the light is not many but one. The one light, that is to say, is being displayed through all those bulbs; and we may think, therefore, either of the many bulbs or of the one light. Moreover, if this or that bulb went out, it would be replaced by another and we should again have the same light. The light, which is one, appears thus through many bulbs. Analogously, I would be looking out from the lecture platform, seeing before me all the people of my audience, and just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his consciousness. And although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all. These are but two ways of interpreting and experiencing the same set of present facts. One way is not truer than the other. They are just two ways of interpreting and experiencing: the first, in terms of the manifold of separate things; the second, in terms of the one thing that is made manifest through this manifold. And as, in Japanese, the first is known as ji hokkai, so the second is ri hokkai, the absolute universe.

But perhaps the most celebrated of these auto-incendiaries is Kalanos. You will remember, no doubt, that Kalanos (the Greek version of the Sanskrit Kalyāna) was an Indian ascetic—though not a Buddhist—who accompanied Alexander's army on its withdrawal from India. At a certain moment he announced that his time had come to die, and arranged for a funeral pyre to be constructed. He mounted the pyre, had it set alight, and, sitting cross-legged, remained motionless until his body was consumed by the flames. What an occasion! With the entire Greek army, and probably Alexander the Great himself, watching him; with each one of those hardened and undefeated veterans, themselves no stranger to pain and mutilations, wondering if he himself would be capable of such cold-blooded endurance: with the eyes of posterity upon him (his peculiar fame has come down for more than twenty centuries); and with the honour of Indian asceticism at stake (and Indian asceticism is India);—how could he fail? For a moment one could almost wish to have been Kalanos. And yet, from the point of view of Dhamma, all this is foolishness—a childish escapade.

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution. But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

To live without comparison, to live without any kind of measurement inwardly, never to compare what you are with what you should be. The word 'meditation' means not only to ponder, to think over, to probe, to look, to weigh; it also has a much deeper meaning in Sanskrit - to measure, which is `to become'. In meditation there must be no measurement. This meditation must not be a conscious meditation in deliberately chosen postures. This meditation must be totally unconscious, never knowing that you are meditating. If you deliberately meditate it is another form of desire, as any other expression of desire. The objects may vary; your meditation may be to reach the highest, but the motive is the desire to achieve, as the business man, as the builder of a great cathedral. Meditation is a movement without any motive, without words and the activity of thought. It must be something that is not deliberately set about. Only then is meditation a movement in the infinite, measureless to man, without a goal, without an end and without a beginning. And that has a strange action in daily life, because all life is one and then becomes sacred. And that which is sacred can never be killed. To kill another is unholy. It cries to heaven as a bird kept in a cage. One never realizes how sacred life is, not only your little life but the lives of millions of others, from the things of nature to extraordinary human beings. And in meditation which is without measurement, there is the very action of that which is most noble, most sacred and holy.

The key point here is Macaulay’s belief that “knowledge and reflection” on the part of the Hindus, especially the Brahmanas, would cause them to give up their age-old belief in anything Vedic in favor of Christianity. The purpose was to turn the strength of Hindu intellectuals against their own kind by utilizing their commitment to scholarship in uprooting their own tradition, which Macaulay viewed as nothing more than superstitions. His plan was to educate the Hindus to become Christians and turn them into collaborators. He persisted with this idea for fifteen years until he found the money and the right man for turning his utopian idea into reality. He needed someone who would translate and interpret the Vedic texts in such a way that the newly educated Indian elite would see the superiority of the Bible and choose that over everything else. Upon his return to England, after a good deal of effort he found a talented but impoverished young German Vedic scholar by name Friedrich Max Muller who was willing to take on the arduous job. Macaulay used his influence with the East India Company to find funds for Max Muller’s translation of the Rig Veda. Though an ardent German nationalist, Max Muller agreed for the sake of Christianity to work for the East India Company, which in reality meant the British Government of India. He also badly needed a major sponsor for his ambitious plans, which he felt he had at last found. The fact is that Max Muller was paid by the East India Company to further its colonial aims, and worked in cooperation with others who were motivated by the superiority of the German race through the white Aryan race theory. This was the genesis of his great enterprise, translating the Rig Veda with Sayana's commentary and the editing of the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East. In this way, there can be no doubt regarding Max Muller’s initial aim and commitment to converting Indians to Christianity. Writing to his wife in 1866 he observed: “It [the Rig Veda] is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years.” Two years later he also wrote the Duke of Argyle, then acting Secretary of State for India: “The ancient religion of India is doomed. And if Christianity does not take its place, whose fault will it be?” This makes it very clear that Max Muller was an agent of the British government paid to advance its colonial interests. Nonetheless, he still remained an ardent German nationalist even while working in England. This helps explain why he used his position as a recognized Vedic and Sanskrit scholar to promote the idea of the “Aryan race” and the “Aryan nation,” a theory amongst a certain class of so-called scholars, which has maintained its influence even until today.

Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals. The process includes dopamine, which does more than tune signal-to-noise ratios. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. Evolutionarily, it serves a similar function. Human beings are hardwired for exploration, hardwired to push the envelope: dopamine is largely responsible for that wiring. This neurochemical is released whenever we take a risk or encounter something novel. It rewards exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well. Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed, which means this enhancement comes with a hell of a high. Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. The next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories. Lastly, at the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,” Oxford University’s Philip Cowen told the New York Times, “to not lose it, to keep going and try to sort everything out.” In flow, serotonin is partly responsible for the afterglow effect, and thus the cause of some confusion. “A lot of people associate serotonin directly with flow,” says high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “but that’s backward. By the time the serotonin has arrived the state has already happened. It’s a signal things are coming to an end, not just beginning.” These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop.

I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can’t be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth, Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that’s the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don’t mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can’t lie down so innocent on objects made by man,” I said to him. “In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can’t keep so many things on your mind and be happy. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God’s wrath on page one and Wieboldt’s sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?” Kayo said, not much surprised by this, “What you are talking about is moha—a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another.